An Almost Perfect Moment (9 page)

D
uring the week which began with the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the second day of February, the wind bit and the remnants of the last snow looked more like charcoal briquettes, fist-sized and sooty black, and everybody was good and goddamn sick of winter. Spirits were generally low, but Valentine’s Day would be a reprieve, the bright spot in an otherwise bleak month.

Valentine’s Day was a highly respected holiday in this part of Brooklyn. To make the most of it, the shops along the avenue were festooned with paper cutouts of red hearts and metallic gold Cupids. Children were eyeing greedily the boxes of candy displayed at Woolworth’s; teenage girls were pressing their noses to the window of Harry’s House of Gold and Other Fine Jewelry, and they clustered together to read aloud the Valentine’s Day cards at the stationery shop. And on this Valentine’s Day coming, Valentine Kessler would turn sixteen. Sweet Sixteen was a milestone, a
very big deal. The commemorative party was to be a memorable event of the sort that produces a photo album, and a scrapbook, and a bouquet made from the ribbons and bows from the plentiful gifts.

Joanne Clarke found herself browsing at a jewelry store—not at Harry’s, which was too close to the school and therefore risky because suppose someone, another teacher or, worse yet, a student, saw her, so she went to Kretchfeld’s Jewel Box—just to look. It was highly unlikely that John would give her a diamond, an engagement ring, for Valentine’s Day, but it wasn’t impossible. They’d been dating for nearly two full months. Much of their free time was spent together, weekends and dinners during the week, and not that it was anybody’s business but yes, they been doing
it
regularly. To get engaged after seven weeks would be something to tell their children.
We just knew we were right for each other
.

John Wosileski had been thinking along the lines of flowers or a box of chocolates. One or the other until a week or so before the big day itself. Over dinner that she cooked for him—a steak, very fancy, and mashed potatoes which came from flakes in a box but he liked them—at his place—they always went to his place because of her father, who, John had gathered, was sick or maybe crippled and never went out—Joanne swallowed a piece of the steak and then she blushed, which did not become her. “Are you okay?” John feared that perhaps the meat had lodged in her windpipe. She was that kind of red.

“I’m fine,” she said, and then in an offhand manner, she made
mention, “I heard that Paul Martinelli is buying Katie O’Brien an engagement ring. For Valentine’s Day.” Paul Martinelli and Katie O’Brien were also teachers at Canarsie High School—chemistry and Spanish respectively. That Paul and Katie were an item was common knowledge around school, but not so about John and Joanne. Joanne kept it secret because what if it didn’t work out? Then she would be publicly humiliated. John told no one because he lacked the desire to utter the beloved’s name that usually accompanies romance. He wasn’t bubbling over, effusive, giddy from the lightness of love. They were dating. That was it. Besides, whom would he have told?

He didn’t have friends. He didn’t have much of a family. He was alone, and he would always be alone if he didn’t do something radical to alter his destiny. So why not marry Joanne Clarke? He could have done worse. She was nice to him. She baked him brownies and cookies and she did have that knockout body. He liked having sex with her. Not that he had much to compare it to. Two other girls in college, and one wasn’t really a girl but a local woman, in her twenties, and he had to pay her money. So why not marry Joanne Clarke? With both their salaries combined, they could live comfortably. Maybe even get themselves a little house of their own. And someday they could have a family. He could be a father with children who loved him. In that instant, he decided he would do it. He would get Joanne Clarke an engagement ring for Valentine’s Day, and the idea made him smile and he felt warm and kind of fluttery, in a good way.

In this part of Brooklyn, at this time, some of the girls had Sweet Sixteen parties to rival their brothers’ bar mitzvahs. Catered affairs in rented halls; roast-beef dinners and dance bands.

That wasn’t what Miriam had been proposing. “But a party of some sort,” she said.

“Really, Ma. I don’t want to make a big deal of it.”

“But it is a big deal,” Miriam argued. “It’s a very special birthday.” Miriam was devastated. She had ideas, plans, themes. She never dreamed that Valentine would not want a Sweet Sixteen party. With the thought of making the party a luau, she had Sunny Shapiro bring back three dozen paper leis from Hawaii. “But it should be a day to look back on.”

“It will be,” Valentine promised her mother. “I just don’t want a party.”

