An Almost Perfect Moment (3 page)

In Miss Clarke’s estimation, John Wosileski was husband material. A suitable partner for life, and a mere few months ago, Miss Clarke might very well have snagged her man. A mere few months ago, before Valentine graced his classroom, John Wosileski would’ve been content, happy even, in his way, to date Joanne Clarke, never minding the bad skin and something of a sour demeanor. They made for a likely couple. A pair of schoolteachers, it happened all the time. Such was the scenario Miss Clarke had in mind—yes, she dared to dream—when John Wosileski joined the faculty. And although thus far there were no signs from his end, no signals of any romantic interest, she had not yet begun to give up.

Indeed, only two days before, she’d brought him a tin of brownies—a gesture that emitted more than a whiff of desperation—loneliness does that to people—which she claimed to have baked herself, but in fact bought them at Nevins Bakery because who had time to make brownies between this job and caring for her senile father. A small fib,
I baked them myself,
and he did eat all four of them before lunchtime. So when Joanne Clarke spied that insipid Valentine Kessler going into John’s room, Joanne waited but a minute before popping by herself.

Not that Valentine was competition. Pretty as she was, she was a student, and although she was somehow getting A’s in biology, she struck Joanne Clarke as having all the brains of a fern. John might be flattered by her attentions, but nothing could come of it because he was a decent man. And certainly nothing could come of it if he intended to keep his job.

Now Joanne Clarke acted all surprised to find Valentine in John’s room. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. Am I interrupting extra help?”

At once, Valentine and Mr. Wosileski said, “No” and “Yes,” and then reversed themselves, which clarified nothing but looked suspicious, rendering Mr. Wosileski increasingly nervous and tongue-tied. Finally, despite Joanne Clarke looking him right in the eye, he was able to say, “What I mean is, you’re not interrupting.”

A few days before, there was, in Valentine’s biology class, a kind of mass hysteria, the result of a sartorial blunder on Miss Clarke’s part. To school that day, over a white blouse, she’d worn a gray wool jumper, snugly fitted, not too tight, just enough to accentuate her curves—so far, so good—that featured two rows of red decorative buttons running vertically from just below the collarbone to the waist, which would’ve been kind of snappy except for the pair of
buttons, red, mind you, sewn exactly dead center on the tips of her luscious breasts. It was like she was wearing her nipples on the outside, and this was just a bit much for tenth graders to take in their stride. A nudge with an elbow, a sly nod of the head, eyebrows raised and wiggled, and giggles suppressed erupted into snorts, and in no time flat the laughter was out of control. Miss Clarke, not only unable to restore order, in fact aggravated the situation by demanding to know, “What is so funny? Someone tell me what is so funny.”

Perhaps that’s what Valentine was picturing, those button nipples, when her awkward smile manifested itself, prompting Miss Clarke to say, “It would behoove you to wipe that smirk off your face, young lady.”

John flinched as if he were the one who’d been snapped at. That he was unable to shield Valentine from the harshness, that he could not demand Miss Clarke apologize, the shame at being rendered ineffectual in his own eyes and perhaps in the eyes of Valentine too, caused him to experience agony.

Behoove you
? Who talked like that anyway?
Behoove you
? This was Brooklyn. Not England.

Miss Clarke might have assessed Valentine as a dull-witted girl, but apparently Valentine was quick enough to catch on to the fact that Miss Clarke wanted her gone, and perhaps not just gone from the room but from earth too.

Lifting her books to her chest as if her loose-leaf binder would deflect the poisoned darts Miss Clarke was aiming at her heart, Valentine said, “I’ve got to be going. See you tomorrow.”

Poor, foolish Joanne Clarke. Rather than enhancing her chances with John Wosileski, having rid the room of Valentine Kessler served only to fill him first with resentment and then with despair. Of course he hid his grief from Miss Clarke. He even hid it from
himself because steadfast refusal to acknowledge these feelings was all that prevented him from flushing his career down the toilet and ruining his life entirely.

Valentine walked home alone. The clean smell of winter was in the air, although it would be some weeks before the first snowflakes fell.

O
ver the traditional Sunday-morning meal, a table laden with the bounty of bagels, cream cheese, and lox, Valentine Kessler asked her mother, “Ma, what kind of name is Wosileski?”

