Seeking Rapture: A Memoir. Kathryn Harrison

at hot paraffin and hid the candle-making kit, but, still, we paint and draw and mold and glue a lot – every day – and the more ambitious art projects do leave incidental impressions, stains, gouges. The rocking chair, I noticed recently, has been decorated with stickers and wobbly stripes of red and green around its arms and along the sides of its seat. It has older scars, of course; this rocker was in my childhood bedroom, and before that in my mother’s. It has been glued and clamped, screwed and reglued by both my grandfather and my husband.

      The baby swing and the changing table, the crib and the walker are gone now, and each of the children has what is called a ‘youth’ bed – smaller than a twin and closer to the floor. At five, Sarah is nearly too large for hers, but she’s not ready to part with it. She hated to lose its predecessor, the crib, which we tactfully dismantled long before her brother’s arrival and only after we had put together her new little bed, with its shiny, red enameled frame. We were careful to allow a full six months between the older child’s moving out of the crib and the younger’s moving in, careful that she never felt that she was forced to pass her bed directly along to another baby, but still Sarah wept when its polished wood head and foot and sides were carried from the room.

      Walker, for whom a crib was never better than an inadequately disguised cage, clapped at its second dismantling. He bounced on his version of the little bed, the same as his sister’s but enameled in blue.

      Between the two little beds is the fireplace, whose flue is permanently shut, bricked up. The empty hearth has become a cubbyhole for an appropriately combustible-looking collection of junked toys: Barbie’s broken refrigerator and her hot-pink range, a fire engine without its wheels, stray blocks, twisted and retwisted pipe cleaners, ravaged coloring books – all trash they cannot bear to discard. Together the objects make a blaze and jumble of color. Presiding disconsolately over the heap is the piñata from the most recent birthday party. A papier-mâché donkey with a festive hide and mane of orange and red and pink tissue paper, he was torn in two, vivisected by preschool greed wielding a broom. Now his head and tail both face out into the bedroom, so we are spared the dispiriting sight of his hollow middle. The mantelpiece above bears another rubble of objects, most of which our daughter hopes to keep out of her brother’s reach: stickers, costume jewelry, a collection of tiny plastic horses.

      Propped in the center of the mantel is an old wall hanging: a wood bas-relief of a tavern, including kitchen, dining hall, and bedrooms. Every object and gesture is carved and painted with cunning attention: dinner plates the size of dimes, a butter churn with a three-inch dash, washtubs, rolling pin, crucifix, table and benches, a clock whose hands read a quarter past five, hats hanging on hooks by the door, an accordion, two flowerpots, shotgun, and stove. My grandfather, who was apprenticed in 1904 to a cabinetmaker in Berlin (he was fourteen), acquired the hanging, which was made in the Black Forest. It used to contain a working music box, and just under the eaves is a brass key that no longer turns. The hidden mechanism, with its rolling, metal-toothed platen and minuscule comb of tines, once played, my grandfather told me, a feeble polka.

      As a child, I spent many hours staring at the tavern’s tiny furnishings, at once seduced and bewildered by the very nature of bas-relief, neither flat picture nor free sculpture, a dollhouse enduring an uneasy metamorphosis from three dimensions to two. Before we had children, I moved the tavern from closet to basement to guest room and back to closet, never knowing what to do with it until our children showed me.

      ‘Take it down! I want to look at it up close!’ one of them will say. The request is never more avid than when the children are ill, and I can remember exactly how fever enhanced the little row of frying pans hung over the stove, gilded the flowers painted on cupboard doors the size of my thumbnail. I can remember, in the glaze and glitter of their feverish eyes, but I can no longer feel the luxury of benign childhood illness, of recoveries uncompromised by meetings, deadlines, chores.

      From experience, I know that if my children are not sufficiently entertained they will escape the confines of bed, and I supply toys, rescind the TV laws, and bring them from their room into ours. In our family, sick children inevitably end up in the parental bed, an indulgence intended to compensate for an ailment serious enough to mandate bed rest: a way of separating horizontal day from night, a chance to command the empire of our tall, king-size bed, at whose foot I prop the tavern.

