What She Saw...

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  THE ONLY GUY Phoebe was absolutely sure she had a crush on was Coach Clay. Not that she would have admitted such a thing to Rachel or anyone else. He doubled as the trigonometry teacher. He was pushing forty-five and completely bald. His skin tone was about six shades darker than the white Mercedes sedan he heedlessly parked in one of two handicapped spaces outside the gym. He was generally regarded as a tyrannical prick.

  Phoebe wanted desperately to please him.

  It had been like that since the first day of practice—since he’d bounded onto Court 1 as if tennis were no laughing matter, the collar of his white polo shirt standing up, name-brand sweatbands circumscribing each of his well-defined wrists. He held his racquet by its throat. His lemon yellow shorts were so tight they made smiley faces around his crotch. He smelled of cologne and sweat and things still unnamed. He leaned his shapely backside against the white leather tape that ran along the edge of the net. “How you guys doing?” That was Coach Clay’s first line—a line Phoebe and her teammates, huddled together on the service line, were too intimidated to answer— until he said it again: “I SAID HOW YOU GUYS DOING TODAY?”

  Then they said, “Fine.”

  Then he said, “Two rules on my team. Come here to hustle, or don’t come at all. Is that understood?”

  They nodded.

  They never heard the second rule.

  “Drop your racquets,” demanded the head coach of Pringle Prep’s varsity tennis team. So they dropped their racquets. “I want you to touch the net, run backward to the baseline, touch it, run forward to the net, touch it, and repeat ten times. NOW GO!”

  They lunged for the white leather tape. Then they started backward. Coach Clay was the size of a tennis ball by the time they hit the baseline. He seemed larger than life on Phoebe’s way back to the net.

  He stayed that way for the rest of the school year.

  “Get your racquets, go back to the baseline, and form a line,” he ordered his panting subjects upon their completion of the drill. “THERE WILL BE NO LASSITUDE TOLERATED ON THIS TEAM!”

  Standing at the net, he fed them each three balls, two into the left corner and one into the right. They were to hit all of them straight down the line. Without a doubt, Phoebe had the best ground strokes of the lot. But Coach Clay wasn’t one to throw gratuitous flattery around. “Racquet back earlier,” he demanded her first time up.

  “Deeper,” he ordered on the second.

  “Nice.” He caved in her third time up. “I want you all to notice how—what’s your name again?”

  “Phoebe Fine,” she told him, delirious.

  “. . . Miss Fine follows through.”

  Then he hit an extra ball to her forehand. And she hit that one perfectly as well—so perfectly that he was unable to stop himself from meeting it midair. His backhand chop volley fell to the right of her feet. She barely had time to take her racquet back—to scoop it up and off the court and then right past him. He lunged but missed. Then he turned sideways to trace its charmed trajectory—to watch her forehand drop just inside the parameters of the right pocket, before he turned back around to congratulate her on her “nice execution.”

  And in that magic moment it seemed to Phoebe as if Court 1—like the Garden of Eden; it was just as green—had only two players to its name: Phoebe Fine and Bradley Clay.

  But it turned out there were others. “Next!” he thundered.

  Whereupon Phoebe scurried out of the way of Pringle Prep’s soon to be crowned first singles, Amanda Chang, and assumed her place at the back of the line. (It was always like that, Phoebe found. There were always others waiting in the wings.)

  And would she ever be the star of anyone or anything?

  WITHOUT WARNING, PHOEBE squirmed out from under Jason, expelling his finger in the process.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Mr. Popularity, trying to bring her back under his sway.

  “I just—I can’t,” she said, planting her feet on the carpet.

  “Can’t what?” said Jason, trying to regain lost ground.

  “Please!” She must have cried out a little too frantically. Now Jason sat up with a start, wiped his finger on the side of his jeans, then his mouth on the back of his arm. Then he walked over to an enormous gilded mirror, where he stood with his back to her flicking at an invisible eyelash. “Jason,” she began again, suddenly as desperate to reconnect with him as she was consumed by guilt. No doubt he hated her now, hated her for leading him on. . . .

