Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [22]
“You shouldn’t have spent so much money,” says his mother dryly to his father, who is flossing his teeth at the table.
“Nothing’s too good for my birthday boy.”
It’s the night of his parents’ New Year’s Eve party, and for once Jude doesn’t mind sharing his birthday with his parents’ friends. The house is full of eggnog and balloons, which that afternoon Jude helped to blow up. His dad rubs a stray one on Jude’s head, letting it hang above him like a cartoon thought bubble. Then he sends him upstairs, promising he’ll wake him at midnight.
In the bean bag chair in his room, on the black-and-white TV with the rabbit ears, he plays Frogger, winning again and again. He’s played it at Frederick Watt’s house, and each time he’s kicked Frederick Watt’s ass. There is no greater exhilaration than the mad dash of the frog against heavier and heavier traffic, the leap from log to log across the croc-infested waters, the perfect dance of plunking oneself safely in one of the boxes at the top of the screen, unless it’s watching one’s little sister being squashed repeatedly by a truck, two leaps into the street. No matter what those boxes at the top of the screen are or why a frog would want to be in them—each time the circus music begins again, death has been evaded, shelter has been found.
But after Prudence, crying, tired of dying, goes to bed, Frogger ceases to jump. The screen is a storm of grays, the street, the river, a jumble of shapes just out of reach. Jude removes the cartridge, blows mightily into it as he’s seen Frederick Watt do, but the thing’s broken. His heart beats with disappointment. Downstairs, Paul Simon is singing “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” to which Jude and Prudence know all the verses. There’s laughing, and that high-pitched delight in women’s voices. Just slip out the back, Jack. He puts on his bathrobe and his boots and climbs out the window, down the rusty fire escape from the third floor to the first.
Through the thin yellow curtains, he can see the party taking shape in the living room, just below eye level. There are the Hausers and the Mayhews, and the lady who poses for the life drawing class Harriet teaches (she’s wearing clothes), and the Donahoes, and the rest of the botany professors and their pretty wives. The glasses in their hands are filled with liquid the color of fluoride rinse, except for Mrs. Donahoe’s, which looks like it’s filled with ginger ale. She’s wearing a sheer white dress with a slit up to her thigh. Jude kneels to find the part in the curtains. He can see Mrs. Donahoe’s nipples, and her outie belly button, which looks like a SpaghettiO. She’s examining the ice in her glass. She looks, Jude thinks, sad.
He sits up straight. He’s on the bottom rung of the fire escape, his legs dangling over the edge, and when he turns around, he can just see the roof of the greenhouse. He can see the Christmas lights blinking in the window of the office building next door—red, green, red—and the wreath of mistletoe his father has hung on the front of the camper van parked in the alley below. He can hear the front door of the house opening and closing, and he can see Mr. Donahoe, the department chair, come around the corner in his overcoat. He’s big and tall, with a shock of white-blond hair and a nose with a cleft in the middle, like one of those monster strawberries. He leans up against the side of the van, in its shadow. Jude sits very still, thinking that if he can make himself invisible, something will happen. What seems like many minutes later, his mother comes out of the house, her camel-colored coat draped around her shoulders, a martini glass in her hand. In her unlaced snow boots, she walks to the van and, unsurprised to find Mr. Donahoe there, lights a cigarette beside him. The two of them are talking close, so close Jude can’t hear them, their lips moving just a few inches apart. The van is called the Purple People Eater, because Jude’s dad painted it lavender and once fit twenty-four friends