What was up with this kid? First she wanted almost nothing for Hanukkah. Now she didn’t want a Sweet Sixteen party. Moreover, it had not escaped Miriam’s attention that, as of late, Valentine no longer used the telephone. Up until a few months ago, you’d have thought that the phone was a fifth extremity, that the kid had two legs, two arms, and a phone. Now, when the phone rang, ten times out of ten it was for Miriam. “What’s going on with you and Beth?” Miriam opted for an Ockam’s-razor type of explanation; the least complicated reasoning for Valentine’s solitude and who could fault a mother for grabbing hold for dear life of the easy, the simple, the obvious when dealing with a teenager daughter? “What happened between you two?”

“Nothing happened. She’s got a boyfriend, and she’s with him most of the time.”

Miriam reached over and smoothed her daughter’s hair, a gesture of reassurance, of promise, and Valentine said, “There is something I want for my birthday. I want highlights. You know, some streaks of blond in my hair. Maybe I could have that done for my gift.”

“You have beautiful hair,” Miriam said. “I don’t know why you’d want to do anything to it, but if that’s what you want, then that’s what you want. I’ll make an appointment for you with the girl I go to.” Despite that Miriam spoke the truth in regard to the issue of Valentine’s hair, she was nonetheless pleased by the request. Vanity was normal and Valentine’s desire to put blond streaks in her hair was evidence that fundamentally all was right with the world.

Between the preparations for Valentine’s Day and the big day itself came Ash Wednesday. That day at school, the Catholic kids wore the smudge of ash on their foreheads as if they were marked for something as magnificent as martyrdom. “It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it?” Valentine asked Beth. They were on the lunch line, cafeteria trays sliding along the rail. “What?” Beth reached for a cup of chocolate pudding. “The
schmutz
on their faces? They look dirty.”

“But it’s symbolic or something.” Valentine took two brownies.

“Symbolic of what?” Beth asked, and Valentine said, “How should I know? I just think it looks kind of hot. That’s all.”

“Hot.” Beth shook her head, and concluded that her days as Valentine’s friend were numbered.

Miriam was hosting the game that afternoon, and no sooner did they get set up, before any of them even had a chance to assess the tiles they’d drawn, than Judy Weinstein touched on a raw nerve. “Isn’t Valentine having her Sweet Sixteen? What are you doing about the party?” she asked Miriam.

“Did she like the idea of the luau because I’ve got all kinds of
suggestions for that.” Sunny Shapiro was now the authority on all things tropical.

“Valentine doesn’t want a party,” Miriam said.

“My sister’s kid just turned sixteen, my niece Lisa. She didn’t want a party either.” Edith Zuckerman cuddled with her mink as if the notion of not wanting a party were chilling. “She’s going through that homely stage, the kid. So boys are a sensitive issue right now. No boys. No party,” Edith explained. “Instead, she invited three of her girlfriends for a day in the city. My sister got them tickets for a show, a matinee. They had lunch in a nice restaurant. They spent an hour in Bloomingdale’s. They had a ball. Maybe Valentine would want something like that.”

“Maybe,” Miriam said, but she was not optimistic. “Two Dragon.” Lest The Girls think there was something wrong with her daughter, Miriam let them know, “She wants to have blond streaks done in her hair. So that will be part of her present.”

“Sounds like there’s a boy on the horizon.” Judy Weinstein took three tiles from the center. “Could be she has a date?”

“Five Bam,” said Edith Zuckerman.

At the end of the school day, much to her chagrin, Beth Sandler found Valentine waiting by her locker. Beth didn’t hate Valentine or anything so extreme as that. It’s just that Beth was ultraorthodox when it came to normal, as if only the conventional could be trusted. And also by now she was pretty much best friends with Marcia Finkelstein. But it wouldn’t kill Beth to walk home with Valentine, and so she did, and as long as they were walking home together, they had to talk about something and a preengagement ring was first and foremost and mostly the only thing on Beth’s
mind. Was Joey Rappaport going to give her a preengagement ring as a token of his love on this Valentine’s Day? It had slipped from Beth’s mind entirely that Valentine’s Day would also be Valentine’s sixteenth birthday. “So what do you think?” she asked Valentine. “An opal? Or maybe a garnet?”

“Don’t get your hopes up. You’re not going to get a ring,” Valentine said.

“What makes you so sure?” Beth asked.

