What She Saw... (3 page)

“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 hungry,” 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.

“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.