An Almost Perfect Moment (15 page)

She licked the glue on the envelope and then sealed it shut. The stamp was already affixed. She would drop it in the mailbox on her way home.

To alleviate any residual guilt generated by this less than filial devotion, she rationalized her decision by asking herself a rhetorical question: Where was he when she was a lonely fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old girl with a face like a pizza pie and crying herself to sleep every night? On the other side of her bedroom door, in the living room, with the television turned up loud to drown out the sounds of her weeping, that’s where he was. But Joanne Clarke was mistaken to think that her father was indifferent to her suffering. He kept the television volume up high because it hurt him to hear his daughter cry like that, and worse, he simply didn’t know what to do about it. He was useless, but he cared. If Joanne Clarke were to know that, to know that her suffering caused him heartache too, would she still have gone ahead and
signed those papers? Probably yes. Yes, she would have done exactly the same thing regardless, because, no matter how or when she got that way, Joanne Clarke had become a cold woman.

Miss Marks was one of the nicer teachers, but gym was definitely Valentine’s worst subject, and it was with a slightly green pallor that she entered the office. “You wanted to see me?” Valentine said.

“Yes.” Miss Marks smiled and pulled a chair up close to her own. “Come. Sit down.”

At the warm reception, Valentine’s expression changed to one of surprise and delight, as if butterflies had flown up from her stomach and fluttered out of her mouth, like in a surrealist painting.

Miss Marks leaned in toward Valentine. “Valentine,” she said, “I need to ask you something personal, okay?”

Valentine nodded. “Sure,” she said.

“When was your last menstrual cycle?” Miss Marks did not beat around the bush. “Do you remember?”

Valentine’s brow furrowed deeply, as if in abetment to recollection, as if her brain were constipated, but no matter how she bore down, she could not recall. “I really don’t know,” she concluded. “I guess it’s been a while.”

Her reason for concern now realized, Miss Marks took Valentine’s hand into her own. She formulated, in her mind, just how she would phrase this before speaking. “Valentine, I’m not judging you here. I’m talking to you as a friend. You can trust me, okay? Is there any chance that you might be pregnant?”

Now remember, as a gym teacher, Miss Marks had heard it all. Every lie imaginable; teenage girls were a font of mendacity. Consequently, Miss Marks had a finely tuned sense of perception when
it came to prevarication. As she put it, “I’ve got a built-in bullshit detector.”

Miss Marks would’ve bet the farm that Valentine Kessler was four months along, but when Valentine said to her, “I’m still a virgin,” Miss Marks saw no evidence of fibbing, none of the telltale signs of a tall tale. Could it be that Valentine was indeed telling the absolute truth? Had it been any other girl, any girl not Valentine Kessler, Miss Marks would have let it go at that. But this gym teacher was a wise woman, and the thought did cross her mind—
With this kid, it’s possible that she did it but doesn’t know she did it. With this kid, it’s very possible that someone took advantage of her; she’s not stupid but she is an innocent
—because Miss Marks knew a knocked-up teenager when she saw one, and she saw at least one every year.

As these were days when a person could still be a good Samaritan without fear of being sued for it, days when teachers could be confidants to students, days when they were expected to be
in loco parentis
, Miss Marks did not hesitate to step into it. “Valentine,” Miss Marks said. “After school today, I want you to come with me to see a doctor friend of mine. I’d like her to take a look at you. Will you do that? For me?”

“If you really want me to,” Valentine said, “but I am a virgin, Miss Marks. Really. I am.”

“I believe you,” the gym teacher said. “But humor me, okay?”

Valentine sat in the passenger seat, and Miss Marks drove in the direction of Mill Basin. At a stop sign, Miss Marks saw the oddest thing—a pair of birds, not sparrows of which there were zillions, but a pair of yellow and orange and pinkish birds, sort of like
canaries, perched on top of a telephone pole. She turned to Valentine and said, “Look. Look on top of that telephone pole.”

Valentine looked, but said she didn’t see anything, and when Miss Marks looked again, she didn’t see anything either. “Oh, they must’ve flown off. Canaries. They probably escaped from a cage and flew out an open window.”

“Chippy-chasers,” Valentine said.

