An Almost Perfect Moment (12 page)

C
alling in sick that Monday was an option, but when John Wosileski reached for the telephone on the nightstand beside his bed, the bed of the scene of his shame, he went limp in defeat. The man lacked the gumption to tell so much as a little lie which wasn’t even really a lie at all. He did feel sick, but not with any ailment he could name. Much the way a condemned man comes to his last meal knowing it’s going to taste like cardboard no matter that it’s a T-bone steak, listlessly John Wosileski picked up a shirt from the floor, and without sniffing at the underarm areas as he usually did before putting on a less than fresh shirt, he began to dress.

Despite having cried and cried for some thirty-six hours, give or take, Joanne Clarke was no closer to a catharsis. Rather, each tear was like the prick of a pin, and as is the way in evolution, nature
was providing for her in the shape of an impenetrable shell calcifying around her heart.

Joanne Clarke did not lack the gumption to tell a lie. What? She should own up to having been hurt and humiliated to some sniggering secretary? Of course not. The flu would do just fine as an excuse. She would call in sick with the flu. That was her intent, but as she went for the phone, the sound of her father whimpering from the next room sent her from the rock to the hard place. Which was worse? To go to work and face that music? Or to stay at home with her father? She had no idea what prompted her father’s crying, only that he did so more and more frequently. Rather than evoking sympathy or even pity, his crying got on her nerves. She wanted to smack him across the face to shut him up. Instead, in her darkened bedroom, by the faint glow of a bedside lamp which was really more of a night-light, she lifted her nightgown up and over her head.

From her closet, where the red dress was now crumpled into a ball and stuffed behind the row of her three pairs of shoes, she took out a brown pants suit—pull-on trousers and a tunic top—made from a fabric which was similar to that of a synthetic sponge.

Forget pulling the wool over Miriam Kessler’s eyes when it came to illness, neither feigning it nor denying it. Although it never once entered her narrow lexicon of pipe dreams, Miriam would have made a first-rate physician. But not even in the 1970s did many girls in Brooklyn consider becoming doctors, never mind in Miriam’s day. To marry a doctor, to that a girl could aspire. To be a doctor? Whoever heard of such a thing? And nursing was not a nice profession for Jewish girls. Emptying bedpans and changing
sheets? You call that a profession? That’s not a profession. Teaching, now that’s a profession.

Miriam might’ve been ignorant as to the whereabouts of Valentine’s heart and soul, but she was like a specialist when it came to appraising ailments of the digestive and respiratory tracts. Never could Valentine claim a stomach ache or nausea or a sore throat or a cough where none existed.

One morning the summer before, when all the kids were going to Coney Island for the day, Miriam took one look at Valentine and said, “You’re not going anywhere except to bed.”

“Ma,” Valentine argued. “I feel fine.” Valentine did three jumping jacks as if that were proof of good health.

“Well, maybe you do feel fine,” Miriam said. “But you’re sick as a dog. Bed. Now.”

The last time Valentine asked to stay home from school—she said she had severe menstrual cramps—just happened to be the same day as the big dodgeball game in gym class and Valentine had reason to fear both the ball coming at her as well as her teammates’ ire at her incompetence. Miriam looked her in the eye and said, “You think you can fool your mother? Maybe you can fool other people, but not your mother.” And indeed Valentine did fool other people, in particular, Miss Dench, one of the gym teachers, who didn’t question Valentine’s claim to severe menstrual cramps and genially excused her from the game. Or maybe she did suspect that Valentine was faking it but was just as happy to let that delicate little puff sit it out on the sidelines.

Any attempt to deceive Miriam would be an exercise in futility, so when Valentine, after getting dressed and on her way down the stairs, announced, “I’m not hungry,” maybe she really was sick, because Valentine always had an appetite. An appetite which, sure
enough, go figure, returned to her once she got to the kitchen and found that Miriam had made buttermilk pancakes.

Beth Sandler could not wait to get to school that day, itching to show off her new S-chain bracelet, her Valentine’s Day gift from Joey Rappaport. Instead of taking time for breakfast, she grabbed a chocolate-covered donut and headed out the door.

