What She Saw... Read online

  “I hate to interrupt your fun, kids, but it’s getting awfully late,” said Roberta, appearing at Stinky’s side to repossess her instrument. “Roger, your mother’s probably starting to wonder where you are!”

  “Thanks for the wheat germ,” was all he said.

  Phoebe heard the screen door slam behind him.

  HE WASN’T IN school the next day.

  Or the day after that.

  But the next afternoon, art class having just ended—Mrs. Carter had everyone silk-screening unicorns on T-shirts again— Phoebe was standing in line for the water fountain outside Mrs. K.’s class when Stinky appeared out of nowhere, then cut to the front, without comment from his permanently cowed classmates. “Hey, Fine—you going uptown Friday night?” he said before he bent down for a drink.

  “I don’t know—maybe,” she told him.

  Then she started to back away from a potentially dangerous situation—namely, Stinky’s water-filled cheeks. But it was only a false alarm. The Stink Bomb King gulped down the contents of his mouth and let out an exaggerated “Aaaaahhhhhhh” before he asked her, “What’s the matter—the maestros won’t let you?”

  “The maestros don’t care,” she lied.

  In fact, she had no reason to believe that Leonard and Roberta would ever let her hang out on the hoods of parked cars in the immediate vicinity of Whitehead’s only twenty-four-hour convenience store free of parental supervision between the hours of seven and midnight—the unofficial definition of “going uptown.”

  On the other hand, the nature of Friday nights uptown had changed dramatically since the Whitehead Recreation Center (a.k.a. “the recacenter”) began hosting a weekly roller-disco party on its all-purpose athletic court. All the kids in school were talking about how cool it was—even those kids who, like Stinky, were adamant in their belief that “disco sucked.” What’s more, admission was free.

  “Be there or ya gay.” Stinky disappeared around the bend.

  “IT’S BRENDA’S BIRTHDAY and Mrs. Cuddihy is taking everyone roller-skating at the recacenter on Friday night,” Phoebe falsely informed Roberta later that evening. In fact, Phoebe and Brenda intended to go roller-skating on their own, and Brenda’s birthday wasn’t for two weeks.

  “Now, if that woman tries to convert you, I want you to tell her that your mother would like to speak to her,” said Roberta. “Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Phoebe assured her mother, who, though lacking any religious convictions of her own—it wasn’t as if they belonged to Whitehead’s Reform synagogue, and when they had to go to White Plains for Phoebe’s cousin Jonathan’s bar mitzvah, Roberta had acted as if it were a huge imposition—had been extremely unhappy to learn that Mrs. Cuddihy had asked Brenda to ask Phoebe if she was interested in joining a youth-oriented Bible-study class on Thursday afternoons. (She wasn’t; she always hated studying.) But Phoebe’s apathetic relationship to her schoolwork wasn’t the point. The point was that Phoebe felt guilty about lying to her mother, but not that guilty. She’d heard about white lies. She figured maybe this qualified as one. She didn’t want Roberta to worry the way she had last Halloween when she and Brenda had stayed out trick-or-treating until well past dark, even though they were supposed to be home before. But at the very last minute they’d heard about a “really good house” on the other side of town rumored to be handing out silver dollars as if they were M&M’s, and they’d been unable to resist.

  As it turned out, that “really good house” had been handing out chocolate coins, which were tasty but not worth getting into trouble for, which is exactly what Phoebe and Brenda got in. Roberta hid the very candy Phoebe had worked so hard to obtain. Brenda wasn’t allowed to watch TV for a week—a major blow considering the Cuddihy kids, despite their religious background, usually had unrestricted access to network television, whereas Phoebe and Emily were limited to one hour per day. (They could see all the public-television programming they wanted—as if they wanted it. At least, Phoebe didn’t.)

  Indeed, it was only under duress that she subjected herself to those British period dramas that made Leonard hallucinate with pleasure. The Masterpiece Theatre theme music was catchy, sure. As for the plots—all those pasty English people getting worked up about who got to sit where in the barouche—Phoebe was less than riveted. Her favorite evening drama was The Dukes of Hazzard. There were guaranteed to be at least two good car chases per episode. And the Duke brothers—unlike Emily—always treated their kid sister, Daisy, with the utmost respect. The only problem was that the show ran a full hour. So watching it meant forgoing her otherwise daily Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy rerun fix. That’s where Brenda came in. Phoebe could always count on her best friend for detailed plot descriptions of the previous night’s shows.

