What She Saw... Read online

  And there were as many college professors and psychotherapists living in Whitehead as there were mechanics and landscape gardeners, their “respectable” salaries differentiating them from the five households in town known to receive federal assistance. Of the latter, the Cuddihys were perhaps the highestprofile, thanks to their large numbers (six girls, two boys); their hair color (a shocking shade of strawberry blond); and the athletic achievements of the second-eldest daughter, Maureen, who was single-handedly responsible for Whitehead’s countywide reputation as a basketball stronghold. The Cuddihys were so poor—Mr. Cuddihy was housebound with metal legs, while his wife (a.k.a. Culottes Cuddihy) served sloppy joes in the middle-school cafeteria—that Maureen’s gym teachers were reduced to purchasing her high-tops out of their own pocket change. Everyone said Maureen would get a free ride through college if only she could pass math. Unfortunately, she couldn’t, thanks to a crippling case of dyslexia that incited her classmates to nickname her “Neeraum.” (Phoebe was the only one who ever called Brenda “Adnerb.”)

  And the residential blocks of Whitehead were long and shaded by mature maples whose leaves turned into abstract expressionist canvases in mid-October and were subsequently raked into humongous, crepitating leaf mountains into which Phoebe and her friends would jump from the hoods of their parents’ parked station wagons in the dusky hours before dinner. And the houses were a nice size. Most of them were set back from the street. Some came with half-acre plots. There were split-levels with circular driveways and white-gravel front yards, three-story Victorian “dollhouses” with stained-glass windows and fairy-castle turrets, and Depression-era bungalows with screened-in front porches and ivy creeping up their stucco siding. It was to this latter category that the Fines’ purple house— Phoebe never entirely recovered from that embarrassment— belonged. Though in all fairness, it was pretty cozy inside. And it had a bigger-than-average backyard, where Leonard grew his prize tomatoes and Phoebe built obstacle courses out of old tires and sawhorses and tried to beat her own record for time.

  And Phoebe was grateful to have her own bedroom—plenty of her friends had to share with a sibling, and some, like Brenda, with multiple siblings—even while she always resented its minuscule size. Having been born three years before her, Emily had been awarded the “real” bedroom. Not that Phoebe had asked to be born second. Not that she’d asked to be born! But since she had been, she tried to make the best of it—occupying herself with a host of before- and after-school electives (band, chorus, bell choir, Spanish Club, yearbook); classes (pottery, gymnastics, tennis); lessons (violin, piano, and, briefly, flute); independent projects (joke books, journals, found-object models of national landmarks); contests (poster, poetry, essay, coloring); collections (rocks, minerals, marbles, stamps, postcards, play-bills, matchbooks, foreign currency, foreign newspapers, shirt cardboard, puffy stickers, baby teeth, dried boogers, foot skin); and hobbies (beading, chemistry, shortwave radio, biking, reading, calligraphy, origami, watercolors). All of which didn’t leave much time for boys. For example, she still hadn’t gotten around to writing back to her East German pen pal, Günter Hopstock.

  She always found time to daydream about Stinky Mancuso.

  AT NIGHT PHOEBE lay awake beneath her pink and orange poly-cotton elephant-motif sheets, asking favors of the Almighty, whom she didn’t necessarily imagine to be a white bearded fellow in keeping with the Judeo-Christian tradition but on whom she nevertheless projected such avuncular qualities as having a soft spot for overachieving ten-year-olds like herself. “Oh, please, God, whoever you are,” she’d whisper into the cold. “Just let Stinky be in homeroom tomorrow. I swear I’ll clean my room and practice third position really hard. Oh, please!”

  Though if God wasn’t coming through with the results she wanted, she was just as happy to put her faith in out-and-out superstitions. For example, if she could make it to school both without having stepped on a single crack in the sidewalk and without having had to wait for a single light to turn green, she’d feel she had every reason to expect to find Stinky Mancuso standing at attention at seven forty-five in the morning, his hand over his heart, reinterpreting the Pledge of Allegiance— “for which it stands” became “for Richard Stans”—a Founding Father?—along with the rest of Mrs. K.’s class. In fact, Phoebe’s superstitions proved about as effective as her prayers and even complete silence, since Stinky was just as often out of school as he was in.

