An Almost Perfect Moment (25 page)

Visiting hours were over for the afternoon. The Girls went home. Miriam was watching
General Hospital
on the television mounted on the wall across from the bed where Valentine was sitting up reading the newest issue of
Seventeen
when a nurse came into the room with a sheaf of papers and a pen. “You’ll need to fill these out,” she said to Valentine. “And you’ll have to cosign,” she told Miriam. “It’s for the birth certificate. You need to give the baby a name. Do you have one picked out?” the nurse asked.

A name. It was only then that it struck Miriam how odd that she and Valentine had not heretofore discussed a name for the baby. Everything else, but not a name. How very strange that she had given no thought at all to a name. Miriam then made the assumption that Valentine would want to name the baby in memory of her grandfather Sy, may he rest in peace. A name beginning with an S.
Susan. Susanna. Suzette. Sally. Sonia. Sandy. Suzette. Yes, Suzette. Suzette Kessler. That is a name!

“Ronda,” Valentine said. As that name is traditionally spelled
Rhonda,
Valentine clarified, “No
h
. R-O-N-D-A. Ronda. In memory of my father.”

C
ardboard cutouts of Santa Claus and elves and giant candy canes were taped to store windows framed with garland. The streets bustled. Blinking lights in red and green and blue wrapped like ivy around posts and gates and railings and the trim of houses, and little white lights laced through the branches of trees. The world was ablaze with the decorations celebrating the Christmas season, and as if the glitter brought warmth, neighbors greeted one another with
ho-ho-hos
and
happy holiday
s.

John Wosileski, however, was impervious to the good cheer and prevailing jolly mood as he carried the last of the cardboard cartons up the stairs. Cardboard cartons filled with his worldly goods, which didn’t amount to much. He’d left behind his furniture; it wasn’t worth the cost of moving it, and where would he have put it? So he arrived and returned whence he came, all in one trip, with his clothes, a few books, a miniature silver Christmas tree in a pot, a puny diamond ring in a velveteen box, his skis, and his television
set. Two television sets in one small apartment was excessive, but perhaps some night he’d want to watch a ball game while his mother’s game shows were on. John put his TV in his bedroom, on top of the chest of drawers.

Miriam had been up half the night with feedings and diaper changes, just as she’d been up half of every night since the baby was born. A baby is exhausting under any circumstances, but Miriam was no spring chicken and it wasn’t like she had any help either. Whether Valentine would have been any real help is moot. Miriam insisted that Valentine get back to the business of being a teenager; business which had nothing to do with the care of a baby. “When you fall off a horse, you get right back on,” Miriam said, and never you mind that the analogy was strained. “You know exactly what I mean. I want you to start living your life. You’ll start the new school in a few weeks. Go to the mall, and buy a new outfit.”

And so Miriam took on all responsibility for Ronda and never once complained. She did, however, take advantage of every and any chance to nap, to sleep like one of the dead.

Tennille was dead, although unlike The Captain, whose cause of death was readily apparent, Joanne had no idea how this bird died. It was just there, dead in the cage, on its back, stiff, its bird legs sticking straight up in the air. Two dead birds in a matter of what—five weeks? This was no reason to rejoice.

While her mother and her daughter slept, Valentine was on her hands and knees rooting around under her bed.

In the top drawer, John Wosileski put his socks and underwear, and he tucked the red velveteen box with the puny diamond ring in the back corner behind a balled-up handkerchief which might, or might not, have been used. His shirts went in the second drawer. His pants he hung in the closet. And that was it. He was back in that place where he did little but dream of a day when he could be free of it. There should have been something significant to mark this occasion of utter defeat; something other than John shelving a few tattered paperback books, science fiction mostly. Shouldn’t such an event, at the very least, have been heralded by a bugle-blowing clown?

She was not exactly glad that they were dead, but Joanne did experience a kind of relief. It had been a mistake to get those birds. They were demanding creatures, what with feeding them, cleaning the cage, giving them fresh water. Joanne Clarke had enough on her plate, thank you very much, without all that too. So really, it was for the best that they’d passed away.

For the best, but, Joanne could not help but think, strange. The circumstances were odd. Suspicious, even. It would not have been unreasonable to consider that after she’d pecked her mate to death, guilt ate away at the bird Tennille until she could bear it no longer. Perhaps guilt killed her. But such a cause of death was not a possibility that Joanne Clarke could willingly entertain. Nor could
Joanne consider that while yes, Tennille did kill The Captain, she nonetheless might not have been able to, nor wanted to, live without him. It hardly would have been the first time that love had gone awry in such a sorrowful fashion. Still, how could Joanne Clarke face up to the bird’s decision that it was better to die than to live alone in a cage, tended to by a woman who would feed you and clean up your mess but would never love you as you needed to be loved.

