Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

“It has. Since the bazaar. When I found you tossing your cookies, very literally, next to the trash cans, and you begged me to go down on you to cure your tummy trouble.”

“Yeah. Temple noticed we slipped away.”

“What do you mean, ‘slipped away’? We were back inside of half an hour. And that raises Temple’s suspicions? I would think a progressive boy like him would have higher standards than that.”

He drummed his knuckles against the dresser and stared at the carpet. She slid off the bed and came to him, cupping his face in her hands. He met her eyes and let her kiss him softly on the mouth.

“But we can take a break whenever you want to,” she whispered. “You call the shots, remember. Are you leaving right away? Or are you staying a few minutes longer?”

“I didn’t bring anything with me.”

She nodded. “It’s your call, then.”

“We’d better not.”

She nodded again, but as she took a step back he reached for her upper arms and kissed her again. Then again; and of course she did not stop him, and of course he did not want to stop. A tumult of conflicting thoughts rushed forward in his mind, then fell like lemmings off the edge of the cliff past which he knew, good or bad, right or wrong, he was going to do this.

What is it about her? he wondered hopelessly. What did she offer him that he couldn’t find elsewhere? Why did he persist in seeking her out, thinking of her, wanting her, when she was exactly wrong for him in nearly every way? Why was he willing to be this adversary to Scott, to Russ, to his own father—to scatter principle to the four winds and scuttle off to hunt what was forbidden?

But that question was its own answer. Because it was forbidden. Because fucking a woman in a crashing plane is a thousand times more exciting than in the bedroom of a nice home.

It occurred to him, as he crawled onto the bed and nestled himself into the welcome of Judy’s body, that he suddenly understood all he needed to know about his mother’s affair. That it had nothing to do with him. Nothing to do with his father. Nothing connected to it but the drumbeat inside her that called her to the atrocity. It was comforting to understand, at last, his own irrelevance. In the moment of this realization he felt a momentary spark of sympathy for her, before other feelings overwhelmed him and snuffed it out.

Maggie called while I was untangling a knotted thread with my teeth, working on a dream pillow that had gone all wrong. Right away I knew this was not going to be a pleasant phone call. Maggie never called to chat.

“You can use my room for storage or whatever,” she said. “I’m not coming home for Christmas.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I’m going home with my friend Elise. I’ll be in Hagerstown. I’ll give you the number so you can call me or whatever.”

“Maggie.” I sat on the edge of the bed and rested my forehead against my hand. “We’ve got the tree up already and everything. I’m counting on you coming home. It won’t feel like Christmas if you’re not here, and it’s hard enough already this year.” I did not attempt to go into detail as to why.

“I want a real Christmas,” she replied, her voice attempting a breezy note but leaking venom nonetheless. “One with Jesus in it. Elise’s family goes to church and all that stuff. I need to experience this for myself.”

“You know perfectly well there’s Jesus in our Christmas,” I said, feeling my blood pressure rising with each word. “God only knows they’ve been hammering Jesus into your brain at school since kindergarten. I make those damn salt-dough nativity scenes with my kids every year. I know .”

“That’s that Waldorf phony crap. The ‘Cosmic Christ.’ Puh- leeze. And that stupid story about how there used to be two baby Jesuses and one died and was reincarnated as Buddha or something—”

“‘The Two Jesus Children.’”

“God, what crap! How can you teach that stuff to kids? Do you have any idea how ridiculous it sounds?”

“I don’t teach that stuff,” I reminded her. “I don’t believe in anything at all.”

“You think you don’t, but you would if you pulled your head out of the Steiner sandbox long enough to consider the possibility. You would have handled it a lot better when your best friend died if you’d had some kind of context to put it in, but instead you fell apart like wet toilet paper.”

“Thank you.”

“My point is, Christmas is about a miracle. And I want to spend it celebrating that miracle. I hope you can honor that.”

My lips pressed into a brittle smile. “I understand better than you might think.”

“Good.” Her voice sounded assertive but a little confused. “Merry Christmas, then.”

“To you, too.” A pregnant silence hung across the low static of the phone line. “And when the trap snaps closed, I’ll understand that, too. You can cry on my shoulder then.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your ideas. Your miracles. They’re just peanut butter on some fucked-up cosmic mousetrap. I’ve been there. I’ve wanted that, too. And what I’ve learned is, seek out what’s beautiful and love it before it rots. Because there’s not a damn thing in this world that doesn’t.”

For a long moment she said nothing. Then she said, “I hope you’re not teaching that to the kids, either.”

“No need,” I told her. “They’ll learn it on their own.”

He felt ashamed after the afternoon with Judy, displeased with himself for his lack of self-discipline. After the day of the holiday bazaar, when he had puked by the Dumpster and she consoled him with her version of chicken soup for his morally conflicted soul, he had told himself they needed to break things off. The dreadful conversation with Temple only steeled his resolve, not just to end it but to erase it, to bend his eleventh-grade year into an arc that, as far as it mattered, had never included Judy in the first place. It helped to focus on the negative: the time he was feverish, the slap to his face, the sickening guilt, and, of course, the times he’d turned in a lousy performance and felt himself revealed as a hopeless amateur.

And then—every once in a while—there was a rip in the fabric. Monday afternoon, for example: when his desire did not feel like a backburn to her wildfire, when everything flowed, and at the end he rubbed his eyes and felt restored. He could almost convince himself they were two normal people doing what normal people do, until he peeked between the blinds before she opened the door and he was reminded that everything he took he was stealing.

When the temperature reached sixty-seven degrees one December day, Fairen cornered him after Main Lesson and suggested they cut out early. She had twenty dollars from babysitting. She wanted to get a pizza.

They slipped out as if going to the workshop, then hustled into the woods. The trees were bare gray skeletons against the sky, but the air had a springtime headiness to it, fragrant and brisk. Once on the sidewalk, Fairen reached for his hand. It was a friendly, tentative sort of hand-holding, fingertips loosely intertwined, but it gave Zach hope. She had invited him, after all.

The pizza place was not far away, in a minimall with a barbershop and variety store. Signs plastered to the brick advertised an upcoming festival at the lake. Fairen ordered a mushroom-and-green-pepper, size large, and two giant Cokes.

“Because I know you eat like there’s no tomorrow,” she said.

“There isn’t.”

She gave him a strange look and he said, “Carpe diem.”

She smiled approvingly. As they waited on the bench, she played footsie with him. There were no tables or chairs, so when their pizza was ready, they carried the box to a small underpass beneath the street, built like a stone bridge to shelter a sidewalk. It was cozy and relatively private, and Zach felt a little saddened to realize that he enjoyed her chaste company as much as the non-chaste. Had he realized that months ago, he might have saved himself a lot of trouble.