An Almost Perfect Moment (16 page)

V
alentine took the chair beside Miss Marks, and Dr. Stern asked her, “Valentine, do you have a steady boyfriend?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t have a boyfriend. Not steady or otherwise.” Valentine was not making Dr. Stern’s job any easier here.

Dr. Stern took a deep breath to fortify herself against the hysteria that dollars-to-donuts would ensue upon breaking the news to a sixteen-year-old virgin that, against all odds, she was nearly four months pregnant. It was at times like this that Dr. Stern wished she’d listened to her mother and gone to law school. “Medicine will eat you alive or it will turn your heart into a pebble,” her mother had said. “It’s no job for a woman.” Not yet pebble-hearted, Dr. Stern concluded that it was kindest in the end to be swift. “Valentine,” she said, “you’re pregnant,” and she moved the box of Kleenex so that tissues were handy to the girl.

Miss Marks put her arm around Valentine, but Valentine took
the news better than the teacher and the doctor had anticipated. Whatever her distress, it was absent blood and thunder. She reached for a tissue and blew her nose, which honked, and then she smiled; a smile that was positively serene, as if her world were now bathed in white light, illuminating all of which, heretofore, had bewildered her. As if there were shape to what had been formless, order to the chaos, rhyme to the reason, God’s plan revealed.
Arrrre Vey Maaaaa-reeee-er
.

Or the other possibility: She was in a kind of shock, denial, unable to face the fact, she simply refused to comprehend what was said. Perhaps Valentine had retreated behind some bubble that only looked like bliss.

Well, whatever it was, Valentine was going to have to snap out of it, because decisions had to be made and they had to be made fast because already Valentine had entered her second trimester. Having been a powerful advocate for legal and therefore safe abortion, Dr. Stern said a quick and silent prayer of thanks to the Supreme Court for its wisdom in regard to
Roe
v.
Wade
and then said to Valentine, “We’re going to have to schedule the abortion for as soon as possible.”

“Abortion?” Valentine shook her pretty head. “No. I can’t do that.”

Miss Marks and Dr. Stern both tried to reason with the girl,
Think of your future. You’re throwing your life away. You’re so young. What about college? This is going to kill your mother,
to no avail.

The doctor and the teacher, two women who had marched and demonstrated and signed petitions to help girls like Valentine, they were getting nowhere with her.

Miss Marks tried another route. “And what about the boy, the
father of this baby? Is he ready for this?”—to which Valentine responded, “There is no boy.”

“There is no boy? There has be a boy, Valentine,” Dr. Stern said.

Valentine shook her head. “There is no boy,” she repeated. It was certainly possible that she was telling the truth as she knew it. It was possible that all memory of the seedy encounter had been eradicated, that a reclamation of innocence had taken root. It was possible because anything is possible.

“Come on, Valentine.” Miss Marks stood up. “I’ll drive you home.”

Home from her game, Miriam was three dollars poorer—Edith Zuckerman had cleaned up—but none the wiser when she called up the stairs for Valentine. “Valentine,” she called, but got no response. “Valentine?” she called again, louder. “Are you here? Valentine?”

Miriam looked at the watch on her wrist. Just after five on a glorious Friday afternoon in springtime, where could she be? Out? Out with friends perhaps for the first time since her sixteenth birthday, and whatever happened that night, Miriam had a hunch it wasn’t what Valentine had wished for. Not when she came home early and went straight to bed. What had happened that Valentine should suddenly become a loner? This was a question that Miriam still refused to address, and now, it seemed, she wouldn’t have to. Not when she was convinced that Valentine was out, with friends.

Mothers have an limitless capacity to delude themselves where their children are concerned.

Maybe for dinner a nice chicken cutlet, dipped in flour and egg, then fried in butter, that sounded good to Miriam, with a salad and
rice. She got out the necessary ingredients and was whisking the eggs in the bowl when Valentine came home and into the kitchen, kissing her mother on the cheek. Then she, Valentine, took Miriam by the arm and led her to the table. “Sit down, Ma. I’ve got to tell you something.”

