An Almost Perfect Moment (6 page)

John had a hard time making friends. People didn’t actively dislike him. At least not since he was in high school. They disliked him then. Plenty. But after that, no one was overtly nasty to him, nor was he treated cruelly. Still, even after three months at Canarsie High, he had yet to be invited out with any of the groups who went for “Thank God It’s Friday” drinks. No one ever asked him to go to a movie or a ball game. The only person who had shown any interest in him was Joanne Clarke, and well, isn’t that all too often the way? To have zero interest in the one person who has interest in you.

Joanne Clarke looked in on her father. Even asleep, he looked befuddled. Joanne wondered which was worse: to be stuck with her father as he spiraled toward a kind of infancy? Or to live alone, to have no one, no one at all. She wasn’t there yet, but she was near to giving up on John Wosileski. Three months without so much as a nibble on the line. Resignation was on the horizon like the first ribbon of light heralding the dawn.

Joanne Clarke took off her terrycloth robe, under which she wore a flannel nightgown, red with little yellow flowers. She got into bed and closed her eyes, but sleep did not come to save her.

It just happened that they, The Girls—having taken a break from their morning routines, which were centered around vacuum clean
ers and dust cloths, spotless their houses were—found themselves at Judy Weinstein’s house having an impromptu midmorning coffee at her kitchen table, which was wrought iron painted white and covered with a glass top. They, The Girls, were that way sometimes, spontaneous. Miriam didn’t know how Judy lived with that glass tabletop, with every fingerprint and smudge glaring, you’ve got to spend half your life spraying the Windex and wiping, with a table like that one.

Judy served an apple cake that was out of this world.

Miriam Kessler stirred the half-and-half in her coffee, which frankly was not up to the standards of the cake. “I asked her to write up her list. What she wants for Hanukkah this year.”

“Did she ask for those baggy dungarees?” Judy Weinstein wanted to commiserate. “What do they call them? Carpenter’s pants? Like the workmen wear. My Marcy wants three pairs of those. Two in blue and one in off-white. I said to her, ‘What do you want those for? They’re not the least bit flattering. What about the Jordache jeans? Or the Gloria Vanderbilt?’”

“That’s what my Ellen wants. The Gloria Vanderbilt,” Edith Zuckerman said.

“At least the Gloria Vanderbilt show off the figure. My Marcy has a cute shape. What does she want to hide it for?”

Valentine did not put carpenter’s pants on her wish list, and not Jordache jeans or Gloria Vanderbilt’s either. She did not put down anything that was rational to Miriam. Last year, her Hanukkah Wish List was rational. Last year she wanted what all the other girls her age wanted: Huk-A-Poo blouses, a Bobbie Brooks blazer, a gold S-chain bracelet, the Princess telephone. From Grandma and Grandpa Kessler, she got a new stereo. This year, Valentine’s Wish List read, in its entirety: (1) a white silk shawl (2) a blue silk
shawl (a very specific shade of blue that didn’t even have a name, but Valentine had glued an itty-bitty snippet of something this shade of blue to the piece of loose-leaf paper), and (3) a pink ski jacket.

In light of the ski trip, the pink ski jacket at least was a rational request, but the rest of the list, or rather the lack of a list, that wasn’t normal. Three measly things she asked for? What teenage girl can’t name three thousand things she wants? Plus there were eight nights of Hanukkah.

“That’s it?” Edith Zuckerman asked. “That’s all she wants? A ski jacket and two
babushkas
? She’s going through a phase?”

Miriam hoped that’s all it was, a phase. A phase comfortably explained away all aberrant behavior. Kids go through phases. Like when the Moskowitz girl quit eating, and when the Gloskin boy got mixed up with drugs, and when their own Sunny Shapiro’s son insisted on wearing eyeglasses that he didn’t need, and when the Samuals twins joined up with that cult and dressed exclusively in orange—phases, all.
This too shall pass
.

“The skiing is a phase. They’re all skiing now.” Sunny Shapiro lit up a cigarette. “It’s the fad. My David, he went skiing last weekend. They’re knee-deep in snow already up there at Cornell.” Sunny Shapiro never passed up an opportunity to let drop
my David
and
Cornell
in one breath.