Although he’d still be with her for another couple of weeks, at least, Joanne Clarke started to pack up her father’s things.
Why wait until the last minute?
was her rationale for filling a suitcase with pajamas, a bathrobe, slippers, socks, underwear, and a new toothbrush.

As far as his personal effects went—his books on fly-fishing (why he had those was a mystery to Joanne; as far as she knew he never went fishing, but he must have had thirty books at least on the subject and all of them clearly read), his sergeant stripes from the army (too old for combat in the Second World War, he nonetheless enlisted and was made a clerk at Fort Dix), some crappy old fountain pen he was attached to for reasons beyond his daughter, a brass plaque commemorating twenty years of service with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company—all this she would throw in the trash. It’s not like he’d know the difference.

His watch she would keep because it was gold.

Dr. Stern, who was a woman, gave Valentine a paper cup and told her to pee in it. Then she was to put on a green hospital gown, open in the front. This was Valentine’s first visit to a gynecologist, and while she’d heard tell of the ordeal, you really do have to expe
rience the stirrups firsthand to appreciate the wretchedness, and the cold speculum forcing you open is not unlike the torture of the Iron Maiden. “I know.” Dr. Stern patted Valentine, to comfort her. “It’s a little uncomfortable.”

“A little uncomfortable?” Valentine spoke rhetorically. “You’re kidding me, right?”

Moments later, the doctor snapped off her surgical gloves. “All done,” she said, and she dropped the gloves in the trash. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“A regular day at the beach,” Valentine said, and then Dr. Stern was at her breasts. Feeling her up!

“Are your breasts tender?” Dr. Stern asked, while fondling them still. “Do they hurt at all?”

“Yes, they hurt,” Valentine said. “Of course they hurt when you’re pinching at them like that.”

“Sorry.” The doctor apologized, which didn’t stop her from pinching the other one before saying, “Okay. When you finish dressing, meet me in my office. It’s the second door on the left. We’ll talk then.” Dr. Stern shut the door on her way out, leaving Valentine alone, about as alone as a teenage girl could be.

Sometimes the very worst pain is that with no discernible fault. John Wosileski sat catercorner from his mother at her kitchen table, covered with a pinkish oilcloth, knowing that although there was once a point of origin for this anguish he was suffering, its whereabouts were lost because the anguish had spread like a cancer.

“John.” His mother reached out for his hand, but he pulled it away, as if what held him together was of such a delicate balance that the slightest breath of contact would cause him to collapse like
a game of pickup sticks. “John,” she said again, softly, so that her husband in the next room drinking a beer from the can and looking at the
Daily News
wouldn’t hear. “John,” she asked, “are you happy?”

Under the pretense of rubbing his eyes as if he were tired, John covered half his face with his hands and said, “Sure, Ma. I’m happy.” As Miriam Kessler could’ve told him,
Truth can walk around naked; lies must be clothed
.

It struck John as extremely peculiar that his mother should ask such a question. Never before had she made any such inquiry. He wondered if maybe she was dying. While each of the Wosileskis had experienced their rare moments of happiness, John thought that they might have been better off had they not; that the moments of happiness served only to accentuate the despair. Had John never skied Whiteface and Mount Snow, had he never known those excruciatingly beautiful seconds with Valentine Kessler, had Mrs. Wosileski, twenty-four years ago, not walked down the aisle as a grateful bride and hopeful mother-to-be, had Mr. Wosileski not, those same twenty-four years ago minus a few months, known a surge of pride and love, yes, love, at the sight of his newborn son, had he not twice—twice!—bowled a perfect game, then the Wosileskis might not have understood that they were unhappy now. With nothing to compare it to, a dreary life would’ve been a flatline, which is something like a contented one. But they did know rapture and so the loss of it, the fleetingness of it, rendered the sadness that much more acute.

Mrs. Wosileski reached into the pocket of her housecoat—a cotton smock which seemed to John to be new, the print of oranges and cherries was vivid, almost shockingly so—and she pulled out what John first thought was a bankbook or a passport; it was a lit
tle booklet of some sort and she kept it hidden beneath her hand. Beckoning her son to come in closer, she revealed to him what she had. Plaid Stamps. Trading stamps given out by the A&P, the number of them determined by how much you spent on groceries. Pasted into these booklets, they were redeemed for valuable merchandise. Six and a half books of Plaid Stamps got you a steam iron, or a whopping eighty-seven books got you a set of luggage, or you could exchange two books for a punch bowl. A mere one and one quarter books was the price to pay for a kitchen clock mounted on a hen silhouetted in gold tone.

