Because heretofore, in regard to the baby, Valentine had expressed exactly zero number of preferences whatsoever, Miriam didn’t want to refuse her the one request. Moreover, Miriam couldn’t put her finger on any good reason to oppose the cradle. In her grandmother’s day, they feared keeping the baby so near to the ground because of rats, but a rat in Miriam Kessler’s house? Bite your tongue.
Despite her misgivings, whatever they were, Miriam relented. “Okay, okay, but we have to get a crib too.”
And when the bough breaks…
On this last day of the week of his father’s death, John was having lunch with his mother. A dutiful son because to eat by yourself is to dine on grief. There is no avoiding loneliness at mealtime. Not even watching television or reading the newspaper can alleviate the excruciating isolation of breaking bread alone. So even though it was for her sake, it was kind of nice, having lunch with his mother, even though you could never describe her as a good companion.
Mrs. Wosileski dished out pork chops with applesauce and roasted potatoes. Three chops for him and one for her. For herself, she took only a forkful of potatoes.
She eats like a bird,
he thought, although, in fact, that simile was inaccurate. Proportionately speaking, birds are big eaters.
She looks like a bird too. Like a sparrow caught in a downpour.
That simile was accurate. Mrs. Wosileski looked as if she were perpetually shivering. “Ma,” John said. “You really don’t have to make a big meal like this. Especially in this heat.”
Although he would eat it to please his mother, ever since working at the butcher shop, John had lost his taste for meat.
“Your father insisted on a hot lunch.”
John’s father never took a sandwich to work with him or grabbed a burger with the guys. Every day at twelve-thirty, he came home for lunch, which was every bit of a meal as dinner was, and watch out if the lunch wasn’t ready the minute he walked in the door. If a meal—lunch, dinner, and even breakfast—were not to John’s father’s liking, or if the beer he drank with dinner wasn’t sufficiently cold, John’s mother was made to suffer. Yet, as little sense as it made to John, it seemed that now with each day passing, his mother grew sadder and sadder.
Often, in the past, Mrs. Wosileski had imagined her husband’s death, and how it would be after he was gone, but the trouble with fantasies is that they are not bound by the practicalities of how things are. For example, Mrs. Wosileski imagined that being sprung from the tyranny of her husband would somehow include also being sprung from their sad apartment, from the darkness of the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn, from Brooklyn altogether. Her husband’s death, she thought, would have relieved her of the burden of herself. Mrs. Wosileski had spun elaborate fantasies about living in a little house in the country where she could grow vegetables and flowers, where every day the sun would shine, where she would be the sort of woman who wore a straw hat and kept cats. What John took to be his mother mourning his father was really her coming to grips with the fact that the reality of any situation was bound to be a disappointment.
At the Baskin-Robbins where they stood on line to get themselves each a double-scoop cone of Rocky Road, Marcia Finkelstein elbowed Beth Sandler and said, “Quick. Look. Over there. By the Florsheim. Do you see who I see?”
Beth craned her neck and she too spotted the biology teacher, who was looking at the window display of shoes, sensible shoes. “Ew,” Beth said. “I hated her. Didn’t you hate her? And that skin on her. Gross.”
“Let’s follow her.” Marcia pulled Beth from the line. “Let’s see what queer stuff she buys.”
“But what about our ice cream? Two scoops of Rocky Road,” Beth reminded her friend.
“Later,” Marcia said, and eight paces behind Joanne Clarke, they paused when she paused again, this time at Pet World.
While John had a second cup of coffee, his mother sorted the laundry. Whites in one pile, darks in another. When she was done sorting, she said to him, “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” and she carried the two baskets down five flights of stairs and three blocks to the Laundromat, which had to be like a sauna bath on a day like this, with all those dryers going at once.
