Chapter 3 F.A.Q.S #2
“So, what would you suggest?”
—
The next night at dinner Phoebe told her parents she was sorry. She was really, really sorry.
“Don’t apologize,” said Dan. “Don’t sit there apologizing to the world. Get up and do something.”
Phoebe said that she would wash the dishes. When she was done, she sat with Melanie on the couch while Dan leaned back with his laptop in the reading chair.
Emboldened, Melanie hugged Phoebe. “You’re great.”
This was lame, so Phoebe didn’t answer.
“Breaking up is hard, but you’ll get through this,” Melanie said.
Embarrassed for her mother, Phoebe patted Melanie on the shoulder.
Melanie hesitated. Then she said, “We’ve got Uncle Steve and Aunt Andrea coming over with the boys on Friday night, okay?”
Dan closed his computer. “Why are you asking? Are you asking her permission?”
“I’m not asking.”
“That’s what it sounded like.”
“I wasn’t asking a question. Even if I was!”
“Oh my God,” Phoebe said. “Stop.”
Immediately the bickering ended. Bright-eyed, expectant, her parents turned toward her. Their daughter had come alive again.
Were they expecting a speech? A manifesto? Phoebe had nothing.
“I just wanted to give you the heads-up,” said Melanie.
“It’s fine,” said Phoebe. Uncle Steve and his family wouldn’t make her feel better or worse. Phoebe barely knew what grades her cousins were in.
—
On Friday night, Phoebe watched through the living room window as her father’s brother and his wife arrived.
They lived only three miles away, but she could not remember the last time she had seen them.
Last October when Grandma Jeanne passed away?
Approaching the house, they looked familiar and awkward all at once, like animals who had learned to walk on their hind legs.
Andrea brought a bottle of wine. Steve carried a wedge-shaped pillow for his back.
In the entryway, their sons, Zach and Nate, crowded in behind them.
“Nate is looking at colleges,” Andrea told Phoebe. “You can tell him about Michigan!”
Melanie and Dan exchanged looks, but Phoebe didn’t take offense. She was watching her younger cousins—huge, laconic, grazing the light fixtures. Zach brushed against a side table and knocked off a glass paperweight, but he was quick and caught it with one hand.
“Good save,” said Nate, who did not ask Phoebe about Michigan.
The three kids sat together at one end of the table, and it was peaceful there.
Zach and Nate devoured Melanie’s brisket, while Phoebe picked at her wild rice.
The adults did all the talking, discussing dehumidifiers.
They spoke about French drains and cars, but they kept their eyes fixed on the children.
Not that anybody made comparisons. Just that the boys had grown so much, and Phoebe looked—crushed.
What was she wearing? Nobody asked, but Melanie knew what her sister-in-law was thinking.
Phoebe’s post-consumer dress was faded blue, and nearly shapeless.
Not a dress, but an apology for one. Oh why? Melanie wailed silently.
“Good to be home?” Andrea asked Phoebe. “Nice and quiet?”
Phoebe said, “I keep busy.”
Dan could not conceal his surprise.
Melanie tensed, but Andrea saw an opening. “How do you like the violin?”
For a moment, Phoebe didn’t know what her aunt was talking about. Then she remembered Jeanne’s instrument, unopened in her closet. “I don’t know,” she said. “I quit.”
“What?” Steve said slowly. Supposedly the whole point of Jeanne’s bequest was that Phoebe would play it. (His sons had received nothing.)
“She’ll get back to it,” said Dan.
Poor Dad, thought Phoebe. Never say die!
“When did you quit?” Steve asked.
“Like a year ago.”
Even her cousins stared, absorbing this news. They had grown up with Phoebe’s recitals. Her music endless, wordless, intricate. All their lives they’d settled down to listen.
Slowly Andrea said, “Well, that’s a shame.”
Phoebe knew what that meant; the instrument was worth a lot of money. “Maybe someone else should have it.”
“Oh no you don’t,” her father cut her off.
Melanie said, “Jeanne wanted you to have that violin.”
“She wanted somebody to play it,” Steve corrected.
“She didn’t want just anybody. She gave it to Phoebe,” Melanie said. “It was her wish.”
The others settled in their chairs. Dan furious, Steve and Andrea not angry but surprised and disappointed. Okay, smoldering.
—
That night the violin kept Phoebe awake.
She’d barely noticed it before, but now she sensed it suffering.
Jeanne’s gift seemed to her a wounded thing.
Her closet, her room, her house could not contain the blood gushing from that violin.
Blood soaked the carpet, stained the walls.
