An Almost Perfect Moment (18 page)

“Did Miriam get anywhere finding out who the father is?” Edith asked.

“No,” Judy said. “Valentine continues to insist there was no one. And Miriam never saw her with a boy. But I say, forget that.

The boy could only complicate matters, and things are bad enough.”

“When I think of what poor Miriam must be going through.” Sunny’s hand went to her heart.

“She has no luck, that one.” Edith stroked her white mink—never mind that it was practically summer already—as if the stole were a rabbit’s foot to wish upon. “I never saw anything like it. The way she has no luck. Everything she touches turns to
dreck
.”

“Life is not fair,” Judy said, as if such a pronouncement were a bold and new theory. “Miriam is such a good person. That she should have no luck, I ask you, is that right?”

Sunny sliced off a piece of apple strudel. “You made this?” she asked Judy. “Or you bought it?”

“I made it. This morning.”

“I thought so. You can’t buy a strudel with a crust this light.”

Judy Weinstein took in the compliment—she had a knack with a crust, it was true—but who could think about strudel when Miriam’s world was falling apart, and, mind you, not for the first time. Judy worried that Miriam might’ve reached her limit in how much disappointment a person could take before she went to pieces. “Miriam needs us now,” she said. “More than ever. We have to be there for her. Things can’t get much worse for her than they already are.” Because these were words to tempt fate, words which Judy should not have uttered out loud, Edith Zuckerman picked up the saltshaker and tossed salt over her shoulder. This was something her mother did against any incursion against
that Power which erring men call Chance,
and as far as Edith was concerned, it couldn’t hurt.

Before the afternoon was over, although the strudel was long gone even without Miriam there—it was that delicious—Judy
Weinstein, Sunny Shapiro, and Edith Zuckerman made a pact. They would stick by Miriam like glue; they would do whatever they could to help see her through this; they would be, in essence, three pairs of helping hands, a trio of fairy godmothers, a triumvirate of
lares familiares,
the Intercessor, the Consoler, the Paraclete. Such care they had for Miriam, such concern, such love for their friend, they plumb forgot about Valentine. It was as if this downturn of events had nothing to do with her at all.

Mrs. Rosenthal sat in the hard-back chair across from Mr. Fischel, who sat in one of the plush Naugahyde ones. She had a yellow pad in one hand, her pencil in the other, poised to take dictation. Mr. Fishel cleared his throat, as he always did before giving dictation. A vociferous clearing of the throat as if he were gargling. This little tic of his drove Mrs. Rosenthal bananas, but you’d never know it. Her face gave away nothing because the benefits and the hours to this job, you couldn’t do better. In shorthand, she wrote as he dictated:

Mrs. Rosenthal made copies for each of Valentine’s teachers, which she would hand-deliver to the appointed classrooms. In reference to how Mr. Fischel and the board of education were treating this girl as if she were a criminal or worse, and the father of this child, he gets off free and clear, Mrs. Rosenthal thought,
This stinks
.

Miriam signed the papers in triplicate. Signed, sealed, and done with, and once they were off school property, she suggested to Valentine that they not go straight home. “Let’s go to Rossi’s and have a cannoli,” she offered. Miriam didn’t know if she could face the house just then, just the two of them there alone. When Valentine was a little girl, Miriam would take her to Rossi’s Bakery after shopping, a treat for being good. The Italians did that nice, the way they put a few tables in the bakery, so you could sit and have a pastry and a cup of coffee or a lemonade like you were in some café in Greenwich Village or Paris even instead of Canarsie. Valentine, who seemed to be in no hurry to get home either, readily agreed.

Leaning in close to her daughter, which wasn’t difficult because
the tables were the size of breakfast trays, Miriam said, “Valentine, we need to talk about something. Dr. Stern says it’s late but not impossibly late to, you know, end the pregnancy. Have you thought long and hard about that? Because this is going to change your entire life, Valentine. All your plans for the future.”