Miriam put down her bagel and asked in the rhetorical fashion, “What kind of name is Wosileski? Are you for real?”

“I know it’s Polish,” Valentine said. “But is it Polish and Catholic? Or Polish and Jewish? You said yourself, the
skis
and the
witzes
can go either way.”

Years before, as soon as she’d determined that Valentine was old enough to grasp the concept of
one’s own
, Miriam had explained to her daughter, “Names that end with
field, baum, stein, farb,
and
berg
are Jewish. Anything from the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, is Jewish too. You know, like Isaac or Solomon. If the name ends with an
a
or an
o,
they’re Italian, but Shapiro is an exception. Don’t ask me how that happened because I don’t know. Italians are always
Catholics. The American names, the plain ones, Jones, Smith, Anderson, like that, those are your Protestants.”

The intent of this instruction, an initiation really, into decoding the clans, was meant to protect Valentine, to keep her safe, not from harm, but from hurt. Miriam had no problem with the
goyim
. They were good neighbors, nice people, but Miriam believed safety was among your own kind. As Miriam told her daughter, the fact of the matter was this: Should you make friends outside, and not that there aren’t plenty of lovely boys and girls of other origins, but the truth is that the minute you have an argument, you know what you’re going hear?

“I hate you?” Valentine had guessed.

“No. You’re going to hear anti-Semitism. Because beneath the surface, they’re all a little bit anti-Semitic. They can’t help it. You should never have to hear such a thing from your friends and loved ones. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The problems that come with mixed marriage are too many to list. Trust me on this.”

Vast and intricate knowledge and now there was more. “With the Polish ones,” Miriam explained, “you can often figure it out by the first name. Jewish girls are never named Theresa or Mary. David is likely to be Jewish,” Miriam told her. “John is definitely not Jewish unless it’s short for Jonathan. Jonathan can go either way.” Then Miriam’s antennae went up. “Why are you asking? Who is Wosilwhosits?”

“Wosileski,” Valentine said. “Nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“Just a teacher at school, Ma. That’s all.”

The knock at the door saved Valentine from further evasiveness or outright lying. “That’s Beth,” she said, and she washed
down the last bite of bagel with a swig of orange juice, grabbing her coat on the way out.

As they did every Sunday morning after breakfast, Valentine Kessler and Beth Sandler walked along Rockaway Parkway to the Ice Palace. Beth’s white ice skates were slung over her shoulder, pale blue pom-poms dangling from the laces. Her skating costume she carried in a vinyl tote bag.

Valentine carried nothing other than her wallet in her jacket pocket plus the minimum of two big secrets she kept from Beth. There is a weight to keeping secrets, not an unbearable weight, but the equivalent of a five-pound sack of Idaho potatoes per secret. Valentine could carry ten pounds of potatoes, but that’s not like carrying air.

There’s no telling what Beth would have made of Valentine’s striking resemblance to the Blessed Virgin, but odds are that had she learned the identity of Valentine’s beloved, Beth would have said, “Make me barf. Valentine, that is so gross. You could get any guy at school, and you pick a queer? Plus, he’s like a thousand years old or something.”

After the nine o’clock mass, where he did not take Holy Communion because, despite Friday night’s confession, he was not in a state of grace, John Wosileski went to his parents’ apartment for Sunday breakfast. It had been only a matter of months since John had moved from the dreary apartment in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn to his own dreary apartment in the Canarsie section.

Now he and his father were seated at the table while his mother served them scrambled eggs and kielbasa and sourdough bread. John rested his elbows on the edges of the place mat; the plastic, once yellow, was now brown with age, and he drifted off mentally to picture Sunday mornings at the Kessler house: sunshine spilling through their kitchen window, their table covered with a tablecloth that was clean and white and made from some expensive fabric like silk or satin, a svelte mother who was wearing a real dress and not a housedress from Woolworth’s, and maybe even a string of pearls around her neck, and a good-guy kind of dad. John pictured Valentine wearing powder puff pink pajamas and rubbing the sleep from her eyes. He imagined they ate waffles.