  Answers to the ongoing mystery of his whereabouts were occasionally provided by his classmates.

  There was the morning Patrick McPatrick, Jr., son of Patrick McPatrick, Sr., of McPatrick Landscape Gardening, startled everyone by rising from his beveled seat and informing Mrs. K., “Roger has asked me to tell you that he’s not feeling himself this morning.”

  Of course, this made the class fall off their seats and clutch their stomachs for air. It also made Mrs. K. trumpet, in her signature postmenopausal baritone, “Shut your mouths, or you’ll all go to the principal!”

  In truth, almost no one was ever sent to Whitehead Middle’s diminutive Greek principal—no one, that is, except for Stinky Mancuso, who considered himself, if not a close personal friend of Mr. G., as he was known—his last name was even harder to pronounce than Mrs. K.’s was—then certainly a partner in crime. According to Stinky, Mr. G. hadn’t merely hobnobbed with the Hells Angels at Altamont; he’d been on the front lines of Woodstock, close enough to Jimi Hendrix to see the liquid acid seeping off his terrycloth headband and into his brain. And he still liked the “good weed” every now and then. In fact, he kept a little Baggie in the top drawer of his desk for when he was in the mood, which was all the time. And when he was high as a kite, he liked to “get it on” with Mrs. Carter, the art teacher with the long middle-parted hair and the drawstring peasant blouses that barely obscured her heaving, braless milk bags. And she never said no. She always said yes. She couldn’t get enough of Mr. G. That’s what Stinky said.

  Stinky said Mr. G. was a pal for letting him skip school as often as he did.

  AS FATE WOULD have it, however, Stinky was very much present in homeroom the day after Patrick McPatrick’s announcement (this despite the fact that, on her way there, Phoebe had had to wait for nearly every light to turn green). And that afternoon, during a filmstrip on the invention of the abacus— Mrs. K.’s audiovisually inclined retiree husband, Mr. K., ran the projector—Stinky sat down next to her on the activities rug, then proceeded to sprinkle spiral-notebook confetti in her hair. It was then that Phoebe began to wonder if Stinky’s interest in tormenting her was more than a matter of convenience.

  She became even more convinced his note was no joke when, the following day in gym, he laid his mat down next to hers, then offered to spot her for the sit-up test.

  “I don’t care,” she told him, which was her way of saying, “Please do.” Then she rolled onto her back, linked her hands behind her head, and waited for Stinky to spring into action. A wide grin encompassed his peanut-shaped face as he dug his hands into the toes of her no-name sneakers—so hard that she screamed, “Ow!”

  “Oh, sorry,” he said.

  “Quiet back there,” barked Mr. Bender.

  “What?” asked Stinky with an auspicious snap.

  “Mr. Mancuso, is that gum you’re chewing?”

  “Tobacco,” Stinky corrected their ex-marine gym teacher.

  “WHATEVER IT IS I WANT IT OUT NOW!” bellowed Bender.

  Then he launched into his usual tirade about all the kids he’d watched choke to death on chewing gum during competitive athletics. He was just getting to the part about Billy So-and-So’s mother and how hard she was crying at Billy’s funeral when Stinky returned from garbage duty and assumed his earlier position at Phoebe’s feet. By then, she’d begun to drift. But even with her lids down, she could feel Stinky’s bug eyes peering inquisitively at her body. And why shouldn’t he have stared? She was wearing her best zip-up sweatshirt (navy blue acrylic with red piping) and elas
tic-waist chinos that tapered to the ankle. (Fifth-graders didn’t change for gym; they were supposed to be too young to sweat.) And thanks to the low humidity, her winged hair was feathering nicely.

  Being the sole athletic member of the Fine family, however—Emily had asthma, and Roberta and Leonard were both tea-drinker types who hadn’t broken a sweat since 1955— Phoebe was also someone who cared deeply about her physicalfitness test scores. And so, to the tune of “Ready, set, go,” she touched her elbows to her knees, then her head to the mat, back and forth, back and forth, until, five minutes later, she’d set a new Whitehead Middle record. Needless to say, Mr. Bender was impressed—as was Stinky. “Shit,” he said. “You’re really good at sit-ups—especially for a girl.”

  “We have to do sixty of them every week in gymnastics,” she told him by way of explanation.