“Valentine isn’t going to ski,” Judy Weinstein said knowingly. Each of The Girls had their own memories of Valentine: Valentine catapulting off a swing; Valentine bowling a zero, a
zero,
twenty gutter balls at Ellen Zuckerman’s bowling party; Valentine catching a softball right between her eyes. The fact that she never even once got seriously hurt or so much as needed stitches had to have
been the result of God watching over her. “Trust me on this,” Judy Weinstein said. “She’s going to spend the day sitting in the lodge. That’s what I did the one time I went skiing.”

“You went skiing?” Miriam was skeptical. “When?”

“Years ago. Before I married. I was dating a boy who wanted to try it. So we went. He skied, and I sat in the lodge where I struck up a conversation with another girl who ended up fixing me up with her brother. Believe me, Miriam. She’s going to spend the day sitting in the lodge, drinking hot cocoa.”

“Maybe I should get her the whole outfit. Not just the jacket.” Miriam asked The Girls for their opinion on that.

“Why not?” Edith Zuckerman said.

“Get her one of those knit sets, you know, the sweater, hat, scarf, gloves all in the same pattern.” Judy Weinstein knew fashion. “They’re adorable, those sets.”

Edith Zuckerman wrapped her mink tighter around her shoulders and asked, “But tell me, Miriam. Why does she want these shawls? Is it the style now?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so.” Miriam helped herself to another slice of apple cake; The Girls didn’t stand on ceremony with one another. “They must be the style. Why else would she want them? Maybe the gypsy look is in again.”

“That was a cute look, the gypsy thing. Not for us. But for the young girls, it was cute as could be.”

Miriam didn’t really believe the gypsy look was in again. She’d seen no evidence that it was. Frankly, it disconcerted her that Valentine wanted such things. What good could come of two shawls that weren’t even the fashion? Valentine must’ve wanted the two shawls to express herself, her individuality, which wasn’t a
terrible thing provided it didn’t go too far. Miriam would have to keep an eye out for that, for
too far
because while individuality wasn’t the worst thing—creative people were often individualistic—to be an out-and-out nut was another story altogether.

Despite that she didn’t have all good feelings about this, Miriam wouldn’t dream of denying Valentine, so she chalked up the Wish List to
dementia praecox
, which is Latin for
Teenagers; don’t even try to make sense of them.
“My biggest problem right now,” Miriam said, “is where am I going to find silk shawls? The last thing I want to do is
schlep
into the city for them.”

The last time Miriam
schlepped
into Manhattan was almost ten years ago. She and her girlfriends went to see a show,
Man of La Mancha,
on Broadway, a Sunday matinee, which, they concurred, was fan-tas-tic. After they went to dinner at Mama Leone’s, a famous and fancy place back then and often the actors went there for dinner too.

“Kleinman’s,” Judy said. “You know, the big bridal shop in Bay Ridge. They’ll hem two squares of white silk. There’s no shortage of white silk at a bridal shop. Then they’ll dye one of them the color you want. Every day they’re dyeing shoes to match the bridesmaids’ gowns in colors like you wouldn’t believe. They do gorgeous work.”

Fueled with a sense of purpose, a mission, the four women, right then and there, left their coffee and apple cake, and got into Judy Weinstein’s emerald-green El Dorado, to journey to Bay Ridge. Miriam sat in the backseat, where she watched out the window to see if anyone on the street was wearing a silk shawl, because who knew? Maybe it was a style.

On the way to the faculty dining room, John Wosileski met up with Mark Ornstein. John quickened his pace, just a little, so that he could fall into step alongside the other teacher, and then, just as he’d rehearsed it, he said, “Hey, Mark, you want to grab a beer after work, and you know, talk over the ski trip.”

