In front of the church, the Church of the Holy Family, eponymous with the festival, they stopped and stared at the big statue of the saint or maybe it was the pope, who could tell, and watched the
righteous pin dollar bills to the purple satin gown. “Catholics are so weird,” Leah Skolnik noted, and the others nodded in assent, the exception being Valentine, who appeared lost in thought.
“Come on,” Beth Sandler said. “Let’s ride the Ferris wheel.” This suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm by all, except Valentine, again the odd duck out, who begged off. “I always barf on those things,” she said, which was true. She did.
Free from her friends, at least for a few minutes, Valentine moseyed around the church, not to oogle the statue with money pinned to it, but to peruse the table where the nuns were selling rosary beads and eight-by-ten glossy pictures of Jesus in plastic gold-colored frames and statues of Saint Christopher to fix on car dashboards. Saint Christopher remained a perennial bestseller despite the technicality of having been de-sainted. The nuns also sold votive candles, and night-lights shaped like crucifixes, and prayer cards which had a prayer printed on one side and a picture on the other. The pictures were of Jesus and a lamb, Saint Peter at the Gates of Heaven, the Last Supper, and the one that Valentine bought for fifty cents: Mary, the Blessed Virgin.
Later, at home, Valentine tucked the prayer card inside a book on her shelf,
Jonathan Livingston Seagull,
a book that everybody said was deep. Whatever. Valentine went to the book often, not to read it but to take out the prayer card to gaze upon Mary’s face.
She was a nice-enough kid, but Valentine Kessler was no angel. Miriam had still to recuperate from the phone call she received three years before from the Macy’s security force at the mall telling her that, along with two of her friends, Valentine was in custody
for shoplifting. Socks. They’d stuffed socks in their pockets and tried to walk out of the store, pretty as you please.
“Is this going to be in the newspaper?” Miriam asked the store detective. Of Valentine, Miriam asked, “What in God’s name is wrong with you?”
No angel, no saint, yet whenever Valentine looked in the mirror, the Blessed Virgin Mary looked back at her.
It had to mean something, didn’t it? But what?
While Miriam traded Two Dot for Two Flower, Angela Sabatini, in the house next door, was chopping onions at her kitchen counter and eye to eye with a portrait of the Blessed Virgin as she appeared to Bernadette at Lourdes. She was the prettiest of the Marys. The prettiest, but also the least interesting to look at. Lovely, but lacking a depth of beauty. That Angela Sabatini never noticed how Valentine Kessler was a ringer for this rendition of Mary was likely to be a matter of not allowing herself to notice, to turning a blind eye. After all, this was the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary, Mother of God.
The Kessler kid was a nice-enough kid, polite and all that, but still Angela Sabatini had a feeling about her. Someday Valentine Kessler would wind up in trouble, the kind of trouble in which only girls wind up. When Valentine was a toddler, she was always darting out of the house naked. In all kinds of weather, even once during a hailstorm, the kid rushed naked from the house and raced around the yard trying to catch hailstones, some of which were the size of eggs. Stark naked, she did that, Miriam right behind her, scooping her up in her arms to bring her inside. At first it was cute
kid stuff, showing herself to the world, but then Angela started to think maybe the kid was oversexed or demented or both.
Besides, who would ever think to look for a resemblance between Mary, Mother of God, and the Jewish kid from the house next door?
Ten thousand times Miriam had chastised Valentine for her habit of chewing on pencils. “You want to get lead poisoning? Is that it?” Miriam had said, but still, no further along with her homework than when she first sat at her desk, which was made of white particleboard trimmed with pink sweetheart roses and one piece of a matched bedroom set—a dresser, a canopy bed befitting a princess, a bookshelf, and a nightstand—Valentine absentmindedly chewed on the end of the number-two pencil she held in her hand as if it were a lollipop stick.
Ah, it is difficult, nigh impossible, to concentrate, when the heart is burning, and all indications were that Valentine’s heart was aflame.
