What She Saw...

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

His thick legs angled out beneath his torso like the supports of a sawhorse. His blue eyes were as narrow as the change slots on a public phone. His cheeks were pink. His curly blond hair poked through a bright red baseball cap. His meaty shoulders carried the weight of an overstuffed knapsack. He was wearing a pair of tan khaki pants and a faded T-shirt that read WHATEVER THE LETTER, GREEKS DO IT BETTER on the front and KAPPA OMEGA, SAN JUAN NIGHT ’87 on the back. “Ho, ho, ho,” he chortled like some kind of Santa Claus on spring break.

  “You must be Spitty,” said Phoebe.

  “And you must be Pledge Fine,” said Spitty.

  “That’s me.”

  “Well, it’s a pleasure to make your blood-alcohol content rise,” he told her.

  Then he burst into the cinder-block cell she shared with Karen Kong, out as usual though no doubt somewhere nearby, wasted out of her mind with her legs spread. That’s how Phoebe’s roommate spent most nights—like a zoo animal recently released from captivity. During Freshman Orientation Week she’d gotten so drunk she hadn’t known she’d lost her virginity to the pothead on the sixth floor, who felt so bad about the whole thing—he hadn’t been able to tell if she was passed out or not— that he’d asked Phoebe to tell Karen he hadn’t meant any harm. Which Phoebe did, the next afternoon. She told Karen, “Danny came down to talk to me. He’s worried that you didn’t know you had sex with him last night.”

  “I did?” said Karen. “Are you sure? Wait a second, how do you know? And, by the way, is it any of your fucking business?”

  Since then, the two girls had drifted apart.

  Maybe because Phoebe was still (humiliatingly enough) a virgin, and Karen wasn’t.

  Spitty scanned the room. Phoebe watched his eyes linger on Karen’s votive candles, then shift abruptly to her buns calendar. February’s featured attraction was the Lycra-clad backside of a competitive biker. “It’s my roommate’s calendar,” Phoebe told him, so he wouldn’t get the wrong impression.

  “Interesting roommate,” said Spitty before he flumped himself on her desk chair and rolled it over to where she now sat—on the edge of her bed, her knees tucked inside her pink-and-green floral-patterned flannel nightgown. Then he reached into his sack, pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two plastic cups. “Thirsty?” he asked while he poured.

  But it was less a question than a command. So Phoebe said nothing, took a tiny taste, and gagged before she grumbled, “I hate tequila.”

  “It’s whiskey,” he scoffed.

  “Well, then I hate whiskey.”

  Spitty lifted his chin authoritatively. “Pledge Fine, I think Mr. Daniel deserves a little more of your respect than you’re showing him at present. Otherwise stated, I’m trying to suggest that you reconsider your position on the Jimster.”

  Phoebe wrinkled her nose in confusion. “Who’s the Jimster?” She thought he might have been referring to one of his fraternity brothers.

  It turned out he wasn’t. He held up the bottle. “The Jimster, my good friend, goes by many distinguished names—among them, the Jackster, Jackie D., Jackie Boy, Jack of All Trades, Mr. D., J.D., Mr. Daniel, and finally, Jack Daniel’s. In short, the Jimster is what our English majors here at Hoover University might refer to as an epaulet.”

  “I think you mean epithet,” she said. “Epaulets are like shoulder pads.”

  “Whatever.” He shrugged off the mistake. “I’m not an English major.”

  “What major are you?”

  “I’m in the Hospitality School.”

  That’s when it dawned on Phoebe that Spitty Clark looked a little old to still be an undergraduate. “Senior?” she inquired.

  “I’m actually still a junior,” he conceded. “I took some time off last year. You know. Bummed around. Made some new friends. Saw some old ones.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Where didn’t I go! Jamaica, Daytona, New Orleans, the Keys . . .”

  “Where the sun shines.”

  He seemed to like that. “Yeah—where the sun shines.”

  “I hate the sun,” Phoebe told him.

  “Hate the sun?” Spitty uttered her blasphemy out loud, as if he had to hear it again to believe those three words had ever been put together in the same sentence. “How can you hate the sun? ’Specially in this wrist-slitter of a town. I mean, it’s a goddamn rain forest out here! Not that our annual ‘Fun-dra in the Tundra’ celebration isn’t among the premier keg spectaculars of the Greater Allegheny Region. But enough about the weather. PLEDGE FINE, I ORDER YOU TO IMBIBE!”