It was then that John had an epiphany of sorts, a thought which was pure of heart. His original intent, in regard to the extra money earned and saved this summer, was to blow it on skiing. Now skiing seemed irrelevant to him. Perhaps ski season was simply too far off in the future to contemplate for real. Can a person rightly imagine crisp white snow while suffocating in a Brooklyn apartment in July? Or perhaps, although he never would have considered it himself, it was possible that Valentine took from him the one pure joy
he knew. But whatever the reason, forsaking the slopes did not seem like much of a sacrifice. Not in the face of goodness. He would use the money to buy his mother a washing machine and dryer. A washing machine and dryer all in one unit and have it installed in the kitchen. It was the least he could do for her, for this woman who gave him life, this mother of his, whom, try as he might, he just could not manage to love.
As she watched a pile of puppies cavort in the pet-store window, Joanne Clarke’s heart tugged at her sleeve. A longing for something to love.
A puppy or a kitten
. If only that nosy nurse hadn’t suggested as much; Joanne hated to prove her right.
A puppy or a kitten
. Well, a puppy was out of the question. Dogs require time and effort, otherwise they’ll poop all over the floor, and Joanne was done cleaning up the excrement of others. And kittens, cats, scratch the furniture, and also Joanne wasn’t entirely unaware of the association between a single woman with a cat and the resignation to the fact that there never will be a man in her life. But she could get some other type of pet. Fish, maybe. A tank with brightly colored gravel and an oxygen pump in the guise of a little plastic deep-sea diver. Tropical fish in startling shades of blue darting out from behind plastic foliage to greet her when she came home from work might bring some warmth to her life. Or an iguana. As long as she would get neither a puppy nor a kitten, then Joanne was able to separate the nurse’s solicitous, and, in Joanne’s book, patronizing suggestion from her current decision. Entirely unrelated. An iguana was nothing like a puppy.
Birds were nothing like puppies and kittens either. A wholly other species of being. Joanne stood before a large cage bustling
with parakeets. Blues ones and green ones hopping and chirping and fussing about. Joanne remembered hearing that parakeets can learn to talk, although not as eloquently as their grander relation, the parrot.
That could be something to have, a talking bird, a bird that returned your greeting, a bird that could express affection in English, a bird that could ask for a cracker
ad infinitum
; it could be something with enormous potential to get on her nerves.
Joanne was set to give up on the birds, to return to the idea of fish, when a flutter of commotion erupted in the parakeet cage. Squawking and wings flapping, and as if playing a game of musical chairs, they all shifted position, hopping from one perch to another. When the dust settled, Joanne noticed what she had not noticed before: a pair of canaries in the cage. Or at least she thought they were canaries. Yellow and pinkish orange, and one of them looked right at her while the other trilled a lovely little song. Joanne was smitten. She wanted those birds. To have and to hold for her very own.
Locating an employee, a young man with jug ears who was taking note of the curves of the behinds of two teenage girls who had abruptly turned their backs to him, Joanne Clarke interrupted his appreciation to ask, “The pair of canaries, how much are they?”
“Canaries?” he said. “We don’t carry canaries. Just parakeets.”
“You are mistaken,” Joanne said. “There are two canaries in with the parakeets.”
“Maybe you saw yellow parakeets. They come in yellow.”
“Why don’t you come look for yourself,” Joanne said, and so he did.
“Well”—he shook his head—“I’ll be damned. You’re right. Those are canaries.”
“I know they’re canaries. What I want to know from you is how much do they cost?”
The jug-earred man scratched his head. He wasn’t sure what they cost because Pet World didn’t carry canaries.
“How about this?” Joanne suggested. “How about you sell me those two yellow parakeets, the funny-looking ones?”
And so a deal was struck. Along with the two funny-looking yellow parakeets, Joanne chose a cage, a cover for the cage, a box of birdseed, and a little plastic ball with a bell inside.
She named the birds: The Captain and Tennille, which she thought to be the opposite of what an old-maid schoolteacher would do. Naming her birds for the singing sensation with the hit record “Love Will Keep Us Together,” she’d show
them
how with-it she could be, except for the fact that there were no
them
to show.
