Having treated themselves to, and subsequently having finished a second cannoli each, Miriam Kessler and her daughter Valentine headed for home. Together, side by side, they walked. Although she might not have said so in so many words, Miriam was warming considerably to the idea of a baby in the house. Really, who can
resist the idea of a baby, no matter what the circumstances?
We’ll be fine. It’ll all work out for the best in the end,
Miriam thought, and she searched for a way to let Valentine know how much she, Miriam, loved her. To express that kind of love, words would fall short. A dramatic action is needed to express big love, the way children open their arms as far as they can go and say,
Do you love me this much?
and the mother says,
Much more than that
.
M
iriam tapped her teeth with the eraser end of her pencil as if that would get her creative juices flowing, to come up with designs for the baby’s room. They, she and Valentine, were going to turn The Guest Room into The Nursery. As was befitting a guest room, those walls were white, the shag carpet was slate gray. A double bed, the gilded headboard against the far wall, was covered with a blue-on-blue brocade spread. Framed and hung over the bed was a seascape done in oil paint which Miriam got a deal on at the art gallery in the mall. On the night table, a vase was filled with blue silk flowers which you really had to touch to know they weren’t real. As Judy Weinstein had said, “It’s like a room in a four-star hotel, like a Hilton. So elegant,” but
elegant
wasn’t the tone you wanted for a baby’s room.
This, decorating the baby’s room, was supposed to be a mother/daughter project, a project for them to do together, but Valentine was lacking opinions on how to do up The Nursery, as
she was lacking opinions on damn near everything these days. Whatever Miriam suggested, whether it was pale yellow carpet for The Nursery or liver for dinner or what to watch on television, Valentine invariably said, “Whatever you want, Ma, is okay by me.” It was as if she had no desires or needs or wishes of her own, and frankly, this humble subjugation was getting on Miriam’s nerves. Now, when Miriam asked, “What do you think about having a rainbow going across one wall?” and Valentine said, “Whatever you want, Ma, is okay by me,” Miriam lost it. “What do
you
want?
What
do you want, Valentine?” she shouted at her daughter. “You act like nothing matters. But I got news for you. Things matter, Valentine. It matters whether we paint a rainbow in the baby’s room or Old MacDonald’s Farm.”
Yes, she’d lost her temper, which was not something that happened often, but Miriam was sane enough to know that it wasn’t the question of the theme of the baby’s room which triggered her outburst. It was Valentine, and how she seemed so removed from her own life, how she acted like her life was happening to some other girl. Miriam was desperate for a way to connect with her daughter, and desperation caused her to shout, “You’re not special, Valentine. You’re acting like you’re somebody special when you’re just one more Brooklyn girl who got knocked up. I don’t even know you anymore.” This was both true and not true. True, Valentine was yet another girl from Brooklyn who got knocked up, but she got knocked up in a most unusual way and that did render her special.
It didn’t take so much as a half of a second before Miriam regretted her words, words spoken in the heat of the moment and she didn’t mean any of them, but before she could apologize, Valentine asked, “Did you ever, Ma? Did you ever know who I am? Because to love isn’t the same as to know.”
Miriam was taken aback by her daughter’s words because Valentine was not wrong. To love is not the same as to know. Miriam lived for Valentine, but to live
for
her was to live
through
her, and that precluded any ability to fathom her.
John Wosileski was desperate for a way to communicate his feelings to Valentine. The sands of the hourglass were running low. With but days of school remaining, this final exam would be the last opportunity to send Valentine a note along with the problems of angles, planes, and the circumference of circles.
On a separate sheet of paper, he wrote
Dear Valentine
.
Ask yourself this: What good could come of it, of his writing to her? None. No good at all. It’s not as if a note from him was going to change anything. He knew that. She wasn’t going to suddenly decide that she loved him, or even liked him, for that matter. Yet John Wosileski, and hardly for the first time either, allowed a smitch of hope to rise up, and that’s all it takes, a smitch of hope, which has the configuration and properties of a virus.
Dear Valentine, The thought that I will never see you again makes me want to die.
He read that over, crossed it out, and tried again.
Dear Valentine, I was very sorry to hear that you will not be returning to school
.
