What She Saw...

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  “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.

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nbsp; “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.

  It turned out being comfortable with someone and being attracted to someone were two different things.

  JASON DROVE HER home the long way. “So whadju think of the movie?” he asked her on the back roads of Ho-Ho-Kus.

  “It was okay,” said Phoebe. “But you know that part where that girl does coke with all those Arab sheiks and then she freaks out? I thought that was really unrealistic.”

  “In your personal experience, doing coke with Arab sheiks does not produce the same type of mental freakout?”

  “Come on, you know what I mean! Like, when she’s quivering in the corner and they have to go rescue her. I mean, that seemed so exaggerated to me.”

  “Well, in my personal experience,” continued Jason with a signifying glance in her direction. “That drug can definitely fuck you up big time.”

  Phoebe didn’t answer immediately. She was too busy hating herself for always talking about things she didn’t know anything about.

  But then, she didn’t know much about anything, so what exactly was she supposed to talk about?

  “Well, I guess you know more about it than me,” she mumbled plaintively.

  “No doubt,” Jason concurred. “But hey—I’m not looking for another drug buddy.”

  She swallowed hard. “What are you looking for?”

  He reached for the equalizer. “To tell you the truth, I’m not really looking for anything. I’m pretty much content with the way things are.”

  “That’s cool,” said Phoebe.

  But it wasn’t cool at all. In the days since he’d called to ask her out, she’d been harboring the fantasy that Jason Barry Gold had perceived in her a certain emotional depth—a certain affinity for the “poetry of life,” as evidenced by the dog-eared copy of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, one of few concessions to “weirdness,” she carried around school with her—that he’d been unable to find with a vacuous rich girl like Aimee Aaron.

  BUT HE MUST have perceived something, because he called again on Sunday afternoon. “My parents are out of town,” he said. “Come over and we’ll rent a movie.”

  Phoebe couldn’t believe this was happening. She couldn’t understand why he liked her.

  She didn’t know if she could sit through another movie.

  “Where’d they go?” she asked.

  “Conference in the Bahamas,” he answered.

  “What kind of conference?”

  “Plastic surgery.”

  “Maybe I should become a plastic surgeon.”

  “Probably boring.”

  “Probably,” she said.

  She didn’t know if Jason was referring to the conference or the plastic surgery.

  She was too embarrassed to ask.

  He picked her up in his father’s canary-yellow Porsche. From Whitehead, they drove to Saddle River, to a modern château with a five-car garage and several acres’ worth of pine forest in back. Dr. and Dr. Gold turned out to have matching canary-yellow Porsches. Her vanity plates read FACE. His read LIFT. The Mercedes station wagon had apparently fallen out of favor. So had the Chrysler Le Baron convertible. “Check out my blowfish,” said Jason, leading Phoebe down a long hallway that led to a walk-in aquarium.

  They toured the house and grounds, the indoor and outdoor pools.

  Then they went up on the roof with binoculars and spied on Richard Nixon’s house. “I’ve always thought Tricky Dick got a bum deal,” volunteered Jason. “I mean, look at what he did in China.”

  “What did he do in China, again?” said Phoebe.

  “I can’t remember. But people are always talking about what he did in China. Maybe he got his feet bound or something.”

  “That’s Japan.”

  “Whatever.” Jason sounded annoyed.

  Phoebe wished she’d let it go. Who was she to be correcting other people? Besides, maybe Jason was right; maybe foot-binding was a Chinese custom.

  Maybe she didn’t know shit about anything.

  “What do you say we get the fuck down from here?” asked Jason, but he didn’t wait for an answer.

  Phoebe followed her date down a spiral staircase that led to a museum-style atrium, complete with vaulted ceiling, bubble skylight, low-lying chandelier, geometric art, and a marble side table for holding mail.

  They wound up on a white leather sofa unit in a vast, sunken living room.

  The carpet was white shag. The fireplace was white, too. All the lamps were made of chrome. All the tables were made of glass. Dried branches dyed the color of lapis sprouted from imitation Ming Dynasty vases. Orchids grew like grass. An original LeRoy Neiman—a colorful oil of an in-flight pole-vaulter— hung over a white piano. Another whole wall had been given over to photographs of Jason in various states of athletic dress and undress: Jason emerging from an Olympic-sized pool, Jason skiing at Vail, Jason snorkeling in the Caribbean, Jason at home plate, Jason windsurfing, Jason in full lacrosse gear holding a trophy high over his head, Jason in white gloves teeing up for a hole in one.

  He’d rented Caddyshack.

  He said he’d already seen it three times, but he wanted to see it a fourth. He put the tape in the VCR, turned off the lights, kicked off his shoes. Phoebe did the same. Then she sank her backside into the sofa, rested her sock feet on the coffee table, but it didn’t last. Midway through the movie, Jason had rearranged things so she was leaning against him—against his chest and between his legs, his arms wrapped around her like a straightjacket, her legs extended before her. Then he pressed his open lips to the back of her neck. And he smelled like dandelions and beer and fresh-cut grass. Then he hit “pause” on the remote, dug his elbow into the back of the couch, and rolled the two of them over, inch by inch, limb by limb, until all 185 pounds of Jason Barry Gold rested on top of Phoebe’s shapeless body, and Jason Barry Gold was breathing like an elephant.

  Phoebe was hardly breathing at all.

  As Jason groped the waistband of her army-surplus pants, she lay there like a cadaver, petrified that things would careen out of control—and then w
hat? Did he think she was going to have sex with him? Would he be angry if she didn’t? Had she “asked for it” by coming here while his parents were away? Would she be able to face him on Monday if she did? And what if she didn’t? What if she got pregnant? She could never admit a thing like that to Roberta. If it came to that, she would have to call Emily at college. And how soon could she go home? How could she act natural when she felt anything but? How could she enjoy what was happening to her when the burden of experience—her lack of it, her need for it, her desire for it, her fear of it, her exhaustion in the face of it—was a heavier load to bear than all 185 pounds of Jason Barry Gold?

  And was it okay to skip from first base to third base, or did you have to go to second base first? Phoebe pondered this last question as she steered Jason’s hands down and away from the site of her shame—her nearly nippleless flat chest.

  Years later, Roberta would express the belief that her younger daughter had stunted her frontal development with all the strenuous exercise she’d undertaken between the ages of eight and eighteen, when most girls recede to the couch to watch TV, snack, and talk on the phone. She postulated that Phoebe ran too many laps, played too many tiebreakers, straddled the uneven bars one too many times. Maybe she was right. Back then, however, Phoebe’s flat chest struck her as just another sick joke on the part of an unjust God. Here Emily was a busty 34C, while Phoebe was flatter than a two-lane blacktop in Iowa. She felt cheated, she felt cursed. What was the point of having horrible cramps and ruining all your underwear once a month when you still looked like a nine-year-old? In the beginning of tenth grade Roberta bought Phoebe a training bra, but in that flimsy bandage Phoebe felt like an impostor. She might as well have been wearing a police badge.

  She went back to her little-girl undershirts with the applique flowers on the neck.

  And she let Jason Barry Gold finger her underwear instead— her white cotton panties decorated with tiny red apples. Then he lifted her underwear away, pried apart the intruding skin, and jammed a finger inside. It felt cold and vaguely constricting. It didn’t feel like much else. Or maybe Phoebe was too busy wondering what Jason Barry Gold wanted from her when he could have Aimee Aaron? And did she even like Jason Barry Gold, or was she just flattered that he would pay her this kind of attention—flattered that the most popular boy in the twelfth grade would have sex with her if she were willing?