Mark Ornstein’s eyes darted, almost wildly, as if he were scouting for an emergency exit in a burning building, or looking for someone, someone not John Wosileski, but rather someone who would rescue him from John Wosileski. “Ah gee,” he said. “I can’t. Sorry.” No excuse was offered. No
I’ve got a dentist appointment
. No
I have to drive my mother to the chiropractor
. No
I’ve got exams to grade
. Not even
I have other plans
. Nor did it escape John Wosileski’s attention that there was no
Perhaps some other time
either.

Lest Mark Ornstein be judged harshly, before it is said,
Oh, how could he be so heartless? Couldn’t he just have a beer with the poor guy?
—a truth, an ugly truth but a truth all the same, must be revealed: Everybody does it. Everybody shuns life’s losers, the weak, the unattractive, the poor, the dispossessed, the friendless, and not because we want to be cruel, but because we can’t bear the responsibility of them; they need more than we can give; we will fail them. No matter what we do, we will fail them.

In the faculty dining room Mark Ornstein joined a group of hail fellows. John Wosileski took a seat at a table that was empty until Joanne Clarke came by. She set her tray down across from his and said, “Well, fancy meeting you here.”

John Wosileski, someone you would think would be empathetic, closed his eyes to Joanne Clarke’s suffering.

Talking with pins in his mouth, Mr. Kleinman told The Girls he’d be with them shortly. He was in the middle of a fitting. Miriam, Edith, Sunny, and Judy basked in the radiance emanating from the bride-to-be as she stood perfectly still while Mr. Kleinman tucked and pinned the white taffeta along her waist. “It’s true,” Edith said. “All brides are beautiful.” Edith made mention of this because, stripped of the white gown, this one would have been anything but beautiful with that schnozzola and a half, what a nose on her.

The Girls moseyed around the shop, oohing and ahhing at the gowns and veils and tiaras. Miriam fell in love with a tulle-and-lace gown, but Judy returned to the first one they’d looked at, an ecru satin bridal gown, artificial seed pearls sewn at the bodice and cuffs, and said, “I still say this one for Valentine, when her day comes. Seriously, Miriam. Picture your Valentine in this. Can you imagine how gorgeous?”

Miriam often fantasized about Valentine’s wedding day. What mother doesn’t, and especially with an only daughter and also because Miriam didn’t get to have a real wedding of her own. When the time came, Miriam intended to make Valentine a celebration elaborate enough for both of them: first an engagement party at a catering hall; then a bridal shower at the house; the wedding itself she’d like to have at one of those Long Island mansions you can rent for special occasions; Valentine’s gown would take your breath away—the heaviest silk and an eight-foot train. She’d carry a bouquet of pastel roses and baby’s breath, the bridesmaids in peach-colored chiffon and the maid of honor in yellow the same as the flower girl.

Miriam had yet to breathe a word of these plans to anyone, not even to The Girls, and definitely not to Valentine. For the time being, it was Miriam’s own to decide if the candy coating on the
Jordan almonds should be all white or the same pastel colors as the bridal bouquet, and to picture, God willing, Ronald’s father walking Valentine down the aisle, and when they reach the
khupah,
the organist will play “Sunrise, Sunset” from
Fiddler on the Roof,
and there won’t be a dry eye in the house. At that juncture in her musings, Miriam began to hum and then to sing softly, “Is that the lit-tle girl I car-ried, is that the lit-tle boy at play, I don’t re-member growing older, when did they?” Judy Weinstein and Edith Zuckerman and Sunny Shapiro joined in with the chorus—“Sun-rise, sun-set—” and in a heartbeat the four of them were bawling like babies.

That’s how Mr. Kleinman found them, standing in a row in front of the mannequin in the white satin gown, tears rolling down their faces and singing, like an a cappella girl group from the fifties, “Sun-rise, sun-set.”

“So tell me, ladies,” he said. “Tell me, how can I make your dreams come true?”

T
he sun set and Valentine lit the candles to commemorate the second night of Hanukkah. The glow from the flames framed her face, the yellow light fluttering and then growing strong as it had done more than two thousand years before when the faithful trusted that God would provide oil for eight days of light. Neither Valentine nor her mother nor her grandparents recited the blessing—
Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the Universe, who performed miracles for our ancestors in ancient times and in our days
—because who knew from that anymore? Tradition may have outlasted its original function to keep the faith, but then it got other functions such as keeping up with the Christians.

