“Thanks,” Eliza said, taking out a lighter. They all stood in a circle on the platform, staring at the red eyes of their cigarettes, trying to keep warm, no obvious place to go. It was not hard to fend off the disappointment that she wouldn’t be meeting Prudence. She had been curious to know what Prudence looked like, to observe her from afar, but it was Jude, she realized now, that she had wanted to meet. Girls irritated her, intimidated her, and finally bored her; around girls she became territorial, sniffing their asses, showing her teeth. It was not a part of herself she liked. Around boys she was herself, she could relax; she had nothing to win but them.
Still, she’d expected . . . something different. The novelty of a foreign exchange student. Provincial fashions. Elaborately laced snow boots. These boys looked like they’d just stood up from Les’s stoop on St. Mark’s Place.
“You guys get into a fight or something? You look sort of bloody.”
Under the streetlight, she could see that Teddy’s mouth was ringed with red bumps. At first she thought it was acne, but Jude had it, too, a raw, rosy stubble, like a beard of hives.
“No, it’s huffer’s rash,” said Jude. “It happens sometimes.”
“From turpentine,” said Teddy.
“Turpentine,” she mused. Maybe they did have their tricks in the country. Maybe they wouldn’t be impressed by the cocaine in her makeup bag. “Are you fucked up right now?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Jude said.
“It wears off pretty quick,” said Teddy.
“I thought it was part of the Dracula punk thing.” She tipped her cigarette toward Jude’s devil lock. “You into the Misfits?”
Jude and Teddy exchanged glances.
“They’re not bad,” said Jude.
“I saw them at Irving Plaza when I was ten. It was my first show. With the Necros and the Beastie Boys.”
“No shit?”
“It was some show,” she said, looking up at the Vermont sky, remembering. So this is where Les used to live, in this snowcapped village, with his other family.
Jude said, “Your mom let you go to a show when you were ten?”
“Not by myself.”
“Who took you, then?”
She watched her smoke rise white in the air, and then her breath, fainter. “Your dad,” she said. “I sat on his shoulders.”
J
ude’s desire for girls was indiscriminate, feverish, and complete; he wanted them all equally, and he wanted them not at all. Blondes or brunettes, big ones or small ones—they were cold, fragile, impenetrable creatures, all desirable as they were undesirable, all perfumed and pretty. To get one, he would have to get near one. He’d attempted this at a barn party in Hinesburg, kissing the girl unkindly and without asking, kind of pressing her up against a wall, and the whole drunk drive home in the backseat of the Kramaro, he’d felt so bad that he hadn’t said a word about it to anyone, not even Teddy.
Eliza was different and not different. She was a girl, a painted doll. Her hair, bobbed to her elfin ears, was thick and black, her heavy bangs straight as a blade. Her eyes, too, were black, Egyptian, or was it an effect of the makeup shadowing her lids, the stiletto lashes, the feline inflection of the black, what was it called, eyeliner? Her lips were red, her skin translucent as wax paper. Her coat was white and puffy and slick, with cinched cuffs and a hood that looked like it was made of feathers, and she wore tights and a kilt. She could not have been much more than five feet; he could have opened up his own coat and smuggled her inside.
The fact that she possessed knowledge about his father, for instance that he still sold pot and that he still owned his 1968 Dodge camper van, was what was disconcerting. It was as thrilling and as freakish as if she had revealed to him that she was his flesh-and-blood sister, come all the way from Manhattan to find him.
“Here’s the thing,” she said, getting down to business. In an effort to offer her the Vermont experience, they’d taken her to Ben & Jerry’s, the only place on Ash Street that was open on New Year’s Eve. Her treat—Jude and Teddy were still broke. It occurred to Jude to be embarrassed, but she insisted on paying, peeled a starched twenty out of a wallet that looked like lizard skin. They sat in a booth, Eliza on one side, Jude and Teddy on the other. She said, “I think your dad wants to be part of your lives.”
