What She Saw... (8 page)

She couldn't imagine anything more embarrassing.

THAT SAID, LEONARD and Roberta Fine were hardly the weirdest Whitehead had to offer. Yes, Roberta knitted her own sweater vests, forgot to cut the sales tags off her shirts, and managed to get food in her hair every time she ate. And sure, Leonard was wearing two different-color socks—one green and one black—the day he came to play the oboe for Phoebe's tenth-grade class. Compared with their neighbors, however, Phoebe's parents might as well have been a TV sitcom couple from the 1950s.

An avid numismatist with an Adam's apple the size of a plum, the former Swiss ambassador to Togo lived in a split-level across the street. His next-door neighbor to the left was a World War II spy turned cookbook writer whose youngest child died in a freak accident involving a desk lamp. And who could forget the Kaminskys, a husband-and-wife magician team who mostly performed at local bar mitzvahs? Once upon a time Stan and Barbara Kaminsky had been a brand name on Broadway. The real tragedy, however, was their dreadlocked daughter, who lived at home and—despite her pear-shaped body and relatively flat chest—commuted to work at Peep World on Forty-second Street, where she danced without her shirt and (some said) pants.

Then there was Bill Cornish, the painfully shy arcade game addict who lived farther down the block with his senile grandma with the red shawl. There were rumors that Mrs. Cornish was hoarding her husband's pickled corpse in the two-car garage. She wasn't the only old lady on the block getting a bad rap. It was said of Miss Clapp, who'd lived alone in a rickety blue house on the corner since before anyone could remember, that she was actually a witch. The evidence? She dressed primarily in black. Her cat was blind. She rarely came outside during the day. And when she did, she walked with a thick wooden cane that bore a vague resemblance to the stick portion of a broom.

As for the guy who built the place to the Fines' right—a near-windowless concrete affair hidden behind a hedgerow of tall pines—it was common knowledge on the block that he'd helped build the atom bomb. Though a resident of New Jersey, he'd somehow gained access to the Manhattan Project. But that was before Phoebe's time. As she grew up, about six different families would move in and out of that gloomy bomb shelter of a manse. Phoebe's least favorite were the Glicks, a retired couple whose Rottweiler, Anselm, always made a beeline for her crotch.

And still, from Phoebe's perspective, the Glicks were an ever more welcome sight than the Bertmullers, a motherless family of three who lived two doors down. Mr. Bertmuller was a Jungian psychoanalyst. It was never clear what had happened to his “female archetype.” It was hard to believe that the Bertmuller boys would ever be anyone's types. The older son, George, was a badly shaven, white-painter-pants-wearing perpetual-graduate-student type rumored to be studying mushrooms at Columbia, while his roly-poly younger brother, Gary, was perhaps best known for skinning squirrels and hanging the hides to dry on nails he hammered into prominent trees in the purlieu. The Bertmullers also found room in their house for a constantly rotating assemblage of Japanese exchange students, as well as two black Labs (Evil and Knievel) and three boa constrictors to whom Emily had the job of feeding mice one year while the gang pitched tents in Yosemite. On the day of Emily's African dance recital in Teaneck, Phoebe kindly offered to fill in. That was the one and only time she saw the inside of the Bertmullers' ranch home. Once was enough. There were wooden masks hanging from dark red walls. There were hand-woven Peruvian throw rugs draped over mustard leather couches with metal arms.

There were several piles of fossilized dog shit collecting dust on the living room carpet.

RACHEL DIDN'T BELIEVE her at first—or maybe she didn't want to believe her. It went against her entire philosophy of life that a guy like Jason Barry Gold would want to have anything to do with Phoebe Fine. “Right,” she said. “You and Jason Barry Gold.”

But Phoebe told her, “I'm not kidding. He called me last night. I don't even know how he got my number.”

“Maybe you gave it to him?”

“I swear I didn't!”

“So Jason Barry Gold called you last night.” Rachel said it over and over again until even she began to believe it. “And the two of you are going to the movies on Friday night. Which is why you want to go see
Youngblood
with me on Saturday night instead.”

“Right.”

“Look, Phoebe, I'm not gonna even bother making plans with you in the future if you're always, like, canceling them!”

“But I'm
not
always canceling them! I only canceled that one time when my grandfather died!”