      ‘Why,’ Walker asks, as I asked my grandfather, ‘are the flames right on the pot?’ A tiny black kettle hangs in the kitchen over kindling the size of matchsticks, its underside painted with tongues of red and yellow and orange.

      ‘Because,’ I say, not finishing the answer any more than my grandfather did – in 1904 they didn’t have cellophane for fake fires.

      Not only my own childhood is recapitulated in our children’s bedroom; their father’s is here as well. Along the top shelf of the bookcase are twenty-nine bottles and nine glass inkwells, anywhere from ninety to a hundred and twenty years old. Clear, clouded, blue, green, amber – old enough so that none are actually colorless, so that even plain glass has acquired a purple tint. Though they were dug from old dumps, none are chipped or broken. There are hundreds of these bottles in our house, most packed away, all of them together representing thousands of hours of my husband’s childhood, countless afternoons spent on his knees, alone or with a friend, excavating the past.

      Time continues to possess and confound and mystify us. It passes, of course, with a relentlessness familiar to all grownups, but never more than when compared to the clock of childhood, with its burden of hours to be wasted, a burden compounded by the as yet misperceived vagaries of hour hands and minute hands and calendars. Questions of measurement include: When will it be Christmas, summer, Friday, my birthday? Dinner? Young children float on an ocean unmarked by adult dates and appointments. Sarah stands at the front door, dressed to go, whole hours before a birthday party. Walker looks out the window of the car, uttering ‘Are we there yet?’ while still in our neighborhood. He cannot imagine that his parents treasure long car rides for their enforced enclosure, their near-idleness.

      But childhood has many hours that must be filled. Is this one reason for our curiously misguided idealization of it? Waiting for important phone calls, we read professional journals while riding our exercise bikes. Dinner cooks slowly in the Crock-Pot while I fold the laundry, catch the lead stories of the six-thirty news, and police the crayon situation (she takes his reds, he breaks her blues). How different from the time when we drooped over banisters, loitered limply at the back door, moaned, ‘But I have nothing to do. I’m so, so, so bored.’

      While our children wait to be older, imagining perhaps that grown-up busyness is a measure of happiness and freedom, they are amused by Barbies and blocks and crayons and tiny cars, by trains, stuffed animals, picture books, dress-up clothes, beads, stencils, pipe cleaners, fire engines, balls, balloons, putty, puzzles, and puppets. All of these, in every state of disrepair (Madison Avenue Barbie reduced to a gruesome paraplegic, her hair matted into dreadlocks), form a tide that washes over the surfaces of their room. Beds, tables, chairs – nothing is uncovered, clutter is fierce, the room infrequently tidy. Still, ‘What a great room!’ people say when they enter for the first time. The walls are decorated with Babar and Mickey Mouse and Beatrix Potter, in determined contrast to my own room as a child, with its one print, entitled In Disgrace, of a little girl, face to the wall, blue sash drooping, socks rumpled, sad-eyed puppy at her scuffed heels. Flanking this print were two framed prayers by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Of a troubling and final nature, each seemed to indicate that I was not long for this world.

      As a small child, I was high-spirited, careless, clumsy, and often in ‘Coventry,’ my British grandparents’ way of saying ‘the doghouse.’ Even without the solace of canine sympathy, I knew myself to be that painted, rumple-socked girl sprung to life. Who needed to tell me that I was my mother’s disgrace? She was pregnant and unmarried the summer after she graduated from high school, and every look she gave me was one of regret. My mother’s parents reared me to be all that she was not – responsible and studious and steady – and they decorated my childhood bedroom to exclude the whimsy revealed in photographs of my mother’s room, with its three dollhouses and trunks of dress-up clothes. Before I could read, I had a desk, a bookcase, and edifying messages on the wall – none of which