Valentine was too old to play
dreidl
, but she wasn’t too old to get Hanukkah
gelt
along with her gifts. Grandpa Kessler slipped her a fifty-dollar bill and told her, “You buy yourself something pretty, sweetheart.”

Valentine kissed her grandfather on his cheek, a small gesture of affection which set his heart to flood.

Grandma Kessler gave her one and only grandchild—her granddaughter, the light of her life with a face like you wouldn’t believe, so beautiful and sweet as honey—a small black velvet box. “Wear them in good health,” she said.

Valentine opened the box to reveal a pair of diamond earrings. “Oh,” she gasped, and the diamonds winked.

Miriam leaned over her daughter’s shoulder and her eyes bugged at the size of the stones. “Rose,” she admonished her mother-in-law. “She’s a kid. When you said diamond earrings, I thought you were talking chips. These are like the Rocks of Gibraltar. What does a kid want from diamonds like that?”

“So she’ll have them for later. When she’s older.” Rose Kessler wasn’t going to buy her only grandchild little
pitseleh
nothings.

While her mother and grandmother were having it out, Valentine put the earrings on and went to the mirror. Ice-blue light flickered and danced from the diamonds to her eyes and back again, light even more ethereal than that from the candles. Ever since anyone could remember, Valentine had an open affection for things that glittered and shone. The earrings were no exception. “Ma, look,” she gasped. “Look how beautiful.”

Valentine’s face, so radiant, coupled with the fact that her daughter’s reaction to the diamonds was a normal one, as opposed to something mental like eschewing material goods, this caused Miriam to melt. “You’re crazy,” she said to Rose, “but they do look gorgeous on her. Thank you.”

The previous night, the first night of Hanukkah, Miriam gave Valentine the pink ski jacket, which fit her like a glove. On this
night, the second night, Miriam handed her the box from Kleinman’s Bridal Shop, wrapped in blue paper and tied with white ribbon. Even though the two shawls exactly fit Valentine’s expressed desire—they were geniuses over there at Kleinman’s, they got the shade of blue neither more nor less, but flawlessly precise—diamond earrings were a tough act to follow. Valentine opened the box, and then looked at her mother with tears in her eyes, which Miriam could not decipher. Tears of gratitude? Tears from disappointment? “That is what you wanted? No?” Miriam asked.

“Yes. Thank you, Ma,” Valentine said.

“Try them on,” Miriam urged. “The blue goes nicely with the sweater you’re wearing.”

But Valentine wouldn’t try them on. She wouldn’t so much as lift the shawls from the box; rather she left them folded just so between layers of tissue paper. “They’re perfect,” she said. “I don’t want to mess them up.”

Later that night Valentine would put the fifty-dollar bill between the pages of
Jonathan Livingston Seagull,
where there was, along with her prayer card of the Blessed Virgin, the hundred-dollar bill that Grandpa Kessler gave her for her last birthday, along with some twenties, and the two ten-dollar bills she’d earned babysitting for the Silverberg kids, which she swore she’d never do again under penalty of death. They were maniacs, those children. Plus Mrs. Silverberg left Hydrox cookies for a snack. Hydrox. A poor imitation of an Oreo. Clearly, Valentine was hoarding the money, but for what? What did she want that Miriam wouldn’t buy for her?

The box from Kleinman’s she slid under her bed, where it stayed, with the two pristine shawls inside, for some time to come.

Once the gifts were opened, wrapping paper in the garbage can,
ribbon put away to be used again, Miriam said, “Dinner’s ready,” and the four of them sat around the table for brisket and string beans and potato latkes with applesauce. Miriam surveyed her family, such as it was, and while the ache for Ronald involuntarily pulsated, the wound never healed, nonetheless Miriam felt grateful for what she did have, and as she chewed a piece of brisket that was, frankly, a little bit stringy, she thought to herself more than to any deity,
Please God,
God in many ways being nothing more than a figure of speech,
watch over Valentine and don’t let her do anything stupid
. But as Miriam’s mother, may she rest in peace, was fond of saying, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” and if God had ever heeded Miriam Kessler’s prayers, Ronald would have strolled through the door as casually and happily as he walked out all those years ago. But all old stories are driven by desire, and it was an old story already, Miriam’s wish for Ronald to come back to her.