“Do you have any idea how hard it was getting those tickets?”

“I'm sure it was . . .”

“I don't even like Genesis.”

“Look, I'm sorry—”

“Whatever. It doesn't matter. We'll go to
Youngblood
on Saturday night. Do you want to sleep over afterward?”

“Sure.”

“I'll rent a movie for afterward.”

“You want to see two movies in one night?”

“Oh, and I'm sure you have a better idea what to do afterward?”

“Fine, we'll watch a movie afterward.”

“Have you seen
Meatballs
?”

“I saw it with you. Remember?”

“Do you want to see it again?”

“Sure, why not?”

Sometimes, Phoebe found, it was easier giving in.

THAT FRIDAY NIGHT Jason and Phoebe went to see Ferris Bueller's Day Off at the Paramus tenplex. He picked her up in his BMW convertible. And he had the top down even though it was mid-October. And he was wearing mirrored shades even though it was already dark. “Dude,” he said, pushing open the passenger door. “You look really nice.”

Phoebe couldn't believe her ears. The compliment thrilled her. Then she remembered Jason's shades. “How would you know?” she said.

“I can just sense these things.” He shrugged.

“Are you gonna drive with those on?” she asked him, but not because she necessarily cared. In truth, she could think of worse ways to die than at the hands of Jason Barry Gold. Rachel would be really righteous about the whole thing. But Jennifer Weinfelt, Phoebe thought to herself with morbid glee, would never fully recover from the shock.

Jennifer Weinfelt would have to live with her and Jason's names linked forever in death.

“Would you like me to take them off?” he asked her.

“Okay,” she answered, thinking the better of it. (Maybe Jennifer Weinfelt wasn't worth dying for, after all.)

There was traffic on Route 80. And the movie had just opened. So they had to sit in the front row. All the actors looked like fuzz, and by the end of the movie, Phoebe's neck was so sore she could hardly keep her head upright. So Jason Barry Gold, who was wearing belted blue jeans and a collarless linen shirt with balloon sleeves, massaged it in the front seat of his convertible in the parking lot after the movie. He said, “Let me,” and she let him, and he squeezed her neck so hard she thought he was going to break it. And he smelled the way Roberta's déclassé brother, Uncle Sol, who worked in the glass business and didn't know Mozart from Mendelssohn, always smelled—as if he'd always just shaved and showered. Then Jason let her neck go, pressed “play” on the tape deck, moved closer, put his arm around her the way he had that night at Aimee Aaron's Sweet Sixteen. It was the Police's first album. It was that song, “Roxanne.”
You don't have to wear that dress tonight.
Phoebe was wearing pants—her beige Et Vous khakis with narrowed ankles, a red long-sleeved T-shirt, and black penny loafers with original buffalo nickels fitted into each slot. “Are you still going out with Aimee Aaron?” she asked him.

“Let's just say I'm a free agent,” he told her.

Then he stuck his tongue down her throat and his breath reeked of mouthwash and mustard and she nearly gagged. And she couldn't understand how you were expected to breathe and make out at the same time. Still, she had to consider it a success. It was her first real kiss.

IT WAS NOT, however, her first real date.

Her first real date had been a double date with a champion slalom skier named Chip Krupp and his older brother, Brett, who was also training for the Olympics. It was the summer after ninth grade, and Phoebe was working as a volunteer usher at one of those New England summer stock outfits populated by soap opera actors in search of legitimacy. (Leonard had a gig at a nearby chamber music camp.) During intermission one night—they were putting on that play about the invisible rabbit,
Harvey
—a guy with white eyelashes eating an oatmeal raisin cookie idled over to where she stood on the back patio and asked her if she was enjoying the show.

“Yeah,” she said, even though she was bored out of her mind.

“These damn mosquitoes,” said White Eyelashes, swatting at the air.

“They're really bad this summer,” agreed Phoebe.

“Yeah, I got bites all over my legs.”

“One summer I got bitten seven times on my left eyelid, and it swelled up like a golf ball.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Chip. “That must have been really bad.”

“Yeah, it was pretty bad.”

“So you live around here?”

“Sort of.”

“That's cool.”

“I guess.”

“By the way, my name is Chip.”

“I'm Phoebe.”

“That's a pretty name.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you think you'd want to get together sometime?” he asked her after the show.

