Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [142]
“I still have my key, but I didn’t want to bust in. I just want to pick up my stuff.”
She held the door open, and he stepped inside. Hitching up his shorts—those were Les’s, too—he looked around the apartment as though he hadn’t been there before.
“What were you playing? It sounded pretty good.”
“Nothing. Just scales.”
Jude looked across the room for a place to sit, then shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned his shoulder against the wall.
“Anyone home?”
Eliza shook her head.
“How you feeling? I like your head wrap thing.”
“Thank you. Neena gave it to me.” She reached up and touched the top of her head, stroking the silk scarf. “They gave me a list of things I could take for pain, but I don’t want to take anything.” She put her hands in her lap. “What about you?”
Jude shrugged dismissively. “You got it worse than I did. I wish it was my head that got split open.”
Eliza took a sip of her Yoo-hoo. Then she slipped off her scarf. “You can make it up to me.” She found the end of the bandage and unwound it, undressing her head, and released the ribbon of white gauze. Across her left temple, nine stitches held together a naked patch of scalp. “Do you have your clippers?”
He shaved her head in the living room, Eliza sitting on the piano bench, Neena’s purple scarf now wrapped around her shoulders. He circled her body, the clippers humming, her dark hair feathering to the floor. She didn’t open her eyes until the sound stopped. In her mother’s bathroom, her back turned to the sink, she angled Di’s hand mirror in front of her face.
“Now you’re really punk rock.”
“We’re twins,” Eliza said, putting down the mirror on the sink. She swept the scarf from her shoulders and dropped it over his head.
“Do I look punk rock?”
Eliza said, “You look like Little Red Riding Hood.”
“I wanted to ask you something,” he said, taking off the scarf. Scattered across the marble vanity were the various toiletries he’d left behind. Noxzema, shaving cream. Like the skeletons of some spiny-backed mollusc, his retainers.
“You’re not going to ask me to marry you, are you?”
“Do you want me to?” Jude asked. The scarf around his shoulders looked like the shawl Johnny had worn on their wedding day, the shawl she had tied to her own.
“Not anymore,” she said. “Sometimes I wished we were the ones who were married, though.”
“You did?”
“It’s stupid.”
Jude tried to hide his smile by playing with his lip. “Well, sometimes I wished the same thing.”
She was rubbing her shaved head, and now she took another look at it in the mirror. “What were you going to ask, then?” she asked his reflection.
“If you’re sure,” he said, rubbing his own head reflexively. “About the baby.”
“I’m sure,” she said. Her other hand was on her belly, and, reflexively, she began to rub it, too. He copied her. They rubbed their bellies and their heads.
“Is it pat your belly, rub your head?” he asked.
“No, it’s rub your belly, pat your head.”
They attempted this for a minute, watching each other in the mirror. He kept messing up and patting his belly. “It’s not that hard!” Eliza said, laughing. He gave up and reached for the handful of charms hanging from her neck. He fingered the subway token. Teddy used to hold it up to his glasses and peer through the hole at Jude.
“What’s in this locket, anyway?”
Gently, she took it back from him. “It’s a secret.”
Empty-handed now, he dropped his hands to her belly. She closed her eyes. He held his hand over her T-shirt and he rubbed. It was a Green Mountain Boys T-shirt, extra large. Clockwise, he polished her belly. He leaned in to kiss her and closed his own eyes, and no one but the mirror was there to witness their image, their profiles locked at belly and mouth.
They remained in this position until, at the distant door of the apartment, there was another knock.
“Maybe Neena forgot her key,” she said.
It was Johnny. Linen jacket, tie. The bridge of his nose was bruised, and beneath his left eye was a jagged cord of skin,