After Sy and Rose went home, after the dishes were washed and put away, Miriam swept the kitchen floor. Somehow the Kessler house seemed darker than usual. True, it was late December and after eleven at night and the kitchen light, overhead, cast a white halo, a halo which, rather than heralding the arrival of an angel, radiated a kind of desolation. Miriam felt the weight of sadness come over her. A sensation which was no stranger to her, although no one else, not The Girls, not Valentine, knew that daily, even if only for a few minutes, Miriam experienced profound grief. She sat herself down on one of the kitchen chairs, her arms wrapped around the broom, and she stayed that way until the feeling passed.

Upstairs, the mood was different.

In her bedroom, Valentine sat cross-legged on her bed, her Princess phone in hand, listening to Beth Sandler in ecstasy. The
kind of ecstasy that emanates from a gold heart-shaped locket with a diamond chip in the center. “So, now that we’ve made this step toward preengagement,” Beth said, “tomorrow night his parents are going out. We’re going to do it.”

“Are you nervous?” Valentine asked.

“Yeah,” Beth admitted. “Kind of.”

Two years or so before, at Beth Sandler’s house, Beth and Valentine, behind the closed door of Beth’s bedroom, had an exhaustive talk about
it,
about
doing it,
or more specifically,
how it is done.
Aware that their knowledge of
it
was garnered in bits and pieces and from sources not always reliable, they worried about, when the time came,
doing it
right because their mothers had taught them there was a right way and a wrong way for doing all things under the sun. Just then, Mrs. Sandler happened to come into Beth’s room with a tray of tuna-fish sandwiches and two glasses of juice because it was time for lunch. “Ma,” Beth asked, “how do you know if you’re
doing it
right? You know, after you’re married and on your honeymoon, how do you know what to do?” Beth added the bits about
married
and
honeymoon
to avoid the cow-and-the-free-milk speech. “Girls,” Mrs. Sandler said, “the dogs know how to do it, the cats know how to do it, when the time comes, you’ll know how to do it too.”

And now here they were, on the cusp of Beth’s loss of her maidenhood, and Beth was overcome with a rush of generosity toward Valentine, the kind of love that is often the antecedent to permanent separation, like the heat of one final fling. “I still don’t get it,” she said. “How come you don’t have a boyfriend? You’re the prettiest girl at school. Everybody says so. No one gets why you don’t have a boyfriend. It’s like a mystery. There must be a thou
sand guys who are dying to go out with you. All you would have to do is snap your fingers. You could get anyone.”

“But I don’t want just anyone,” Valentine said, and Beth thought that was a stuck-up thing to say. What? Did Valentine think Beth was compromising with Joey Rappaport? Hardly. Joey was adorable, plus he was so smart. He scored almost perfect on his SATs and was in the National Honor Society, which was very competitive intellectually. If Valentine Kessler thought she could do better than Joey Rappaport, she had another thing coming.

In his two-room apartment over a dry-cleaning establishment on East Ninety-sixth Street, John Wosileski, having, hours before, finished with his dinner—a Swanson’s Hungry Man meal, double portion of meat and potatoes and no vegetables—returned to the kitchen for a snack. Actually, John didn’t have a kitchen. He had a kitchen area that ran along the rear wall of the living room. There he opened a bag of pretzels and a beer, which he drank straight from the can. The television was on, but only for whatever warmth the blue light provided and for the comfort of a voice not his own. John was neither watching nor listening to the TV. If he had been watching the television, he would have gotten up to fiddle with the reception, as there was something like the opposite of a shadow, something like when a photograph is overexposed, something like a halo over Mary Tyler Moore’s head.

