An Almost Perfect Moment (8 page)

With Valentine thusly engrossed, Miriam took the opportunity to snoop. You can’t expect teenagers to consistently be honest, and what mother isn’t nosy? It is a rare mother who doesn’t snoop every now and then, and Miriam Kessler was no exception to the rule. The last time Valentine tried to sneak something past Miriam, it was one of those tube tops, a strip of elasticized cotton covered with sequins designed to barely conceal the boobs. “Over my dead
body will you go out of the house with this on,” Miriam had said, and Valentine had cried and sniveled about how all the girls were wearing them, but Miriam wasn’t interested in what the other girls were wearing. So what was it this time? A micromini? Bikini underpants?

After finding nothing new in the closet or the chest of drawers, Miriam got down on the floor, no mean feat for her, and reached under the bed, where, alongside the box from Kleinman’s, she found a book. On the spine was the white label displaying the Dewey decimal. A library book.
Well,
Miriam reasoned,
a library book, it’s not pornography
. But still.
Saints? What could she want from saints?
Then Miriam opened the book to the table of contents, and she had to laugh.
Saint Valentine,
and Miriam was satisfied. Here was nothing more than a display of adolescent self-absorption.
Valentine
.

Valentine. Like the offspring of most young Jewish couples, now second- and even third-generation American, Ronald and Miriam Kessler’s baby would be named in memory of a deceased loved one, but not exactly. You couldn’t saddle an American kid with a moniker from the old country. So you compromised. A daughter named for
Bubbe
Hodle got called Holly or Honey.
Tante
Lippe would get remembered as Larry or Lisa. Children named for
Zeyde
Moshe were called Michael and Marla, and because it never occurred to Ronald or Miriam or anyone on either side of the families that Willy was spelled with a
W
and not a
V
as it was pronounced,
Villy,
the young couple—in memory of Ronald’s
zeyde,
may he rest in peace, who had died the year before but, thank God, didn’t suffer much—bandied about names such as Veronica, Vera, Vance, Valerie, and Victor.

Perhaps knowing that he would soon enough dishonor the family name, Ronald opted, on this occasion, to honor the patrimony. Besides, Ronald Kessler had adored this grandfather of his,
Zeyde
Willy, a small-time bookie.

According to Dr. Isaacson, Baby Vera or Vance was due to be born during the third week of January. By the end of the second week of February, with Miriam the size of Cleveland and about to rip her hair from her head, Dr. Isaacson induced labor. On February 14, Miriam and Ronald Kessler became the proud parents of a beautiful baby girl, and in an unimaginative gesture, but one of loving enthusiasm, they scrapped Vera and named her—what else?—Valentine.

That Valentine’s Day was a Catholic feast day and not only a holiday by Hallmark was not of concern to the Kesslers. All that mattered to them was that their precious little girl was as sweet as the candy that came in a heart-shaped box covered with pink satin.

Sharing a large buttered popcorn, but each with their own Coke, in the fifth row from the back not quite dead center, Joanne Clarke and John Wosileski sat side by side, their eyes fixed on the screen, watching
Silent Movie
, which was supposedly a comedy.

Curiously enough, outside of the confines of school, John rarely found Joanne annoying. But what he didn’t factor into the equation was Valentine. When there existed the possibility of feasting his gaze upon Valentine, Joanne was an irritation. Take away all but the most remote chance of that and Joanne Clarke wasn’t so bad. Of course he didn’t couch it in such terms, but at least some of John’s pleasure with Joanne’s company originated from the same place as his burgeoning desire to have sex with her; the place where
absence is located, which is to say Joanne Clarke, as a person unique unto herself, was somewhat irrelevant.

His eyes were on the screen, but his focus was on strategy: how to get from point A, the movies, to point B, his bed.
Do you want to come in for a beer?
Too bad he had nothing to show her. No etchings. No tropical fish. Nothing in the latest stereo equipment. In fact, there was no stereo of any sort.
You want to watch television for a while?

Joanne Clarke pressed her leg against his.

