The Kingdom of Childhood

by Rebecca Coleman

  On the last day of school, as soon as the bus dropped her off, Judy took off at a run down the country road toward her home. Her rucksack, empty but for a single book, thumped against the small of her back with each footfall. The trials of home were, for a few precious moments, forgotten. She carried two parting gifts from her teacher, who knew she would not be back for the following school year: the Struwwelpeter book, which she carried in her pack, and a large gingerbread heart with Viel Glück written on its face in jaunty pink icing. A good-luck wish for our newest friend, her teacher had declared, smiling upon Judy fondly. The heart, wrapped neatly in wax paper, she cradled against her body as she ran. She wanted to share it with Rudi, because she knew he liked gingerbread, and also because it was a heart. It smelled mouthwateringly of cinnamon and confectioner’s sugar. When the barn came into view she picked up her flagging pace, crunching gravel beneath her saddle shoes as she cut across the driveway, then criss-crossed the perfectly manicured front lawn.

  She shrugged off her rucksack by the gate and let herself into the barnyard. The barn door was ajar, buoying her hopes that he would be there. The white hens ignored her, scratching in the dust for hidden bugs. From an open window she heard Daniela’s strident voice, an argument with her mother or father in vehement German that carried on the gusty breeze. The wind sucked the edges of the curtains outward, twisting them wildly like waving hands.

  A metal rake stood propped beside the partly-opened barn door. Judy was thin enough to slide in without moving it, which was fortunate, because the hinges were old and tired and the heavy door usually stuck in a rut of mud. She gripped the gingerbread against her chest and stepped inside, pulling in her breath to call for Rudi; but before she could speak his name, she saw him right before her.

  He was there, seated on a straw bale with his back to her, his shirt in a heap on the ground; straddling his lap was the girl who was Kirsten’s friend, wearing the flower-sprigged dress Kirsten had sewn for her, its white crinoline flaring out on each side of Rudi’s waist like two chrysanthemums. She was facing him, and Judy could see now that Rudi’s disregard for the crucifix that hung above them was absolute: he kissed her with his hand behind her head and his mouth pressed hard against hers, so ardently that all the gentleness Judy knew of him was gone. The girl’s hands traveled across the creamy skin of his back, her pace languorous, and when they circled around to the front of his pants he dropped his head back and disturbed the silence with a noisy, quivering sigh.

  Judy took a large step back. One shoulder at a time, she retreated out the barn door. She let herself out through the wooden gate and threw the gingerbread heart into the mud. At home, Kirsten stood at a living room window, cleaning it with ammonia sprinkled onto a crumpled page from the Stars & Stripes. The bow of her apron bobbed at her hip, and her feet were bare.

  “Guten Tag, Mausi,” she greeted Judy.

  “Guten Tag,” Judy replied. She looked into Kirsten’s eyes and wondered how it is that a soldier fights and a savior suffers, but a woman, in lying down, rules everything.

  12

  Zach was a Pisces. I discovered this while rooting through his school file, not long after. It should have come as no surprise—I had already suspected as much by his nature, and his March birthdate only confirmed it—but I felt chagrined nonetheless. Sixteen and a half, and solidly so. I had hoped he was nearly seventeen, as if it made a difference.

  Say no, I remembered imploring him. Because I knew the wrong was in my intention, and his was powerful enough to stop it. But he hadn’t wanted to, and so there was nothing left to hold it back. The frenzied desire I felt for him surprised even me. I had thought I wasn’t capable of it, all the way up until I crawled over him on all fours and knew I would have him or be consumed by what burned in me for him.

  It took me no time at all to make an appointment with my midwives’ practice, once I could no longer pretend I wasn’t going to do what I had just done. I knew enough to understand I was out of my depth when it came to the contemporary rituals of birth control. Prior to the moment Ted produced a small foil packet from the night table, I had never seen an unwrapped condom that wasn’t on a safe-sex poster. Russ had no use for the things, and my only other serious boyfriend, Marty, hadn’t either. Back in the 1970s, the solution was simple: the woman went on the Pill, and that was that. Clearly Ted had caught up with the times, and now Zach had proven to be a devotee as well. But anything that could break or slip off provided too great a margin of error, by my accounting, especially when the stakes were as high as these.

