Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

“Hey, now,” she said. She picked up a few and threw them back at him. He retaliated with several more, and then, dodging hers, slipped a handful down the back of her jumper. When she chased after him he took off, diving behind a tree just a moment too late to avoid catching one on the forehead; and then, with mock indignation, grabbed her around the waist and hauled her, squealing, back in the direction of the car. She was so small, barely more than five feet tall it seemed, and a hundred pounds at most. But she could kick like a girl gangbanger in a street fight, and got him in the shin so hard he winced.

“Damn,” he said, setting her down. “You’re strong for a midget.”

She turned to face him and laughed. Her fingers were hooked in his belt loops—perhaps for balance, perhaps for the excuse to touch him, but either way, they were there. The sun, piercingly low in the sky, threw rays of light against her cheek. When he tipped his head and kissed her, he could not be sure who had instigated it. He knew only that her mouth felt as ardent beneath his as it had the first time, and his touch met with no resistance just as before, and when her hands slid down the back of his jeans he knew there was no one around who would knock at the door this time and put at end to it. The end rested wherever Judy determined it to be, because he certainly wasn’t going to stop her.

Not a chance. Not when her mouth moved so quickly to his neck, his nipple, down the belly to— she wouldn’t, would she? —release him from his boxers into the liquid heat of her mouth. The sound that escaped his throat was somewhere between a groan and a whimper, and she raised her gaze to meet his. At the dark hunger in her eyes the pleasure zigzagged wildly through his nerves, and in deference to his wavering knees he leaned back against the tree behind him.

“Lie down,” she whispered.

He swallowed his gum and did as she asked. Leaves crackled beneath his head and heels. The aggressive sunlight needled through the trees. He laid his arm across his eyes, expecting her mouth again. But instead her palms plunked down beside each of his ears—one, two—and when he opened his eyes her hazel gaze locked with his, intent, calculating almost. Her dark hair blocked the sun like a tattered curtain.

She said, “If you want to say no, now’s a good time.”

He quickly recalibrated his expectations, wondering if his eyes betrayed his surprise. “I need to get a condom on,” he warned her, uncertain still of her intent.

“Do you have one?”

“Yeah.”

She smiled. “That answers my other question.”

He wedged his fingers into his pocket. “What was it?”

“Whether you’re a virgin.”

“Nope.”

“I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear that,” she told him dryly.

He felt his face break into a grin. Her nose wrinkled with pleasure, eyes squeezing shut, as she eased herself onto him, and he let the back of his head relax into his palms so he could watch her. The submissiveness alone was exquisitely relaxing; her inwardly drawn face changed endlessly above him, and its small movements mesmerized him, offering a blessed distraction. The weight of her body pressing him against the earth felt snug and comforting. Only when her back arched in the way he knew, tension shuddering, did he reach for her hips and allow his thoughts to narrow down to the sea-warm inner space of her, everywhere rounded, everywhere rose, into a guiltless and freely offered climax he couldn’t have stopped if he tried. At the end of it he let his hands fall exhausted to his sides, savasana, and he laughed, looking up at her grinning face in sheer elation. He felt ready to conquer the whole fucking world.

1965

Mainbach, West Germany

Judy’s father was skilled at many things. He was fluent in Russian, German and French, and conversant in several languages of the smaller Soviet republics. He knew everything about college basketball, played an excellent game of tennis, and could fold a square of paper into a little balloon that one could inflate with a puff of air. When they visited famous buildings he could point out the features of the architecture— dentil, fret, triglyph —and, when Judy grew tired of sightseeing, he could hoist her onto his back and carry her for seemingly infinite lengths of time, looping her knees over his arms that rested on each side of his trim waist. He could do anything, Judy was certain, that was of any importance.

It was not conceivable that he might do something which was terribly wrong. Kirsten, however, was a human like any other, and so onto her Judy projected a double helping of mute rage. The girl had always been kind to her, but now grew openly solicitous, asking in simple German whether Judy preferred ham or salami butterbrot for lunch with a look of rabbit-eyed fear. Her father never addressed what she had seen, and the events of that afternoon—the empty kitchen, the muffled squeaking, the violent shattering of her vision like a flashbulb in reverse—never repeated themselves; Judy might have finally shrugged it away as a bad dream had it not been for that look. The fear acknowledged the crime, and the crime made Judy writhe inwardly with her own unspeakable terrors: that her father would choose to return to the U.S. and abandon her mother, nodding and inert, to her small room at the military hospital. That he was not the father she knew at all, but a seething mess of primitive urges leaking out around the seams of his tennis whites. That Rudi’s family would discover what their girl was up to and send the men over in a rage to match Judy’s, pitting against each other the men she loved most.

Not that she had seen a great deal of Rudi that season. When she caught up with him in the barn he was as friendly as ever, but he did his chores expediently now. Not anymore did he linger to stroke the cow’s nose or to show Judy how to fashion a few pieces of straw and a length of wool into a small star, telling her, as he turned it in his hands, the fairy tale about the generous girl who was showered with stars from heaven that turned into coins as they fell. She missed him awfully. One day when the air was warm and breezy she took the long way home from school, following the gray and winding road to the church behind which she and Rudi had gone sledding the winter before. Her two French braids, plaited by Kirsten that morning, still pulled tight against the skin of her temples; her folded socks were the whitest they had ever been. As she approached the church she could see, jutting from the ground at odd angles behind it, the tombstones of the old cemetery: lozenge and cross-shaped, decaying at the edges, flecked with moss. Between these she and Rudi had dragged their toboggan, moving among the dead as if through a crowd at the market. She remembered the weight of his body when they took a curve too tightly and tumbled into the snow. His gloved hand, grasping hers to pull her to her feet, was so strong. In her belly the ache set in. There would be no second winter with Rudi. By then Judy’s family would be long gone.

For the first time, looking out over the cemetery, she noticed the grave markers at the base of the hill that lay flat against the ground. During the winter they had been covered in snow. The realization alarmed her for a moment before she shoved it aside in her mind. Human beings, after all—for this was the lesson she had gained from months of taking dictation from Struwwelpeter —got what was coming to them. One’s fate was the consequence of one’s actions, and the poorer the choices, the poorer the results. The dead had ended up there for a reason. And she was not to feel guilty if she and Rudi had treated their resting place as a playground, for it was the task of the living to look with a cool eye over the cautionary tales they represented, and shrug, and remember to eat one’s soup and not play with matches or go out in rainstorms.