Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [74]
The morning after her birthday party, zipping an enormous cowhide suitcase on her bed, Eliza announced that she was leaving. “Don’t let her out of your sight,” her mother had instructed Neena before leaving the apartment herself an hour earlier, but when Eliza threw her arms, quite abruptly, around Neena’s neck, the woman did not feel she could hold her captive. Neena was not confident she could construct a sentence in English adequate to express her confusion, embarrassment, worry, and joy. With gratitude she had several times accepted the girl’s cocaine, which her son had traded a friend for a VCR, an interview suit, and a 1972 Dodge Coronet, but she did not know how to accept a good-bye hug.
Downtown Les was chasing a fly with a flyswatter when the buzzer buzzed. When he opened the door in his undershirt, Eliza was sitting on her suitcase, breathing heavily. “What are you doing, crazy woman? You carry that up the stairs?” Les dragged it through the kitchen and into the living room, where Eliza collapsed on the futon. Then he brought her a glass of water.
“Where’s Jude?” She gulped from her glass.
Les, standing, swatted at the drone that swept by his ear, his hangover indistinguishable from the insect that orbited his head. “Gone somewhere on his skateboard.” With his flyswatter, he indicated the suitcase. “What, are you moving in?”
“Not with you. I’m on my way to Johnny’s. I don’t think he’s home yet.” She placed her glass on the coffee table, lifted her necklace out of her collar, and gently bounced the charms in her hand. “I had to get out of there before my mom came back.”
Les turned the flyswatter on Eliza, fanning her. “Just so you know, it’s a terrible idea.”
“Moving in with Johnny?”
“Marrying him. Jude told me.”
A sticky strand of Eliza’s hair batted in the draft of the fan. “Papa, don’t preach,” she said. “You have any better ideas?”
“You can stay here with me. Sleep in the loft. Jude can sleep in the bathtub. When the baby’s born, we’ll sell it on the black market. I know a guy in Jersey City who can get ten thousand bucks for a white kid.”
“What if it’s not white?”
“Five,” said Les.
Eliza unzipped one side of the suitcase, slipped her hand in, and withdrew a chamois bag, which she tossed to Les. Les caught it against his chest. “She must have junked everything else last night. When I woke up this morning, she was gone.”
Les opened the drawstring and slid out the glass pipe. It was baby-shit brown marbled with streaks of green, squat as a mushroom and smooth as a stone. Not the prettiest thing, but she was reliable. Inside the bowl was an ancient bud, which he dug out like a booger and dropped on the carpet. “Harriet!” he said. “This old girl must be twenty-five years old. My ex’s earliest work. You meet my old lady when you were in Vermont?”
“I didn’t have the pleasure.”
“She’s a piece of work.”
He thought about her while he stroked her namesake, the curve of the woman’s thickened hips not unlike those of the pipe. He thought about the way, back in February, he’d approached her bedroom door—their bedroom door—the five musical knocks he’d played on it. He had intended only to say good night. Instead he’d found himself smelling the patchouli and cigarettes in her hair, the warm mama scent in the crook of her neck, like borax and breast milk and the sawdust of their bygone household, and as he walked her backward to their bed, she had smelled him back.
Now he went instinctively for the cookie jar on the kitchen counter, took out a thimbleful of pot, and packed it in the pipe. They’d been like a couple of teenagers, pawing at each other, up all night, like the teenagers they’d actually been when they’d first smelled the crooks of each other’s necks. He was back on the couch by the time their children, now teenagers, had woken the next morning. And now Eliza was pregnant and her suitcase was packed and out of it snaked the black lace of some undergarment