  When that got boring, they’d talk about religion. Tears brimming in her lugubrious brown eyes, Brenda would implore Phoebe—herself of the gray-blue-eyed persuasion—to convert from her heretic faith. “How can I walk to school with you every morning knowing you’re going straight to hell?” was Brenda’s preferred line of reasoning.

  “But I told you, we celebrate Christmas!” Phoebe would seek to reassure her. “And I swear I’ve only been to synagogue once in my entire life!”

  Never to any avail.

  BUT THAT FRIDAY night, as Phoebe and Brenda made their way “uptown,” they hardly spoke at all, such was their abject fear of their immediate surroundings. No matter that they knew every shrub along the way by heart—every mailbox, streetlight, telephone pole, and patch of grass with four-leaf clover potential, too. In fact, they walked the same six blocks to and from Whitehead Middle every weekday morning and afternoon of their school-year lives. At the advanced hour of 7:30 P.M., however, so very foreboding seemed the landmarks of their school route that they might as well have been negotiating the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The rosebushes seemed eager to prick their fingers, the telephone poles intent on crushing their skulls. There was no doubt in either girl’s mind that famed serial murderer Son of Sam, though reported to be incarcerated, was lying in wait inside the bright blue mailbox on the corner of Catalpa and Main.

  The little stone house on the corner of Briarcliff was another kind of horror story—the real kind. A year earlier, a veteran of the Vietnam War had sweet-talked his way into the basement, where he’d strangled to death a Whitehead ninth-grader in her own rec room. Brenda and Phoebe had stumbled upon the crime scene on their way to fourth grade. It had rained the night before. There were felled branches all over the street, and colored leaves blowing everywhere, and two Whitehead cop cars parked at right angles on the front lawn. And standing behind the yellow tape contemplating the silence of that little stone house on the morning after the storm, they’d known something was terribly wrong. The curtains were drawn, and they’d correctly associated drawn curtains with hearses and funeral homes. At the time, however, they were more excited than they were frightened by the idea of untimely death. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with them. Then they grew up a little and realized it did.

  Then they were terrified every time they walked by that house, that real-life haunted house, and never more so than they were that evening, alone after dark en route to their very first roller-disco party.

  BUT THEIR TERROR only grew realer when they pushed open the Recreation Center’s steel door. Milling about the trophy-lined corridor were a collection of Whitehead High students who appeared closer in age to the girls’ parents than to Phoebe and Brenda. Not that they appeared to have much else in common with their Bible-and-Berlioz-obsessed elders. They were wearing sleeveless mesh football jerseys and faded blue jeans with frayed bottoms. And they were chewing on toothpicks and shoving one another and laughing about the “back entrance.” (As far as Phoebe knew, the recacenter didn’t have one.) But it was too late to turn back, so Phoebe and Brenda got in line to rent skates, a task they accomplished with the week’s accumulated milk money. Ten minutes later, their fingers damp with nervous excitement
, they laced them up and rolled out onto the all-purpose athletic court.

  A strobe light had been attached to the ceiling, and the floor was flickering blue, red, and green. And the music was so loud they had to yell, “What?” at each other over and over again. And everywhere they looked there were feet flying, and heads bobbing, and girls wiping out, only to be scooped up off the shiny blond-wood floor by their pale, pimply, vaguely sinister-looking boyfriends. Under the scoreboard, a guy in a Tom Petty T-shirt was French-kissing a pretty blonde in designer jeans and a turquoise velour V-neck sweater. It was a good while before Phoebe and Brenda spotted Stinky. He was standing by the sidelines trying to trip passing skaters. He didn’t even have skates on. He was wearing black-and-white Adidas soccer cleats and a Stones T-shirt depicting a giant red tongue. Phoebe and Brenda skated right by him before coming to a grinding halt at the corner of the bleachers.

  He took his time ambling over to where they stood. “You girls dancing or what?” That was his opening line.

  And it was a pretty stupid one, Phoebe thought. So she said, “Do we look like we’re dancing?”