  But Pledge Fine didn’t want to imbibe. She didn’t want to be ordered around, either. She wanted to quit college and get a job at the airport driving one of those little green shuttle buses back and forth between the arrivals terminal and the car-rental lot until she couldn’t remember her own name. Couldn’t remember a time she’d ever thought she was going somewhere in life—except back to the car-rental lot. Or the arrivals terminal. That’s how much she hated college. Even more than she’d hated high school. All the bathrooms smelled like puke. All the white guys spoke like they were black. All the black guys spoke like they were white. All anyone cared about was getting wasted. It was so loud in the dorm she couldn’t sleep at night. All the food tasted the same. None of her professors seemed to know she was alive.

  She couldn’t even figure out what to major in.

  She’d begun with international relations—had attended eight-hundred-person lecture courses in Greek Revival amphitheaters, read articles by Henry Kissinger, and mastered terminology like “realpolitik,” “domino theory,” and “détente.” That was before she enrolled in “El Siglo De Oro 215.” It was the theme of trickery in Don Juan Tenorio that turned her on to Spanish literature. But then she read a book by Emile Durkheim about suicide being a constant in every culture. It seemed to validate her own inability to enjoy “keggers.” She promptly switched to intellectual history, then found she couldn’t muster up any interest in Voltaire’s coffee addiction— kept reading the first two sentences of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black over and over again: The little town of Verrières must be one of the prettiest in the Franche-Comté. Its white houses with their steep, red tile roofs spread across a hillside, the folds of which are outlined by clumps of thrifty chestnut trees. What the hell were thrifty chestnut trees? And where the hell was the little town of Verrières? All of a sudden, Phoebe felt like crying.

  Spitty must have seen it in her trembling lower lip. “Hey, look,” he said in a newly compassionate tone of voice. “If you don’t wanna drink, you don’t have to. I mean, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m just doing a favor for your Big Sister, Cheri. And besides, it’s supposed to be fun.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not,” Phoebe started to tell him, and found she couldn’t stop. And then she kept going. “Sororities are really stupid. I wish I’d never rushed. I wasn’t even going to do it. I thought it was really elitist. My friend Mindy talked me into it. We wanted to be roommates next year, but we got divided up. We were both going to be in Tri Pi. Only, I di-di-dididn’t get in, and sh-sh-she did.”

  Now she was swallowing her breath, holding back tears. She hated herself for caring. But she did care. In fact, she was devastated. Getting into Tri Pi had promised to correct all the social slights she’d suffered during her earlier adolescence. She still couldn’t believe she’d been turned down. During rush, the Tri Pi sisters had complimented her on her L. L. Bean moccasins, dropped not-so-subtle references to “next year,” laughed at her stories about Karen Kong, fed her juice and cookies, asked her where she’d gone to high school, and sounded impressed when they heard it was Pringle Prep. Had it been obvious that her navy-blue blazer was one of Leonard’s castoffs, and that her moccasins—purchased at the L. L. Bean company store in Freeport, Maine, in a wicker basket marked “Singles”—were actually two different sizes, one a 7½, and the other an 8½? Had someone talked to someone else who’d gone to Pringle Prep— someone who’d heard from Jennifer Weinfelt that Phoe
be used to wear weird rings?

  “Sheeeezzzzz.” Spitty Clark shook his head at the injustice of it. “That really sucks. BUT HEY, LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE. YOU WOUND UP IN AN EXCELLENT HOUSE WITH A TRULY EXCELLENT BUNCH OF GIRLS. I MEAN TRULY EXCELLENT. And I’m not lying. Very excellent bunch, the Delta Sigs. Hey—you okay?”

  Phoebe had begun to shake uncontrollably. Poor Spitty. He didn’t know what to do with her. He placed a steadying hand on her upper arm. “Come on, Stein,” he said. “It can’t be that bad.”

  But it was even worse than that. “It’s Fine,” she moaned.

  “So you’re gonna be okay?”

  “No, I said, ‘Fine.’ That’s my last name—as in Phoebe Fine.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  That’s when she started to bawl.

  “You want me to get a nurse or something?” he asked her when it seemed like she might never stop.