Whatever fun this was supposed to be was long over, and Beth Sandler asked Marcia Finkelstein for the third time in half as many minutes, “Can we please go now? She’s buying birds. Big frigging deal.” Their former biology teacher was standing on line behind a woman who was buying a case of Puppy Chow and a book titled
Your Shih Tzu and You
.
“Okay,” Marcia acquiesced, finally. “Let’s go to Macy’s. I want to try on blue jeans.”
“What about our ice cream?” Beth had yet to give up on two scoops of Rocky Road.
“Forget the ice cream. I want to get new jeans. Sassoon’s.”
Beth looked back at Miss Clarke and her birdcage and she was struck with a lonely feeling. As much as Beth hated to admit it, sometimes she missed Valentine. Marcia Finkelstein was so bossy. Valentine was so agreeable.
“No offense, Beth,” Marcia felt compelled to add. “But you don’t need any ice cream.”
Beth also missed Valentine because sometimes Marcia Finkelstein could be such a frigging bitch.
John Wosileski wound his way through the home-appliance section of Sears, past refrigerators and dishwashers and convection ovens until he got to the washing machines. There he looked at the prices.
A salesman was by his side in no time flat, singing the praises of a Kenmore washer-dryer unit. “A solid machine,” the salesman said. This one wasn’t the top of the line, but it was
a solid machine that will last practically a lifetime
. The top of the line would have been extravagant. Even the salesman agreed. “That’s for your big families,” he said. “People who do three, four loads a week.” The machine came in white, copper, and avocado green. “If you take the green,” the salesman said, “I can shave a few bucks off the price.”
Avocado green it was, and the salesman worked out payment on the installment plan because this was in a time before every Tom, Dick, and Harry had a credit card.
It was not true altruism—giving anonymously and of course without any reward, including lunch or the pleasure of giving—but it was near to what Maimonides prescribed, and buying his mother
a washer-dryer made John Wosileski feel good about himself, which was something.
Perhaps it was the light in her apartment, but when Joanne got them home, The Captain and Tennille—the canaries—no longer looked peach-colored. Rather, they were just yellow. Plain yellow canaries. Well, no matter. They were her babies. “Aren’t you my babies?” she cooed at the birds, although, if truth be told, her heart wasn’t in it. They were nowhere near as pretty as she’d thought them to be in the store. Then she wondered if her parents had thought the same thing about her.
Miriam was handy with a screwdriver. Of course she had to be, all those years without a man in the house. Alone, she assembled the crib, and had stepped back to admire the job well done when Valentine called from the living room, “Ma! Where are you?”
“Here,” Miriam called back. “In the baby’s room.”
The baby’s room
, Miriam repeated to herself, as if she depended on litany to believe,
We’re having a baby, and this is the baby’s room
. The walls and ceiling were painted like the sky, not like the real sky which was capable of turning gray or even black. This was a happy sky with a big yellow sun and a few fluffy white clouds and, just as Miriam had imagined it, a rainbow across one wall.
Valentine joined her mother. Of the crib, she said, “It looks good,” but she sat beside the cradle. “When the baby gets delivered,” she said,
when the baby gets delivered
as if the baby were a package to be delivered by the United Parcel Service, “it has to
sleep here, in this.” Valentine rocked the cradle, as if she were a child rocking her Betsy Wetsy doll.
“Valentine,” Miriam admonished her, “a baby is not a toy. It’s a baby. Do you understand? Your whole life is going to change.”
“Guess what, Ma? It already has,” Valentine said, and she let go of the cradle, which continued to rock on its own force of momentum.