Dipping her finger into the shell of the cannoli, Valentine extracted a dollop of cream, which she popped in her mouth. With some other teenage girl, a dollop of cream poised on her fingertip sliding into an open mouth might have seemed obscene, but it really was, despite her condition, near impossible for Valentine to appear anything other than the personification of innocence. “I think maybe God made other plans for my future,” Valentine said, and Miriam, assuming Valentine was referring to nothing but the stroke of lousy luck, smiled and said, “It would seem so. But it doesn’t have to be. Dr. Stern said if we make arrangements right away, like today, it’s still possible to have, you know, an…” Miriam mouthed the word which she could not bring herself to say.

“No,” Valentine said. “No. I can’t do that.”

Miriam, no feminist to be sure, did however believe that girls should have a choice. She remembered the stories from her youth, stories of girls and coat hangers and back alleys. That was wrong, that a girl should have no choice, but Miriam wouldn’t insist on an abortion for her daughter if Valentine didn’t want one, especially at this late date.

Moreover, she was of the same opinion as The Girls in regard to Valentine’s refusal to name the boy. What good could come of identifying him? What? They could get married? Just so he could leave her high and dry? Whoever he was, he was out of the picture
now and good riddance to him. Miriam found she was coping with this situation far better than she would’ve predicted. There was a reserve of strength she didn’t, heretofore, realize she had, and Miriam experienced a surge of empowerment. The hell with this boy, whoever he was. After the baby was born, Valentine could return to school, not to Canarsie High, where she’d surely be ostracized, but she could go to some other school. A private school was not beyond their means. Miriam would take care of the baby, and then Valentine could go to college. Maybe not away to one of the fancy schools Miriam had hoped her daughter would attend, but still, there were plenty of universities in greater New York City. This didn’t have to be the end of the world.

Near the end of the lunch hour, at a window table in the cafeteria, Marty Weiner sat as still as a pillar of salt. Marty Weiner, who had smoked so much dope before digging into a hot open-face turkey sandwich, assumed he must be hallucinating those two pink-and-yellow birds perched on the nearest branch of a spruce tree. A pair of pink-and-yellow birds staring right at him, like they had something to say.
Too fucking weird.

Trees are renowned as favored places for spiritual visitations. In Denver, Colorado, there was a report of Mary’s likeness on the trunk of a willow tree. A pine tree in Colman, New Hampshire, revealed the Virgin’s image on a flat portion where the branches seemed to have been cut away. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Blessed Mother’s visage was formed in the age rings of an elm. In the empty spaces between the bushy branches of a thirty-foot-high black
locust tree in Hartford, Connecticut, the Virgin Mary appeared, arms spread and a crown on her head, as well as in the bark of an oak tree in Watsonville, California. Admittedly, some of the faithful who made the pilgrimage to Watsonville thought the image was that of a quail or a bell. The point being: You either see or you don’t, but even the most cynical can understand how the desire to see, the need to see, can produce the vision, whether it be in the clouds, on a freshly painted wall, or in the near branch of a spruce tree, or on the burned part of a potato chip.

Miss Clarke clapped her hands sharply for attention. “Okay, everybody. Let’s settle down,” she said, for the fifth time in as many periods that day. “We are going to begin our study of the reproductive system. Who can tell me what the aim of the reproductive system is?” This would seem to be a question geared for the stupidest of the stupid, but Miss Clarke was not one to ever overestimate her students’ intelligence. “The aim of the reproductive system is…?” She repeated the question and someone from the back of the room, one of the boys, quipped, “Ask Valentine.”

“That’s enough of that,” Miss Clarke said, and she bit back the tail end of a smile.

