What She Saw... (4 page)

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.

Even so, you'd think he could have said good-bye.

But he didn't; he didn't even say where he was going. He disappeared without a trace. Just like the Lenni Lenape. None of the kids in school knew why. And Mrs. K. wasn't talking. She crossed “Mancuso, Roger” off the class list without comment. She never uttered his name again. It was as if he never existed. Or maybe Phoebe was the one who never existed. In the end, it seemed, she was just “some girl” Stinky once knew,
didn't anymore.

She was a lot more than that to Roberta and Leonard.

In her double stops they heard traces of Paganini. In her slow movements they found reason to recall Milstein. They said she was a natural. They said she had the makings of a soloist. It didn't matter that her talent was questionable. Or that she planned to become a newscaster or a chemist. It was enough that she trekked over to Mildred Street every Wednesday at four for her private lesson with Mrs. Bernstein, developed indestructible calluses on four of the five fingertips of her left hand, suffered the embarrassment of having the semipermanent abrasion under her chin mistaken for a hickey. It was enough that she pretended to like their music. That's how easy it was maintaining the affection of her parents—a whole lot easier than it was maintaining the affection of boys like Stinky Mancuso, boys who didn't seem to care if you pretended to like the Stones or not, boys who asked questions to which they didn't apparently want the answers.

Boys who were kissing you one minute and were gone the next.

SHE CAME ACROSS the obituary a few weeks later. She was sliding rubber bands over rolled-up copies of the
Whitehead
Ledger
—she'd taken on a paper route to supplement her skimpy allowance—when one rolled open. It was the last name that caught her eye. “Eugenia Mancuso Dead at 74,” read the headline. “Beloved Mother and Grandmother Active in Community Affairs. . . . Her only son, Vincent, and daughter-in-law, Mary, died in an automobile accident in 1976. . . . Survived by a nephew, Boz Mancuso, of New Rochelle, N.Y., and a grand-son, Roger Mancuso, formerly of Whitehead, now also of New Rochelle. . . .”

That was the last Phoebe heard of Stinky, though not the last she thought of him or of the stink bomb for which he was named. For in that terrible smell, she somehow perceived that the antiseptic odors of suburbia—of newly cut grass and lemon-fresh furniture polish and brand-new basketballs—were not the only odors there were, that there were other smells she might one day sniff, some that merely stunk, but others that spoke of a larger drama than the one being played out in the not-quite-hallowed halls of Whitehead Middle.