Jude licked his cone. New York Super Fudge Chunk.
“Lives?” Teddy said.
“Jude’s and Prudence’s. Sorry.”
“He said that?” Teddy asked.
“Not like, those exact words. But I
sense
it.”
“My dad’s a prick,” said Jude. “He doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
“How do you know, though?” Eliza asked. There was a gap between her two front teeth, just wide enough to slide his napkin through.
“Because I haven’t seen him in seven years?”
But that was the thing, Eliza said. Les felt that Jude and Prudence wouldn’t want anything to do with
him
. He’d been gone so long that he felt he was better off leaving them alone. “I think he feels bad about everything. I can tell he does.”
“What’s ‘everything’?”
“You know, deserting you. Not being there for you.”
“Where’s ‘there’?”
“Jude, okay, listen.” Eliza stabbed her spoon into her cup of Cherry Garcia. Jude did not want to listen. Whatever she had to say wouldn’t be true, not because he knew his father better than she did but because his father no longer existed. He was a voice on the phone, that was all.
“You should have seen him at Christmas. He got drunk—which I’ve never seen him that drunk—and he was
crying,
Jude. It was after he talked to you on the phone. He was standing out on the balcony, and he was alone, just
crying
.”
“You were there? When I talked to my dad?”
“Isn’t it sad?”
Jude said it was sad that he’d sent her to be his messenger.
“Oh, he didn’t. He wouldn’t do that. He just thinks I’m here to, you know, meet you guys.”
“Why
are
you here?”
Eliza deposited a lump of ice cream on her tongue and swallowed. “I was in the neighborhood.”
“Stowe’s not really in the neighborhood,” Teddy pointed out.
She shrugged. “I feel bad, I guess. I’m hogging Les all to myself.”
Jude laughed. “Really, that’s okay. You can keep him.” Then, having lost his appetite, he turned his ice cream cone over onto the table. “No offense, but it’s not really your business.” The cone settled, and then began to melt.
Teddy was working on his own cone. Jude looked at him and Teddy looked back. Teddy’s rash looked like a birthmark, a twin scar that bound them together. They were parentless; they were orphans, fiercely so. Eliza, Misfits or no, could not get to them. Her red mouth was pouting. Jude wanted to lean over the table and glide his tongue against the groove between her teeth: that would shut her up.
“Maybe you should go see him,” Teddy said to Jude.
“What?”
“Maybe you should give him a chance.”
Jude looked at him. “Don’t mind Teddy. His mom left this morning. He’s feeling homesick.”
Teddy fired a look at Jude. It was the same look he’d given Jude in front of Harriet earlier, drained of all its pleading warmth. Their silent pact had been broken.
“She left?” Eliza asked. “Where’d she go?”
“We don’t know,” Jude said. “We just woke up and she was gone.”
“Just—gone?”
“Just gone.”
Eliza put her small white hand on top of Teddy’s brown one. “Oh,
shit
. What should we do?” Her nails were painted with red polish, now chipped. Jude wanted to put his hand on top of theirs, as if they were making a promise or cheering before a game, but he didn’t know what they would be cheering for.
O
n Christmas, Les had asked her, “Do you know what your problem is?”
“I don’t appreciate my mother.”
“That’s true.”
“Or my trust fund.”
“That, too.”
They were sharing a bottle of wine on his fire escape overlooking St. Mark’s Place.
“You’re young,” Les said. He got like this when he was tipsy—enigmatic, flirtatious—but now he was full-on drunk. “You’re naive, girl. You’re a drama queen. You’re a sad-story addict. You’re drawn to them like a moth to a flame. You believe you can save the world by saying so.”
“Whatever,” Eliza said.
“Fine,” said Les. “Go up there. Scatter your pixie dust.”
