Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [89]
“Your mom is looking for you,” Harriet told Eliza now.
Eliza closed her eyes. “She is?”
“Do you want to maybe give her a call?” Harriet asked.
Eliza curled into Harriet’s arms again, and Harriet felt her shake her head. “No,” Eliza whispered, and Harriet was surprised to feel a river of relief in her chest. Now, with Eliza’s feverish head on her breast, she, too, felt the need to defend this cub from her own mama. It was the same proprietary impulse she exercised against the girl who’d given birth to Jude, to prove her maternal prowess, to make up for its derelict history. Diane Urbanski, the Jewish British widow ballerina, was no longer merely a romantic rival. She was another woman who was coming to collect.
Through May, as the first fists of bloodroot opened and the gauzy swans of fiddlehead raised their necks, Harriet and Eliza turned the garden, shook the rugs, walked together to the farmers’ market to buy eggs and honey and cheese. Out in the greenhouse, Eliza watched Harriet blow two salad bowls, a set of wine goblets, and a bud vase. Out in the greenhouse, Eliza posed for a drawing, a full-length portrait of her naked pregnant profile, which Harriet let her keep.
Prudence spent more and more nights at her new friend Dena’s house, leaving her room to Eliza. Had Prudence, the girl with whom Harriet had until recently shared a bed, shown jealousy or exasperation or the territoriality which Harriet herself had refined, Harriet would have known how to suffer this guilt. Instead Harriet was the one who felt jealous, of the mysterious people with whom Pru was now content to spend her time. There were new kids in Jude’s life, too—boys showing up at the door with guitars, leaning their bikes against her house. Harriet let Eliza do her makeup. At the second-run theater, Harriet and Eliza saw Moonstruck.
Meanwhile, the music stabbed through the ceiling of the basement.
Harriet asked Eliza to translate the lyrics for her, but even she could make out only a handful of words. If Jude were to name his own children after the songs of his youth, they might be named Truth, Strength, or Justice. Purity, Brotherhood, Loyalty, Trust. The words filled Harriet with a measure of gratification—her son was singing the merits of purity!—but they also amused her, embarrassed her, and concerned her. What kind of teenage boys sang songs about purity? What had happened to songs about getting stoned? Getting laid? And if one had to sing songs about purity (she didn’t mind songs about purity!), why did they have to be so hard on the ears? They were awfully angry, these songs. The classics of her own youth, about getting stoned and getting laid, were strummed on the guitar, they were hummed in the shower, there were harmonicas.
Les had attempted to take up the harmonica one summer, but it was a phase. He had other passions to cater to. When Harriet had first met him, when he was not much older than Jude was now, he had embraced drugs with the same unqualified exuberance with which their son now refused them. That, it turned out, had not been a phase. She hoped Jude’s newfound sainthood was not a phase, either.
But how could it be anything else? Her son’s life story was a series of phases: scooters, BMX, skateboards; metal, punk, hardcore. He had ADD, he grew out of a pair of shoes in six weeks, and the songs he now sang were an average of forty-five seconds long. He would be over it by the end of the summer.
Harriet watched the boys come and go. From the basement to the van, from Jude’s room to the fridge. She listened for them on the stairs, on the fire escape, to the ring of the phone and the drone of their showers and the puerile wail of their guitars. She observed Jude’s romance with straight edge as she might have observed his first love—warily, with a mother’s pride, hoping that, in the end, his heart wouldn’t break too hard.
Thirteen
The Champlain Recreation Center, like Jude’s house, had over the years served Lintonburg in a number of faces. During the French and Indian