What She Saw... (11 page)

“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 Phoebe 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.

It wasn't the kind of noticing she'd hoped for.

In fact, with the possible exception of Meredith Bookbinder, who put all her energy into despising herself—she was still mourning the fetus she'd aborted on the first day of school— Phoebe's so-called sisters seemed to have started hating her even before she'd given them a reason to. She'd walk into the TV room where they'd be sitting Indian-style on the industrial carpeting watching L.A. Law, stainless steel mixing bowls of airblown popcorn lodged between their fleshy thighs, and they wouldn't even acknowledge her presence—not even during the commercial breaks. Maybe they'd found out Delta Sig wasn't her first choice. Maybe they were jealous of her thighs. Maybe it was her attitude they resented. In truth, the last time Phoebe had demonstrated any kind of sororal spirit was the first night of Pledge Week. She never baked for bake sales. She arrived late to chapter meetings. She hadn't even participated in the Fall Walkathon—couldn't even remember what it was they were walking for. Muscular dystrophy? Cystic fibrosis? Multiple sclerosis? Homeless cats? She'd spent the day hiding in the Law Library.

To think she was an outcast even among Jews!

But, then, what made her Jewish anyway? She'd probably been to temple about as many times as Spitty Clark had. And who was to say she didn't have more in common with the Roman Catholics or the ancient Etruscans? And didn't it count for something that she had the same birthday (December 25) as Jesus Christ? Maybe she was the goddamn Second Coming. Ha, ha. It was all pretty funny when you started to think about it— about how upset she still was about not getting into Tri Pi, and here she was about to save humanity from itself. . . .

Spitty must have heard her sniveling on the other end of the phone. “That's it,” he said, taking matters into his own hands. “I'm picking you up at noon!”

“But—”

“No buts allowed. Only tits. And asses.” He howled with laughter.

TAILGATING TURNED OUT to consist of leaning your back against someone's Jeep in the parking lot behind the football stadium, drinking warm beer out of paper cups, and eating cold fried chicken legs laid out in picnic baskets on fold-up tables folded down in the immediate vicinity of the Jeep. Phoebe didn't know it was a dressy affair. She wore jeans and a T-shirt. Spitty was wearing pressed pants, white bucks, and two button-down shirts on top of each other—the outer one being a bizarre Brooks Brothers issue consisting of three separate striped fabrics, one pale blue and white, another pale yellow and white, and a third pale pink and white. His buddies were dressed in a similarly colorful manner. “Hey, what's up?” they nodded in Phoebe's general direction.