Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

“They’re playing Grenade Bandits,” he corrected.

“Well, why don’t you go play with them.”

As he scurried out, I shut the Dutch doors in relief. I felt thankful the playhouse was not destined for my classroom. Watching the children run around in it was unnerving. In the days since my encounter with Zach, even—perhaps especially—after I knew my job and life would be safe, I found myself mired in uneasy guilt and gloomy self-reflection. What could have possessed me to do such a thing? I wondered. I had spent my entire adult life in the service of a single master: pure childhood. Not God. Not a messiah or a prophet. Only childhood at its most undefiled, a walled garden as big as a child’s imagination could stretch, into which no evil thing could enter. I had obsessed over the minutiae of the color of a silk square, the finish of a toy horse. With a religious devotion, I worked to ensure that the unformed mind would experience only what was natural, what was pure. Now, in my failure to control a most natural impulse, I had revealed the wildly impure.

A lapse of reason, I thought. It wasn’t his youth that intoxicated me, but the way he had of bringing my own youth to the surface; with each passing hour with him another year seemed to fall away, until the woman in the mirror would have appeared to me a stranger. When he kissed me, he recognized the girl radiating out from within me. But I was not that girl anymore. Any jury of my peers would be happy to remind me of that fact. And because of that, I had to find a way to stay oriented in time, not to succumb to the pull of his camaraderie. If I needed affection so badly, then I needed to find a lover my own age.

I clutched at the knot beneath my head scarf and turned my thoughts toward the choir trip coming up at the end of the week. Sylvania’s madrigal choir had won a spot in a regional competition in Ohio, and so for four days I would be away from home, supervising teenagers but also free, off and on, to do as I wanted. In a year or so that might mean the chance to find a replacement for Russ, but at the moment I lacked enough nerve. Instead I would try to think like a free woman rather than a confined one. In my mind I would be nineteen again, attuned to the undercurrent of hunger in the way men greet women. Rather than shrug it off, I would welcome it. “Teacher’s base! Teacher’s base!”

The sound of my children’s voices brought me back into the moment, and I worked to decipher their meaning as I watched them chase each other across the dampened sand that flew out behind their sneakers like brown sugar. All at once I spotted Aidan racing toward me at full speed, his small arms pumping hard, fine blond hair flying; his face bore an ecstatic smile. I grinned at the sight of it and braced for impact, knowing what Aidan knew: I was the safe zone. Small, but rock-solid.

I still had no reason to doubt it, then.

My goal for Ohio was to have a fun, enriching, self-actualized time pursuing grown-up things. Antiquing, learning about Amish life, tasting wine. In less than a year Scott would be off at college and it would be my turn to enjoy the pursuits denied to me during the thick of mothering. And if ever I needed a pep talk about the scintillating fun of adulthood, it was now.

Now, as I watched my teenage charges touch and jostle each other as they filled their buffet plates with the building blocks of heart disease, laughing and joking, stacking on a third or fourth brownie. Now, as they bought magazines and bubblegum and showed up twenty minutes late with perfectly flat-ironed hair. Removed from the fairy-tale paradise of Waldorf school, they dove into American consumer culture as if it were a deep-water quarry on a hundred-degree day. Had I been more naïve, I would have found it disheartening. But, as I reminded myself while I examined quilts in a farmhouse shop, even the Amish allow their teens to go a little crazy with the confidence they’ll return to the fold. Rumspringa, they call it; and if the Plain People can tolerate smoking and drag racing, then I could overlook tabloids and corn syrup.

Overlooking the way Zach shadowed Fairen’s every move, however—that was not so easy. Touching her shoulder, her ear, her waist. Adjusting himself covertly in his jeans. His desire for her was throwing itself against the walls of his body. I felt determined not to care.

During my few free hours I drove down the tourist strip in search of crafts to bring home—pottery, wood carvings, textiles. Always, I was searching for new things for my classroom, a glazed bowl for the nature table or a toy sheep for a tableau. In the quilt shop I came upon a handsomely carved sleigh bed, mahogany like my own. Draped with hand-stitched merchandise, it looked cozy and darling. I ran my hand across the smooth wood and recalled the day Russ and I bought ours on a trip to Vermont. We were engaged then, weekending at a bed-and-breakfast, and found ourselves booked to a room that held one treasure after another—an apothecary cabinet, a pewter Revere bowl, a gorgeous bed. Russ laughed when he turned over the bowl and found a price tag. We soon discovered the whole room was for sale, a clever sales technique for romantic young couples. We wrote a check that accounted for both our bank accounts and my next paycheck, and had the bed shipped to his apartment.

I hadn’t cared about the expense; in fact, I’d embraced it. My own parents, for their entire marriage, had slept in twin beds. Things hadn’t gone well for them. I loved the fact that when Russ and I climbed into the same bed together, we all but ate each other alive. Even Bobbie, whose disdain for Russ had been thinly concealed, envied us in that respect. I need to find myself a man who looks at me the way he looks at you, she told me more than once. The only wedding gift I wanted was a bed big enough for all he and I wanted to do in it, one magnificent enough to suggest the importance of its function.

But now Russ was a stranger. Half the time he seemed wound up tight as a spring; the other half, disinterested in anything but setting his feet up in front of the TV, or sleeping. The week before, I had come home to four messages on the answering machine from his boss and his teaching assistant trying to find him for the class he taught. When I pushed open the door to his home office I found him sprawled facedown on his ragged old sofa, his arm dangling loosely, like a napping baby’s. The condensed glare of the desk light, hard and dense as a star’s, caught in the dull shine of his wedding band. For a moment I’d thought he was dead, and in those otherworldly seconds before his foot and fingers twitched in sleep, what I had felt was a rising wave of relief. I felt shamed by it, but weary, too. I couldn’t make sense of him anymore, this man who slept beside me, when he slept at all.

I looked over the quilts, a dozen of them, artfully arranged on the mattress, but didn’t have the heart to buy one. Beautiful as they were, to spread one over my bed would feel like draping a sheet over a dead body. I bought a doll blanket for my housekeeping corner, and drove back to the hotel.

At ten o’clock I left my room and parked myself at the midpoint of the hallway, sitting on the floor where I had a view of every door in both directions. Almost immediately, one door cracked open, then quickly pulled shut. I felt a cosmic irony at being appointed the Sex Police. When my generation had once declared all people over thirty to be hypocrites, we had been right.

As I sat guard, I worked a needle in and out of a square of velveteen, making a small dream pillow for one of my kindergartner’s birthdays. I was forever making these velveteen pillows, yet even after sewing hundreds I still enjoyed the process: focusing on a particular student, on who he or she might grow up to be, on the things that make the child an individual. Inevitably I loved the child a little more after making his or her birthday pillow. Today’s was for a little girl named Josephine, a curious little blonde who desperately wanted to learn to read. She often tied a blue playsilk around her shoulders, and liked most to play with the wooden fish and dolphins. She had one loose tooth, a sign she was on the brink of a jump in maturity, both physical and mental.