S
ummer, with its way of lazing along, as if it were going to go on forever and ever, suddenly, like a tornado, gathers speed and races toward its end. Autumn was wafting in with the late August breeze, and John was of two minds. He was decidedly glad that this was his last day at the butcher shop, but whether or not he was glad that the first day of school was just around the corner was up for debate. The same sensation was experienced on Sunday nights, the end of the weekend, albeit in a lesser degree, by students and faculty alike. That a new school year was about to commence, that the days of summer remaining could be counted on less than two hands, made for a balance, equal parts of anticipation and dread. Certainly John preferred teaching to cleaning up the blood and guts in the butcher shop, but there was hollowness to the prospect of September too. A feeling that left him as empty as if his insides were tossed in the Dumpster along with those of the pigs and the chickens.
Valentine and her mother sat in the waiting room of the obstetrician’s office. Experience had taught them that they would be waiting for an hour minimum. What experience would never teach them was this: You might just as well come late. But to suggest such a thing to Miriam? Bite your tongue. Never. Far better to sit and twiddle your thumbs for an hour than risk offending the esteemed Dr. Hammlisch, who was doing you a favor by seeing you in the first place, the man was so busy and important, and only because he was Edith Zuckerman’s sister-in-law’s cousin did he take Valentine on as a patient to begin with.
Having finished with her magazine, Valentine went and got a pamphlet off the wire rack that stood in the corner, displaying six different pamphlets on subjects such as birth control, menopause, the stages of gestation, and prenatal nutrition. The one Valentine took was on breast-feeding. Printed on pale pink paper, it featured a sketch of a mother with an infant at her breast, only the breast wasn’t much visible. It was nothing like the pictures of the Mother and Child that were in the art books at the library. In those books, the Mother’s breast was almost always visible and the Child didn’t always look so much like an infant but often like a miniature adult person.
Valentine’s breasts were getting bigger and bigger, and, as she’d complained to Miriam, they hurt. “You think it’s all fun and games being a woman?” Miriam had said. “Believe me, when you’re a woman, everything hurts. And when you’re a mother, it hurts twice as much.”
Beth Sandler was hurt beyond belief. To see Joey Rappaport was painful enough, but to see him with another girl, and such a girl, such a
shiksa
—who knew where he found her, certainly not in Canarsie—was like a knife in Beth’s heart. On the inside, she was bleeding profusely, but she wasn’t about to cry in front of Joey or in front of the girl, whose legs were so long that Beth felt like a dwarf, a chubby dwarf, standing beside her.
Also, Beth had the sneaking suspicion that Marcia Finkelstein had done this on purpose, and what kind of best friend rubs your nose in your agony? Well, maybe it wasn’t really Marcia’s doing. Maybe it was only a coincidence that while walking the boardwalk, two steps beyond Hirsch’s Knishes, Marcia was genuinely seized with the need for a cherry knish; she might have perished if made to go knishless. Maybe that really was why Marcia pulled Beth back the two steps and—
Oh my Gawd! What a surprise!
—who should be on line directly ahead of them but Joey Rappaport with a girl, blond and leggy and wearing not a dot of makeup, a golden girl.
Introductions were made all around, and in the awkward moment that followed, the shiksa said, “Joey tells me that I must try a nish.”
“Ka-nish,” Beth corrected her, and instantly regretted having done so.
KEH-nish
sounded so Brooklyn. This girl spoke as if she were from Maine or Rhode Island or someplace like that. Someplace sophisticated. Someplace that was nowhere near Brooklyn. Maybe even the city.
“Ka-NISH.” The girl tried to get it right, but as to be expected, she failed miserably and elegantly.
“So where did you two meet?” Marcia Finkelstein asked the golden girl. That Marica’s tone was a gleeful one did not escape Beth Sandler’s notice.
When they got to the front of the line, Marcia Finkelstein suddenly no longer wanted a knish after all.
If school weren’t starting in a few days, Beth Sandler might’ve told Marcia Finkelstein to go fuck herself. But school was starting in a few days and Beth needed Marcia. Canarsie High School was no place to go it alone.