  Brenda giggled.

  Stinky announced to no one in particular, “I’m gettin’ a soda.”

  “What kind are you getting me?” asked Phoebe.

  “I’m not going back out there,” said Brenda, shaking her head.

  “I’ll be right back,” Phoebe assured her best friend, but it wasn’t her best friend she was thinking about just then.

  At Stinky’s lead, she rolled off the court and back down the trophy-lined corridor. The burnouts were still there, but they’d mostly relocated to the windowsills. “Check it out,” slurred one gangly figure overhead, his long legs swinging beneath him like Tarzan’s vines, his face reduced to two nostrils in the tightened hood of his gray sweatshirt. “It’s Stinky Fuckin’ Mancuso.”

  “Dude,” said Stinky. “It’s so fuckin’ hot in there.”

  Then he reached inside the soda machine and scored himself a Coke and Phoebe a Tab.

  “Thanks,” she mouthed in disbelief. That he knew how to get free sodas.

  That he knew these quasi adults!

  “Let’s go outside,” said Stinky.

  Phoebe thought of Brenda, waiting for her on the court. Then she thought of Leonard and Roberta, waiting for her at home. It wasn’t precisely guilt she felt; it had more to do with fear-tinged fascination. “Okay, but not for very long,” she told him, amazed to find herself so effortlessly removed from everything she knew and trusted.

  Then she followed Stinky back out through the Recreation Center’s steel door and around the side of the building, through the parking lot, to the wooded entrance of Nutley Park.

  OVER THE YEARS, the Veterans’ Memorial statue had turned a putrid shade of green. But in the glow of the street lamps that night, it looked even more sickly. Stinky and Phoebe climbed up its base, and sat down on the narrow ledge that separated the dedication stone from the soldier. A hundred feet away the suburban traffic seemed to trickle by in slow motion. “Want one?” said Phoebe, reaching into her jacket pocket and pulling out a fresh box of candy cigarettes. She thought her choice of sweets would make her seem knowing. She thought a guy like Stinky would appreciate the symbolism of a candy cigarette.

  But he only laughed, reached into his own jacket pocket, pulled out a real box of Kool menthols, and offered one to Phoebe, who declined.

  It wasn’t just that Leonard would be horror-struck if he ever smelled cigarettes on her breath. (To a double-reed instrument player, tobacco was akin to suicide.) But she didn’t know how to smoke, and she certainly wasn’t going to try to figure it out in front of Stinky Mancuso. So she just sat there while he puffed away. She was thinking about how some of the kids in school were saying he might have to stay back a year if he didn’t start doing his homework. She was thinking she could help him do it, when he asked her, “Your mother still playing Dildo and Anus?”

  “Is your mother still wearing army boots?” she asked him back.

  “My mother’s wearin’ shit,” he said, downing the last sip of his Coke.

  “Your mother’s a nudist?” Phoebe thought she was being funny.

  But Stinky didn’t laugh. He didn’t answer either. He stood his empty Coke can on its end. Then he raised himself to his feet and proceeded to stomp the thing flat. He sent it flying in the direction of a nearby sandpit, and tossed his cigarette in the same direction. Then he lowered himself back onto the ledge and grumbled, “I’m gettin’ out of this shit hole, and soon.”

  Phoebe’s stomach lurched. She didn’t want Stinky to move away. “You’re moving?” she squeaked.

  “Depends whether I feel like it,” he shot back.

  “But where would you go?”

  “Anywhere I like.”

  “What about your grandmother?”

  “What about her?”

  “Would she move too?”

  “She’s not going anywhere.”

  “Why not?”

  “She can’t even get out of bed—not unless I pull her.”

  That’s when he grabbed Phoebe by the jacket collar and brought her to his mouth. His lips tasted like cigarettes. Startled, she pulled away. “What’s the matter?” he said, elbowing her in the ribs. “You scared or something?”

  Phoebe pulled her jacket tight around her heart-motif T-SHIRT and stared into his eyes—eyes as big and black and insistent as the eyes of the raccoons that terrorized the Fines’ attic every spring. “Brenda’s going to be really mad if I don’t go back soon,” she told him.

