bidet, which Delph and Kram used immediately, reporting the details of their experiences. Delph and Kram took the two single beds in the guest room, and Matthew and Ben took over the living room. Johnny stopped by long enough to drop off his stuff in Neena’s quarters, where he had his own TV and minifridge and telephone line. He said, “I’ll stay at Rooster’s if someone else wants it,” and Eliza said, in front of everyone, “I’m sure you would,” and then Johnny left to meet Rooster at Tompkins to protest the curfew. Evidently the householders no longer cared about keeping up the appearance of sharing a bed. Jude took Di’s room, because no one else wanted to share with him, either, and because no one else wanted the responsibility of staying in the master suite. In the top drawer of Di’s dresser, beneath a layer of silky underwear in metallic hues, was what Jude determined to be a vibrator, which he tested against his wrist, then returned to its drawer. All of these items, along with the thought of his father having sex with Di here, creeped Jude out; nevertheless he was glad for a room of his own. He peeled back the sheets on the king-size waterbed and slept soundly on the cool, silver surface.
At home in her own bed at last, Eliza watched an old tape of Santa Barbara, paged through her Greek textbook (she’d forgotten nearly every word), and ate the banana pudding Neena had left for them. She felt strangely safe here. It was the last place her mother would think to look for her. And if she did: so be it. She was tired of running.
But she still couldn’t sleep. The down mattress pad she had always loved was too soft for her now. Twice she got up to tell Matthew and Ben to turn down the video game they were playing on the computer. Twice she got up to pee. After the second time, she stopped at her mother’s door and knocked on it. Jude answered in another pair of sperm boxers, these red. This time he was shirtless.
“Sorry about before,” she said, sinking into the pool of her mother’s bed. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at Johnny.”
“I tried to find you, but you weren’t standing outside like you said.” His voice was hoarse with sleep. “I didn’t know where you went.”
“You came after me?”
“I was worried.”
“Neena had this little baby, her granddaughter. She was this big.” She cradled an invisible baby in her arms. She wanted to say that she looked like Teddy, but this wasn’t precisely true. She closed her eyes and tried to conjure his face, but his features swam out of her reach. “I can’t remember what Teddy looked like,” she said quietly.
Jude’s eyes were closed, too, his face raised to the ceiling. “He was handsome,” he said. But Eliza could tell that he was seeing something more behind his eyelids, contours sharper than he could describe, or cared to.
She lay down across the sheets, which smelled like the lavender soap Neena laundered them in, and she told Jude that she used to sleep in this bed after her dad died, to keep her mother company. Eliza wanted to sleep in it again, but Jude didn’t lie down beside her. When the baby kicked, he didn’t want to feel it. Eventually she said good night and walked back down the hall to her own room.
That week, they came and went.
Eliza and Jude window-shopped at the baby boutiques on the Upper West Side, where a crib shaped like a sailboat cost a thousand dollars. Delph and Kram played pickup with some guys in Central Park, and Matthew and Ben went to work selling merch at Some Records. They reunited only for an occasional meal, and the show at the Pyramid, which Rooster did book. Delph and Kram left early to go to some club in Brooklyn some girls had invited them to. Di’s dining room table, polished as a pond and the size of a shuffleboard court, was quickly buried by maps and guides, ticket stubs, subway tokens, backpacks, cassettes, Gatorade bottles, granola bars, a jingle jangle of spare keys.
Johnny and Rooster went to the Love Feast at the Krishna Temple on Sunday night. On Monday they skated their friend’s half-pipe until Rooster got too tired. On Tuesday they swam at Coney Island, deep in the ocean where no one could see their limbs tangled underwater. On Wednesday