To put his feelings down on paper was proving to be a confounding enterprise. For starters, he wasn’t even sure what those feelings were. It seemed to him that his feelings for Valentine were like apparitions, a presence sensed, hovering ghostlike. All he knew was he wanted her to exist, to be. That’s what he wanted to tell her; that her very existence mattered to him, made a difference, the way it makes a difference if the sun rises or not.
John Wosileski reached for a fresh piece of paper.
When the lemon cake had cooled, Judy Weinstein covered it with Saran Wrap and brought it over to the Kesslers’ house. At the sight of it, Miriam’s salivary glands activated, but still, Miriam said, “Judy. Enough. We’re not sitting
shivah
here. No one died.”
“God forbid,” Judy said. “We just want to help out, is all.” The Girls had kept their pledge. Each day one of them, in rotation, brought a cake or a side dish or a pot of soup to Miriam, like an offering. “We want to show you that we love you.”
“I know you do.” Miriam set the cake on the table. “Sit.”
While Miriam spooned coffee into the pot’s filter, Judy picked up the yellow pad and read over Miriam’s notes regarding the decor of the nursery, and she put in her two cents, “The rainbow. Definitely.”
“That’s the direction I was leaning toward,” Miriam said. “The rainbow on the wall, and for the ceiling, I was thinking sky blue with a big yellow sun in one corner and puffy white clouds dispersed throughout.”
“Adorable.” Judy clapped her hands. “Absolutely adorable. And very with-it. You know, modern. The farm is a little old-fashioned.”
Miriam got out cups and cake plates, and Judy asked, “Which did Valentine prefer?”
Miriam made a face. “Who knows what Valentine prefers. Nine times out of ten, she’s walking around here with this loopy little smile on her face and agreeing to everything I say. She’s like a happy zombie. It’s driving me nuts.”
Judy reached over and put her hand over her friend’s hand. “Miriam,” she said. “You forget when you were pregnant? Remember feeling all blissful? It’s the hormones.”
The dermatologist stepped back and guessed, “It could be hormonal. Are you going through any changes in your life? Any stress?”
Joanne Clarke shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of,” she said.
The doctor reached for his prescription pad and scribbled on it. “Stay away from oily foods,” he advised, “and keep your face clean. Wash frequently, once an hour.” Such advice would prove to be in error; it would soon be demonstrated to the satisfaction of an authority no less than
The New England Journal of Medicine
that potato chips and fried chicken had no bearing on the complexion whatsoever, but this—that greasy food and chocolate too caused acne—was still the prevailing wisdom of the day. Also, frequent washing, in fact, stimulated more oil production, but who knew? The doctor tore the top page off the prescription pad and handed it to Joanne Clarke. “Apply this topically at bedtime,” he instructed.
She looked down at it. Benzoyl peroxide. The very same ointment she used when she was a teenager, applied topically every night at bedtime along with the prayer
Dear God, please make this work,
the prayer that went unanswered for seven long and hateful years.
Outside, she crumpled the prescription into a ball and littered the street with it. The early evening air was still, not even a hint of a breeze, and so the crumpled prescription stayed put where it had landed, the same as if it were weighted with stones.
Miriam was sitting on the toilet when Valentine rapped on the bathroom door. “Ma,” Valentine said.
“A little privacy would be nice.” Miriam didn’t ask for too much, did she? But no matter whether it was too much to ask for or not, she wasn’t going to get it.
From the other side, the door between them, Valentine said to her mother. “Ma, I’m sorry. For what I said before, you know, about how you don’t know me. I didn’t mean it.”
“There’s no need to apologize,” Miriam said.
“I’m not perfect,” Valentine allowed.
“Yes, you are,” her mother told her. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re perfect.” Maybe Valentine wasn’t perfect, maybe she was, but Miriam was not one to shirk from her own shortcomings, and she wasn’t going to lie to herself: Valentine had hit the nail on the head. Miriam loved her daughter more than life itself, but she didn’t know the kid from Adam. “Now,” Miriam said, “could I please get a little privacy.”
Joanne Clarke could not face going home to her apartment where it was all too likely that she would catch sight of herself, her image, in the mirror. And not only did she dread seeing the zits, but she feared seeing something else in her reflection, something like her soul or her future revealed, neither of which would be any more lovely than her complexion.
So she took advantage of the weather, and she headed to Canarsie Park. It was a balmy evening, and the sun was nearing the horizon. Joanne sat on a park bench, and fishing her cardigan sweater from her book bag, she draped it over her shoulders.