The vast majority of the people who came to the library required nothing more of Lucille Fiacco than to stamp the due date on whatever mystery novel or romance they were taking out that week. That, or to ask where the toilet was. For this she got a master’s degree in library science?

But every day this week, that Valentine kid sought her out to ask advice, as if she were the oracle at Delphi, like she knew the answer to every frigging question on the planet,
Do you think a red sweater would look better with these pants?
, and to untangle the mysteries of the world,
If you don’t actually blow on it, why do they call it a blow job?
Lucille’s conversations with Valentine served to remind her that she was a highly knowledgeable person as well as a very attractive and stylish one and if she didn’t have a date for New Year’s Eve it was because those Bensonhurst
goombahs
were too thickheaded to recognize her qualities. Lucille Fiacco told herself that she really needed to start associating with a finer caliber of persons.

That Valentine did not have a date for New Year’s Eve was one thing, but her claim that she wasn’t invited to a party, that was a
matter for concern. She’d always had friends. She’d always been invited to parties. “
No one
is having a party?” Miriam asked her for the third time.

“No one that I know of,” Valentine said.

Nor did it escape Miriam’s attention that not once all week, the entire Christmas vacation, did the phone ring for Valentine. As nonchalantly as it is possible for a mother who is prying, Miriam asked, “So what’s Beth been up to?”

“I don’t know,” Valentine said. “Off with her boyfriend, I guess.”

Miriam then offered their house if Valentine wanted to invite some friends over for a little get-together.

“No thanks,” Valentine said. “Really, Ma. I don’t want to do anything. It’s not a big deal.”

Miriam wasn’t sure how to react to her daughter’s display of emotional maturity. Yes, emotional maturity was one way of looking at it, if you happened to be the sort of person who found the silver lining in every cloud. If Miriam, at fifteen, hadn’t had plans for New Year’s Eve, she would have cried for a week. But this display of emotional maturity could just as easily be yet another whorl in a pattern of aberration. Would a normal teenager be so blasé about staying home alone on New Year’s Eve?

For the first time in either of their lives, John Wosileski and Joanne Clarke did not spend New Year’s Eve in cruel isolation. At John’s apartment they met for an aperitif of Asti Spumante, which was like champagne but nowhere near as expensive. John Wosileski was agog to discover that people actually drank something as costly as the bottle of Moët he’d looked at. John didn’t have any
thing like champagne glasses, or wineglasses either, but he, in fact, did have a pair of brandy snifters which had been left in the apartment by the previous tenant, who’d forgotten to pack up the contents of the far left kitchen area cabinet. There John had found the two snifters, an unopened box of Minute rice, and a can of mushroom gravy. He was proud of the snifters. He thought they were sophisticated. He filled each of them nearly to the brim with sparkling wine and passed one to Joanne.

She took a few sips and he took a few sips and then they kissed, which isn’t anything to dwell on. Later they would go to a Chinese restaurant on Mott Street in the city.

Miriam Kessler was going to a party at Edith Zuckerman’s house around the corner. It was a tradition, Edith’s party. Every year, for as long as anyone could remember, Edith and Stan made a New Year’s Eve party, and every year, Miriam went. This night she squeezed into a slimming black dress and she put on her good pearls and patent-leather pumps bought only weeks before but already they were too narrow for the plumpness of her feet.

From her window Valentine, already in her pajamas, watched Miriam as she made her way down the street, walking as if her feet hurt. As soon as her mother was beyond her line of vision, Valentine reached around and under her bed for
Lives of the Saints
. With a package of Oreo cookies by her side, she opened the book to the chapter about Perpetua stripped naked and thrown to a mad bull. Valentine read while she licked the vanilla icing from the chocolate wafers.

In Edith Zuckerman’s living room, Miriam parked herself in a chair near the buffet table, and thought to herself that Edith could be a professional caterer. Such a spread—miniature quiche lorraines, four kinds of meatballs in chafing dishes to keep them hot, olives which Edith stuffed herself with cream cheese and pimiento, macaroni salad, smoked salmon on bite-sized triangles of toast—Edith outdid herself. Well, knock wood, her husband, he’d had a good year.