At the kitchen sink, Miriam, with a Brillo pad, scrubbed the skillet she used to make the pancakes. The dishwasher, however much a blessing, was not equipped to scrape off batter baked into aluminum. For that, you needed steel wool and plenty of elbow grease. As she scrubbed, Miriam chastised herself, her own foolishness, for making buttermilk pancakes on a Monday morning. But they were Valentine’s favorite, and Miriam wanted to do something nice for her daughter. Lucky for Miriam, she was scheduled for a manicure tomorrow because this steel wool was sanding away her nail polish at the tips. Finally the damn thing was clean, spotless, because Miriam was nothing if not meticulous. She was rinsing it under the faucet when, from the kitchen window, she thought she saw two birds, pinkish-yellow birds or maybe orange, flit from the armrest of a lawn chair to the post of the chain-link fence. Miriam’s heart broke for the poor little things, canaries maybe, no doubt escaped from a cage and out an open window. Now they might freeze to death, out there in the middle of winter. She wondered if she could coax them into the house, but although she didn’t notice them flying away, they were now nowhere to be seen. It occurred
to Miriam that she had imagined the birds or that maybe it wasn’t a pair of birds but some kind of trick with the light.

As if he’d literally lost his spine, John Wosileski was slumped over his desk, and instead of teaching, he assigned the class six problems from the textbook. “Do the problems on page one twenty-four,” he said, and then he said nothing else.

“Mr. Wosileski?” Joel Krotchman asked, tentatively, softly, as if he thought perhaps Mr. Wosileski had a migraine headache or a death in the family. “Are we going to be graded on these?”

“What? No, no. You’re not going to be graded. Just do them.”

Learning they weren’t going to be graded gave license to the majority of the class, that is, everyone but the Suck-up Six and Valentine Kessler, to carry on as if they were in the lunchroom rather than the classroom. The Suck-up Six had, no surprise, turned to page 124 and were diligently doing the assignment. Valentine was looking at Mr. Wosileski. He was looking out the window, the very same window that might well have been the egress for Valentine’s love for him. And, as we all know, when love flies out the window, clarity of vision fills the vacuum. The spell is broken. As suddenly and surely as Titania recognized Bottom as an ass, did Valentine see Mr. Wosileski as a pasty-faced math teacher?

Across the hall, in Room 215, Miss Clarke’s class was in a similar state of disorder. Not that Joanne Clarke willingly abdicated authority the way John Wosileski did. She was a stern, no-
nonsense schoolteacher, and while perhaps the students respected her or perhaps they did not, they did fear her. Until now.

It’s a gift of the young: the ability to sense weakness, vulnerability, to sense it and to exploit it. Perhaps not consciously aware of it, but they knew, viscerally her students knew, that the Joanne Clarke who now stood before them desperately trying to get their attention, to get them to follow her pointer as it coursed the diagram of the circulatory system, this Joanne Clarke was not the same Joanne Clarke who dismissed them on Friday with more homework than they thought was fair.

Instead of dutifully taking notes, Linda Haber examined her hair for split ends, Hank Alpert doodled sketches of humongously breasted women, Terri Calabrese and Alison George were passing notes back
(gorgeous)
and forth
(conceited)
about Vincent Caputo. Scotty Rosen, because he forgot to do it the night before, took the opportunity to do his history homework, which would be collected next period. And so it went.

Blame it on the stars or maybe there was something in the water, but during the fifth period, in Mrs. Marmor’s room, an incident was under way, and all because Cathleen Curran didn’t look up in the dictionary, and then write down, the definition of the ten vocabulary words Mrs. Marmor had assigned for homework. Of course, Mrs. Marmor was not entirely without blame. She had to have known that Cathleen didn’t do her homework. Cathleen never did her homework, but still Mrs. Marmor called on her. Cathleen stood up, as Mrs. Marmor required students do when defining vocabulary words, as if five-dollar words demanded such respect.

“Niggardly,” Mrs. Marmor said. In retrospect,
niggardly
was not
a wise choice of a vocabulary word, but the times were different then, and it was a word which, for reasons unknown, appeared often on the standardized tests for which Mrs. Marmor was trying to prepare her class.

Cathleen remained mute, except for the sounds she made swallowing hard.

“Niggardly,” Mrs. Marmor repeated. “The definition, please.”

Cathleen cleared her throat. “Niggardly,” she said. “Niggardly. Of or having to do with the black persuasion.”

