The Kingdom of Childhood

I nodded and tried to mask my surprise. Woodworking was an eleventh-grade subject. I realized she must be considerably older than I had guessed. Yet here she was, about to have another baby. Better her than me, I thought. I was ready for a second shot at a lot of things in life, but mothering a newborn was not one of them.

“If you want to talk crafts, Judy’s your woman,” Dan told her, and patted me on the shoulder. I stiffened. “She can probably spin straw into gold.”

Vivienne grinned. “Is that a course at the Steiner teachers’ college?”

I twitched my shoulder out from his grasp. “If it was, he’d have me locked in the workshop right about now.”

He laughed, and I watched Vivienne Heath’s gaze shift from me to my boss and back again. Dan always upped his show of goodwill and camaraderie around me to compensate for the fact that we hated each other. Upon his arrival the previous year, it had quickly become clear that he thought I was a dinosaur excavated from Woodstock; I disdained him for being a bourgeois bohemian. The ideological tension ran deep even before I began having vivid dreams of coupling with him. Whatever uptight vibe Vivienne was observing could have come from either source.

“Speaking of the workshop,” said Dan, “he’s in there working right now. Perhaps you can drop in and say hello before you leave.”

“Of course.” I shouldered my purse and gave my classroom a final glance. “I’ll head over right now.”

“Thanks so much. I’m sure this will be a wonderful experience for him.” Vivienne turned her head and smiled at me. “Have you met my son? Zach Patterson?”

It dawned on me suddenly. The black hair and eyes. The faded, peachy tan. Barring the pregnant belly, the slender and neatly toned frame. I suppressed a groan.

“I have, as a matter of fact,” I said, impressed by my own composure. “He and my son are in the madrigal choir together. I brought him home the other day.”

She narrowed her eyes slightly. “He didn’t tell one of his Lewinsky jokes, did he?”

“He did.”

A sigh of disgust escaped her lips. “I apologize for that. If it’s the joke I think it is, he’s been telling it to his father’s employees, his uncles and even his grandfather. Quite the comedian, that one. He’s probably getting revenge on us for listening to too much NPR.”

“Maybe he finds it upsetting,” I suggested. “Losing faith in one’s leaders and all that. Maybe it’s his way of relieving the stress.”

She smirked and responded with a snorting little laugh. “You don’t know my son. He doesn’t have stress. He just wants to use dirty words in front of adults. It gives him a thrill.”

Beside me Dan shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, well,” I quickly added, “I’m pretty experienced with teenagers. I’m sure I’ll be able to keep him in line.”

I said goodbye to Dan and Vivienne and headed out in the direction of the workshop, taking the long route to avoid walking past Bobbie’s history classroom, now occupied by a young teacher who bore no resemblance to Bobbie in either looks or spirit. On the first day of school I had made the foolish decision to drop by and peek in. The sight of all those teenagers chatting and working and laughing, going on as though she had never been there, sent me into a spiral of depression so confounding that I spent all afternoon emptying dropperfuls of Bach’s homeopathic Rescue Remedy into my coffee. Since then I employed the methods of avoidance and repression to deal with my grief, and while I knew the conventional wisdom declared that this was a poor idea, it had always worked fine for me.

The bedraggled workshop building sat behind the school, an oversize shed in need of some serious love and exterior latex paint. Amish craftsmen had been contracted to build it ten years before; it had been trimmed and painted by the school’s juniors and seniors, and left unheated except for a wood stove they fed with scraps from student projects. That much I knew, because the underwriters had canceled the insurance on that building three years before unless we agreed to put in a heating system that complied with building code. The funds didn’t exist, and so the building survived on vigilance and hope.

I heard Zach Patterson before I saw him, crouched on the floor of the workshop beside a very loud saw. With safety glasses over his eyes and his shaggy black hair shielding his face, I would not have been certain it was him were it not for the backpack lying on the table, the initials ZXP drawn in big bold letters on the front pocket with a black marker. I wondered what the X stood for.

“Hi, Zach,” I yelled over the din of the saw, trying to start the partnership on a friendly note.