With only days remaining to work on her tan, Judy Weinstein was stretched out on a chaise longue. The two weeks in the Borscht Belt, at the Nevele Hotel and Country Club, had slipped away as if time were as greased up as Judy was with Bain de Soleil tanning oil.
When the sun shifted, Judy checked her watch and got up. She stepped into her gold-tone wedgie sandals and over her gold lamé swimsuit, she slipped on the matching beach jacket. It was three in the afternoon, peak tanning time was over, and she was scheduled to round out the fourth in a game of mah-jongg.
By setting up the table poolside, these women could keep one eye on their children as they swam and frolicked and cannonballed off the diving boards, and called out, “Ma! Ma! Look! Look at me! Watch!”
The woman with the horse face—Judy didn’t catch her name—waved to her kid—a butterball wearing red swimming trunks that slipped down to reveal an inch of the crack in his ass. “I’m watching. I’m watching,” she said, and then turned away as Judy watched the kid belly flop off the high board. Judy winced sympathetically. That had to hurt.
Having taken note of the pamphlet that Valentine had selected, the pamphlet she was now reading, Miriam tugged it from her daugh
ter’s hands. “You don’t need that,” Miriam said. “Start on the bottle first thing. The other”—meaning the breast—“isn’t sanitary. On top of which, you’re trapped with the feeding schedule. Trust me. That’s not for you.”
Just as it was in the weeks before the summer, come September Valentine’s school work would be sent to the Kessler house as if Valentine were taking a correspondence course, like the “Draw Winky” art school. But not for long. Miriam, in her infinite wisdom, had already made arrangements for Valentine to attend a new school in January; a private school in Brooklyn Heights. She wanted Valentine to resume as much of a normal life as was possible given the circumstances. That’s what Miriam had planned.
What Valentine had planned, who knew?
According to plan, Mrs. Wosileski went to do the grocery shopping and no sooner was she out the door than the washer-dryer arrived. In no time flat, the two men wearing overalls and carrying toolboxes got it installed and ready for its maiden load. When they left, John cleaned up the debris and stuck a red bow he’d bought at Woolworth’s on the dryer’s porthole.
Shortly after four, Mrs. Wosileski came home carrying sacks of groceries, which she placed on the kitchen table and then looked to where her son was standing; standing there beside an avocado-colored washer-dryer with a disheveled red bow on the porthole, and he was beaming. Mrs. Wosileski took one look at that red bow and tears filled her eyes. Clearly she was overwhelmed by her son’s gesture, but overwhelmed how?
What John did not know, and how could he have, really, was that going to the Laundromat was Mrs. Wosileski’s one reliable
pleasure. It was there she could sit with the other women in the neighborhood and gripe and gossip and laugh a little; the Laundromat was an urban version of the quilting bee, a chore that had to be done but also a way for women to come together, almost like a party, a hootenanny for oppressed women city-wide. It was only then, while doing the wash, while waiting for the clothes to dry, while folding towels and sheets and pairing socks, the once-a-week task, once a week for two hours, that Mrs. Wosileski felt like a person, fully alive. Other than church, the Landromat was the full extent of her living it up. And now her well-intentioned son took even that from her.
Claiming sunstroke for herself—
really dizzy; I think it’s sunstroke
—Beth Sandler begged off from the remainder of the day at the beach. She gathered together her things, her towel, her rubber flip-flops, her Coppertone lotion and Marcia Finkelstein asked, “What about tonight? Are you coming to the party?”
Leah Skolnik’s parents were away at Grossinger’s, and Leah was taking advantage of their absence. “Not a party,” she’d told Beth and Marcia. “Just a few people coming over. I can’t have a real party. My parents would kill me.” But word had spread that her parents were away, and Leah could call it what she would, it was going to be a blowout.
Beth brushed sand off her arms and said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be there. If I feel better.”
But she wasn’t going to feel better, and she knew as much. She was feeling perfectly miserable, and worst of all, there was no one for Beth to talk to about Joey and the
shiksa
and why Marcia Finkelstein took pleasure in Beth’s pain.