  “What?” he said.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Depends what question.”

  “Do you, like, like me?”

  “Sure I like you. Why?”

  Marginally encouraged, Phoebe readjusted her hairband, re-buttoned the top button of her army-surplus pants, took a deep breath. “Because you could be with any girl at Pringle, and I just don’t understand why you’re with me.”

  “It’s not like we’re going out,” he said.

  Then he turned back around. His face was blank. And she couldn’t believe she’d ever talked to him—couldn’t believe he even knew her name. “I didn’t say we were going out,” she said, swallowing her own words.

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m just saying that I don’t understand why you’re not fooling around with Stephanie Cohen or Jennifer Weinfelt or something.”

  “How do you know I’m not?”

  Phoebe could see now that it was a losing battle. And she turned away, defeated, debilitated, but somehow still unprepared for the final analysis: “Look, Phoebe, I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything. But I fool around with a lot of different girls. No, I take that back. You are different from the other girls I fool around with.” He let loose a disdainful snort. “You’re more of a challenge—’cause you’re a virgin.”

  Phoebe got her bag and called a taxi.

  Jason Barry Gold didn’t try to stop her at the door. He was too busy watching Caddyshack for the fourth time, laughing his head off at all those misfired drives.

  NEEDLESS TO SAY, Rachel felt compelled to remind Phoebe that she’d seen it coming from a mile away. “I told you he was an asshole,” she told Phoebe after Phoebe told her the whole story—stretched out on Rachel’s sleigh bed a few afternoons later, a box of half-eaten doughnut holes resting forlornly in her lap. She was more blah than brokenhearted. She was thinking at least now she could say she’d gone to third base. She wasn’t expecting to ever talk to Jason Barry Gold again.

  She wasn’t necessarily sorry about that, either.

  But at a certain age, the past is as irrelevant as the future is unthinkable. (Only a social ignoramus, for example, would dare mention the previous weekend’s parties on Monday morning.) Indeed, a week or two later, Jason waltzed up to Phoebe in the hall outside Petite’s classroom as if that night in Saddle River had never happened. “Yo, Phoebster, waz up?” he said, hand raised to high-five her.

  “Hey.” She smiled warily as she raised her hand to meet his, thinking she had at least one thing to be happy for in life: at least she wasn’t wearing her pale pink polo shirt with the mysterious bleach stain beneath the left armhole.

  But he caught her hand around the wrist. “You should come by the field after tennis,” he told her. “We’re playing the Peddie School, and it looks to be an excellent matchup.”

  “Oh, really?” she said, mock-wrestling to free herself of Jason’s grip.

  But he still wouldn’t let go—not until she’d promised him she’d be there. And she was.

  She was standing on the sidelines pretending to be “psyched” when Jason scored the winning goal in the final ten seconds of the game.

  After that, it was only a matter of time before the two became “really good friends.” Which is to say that, much to Rachel Plotz’s consternation—“he’s just using you” was Rachel’s personal opinion—Phoebe spent more than the occasional free period driving to and from the Pringle Bagel Emporium in Jason’s BMW convertible. Ther
e was never any indication that he had the slightest interest in fooling around. In fact, he spent most of the time talking about Aimee Aaron. (They were back together, but he was still having “space issues.”) And that was fine by Phoebe. She only wanted to get along, to avoid conflict, to have other people not hate her. Or so she told herself.

  Maybe that was all Jason wanted, too.

  Though as his graduation neared, it began to seem that his stake in his and Phoebe’s friendship was larger than it had first appeared. He said he’d never met a girl he could really talk to before. He said he was really going to miss her next year. He said he’d keep in touch, and he lived up to his promise.

  The following letter arrived in the Fines’ mailbox the summer before he started college:

  JULY 25, 1987

  Dear Phoebe,

  I’m actually writing this letter from Stratton, Vermont, where I’m attending a tennis clinic. Yeah, you’re right: tennis IS a very good time. Speaking of which, when you return from summer school, I’d like to reserve a few days with you. This is so I’ll have the chance to kick your petoot in tennis. And no doubles with Rachel Plotz. Nothing personal, I’ll have you know, but I don’t want to deal with that sob story. No fucking way.