Even so, she didn’t scream; she didn’t move.
She couldn’t wake her parents. Instead, she watched the window, waiting for the sky to brighten.
Daylight wouldn’t come. The sun would not rise.
She turned on her light and stole from bed.
Softly she opened her closet door and took down the sealed casket.
Then softly, softly she carried it downstairs, scanning cabinets and pantry shelves for a place to hide her inheritance.
The kitchen was too cluttered for a violin.
The mudroom was too cold. She sank into the couch and rocked slightly with Jeanne’s gift in her lap.
Her parents found her in the morning sleeping there.
In its case, the violin sat mildly on the coffee table.
“Oh, sweetie,” Melanie said. Phoebe opened her eyes and sat up as her mother said, “They upset you.”
“They had no right,” Dan began.
But Phoebe cut him off. “They were fine. Everything’s fine.”
“Everything is not fine,” Dan told her. “Look at you.”
She tried to look at herself sitting on the couch in sweatpants and an Interlochen T-shirt. She was clutching her knees to her chest.
Melanie didn’t want to leave Phoebe in the house all day.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Phoebe told her mother.
“Prove it,” Dan said.
“I’m going for a walk,” Phoebe said.
“Where?” Melanie asked.
“Just to get some exercise.”
As soon as her parents left, Phoebe pulled on a clean shirt, combed her hair, and stepped out, blinking in the sunlight.
Then she felt awkward because she had nowhere to go.
Nothing to do, no bags to carry. She retreated to the house and took Jeanne’s violin, carrying it like a briefcase to the end of the street and then around the corner.
A Rutgers shuttle bus stopped there, and she climbed aboard.
The bus was free, half-full of summer students.
Phoebe chose a window seat and rode from one campus to another.
Busch, Livingston, Douglass. She watched trees rustling near the Raritan and saw one orange leaf in all the green. It was the first week of July.
The next morning, after her parents had left for work, Phoebe headed out again with the violin as briefcase, carry-on baggage.
She got home just after three and sat in the kitchen gazing at the groceries Melanie had bought in her honor.
Oats and nuts and grains and sprouted wheat berries and unsweetened coconut piled up in bags on the kitchen counter.
Nobody really ate these things. Her mom poured herself sugary cereal.
Her dad skipped breakfast. He was supposed to watch his cholesterol but he loved cookies and Icelandic chocolate.
Phoebe preheated the oven and mixed the grains and nuts along with coconut oil and diced pieces of crystallized ginger. Then she toasted everything on a pair of cookie sheets. The result was a lot of lumpy granola which she divided into snack-sized bags.
“This is for you.” She handed her mother a little bag that night. “And this is for you,” she said, handing one to her father.
“This is awful,” her father told her.
“Dan,” said Melanie.
—
“I don’t like your tone of voice with her,” Melanie told him later when they were alone.
“What tone?”
“Your hostility and sarcasm.”
“That’s the way I talk,” he said. “That’s my natural voice. The hostile one is you.”
“I was just—”
“Listen to yourself!”
In the morning, Phoebe took the shuttle bus again.
She got off at New Brunswick and sat outside the library.
She didn’t have a library card, but, carrying her instrument, she might have been an undergraduate.
She liked the possibilities. She could have been a music student; she could have been a tourist. It was hot out, but she sat on a bench in the midsummer sun.
When she got home, she showed Melanie an article about cruciferous vegetables. “Phoebe?” Melanie said.
Phoebe said, “I think you should eat more of these.”
Dan and Melanie were seeing someone in Edison, a psychologist recommended by a colleague of Melanie’s.
The doctor counseled them to wait patiently and allow Phoebe to lead the way.
But where was Phoebe leading? She liked to turn off all the lights.
Her parents would sit in the living room at night, and Phoebe would turn off the lamps around them.
Could we not sit in the dark? Dan said. Meanwhile, Phoebe kept Jeanne’s violin with her on the couch.
Melanie asked Phoebe to go with them to Edison. Phoebe said no thank you. Melanie asked if Phoebe would like to take lessons with her old teacher. Phoebe spoke cheerfully. “Not really.”
She took the train to the city, boarding with her violin. The train rattled through Brunswick and Rahway and Elizabeth. Gazing out the window, Phoebe saw black benches and vistas of chain-link fence.
When Phoebe got to Penn Station, she thought about walking around, maybe visiting the Egyptian tombs at the Met. She bought a MetroCard and entered the subway, but she didn’t go anywhere. She sat on a bench on the platform and watched tides of people rising and sinking away again.