As is customary in Chinese restaurants, John and Joanne ordered dishes to share: scallion pancakes, dumplings, shrimp with lobster sauce, and moo shu pork. A feast.

They, along with everyone else at Ho Fat’s, wore cone-shaped paper hats on their heads. Noisemakers were set on the table alongside the silverware, and even though it was well before midnight, it was as if the room were quivering in anticipation of the hour, that brief moment of time when happiness is obligatory. Joanne Clarke was considering her own happiness, how her future seemed like a red balloon filled with helium, bright and light, and as long as you hold on tight, you can keep it from floating away. John Wosileski was also contemplating happiness. He wondered if this was indeed what he was feeling, and if so, was it as good as it got? Was this it?

At twenty minutes before midnight, Miriam helped herself to a few more of the olives and then, without anyone noticing, she got her
coat from the bedroom and slipped out the back door. The air was cold. Sharp. Miriam could see her breath, and a fine layer of frost dusted the sidewalk and the bare branches of the trees.

Once home, after hanging up her coat in the hall closet and taking off her shoes—her feet were killing her in those shoes—Miriam went upstairs and looked in on Valentine, who was asleep.

Miriam considered waking her daughter so that together they could welcome in the new year. She considered it, but did not because in the final analysis, Miriam could not face the pretense of joy.

For Valentine’s sake, and her own too, Miriam made it a point to reek of indifference as if it were a perfume mist.
A good sport, tough as nails, a brick, a trooper
are words The Girls used in reference to Miriam, in reference to
the lousy hand she was dealt in life and yet, she enjoys the game nonetheless. You got to admire her
. Only when she was alone could Miriam indulge in the truth.

Alone with herself, Miriam could admit that she feared rejection more than she feared being fat, and that she feared the unknown more than she feared being lonely.

On the cusp of the new year, standing alone in the dark hallway between her daughter’s bedroom and her own, Miriam could admit that she lived off romantic recollections that probably weren’t even accurate.

The clock struck midnight, and the revelers at Ho Fat’s erupted into a public exclamation of merriment and sentimentality. A party of ten seated around a circular table sang “Auld Lang Syne.” John Wosileski and Joanne Clarke, each leaning in to the other, kissed; a
kiss long enough and deep enough that John Wosileski’s eyes closed, and he did not open them until the vision of Valentine Kessler faded away.

The truth was: What could a new year promise Miriam? If anything was different, in this year after year after year, it was that by now, over time, she had given up on herself entirely, as if hope for herself were birdseed that had sifted out through a hole in her pocket.

All hope was now pinned on Valentine. Miriam meant well. No one could dare say otherwise, but to pin her hopes on her daughter was to deny Valentine hopes of her own. It was to be unaware there was a possibility, however small, that perhaps Valentine did not want a college diploma from a good school, a respectable career she could return to after the children are grown, a husband who loves her, who worships the ground she walks on, a
mensch
. Those were Miriam’s dreams and was it too much to ask for? Ordinary dreams. No special privileges. Just a little happiness.

Miriam was blissfully unaware of what was to transpire in this new year. If she had known, well, then and there you might as well have given her a knife and let her cut her heart out.

I
t was that darkest of hours, no sign of the dawn that would come within a matter of minutes, when the thirty or so students gathered on the sidewalk in front of Canarsie High School before getting on the bus that would transport them to Hunter Mountain, which was early into the Catskill Mountains. Despite the boast of the longest chairlift in the Catskills (over one mile long!)—and big whoop to that because long is not high, the Catskills are hardly the Alps—Hunter isn’t much of a mountain. To ski Hunter is not an ultimate experience, but it was the ski area nearest to Brooklyn, and even then it was three hours to get there. The few students who’d had skiing experience—Sheila Rosen in particular, with the thicket of lift tickets stapled to the zipper on her jacket—they, the experts, huddled together and compared notes on other mountains, better mountains, mountains of significant proportions, but most of the students of the Canarsie High School Ski Club had never skied before. The inferiority of this slope was irrelevant to them.