Or maybe it wasn’t something like a halo over Mary Tyler Moore’s head; maybe it was indeed a halo. It wouldn’t have been the first
time such a thing—Mary bathed in light—had appeared on television. To Zeitun, the very place where Mary and Joseph and Jesus had come when they fled King Herod, Mary—not Mary the actress but Mary the Blessed Virgin—returned some one thousand nine hundred and sixty-eight years later. The figure of Mary in a halo of light was filmed and shown on Egyptian television, which resulted in the otherwise unaccountable healing of untold numbers of open sores, shrinking of tumors, and twenty-twenty vision for the blind.

And if JohnWosileski had been paying attention to the television, he would have heard that it was telling of another miracle, the miracle of light on this second night of Hanukkah; he would have heard the anchorman on the ten o’clock news—
wishing all our Jewish friends
—but John Wosileski was caught up in his own thoughts; John Wosileski was examining his life, which is always a dicey proposition.
What is to become of me?
he wondered, and all he could come up with was more of the same. That at age fifty-four nothing would be different for him than it was now at twenty-four: He would still be teaching geometry at Canarsie High; he would come home every day by four, check homework or grade exams, put a Hungry-Man dinner in the oven, touch himself, go to sleep. Nothing worth noting would ever happen for him.

Even if Valentine Kessler weren’t legally off-limits, he could never win the heart of such a creature. Things like that happened only in the movies, and John Wosileski knew all too well that his life bore no resemblence to a romantic comedy. His life was bleak; almost entirely devoid of pleasure. The loneliness would never go away, but in time it would mutate into something worse than loneliness: the surrender to it. Worse yet bearable. And so on this
night, on this second night of Hanukkah, sitting alone in the dark but for the blue light of the television, and drinking his third Pabst Blue Ribbon, which was not unlike piss water, John Wosileski, friendless and unloved, cried, which was something he had not done, cried, since the night of his high school prom; a night he spent alone, alone in his bedroom with the door closed crying while in the kitchen his father drank whiskey and his mother washed the dishes and mopped the floor and then cleaned out the refrigerator. Anything to avoid going to her son because what could she possibly have said to him? She had no words of comfort to give.

Crying, in and of itself, is sad, and it is particularly sad to cry alone. However, crying can be cathartic. And indeed, after he was all cried out, John Wosileski emerged from this bout of anguish with a new resolve. Or something close to resolve. Maybe it was resignation. Either way, he would take the initiative, the plunge. He would ask Joanne Clarke out on a date. To dinner. Maybe a movie. Why not? She liked him. And she was a good woman. Good enough. He couldn’t quite picture himself falling in love with Joanne Clarke. She had a mean streak, whereas John, a romantic at heart, dreamed of sweetness, but he was rapidly warming to the idea of a date. The thought of them holding hands sped like electricity to the thought of fondling those pretty breasts of hers. And sex! Real sex with a live woman! He did imagine he could grow to like Joanne. He imagined that they could be compatible, and he even imagined that maybe someday they could get married and that marriage to someone you didn’t love was probably preferable to being alone. In short, that night he imagined the very same things about Joanne Clarke as she had been imagining about John Wosileski all along.

Determination took hold, and he opened the Canarsie High School Faculty Directory.

Joanne was as startled by the ring of the phone as if she’d been in deep slumber instead of cutting her toenails. No matter what time of day or night it happened, the ring of the phone would have startled her because no one ever called.

Apologizing for phoning at such a late hour, John Wosileski said, “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No. No, not at all,” Joanne said. “I just got in. I was out with…” Here she paused, deliberating,
Which would have greater effect?
Out with a friend, thus implying a date? Or with friends, plural, thus letting him think she had friends? The former could maybe get a little jealousy going, everybody wants what someone else has got, but it also came with the risk of turning him away. “With friends.” Joanne opted to play it safe. “What can I do for you?” she asked him.

“I was wondering if you’d like to go out? Saturday? For dinner?”

“Mmmmm, Saturday. Let me check my calendar.” Joanne put down the phone, and ruffled the pages of
The Reader’s Digest
on her nightstand. Is it embarrassing to witness Joanne Clarke as she pretended to have social engagements? Or is it just plain sad? “As it turns out,” she said, “I am free on Saturday.”