  As I signed my name on the clipboard at the front desk of the midwives’ practice, I asked, “Is Lynnette here today?”

  The heavy woman in the pastel-print scrubs didn’t take her eyes off her computer screen. “No, she doesn’t work here anymore.”

  I blinked. “She doesn’t? Really? But she delivered both my kids.”

  The typist looked at me with a smile at the corner of her mouth, and I imagined she was gauging my age and thinking I was lucky if my midwife was still alive. “We have several excellent practitioners,” she said dryly. “When were you last here?”

  “About three years ago,” I told her, chagrined. So much for my annual well-woman visit. I hadn’t given it the slightest thought before last week.

  “You’ll be seeing Rhianne Volker today. She’s new to our practice but has a lot of experience. I’m sure you’ll like her.” Her smile was not a reassurance so much as a period at the end of her sentence.

  I sighed and took a seat. Once back in an examining room, I glanced around at the sterile surroundings and ruminated on how much more medical midwifery looked now than it did when I was having babies. Back then it all seemed touch-and-go in someone’s converted spare bedroom, quilts and blood pressure cuffs competing for shelf space. I relished feeling comfortable with it, affirming to myself the naturalness of the birth experience. Now, I could hardly see the difference between this office and an obstetrician’s.

  The door opened and a short-haired woman came in, wearing a lab coat over a band T-shirt and jeans. “Hello, Judy,” she said with a glance at my chart. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Rhianne.”

  “I haven’t been here in a while.”

  “Several years. Have you been anywhere else for your care?”

  I grimaced. “No. I used to come every year like clockwork to get my birth control prescription renewed, mainly. But I haven’t needed it in a while.”

  She sat in a molded chair and smiled. “And now you do.”

  “Yes. People do still use the Pill, right?”

  She laughed. “Yes. Things haven’t changed that much. There are other options available, though, if you’d like me to discuss them with you.”

  I shrugged. “I’d rather just go with what I know.”

  “That’s fine. So how are—” she glanced at my chart again “—Scott and Maggie?”

  “Oh, they’re doing well. Both busy with school.” I shifted my weight on the sterile paper of the exam bench. “Do you have children?”

  “Not yet. Someday.” She smiled again and stood to wash her hands at the sink. “I’m glad yours are well. You should send in pictures. We always love to put up photos of the babies we’ve delivered, all grown up.”

  I chuckled. “Now, if that doesn’t make me feel old.”

  “I’m sorry.” She pulled on a pair of gloves and turned to face me. “Now, shall we get started with our exam?”

  As the noodles boiled, Zach mixed up a batch of cheese sauce from a bag of yellowish powder, smashing butter down with the side of a fork. He felt a little guilty cooking up such a lame meal for his mother’s lunch, but with her regular trips to the grocery store cancelled because of bed rest, he and his father had let the pantry get way too bare. Rhianne would be over shortly, leaving him no time to indulge any sort of vegetarian creativity with whatever remained. The important thing was to get her fed.

  He took the glass bottle of milk from the fridge and eyeballed
three tablespoons, then took a swig from the bottle. It was good, he considered, that she was having this baby in the Maryland ’burbs. In New Hampshire she had an arrangement with a local farmer to provide unpasteurized, straight-from-the-cow milk for their family’s use—officially, due to what the law required, for the use of the cat. The farmer never questioned Luna’s three-gallons-per-week requirement, and it was not until Zach was in high school that he realized the practice was unusual even among the most hardcore health enthusiasts in his community. Here in Maryland, the best his mother could do was organic glass-bottle milk, pasteurized but not homogenized, home delivered twice a week. He had never gotten sick from the raw stuff, but the pregnancy made him feel protective; it was probably better for her to drink the thin watery version everybody else was used to.

