What She Saw...

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  The conductor, Walter Major, made disturbingly sexual facial expressions during all the slow movements and took out his career frustrations—obviously he would have preferred to be conducting the Berlin Philharmonic—on the second violins, of which Phoebe was one. Even worse, she had to share a stand with a righteous pimple-face named Kwan who was always correcting her bowings—her fingerings, too. Not that it ever occurred to her to quit. Despite her acid-tongued letters to Iron Curtain pen pals, she didn’t have a rebellious bone in her body. She still considered family to be destiny. Which is not to say she wasn’t increasingly resentful of the hand she imagined destiny to have dealt her—the hand that had denied her the leather couches, Central American cleaning woman, three-car garage, and color TV with remote control that all the other kids at Pringle Prep had.

  Phoebe had matriculated in the ninth grade. Pringle Prep wasn’t like Whitehead Middle at all. It wasn’t even in Whitehead. It was in the next town over, a town whose abandoned railroad tracks literally divided rich from poor, and black from white and predominantly Jewish, with the exception of one or two over-the-hill R&B stars who lived in gated Italianate mansions up on the hill, over by Pringle’s playing fields. It was Roberta who’d insisted that Phoebe transfer there, because, for one thing, Phoebe had begun speaking “Jersey-ese.” (She’d say, “I’m goin’ a scooull,” instead of “I’m going to school.”) For another, it was Roberta’s contention that with a diploma from Pringle Prep, Phoebe would have a better chance of getting into a good university or music conservatory—the kind whose clear plastic bumper sticker would look impressive affixed to the back window of the family station wagon for all the neighbors to see. There was already a clear plastic Yale University sticker affixed in this very manner. Emily had gotten in early admission.

  It wasn’t exactly a surprise.

  By her junior year, Emily had won all the academic prizes the school had to offer, so the school invented more prizes on her behalf. In addition to editing the school newspaper, she sat on an independent council of faculty, administrators, and alumni who met bimonthly to brainstorm on the topic of pedagogical theory. As for her S.A.T. scores, they were a near-perfect 1,580. Still, Emily Fine was perhaps best known as the only student in the history of Pringle Prep to have researched a history term paper at the Library of Congress, where she ploughed through more than two thousand primary documents issued by the Freedman’s Bureau. (“White Lies: Race, Politics, and Dialectical Materialism in Reconstruction Georgia” was the name of the resulting screed.)

  Phoebe didn’t begrudge Emily the success so much as she did Leonard’s and Roberta’s excessive pride in it. Never mind the Yale sticker. To Phoebe, it seemed as if her parents looked to their children to succeed where they had only ever survived, their love of classical music grossly outweighing their drive to climb its arcane but increasingly cutthroat hierarchy. Indeed, every month another orchestra folded; every year Henry Purcell crept further into obscurity. And the classical-music audience was shrinking, graying, shriveling up like an old peach. And there weren’t enough jobs for all the fresh-faced musicians Juilliard dumped on the city streets each June. Not to mention the fact that there were only two oboists in every orchestra, compared with nearly three dozen violins. Never mind the paltry number of violas. This is the kind of talk Phoebe heard at home, at dinner, and in the car to Grandma Lettie’s house in Tarrytown.

  She heard another kind of talk from the top of the stairs, where she sat obscured from view trying to eavesdrop on the purportedly private conversations Leonard and Roberta conducted late at night in the kitchen in hushed tones, and sometimes, if they were being extra paranoid, in broken French. They spoke of Leonard changing careers—of him becoming a real estate or travel agent like Mr. Grossblatt, who used to play the bass clarinet but now booked flights to Aruba because the music money wasn’t coming in the way it should have been. If only Leonard had been a little more like Rachel’s father, Mr. Plotz, who wore Italian suits and made pots of money doing things no one understood at a company called Technotron Incorporated. But he wasn’t like Mr. Plotz at all; he was a freelance oboist. Which meant that Phoebe was a freelance oboist’s daughter. Which meant she didn’t stand a chance at real popularity, built as it was not just on cup size and charisma but on the ability to afford ski vacations in Park City, Utah.