Although it was only a part of a smile that got through, it did not go unnoticed by Beth Sandler. Despite the fact that Beth and Valentine were no longer friends and had not been friends for ages now, and despite the fact that they would never be friends again, a decade of best friendship cannot be erased without leaving a trace of affection behind. Beth bristled at the teacher’s obvious delight in Valentine’s misfortune, and then it dawned on Beth that all day long, up until just this very minute, she too had been in love with
the news, cross pollinating the scoop as if she were a little butterfly of the gossipmonger species, flitting from person to person, deep breath, big grin, and,
Brace yourself. I’ve got such news. You will not believe it
. And then the laughter and the speculation, and now Beth’s indignation at the teacher morphed in shame of self. For the first time in her life, Beth Sandler was ashamed of herself. Oh, there were other times when she should have been ashamed of herself, but she wasn’t. Now she was. Big-time shame.

At the start of the last period of the day, John Wosileski’s world took yet another hit. Never again was he going to feast his eyes upon Valentine Kessler’s visage. That was the upshot of the memo which Mrs. Rosenthal brought to him.

Given what had happened between them and given his absolute certainty that she would never be his, you’d think he’d be glad that she was now to be forever out of his sight. Out of sight leads to out of mind, but it was precisely that, that there would come a day when he would no longer be able to remember her face, no longer able to conjure her image in his mind’s eye, which pained him most. She would be lost to him entirely. Even the memory of her would leave him, that crumb that he’d had, that crumb of recollection, was at least something.

Until this too, her presence, was taken from him, John hadn’t been aware that her mere attendance in his classroom was a faint ray of sunshine, and now that light was extinguished, snuffed out like an ember. And so from this, John Wosileski was forced to learn yet another of life’s hard lessons: Sorrow is a bottomless pit.

Taking attendance as if each name on the roll were a weight to
be carried, John told the class to open their books and do problems one through eight on page 162.

“Are these going to be graded?” asked Michelle Ratner.

“Yes.” One other thing Mr. Wosileski had finally figured out was that if it wasn’t going to be graded, they wouldn’t do the assignment. “It’s going to count as a quiz,” he said, thus ensuring that they would work quietly and not go wild. There was a collective groan throughout the class, but the students got down to work.

What John had yet to learn was to ignore, completely and totally ignore, that smidgen of hope which occasionally rose up from the pit. He should have ignored it, he should have known from experience that to have faith in redemption had gotten him nowhere, but then again, the sorrow would not have been as profound if faith had not been in the picture.

As a biology teacher, Joanne Clarke was all too aware of life-forms that clung to toilet seats, especially in warm weather, and even in the women’s faculty bathroom and not one shared with students, but the pressure on her bladder was tremendous. No way would she be able to hold it in until she got home.

Lining the seat with squares of toilet tissue, but nonetheless taking care to squat as opposed to actually sitting down because you can’t be too careful, Joanne Clarke peed profusely. Thus relieved, she flushed and then went to wash her hands with hot water and soap.

It was there, at the bathroom sink, while washing her hands with the vigor of a surgeon, that Joanne Clarke looked up and into the mirror. She closed her eyes for a moment, as if that would clear
the slate, and then she looked again. Oh no! This couldn’t be! But it was. The return of her cystic pustular acne in the guise of four mammoth pimples. Two on her chin, one on the left side of her nose, and the one dead center on her forehead was like a beacon glowing red.

At the end of the school day, Beth turned down invitations to go for pizza with Marcia Finkelstein, to go hang out at the park with Leah Skolnik to watch the boys shoot hoops, to go with Joey Rappaport to
do it
at his house, where no one, he assured her, was home. It was the very last thing Beth Sandler wanted to do that afternoon. It wasn’t because she feared that pregnancy might be going around like a bad cold. She’d gotten herself on the Pill, but the truth was that
doing it
with Joey was nowhere near as dreamy as she’d proclaimed it to be. In fact, it left her wanting, but wanting in ways she could neither pinpoint nor articulate. Sex with teenage boys will do that, leave a girl wanting, not more, but wanting something. “I don’t feel so good,” she told Joey, and she went off alone, although she wasn’t sure where she would go. All she knew was that she wanted to be by herself. Desire for solitude was a new inclination for Beth, and she worried that this craving might be the onset of her growth as a person.