An Almost Perfect Moment (13 page)

“I could not believe it,” Judy said. “Literally, her hand was open. Waiting for her change. Seven cents. Four Flower. I’m sorry, you go for lunch with a person, you split the check down the middle, but there she was with her hand out, telling me hers came to seven cents less than mine.”

“So what did you do?” Sunny asked. “Two Crak.”

“I gave her a dime and told her to keep the change.”

“She can’t help it,” Miriam said. “It’s a sickness, to be cheap like that. She once told me that she was very poor while growing up.” Miriam passed one tile, a Four Bam, to Judy. “That some nights her mother went without dinner to feed the children. So now she worries about not having.”

“But they’re rolling in it,” Sunny said. “Do you have any idea how much her husband makes? Sixteen fortunes.”

“It wouldn’t matter if he made seventeen fortunes.” Miriam reached for the cream to add to her coffee. “The poverty left a mark on her. That doesn’t go away.”

“Miriam’s right,” Edith said. “When she’s right, she’s right.”

Reluctantly, Sunny agreed and then added, “You’re very perceptive, Miriam. You always were. You see right through people. You could be a psychiatrist, the way you’re perceptive.”

It was true. Miriam was a very perceptive person. It was like a second sight, the way she could see through people. Except for her daughter. Most every mother has blind spots where her children are concerned, and Miriam was no exception. Teenagers, they’re like alien creatures from another planet. On top of which, Valentine was never an easy person to know. Frankly, Miriam was just as glad that she could not read Valentine as if the kid were an open book. It was her philosophy that there were some things a mother
was better off not knowing, and she was confident that if there were any serious problems, those she would see.

“Mah-jongg,” Edith Zuckerman called, and the tiles were washed for the next round.

On the kitchen table, Valentine found a note from her mother:
I’m at Edith’s. Fresh fruit is in the refrigerator. I’ll be back around 4. I love you. Mom.

Valentine took a pear and went to her room, where she opened her desk drawer and got out her diary. A pink vinyl book with gold trim and a lock with a small key that Valentine never bothered with. Placing the diary on her desk, she opened it to the first page, January 1 of that year, and using her index finger as a pointer, she scanned each entry. Coming upon any mention of John Wosileski, she tore out that page. She tore out the page, then tore the page in half, then in half again, and again until she’d torn it to bits. And so it went. All pages where John Wosileski’s name or initials appeared were excised and shredded.

Then she ate the pear.

The core of the pear and the stem attached to it, she wrapped in a tissue, which she left on the desk while she went through the drawers, one by one, systematically examining each scrap of paper. All doodlings of telltale hearts, of initials joined by an ampersand and a
4 Ever
written in an especially florid script, were consigned to her garbage can.

By the time her mother got home from her mah-jongg game, a little before five, Valentine had successfully purged any remnant of John Wosileski from her environment and assumedly from her heart.

Miriam Kessler was about to make a meat loaf when Angela Sabatini knocked on the door. Holding out a jar of her homemade tomato sauce, which Angela called
gravy
, Angela said, “I made too much. It doesn’t keep. The freezer gives it an aftertaste. I thought maybe you could use it.”

“You’re a doll,” Miriam told her neighbor. “I was about to make a meat loaf. So I’ll make spaghetti with meatballs instead. You want to come in? I’ll put up some coffee.”

“Ah, I can’t. I got the stove on,” Angela said, but before she left, she passed on words of wisdom: Don’t cook the pasta for more than five minutes. I don’t care what they say on the box. You don’t want it too soft. You want
al dente
.

There were things that Angela Sabatini knew. Spaghetti was one of them.

John Wosileski took the Swanson’s Hungry-Man meal from the oven and placed it on the kitchen counter. The television was on. The news? A game show? A rerun of
I Love Lucy
? Who cared? Standing there at the stretch of counter between the sink and the stove, John sliced off a piece of the Salisbury steak—really just a hamburger without the bun—and popped it into his mouth. He bit down on the meat and his teeth hit ice; the center of the patty was frozen. All he had to do then was put it back in the oven for another ten minutes, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. He ate it as it was, his teeth crunching the ice particles. The mashed potatoes were frozen at their center too.

Joanne Clarke fed her father an American-cheese sandwich on rye bread along with two bananas because bananas are binding, and his bowel movement had been a little loose. For herself, although she could’ve dined on misery alone, she made tuna-fish salad, which she ate but did not taste.

