An Almost Perfect Moment (17 page)

Before going home, Angela Sabatini paused on the front step alongside Valentine. Mrs. Sabatini touched the girl lightly on the arm. “Valentine,” she said, “I’ve been married for fourteen years and four months. My Joey is fourteen years old on the nose.” She made a face which said,
What are you gonna do?
“It might seem like the
end of the world, but it’s not.” Angela Sabatini derived no satisfaction from the realization of her prediction that
that Kessler kid is going to wind up in trouble with a capital T
had come to pass. She would not indulge in the pleasure of
I told you so. Didn’t I say that would happen? Haven’t I been saying so for years?
“It’ll work out,” Angela Sabatini said, and when Valentine turned so that she was looking directly at Mrs. Sabatini, Angela experienced something like déjà vu or whatever it’s called when someone affects you for no reason at all. Angela Sabatini was haunted by a recognition of love for this girl. Her heart burned with love, she was awash in love as if love were water and she were bobbing like a rubber ball in a tub, but the very strangest part of loving her was that she did not want to comfort Valentine; rather, she wanted Valentine to offer
her
comfort, as if it would be something significant if this teenager would hold Angela Sabatini’s hand or kiss her brow.

At a loss, Angela Sabatini said to Valentine, “Now go inside. Your mother needs you.”

In Joanne Clarke’s kitchen, pandemonium reigned. For no reason at all, or no reason that Joanne could ascertain, her father, fresh from defecating on the linoleum at the foot of the refrigerator, went wild-eyed as if something like fury had erupted inside of him. He proceeded to smash dishes on the floor, to fling pots and pans against the wall like a man possessed by a demon or by hatred. Joanne barricaded herself in her bedroom, where she called for emergency services.

The police arrived along with the paramedics to find her father, wearing only his pajama top, hurling fruit, apples mostly, although he did fling a pear and two bananas, at the stove.

“He’s senile,” she said. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she explained to the policemen. One paramedic held her father down, one shot him up with Haldol, and then they strapped him, naked from the waist down, onto a gurney to take him to the hospital.

While her father was being loaded into the back of the ambulance, like a crate onto a truck, Joanne came racing out the door from her building and along the path to where the ambulance was parked. “Wait,” she called out. “Wait a minute.” When she got to paramedics, she handed one of them her father’s suitcase, the suitcase she’d packed weeks before and had waiting. “You might as well take this,” she said. “He’s not coming back.”

Joanne watched as the ambulance pulled away until it was no longer in her line of vision, and the wail of the siren was a distant hum in her memory. She turned to go back inside, back inside to the mess that would have to get cleaned up, but then changed her mind. She stayed where she was, on the sidewalk, long after the streetlamps lit.

It was dark and Valentine was still outside on the front step. From there, she looked up as if she were searching for stars, but the thing about living in Brooklyn, you almost never see stars in the sky.

T
he way Adam begat Seth and Seth begat Enos and Enos begat Cainan and Cainan begat Mahalaleel and Mahalaleel begat Jared and Jared begat Methuselah and Methuselah begat Lamech and Lamech begat Noah and Noah beat Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and the next thing you know there are a billion people in China, this was how the word spread. Come midmorning Monday, there wasn’t one person at Canarsie High who hadn’t heard the big news: Valentine Kessler—get this—was pregnant.

The students celebrated that on this day the dulling sameness was enlivened by scandal. A delectable piece of gossip is the elixir of life, and all of them—students and faculty alike—were drunk on it. What a lark! Oh, the rumor about her being a virgin did float, but like dust motes, insubstantial and without foundation, it was brushed aside. No one really believed such a story, and speculation as to who the father might be was irresistible.
A college boy? Someone from the city? Do you think maybe she was raped? I heard it was some
body famous? Somebody famous? Where would she meet a celebrity? Hey, has anyone seen Vincent Caputo today?

Joanne Clarke was humming, literally humming, audibly humming
Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day,
while she wrote on the blackboard in capital letters:
THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM
, underlining it twice. The reproductive system was, as far as Joanne Clarke was concerned, the most worrisome installment of the biology curriculum. She’d saved it for the end in the hopes that they wouldn’t have time for it. Not that detailing the excretory system for high-school students was a bowl of cherries, but it was the reproductive system that contained the parts most noxious. It wasn’t that Miss Clarke was so much of a prude. Rather she feared association; that to stand before her class and articulate words such as
mons pubis
and
labia majora
and
vaginal orifice
would be to draw attention to her own
mons pubis, labia majora,
and vaginal orifice, which led to the fear that since she was the center of attention, her own sexual parts would be deemed lacking.

Now it was the dawn of a new era. The reproductive system was her friend, having done Joanne a favor, offering her this choice opportunity to indulge the mean and petty parts of her nature. Irrational though it may have been, she believed that girls like Valentine Kessler—or rather the kind of girl she assumed Valentine to be—pretty girls, confident girls, popular girls, snotty stuck-up bitches—somehow got Joanne Clarke’s share of happiness. As if there were a quantifiable amount of it, and that there simply was none left when she got to the front of the line because they got there first. Furthering this misconception, she expected to some
how profit from Valentine’s reversal of fortune, as if happiness could be handed over like canned goods.