As these things often are, the rental shack was built to resemble a Swiss chalet, and those without their own gear waited to be fitted for rented boots and bindings, for skis and poles. Despite having no equipment of her own, Valentine Kessler—head to toe in pink—did not queue up for boots and skis. Instead, she made straight for the lodge, which wasn’t a lodge in the traditional sense. No overnight accommodations were offered, but it was a pavilion with high ceilings. One wall, made entirely of glass, offered a view of the mountain. Chairs and tables were placed around a fireplace made of stone set into the far wall. With her back to the mountain view, Valentine sat as if she were posed for a portrait:
Girl in Pink by the Fire;
a vision to still any man’s heart. She ordered a hot chocolate. Valentine gave no indication that she had any intentions whatever of hitting the slopes. She could’ve been sitting in a lodge in the Negev desert for all advantage she took from the area.

While the other first-timers were flopping along the bunny trail, Valentine idly flipped through the most recent issue of
Seventeen,
the one magazine to which she subscribed and read religiously.

This day at Hunter Mountain was a gift, and John Wosileski was having fun. That might not sound like much, having fun, but it was something wondrous.

By noontime, a half-dozen members of the Canarsie High School Ski Club, girls all, having concluded that this was not the sport for them,
too cold, too wet, harder than it looks, bore-ing, that frigging sucked,
joined Valentine in the warmth of the lodge. They took turns looking at Valentine’s
Seventeen
magazine. They ate frankfurters and french fries and donuts. Cathy DiChiaro suggested to Valentine that she highlight her hair. “Just a few blond streaks. That would look so gorgeous on you.”

“Really?” Valentine was showing herself to be as fluffy-minded as the best of them. “You think so?” she asked, and the others were wild with enthusiasm for the idea.

Each slice of pineapple on the top of the upside-down cake was shaded with its own individual paper umbrella. Normally, when baking, Miriam, like all The Girls, stuck to her mother’s and grandmothers’ recipes, which meant strudels and poppy-seed cakes and marble loaves. They didn’t have pineapples in Poland, so who knew from a pineapple cake? Miriam got the recipe from
Woman’s Day
magazine. Miriam had baked the pineapple upside-down cake in Sunny Shapiro’s honor, and The Girls clapped their hands at the sight of it, except for Sunny, who was too choked up to clap. Sunny Shapiro and her husband Mel were going on a second honeymoon. To Hawaii. The kids were going to stay with Sunny’s parents in Flatbush. Miriam was happy for her friend, really she was. Look, she baked a cake and the pineapple upside-down was no child’s play, but while tears of joy made their way along the crevices of Sunny’s raisin face the way rainwater travels a brook, Miriam turned to the window, to the cold gray afternoon, and cried on the inside, just a little bit, for herself, for the second honeymoon she would never have.
Oh Ronald.

John Wosileski zigged and zagged and whooshed down Hunter East to reach the end only to begin again. Shortly after midday, he boarded the Hunter West chairlift for the run known, in some circles, as Daredevil Dan, Hunter Mountain’s most perilous trail. His stomach grumbled, but John disregarded the call to lunch, as if he could ski for days with no more sustenance than the clean cold mountain air. Poised at the summit, he took a few deep breaths and surveyed the view. The sun, high in the sky, cast a golden glint on the snow and broke through the thicket of fir trees on either side of him. John pushed off, and as he cut a clean path between the trees, he thought he saw a pair of birds, one yellow and the other the colors of a peach, perched on an upper branch of a blue spruce, but that would’ve been impossible. No doubt it was the glare from the sun on the snow and the ice and his own sweet delight teasing the eye, and leaning forward to pick up speed, he left great clouds of powdery snow in his wake.

At the day’s end, when the sun was red and paused between the trees, Mr. Ornstein came to collect the girls, and if Valentine was terribly disappointed that Mr. Wosileski never did show up to the lodge for lunch or a hot chocolate, she gave no indication of it. “Everybody up and out,” Mr. Ornstein said. “Single file into the bus. No pushing. No shoving.”