“You just got the locket for Hanukkah. You’re rushing things.”

“Well, maybe you’re just jealous,” Beth said, to which Valentine said, “Yeah, maybe I am.”

Beth was flabbergasted by this admission. No one knows what to do with the truth. It ends up being embarrassing, so it’s best to ignore it. “You’re probably right,” Beth said. “About the ring. It’s too soon to get preengaged. Maybe he’ll get me an S-chain bracelet.” With that settled, the girls turned the corner and stood on the sidewalk in front of the Kessler house. “You want to come in for a while?” Valentine asked. “My mother bought a cheesecake yesterday. From Junior’s.”

Because Joey Rappaport was working at his father’s real estate office that afternoon and Marcia Finkelstein had to visit her grandmother in the hospital, Beth didn’t have anything better to do. Besides, who could say no to a slice of cheesecake from Junior’s?

No one could say no to a slice of cheesecake from Junior’s. By the time Valentine and Beth got to it, the cheesecake was no more. Miriam and The Girls had devoured it down to the last morsel. “I’m sorry,” Miriam said. “We couldn’t resist. There’s a Pepperidge Farm cake in the fridge. Five Flower. Angel food. You know, chocolate
chawk-lit,
with the white icing.”

Valentine cut two hefty slices of cake and poured two glasses of
Diet Pepsi. Except for the clinks and tinks of forks against plates and glasses set down after drinking, Beth and Valentine ate and drank beneath the suffocating, dank blanket of silence, all the while Beth wishing she were hanging out with Joey now or Marcia Finkelstein or even to be at home with her mother would be better than this.

John Wosileski hurried along the few blocks to the Church of the Holy Family, which was not his family parish. There he knelt before the priest and received the ashes, not so much in the spirit in which they were intended—
thou art dust and unto dust shalt thou return
—but rather as if they were a public penance. For Lent, he vowed he would give up all thoughts of Valentine Kessler and he would refrain from self-pleasure. He vowed to give up both as if they were unrelated.

Upon leaving the Kesslers’ house, Beth Sandler had to face reality as she saw it: Valentine was simply no longer normal. But really, who could live up to Beth’s rigid standard of what normal should be? The year before she’d cast out Randi Rubin from her crowd for wearing two different-colored socks. One red sock and one black sock. “It wasn’t an accident. Like she got dressed in the dark and didn’t see what she was doing. She did it on purpose. I’m sorry. That is too weird.” Beth justified that banishment, and this one too.
Ashes? Hot? Not normal.

Alone in her bedroom Valentine opened the window all the way, the rush of cold air giving her goose bumps, and lit the cigarette
that earlier in the day she’d bummed from Alison George. “Since when do you smoke?” Alison had asked.

“I just want to try it,” Valentine explained, and when Alison handed her a book of matches too, Valentine said, “Later. I’m going to try it later,” and she slipped the cigarette into her coat pocket.

Leaning out the window so that her bedroom wouldn’t smell from the smoke, Valentine took a few puffs of the cigarette, just enough to produce a quarter of an inch of ash, which she tapped into a saucer. After extinguishing the cigarette and flushing the remains of it down the toilet, she stood before her mirror and wiped a smudge of ash onto her forehead. Valentine Kessler was not the first Jewish girl, nor would she ever be the last, to put a thumbprint of soot on her forehead on Ash Wednesday. This seemingly blasphemous act is usually nothing more than curiosity coupled with the vague eroticism of sackcloth and ashes; an eroticism which seemed to have affected Valentine. Her nipples hardened and from there she engaged in an interlude of touching herself, the climax to which, as it had thus far all along, remained elusive.

She washed her hands and her face before going downstairs, so that the ash on her forehead was yet one more thing her mother did not see.

On his way home from church, John Wosileski boldly entered Harry’s House of Gold and Other Fine Jewelry, which Harry was keeping open until nine every night during the week before Valentine’s Day, which was his busiest week of the year. John stood at the showcase counter while Harry, to best contrast the diamond’s sparkle, placed a ring on a black velvet pad. “Will you look at that,”

Harry said. “Like a star in the night sky.” If truth be told, Harry’s stones were flawed but so what because no one in this part of Brooklyn was buying a top quality rock anyway. Even this one he was showing, a quarter of a carat with more imperfections than man himself, would be out of this
schlemiel’s
price range.