Miriam Kessler was on the phone with Dr. Stern, on the receiving end of this loony story about her daughter being a pregnant virgin. “How could that be?” she asked. “Whoever heard of such a thing?”

“Granted,” the doctor said, “it’s rare. And this is the first time I’ve encountered it personally, but it does happen.” Dr. Stern explained to Miriam how it happened that while the penis did not penetrate the vagina, the ejaculate got close enough. Making a mad dash for the pool, some sperm then swam like Mark Spitz, that handsome Jewish boy who won seven gold medals in aquatic sports at the 1972 Olympics. Against all odds, one sperm in a moment of triumph and jubilation, crossed the finish line. “All it takes is one,” Dr. Stern said.

“Yeah, tell me about it.” Miriam knew all too well how it takes but one slippery sperm to make a baby. What she heretofore didn’t know was the lengths to which this sperm would go to get there. “The women in my family,” Miriam said, “we’re very fertile.”

As with all generalities, there is always an exception. John Wosileski, for example, was not the least bit titillated by the news of Valentine Kessler’s condition. Nor did he take satisfaction in thinking he was right all along, that there was a boyfriend in the picture, that he’d had a snowball’s chance in a furnace at ever winning her affections. Why she had come to him on that February afternoon was, and would forever be, a mystery. All that remained
for him of that day was the irrevocable shame of it, and, of course, the despair which followed.

Another person not exactly overjoyed with the day’s tidings was Mr. Fischel. As the principal of Canarsie High School, he now had to deal with this girl. Mr. Fischel hated dealing with students; he despised the little shits. And no doubt this girl was going to blubber and cry and he was going to have to pretend that he gave a fuck about what happened to her. Two years and a few weeks more of this pimple-ridden gulag and he’d be eligible for his pension. Good-bye, Canarsie High.
Adios
.
Au revoir
, and a Bronx cheer to all that. Well, at least now he had Mrs. Landau to help him with this mess. She could comfort the girl. Isn’t that what guidance counselors were for? What the hell else did they do?

Mrs. Landau, the overworked and underappreciated guidance counselor, was at her desk acquainting herself with Valentine Kessler’s records. She carefully read over files that followed Valentine from kindergarten—
well behaved, enjoys the company of other children but sometimes drifts off from play to stare out the window; physical coordination below average; very good at finger painting
—to this point: a transcript of all A’s and B’s. All Mrs. Landau could think was,
What a shame,
a nice kid who never caused a minute’s trouble and here she is
in trouble
in the lousiest sense. A seemingly bright future cut off at the knees.

Closing the folder, Mrs. Landau tucked it under her arm and walked down the hall to the principal’s office, where he gestured
for her to sit on a green Naugahyde chair, which Mrs. Landau admitted did look like genuine leather.

Mr. Fischel flicked the switch to the public-address system, and for the entire school to hear, he said, “Valentine Kessler, please report to the principal’s office.” And just in case he hadn’t been clear, he repeated the message. “Valentine Kessler, please report to the principal’s office immediately.”

Mrs. Landau frowned.
Really, couldn’t someone simply have collected the girl from her class rather than call further attention to her in front of the entire school?

And, make no mistake about it: attention was called. In each and every classroom, looks were exchanged. Elbows jutted out, making contact with rib cages at the next desk over. Giggles erupted. Teachers demanded everyone settle down. “All right. All right. Enough of that. Back to work,” they said, practically in unison.

In the midst of this seismic ripple, Valentine Kessler stood up from her desk and gathered her books. To the puzzlement and to the defeated expectations of her classmates and particularly dissatisfying to Miss Clarke, whose class she happened to be in then, Valentine did not look near to tears. Her gaze did not reflect her reduced circumstances. Rather she appeared almost haughty, as if she were being summoned to the principal’s office to receive an award of honor as opposed to the mark of disgrace.

The calm that Valentine exuded also rattled the principal and the guidance counselor. Both of them had expected, indeed had braced themselves for, sniveling and sobbing and recriminations, but here she was as calm as if the Buddha had returned in the guise of a slim, very pretty girl instead of a fat bald man. It appeared as if Valentine had achieved
the peace that passeth all understanding
.

Even when asked about the boy who played some part in her predicament, Valentine did nothing but shake her head. Well, if she didn’t want to say who put the bun in the oven, that was her business. The school’s business was simply to get her the hell out of there, out of sight, and to make arrangements for her to be educated at home. In these enlightened times, Valentine would keep up with her schoolwork from the comfort and privacy of her mother’s house. Gone was the era when pregnant teens were shipped off to homes for unwed mothers, which, rumor had it, were as warm and cozy as a Dickensian orphanage. Tutors would come to Valentine three times a week, work would be dropped off, and picked up when done, and if she chose to, she could, at any point, take the high-school equivalency exam. What she could not do was attend classes or show her pregnant self anywhere on school property.

