The Kingdom of Childhood by Rebecca Coleman Page B

Goats Gruff.”
    “They’re playing Grenade Bandits,” he corrected.
    “Well, why don’t you go play with them.”
    As he scurried out, I shut the Dutch doors in relief. I felt thankful the playhouse was not destined for my classroom. Watching the children run around in it was unnerving. In the days since my encounter with Zach, even—perhaps especially—after I knew my job and life would be safe, I found myself mired in uneasy guilt and gloomy self-reflection. What could have possessed me to do such a thing? I wondered. I had spent my entire adult life in the service of a single master: pure childhood. Not God. Not a messiah or a prophet. Only childhood at its most undefiled, a walled garden as big as a child’s imagination could stretch, into which no evil thingcould enter. I had obsessed over the minutiae of the color of a silk square, the finish of a toy horse. With a religious devotion, I worked to ensure that the unformed mind would experience only what was natural, what was pure. Now, in my failure to control a most natural impulse, I had revealed the wildly impure.
    A lapse of reason, I thought. It wasn’t his youth that intoxicated me, but the way he had of bringing my own youth to the surface; with each passing hour with him another year seemed to fall away, until the woman in the mirror would have appeared to me a stranger. When he kissed me, he recognized the girl radiating out from within me. But I was not that girl anymore. Any jury of my peers would be happy to remind me of that fact. And because of that, I had to find a way to stay oriented in time, not to succumb to the pull of his camaraderie. If I needed affection so badly, then I needed to find a lover my own age.
    I clutched at the knot beneath my head scarf and turned my thoughts toward the choir trip coming up at the end of the week. Sylvania’s madrigal choir had won a spot in a regional competition in Ohio, and so for four days I would be away from home, supervising teenagers but also free, off and on, to do as I wanted. In a year or so that might mean the chance to find a replacement for Russ, but at the moment I lacked enough nerve. Instead I would try to think like a free woman rather than a confined one. In my mind I would be nineteen again, attuned to the undercurrent of hunger in the way men greet women. Rather than shrug it off, I would welcome it. “Teacher’s base! Teacher’s base!”
    The sound of my children’s voices brought me back into the moment, and I worked to decipher their meaning as I watched them chase each other across the dampened sand that flew out behind their sneakers like brown sugar. All at once I spottedAidan racing toward me at full speed, his small arms pumping hard, fine blond hair flying; his face bore an ecstatic smile. I grinned at the sight of it and braced for impact, knowing what Aidan knew: I was the safe zone. Small, but rock-solid.
    I still had no reason to doubt it, then.
     
    My goal for Ohio was to have a fun, enriching, self-actualized time pursuing grown-up things. Antiquing, learning about Amish life, tasting wine. In less than a year Scott would be off at college and it would be my turn to enjoy the pursuits denied to me during the thick of mothering. And if ever I needed a pep talk about the scintillating fun of adulthood, it was now.
    Now, as I watched my teenage charges touch and jostle each other as they filled their buffet plates with the building blocks of heart disease, laughing and joking, stacking on a third or fourth brownie. Now, as they bought magazines and bubblegum and showed up twenty minutes late with perfectly flat-ironed hair. Removed from the fairy-tale paradise of Waldorf school, they dove into American consumer culture as if it were a deep-water quarry on a hundred-degree day. Had I been more naïve, I would have found it disheartening. But, as I reminded myself while I examined quilts in a farmhouse shop, even the Amish allow their teens to go a little crazy with the