  At Whitehead Middle, Phoebe had been safely middle-class; at Pringle, where she was one of the so-called financial aid students, she found herself well below the poverty line—a point of fact made clear on her first day of school, for which she made the mistake of arriving not just by car pool but in a zip-up sweatshirt and white painter pants. In their elaborately patterned Benetton sweaters and snakeskin cowboy boots, her new classmates showed their contempt through their colored contact lenses. That’s why Phoebe started shopping at Suburban Sophisticates, a designer-seconds emporium in shouting distance of Teterboro Airport, just off Route 46. The place reeked of overbuttered popcorn and ammonia-rich floor cleaner. Every other garment seemed to feature a fuchsia lipstick stain. The carpet that lined the ladies’ changing room never seemed hygienic enough for bare feet. There was an abandoned day-rate motel (MIDNIGHT SPECIAL $27!) at the edge of the parking lot. But Roberta told Phoebe that if she wanted the same things rich kids had, this was the only way she was going to get them— with pulled threads, mangled insignias, and two different-length sleeves no one was supposed to notice.

  Except they did—especially Jennifer Weinfelt, who would fix her eyes on Phoebe’s paraplegic polo players and ask, “Is there something, like, wrong with your shirt?”

  Another time Jennifer pointed at the plastic flower ring on Phoebe’s middle finger, and asked her, “Is that, like, a flower?”

  “By the way, Jennifer, in case you haven’t noticed, your skin’s falling off,” Phoebe was tempted to say, was going to say, because Jennifer’s acne-blemished skin had turned red and flaky on account of her Retin-A prescription. But she never would have. She didn’t have the nerve for scenes. She was still thinking she could make people like her. She hadn’t yet learned that it’s a waste of time to try—that they either do or they don’t, and usually they don’t. But even if they do, they still say nasty things about you—just not to your face. So she answered, “It’s just, like, a ring,” because it was a ring—just not one of the silver and gold Tiffany’s bands that Jennifer sported on her short, tan fingers.

  “Oh—right,” Jennifer responded, as if Phoebe had just shown off her termite collection.

  RACHEL RETURNED FROM the rest room with a new coat of Silver City Pink anchored to her thin, downturned lips. “Like, what was that about?” she demanded to know.

  “I have no idea,” Phoebe told her.

  “Well, you sure weren’t acting like you didn’t know . . .”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “Didn’t know what Jason was, like, doing here.”

  “Did I invite him to sit down?”

  Rachel lifted one overplucked eyebrow to the heavens. “I don’t know who invited who, but you certainly weren’t acting like you minded sitting next to him.”

  “You were the one who started talking to him!”

  “I was just trying to make a point, whereas you,” she said, pausing for effect, “were flirting your ass off.”

  Phoebe grimaced and turned away. At times like this, she really hated her best friend—even if she was only trying to protect her. Rachel would claim so much if Phoebe challenged her motives. She’d say, “You should be glad someone cares!” (That’s what Rachel always said when Phoebe challenged her motives.) “Look,” said Phoebe, turning back to Rachel. “If you have a better idea of who to hang out with at this party, then go ahead.”

  “Fine,” said Rachel, rising from the table, but not before she’d helped herself to another palmful of nuts. (Phoebe wanted to tell her to stop—Rachel was gaining weight at an astounding speed—but understood it wasn’t her job.) “Are you coming or not?”

  �
�Fine,” said Phoebe, following her best friend onto the dance floor, where fifty or so of their classmates were jumping up and down to the kinetic beat of “Twist and Shout.”

  The two girls staked out a remote corner near the mime— well, maybe it wasn’t that remote. In truth, it was no accident that Phoebe positioned herself a mere two feet from where Jason Barry Gold was busy hamming it up for the party photographers. And still, upon discovering (two minutes into her own half-hearted shuffling) that the elbow nudging her spine belonged to Jason, she was startled enough to find her knees buckling beneath her.

  “Whoa, baby, careful,” said Jason, grabbing her around the waist as she fell toward him, into him. “Don’t want you lying down—yet.”

  “Uhhhhhhhhh,” growled Phoebe, her eyes narrowed with evident disgust even as she made no effort to free herself from his grip. That must have been obvious to Rachel. Out of the corner of her eye, Phoebe watched her best friend stomp off in the direction of the buffet table. In that moment, however, antagonizing Rachel Plotz seemed like a risk worth taking. Indeed, experience suggested that tomorrow they would go to the mall, Phoebe would help Rachel spend her father’s money, and they would make up. In the meantime, “Twist and Shout” was winding down. Phoebe lifted her arms into the air for the last time, then shimmied her body down into a crouching position. The space between the songs seemed interminable. Her body frozen on the floor, she prayed that deejay Johnny Jamtastic was on her side.