Some years before, Mrs. Wosileski, John’s mother, had read an article in a woman’s magazine,
Redbook,
maybe, one that had been left behind in the Laundromat. The article was titled “Ten Surefire Ways to Put Zing in Your Marriage.” Not that Mrs. Wosileski had any itch whatsoever to put zing in her marriage, but she read the article anyway, and number seven on the list struck her powerfully. It, number seven, prescribed cutting comic strips from newspapers and
putting them in his lunch box or on his pillow or taping them to the bathroom mirror
. From that day forward, Mrs. Wosileski began cutting comics from her husband’s discarded newspaper, although she never did leave one on his pillow or anyplace else where he’d be likely to find it. Rather, she hoarded them, and on days when she felt particularly sad, she would, with her eyes closed, chose one and slip it into the pocket of her housedress. Then, when the sadness seemed unbearable, she would take it out, as if she’d found it there, as if it had been put there by someone other than herself, someone who loved her. She would unfold it and read it and feel better, especially if it was a
Peanuts
.

On the afternoon that her son returned to live with her, she
went looking for those cutout comic strips. She was fairly certain they were in a shoebox under the bed.

Rather than dwell on the cause of Tennille’s death, Joanne stewed over the injustice of it. She’d paid good money for those birds, birds which were clearly defective. She’d been sold damaged goods. And not for the first time either, Joanne Clarke had been cheated. Life was always cheating her out of something or other.

The homemade pierogi were a considerable improvement over the peanut butter spread on saltines that John Wosileski usually had for lunch on Saturday afternoons. Still, John felt cheated. Deceived somehow. And then there was the bit of weirdness with the cartoon. A
Peanuts
cartoon, Charlie Brown and Snoopy in the doghouse together, cut out from the newspaper, an old newspaper from the looks of it—yellow and brittle—and placed beneath his glass of milk like a coaster. What was that about?

One advantage to silk as a fabric is how compactly it folds. The two silk shawls fit easily into Valentine’s pocketbook; not her new pocketbook, which was a Day-Glo pink satin disco bag big enough to hold keys, a lipstick, a mint, and nothing else. The snappy and useless disco bag had been one of this year’s Hanukkah gifts from Miriam. Hanukkah had come early this year. Already, it seemed something of the distant past.

Next, Valentine turned to her bookshelf, where she scanned
the titles. Between
Goodnight Moon
and
The Catcher in the Rye
was
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
. Turning the pages she extracted, not treacly and trite sagaciousness courtesy of a bird, but money. From between pages five and six, she claimed a fifty-dollar bill. Two twenties were plucked like daisies from between pages nine and ten, and a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill from the last pages. What she did not take—one ten-dollar bill, another twenty, and a prayer card—was sheathed between pages sixteen and seventeen. She simply might have forgotten they were there. That happens often; we squirrel away our things of value, and then forget where the gems are buried. Sometimes we even forget that we had gems in the first place. Then we happen upon them by accident and try to remember the circumstances of them.

Just because life cheats you on a more or less regular basis doesn’t mean you have to take it. It doesn’t mean that
they
should be allowed to get away with practically murder, and so Joanne Clarke called Pet World to lodge a complaint.

As soon as she got the manager on the phone, she told him, “You sold me defective birds. One canary pecked the other’s head off and then it died from I don’t know what. Mange, maybe. Cooties or something.”

For the benefit of the employees who stood around him, the manager made small concentric circles with his index finger pointed just above his ear, thus indicating that he had a Looney Tune on the phone. “Ma’am,” he said, in that tone always used on the mentally ill, “we don’t sell canaries here.”

“Right,” she said. “Not canaries. Yellow parakeets.”

“And one yellow parakeet murdered the other one, you say? Did he do it for the insurance money?”

Joanne wasn’t going to get anywhere with this manager; another condition—not getting anywhere—with which she was familiar. Also, Joanne recognized the tone of voice he used, and it both frightened and shamed her that such a voice would be used when speaking to her. She knew too that it was pointless to say,
I am not crazy
. The minute those words,
I am not crazy,
are uttered, you’re pegged a headcase for sure.