  Update. It’s over with Aimee. Finished. Kaput. End of Story. I just couldn’t deal anymore. But you shouldn’t get the idea that I’m a cold, unforgiving louse of a person—or that I’m a legitimate heartbreaker. I’m not, I tell you, I’M NOT! But sometimes in this world, certain people take life a little too seriously for my taste, if you know what I mean. (I know you do.)

  Dude—I MISS YOU!

  I’ll see ya soon. (I better.)

  Love always,

  Your best buddy,

  Jason Barry Gold

  a.k.a. “The Gold Standard”

  Pringle Prep, Class of ’87

  University of Pennsylvania, Class of ’91

  Harvard Business School, Class of ’94?

  C.E.O. of the World, 2010?

  P.S. Dude—what do you say the two of us get married in fifteen years if we’re still single (and desperate)? Ha, ha.

  Phoebe never wrote back. With his connection to Pringle severed, Jason Barry Gold no longer seemed like the expedient social investment he once had.

  And she didn’t appreciate the backhandedness of his marriage proposal.

  Maybe, also, not writing back was Phoebe’s way of getting back at him for the way he’d treated her that night in Saddle River. Somewhere along the way, she’d come to realize that neglect is the best revenge. Which is to say that the nastiest thing Jennifer Weinfelt ever uttered still couldn’t begin to compete, cruelty-wise, with the silence of a phone not ringing, a letter not arriving, an overture played to an empty concert hall.

  4. Spitty Clark

  OR “The Gentle Date Rapist”

  CHANCES ARE THAT Phoebe Fine never would have “rushed” if Mindy Metzger hadn’t persuaded her to, arguing that sororities, despite their less-than-democratic admission policies, were largely self-selecting institutions, and therefore not half as elitist as they might at first appear. And Phoebe believed her—up until the moment the Greek Committee, having summoned all the participating freshmen to the second-floor TV lounge of Alumni Hall, distributed its so-called invitations. As it happened, Mindy Metzger received her invitation first. And Mindy Metzger, upon discovering the most-revered of all Greek letters, Pi Pi Pi, printed in purple on a parchment card inside, had the decency not to scream for joy—not until Phoebe had received her invitation. But then when Phoebe did receive hers, Mindy didn’t even ask if she could see it. She just leaned over Phoebe’s shoulder and read it for herself. Then she whispered, “Ohmigod, I am so sorry,” because inscribed on Phoebe’s parchment card were the wrong letters, the letters of Phoebe’s second-choice sorority—not Tri Pi (as it was known) but a less prestigious house called Delta Nu Sigma (or “Delta Sig,” for short).

  “Oh, well,” said Phoebe, as if it didn’t matter one way or the other.

  But of course it did. She didn’t want to be a Delta Sig. She wanted to be a Tri Pi. Never mind Mindy Metzger. Tri Pi was the sorority that girls seemingly too sophisticated for sororities wound up pledging. Which is to say, girls raised primarily in cities as opposed to suburbs; girls so exceedingly comfortable with their own self-construction that the act of getting dressed always appeared to have been accomplished in five minutes— even if the truth was more like two hours; girls who, even if they were Jewish, weren’t “too Jewish”; girls such as Phoebe aspired to be and occasionally even convinced herself that she was.

  Delta Nu Sigma was a different matter.

  Blessed with the same approximate demographic as Pringle Prep, it wore its Jewishness with the same sense of duty-bound pride with which its sisters sported Larry Levine lamb’s-wool overcoats in winter. And it was for this very reason that its letters added up to an infinitely less prestigious affiliation even within the Jewish sorority girl population, for whom real popularity depended on approval not just from other Jewish sorority girls, but from sorority girls in general, and specifically from a handful of semilegendary pretty girls—none of them Jewish, and all of them blessed with long blond hair, skinny asses, and solid American last names—whose friendship the rest of the Greek community coveted as small Caribbean protectorates looked to the United States for cash infusions.