“I hope that you understand that you are not being punished,” Mrs. Landau explained. Her heart went out to this girl.

“It’s just that you can’t be here,” Mr. Fischel chimed in. “It’s disruptive to the others.” While there wasn’t one communist hair on Mr Fischel’s head, he nonetheless adhered to the Marxist doctrine of sacrificing the individual for the common good.

Valentine seemed to grasp the reality of this situation because the only question she asked was, “Can I go home now?”

“Yes, certainly,” Mr. Fischel said. “But your mother is going to have to come get you, and she’ll have to sign some papers. We’ll need her written consent before we can release you.”

Unbeknownst to Miriam, the telephone was ringing. She didn’t hear it because she was in the bathroom, running the water for her
tub. Miriam took baths as opposed to showers in order to preserve her hairdo, to keep it dry and intact. The kids, with their stick-straight hair, they could take showers. After slipping off her housecoat and gingerly pulling her nightgown up over her head—careful of the hair—Miriam caught sight of her naked self in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. Given the parameters of the bathroom, this glimpse was not easily avoided, but usually Miriam turned away from her reflection before it registered. On this morning, however, she faced it, and Miriam’s body unclothed was not a pretty sight, but it was an honest sight. Miriam zeroed in on her breasts; these same breasts that were like a central axis, attracting Ronald Kessler the way liquid is pulled in spirally. Well, no. Not these same breasts. The breasts that Ronald frolicked with were full, and although the laws of gravity dictated that the sheer heft of them precluded acclivity, they were firm. Now they were soft and pendulous and hung down to her waist. And the rest of her was no prize package either. Skin the texture of cottage cheese, large curd, and so much of it.

Miriam turned off the faucet, and easing her bulk into the tub, in a demonstration of Archimedes’ principle, water equal to her weight was displaced. Some of the displaced water sloshed over the rim and onto the floor. Miriam stretched her legs out in front of her and leaned back, her head resting on the lip of the tub as if it were a pillow. Miriam was a firm believer in the therapeutic properties of a bath, but no sooner did she close her eyes than did the phone ring again. This time she heard it. As a mother, there was no way she could not answer a ringing telephone. Suppose, God forbid, something had happened to Valentine, something worse than what had already happened to her, and Miriam didn’t answer the
call. So dripping wet and holding a towel over her private parts—she’d had enough of her own nudity for one day—Miriam picked up the extension phone in her bedroom.

“Mrs. Kessler? This is Paul Fischel, the principal at Canarsie High School.”

“What? What happened? Is Valentine hurt?”

“She’s fine. Everything is fine. She’s sitting right here. But I do need you to come in. We’ve worked out an arrangement, given her circumstances, pending your approval. I’d like to go over it with you.” Mr. Fischel navigated carefully, lest there be a lawsuit here of some kind. It wasn’t unheard of, parents suing the schools over all kinds of screwy issues: the big stupid kid is ineligible for football because he’s failing every subject and the parents go to court, the psycho kid is expelled for pulling a knife on a teacher and the parents call their lawyer, budget cuts result in the elimination of art class and the artsy-fartsy parents claim their kids are being denied their civil rights to express themselves. It wasn’t so paranoid that Mr. Fishel should be worrying about covering his ass when dealing with a delicate issue such as this one.

“I’ll be there within the hour,” Miriam told him, and when Mr. Fishel hung up, he told Valentine to go wait in the nurse’s office, as if being pregnant were the same as being sick. “We’ll send for you when your mother gets here.”

Sunny Shapiro and Edith Zuckerman both prided themselves on their unerring punctuality. You could set your watch by those two, which was why, coming from opposite ends of East Ninety-fourth Street, they converged at Judy Weinstein’s doorway on the dot of noon.

Sunny rapped on the door to alert Judy of their arrival, and the two women stepped inside just as Judy emerged from the kitchen, the telephone at her ear and her index finger signaling for quiet at her mouth. Then to whoever was on the phone, she said, “So you’ll call if you need anything. Promise me that.”

As if there were some reward—a badge of goodness perhaps—for proximity to misery, Judy took on a proprietary tone when she told her other girlfriends, “That was Miriam. She can’t make it.” This was disheartening news in and of itself because without the fourth, there’d be no game. Without the game, their togetherness lacked structure, as if trying to hang your hat not on a rack, but on Jell-O, resulting in a disconnected moment, but Judy rallied and saved the day. “Come,” she said. “We’ll sit in the kitchen and talk.”

Judy set out cups and saucers and cake plates, which were bone china with gold edging. The flatware was gold toned. Sunny never understood why Judy used such elegant service for every day, but that was Judy Weinstein for you; a woman who could not bear life without beauty.

While waiting for the coffee to percolate, Judy explained why Miriam wouldn’t be joining them. “The principal from the school called her. She has to go over there. They’re making arrangements for Valentine.”

“Arrangements?” Edith asked. “What kind of arrangements?”

“For her to finish up school at home. Really, it’s better this way. It’s no good for the kid to be in school in her situation.”