Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

It was not difficult to work up fond feelings for Josephine. As I sewed, I became aware of a man coming out of the next room down and sitting on the floor as I did. Now and then I felt his gaze on me, surreptitious. Finally he asked, “What are you working on?”

“A pillow for one of my students.”

“Pretty small pillow.”

“It’s a dream pillow. I’ll fill it with lavender and barley. It’s to put under their sleeping pillow. A birthday gift.”

“Oh.” He looked up and down the hallway. I stole a glance at him: fortyish, solidly built but not fat, a hairline not yet in retreat. He wore khakis and loafers, and, seated on the floor with his knees up, long stretches of his white socks were visible.

I asked, “Are you a chaperone?”

“Yeah. My daughter’s here for a choir competition.”

“I figured. So is my son.”

“Oh, yeah?” He turned to look me full in the face. “So are you the lookout for sinful behavior?”

I chuckled. “Apparently so. I guess they assigned our kids to the same hallway.”

He twisted to stretch his right hand toward me. As he rebalanced his weight against his left hand, I caught a glimpse of his gold wedding ring. He said, “I’m Ted.”

I shook it. “Judy.”

“Nice to meet you, Judy. We’re from St. Scholastica.”

“Is that a Catholic school?”

“Yes. In Michigan.”

I nodded, but didn’t volunteer the details about my school. People always asked question after question, and it was an interview I didn’t feel like engaging. I went back to my pillow.

After a while Ted said, “Well, I don’t see a lot of action going on. I think they’ll stay put.”

“Clearly you don’t know teenagers.”

He smiled. “Let ’em learn. They say virtue untested was never virtue at all.”

I knotted the thread and bit it off between my teeth. “That doesn’t sound like the Catholic-school approach to me.”

“Well, I’m not Catholic.”

“Is your wife?”

He paused, his tongue half in his cheek. “No. It’s a good school, is why we send her. But the academics are what we appreciate, not the conservative teachings.”

I tried to hide a smile, smoothing the velveteen against my thigh. “I’m not particularly conservative, myself.”

He nodded. After a moment’s hesitation he said, “So if I asked you if you’d join me for a drink, you might not feel too bad about abandoning your post.”

I considered that. “I don’t know,” I said. “It wouldn’t look good for another chaperone to see me downstairs when they know I’m supposed to be on duty.”

“I said ‘a drink,’” he pointed out. He waved his thumb toward the wall behind him. “They gave me a really good minifridge.”

“Did they really,” I mused. “Here in Amish country, of all places.”

He smiled in an earnest way. “Yeah, well, I’m not Amish, either.”

His mouth on my neck, my breasts, my belly; his hands beneath my thighs, hoisting my legs around his waist; all were eager, hungry, as though the long drive from Michigan had been a patient journey toward adultery that was finally, blessedly, over. His mouth tasted, beneath the fresh sting of Jack Daniel’s, of cigarette smoke. Beside his ear, his skin was minty with aftershave. He stepped on the toes of his socks to peel them off before undoing his pants, a subtle stab at vanity that struck me as disarming.

Not that I had much time to be disarmed. Once he lifted my chin and found me willing, he moved quickly. I might have wondered if he made a practice of this, prowling for easy sex as the sideshow to his daughter’s choir travel, except that he seemed so grateful, so conventional. He said my name over and over, oh Judy, or Judy Judy Judy, as though we had an intimate history together. But somehow from his lips my name managed to sound isolated, alien—one he had just heard over a handshake and was repeating so as not to forget.

And so I was half old flame, half stranger. He screwed like any husband in his forties, well and skillfully, without any shadow of kink. So clean and plain he might have been my own.

But in the thick of it, after the initial shock of his mouth and hands but before his weight and breadth were over me, I forgot about him. When he grazed his lips down my stomach and—good Ted, experienced Ted—lifted my thighs over his shoulders, I closed my eyes and saw, like a broken and grainy filmstrip, someone else. All motion: dark hair swinging, the twitch of a cheek muscle, the shivery tensing of biceps. Zach. Zach above a faceless woman, all of him in dreamlike grays, traveling along a sensory arc in parallel with me. And it was not until Ted came up laughing, murmuring shhhh, shhhh, did I realize he was still here, and Zach elsewhere, someplace where the waves of my cries were tumbling to right now, like a sonic boom.

On their last day in Ohio, Zach and his friends got up early to sing in the final competition, taking second place, which pleased Zach tremendously. The grown-ups took them out to dinner at a Pennsylvania Dutch buffet in celebration, and by eight they were back at the hotel. He watched TV with Temple for a while, then slipped out with a handful of change to get them each a soda from the vending machine at the end of the hallway.

As Temple’s root beer clunked down to the retrieval slot, Zach heard a whisper coming from the corridor. It was Kaitlyn, peeking out from the doorway around the corner. “Hey,” she said, low-voiced. “Is Temple asleep?”

“Nope. We’re watching TV.”

“I’m bored.”

Zach shrugged. “You can join us if you like. If you can dodge the chaperones.”

She smiled, signaled him with a double thumbs-up, and tiptoed down the hall in her frog-print pajama pants. He grinned and pushed the button to dispense his own soda, then stuck his head into the room, the door of which was still ajar. Fairen lay on her stomach on the far bed, reading. She looked up and said, “Come on in.”

“You want to come watch TV with us? Kaitlyn’s on her way.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t watch TV.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t tell me they’ve brainwashed you that bad.”

“I’m not brainwashed. I just don’t care for it.”

He stepped inside and shut the door behind him. She closed her book and rolled onto her side as he approached, and he sat on the bed beside her. “You’re reading The Little Prince in French?”

“I like The Little Prince. ”

“I did, too, when I was seven.”

She poked him in the abs. “Where’s your shirt?”

“I just took a shower. Gonna go to bed in a little bit.”

“You don’t wear pajamas?”

He snickered. “No. I sleep in my underwear, unless it’s frickin’ freezing.”

“Boxers or briefs?”

“What do you think?”

She smirked and ran her finger under his waistband, behind the elastic. The touch excited him instantly. She tugged his boxers high enough that she could see them, then said, “That’s what I thought.”

“Are you sure?” he joked. “You want to double-check?”

To his surprise she popped open the snap of his jeans and tugged his zipper halfway down. Then she looked into his eyes and grinned. “I see you like this game. I’m flattered.”

“Yeah, feel free to ignore that.”

With her finger she drew two dots above his navel, poked him in its center, and drew a semicircle beneath it. “Happy face,” she said. Beside it she drew a downward arrow. “Right there.”

“Not very. Can you draw a ‘frustrated as hell’ face?”

“You and me both.”

“Oh, please. I don’t get why girls say that. Walk up to any guy on this trip and tap him on the shoulder and he’d be glad to help you out with that.”