Oh Valentine, did you have
to get so frigging weird?
Such was Beth Sandler’s refrain, and the answer to that question? It depends. It depends on whether or not you believe in free will or if you fall into the predetermination camp. It depends on whether or not you believe that God did indeed have a divine plan for Valentine Kessler. Or do you believe that such a belief in God is no different from such a belief in the Tooth Fairy and that once you’re no longer a gullible child, such a belief is cockeyed in and of itself.
“Look at her.” Sunny Shapiro nudged Edith Zuckerman and nodded in the direction of where Valentine sat in a gold brocade armchair, fixated on the television soap opera
All My Children
. “She’s the picture of serenity.”
Indeed, Valentine wore a slight smile and one of Miriam’s tent-like dresses because she could no longer fit into her own clothes.
“Still waters run deep,” Edith said, and then she said, “Miriam, what brand of coffee is this? It’s delicious.”
With Judy Weinstein vacationing in the Borscht Belt, The Girls were decidedly incomplete. Still, they came together to drink coffee, to have a little
nosh
, to enjoy the companionship of their friends because no person was an island.
Yet, no matter the pleasure, still they suffered from mah-jongg withdrawal. Edith’s hands periodically twitched circles as if washing the tiles, Sunny smoked one cigarette after another, and Miriam did what she did whenever she didn’t have something else to do—she ate. “So yesterday”—Miriam swallowed the last bite of an apple turnover—“I got a call from Rose. She’s extending her stay.”
“Again?” Edith asked. This was the second time now that Rose delayed leaving Israel to come home.
“Now she says she wants to be there for six months more. She’s on a kibbutz. My mother-in-law. Do you believe it? On a kibbutz.”
“Rose is picking peaches? That’s what Elaine Meyer’s kid did when she spent a summer on a kibbutz. All day long, she picked peaches. The kid was positively miserable. I can’t see Rose picking peaches.”
“She’s not picking peaches. She’s sixty-two years old. You think she’s going to climb trees at that age? She’s going to work in the nursery school. With the little ones. She’s in seventh heaven. So she says. The only thing that was stopping her was Valentine, but I told her, ‘Rose,’ I said, ‘don’t revolve your life around Valentine. She’s a teenager. She’s going to go to college soon.’”
“It’s true,” Sunny said. “Once they go to college, they’re lost to you. Since my David went to Cornell, he might as well be a stranger for all the time he spends with me.”
“I gather you haven’t told Rose yet.” Edith said. “About Valentine.”
“No. I’m ashamed to admit, I don’t know how to break it to her. So for now, let her be happy. Ignorance is bliss, is it not?”
“And everything else?” Edith tapped a fingernail lacquered fire-engine red, against the side of her head, sign language for inquiry into Valentine’s state of mind.
“Who can tell? Something is going on.” Miriam spoke in a stage whisper, loud enough for The Girls to hear, but out of Valentine’s audile range, especially with the television going. Valentine was quiet, maybe too quiet. Polite, maybe too polite. Agreeable, maybe too agreeable. “But whenever I ask her how she’s holding up, she tells me everything is fine. I don’t want to nag or push or interfere. For now, I try to let her be.”
In that day and age, in the day and age when your parents were your parents and not your friends, a day and age when families didn’t
share
or
open up
and there were no television commercials dictating
talk to your children,
Miriam’s course of inaction was the accepted one.
“That’s wise of you.” Edith reached for Miriam’s hand and squeezed it in her own.
“She’s got enough pressure on her.” Sunny snuffed out a cigarette. “She has no idea what to expect. Be patient with her. Love her. That’s all you can do.”
“You’re right,” Miriam said. “When you’re right, you’re right. As much as I want to help, I have to let her alone. She needs to sort things out for herself.” Such was the path Miriam took, and it seemed like the right one at the time.