The Kingdom of Childhood

“You’re only sixteen,” she reminded him. “There’s no hurry. But when the time comes, make sure you have ’em handy. Because love comes and goes, but herpes is forever.”

Zach grimaced. “Gotcha.”

“And if you ever want to talk—” here she patted his shoulder “—you know where to find me.”

“I know.”

He let her out the door and retreated to his bedroom, where he dropped them in his underwear drawer with the others she had given him. They were

useful, if only for experimenting with how long he could coast on the wave before losing control. He called it “Tantric Sex for One.”

In the beginning with Russ, when he was a bespectacled undergraduate with a simmering anger I mistook for understated masculinity, I had the soaring feeling that together we were really something special. He was the pet of the college’s top marine biology professor, the student president of the fledgling Greenpeace group, a member of the rowing team. Lanky and tall and argumentative, he had a talent for the verbal dogfight and took pride in reducing others to silence. In our dorm building I had grown accustomed to hearing his voice, clipped and strident, as a fixture of late-night conversations in the lounge. When, during those debates, he began to defend the views I quietly voiced—including me as the second member of his Russ-against-the-world faction—I felt exalted. When we began dating, I felt chosen. In the exhilaration of falling in love, either with him or with the idea of being worthwhile, it was easy to overlook the hulking shadows of what his untethered youthful traits would become. I was, one might say, otherwise occupied.

This is what I did see: visions of the two of us walking like overeducated angels into the urban squalor of New York City, him to clean up the Hudson River, me to educate the impoverished youth. With a baby on my hip, we would fly overseas and join the expatriate community in France while Russ devoted his expertise to cleaning up the Seine. After a few years we would move home to a nice brick Colonial and be the toast of our cadre of hip academic friends. There would be parties. There would be wine, and framed photos from a ski trip to Vermont, and a chocolate Lab with a red bandanna around his neck.

Well, I had the house.

But just as Russ had proven himself less brilliant than his professor suspected and downscaled his plans, my own vision of the Perfect Life had shifted. The passion I felt for the stories, the methods, the esoteric philosophies of Rudolf Steiner was all-enveloping; I threw myself into it with all the devotion a new convert has to offer. The Kingdom of Childhood, as Steiner called it, was like a magical forest we guarded with a human chain, in which young spirits unfolded like cabbage roses and children could explore with absolutely no fear. We draped their bassinets with pink silk so they would see the world, literally, through a rose-colored lens. We sliced their apples asymmetrically, so the idea of mass-produced form would not even enter their consciousness. What my friends found trivial, I embraced. God, or his philosophical equivalent, was in the details.

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.