Valentine devoured a mountain of spaghetti and a pyramid of meatballs and then she licked her plate clean of sauce, for which Miriam admonished her. “Young ladies don’t lick their plates,” Miriam said. “You’re going to do that when some boy takes you out to dinner?”

Valentine rolled her eyes heavenward in that exaggerated way of teenagers everywhere, and such a gesture, such a typically teenage gesture, comforted Miriam, comfort that spread like warmth; warmth that morphed into love, a mother’s love for her only daughter.

O
n the afternoon of the first night of Passover, while at the library, always a site for wonder, Valentine Kessler stumbled upon an astounding discovery. Not an astounding discovery new to the world, but astounding and new to her. Valentine brought the book
The Grand-Ducal Medici Court,
a hefty tome of pictures of art, to Lucille Fiacco’s desk and asked, “What is the story with this?” Valentine had the book open to a print of
The Circumcision
by Franceso Mazzola.

Lucille Fiacco wasn’t familiar with that particular artist. All she knew was that she was staring at a picture of the pale light of the moon reflecting the halo over the head of baby Jesus with his weenie exposed. Exposed and about to go under the knife. Twelve years with the nuns did not prepare Lucille Fiacco for this picture. Both weenies in general and the circumcision of Jesus in particular were not areas the nuns would’ve touched with a ten-foot pole. But, Lucille Fiacco reminded herself, she held a master’s
degree in library science. She was an educated and enlightened person, and so she told Valentine, “So? It’s a picture of baby Jesus getting circumcised.”

“Catholics get circumcised?” Valentine asked.

“Jesus wasn’t a Catholic,” Lucille explained, although admittedly, it was not an easy thing for her to say. “He was Jewish.”

The whole business of Jesus being born a Jew was a hot potato for the Catholics and for the Jews alike. The Jews simply didn’t know what to make of it. Moreover, to bring the subject up was inviting trouble of some sort. Best to leave it alone, and for the Catholics, it was preferable to remain ignorant than to get mired in the conundrum of worshiping a Jewish man, of calling to His Jewish mother in your times of need. Better for all concerned to think of the Common Era as a time bubble, at least as far as religion was concerned, some years separate and adrift from the continuum of history. Better to think that for the fifty years before the birth of Christ and the fifty years after, nobody was anything, religiously speaking, which was why it is perfectly plausible that Valentine would have had no idea that the Holy Family and her own family had that in common.

“Back then, everybody was Jewish,” Lucille Fiacco said. “There was no choice,” which wasn’t exactly accurate, but so what?

“And Mary?” Valentine asked.

“Jewish,” Lucille said. “Joseph too. I just told you. Everybody was Jewish.”

“Mary was Jewish?”

“Yes. Mary was Jewish.”

“The Blessed Virgin Mary was Jewish?”

“Yes,” Lucille snapped. “Yes, the frigging Blessed Virgin Mary was Jewish. Are you satisfied?”

Mary, Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin, was Jewish!

At Beth Sandler’s house, with the family seated around the Seder table, seated before plates that were used only for Passover and one plate piled high with matzoth that Mrs. Sandler bought not at the supermarket but in some basement in Crown Heights where it was blessed especially for this night and tasted like sawdust, Beth Sandler’s aunt Sylvia asked her niece, “How is that pretty friend of yours doing? You know, the one with a face like an angel.”

“We’re not friends anymore. She’s gone over the deep end,” Beth said.

“Drugs?” Aunt Sylvia’s voice went throaty with the inquiry, as if the thought were choking her up. “I don’t know what’s with you kids and the drugs.”

“Not drugs,” Beth said. “She’s just weird. You know, not normal. She’s off in her own world half the time.”

“She’s in a cult? You stay away from her if she’s in a cult. They brainwash you, those cults. I read all about them. Five minutes with them and they’ve got you like a zombie.”

“She’s not in a cult, Aunt Sylvia.” This conversation was cut short when Beth’s grandfather stood at the head of table and in a haunting voice that sounded like a reverberation of the ages, as if a voice could be the ripples made by a stone skipping across the water, candlelight casting his face in flickering shadows, he intoned the first blessing of many that night.

A pot roast, a baked chicken, three kinds of potatoes, asparagus, and kasha, and so what if it wasn’t a traditional Seder and maybe a
little closer in kind to Thanksgiving than to the Passover dinner? Would anyone really care that Miriam didn’t bother with all the
mishegoss
with the egg and the nuts and honey and the bitter herbs? The whole bit about slavery and Moses, we’re talking over what, five thousand years ago, who even knew if that story was true? It was the spirit of the thing that mattered. A Seder was nice as a family get-together.