  He drained the macaroni and ladled the concoction into a bowl. She sat up in bed and smiled at him when he entered the room, her black hair in its clip slightly askew.

  “It’s the best I could do,” he said, apologizing in advance. “It’s the organic version, though. It’s not Kraft or anything.”

  “It’s fine, Zach.” He handed her the bowl and pulled over the chair from the corner of the room, turning it around before sitting to rest his arms and chin against its back.

  “How’s school going?”

  “All right. We’re reading Dante.”

  She made a murmuring noise of approval. “How do you like it?”

  “I don’t. I hate it, as a matter of fact.”

  She restrained her laugh, chewing macaroni, but her shoulders flexed with amusement. He continued, “But Spanish is fun, and choir’s all right. Ohio was really fun.”

  “That’s good.” Knitting her brow in mild concern, she added, “You seem to be making new friends here. Aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. Temple’s pretty cool.”

  “And Fairen? You seem to like her.”

  Again he shrugged, this time looking away. His mother took the hint. “We’ll make a trip back to New Hampshire next summer,” she promised him. “The baby will be six months old by then, sitting up and everything. Can you imagine? And you’ll be able to see your old friends then. Jacob and Arne and Sam, all of them. You can call them anytime you want, you know. We’re not worried about the long-distance bills.”

  “They have their own lives,” he said. “I’m out of the loop now. And guys don’t talk on the phone like girls do. You know that.”

  “I do know that.” She put her hand over his. “I never intended to uproot you in the middle of high school, sweetie. I’m sorry we had to do that. But your dad’s business is doing much better here. He’s got so much work now, he needs to hire three more full-timers.”

  “Yeah,” said Zach, and his voice sounded abrupt even to him. This was not the subject he wanted to talk about. The more his parents took the time to explain why they were in Maryland, the more it all felt like a ruse. For all he knew, it might have been the truth; maybe it all came down not to paternity, but to carpentry. Yet trying to believe that forced him to consider the possibilities more than he already did. He just wanted to accept his circumstances and get on with his new life. That new life, after all, offered enough dramas of its own without him dragging in theoretical ones from New Hampshire.

  The doorbell rescued him from further musing. “Rhianne’s here,” he said. “I’ll let her in.”

  The visit was perfunctory. She listened to the baby’s heartbeat, dipped the little test strips into her urine, and told Zach’s mother to get a glucose tolerance test, which caused Vivienne to balk.

  “You know I’d rather not have any of those sort of interventions,” Vivienne told her.

  “This isn’t an intervention, this is a diagnostic,” Rhianne explained. “Your sugars are a little high. It’s a good idea to get it done, in case you’ve got gestational diabetes.”

  “It’s probably just carbs from the macaroni and cheese I just ate.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. We’ll find out. It’s not the first time you’ve tested high.”

  Vivienne held her open hands on both sides of her waist—or where her waist used to be, in any case—and asked, “Do I look like someone who’s prone to gestational diabetes?”

  “You’re forty-one years old,” said Rhianne, “and your sugars are higher than normal. It’s up to you, if you’re not concerned about delivering an eleven-pounder.”

  Vivienne grimaced. Rhianne patted her knee and said, “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. I’ll leave the paperwork on the dining table.” Then she beckoned Zach to follow her to the door.

  “Is my mom going to be okay?” he asked in the foyer.

  “She’ll be fine. It’s a routine test. She probably had it done with you.”

  “She probably didn’t.”

  Rhianne smirked and offered him the drawstring bag. He reached in and pulled out a whole handful.

  “Whoa,” she said. “Fun to have them around, huh?”

  He responded with the broad bashful grin of a guy caught being most impressive, and crammed the freebies into his jeans pockets.

  “Is this a new development in your life?” she asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  He shook his head. “It’s safe and all. I’m covering up. And she’s on the Pill.”

