Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

“You’re way faster than me,” he said admiringly.

“I do this all the time,” she replied, a rueful undertone to her voice. She squeezed the water from a lavender one, coaxed it into a spherical shape, and dunked it back into her basin. “I enjoy it. When I was young and we lived in Germany, after school I used to go to our neighbor’s barn and watch their son take care of the animals. He would hand me bits of wool from the sheep and I’d knead them into balls like this. I didn’t know a thing about felting, of course. It was just something to do.” Lifting the lavender ball from the water, she added, “The texture of it always takes me back to that place and time. And that boy. His name was Rudi.”

“Rudi,” Zach repeated, rolling the r and drawing out the u in a mocking accent.

Judy clicked her tongue. “He was very nice to me. It was so isolating living there. Having no friends. My father screwing the help.” At this Zach snickered. “That boy’s kindness meant the world to me then. You look like him, a little. Not in the coloring. He was very Aryan that way. But around the mouth, and something about your eyes every now and then. And your body.”

He laughed openly. “My body. How old did you say you were, again?”

She smiled. “I just mean how wiry you are. I suppose he was about your age, and that’s typical. Yet Scott, for example, is built solid, like Russ. Temple just looks skinny through and through. But Rudi—he looked like skin stretched over muscle. I had never seen anything like that before I knew him. And you’re that way, too.”

The soapy water was beginning to saturate his skin. For a moment he set down his work and wiped his hands with the bottom of his shirt. When she smiled at the gesture, he said, “Sounds like you were doing a lot of checking him out, for a six-year-old.”

“Oh, no. I was about ten, but there was never anything like that. I always saw him as a—a safe harbor, I suppose. Never as a sex object. Not at all.” Another felted ball emerged from the water and into her hand, perfectly formed, as if by magic. Her smile shifted secretly. “Although, you know—I did have a dream about him the other night.”

“About R-R-R-Rudi? ”

This time she laughed. “Yes. The night I visited Maggie. It was quite graphic. When I woke up, I found the whole thing very shocking. I didn’t like thinking of him that way. In my mind he’s almost a saint. Or a savior.”

“Was it a bad dream, then?”

She smiled again, tight-lipped. When she met his gaze, her eyes twinkled. “No.”

He laughed. Blood surged in a sudden rush through his veins. He kept expecting her to discard the whole idea of having him as a lover, and coming up astonished when it persisted. And it persisted all over the place: in her classroom, the workshop, her Volvo parked by the lake, and, of course, the woods. When he balked at the timing or setting, she sank to her knees and unzipped him and from there he could hardly argue. On those occasions she seemed perfectly content, and while it made no sense to him he simply accepted his good fortune and admired her efficiency. Thus far the crafting session had been perfectly chaste, but Judy had a way of going from teacher to succubus in the time it took to slam a car door, and as the dinner hour approached he wondered which one would drive him home.

Before he could consider the matter too deeply, the door burst open and Scott walked in, his coat open and his back pack over one shoulder. “Hey, Mom,” he said as he entered the kitchen; a moment later, to Zach, “Hey, dude.” He glanced at the toys lined up on the towel and added, “Nice balls.”

The expected response jumped to mind immediately: That’s what your mom said. But this time, Zach thought better of it.

“Would you like to help out?” Judy asked Scott.

“I’m coming and going,” he replied. He grabbed a plastic container from the refrigerator, grimaced at its contents, and took an apple instead.

Judy asked, “Going out with Tally?”

Scott grunted a reply and bit into the apple. He fished around in a cabinet and, coming up empty, made a growling noise, swiped a pile of papers from a counter, and stalked out.

“Make yourself a sandwich,” Judy shouted.

“That bread is disgusting,” Scott yelled back. “There’s seeds in it and shit.”

Judy sighed and offered Zach an apologetic smile as the door slammed. “Welcome to our happy home.”

“Does he always talk to you like that?”

“Oh, yes, when he talks at all. Most days after school Tally comes swinging into my driveway in her little BMW, lets herself in the door and off they go to his room or to the den to ‘watch TV.’” With her fingers she gestured quotes around the phrase. “It astonishes me, the way he’ll do things for no reason other than to upset me. There’s no reason for him to be carrying on in that den with her. The last thing I want to be thinking about, while I’m watching TV, is what my son was doing on that sofa.”

Zach snickered. “Temple said something about that. How he does things just because he knows they’ll make you mad. I think it’s weird. I argue with my folks sometimes, but I always feel like shit when I truly piss one of them off.”

She tipped her head and looked him in the eye. “So why are you friends with him?”

“I dunno. Because he’s friends with my friends.”

“You don’t seem very similar to him at all.”

“I’m not. But I’m a lot like the other people he hangs out with, like Temple. And Fairen.”

At the mention of Fairen’s name her mouth pursed. She said, “Tell me about New Hampshire.”

“About New Hampshire? What about it?”

“What it was like. What you miss. Your school, your friends. Tell me about them.”

It was a question as large as his entire life—his life up until this past June, at least. Stepping outside in the mornings, he still felt his heart sink, often, to see the mountainless horizon and realize he wasn’t there anymore. It was too warm here. The leaves were dull, the forests paltry, the highways too broad and lined with too many chain restaurants cranking out food products matched to an assembly chart. Nobody, in the months since he had moved here, had asked him about his hometown. The truth was he ached to talk about New Hampshire, but knew nothing was more tedious than a new kid who won’t shut up about how much better the old place was. And in any case, nobody cared. He was here now.

He smiled and shook his head, ruminating. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

She rose and opened the refrigerator, rummaged around, and found a can of Coke. She cracked it open and handed it to him. “We have all afternoon,” she said. “Nobody’s here.”

He set down the last ball of wool and took the soda. She nodded to a chair, and he sat. The silence of the house felt expansive around him, but private and still. He realized, in the emptiness, that he craved a listening ear more than anything else right now. He wanted no other Judy more than the one seated at the kitchen table just now, patiently waiting to hear him talk about home.

“It was like the forest in a fairy tale,” he began.

The endless tree canopy is what he remembered first, whenever he thought of home. The way the light came through the leaves in darts and dashes, the way the dark felt so absolute, so complete, in the heart of the woods. In his neighborhood the roots rumbled up from underground, crumbling the sidewalks, twisting across the lawns. Nature curved above and below him. Nature did not deign to be ruled.

The yoga studio rose on stilts beside a small road, its shingled sides faded by snow upon snow. The stilts gave it a treehouse look, but were necessary: it was built on a flood-plain. Behind it ran a shallow stretch of the Saco River, stone-dotted and barely deep enough to twirl around his ankles, but in the snowmelt it could become a torrent. Slim silver fish, disoriented, would slip by his feet as he played. The glacial rocks that bordered it were feathered white and pale green with lichen.