  But what choice did Phoebe have now? Just then, a tiny girl with rubber bracelets appeared at her side, threw a lei around her neck, and introduced herself as “your Rho Chi, Cheri!” before she tried to lead Phoebe away.

  “I’ll just be one second,” Phoebe assured her.

  Then she tapped Mindy on the shoulder to say good-bye.

  “Oh, bye!” Phoebe’s about-to-be-ex-best-friend turned around to fake an empathetic smile before she turned back around to continue freaking out with the other Tri Pi initiates, her mouth moving in exaggerated shapes, her eyes popping out of her skull like one of those rubber-man squeeze toys. That’s when Phoebe knew Mindy had left her behind. And she hated her for it— suddenly hated everything about Mindy Metzger, from her self-deprecating humor to her desperate need to curry favor with the “right people.” Maybe that described Phoebe’s personality, too. Only now Phoebe was the “wrong people.” Now she could stop trying to fit in. If only she had the nerve. But she didn’t. She wasn’t like Emily. She wasn’t interested in overthrowing the patriarchy. She wasn’t even sure what the patriarchy was.

  She was just trying to find a place to call home so she wouldn’t be so sick for the real one.

  So she climbed into the backseat of Cheri’s wine-colored Saab 900 Turbo along with a half dozen other twittering Delta Sig pledges. And she made gratuitous noises of pleasure and victory on the ride back to the House, a crumbling white elephant with a wraparound porch located in the shadow of the agriculture quad. And she was first down the stairs that led to a basement meeting room with fake wood paneling and a flocculent red carpet where a mob of her future sisters stood around hugging, kissing, shrieking, and drinking fruit punch. (She hugged, kissed, shrieked, and drank fruit punch with the best of them.) And she waited patiently while speeches were made and more shrieking achieved. Then Cheri drove a few of them over to Delta Sig’s “brother house,” Chi Zeta Epsilon, where Phoebe was fed brewskies at a rate of one every fifteen minutes and lifted onto the beefy shoulders of a crew team Adonis named Doug for a celebratory whirl around the pungent upper floors.

  THE NEXT MORNING, the Greek Committee distributed the following memo:

  Hoover University does not tolerate hazing. The following activities are therefore prohibited in your pledge programs:

  Denying pledges a proper night’s sleep (six hours per night minimum), edible meals (three per day), and access to showers;

  Preventing pledges from attending class or otherwise interfering with pledges’ academic calendars;

  Forcing pledges to consume any amount of alcohol;

  Requiring pledges
to don uncomfortable or degrading clothing such as dunce caps, girdles, lederhosen, or undergarments appropriate to the opposite sex;

  Coercing pledges to eat or drink any foreign or unusual substances such as saltwater, raw eggs, or raw meat (raw fish may be employed in pledge week festivities only when prepared by certified dining establishments such as the Samurai Sushi House in Spruce Creek);

  Throwing at, pouring on, or otherwise applying eggs, paint, honey, hot wax, or gasoline to pledges’ bodies;

  Making pledges participate in any activity in which the pledge is the object of amusement or ridicule (this does not include such traditional Greek activities as putting on skits, playing charades, or serenading sororities or fraternities);

  Kidnappings or road trips that compromise the health or safety of pledges (e.g., no hanging pledges out car windows);

  Subjecting pledges to cruel and unusual psychological conditions of any kind (e.g., forcing pledges to spend the night standing up listening to loud music);

  Compelling pledges to participate in any activity that is illegal, indecent, or contrary to the pledge’s moral or religious beliefs and/or the rules and regulations of Hoover University, such as they are.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, Spitty Clark came over to the freshman dorm to “tuck Phoebe in.” That’s what it was called. From what Phoebe had heard, however, it tended to involve something considerably less innocent than letting an upperclassman pull the sheets tight around your neck and shoulders. But Cheri said not to worry. Cheri said Spitty Clark was a “total cutie.” Cheri said Phoebe had to make sure to be back in her dorm room by midnight at the very latest. It was ten past when Phoebe heard a knock, went to the door, and flung it open onto a heavyset guy, not particularly tall but not particularly short, either.