Rebecca Coleman: The Kingdom of Childhood

Lately, though, I had moved from a touch of malaise to the brink of a full-fledged burnout. I blamed it on a contagious case of Scott’s senioritis. With my youngest child about to complete his thirteenth year of schooling, I accepted that my personal investment in a philosophy so intense and consuming had just about run its course. But at forty-three I had more experience and commanded more respect than any other teacher at Sylvania, with twenty years of my working life still ahead of me. In the beginning I had fallen profoundly in love with the idea that if I could go back to a past that predated my own, touch the things that had existed since the dawn of time—wood, wool, stone—I could wipe clean the grime that had gathered on me in this corrupted world. And even now, every once in a while when I sat in the rocking chair and took in the cathedral silence of my empty classroom, with the afternoon sun slanting just so on the baskets of knitted elves and folded silk squares and lengths of gnarled wood, from the depths of my heart I thought: I believe.

Driving home from a long day in that classroom, I let my hands rest lightly on the steering wheel and my thoughts drift to the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was perceptive of Scott’s friend to note the relaxing effect their silhouette has on the mind. A calming vista was something my mind yearned for, and, truthfully, it yearned for many things. I had always been a small person—“an elf of a girl,” my father used to say—but lately I had begun to feel like a collapsing star, as though packed into my little frame was the weight of a full universe of unmet goals, unreconciled mistakes, and all the raw-boned loves of my girlhood. Some days I suspected nothing but a broad spectrum of psychiatric drugs and a skilled and compassionate therapist would help me. Other days, I figured a good orgasm would suffice.

A dinging noise jarred me from my thoughts. The gas-indicator light had been red since morning, but this happened often, and from the odometer I had judged the car had enough gas to run a few nearby errands. I pulled into the right lane warily and kept driving, but soon the car began to sputter and I made a quick right turn into the parking lot of a bank, coasting into a parking space just as the Volvo exhausted the last few drops of gasoline. For a moment I sat, staring at the steering wheel as though the car might take pity on me and change its mind. But it did not and, gathering my purse and handwork bag, I climbed out with a heavy sigh. This was not the first time I had abandoned the car for this reason. Russ would not be pleased.

My mother is a basket case, Scott sometimes said aloud to an invisible audience.

But teenagers always do. What child has not, at some point, decided his or her mother is crazy? It’s a staple of American youth, sure as cotton candy and fireworks and that first jingling set of car keys.

I walked on the shoulder in the uneven wind of the passing cars and mentally reassured myself I was not a basket case.

I am adaptable.

Not the type to make a crisis out of a small matter.

And the house was not far, not so very far, in the scheme of the universe.

It was nearly six before I made it home. My husband, miracle of miracles, was already there. As I walked in the door I caught the stinging smell of burnt toast. In the kitchen he stood before the skillet in a tense posture, spatula poised over a grilled cheese sandwich with its topside nearly black.

“I have a roast going in the Crock-Pot,” I said.

“I don’t have time for all that. I’ve got a class in thirty minutes and I had no idea where you were or when you’d be home.”

I pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sat. My husband, Russell, who had once been attractive in an edgy and intellectual way, had the look of a man who was moments away from giving himself an aneurysm. This was nothing new. It had developed shortly after he began his Ph.D program three years before, and had gotten steadily worse ever since. For a while I worried that he was sitting on either a serious medical problem or an affair with a grad student. But no evidence ever turned up, and I found myself faced with the idea that his hair-trigger temper and contempt for me had nothing to do with complaints either physical or sexual. He had his good days and his bad, but overall, I was gradually resigning myself to the fact that my husband was becoming a cranky old asshole.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I meant to be home earlier.”

“It’s just as well.” He slapped the sandwich onto a plate, turned off the burner, and glanced out the window. “All right. Where the hell is your car?”

“It’s in the Citizens Bank parking lot.”

He slammed his plate down on the table. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Judy.”

“I’ll send Scott to fill it up later.”

He glared at me. Behind his glasses his eyes were a blazing blue. “Explain to me again why you can’t take your car to the gas station like a normal human being.”

“Because I’m not a normal human being. You know that.”

“What are you going to do when Scott is in college? What are you going to do then?”

I sat in silence. Realizing no answer would be forthcoming, he picked up his sandwich and stuffed it in his mouth. A bite of bread and cheese filled out his cheek like a sudden growth.

“I’ll have him do it tonight,” I repeated, after the silence had derailed a bit of Russ’s momentum. “I assume we’re taking my car up to Fallon tomorrow.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t go with you.”

“What?” I felt my face crack from careful steadiness into a scowl of disbelief. “What do you mean you can’t go with me? It’s our anniversary trip. It’s been planned for weeks.”

“Our department chair went into the hospital with chest pains. I need to take his place at the conference this weekend.”

“What conference?”

“The one where he was supposed to be giving the presentation that I’ll be giving instead.”

“ Russ . Can’t one of the full professors take it?”

“Sure, if I’d like to flush my career down the toilet.”

I stood and brushed by him, then snapped off the Crock-Pot. “There you go exaggerating. It can’t just be a good move or a bad move. It has to be a gigantic crisis.”

“This is what you don’t understand about careers,” he began, “due to all those years you’ve been sitting in a rocking chair singing ‘Kumbaya’ and handing out the fingerpaints. Other people’s jobs have this thing called advancement. And the way it works is, when something crops up, you don’t say, ‘oh, jeez, I have to go to the mountains with my wife this weekend.’ Because if you do, you get to be the Dean of Remedial Dumb-Shit Classes at the community college.”

I took a deep breath through my nose and closed my eyes for a moment. “All right, then. I’ll cancel the reservations and we’ll just go out next weekend. Maybe Saturday. We can get Chinese.” Chinese food was Russ’s weakness. We had eaten many a paper-boxed meal, back in college, on a bed with a raincoat spread between us for a picnic blanket. It had become something of a tradition that carried on into our marriage, for a few years at least.

He sat down across from me and shook a pile of chips directly onto the table. “No can do. I need to work on my dissertation all weekend.”

I sighed. “Russ.”

“Judy,” he fired back, matching my tone in a nasal pitch.

I met his eyes and tried not to let it turn into a glare. “Maybe one night during the week, then. I just thought Chinese would be nice.”

“Getting my damn Ph.D would be nice, too. And it’s hard to do that when you try to take over my schedule with your demands for entertainment.”