  “Like Nadia Comaneci?”

  “I wish.” (It just so happened that Nadia Comaneci was her current idol.)

  “Can you do a back handspring?”

  “Only with a spotter. I’m better at the uneven bars.”

  “What’s wrong with the even bars?”

  “They’re for boys.”

  “What’s wrong with boys?” Stinky was smiling when he said that—as if he were trying to get at something else.

  Phoebe didn’t help him out. “There’s nothing wrong with boys,” she said, grimacing. “I just happen not to be one of them.”

  “Prove it,” Stinky hissed.

  “I SAID QUIET BACK THERE!” Bender broke in, to Phoebe’s enormous relief.

  Then he launched into a diatribe about all the kids he knew who’d died making too much noise—so much noise they hadn’t heard the alarm that would have alerted them to the fire that eventually engulfed them.

  Mr. Bender was married to the other gym teacher, Mrs. Bender, who doubled as the sex-ed teacher. It was she who’d warned the boys that if their jeans were too tight their “sperm factories” could overheat, causing permanent damage to their reproductive capabilities. After that all the boys started wearing sweatpants to school—all the boys except for Stinky. For whatever reason, he was willing to take the risk.

  “IT’S FOR YOU, crumpet,” warbled Leonard, surprising Phoebe in the kitchen after school a few days later.

  It was independent-project time in social studies, and she was measuring out flour for a papier-mâché model of the Short Hills Mall. She hadn’t even heard the doorbell ring. She went to the porch with chalky hands. She thought it might be Brenda seeing if she wanted to play with the Cuddihys’ new mutt, Michelle.

  She wasn’t expecting to find Stinky Mancuso standing there.

  “Hello, crumpet,” he said, mimicking Leonard’s pseudo-British intonation.

  “Shut up,” said Phoebe, knowing full well Stinky would say anything he felt like saying.

  “Are you gonna let me in?” That’s what he felt like saying next.

  It took Phoebe by surprise.

  She had somehow forgotten that they were separated by a screen door. Or maybe she was secretly hoping Stinky would leave before she had the chance to open it. But he didn’t. So she unlatched the hook. At which point Stinky walked right in and then right past her, into the Fines’ Victorian-eclectic music room, where Roberta sat in a straight-backed chair practicing her viola. “Well, hello there,” said Roberta, laying down her bow on the rusted ledge of her music stand.

  “Hey,” said Stinky. “I’m Roger.”

  “Well, hello there, Roger,” said Roberta. “I’m Mrs. Fine.”

  “What are you playing on that big violin?”

  “It’s actually a viola,” snapped Phoebe’s mother, still the defensive former violinist who’d turned to the viola because her mastery of the violin’s upper registers was never what it should have been—and because the competition was slightly less stiff. “And I’m rehearsing the orchestral score to a famous operatic work by a seventeenth-century English composer named Henry Purcell. It’s called Dido and Aeneas.”

  “Dude,” muttered Stinky, nose wrinkled with the glorious impossibility of it all. “Your mother’s playing Dildo and Anus. ” Then he let out a great firecracker of laughter. He was the only one. Phoebe stared at her feet in shame. She wasn’t entirely sure what a dildo was, but she knew exactly what an anus was. More important, she knew it didn’t make for pleasant conversation in front of her famously prudish mother.

  But then, Roberta Fine was someone who heard exactly what she wanted to hear. Which is more or less what she heard that afternoon. “Here, would you like to try?” she smiled cordially, her instrument extended toward Stinky’s tiny, jutting chin.

  But he backed away. “That’s okay,” he said on his way out of the music room.

  Mortified for her mother—or was it for herself?—Phoebe followed Stinky out the back door and into the yard, where they pushed each other around in a wheelbarrow. When that got boring, they tortured some slugs—cut them in half with Stinky’s Swiss Army knife just to see if they would live like they were supposed to be able to, with only half a body. (They didn’t.) Then they lay feet to head in the hammock and talked about school. “Mrs. K. makes bad farts, huh?” said Stinky.

  “Whoever smelt it, dealt it,” Phoebe reminded him.