Valentine set the table with the good china. One plate for herself, one for her mother, one each for her grandparents, and a fifth setting for the prophet Elijah, should he decide to show up.

One look at that fifth plate and forget the prophet. The reminder of Ronald made for a pall hanging over the Seder as surely as a black cloth is draped over the mirror while sitting
shivah
, and Miriam felt a chill as if death were nearby. She chided herself for being a sentimental fool.
It’s that empty place setting, getting to me
. But to remove the fifth plate, to put it away in the cabinet, would reveal more to her family than Miriam was willing to let on. So it stayed and so she would live with it.

John Wosileski stood at the bathroom sink washing his socks with Ivory soap, which wasn’t the soap for the job. A lonely act, washing socks in a sink.

Excepting the occasions when he had skied, none of John’s days had even been lit with what could be considered giddy fervor, but ever since the incident with Valentine Kessler, it seemed to him that the sad parts of his life had traveled the short but painfully sharp course from the dumps to despair. Also, it seemed to him that the sad parts of his life were the sum total of his existence.

He suspected, and rightly so, that Joanne Clarke would have forgiven him had he bothered to invent some excuse for standing her up—a family emergency, a subway broken down, trapped in a stalled elevator—and they could’ve gone on together, married and all that, had a life like other people get to have—a house, some kids, a car. Before Valentine, he had hope for himself that way. And even though experience had taught him that to have hope is to open the door for hurt, even hurt was preferable to how he felt now. Now he felt nothing. Nothing at all. He did not ask for Joanne Clarke’s forgiveness. How could he? To be with Joanne Clarke after Valentine would be an abomination.

Miriam brought one more bowl, this one filled with roasted potatoes, the small red ones, to the table, and Rose said, “You outdid yourself here, Miriam.”

And yet something similar to guilt gnawed at Miriam for not—you’ll pardon the expression—going whole hog, making the Seder the way it is written, the way it is supposed to be done. And frankly, Valentine didn’t help matters any when she surveyed the bounty which Miriam had slaved over all day and then had plenty to say about it. “Where is the salt water?” Valentine asked. “Where are the greens? This wine isn’t kosher, Ma. Why didn’t you get kosher wine?” What was with this kid? Now she was going to go through a religious phase?
God help me with that one,
Miriam thought. “Valentine,” Miriam admonished her daughter. “Stop it. Will you stop it, please.”

“
Bubeleh,
” her grandmother said gently, for Valentine was the apple of Rose Kessler’s eye, she cherished her gorgeous grand
daughter more than life itself. “Your mother made a beautiful meal here. Enjoy.”

As Miriam reached for the mashed potatoes—mashed with sour cream and chives and exquisite—Valentine nearly had a seizure. “Ma! Don’t!” The kid was carrying on like a regular Sarah Bern-hardt of the
shtetl
. “We didn’t the say prayers,” she said as if life depended on prayer, as if prayer got you someplace.

There was not a Haggadah on the table, nor one in the house for that matter, but Valentine insisted they say a blessing over the matzoth and that they ask the Four Questions. Rather, as the youngest member of the family, it was she who would ask the Four Questions, which is really only one question, which boils down to:
Why is this night different from all other nights?
Four times it is asked, each time with a variation.

The aroma of the potatoes was driving Miriam wild with desire; her mouth watered with want, but just because God had failed her, this was no reason for Miriam not to humor Valentine’s sudden, and surely superficial, piety. Moreover, Miriam was an adherent of the principle of
it could be worse
. As Valentine recited from memory what she must have picked up at Youth Group or from the street—
Why on this night do we eat only matzoth? Why on this night do we eat bitter herbs? Why on this night do we recline instead of sit?
—Miriam had to admit, it was sweet and harmless enough. It was not like, God forbid, the kid came home dressed in a sheet and chanting
Hare Krishna
.