  But Stinky didn’t seem all that worried about it. He reached down and untied one of her skate laces. “Now you can’t go anywhere,” he said. And for a second or two she believed him— believed she was a prisoner of Stinky Mancuso. And the thought of it left her speechless and flashing back to the day last year when her mother had abandoned her at pottery class. Okay, Roberta was only five minutes late to pick her up. But Phoebe was the last one there. Even the pottery teacher had gone home. “You like the Stones?” asked Stinky, interrupting her nightmare.

  “They’re okay,” said Phoebe, swallowing hard. In fact, she’d never heard a single one of their songs. “I like Ozzy better.” (She hadn’t heard any of Ozzy’s songs either.)

  “Well you’re some girl,” he said.

  “Shut up,” she said, but only because she couldn’t think what else to say.

  “No, you shut up,” he told her.

  Then he tried to kiss her again. But he only got her cheek. So she turned her cheek so he got her lips. And they must have stayed like that, glued together, wet olive to wet olive, for at least ten seconds, during which time Phoebe again found herself flashing back—this time, to a certain traumatic moment in second grade, when Karen Meyers, during a filmstrip about the Egyptian pharaohs and how they buried their servants alive, passed around a note that read, “Phoebe loves all the boys,” prompting the boys to direct a stream of decidedly hostile kissing noises in Phoebe’s direction, thereby compelling Phoebe to return the favor with actual kisses, loaded with cooties and conferred on the prepubescent lips of nearly every male subject in the class. To think that, for several years afterward, she’d worried that the incident might be used against her in some future game of Truth or Dare!

  Now she relished the opportunity to spread word of this new indiscretion. In fact, the expected pleasure of “telling all” to Brenda Cuddihy far exceeded the immediate pleasure of the kiss, which was, in all honesty, slightly gross.

  “So you wanna go out?” That’s what Stinky Mancuso said when he came up for air.

  Phoebe’s heart was beating in her throat. “I’ll tell you on Monday,” she told him.

  Because she thought a proposition like that required careful consideration.

  BUT ON MONDAY there was no Stinky to tell. There was no Stinky on Tuesday either. And on Wednesday, when he finally did appear in homeroom, he wouldn’t make eye contact with Phoebe or anyone else. He was sitting
so far down in his seat she thought he might slip off. He was bouncing the eraser tip of his pencil against his three-ring binder, the blue cloth covering of which he’d defamed with ballpoint pen to read, “Rock is my religion and Judas is my priest.” “It’s your breath going up your nose,” he growled at Patrick McPatrick after Patrick McPatrick asked him if he didn’t “smell something funny.” He wouldn’t even answer “Present” when Mrs. K. took attendance—in her usual, punctilious fashion, like an army drill sergeant, by last name first. It was pretty clear he was in a bad mood.

  Phoebe was thinking she could help him snap out of it.

  “Dear Stinky,” began the note she slipped under his elbow while Mrs. K. rambled on about the English settlers and how generous they were to have shared their corn with the Lenni Lenape—according to Mrs. K., a band of extremely friendly Indians who once made their home in and around Whitehead and who could be found farming, fishing, and hunting when they weren’t shaving their heads and faces with sharpened mussel shells, slicking down their hair with bear grease, repelling mosquitoes with eagle fat, applying raccoon grease as sunscreen, foraging for edible plants, locating their animal spirits, communicating with sticks and symbols, or brawling with settlers while under the influence of “fire water.” “The answer is yes. Love, Phoebe.”

  She watched him slip the note into his back pocket.

  She never found out if he unfolded it.

  SHE SAW STINKY for the last time that night—out the side window of her parents’ station wagon. Phoebe, Leonard, and Emily were on their way to the Methodist church, where Roberta was playing an all-Bach program with the Whitehead Symphonia. Stinky was standing by himself in the traffic island across the street from the Recreation Center, his hands buried in the pockets of his gray vinyl Members Only windbreaker, a single soccer cleat grinding a cigarette butt into the blackened pavement below. It was already dark—dark enough that Phoebe doubted he could see her sitting there in the backseat with her nose pressed to the glass. At least, she hoped he couldn’t, because if he could, he should have waved, and he didn’t. He just stood there staring straight ahead as if he didn’t see anyone or anything. And maybe he didn’t.