  “Good, but there are other things that matter, too. Mutual respect, emotional maturity, things like that.”

  “Yeah, I got that stuff, too.”

  Rhianne laughed. “Are your parents aware?”

  He felt his expression go instantly serious. “No. And don’t say anything to them, all right? They’ve got enough going on. They might freak out.”

  “Not a problem. You can trust me to keep your confidence.” Her smile was tight-lipped but warm. “And whenever you want to talk, I’m here.”

  The chances he would ever discuss Judy with Rhianne were exactly zero, but nevertheless, her kindness touched him. “Thanks,” he said, and opened the door to hurry the conversation to a close. “Well, seeya.”

  On Friday I took a half day to visit Maggie at college, now that she was all settled in. The drive up to St. Mary’s took two hours each way. Past Baltimore the roadside landscape of metal poles broke to real trees, the hills grew higher and higher, and my thoughts began a tug-of-war between Maggie and Zach.

  In her most recent phone call—which had been a while ago, come to think of it—Maggie had told me she had decided for sure on a major in biology. High time, I thought, given that this was her second year of college. But Maggie had always been a bit perplexing to me, a bit apart from what I had anticipated. She had been an even-tempered child, quiet and cooperative and easy to please—yet as far as I could discern, she had no passion. Nothing set her off, worked her up, put her in a state to argue. This bewildered me, for how could Russ and I—two people who could be not just enthusiastic, but fanatical about our few interests—have produced such an indifferent daughter? As she grew older it had been a struggle to find ways to relate to her. I had thought she would come to confide in me more when boys entered her life, but Maggie moved through her preteen years still scornful of the opposite sex, settling into indifference as high school wore on. Once again I considered myself, and Russ, and wondered: where on earth had that gene come from?

  Still, it was none of my business, a fact of which I constantly reminded myself. Maggie was old enough to do, or not do, as she chose. And I was, after all, carrying on enough for the both of us. Given how negligible my judgment could become where sex was involved, perhaps it was for the best that Maggie cared little about it. At her age I had fallen for Marty, gone to bed with him, and all too quickly watched him become jealous and controlling, his teasing sense of humor turning manipulative and mean. But as young as I was, and as naïve, it had been difficult to know how to end it. If Maggie could be spared the heartache of that, I would be glad of it.

  I turned off the exit ramp, rolling up the window against the thundering wi
nd. Maggie would be waiting for me at the front door of her building, and was probably already there. I turned up the collar of my jacket, and tried to focus on her alone.

  “You missed Parents’ Weekend,” she said.

  I tucked my hands into my jacket pockets and frowned. “What?”

  “It was two weeks ago. I thought you were going to be here.” Her bottom lip looked petulant and her thick brown ponytail fanned across her shoulder like some sort of Roman helmet decoration gone askew. She had gained some weight around her chin. One doesn’t become immune to the Fresh man 15 just because one hits the thirty-credit mark.

  “You never said anything about it,” I informed her.

  “The school sent a flyer.”

  “Maggie. The school sends us a lot of things, most of them asking if we want season football tickets or if we’ll pay up five hundred dollars for a memorial plaque at the alumni center. You’re a sophomore now. I thought we were past those orientation events.”

  She tightened her fleece jacket around her waist. “Well, I was just lonely, is all.”

  I offered a tight smile. “How’s the dating scene?”

  “Oh, Mom.”

  I took her out to a pizza place just off campus, coercing her into filling up the tank while we were on the main drag. As soon as we were seated I understood why she had chosen the restaurant. The noise level was ungodly, and the tables were so close together that the constant jostling distracted from any focused conversation. This was a punishment for my asking the dating question, I was sure of it.

  “So how are your biology classes going?” I shouted over the din.

  She gave a bouncing nod, indicating things were as well as could be expected. “Good,” she replied. “The science courses are always good. I learned something really important over the past year.”