Moreover, her grandfather was tickled pink by his granddaughter’s attempt to retain the solemnity of the observance, and so what if Valentine got the fourth question dead wrong. In lieu of the one about the dipping of vegetables, she asked, “Why on this night do
we drink kosher wine?” and still, across the table, Sy Kessler was
kvelling
. The older Sy got, the more he regretted abandoning the ways of his father and forefathers before him. For Sy, now it was too late. An old man is set in his ways, ways which included a Friday-night poker game and the occasional ham-and-cheese sandwich, but to see his granddaughter, his cherished granddaughter, picking up the ball he’d dropped, caused pleasure to fill up inside him, the kind of pleasure you could burst from.

Joanne Clarke opened a can of Chef Boyardee cheese ravioli and dumped it into a pot. Turning the flame up high, she gave it ten minutes, which might have been five minutes too long, and without bothering to transfer the ravioli into a bowl, she set the pot, along with a spoon, on the place mat in front of her father, who was wearing nothing but his bathrobe. He peered into the pot and then recoiled, backing up as far away from the table as his chair would allow. “What is that?” he asked.

“It’s ravioli,” Joanne said.

“What’s it for?”

“It’s for dinner. It’s for you to eat.”

Her father shook his head vigorously from side to side. “I’m not eating that. I’m not.” Then he started to cry. Snot bubbled at his nostrils.

“Then don’t,” Joanne said, and she picked up the pot by the handle and dumped the piping-hot ravioli on her father’s lap.

Never ever before had she done such a thing. No matter how much he’d tried her patience, no matter how she, all alone, had to care for him as if he were a baby, no matter how sometimes she wished he’d hurry up and die, never before had she hurt him. And
apparently he was hurt. He was screaming, and not only because she’d frightened him. The ravioli, cheese in particular having a high heat capacity, scalded his thighs and his privates.

She should’ve been ashamed of herself for having done such a terrible thing, but she wasn’t. She should’ve felt positively awful, but she didn’t. She should’ve been filled with remorse, but instead she was filled with nothing but resentment. Bitterness had taken hold of her as if it were resolve.

When she could no longer stand one minute more of his screaming and crying, she called 911 and said to the operator, “I need an ambulance. My father burned himself. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow he managed to dump scalding-hot ravioli on his lap. It looks pretty bad.”

Soon after her in-laws went home and Valentine went to her room, Miriam went for just one more macaroon. In the box she found a chocolate one stuck to a thick envelope. She popped the macaroon into her mouth and opened the envelope to find a wad of one-hundred-dollar bills. Miriam counted them. Fifty. Fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. It was nothing new that Sy Kessler should leave her money in an envelope. No matter how often Miriam admonished him for it, Sy was always leaving her money in an envelope. Miriam knew why he did it. To try to somehow make it up to her for what his son had done. And both Miriam and Sy Kessler knew perfectly well that no amount of money could soothe the constant ache of a broken heart, and no amount of money could have bought Valentine a father. Still, it made Sy feel better to give it, and who was Miriam to deprive him? But it was usually fifty dollars that he left, sometimes one hundred. But five thousand dollars?

Miriam had to sit down. Not because five thousand dollars was a lot of money to find in a box of macaroons. Miriam sat because she understood that Sy was dying.

On this same first night of Passover, it should be noted, it was now nearly nine weeks since Valentine last went to the closet where she kept the tampons. Ever since she first started menstruating when she was twelve, you could set your watch by Valentine’s periods. But it was due on March 2 and here it was the first week of April and still nothing.

If Valentine were aware that her period was late, she gave no indication of it. She did not dart to the bathroom every three minutes to check for spots, there was no audible praying to God to
please, please make it come. I’ll never complain about cramps ever again, I swear
the way some of her ex-friends checked for spots and prayed. Girls who were
doing it
without taking precautions had good reason to mark their calendars with
X
s, to count days, to shit green if they were late. Even though they should have been sensible and gone to Planned Parenthood to get themselves on the Pill, teenagers can be imprudent. Sometimes the boys did use rubbers, but mostly not, and sometimes they promised they’d pull out before they came, but you can be sure that never happened. Instead they’d mumble, “Sorry,” as if they’d spilled a drink as opposed to their seed. It was those girls, those who were sexually active without taking precautions, who kept strict tabs on when their periods were due, those who lived on tenterhooks until, with that first drop of blood, came release. Still they rarely wised up. Again and again, they played Russian roulette with their futures, and again and again they held their breath and checked their panties and said their prayers. But
Valentine was not a part of this crowd. Plus, who would think twice about something as inconsequential as her last period when her grandfather, her beloved grandfather, was dying? Who, smack in the middle of such grief, would’ve paid attention to her monthly comings and goings, to life?