The Kingdom of Childhood

The truth was, I realized gradually, I didn’t really care if Scott knew. If he wanted to heap resentment upon me for it, then he could just add it to the pile he’d been shoveling since he was about thirteen. I felt relatively certain he would not tell anyone, because I could imagine no embarrassment greater to a teenager than for his friends to discover his mother is sleeping with one among them. I cared if he told his father, but mainly because Russ would destroy me in the divorce—and that was a genuine concern. Russ would not be likely to keep his mouth shut. He specialized in preemptive criticism, delivered by deadly accurate, laser-guided verbal missiles loaded with contempt. He would wedge as much distance as possible between himself and my dalliance, and he would do it by digging up all the dirt he could find and broadcasting it like seeds by the handful. And of it there was plenty.

Off went the stove. I picked up Scott’s boot and put it away in the closet. Poured a cup of tea with my shivering hands.

Then I turned on the coffeemaker and sat down with a bag of Russ’s pills, hoarded in a corner of my purse and a meat mallet.

Zach slept most of the day and awoke when Fairen called late that afternoon, her bright, energetic voice breaking through the wall of his fatigue. She wanted to know if he needed a ride to the Advent Spiral, and he was happy to take her up on the offer. By the time she arrived he had managed to work in a shower and an enormous bowl of lentil dhal, and felt almost human again.

The multipurpose room had been emptied of all its chairs and tables, leaving a wide parquet floor on which pine boughs had been arranged to form a great spiral. The room was deeply dark. Only a few candles in the corners provided a small light, their white flames flickering under the invisible draft from the heating ducts. Zach followed Fairen to the section of the floor where his classmates sat. Temple was there, but Scott did not appear to be present; Judy, too, was blessedly absent, so far as he could tell. He guessed the open flames were not her thing. The Advent Spiral was the school festival most likely to end in third-degree burns, which, to Zach’s thinking, also made it the most interesting.

A teacher struck up a few notes on a harp, and a young teenage girl stood and walked forth into the spiral, carrying in her hands a crimson apple fitted with a glowing white candle. At the center of the spiral she stopped and set down the candle beside a bough before slowly walking back out. One after another, the younger children, and a few of the older ones, followed her lead, each leaving their candle and its apple at a point along the path. Now and then a child’s toe struck an apple, and a flame wobbled. Other times, the hem of a dress breezed just above a candle. A bucket of water sat next to the stage, but if it came to that, things already would be quite fascinating.

“I’m going to go up,” Fairen whispered. “Are you?”

He shook his head.

“Oh, come on,” she encouraged. “What kind of Waldork are you?”

“Not as big of one as you are, apparently.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and rose, collecting her candle-fitted apple from a teacher who stood at the spiral’s opening. Her hair was up in braids that crossed at the top of her head, like a Swiss peasant girl. He supposed this was in deference to the St. Lucia theme of the celebration, and since she was too old to crown her head with a wreath bearing four candles, she carried on the childhood tradition with an approximation of it. She lit her candle and progressed slowly up the spiral, and he watched her reverent face, her sly eyes gone childlike beneath the gossamer crown of her braids.

To wonder at beauty, he thought automatically. The first line of the Bell Ringing Verse from his grade-school years. All the compromises he had made, moral and otherwise, to be with Judy, had not corrupted his ability to observe beauty when it happened upon him. He sent his thanks out to the universe for that reprieve. The other imperatives tumbled forth in his mind: stand guard over truth. Look up to the noble. Decide for the good.

He had lost sight of these things. He had been a bad Steiner student, not for the narrow reason of sleeping with the kindergarten teacher, but for allowing his life to tumble into an amoral and disorganized mess. In all the hand- wrought and color-blended loveliness of the Waldorf environment, what outsiders often failed to see was the rigid order that lay beneath it all. What seemed to others to be hypocrisy made perfect sense to him. Freedom can only exist where there is structure. Without it there can be no understanding of how to be beautiful, how to be good.

At the center of the spiral, Fairen turned and began walking the opposite way, still holding her candle. She caught his eye and almost smiled. He smiled warmly back at her, then clasped his hands around his knees and resolved two things to himself.

One, he would not sleep with Judy again. Really and surely this time around, regardless of what happened with Fairen, but especially because of her, too.

Two, he would stop eating meat. It was time.

The second would be easy—well, easy enough, in any case. The first would be more problematic. He could control his own impulses, but when Judy came toward him with all guns blazing, as she had the night of the trip to the abandoned hospital, he had no idea how to defuse her without just nailing her and getting it over with. In his mind he pictured two comets racing toward each other, immolating each other in the explosion.

Then, in a burst of awareness, he realized he had it all wrong. What he had learned in judo flashed into his mind: when you are confronted with force, give way to it. When you are pushed, pull. Apply your opponent’s force against him.

It was so obvious he couldn’t understand why it had not occurred to him weeks ago. Rather than meet her lust with a stronger, angrier lust of his own, he needed only to get out of the way and let her energy consume itself. It would not be easy to watch, but it was the only route to a takedown.

It was what he needed to do. To produce peace in his feeling, as they said at school. Light in his thought.

Beside him, Temple recrossed his legs and leaned back on his palms. Zach stared out at the floor dotted with candles, a nameless constellation being formed one star at a time.

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” Zach said quietly.

Temple glanced at him in mild surprise, then looked back at the spiral. “No prob,” Temple replied. “I didn’t blame you.”

28

I managed to stay out of the house all day on Sunday, coming home late to find Russ’s office door closed and the light glowing dimly beneath it. More and more these days he ended his late