  “This isn’t a hospital!” Phoebe wailed. “This is a freshman dorm!”

  Now Spitty was at a loss. He muttered something to himself. He said, “Come on, Pledge Stein,” a few more times. Then he punched her in the jaw—not exceptionally hard but not all that lightly, either.

  “Ow!” she shrieked. But the blow had done the trick. In the process of nursing her imaginary bruise, Phoebe had stopped crying and started craving something bitter—just like herself. “Where’s the Jimster?” she sniffled.

  Spitty’s eyes lit up. His relief was palpable. “So now you like the stuff?” he said, passing the bottle. “I can’t keep up with you.”

  “I changed my mind, okay?” She faked a little grin of her own, threw back her head, chugged, gasped.

  “Yeah, well, keep changing your mind.” He cheered her newfound respect for an institution he considered sacred. “ ’CAUSE WE GOT A PARTY TO THROW AROUND HERE, AND YOU’D BE WELL ADVISED NOT TO FORGET IT.”

  Then he pulled a noisemaking instrument out of his sack and blew it in Phoebe’s ear.

  “Stop,” she whinged.

  But he kept blowing and laughing. And she kept wincing and whinging. She tried to sound like she was having fun. She wanted to believe these were the best years of her life. That’s what Roberta had told her—that the friends you make in college are the friends you make for life. Except the corners of Phoebe’s mouth kept giving her away, kept turning down on their own miserable accord. (She couldn’t imagine there being a “rest of her life.”) So she drank more and faster. She thought the Jimster would cure whatever was wrong with her—whatever made her feel like she was in a hall of mirrors, watching herself, watching herself go through the motions of having a riotous good time in her newly won capacity as Pledge Fine. She must have drunk half the bottle.

  She wound up puking all over Spitty Clark and his SAN JUAN NIGHT ’87 T-shirt.

  But if he was mad, he didn’t let on. He escorted her to the unisex bathroom at the end of the hall. And he encouraged her to “make love to the porcelain god” at the appropriate moments. And he splashed cold water on her forehead when the worst of it was over. Then he kindly positioned a garbage pail at the side of her bed, parallel to her pillow, before he pulled the sheets up and under her neck, tucked them in and around her legs and ankles, turned out the lights, and directed her to “send my best to the sandman,” before he slammed the door shut, sometime around 3:00 A.M.

  Pledge Week had only just begun.

  ON TUESDAY NIGHT Phoebe was blindfolded and led off to the football fraternity, Phi Upsilon Chi, where she was ordered to lick whipped cream off the hairy chest of a tight end named Carl and eat M&M’s out of the half-inch-deep navel of a halfback named Kurt. On Wednesday she had to steal one pair of boxer shorts from every fraternity on campus; there were thirteen. On Thursday she had to strip naked before her future sisters, whereupon the secretary of Delta Sig, no string bean herself, Magic-Markered the word FAT on those areas of her body deemed in need of toning up. (To Phoebe’s absolute horror, both her thighs and buttocks were singled out for improvement.) On Friday she had to complete a so-called scavenger hunt, a further series of humiliations that concluded with her allowing a Phi Chi pledge named Bart to draw one uninterrupted line down the length of her body. And on Saturday she was presented with a fourteen-carat-gold-plated pledge pin fashioned in the shape of a harp, made to learn the mawkish lyrics to a ditty about the eternal beauty of Lake Hoover, hugged and kissed and congratulated by one hundred of her “new best friends,” and declared a sister of the Hoover University chapter of Delta Nu Sigma.

  Summer arrived shortly thereafter.

  For most of June and some of July Phoebe played in the pit orchestra of an operetta festival on Lake Michigan. After twelve straight nights of The Mikado she was ready to smash her violin into a million pieces—preferably over the heads of the “three little maids.”

  The monotony was briefly interrupted by a piece of fan mail that arrived in her name.

  Dear Phoebe Fine,

  Friday night—I wore glasses, you played the violin. I thought you were stunning, but let my opportunity to speak with you slip by. Can you give me another? I’d like to take you out for dinner. Your pick, my plastic. What do you say?

  Will all due regards,

  Glenn Pecker

  Phoebe didn’t respond. Flattered though she was, she couldn’t imagine anything more desperate than responding to a stalker’s advances.