“Sure,” she said. Only because he'd asked. No one ever had before. It was pretty exciting.

It was even more exciting when Chip called to see if she was free that Saturday night.

She told him that she was, except she wouldn't be alone, since her friend Jody, from tennis class, was coming up for the weekend. That's when Chip offered to bring along Brett. “I'll have to check with Jody,” Phoebe told him. “But it'll probably be okay.”

And it was.

For the big night, Phoebe wore an old tuxedo jacket of her father's and a pair of purple leggings with a pleated yoke. Jody wore striped jeans with zippers at the ankles and a New York Giants sweatshirt. The boys arrived in Brett's pickup. The four of them shook hands. It was the boys' idea to drive to the supermarket and buy wine coolers. The girls climbed into the back. The bumpy ride over made Phoebe's insides shake. She was glad when they got to the Grand Union.

Except then Chip backed into a wine display—he and Brett were tossing around an aerosol can of cheese food as if it were a football—and the manager came over and bawled them out. So they had to get wine coolers somewhere else. Except none of the other stores in town would accept Brett's fake I.D. So they had to settle for sodas. It was pretty embarrassing.

It was Chip's idea to drive to the top of Mount Prettyview and check out the pretty views.

The four of them sat shoulder to shoulder in the dark on a rocky ridge overlooking the valley and giggled about what had happened in the supermarket. After Jody and Brett disappeared into the bushes, Phoebe thought Chip might try to kiss her. She was relieved he didn't.

She was even more relieved when she and Jody got back to the Fines' rental A-frame, where they made hot chocolate, reviewed the events of the night, and pretended to have had more fun than they'd actually had. Or, at least, Phoebe did.

She found it so much easier making conversation with girls.

MORE RECENTLY THERE was the Carnegie Hall expedition with Eugene Lavitsky. He was the only male flutist in the history of the All-County Youth Orchestra. There were constellations of aggravated zits in the corners of his full red lips. He had the kind of hair that attracted fluff and string. He wasn't even cool in the limited context of the wind section. But he said he had two tickets to see Milstein play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto at Carnegie Hall. And Phoebe was flattered. And she felt sorry for Eugene. And she figured Milstein wouldn't be playing much longer, since he was already close to a hundred.

Since neither of them had a car, they took New Jersey Transit to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. On the walk over to Fifty-seventh Street they talked about the ACYO. “The problem with Kwan is that he thinks he's, like, the concertmaster or something,” said Phoebe.

“Yeah, well, you should try sharing a stand with Melissa Goetz,” said Eugene. “She turns three pages at a time!”

“That must suck.”

“It really does. But what can you do?”

Their seats were way up high and to the far left. Milstein was in profile, and the size of a pea. Most of the audience was over seventy. The old ladies were unwrapping hard candies. The old men had their eyes shut. To make the time pass faster, Phoebe and Eugene drew funny pictures of the most egregiously decrepit audience members in the margins of their programs.

After the concert they went to the Carnegie Deli, where they sat in the window and ate pastrami sandwiches. Since Eugene's father was a harpsichordist and his mother was a choirmaster, Phoebe felt comfortable talking about Leonard and Roberta in ways she didn't around Rachel. She told him about the pressure they put on her to practice; and about how guilty they made her feel when she listened to Top Forty radio. Never mind her two favorite bands, Yaz and a-ha.

“Tell me about it,” said Eugene. “My father wouldn't even let me go to the Jethro Tull concert. And, you know, Ian Anderson was classically trained on the flute.”

“At least your father's heard of Jethro Tull,” griped Phoebe. “My father still thinks young people are doing the Charleston.”

Eugene laughed so hard he drooled. Phoebe was willing to forgive that minor grotesquerie. It was when he tried to kiss her—in the back of the bus, on the way back to New Jersey— that she found Eugene Lavitsky suddenly, irreducibly creepy. It was one thing being friends with him; it was quite another imagining his zits touching her mouth. She wondered if they were infected. It didn't help that there was a scrap of pastrami stuck to his incipient beard. She was comforted by the sight of a WELCOME TO FAIR LAWN sign. That's where Eugene lived. She barely opened her mouth wide enough to say good-bye. And she ignored him at rehearsal the following Thursday night. It turned out she could be just as cruel as Jennifer Weinfelt.