It was then that Miriam saw Valentine’s face, flushed, her cheeks pink as carnations, and she wasn’t wearing a drop of makeup. And her eyes, there was something about Valentine’s eyes, as if her eyes had taken on the properties of cut glass, like blue topaz, as if they gave off beams of radiance sweeping like searchlights across the darkness.

“Ma,” Valentine said, “I’m going to have a baby,” and before Valentine could say another word, Miriam let go with a piercing lament, a howling, an ululation, the sound of the inconsolable.

Years later, when this story had become something of an urban legend, it was said that Miriam’s cry echoed throughout Canarsie, from one house to the next, like the call to prayer. This, of course, was hyperbolic, to say the least. No one but Valentine heard Miriam’s wail; God’s ears must have been plugged up with wax.

John Wosileski did not want to break the news to his mother, but better she should hear it from him than from a stranger. “Ma, listen to me, okay. These are worthless.” He slapped the book of Plaid Stamps against the edge of the table.

His mother reached over and snatched the book back, holding it to her bosom, such as she had one, all skin and bone, she was. “No, you’re wrong,” she said. “You can trade them in for beautiful things, John.”

“Not anymore, Ma. They stopped that a couple of years ago. It
was in all the newspapers. They gave it up.” The A&P no longer issued Plaid Stamps. The redemption centers had closed up shop. There would be no beautiful things for Mrs. Wosileski, and now she understood this. What a simpleton she was to imagine otherwise, and having pushed herself up from the table, she turned her back on her son and asked, “You’ll stay for fish?”

Despite Vatican II and the concessions made to the modern age by the Second Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church, the Wosileskis continued to have fish for Friday dinner. Partly this was out of habit and partly because Mrs. Wosileski couldn’t quite believe that all of a sudden out of nowhere God had changed His mind. No matter that the pope said it was now okay to have meat on Fridays, the Wosileskis had fish. No. God never changed His mind. Mrs. Wosileski knew that because she was the living proof.

Once before, Valentine had witnessed her mother in such a state, but because she was only a year old, she couldn’t have remembered how Miriam had collapsed when Ronald left her. But even if Valentine had remembered, that was a long time ago. Miriam was a younger woman then and a good sixty-seven pounds lighter. Now she was heaving and gasping and snorting for breath and it looked as if Miriam were going to give out and expire like a punctured beach ball.

Having no experience with emergencies, Valentine did the sensible thing. She ran from her house to the Sabatinis’ house, where she beat her fists against their door.

One look at Valentine Kessler and Angela Sabatini didn’t so much as take the time to ask what was wrong. She raced across the lawn, Valentine at her heels, and in the Kesslers’ kitchen she found
Miriam on the floor, seemingly passed out in a dead faint or well and truly dead itself. Angela Sabatini—bless her—kept cool, as if she were a professional in crisis management. After checking for a pulse and—thank you, God—finding one, she called for an ambulance and then made a cold compress with ice and a dish towel, which she held to Miriam’s forehead while Valentine went outside and stood on the front step like a beacon.

The wail of the ambulance siren was a call to the neighbors to evacuate their houses. Up from their dinner tables, away from the evening news, homework abandoned, every man, woman, and child on the block swarmed onto the street, where they congregated in front of the Kesslers’ house.
What happened? What happened?
They asked one another over and over
what happened?
but no one had any answers. Having left a corned beef simmering on the stove, Judy Weinstein broke through the crowd and rushed up the walkway to Valentine, grabbing the girl by her shoulders. “Your mother? Is your mother okay?” Then, not waiting for an answer, Judy entered the Kessler house to find the two medics crouched on either side of Miriam, supporting her as she sat on the floor with her head lowered between her legs. Angela Sabatini was making a pot of coffee. “What happened?” Judy asked, and one of medics said, “A distress reduced the blood flow to the brain causing aggravated syncope.”

“She fainted,” his partner clarified.

“A distress?” Judy asked. “What distress? Is she going to be okay?”

The first medic, the officious one, who clearly fancied himself some kind of Dr. Kildare, said, “Impact can cause contusions of the brain.”

Judy looked to the second medic, the one who wasn’t a
schmuck
. He shifted Miriam’s weight nearer to his shoulder to relieve an
ache in his arm and said, “The only danger with fainting is if you hit your head in the fall, but this one, she went down like a pillow. She’s fine.”