  A few nights into The Merry Widow, she submitted her resignation and returned to Whitehead, where she sat around doing absolutely nothing (just like her old classmates from Riverbank) for a month and a half. Leonard and Roberta were away on their once-a-decade European vacation, visiting great composers’ summer houses and the like. Emily was traveling through Latin America under the spurious auspices of some so-called Spanish-language institute. (There was reason to believe she was aiding and abetting Marxist insurgents.) So Phoebe had the house to herself—a whole house in which to contemplate the absurdity of her childhood. It was the tennis trophies that depressed her the most—their buxom tin figurines, racquets reaching, straining, striving, but for what? What was the point of tennis? Of any of it? And what possible pleasure could she ever have derived from hitting a fuzzy ball over a low-lying net? She felt like a ghost in her own life—tiptoeing through old haunts as if they were no longer hers to haunt. As if history had moved forward and left her behind—at ten past ten. Like a stopped clock in a store window. Stranded in the past present. Wondering if she had a future. Doubting that she did.

  That was also the summer Phoebe lost eighteen pounds— not by accident. She worked diligently to achieve hipbones that sharp. She understood the jealousy emaciation aroused in other women. She wanted desperately to be on the receiving end of it. Maybe she was still a virgin. Maybe she hadn’t gotten into Tri Pi. But she could get into a size 4. And how many Tri Pis could say that? Certainly not Mindy Metzger, who, last time Phoebe had seen her—for a reunion coffee, during which time Mindy had suggested that Phoebe transfer out of Hoover rather than roam the campus in the company of her rejecters—appeared to be ballooning into a size 10.

  UNABLE TO SUSTAIN the belief that driving an airport shuttle van would be any less depressing than sharing a bunk bed with a manic depressive named Meredith Bookbinder on the top floor of a second-tier sorority house, Phoebe returned to Hoover the following September with the twin goals of reading all the Great Books that had ever been written and cultivating an elusive mystique in keeping with her newly anemic body. She was still embarrassed about what happened on the second night of Pledge Week—not just the throwing up part, but the tear-stained confessions, as well. And she certainly wasn’t expecting to hear from Spitty Clark again. But when the phone rang—six weeks into the first semester of her sophomore year— she knew exactly who it was.

  Maybe because he asked to speak with Phoebe Stein.

  This time, she didn’t bother correcting him. It seemed hopeless—just like everything else in her life. So she said, “Yeah?”

  “Hey, it’s Spitty.
Remember me? Party ’til you puke?” He laughed raucously.

  “I remember,” said Phoebe, deciding whether to be insulted.

  He redeemed himself with: “Did you like my postcard?”

  “What postcard?” she asked him.

  “I was in Maui,” he told her. “Summer internship at the Ramada. You didn’t get it?”

  “No.”

  “I sent it to Delta Sig.”

  “I didn’t move in here until last month.”

  “You’d think someone would have saved it for you.”

  “Not likely.”

  “Well, it was a good postcard. I can’t remember the exact wording, but it went something like this. Dear Stein. You’d probably hate it here. It’s really sunny. Love Spitty. P.S. You still depressed? Speaking of which, you still depressed or what?”

  “Maybe,” she told him.

  “Well, I got the perfect cure. Me and a few of the guys are gonna be out tailgating Saturday morning.”

  “What’s tailgating?”

  “YOU’VE NEVER BEEN TO A TAILGATE?”

  “Not consciously.”

  “What about unconsciously?”

  “I wouldn’t know, would I?”

  “Well, it’s about time you found out.”

  “I don’t know your friends.”

  “You know me. Come on, Stein—you can’t study all the time!”

  “I never study. I hate studying.”

  “Then what do you do, Stein? I never see you at keggers, never see you at games, never see you anywhere. Where you been hiding anyway?”

  “I’m not hiding!” Phoebe harrumphed.

  But Spitty was right. She barely left Delta Sig—except when she had to go to class. Then she’d put on her Walkman (Peter Gabriel, the So album, especially the single “Don’t Give Up,” or Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, in particular the variation with the emoting cellos) so if she ran into anyone from her past—anyone like Mindy Metzger—she wouldn’t be forced to chat. But that was only half the story. She wanted attention, too—wanted people to notice how she was wasting away. More than a few of the Delta Sigs already had. They nicknamed her “Ethiopia Arms.” They mocked her diet of rice cakes and raisins.