As Beth and Valentine walked, they discoursed, as they most often did, about sex, about which they had little to no experience. But what teenager doesn’t have hot pants? “The first time I do it, I want everything to be white,” Valentine said. “In a white room, on white sheets, with white roses in a vase on the nightstand, and I want to be wearing a white nightgown.”

“I don’t care where I do it,” Beth said. “As long as it’s not in a car. Or at least not for the first time. After the first time, then a car would be okay, I guess.” Beth walked on for two steps farther before she realized that Valentine was no longer at her side. Turning back to get her friend, Beth asked, “What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

Valentine put her finger to her lips. “Shhh,” she said. “Listen,” she whispered.

“Listen to what?” On a Sunday morning, traffic was light. Rockaway Parkway was nearly as quiet as a country road. If it had been
spring, they might have heard birds chirping, but it wasn’t spring and birds don’t chirp when the mercury hovers at the freezing line. “What? What am I listening to?” Beth said.

Ever so faintly from behind church doors, the Church of the Holy Family, floated the sonorous sounds of organ music and a choir singing, “Ahhhh Vey Maaaaa Reee Ahhhh.” Valentine cupped her hand behind her ear to amplify the auditory effect. “Valentine!” Beth snorted, and stamped her foot like a bull, if it is possible to picture a girl bull with a Dorothy Hamill haircut and a bunny-fur jacket.

“That song,” Valentine said. “Don’t you hear that? It’s sublime.” A word which Valentine pronounced as if it were two words or hyphenated:
sub-lime,
like it meant below the fruit.

“Valentine! Come on. Let’s go.”

But Valentine did not budge, as if she could not budge, as if the “Ave Maria” were a kind of siren’s song, the haunting strains wrapped around her, tightening their grip. “You should skate to that song,” Valentine said. “We have to find out what song that is, so you can skate to it.”

“Whatever it is,” Beth said, “it’s church music. If I skated to church music, my mother would shit a brick. Now, please. Can we go?”

If the music hadn’t ended then, Beth might have gone off alone, gone to skate without Valentine there to watch for the first Sunday in who knew how many years because it sure seemed to Beth that Valentine wasn’t going to move until that song was over.

“Honest to Gawd,” Beth said to Valentine. “No offense, but sometimes you are so frigging weird.”

Joanne Clarke asked the girl behind the counter for six sticky buns. “And let me have a quarter of a pound of those chocolate-chip cookies,” she said. Although there was an obvious redundancy to the ploy, John so enjoyed those brownies she baked. Why not bring him some homemade cookies too?

The Ice Palace was thusly named in a fit of hyperbole. Nothing about the Ice Palace was palatial. A circle of ice, closer in color to gray than pure white or arctic blue, centered in a concrete warehouse, three rows of bleachers and a concession stand and music—show tunes mostly, orchestral versions of songs from
The Pajama Game
or
Annie Get Your Gun
—played over a loudspeaker that crackled with static. The Ice Palace was a bona fide dump. It was only when Beth skated there that beauty was bestowed upon the drab arena.

Beth Sandler had been a prima ballerina on skates, a hometown champion. It was thought that she would be the Barbra Streisand of the figure-skating world, an exception to the rule of Brooklyn girls with ordinary dreams, and who knows, Beth might very well have gone on to the Olympics and from there to a glamorous career with the IceCapades, but during the state tryouts, the spotlight shining on her from overhead, her sequinned and spangled costume shimmering, Beth stumbled. Her Achilles tendon connecting her calf to her left heel tore in half. The IceCapades were never to be. Competitive skating was now a part of her past, and to her credit, Beth took the misfortune in her stride. “Kay ce-ra ce-ra,” Beth said. “It happened. What can you do?” And her energies were thus spent elsewhere, mostly on a boy two years her senior named Joey Rappaport.

Mrs. Sandler, Beth’s mother, frequently mentioned, “I swear to Gawd, when Bethie tore her tendon, Valentine cried more than she did.”

Still, Beth skated on Sunday mornings, just for the fun of it, and Valentine unfailingly tagged along. She was Beth’s devoted fan.

The locker room at the Ice Palace wasn’t really a locker room, but rather the toilets, and Beth entered a stall to change into her costume; this particular costume had been designed for a regional competition, a white leotard covered with silver sequins, each sequin sewn on by hand, a white satin flippy little skirt, tights woven with silver thread, a costume which conveyed impressions of snow and ice.