Although Valentine exited the Lodge as part of a group, once in the parking lot she drifted off, away from the others. On this darker side of the mountain, the snow appeared indigo and violet, the way it sometimes does in oil paintings when the artist goes through a phase and does everything in shades of blue. Valentine craned her neck, her eyes roving the line of her classmates waiting
to board the bus. Then, quick as a wink, Valentine took a place in the chain, right behind Mr. Wosileski.

John Wosileski took the first-row window seat on the right side of the bus, and when Valentine Kessler settled herself into the seat beside him, his heart bolted with a thud like a racehorse out of the starting gate and kept on racing. Valentine Kessler. She smiled at him, and John Wosileski felt queasy and thrilled.

Not yet having depleted their energy supply, rather invigorated by the activity of the day, as if adolescent energy thrived on itself, ingesting itself to grow larger and stronger, some kind of mutant creature, the busload of teenagers shouted and slapped at one another’s heads, teasing, joking. No one paid the least bit of attention to the two people who sat quietly in the first row of the right side of the bus.

Words were forming on the tip of John Wosileski’s tongue like a blister, and the words burned there until John blurted out, “I once saw a frozen waterfall. Frozen solid,” he said. “In midflow.” This, having seen a frozen waterfall while taking what he thought might be a shortcut through a wooded area from his aunt and uncle’s house to the convenience store, was something that he had never before told another living soul. What he didn’t say was how the sight of it, the surprise of coming upon such a thing, made his heart expand with a kind of grief, and how it seemed to him that he was seeing something no living person was supposed to see. Nor did he mention that he mentioned it now only because, she, Valentine, as she sat there, frozen too in a way, was also a thing of unspeakable beauty.

“Really?” Valentine said. “A frozen waterfall. That’s weird.”

Although Valentine pronounced
weird
without the
r,
as
weid,
there was no mistaking it for another word. Such a response—that’s weird—caused John to dearly wish he could rewind time, just a minute, and take back his words. Not so much because he regretted sharing a secret with Valentine, but because he didn’t want her to think anything connected with him was weird. He so very much wanted her to like him.

It took another bout of silence for John to rev up his nerve again to ask, “So, did you have fun today?”

“No, not really.”

Did every exchange with this girl have to lead to regret? Couldn’t she go easy on him just once? But Valentine was like her mother in that way; more often than not, she told the truth.

“You didn’t enjoy skiing?” he asked.

In the seats behind them, Max Schumer and Paul Taglio played Monkey in the Middle with Lisa Hochstater’s hat. Valentine looked back at the shenanigans and then she said, “I didn’t enjoy it or not enjoy it. I didn’t do it.”

“You didn’t ski? You came all the way here and you didn’t ski? Why not?”

Valentine scrunched up her nose, her perfect nose, one that had, on three separate occasions, caused strange women, women she didn’t know from a hole in the wall, to stop her, twice on the street and once at the mall, to ask her, “Do you mind my asking? Who did your nose?” And even with that nose—a nose that could have been sculpted by the world’s leading plastic surgeon—all scrunched up, Valentine Kessler’s face was angelic. “I’m not very good at sports,” she said. “And I don’t like being out of doors in cold weather.”

So why in the world, then, did she get herself up before dawn,
shell out thirty-five dollars, and endure a long bus ride if she had no intention of skiing? Why, indeed? What else could it be other than some boy, a crush on some boy, yes, that had to be it, and John shifted in his seat to see who it was across the aisle, who it was that Valentine wanted to be near, and there was Vincent Caputo. It made sense, but still, it was horrible.

Vincent Caputo was well aware of Valentine Kessler in the seat across the aisle. How could you not be aware of it when a doll like Valentine Kessler was in close proximity? And tempting as it was to take advantage of the nearness of her, he had a another fish on the fire. You can’t be wasting time on small hope when a certainty is at hand; the certainty in the person of Alison George, who the following year would have her nose done, seated on his other side. Vincent was banking on Alison to give him a hand job during the trip home. To this end, he took off his ski jacket and placed it over his lap. Shifting in his seat, Vincent turned his back on Valentine. Poor Valentine stuck in the seat next to that queer teacher.