The little children had all gone home for dinner and baths and soon to bed. The swings and the seesaws and the roundabout were stilled and deserted, as if the children had never been there at all, or not for many years.
Some older boys, they looked to be college age, were shooting hoops on the basketball court, laughing it up, slapping palms. Friends. Buddies. Pals. They were. And Joanne Clarke had to ask herself how was it that she had no friends. None at all. Not one. She’d placed the blame for that, for having no friends, at her father’s feet. Caring for him had taken up all her free time. Even before he went senile, she had to cook him dinner and keep the house. So she didn’t have time to cultivate friendships. She didn’t have time to go to the movies with the gang. She wasn’t free to hang out in the diner with a group of girls. She had to take care of her father. That’s what she’d told herself, but it wasn’t the case. One night when she was in high school, sitting down to dinner, meat loaf and baked potatoes—the things one remembers—Joanne was shaking ketchup onto her plate when her father said to her, “Joanne, why don’t you go out with some friends? When I was your age, I was out with my friends all the time. You shouldn’t be spending every night with your old man. Go out and have some fun.”
She did have one friend once. Sort of. A girl at college. One of the few other girls majoring in biology. Back then, Joanne had ideas about becoming a doctor. No doubt this idea was connected to the death of her mother, but her solid B average, while respectable, was nowhere near good enough to get her into medical school. Instead, her solid B average offered her the opportunity to become a lab technician or high-school biology teacher. That she chose the latter, because the pay was better and the benefits more generous, was an example of common sense not always being the wisest
choice because for Joanne Clarke teaching was hardly a vocation. This girl from college, Debra—also known as De Bra because she had enormous breasts which weren’t at all sexy but were rather horrible, and college boys were still immature enough to think that sort of thing, De Bra, to be funny as all get-out—had for a while been Joanne Clarke’s friend. Well, not really her friend. More of an acquaintance. Debra had dandruff which flaked not only onto her shoulders, but onto her eyeglasses, rendering them cruddy. Joanne and Debra had lunch together a few times following their eleven
A.M
. anatomy-and-physiology class.
During one of these lunches, the last of them as it turned out, Debra asked if Joanne wanted to go to the aquarium at Coney Island that coming weekend. There was a special exhibit on mollusks that Debra especially wanted to see.
“Sounds good,” Joanne said, her spirits soaring. A date! Well, not a
date
date, but this was the first time since puberty that she had plans with a friend for a Saturday afternoon, and that was reason enough to smile.
Inside, the aquarium was dark. Only the tanks were lit. Side by side the two young women stood looking at the hammerheads. They could see the teeth as the sharks swam toward the glass. Rows and rows of terrifying teeth. Joanne was so engrossed with the sharks that she was unaware of Debra’s hand, so close to her own, that their hands were touching. Barely. But still touching.
The mollusk room was deserted. Apparently on that day, no one, save for Debra, was interested in the exhibit on mollusks. For reasons beyond Joanne, Debra was agog. Near to tears. “Look,” she gasped again and again. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
Joanne deemed neither the clams nor the mussels nor the oysters nor the whelks nor the sea snails slithering up the glass right in
their faces to be the least bit beautiful. She thought they looked like big globs of snot or, worse, girl parts, from down there. Looking at them was kind of embarrassing the way she was embarrassed, when curiosity got the best of her and she’d looked at herself that time in the bathroom, a mirror positioned between her open legs. To see that was embarrassing enough when she was alone. To see it with someone standing by her side was embarrassing and creepy. Joanne much preferred being frightened by the sharks and she was about to suggest that they go back and look at them again when Debra kissed her. On the mouth! A wet one! With her tongue! When Debra broke away, she gazed at Joanne with love in her eyes, and in return, Joanne spit in her face. Real spit. Right in her face.
Now Joanne might’ve felt bad about that except that Debra had gone on to medical school. Now De Bra was well on her way to being a big-cheese doctor, while Joanne, a schoolteacher with a cardigan sweater draped over her shoulders, sat alone in Canarsie Park until the sun was but a sliver of orange at the end of the sky.
On her way home, Joanne passed by the Chinese take-out place where the smell of pork fried rice enticed her sufficiently to step back with the idea of getting dinner to go. A well-deserved treat, but as she went for the door, she saw, standing at the counter, John Wosileski waiting for his dinner to go.