S
alvatore “Tory” Ventura lived on Lake Champlain in a colossal stone house, bearded with ivy, that Jude and Teddy had passed a thousand times. Up and down the street, cars were double-parked, jammed in snowbanked driveways and scattered across the white lawn. A guy who was not Tory was manning the door, and with an indifference that Jude took as a sure sign of their triumphs to come, he waved the three of them in, through the foyer, past the piles of coats and shoes, through the marble kitchen smelling of microwaved food. In the cavernous, wood-paneled living room, “Pour Some Sugar on Me” was drowning out Dick Clark. People were crowded around the coffee table, playing poker in the low light, and Jude recognized them as he recognized semifamous people on television. Wasn’t she from that one show? Wasn’t she in his homeroom? It was nine o’clock, but he didn’t see Delph or Kram.
Twenty-odd years ago, when Les and Harriet had been in college here, they’d met at a party. Les once told Jude it had really been an
orgy,
that he had found Jude’s mother’s body in a pile of other bodies (a mass like a writhing octopus), and that she’d been wearing nothing but a string of love beads, purple and pink. He’d taken her hand and pulled her out, Les to the rescue.
Since then, the health of Lintonburg’s hippie movement had followed a series of dips and inclines, the same undulating route of the Dow Jones, for which most of the New England Boomers, by the end of Vietnam, had abandoned their peace pipes. By the time Les was fired from his lab position at Vermont State in 1980, the town’s marijuana market had dried up. His customers got promoted, got pregnant, got older.
But then there were their kids. By the end of 1987, at Ira Allen High School, the hippie thrived again, enjoying with the jock a marriage of tolerance, if only for their sheer numbers. Metalheads and punks, though, were few and far between, and they knew how to watch their backs. At Tory Ventura’s house, no orgy greeted Jude with outstretched hands. He and Teddy and Eliza entered the room just as someone was snapping a picture: they would be forever captured in a photo they didn’t belong in, blinking against the flash. Escaping from the room, they took cover on the landing of the staircase, in the shadows of the wide window seat. Eliza went in search of beer while Teddy and Jude stayed put, keeping an eye out for Kram and Delph.
“She knows her way around a party,” Teddy observed.
“She’s not shy,” Jude agreed.
“You like her?”
Jude looked out the window. “She’s awful damn nosy.”
“She’s just trying to be nice.”
In the backyard below, a bonfire was blazing. The light caught a flash of glass—a beer bottle soaring into the lake.
Teddy said, “She’s pretty, though, right?”
“She’s pretty,” said Jude.
Here came another girl now, slithering down the stairs, and up her denim skirt went Jude’s eyes. Whether Tory Ventura, escorting her, caught Jude’s glance, Jude didn’t have time to decide. Tory grabbed Jude’s devil lock and gave it a jerk, as if milking a cow. “I like your pigtail, Maybelline.”
Tory had given Jude the name in Spanish II on the day Jude had made the mistake of borrowing his sister’s acne concealer, a tube of what looked like flesh-colored lipstick. He gave Jude and Teddy a hard time in the halls, for Teddy’s glasses, Jude’s retainers, their band T-shirts. It didn’t help that the members of the Christian Fellowship Club had started wearing T-shirts that reconceived the logos of these bands—
Prayer
instead of Slayer,
Megalife
instead of Megadeth—implicating Teddy and Jude in the same substratum of hallway prey.
“You and your boyfriend been making out?” Tory asked Jude. He was staring with disgust at the rash around their mouths. “Looks like you got a giant hickey.”
“It’s from huffing,” Jude said. “Turpentine? To get
high
?”
Tory was wearing a hot pink T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a pair of pleated khakis with a braided leather belt, and boat shoes with no socks. From his pocket, he withdrew a tube of ChapStick and circled it lazily over his lips, concealing the whole tube in his hand like a kid would hold a crayon. “Hell you doing here, anyway?” he asked Jude, his lips shining.
“Hell
you
doing?” Jude asked, feeling bold.
Tory laughed. The girl, still standing at his side, combed her fingers through the dark hair at the nape of his neck. “It’s my house, dipshit. Who invited you? Fitzhugh?”