There was a report of a miracle not entirely unrelated to the redemption and joy of Plaid Stamps, yours for the taking at the A&P. At a supermarket in a suburb in California, the Virgin Mary appeared in a ball of light and, in a voice gentle and melodious, instructed a young housewife to erect a seventy-five-foot-tall cross in the parking lot. Had she known she was going to meet the Blessed Mother, this housewife, Nicole Dempsy, would have worn something other than cutoffs and a halter top, but she thought she was just going to pick up a half gallon of milk and a quart of orange juice. The Virgin appeared to Nicole Dempsy on thirty-two more occasions, each time with further specifications regarding the cross. It was to be made of redwood. It was to be edged with small white lights. It was to be based in the parking lot, in row D, spot fourteen. Although the supermarket manager consistently refused to so much as consider the Blessed Virgin’s request, he did devote two rows of supermarket shelves in aisle four to the sale of religious items, such as framed photographs of Jesus, books of illustrated Bible stories for children, and snow domes featuring the Nativity
scene because row D, spot fourteen had become a shrine and thousands flocked to the parking spot of miracles, where, it was claimed, silver rosary beads turned gold, rosebushes bloomed from concrete, the deaf could hear the angels singing, a ninety-six-year-old man got an erection for the first time in fifteen years to the day, and another young housewife heard her name called over a loudspeaker, announcing that she was the winner of the Supermarket Sweepstakes—all the groceries she could load in a cart in a mad ten-minute scramble for bounty.

“I’ve got hundreds of them, of these books, all filled.” Mrs. Wosileski trembled with the thrill of it. “He doesn’t know about them.” She cocked her head in the direction of the living room, indicating
he
as her husband. Hardly for the first time, Mrs. Wosileski wished a stroke on her husband, a stroke that would leave him paralyzed and without the power of speech, but this wish was between her and God, never ever uttered aloud.

John asked his mother where the stamps came from because, as far as he knew, she’d never shopped at an A&P. His father forbade it, demanding she shop the old-world way at the local markets where there was kielbasa and pierogi and fresh bread and none of that packaged garbage. “When the old lady upstairs died. Mrs. Sygietynska. You remember her? With the humpback? Father Palachuk asked me to clean out her apartment. She had no family. And I found these. Two shoeboxes full. I brought them to the father, and he said I could keep them. Two boxes full of them, John.” She spoke as if the shoeboxes were filled with real gold. “We can get some nice things. Me and you. To make us happy.”

Mrs. Wosileski, John’s mother, contrary to all experience,
believed in miracles, and she had already picked out a Dacron polyester kitchen curtain with matching valance (two books) and a framed picture of the head of Christ (one book) and an electric organ (twenty-two and a half books). John tried to smile back at his mother, but he couldn’t because forget curtains and punch bowls, it would take more than that to make them happy. If John did believe that God might have answered his prayers, he would have, at that moment, surely put in a request, but he didn’t bother. John Wosileski had somehow gotten the idea that those who are not supremely blessed, people such as himself, get an allotment of one miracle, and John had used his up already.
Oh Valentine
, which he likened to Jesus healing the lame guy only to have the former cripple walk off a cliff.

“How is that possible?” Miss Marks asked Dr. Stern. “I just can’t believe it.”

Dr. Stern sat at her desk across from Miss Marks. “It’s a first for me, you can be sure. I mean, I’ve read of it, and I knew it was theoretically possible, but it’s also theoretically possible to walk on water, and I don’t imagine I’m going see anyone do that anytime soon. Frankly, I rarely even see a hymen these days. Usually it’s long gone just from riding a bicycle or gymnastics or something like that.”

Just then, Valentine Kessler, who neither rode a bicycle nor was capable of mastering the parallel bars, having gotten dressed, opened the office door. She was backlit by a shaft of sunlight, and Dr. Stern had to shield her eyes to make out who it was standing at the threshold. “Valentine,” Dr. Stern said. “Come in. Sit down. We need to talk.”