  It turned out he was. The next song up was the midtempo pop ballad “No One Is to Blame.” A collective groan reverberated throughout the plasterboard walls of Parthenon West. Phoebe’s new dance partner had no part in it. Unique among his peers, Jason Barry Gold could exhibit enthusiasm for slow dancing without being taken for a wuss. That’s how cool he was. Rumor had it he’d slept with ten girls in the eleventh grade alone. “I love this song,” he told Phoebe, who told him, “Me, too,” before he opened his arms to her and she fell in between them, linked her own arms around his sweat-soaked neck and surveyed the scene for future recounting.

  Rachel had disappeared, but Jennifer Weinfelt was skulking back to Aimee’s table. She wasn’t the only one. Within seconds, the dance floor stood empty except for a handful of established couples, not including Jason and Phoebe, whose immediate concern was that Aimee, dancing with her endodontic-surgeon father not four feet away from where she and Jason swayed to the music, would object to the sight of someone dancing with her on-again, off-again boyfriend—at her own birthday party, no less!

  After Aimee offered her a perfunctory smile on her way around a fatherly spin, however, Phoebe concentrated her efforts on making sure that Jennifer Weinfelt saw her in her moment of glory. As she and Jason moved across the dance floor in slow, rocking circles, she tried in vain to catch her archenemy’s perpetually bloodshot eye. It was only after Jason pulled her closer—so close that she could see the individual pores on his face, and many were clogged—that Phoebe settled her score with Pringle’s most notorious bitch. Their eyes met for no more than a second.

  It was a second that Phoebe would replay for months to come.

  And it was a second that inspired Phoebe to succumb to the sensation of Jason Barry Gold himself—to press her stunted hips into his pleated pants and close her eyes. That way, she could enjoy the friction between them without having to think about its origin. She was squeamish about sex, but she wasn’t not interested.

  THE NIGHT PROGRESSED. The ranks of more and less embarrassing relatives began to thin. The buffet table was cleared and filled again—this time with two enormous chocolate tarts, one in the shape of a 1, and the other in the shape of a 6. Whereupon deejay Johnny Jamtastic interrupted the musical proceedings to wish the birthday girl “a really good one,” prompting Aimee Aaron’s twenty-five best friends to break into song— “Happy Birthday,” in particular. At which point, sweaty and exhausted, Phoebe and Jason parted ways—Jason in the direction of the cake, Phoebe in the direction of Rachel Plotz. But where had she gone? And could she have been mad enough to leave without Phoebe? And what was Phoebe supposed to do now— now that it was twenty to twelve?

  If he didn’t hear otherwise, Leonard had promised to swing the Electra around at midnight. So Phoebe would have to call home now if she was driving back with Rachel, who lived in Franklin Lakes, a good twenty-five minute drive from Whitehead. Which is why Phoebe always made backup arrangements to get home, even if Rachel always ended up driving her there. But if she called to cancel Leonard, and Rachel really had left, then how would she ever get back to Whitehead?

  Phoebe circled the ballroom a final time, pausing here and there to inquire as to her erstwhile best friend’s whereabouts— all to no avail. (“Rachel Plotz was here?” was the common refrain.) Eventually resigned to the idea that Rachel had left without her, she decided to pay a quick visit to the fortune-teller. For a Carmen, she looked pretty Anglo-Saxon. She had a small, turned-up nose, a pale blond bun, and a freckly forehead. She reached for Phoebe’s hand with her long, gem-laden fingers. “Your life line is long,” she purred. “What else can I tell you?”

  Phoebe kept her voice low. “How old will I be when I lose my virginity?”

  Carmen ran her index finger down the length of Phoebe’s thumb, then diagonally across her palm in the direction of her wrist. Then she came to an abrupt halt, gazed up and into Phoebe’s eyes with her own watery blue ones, and whispered, “You’ll be nineteen.”

  “Nineteen?” Phoebe croaked in frustration.

  “You’ll appreciate it more at that age,” clucked Carmen.

  “I’m sure I will,” grumbled Phoebe.

  Then she made her way over to the coat check.

  “Thanks so much for having me,” she told Aimee Aaron on her way out.

  “Thanks so much for coming!” said Aimee.