Every head in the room, including Mrs. Marmor’s, swiveled to look at Beverly Johnson, who was the only black student in the class and thereby exempt from any kind of ridicule because that would’ve been prejudiced. The entire class curled up and died of embarrassment.

When the bell rang, when they gathered their books to move on to the next class, Amy Epstein said to Valentine Kessler, “Don’t you feel
soooo
bad for Beverly.”

“A little bit,” Valentine said, “but I feel worse for Cathleen Curran. Beverly Johnson, she’ll get over Cathleen’s stupidity, but Cathleen Curran, she’s going to be stupid for life.”

Such an assessment struck Amy Epstein as profound, which was weird, seeing as how it came from Valentine Kessler, whom Amy had heretofore considered to be no more than an inch deep.

At the end of this day, Valentine Kessler walked home from school alone. Some twenty paces behind her, also walking home from school, was Beth Sandler and her clique, which was led by Beth’s new best friend in the world: Marcia Finkelstein.

To have remained best friends or even friends at all with Valen
tine Kessler would have had grave consequences for Beth Sandler. Practically overnight, in a matter of days, Valentine had become a full-fledged queer. It was most unusual, such a fall from grace. Before this, no one at Canarsie High had ever heard tell of such a plunge in popularity, but rules were rules: To be friends with a queer rendered you a queer by association.

Okay. It’s possible that Valentine wasn’t quite the queer Beth was making her out to be; maybe
queer
was nothing more than Beth’s excuse to change best friends. After all, Marcia Finkelstein was the coolest girl at school, no contest. It was an honor to be chosen as her friend because everybody worshiped the ground Marcia walked on. Whatever. The last threads of friendship with Valentine, Beth pulled them out by the roots. Worship demands sacrifice, and also the giving of gifts.

And so as if she were the little drummer boy, Beth offered Marcia and company a gift in the form of a
rum-pa-pa-pum,
music to their ears. “You know that song that the Catholics sing in church?” Beth sang in a mock-operatic voice, “Arrre-vey Ma-ree-er.” Just that and no more of it because she didn’t know any more of it, but that was enough to make her point. “She gets like hypnotized by it. Really, she goes into some kind of trance. It’s so queer, you wouldn’t believe it.”

Always there is strength in numbers and perhaps nowhere else is social Darwinism as brutal as in a pack of teenage girls. On that afternoon on that street in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, five teenage girls sang “Arrre-vey Ma-ree-er,” with the sole intent of tormenting a sixth.

Although Valentine was neither a child nor a drunk, the two groups renowned for being under God’s special watch, it could have been that He was watching over her that afternoon.

As if she were oblivious to the girls behind her, she never once looked back to the source of the song. The question remains open as to whom she thought was singing, or if she’d heard the singing at all. It could have been a miracle, the opposite trick of the lame walking or the blind seeing, that for a brief but significant period of time, Valentine went deaf as a post. Or to appease the skeptics, the agnostics, the flat-out nonbelievers, you could say it was not a little miracle but rather a law of physics, that the sound waves, caught by the wind, were bent back on themselves, and thus never reached her. Still, even if that was the case, you could wonder, just the way you could wonder about the parting of the Red Sea, that yes, it could be rationally explained by the tides and tectonic shifts, but was it merely coincidence that it happened to shift just as Moses and his people got there? Albeit on a small scale, the wind picking up on that afternoon was that kind of coincidence, the kind that had God’s fingerprints all over it. Whatever the explanation, Valentine seemed impervious to the hurt of Beth’s betrayal.

So where was the fun in it when they failed to elicit a reaction from Valentine? Beth and company quit with the song and instead Beth solicited admiration anew for her S-chain bracelet.

In Edith Zuckerman’s living room, The Girls were deep into it. Maj-jongg tiles
clikity-clacked,
Judy Weinstein striving for the coveted win of Two Dragons with a Pearl, Sunny Shapiro’s cigarette smoke curling overhead, Miriam keeping an eagle eye on Edith’s discard while savoring the buttery pound cake as it dissolved in her mouth, and yet no one missed a beat in the conversation, which at this moment was centered around another neighbor, Elaine Winston, whose frugality was legendary and often a bone of contention.