The Kingdom of Childhood Read Online Free PDF Page B

his mouth with his fingers. Behind him, Scott lifted the lid on the Crock-Pot, glanced at its contents, and set to work making himself a cheese sandwich. I rose from my chair and leaned toward Russ, resting my knuckles on the table. Scott, sensing danger in the quiet, turned just enough to cast a nervous gaze on me. In a hissing whisper I told Russ, “I HATE your Ph.D.”
    “I don’t have a Ph.D,” he hissed back.
    “And I hope they never give you one,” I spat. Voice rising, I added, “I hope you’re stuck in committee hell, talking about goddamned Iceland and its goddamned fisheries for the rest of your life. I hope you die revising the fucking thing.”
    “Jesus, Mom,” said Scott.
    Russ raised his eyebrows high and nodded adamantly. “That’s nice , Judy. Wow, I feel like celebrating our marriage all of a sudden. How about some mu shu pork?”
    In the months that followed I felt bad about what I said. But you see, I only meant I hoped he would be revising his dissertation for the rest of his life, unrewarded. I didn’t mean it literally, that I hoped he would die.

3
    The history teacher was hot. At five foot four or so, she was short enough to make Zach feel tall standing beside her, and she had a lot of loosely-curled hair the color of black coffee that bounced against her back as she moved across the classroom. When she turned to write on the board, her butt jiggled beneath her pencil skirt in such a way that Zach wasn’t gaining a great deal of knowledge about the Roman Empire.
    “When Tacitus visited Germania,” she told them, her voice bearing just a hint of a Spanish accent, “he called it ‘hideous and rude, dismal to behold.’ He found the people warlike, with a violent system for justice. Traitors were hung from trees. Adulterous wives had their hair cut off and were driven through the streets naked, by their husbands, with a whip. Cowards and those of loose morals were buried in bogs under mud and held down with willow branches. Tacitus wrote that this was because glaring offenses must be displayed as a warning, but pollution must be concealed. He said, ‘No pardon is ever granted, for no one turns vices to mirth here.’”
    The girls around Zach sat with their pens poised, their expressions serious and a little offended. The guys grinned.
    “I thought you guys would like that part,” their teacher said. A low titter made its way across the classroom. “Remember this as you write up your group reports. A written history doesn’t have to be boring.”
    There was a squeal of chair legs against flooring as the students turned their seats around to break into small groups. Zach had partnered up with two other Madrigals: Temple, whose SAT score was somewhere around the hundred-and-fiftieth percentile, and Fairen, who was also bright but appealed to Zach because the sort of friendship he hoped to develop with her, in another era, might have gotten one of them buried in a bog. She was lovely in a fine-boned, slightly asymmetrical way, with a long white throat and multi-pierced ears that stuck out past her hair when it fell, white-blond, on both sides of her face. Zach found her pale, bejeweled ears fascinating. Scott called her “Dumbo.”
    “A history of Maryland written in the style of Tacitus,” Temple read from the sheet in front of them. “We could hammer this out in a weekend. And it’s not due until right before Christmas break.”
    Fairen rolled her eyes. “This is what happens when the real teacher dies in July and they have a month to fill the spot.”
    Zach looked over the sheet and scowled. “We’re supposed to do a section on the ‘legends of Maryland.’ How does Maryland have any ‘legends’? It’s a frigging state .”
    Temple patted the desk noisily with his palms and let his gaze drift toward the ceiling. “We could look up old Indian stories, I guess. Or urban legends. Crybaby Bridge, the Chesapeake sea monster, that sort of thing. The Bunny Man.”
    “What’s