“I’m fine.” Miriam spoke in a clear voice, as if nothing had happened. “Let me up. I’m fine,” and the two men helped Miriam to her feet, and then into a chair at the kitchen table. Angela Sabatini poured everyone, except for Miriam, a cup of coffee. For Miriam she poured a little sherry from a bottle she found in the cabinet, which smelled like medicine and not anything good like
grappa.

Before they left, the medics took Miriam’s blood pressure and listened to her heart, pronounced her fit as a fiddle, and told her to take it easy. Outside, they found Valentine standing just as before. “Your mother is fine. She fainted, is all. You got nothing to be afraid of,” the second medic said. The other one, the blowhard, made his way through the throng of neighbors waiting. “Coming through,” he said. “Medical personnel coming through.” His partner followed, assuring everyone that Miriam was not dead, or even a little bit sick. “She fainted,” he told them. “That’s all. She fainted.”

Fainting wasn’t very interesting, and it was dinnertime, so the crowd broke apart. Everyone went back inside their houses. Everyone, that is, except for Angela Sabatini and Judy Weinstein, who had forsaken her own Shabbes dinner, having called home to tell her daughter to light the candles in her stead, which was perfectly acceptable, religiously speaking, because it was the Jewish way to choose life over law. Miriam needed her now, and Judy Weinstein embraced her friend.

Miriam cried on Judy’s shoulder, the gold lamé chafing against her cheek.

The hum of uneasiness was felt more than heard. John Wosileski watched his mother move her food around on her plate, but she brought none of it to her mouth. His father, on the other hand, was shoveling it in, assuring a reserve of energy for later. They, his brethern at the Polish American Club, were counting on him, their star. To have bowled two perfect games made Pete Wosileski a legend. On this night, his team was up against the Italians of Bay Ridge. Mr. Wosileski had tried to interest John in the sport, but John never took to the dank-smelling lanes, to the floors sticky with spilled beer, to the boisterous men slapping one another on the back. Bowling was not his game, although he might have made more of an effort to like it if he’d known that his father had once hoped they’d join the father-son league. But it wasn’t his father’s way to ask, and the best John could do now was to feign interest. “So, you think your team will win tonight?”

“I don’t know,” his father said. “Those wops are good.” Then Mr. Wosileski thumped his fist against the center of his chest and belched. His wife got up to clear away his plate while he went to put on his bowling shirt.

The conversation at Phyllis Marks’s dinner table was animated. Neither Danny, her fiancé of four years five months and holding (so she wasn’t a lesbian, after all), nor the two friends they had over for Chinese takeout, could believe it. “The poor fucking kid,” Danny said. “What shitty luck.”

“Knocked up without any of the fun.” Hal talked with egg roll in his mouth. Hal Wortsberg was Danny’s fellow real-estate salesman at DelMore Properties, and because he was unattached, Phyllis had insisted that she and Danny fix him up with one of Phyllis’s single
girlfriends, of which there were many. So Danny invited Hal and Phyllis invited Tina for what was supposed to be a home-cooked meal (the idea being to show Hal what he was missing), but after such a day, Phyllis couldn’t manage anything more than ordering in.

When the food arrived, Tina followed Phyllis into the kitchen to help her carry out drinks and plates and utensils, and as Phyllis reached into the cabinet for glasses, Tina said, “I thought you said he
owned
the real-estate company. I didn’t know he just worked there.”

At the same time, in the living room, Hal was telling Danny, “She’s flat as a ironing board. I like them big.” Hal cupped his hands in front of his chest. “Like melons.”

While Danny didn’t give a damn if Tina and Hal clicked or not, Phyllis had been hoping they would fall for each other because if they were to get married, that might light a fire under Danny. As Mrs. Marks, Phyllis’s mother, was fond of saying over and over again, “It’s not natural to have such a long engagement. I think he’s playing you. He should, you’ll pardon the expression, shit or get off the pot.” But now, on the heels of this experience with Valentine, it wasn’t that Phyllis didn’t care if Hal liked Tina and
vice versa
. Rather, she understood that she had no say, no place, in the determination of the fates of others, and that included Danny. For Phyllis Marks, the question remained open only as to whether she had any say in her own fate or not.