  “Yeah, well, whoever denied it, supplied it,” rejoined Stinky. Then he poked her stomach with a long gnarled stick he’d found over by Leonard’s tomato plants, causing Phoebe to jerk backward and the hammock to rock from side to side, until it settled back into inertia—just like them. “Hey, Fine,” said Stinky after calm had been restored. “Where’d you get a name like Fine?”

  “I don’t know—I just did,” she told him. “Where’d you get a name like Mancuso?”

  “Beats the fuck out of me. Never met no one named Mancuso.”

  “What about your father? Isn’t he Mr. Mancuso?”

  “Never met no one named Mr. Mancuso,” he told her.

  Then he hurled his stick, boomerang-style, into the yard.

  But Phoebe wasn’t ready to leave it alone. (That was before she knew to leave some things alone.) “Well, what about your mom?” she pressed on. “Isn’t she Mrs. Mancuso?”

  “Never met no Mrs. Mancuso.”

  “Well, who do you live with, then?”

  “I live alone.”

  “You live alone?”

  “I got a grandma that stops by—when I let her. She’s a nice lady but she gets on my nerves.”

  “Is her last name Mancuso?”

  “She’s just Grandma.”

  “So where’d you get the name Mancuso?”

  “It’s just a name.” Stinky unwrapped a piece of Bazooka and popped it in his mouth. “I could change it if I wanted to.”

  “Change your name!” To Phoebe the concept was inconceivable. Never mind the fact that her own Grandpa Solomon had changed theirs from the ethnically charged Feingold to the comparatively mellow Fine some fifty years before her birth. “To what?”

  Stinky chewed for a few seconds, began a bubble, then changed his mind and let it snap across his lips. “To Keith,” he said, sucking the wad back into his mouth. “When I grow up, I just might be Keith Richards. . . . Hey, you got anything to eat?”

  But he didn’t wait for an answer; he was already headed back inside.

  “There might be some granola bars,” said Phoebe, following him into the kitchen, where he circled her mall-in-progress. “What the hell is this?” he wanted to know.

  “It’s for social studies,” she told him. “Aren’t you doing one?”

  But Stinky had more important things on his mind. “Where’d you say those Twix bars were?”

  “I didn’t say Twix bars, I said granola bars,” she said, pulling the box off the shelf, and handing it to him.

  He devoured his first bar in ten seconds flat.

  “These suck,” he scoffed halfway through his second one.

  “So how come you’re eating them?” she asked him.

  “ ’Cause I’m h
ungry,” he answered.

  “Don’t you have to eat dinner soon?”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” he said on his way back into the music room.

  Roberta had disappeared, but her viola lay supine on her chair. Before Phoebe had the chance to object, Stinky had positioned the instrument at the height of his crotch and was pretending to wail on it, his head bobbing up and down to an imaginary beat, his buckteeth biting down on his lower lip. Phoebe thought it was pretty funny, but she rolled her eyes rather than give Stinky the satisfaction of hearing her laugh.

  “How do you play this thing, anyway?” he asked her, having tired of air guitar.

  “Here, I’ll show you,” she said, steering his chin to the chin rest, then his left hand to the scroll. (She was thrilled to find her expertise, for once, in demand.)

  Her hand over his, she guided the bow along the highest string. Whereupon a spine-chilling moan reverberated throughout the Fines’ purple house. “The big violin fuckin’ rocks!” decreed a red-faced Stinky after silence had been restored.

  “Please watch your language,” an invisible Roberta called out from the den, but she didn’t sound all that mad. She was probably secretly delighted to have found a fan of her frequently maligned and forever neglected instrument. Indeed, but one playable piece in the entire classical repertoire— namely, Berlioz’s Harold in Italy—had been written to showcase the viola. And while Leonard always claimed Harold was his all-time favorite piece, Phoebe always suspected that her father was merely trying to make her mother feel better.

  It wasn’t clear she ever did.

  At least she’d never learned to laugh along with the viola jokes that were common sport in her and Leonard’s social circle. (There’s a sixteen-wheeler coming straight at your car. If you swerve left, you kill the conductor. If you swerve right, you kill the violist. Which way do you swerve? Right: business before pleasure.) Nor had it escaped Phoebe’s notice that she’d been started on the very instrument that had eluded her mother. In short, she was slated to become the violin success story Roberta Fine couldn’t tell herself.