  Phoebe might have said good night to Jason Barry Gold as well. But he was currently huddled with his lacrosse-team buddies, and the prospect seemed daunting. Instead, like a suburban Cinderella, she scurried out the side entrance and into her father’s waiting car. “Hi, Dad,” she said, relieved to find none of her classmates watching. (It was bad enough getting picked up by your father; getting picked up in a barge with a taped headlight was unspeakable.)

  The two of them vanished into the maze of malls, car dealerships, plastic-surgery offices, and discount bedding outlets that passed for “the way home.”

  “Did you have a good time?” Leonard asked her somewhere between Bloomingdale’s and Bennigan’s.

  “It was okay,” she told him.

  He didn’t ask any more questions. She didn’t volunteer any more information. She was lost in Jason Barry Gold. She was replaying their slow dance—step by step, turn by turn. It wasn’t easy after Leonard cranked up the volume on the radio and cheeped, “Oh, I love this piece”—just like he always did when the Symphony Fantastique came on. But this time she kept her annoyance to herself. Right then, right there, she understood that no one was to blame—not even her father.

  SURE ENOUGH, RACHEL wasn’t talking to Phoebe the next morning. But that afternoon they had it out. Rachel didn’t mention Jason Barry Gold’s name even once. Instead, she made the case that Phoebe had abandoned her at the party—even though Rachel was the one who drove off without telling Phoebe she was driving off. At least, that’s how it seemed to Phoebe. She said, “I thought you left. I looked all over for you.”

  “Obviously you didn’t look all over,” said Rachel. “Because I was in the bathroom. Okay?”

  “For forty-five minutes?”

  “I had my period?”

  “Well, I thought you’d gone home.”

  “Well, you thought incorrectly.”

  “Well, sorry.”

  “Whatever.”

  Then they drove to the upscale mall at the intersection of Route This and Route That, where they bought Rachel some long-sleeved rugby shirts at the Ralph Lauren store, a peach sleeveless turtleneck at Ann Taylor, and a pair of Gue
ss overalls at Saks Fifth Avenue (by way of Hackensack). By the time they pulled out of the parking lot, they were best friends again. Though Phoebe sometimes wondered why. In truth, Rachel Plotz wasn’t so much nicer to her than Jennifer Weinfelt was. But then, niceness had never been the glue that kept the two girls best friends. Rather, it was loyalty that bound them— loyalty that allowed Phoebe to keep excusing away Rachel’s chronic bitchiness. To know that she had someone to sit with in the cafeteria at lunch, someone to gossip with on the phone at night, someone to drive to the occasional party with on the weekends—someone whose mere existence in her life and phone book served to assuage the persistent fear that she was a complete and total retard—for Phoebe, that was, if not enough, then at least something to hold on to in the sleepless hours of the night.

  THE NAME CALLING had begun in seventh grade. In addition to being termed a retard, Phoebe had been labeled a dexter, a dufus, and a dorkmeister. It wasn’t entirely her fault. There was her bowl haircut, her goofy grin, her good grades, her visible violin case, her no-name sneakers (derided as “skips”), and her body’s stubborn refusal to develop secondary sexual characteristics in keeping with her age group—sure. And yes, thanks to a sudden vertical growth spurt, she occasionally walked into walls, hit her head on hanging plants, that kind of thing. But it was also in seventh grade that Whitehead Middle opened its doors to the school-poor “toughs” of neighboring Riverbank, a dilapidated old fishing and dredging village that cut a two-mile tapeworm beneath the undulating cliffs of the Hudson.

  Several years into the future, Riverbank would be overrun by cash-rich Korean car-company executives, who would bulldoze the old paper-cup factory on the hill to make room for condominiums built in the style of English manor homes. Many would be equipped with sunken Jacuzzis. Almost all would feature exquisite views of the Manhattan skyline. A certain percentage would house obedient tots whose first instruction on the viola would come courtesy of Roberta Fine. (A lesser percentage would seek out Leonard for instruction on the oboe.) Back in Phoebe’s time, however, go-go bars and head shops were still the biggest business in Riverbank, while the two-family houses that lined the town’s elevated main thoroughfare had yet to be vacated by the offspring of the river workers—truck drivers and cocktail waitresses, the children of whom seemingly aspired to little more than ridiculing those members of Whitehead Middle (Phoebe included) who showed enthusiasm for activities other than getting high, building bonfires, attending rock concerts, purchasing beverages at Beverage Barn, and sitting around doing nothing.