Twilight descended into a night sky, and the interior of the bus went dark except for the faint beams of light, eerie yellow and particles of dust free-floating, from the small bulbs overhead. Exhaustion too won out, and everyone settled down. Some of students even fell asleep, while others whispered softly with their seatmates. Vincent Caputo’s voice rustled like curtains, barely audible, and smooth as silk. “Come on. No one will see. Please, Alison. For me.”

Alison, a slut in her own right, didn’t need much convincing. Under the cover of his jacket, she stroked Vincent, and he was feeling
so good, yeah, oh baby like that, yeah,
until he glanced around and there was Valentine Kessler smiling at him, the sweetest frig
ging smile he ever saw, a smile that made Vincent think of someone who talks to birds, and Vincent Caputo lost his erection.

“What happened?” Alison asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Vincent said. “Nothing’s wrong. Forget it. Just leave me alone, okay?”

John Wosileski fixed his gaze into the heartache of that overhead light, that insignificant yellow beam under which the dust particles seemed to defy gravity, and Valentine closed her eyes. Leaning ever so slightly toward him, she let go with a deep sigh, a sigh as if, after having wandered for ages, she’d found her way home. Then her head came to rest on his shoulder.

Who can control where your head lolls while you sleep? But was she sleeping? Or only pretending to be in a downy slumber? Was she indeed wide-awake? Did she not lose so much as a blink of the pleasure afforded by the simple act of one person leaning into another?

As for John Wosileski, he went stiff. Stiff as a board. Stiff as a rod. Stiff as a pole. All of it. Stiff with fear. Stiff with the pang and stiff with the tingle and stiff with an erection that towered with desire and throbbed and threatened to explode Vesuvian-style. John wished he’d had the foresight to put his jacket over his lap instead of putting it in the overhead rack, where now he couldn’t get at it without disturbing the sleeping beauty, and what would happen if Valentine woke and saw the bulge in his pants, ski pants made of material that stretched and moved when you did? So John Wosileski sat perfectly still until passion, as it so often does, turned to pain.

Miriam lowered the flame under the soup, a thick vegetable soup—practically a stew, you could eat it with a fork—and let it simmer. In the oven she had a nice chicken and two Idaho potatoes warming. She looked up at the clock on the wall. Valentine would be home any minute, and Miriam was glad of that. For reasons unknown or maybe it was because Sunny Shapiro’s husband adored her to such a degree as to take her on a second honeymoon, whatever it was, Miriam was feeling very emotional. Not for one second did Miriam begrudge her friend the happiness. For herself, Miriam was a little down in the dumps. But hungry as she was, she would wait for Valentine to have dinner.

The bus pulled up in front of Canarsie High School, and Valentine woke or feigned waking up, did a lithe little stretch, and John Wosileski covered his lap with his hands. Reaching to the overhead rack for her jacket, she said, “Hey, Mr. Wosileski. I’ll see you around sometime, okay?” Behind the others, she stepped off the bus, leaving John Wosileski alone with his agony and his hard-on and the sweet scent of Valentine, which had filled his nostrils as if he’d been in a rose garden instead of on a bus.

Before she would eat, Valentine insisted on changing her clothes. “I’m too hot in this.” With her tongue hanging out, she tugged at the neck of the sweater as if it were choking her. Ah, the drama of youth.

“Make it fast,” Miriam said. “You don’t want the chicken to dry out.”

In the privacy of her bedroom, Valentine undressed, neatly folding the pink ski jacket, layering a piece of tissue paper between it and the pink sweater. Another sheet of paper went over the pink ski pants. The pink cap and mittens she wrapped as if they were a gift, and the way a bride puts away her wedding dress and veil, something that will never be worn again but must be kept pristine, Valentine put her ski outfit into a drawer she’d emptied as if for that purpose, as if it were a keepsake box.