Valentine headed first to the concession stand, where she bought herself the giant-size box of Milk Duds. Valentine could put away the food, but unlike her mother, no matter how much she ate, she never gained an ounce. Her frame was willowy; she was tall, long-waisted, an ectomorph.

The box of Milk Duds tucked under her arm, Valentine waited outside the bathroom for Beth to emerge, from caterpillar to butterfly.

Or from teenager to celestial being. “Oh Beth,” Valentine gasped. “You look like a constellation in the sky.”

“A constellation? In the sky?” Beth’s eyebrows shot upward in time with her inquiry.

“Yeah, like the Little Dipper. You know, all twinkly.”

Beth sat on a bench to tighten the laces on her skates and looked up at Valentine, who remained standing. “Valentine, you’ve seen this costume a thousand times, if you’ve seen it once.”

“I know, and it always gets to me. Right here.” She patted the spot between her throat and her heart.

At that, Beth muttered, “Definitely weird,” and swept onto the ice.

Although Miriam Kessler thought her daughter could’ve used a little more on top, maybe a B instead of the A cup she barely filled, Miriam was relieved that Valentine did not inherit her heartache with weight; a heartache because it signaled surrender. Indeed Miriam had given up. She had traded a chance at happiness for the midmorning Danish she sank her teeth into, and as she savored the cherry preserves and the cheese and the buttery crust all lolling across her taste buds, she told herself,
I put my life aside to be a mother,
but really Miriam put her life aside because she loved Ronald Kessler with all her heart and soul, with every fiber of her being, and the loss of him was an eternal void. Without Ronald, she might as well eat.

From her vantage point, the third and top row of the bleachers, where she sat alone, away from the handful of divorced dads who were looking forward to the close of the weekend visitation, Valentine’s eyes beheld Beth Sandler as she did triple toes and figure eights and double salchows and double-lutz combinations to a Muzak rendition of “Funky Stuff.” Imagine that. The Ice Palace was modernizing, making an effort to keep up with the times. Soon, within a matter of months, a mirrored ball would descend from the ceiling, and Thursday nights would be advertised as “Hustle On Ice.” But now, on a near empty rink, in long, graceful glides, Beth slid effortlessly into a figure eight, which led to a pirouette, spinning like a top on the tips of her blades, faster Beth spun and faster,
seeming as if she might spin until she lifted off the ground, all the while Valentine sang softly to herself,
Arrrrrre vey Maaaa reee er,
which was far, far away from “Funky Stuff.”

Miriam Kessler née Rothstein could scarcely believe it when Ronald Kessler singled her, Miriam, out for a date. She, Miriam, who was certainly pleasant to look at, not gorgeous, but sweet looking, cute, just over five feet tall, and a little bit chunky. Not fat, but plump, with D-cup breasts which looked as if they kept her teetering off balance, as if it took effort not to fall forward under the weight of such a set.

It was that—the D-cup boobs—which caught Ronald Kessler’s eye. Ronald was a boob man of the bigger-the-better school, and that girl who was sitting with three other girls at the table across from his in the Boylan Hall cafeteria, she had some pair. Never one to lack confidence, Ronald knew he was smooth with the girls. Walking right up to Miriam, he crouched beside her and whispered in her ear, “I want you,” which was a brash and bold thing to say even by today’s standards. Then he straightened up and said, “Tomorrow night? A movie? Something to eat?” After all, this was 1959 and girls, nice girls, who attended Brooklyn College, weren’t going to put out so easily, not even for Ronald Kessler. Even he, the best-looking boy at Brooklyn College plus the third baseman for the baseball team, had to work for it, put in some serious effort, to get any. These girls never gave it up rashly, even if the desire for it was mutual, or in some cases greater, because Brooklyn College girls were taught nothing if not this:
No one buys the cow when they can get the milk for free.
Had that adage not been drummed into her consciousness to the point of shackling her legs shut, Miriam might
have hiked up her skirt right then and there in the Boylan Hall cafeteria, for Miriam was a passionate girl by nature, and Ronald Kessler set her blood to boil.