Joanne hung up without saying good-bye, which was all the satisfaction she was going to get from this transaction.

On a piece of her best stationery, which featured Snoopy at his typewriter on the doghouse roof, Valentine left her mother a note—
Dear Ma, I don’t know when I’ll be back. Take good care of Ronda. I love you. Valentine
—the
i
on Valentine dotted with a little heart that she colored in with a purple crayon.

Ronda’s cry, brought on by the distressed state of a soiled diaper, woke Miriam. There is much to be said for experience, and changing a diaper is like riding a bicycle. No matter how much time has elapsed between rides, you can always hop on and go. Miriam cleaned the baby and got a fresh diaper on her lickety-split.

The miracle of genetics is something at which to marvel. Ronda was a cookie-cutter copy of Valentine as a baby. So cute, you could have eaten her with a spoon and a cherry on top.

Déjà vu is also something, and for one second there, when Miriam lifted the baby to her shoulder, she nearly sang, as she did when Valentine was a baby,
Clap hands
,
clap hands, ’til Daddy comes home, ’til Daddy comes home.

But Daddy never did come home, and now Miriam carried the baby to the kitchen, where she would get dinner started and give Ronda a bottle. There she found the note from Valentine.

Most words, if not all of them, are open to interpretation. Miriam took Valentine’s words—
I don’t know when I’ll be back
—to mean that she went to the mall after all and might not come home in time for dinner.
These kids think pizza is a meal,
Miriam thought, but who was she kidding? The very idea of Valentine eating pizza and shopping at the mall satisfied her deeply.

The air was cold and crisp like an apple, and the streets were swarming with the holiday weary on their way home, burdened with packages and, at this point in the day, short on holiday merriment. Feet aching, heads aching, and aching backs bent from the weight of their shopping bags,
frigging Christmas,
no one noticed Valentine Kessler as she walked among them. Perhaps if it had been earlier in the day when the sun was high, she might have been seen by the sidewalk Santa, a scrawny man in a red costume that hung on him like a chicken’s neck, standing beside the Salvation Army kettle. But the teenage girl passing by, her head covered, didn’t register as he rang his bell and called,
Ho-ho-ho. Merry Christmas,
trying to get these
cheap fucks to part with a few pennies.
Also, the lavender dusk, the absence of bright light, altered the colors of her shawls. The fact that one was a very specific shade of blue would’ve been lost on him, and in the December twilight, white can look more like mauve.

Ronda burped and Miriam cooed at her, talking baby-talk nonsense. Then Miriam nuzzled her nose against Ronda’s belly and reveled in baby smell. There’s nothing that smells so good as a baby, and like the nose on Rudolph the reindeer, the very same Rudolph who led the team on the Sabatinis’ roof, Miriam glowed so bright. She understood that this baby, this baby who came with no man, no man to break Miriam’s heart, this baby was a gift from God.

The thought of rubbing shoulders with all those happy revelers, with their chortling and good tidings and jingle bells, shopping for gifts for their friends and family, depressed and repulsed her. Joanne Clarke didn’t have so much as one, not one, Christmas present to buy. Not for anyone. Oh, she could’ve bought something for her father—new pajamas or slippers—but why waste the money? It’s not as if he’d know what new slippers were or what to do with them. She could have bought a little something for Vivienne, the nurse who bathed her father and changed his diapers, but such a gesture never occurred to Joanne. What did occur to her was that she was hungry for dinner and the cupboards were bare.

Under the fluorescent lighting of Enzio’s Pizzeria, the colors of Valentine’s shawls were revealed in all their splendor. It was a quiet time in Enzio’s, the hour’s lull in the pizza business. Too late for lunch, a little too early for dinner. Enzio was behind the counter looking over the spread for Sunday’s games. Enzio liked to bet a little something on football. He heard the door open, but his mind
was on the Jets. He didn’t look up until she said, “Two slices plain and a Diet Pepsi, please.”

Valentine took her two slices of pizza and Diet Pepsi to a corner table and Enzio tiptoed, as if fearful of disturbing something, into the kitchen in the back of the pizzeria where his cousin Paulie was kneading dough. “Paulie,” he whispered. “Paulie. Come here. You got to see this.” Then Enzio said, “Wait. Clean yourself up first.”

Paulie wiped his hands on his undershirt and smoothed his hair and followed Enzio to the counter. There he saw, alone at a table, the Blessed Virgin Mary eating a slice of pizza. His pizza.