As teenage girls in love are wont to do, Valentine doodled the ubiquitous hearts pierced with arrows, hearts containing the initials of her beloved
JW
entwined with her own. She also wrote
Valentine Kessler loves John Wosileski
.
John Wosileski was Valentine’s math teacher. Geometry, and he fell squarely into the category of An Older Man. Nine years older. True, nine years is not a significant age difference when it separates say, thirty-six and forty-five, but when it comes between fifteen and twenty-four, calendar years are more like light-years.
To explain, to rationalize, Valentine’s crush on an older man, one could point to her father, if one could’ve found her father to
point to him, that is. With no father of her own, Valentine made a habit of asking the mailman in for lunch, inviting the shoe salesman to her upcoming birthday party. Once, over dinner at a restaurant, little Valentine wrote her name, the last
e
on Valentine written backward, and her address on a paper napkin which she gave to the waiter who’d been
kibitzing
with her. “Can we stay in touch?” she asked. So it’s natural to apply a sliver of Saturday psychobabble to the situation and conclude that, in falling for John Wosileski, she was seeking a father figure, that she fell for a man very much like the father who’d left her, but to make such an assumption is to miss by a mile.
Valentine was four years old when her mother told her the truth about her father. “Your father,” Miriam said. “Your father is a chippy-chaser,” a figure of speech which sent Valentine to look out the window as if chippies were birds, birds like sparrows, and her father had taken off in flight after them; as if all the chippies were little brown birds and her father were a yellow bird.
A golden boy. That’s the way Miriam Kessler thought of her ex-husband, of Ronald. Her Ronald. The Brooklyn College heartthrob with the big baby-blues and soft brown curls and a physique like Michelangelo chiseled him from marble. All that and dimples too. Ronald. Her one and only love. Her husband of sixteen months. Not a day went by that Miriam didn’t think of him, like now, while she lined up Two Bam, Three Bam, and Four Bam, she thought of him and memory brought about desire, a tingling sensation between Miriam’s jumbo-sized thighs.
Oh Ronald
.
“Your father,” Miriam had said to Valentine, “the bastard, was a real looker. Don’t fall for a pretty face,” she warned her daughter, and Valentine, apparently, heeded her mother’s words.
John Wosileski had skin the color of paste. His upturned nose was an unfortunate one, and his eyes were far too small given the circumference of his pie-shaped face. He was stocky of stature, and although, in fact, he was solid, he gave the impression of being chubby and soft-bellied. His beige hair was already thinning. It could be said that he resembled a pig except that he lacked a pig’s expressiveness. What he looked like most was a pancake. John Wosileski was no Ronald Kessler. That a girl such as Valentine Kessler should be in love with a man such as John Wosileski seemed to defy all reason; yet we want a reason, we demand a reason so as to make sense of the world. Reason is all we’ve got to keep us safe from peril. The only way to accept what is given without reason is to trust that God works in mysterious ways.
In the living room, Judy Weinstein, triumphant, called out, “Mah-jongg.”
T
hird period of the school day, Valentine took her seat at the second desk from the left of the third of five rows. A metal desk covered with a faux-wood laminate. She opened her notebook and her textbook to the appropriate pages and then, while her classmates clowned around flicking spitballs at Peter Janski’s head, making a grab for Richie Weissbart’s slide rule, a few girls flirting with Vincent Caputo, Valentine Kessler stared straight ahead, her hands folded neatly on her desk, as if to exclaim a kind of separateness from the others. Also staring straight ahead was Marty Weiner, but he, the biggest pothead in the school, was totally wasted and in another zone entirely.
There were girls at Canarsie High who considered Valentine to be stuck-up. Conceited. Like she was God’s gift.
She walks around here like she’s God’s gift,
they said of her. When Valentine’s friends—small in number but devoutly loyal and very pretty as well—would say, “No. Really. She’s not conceited at all. Really.
She is so nice,” they were not believed. It was near impossible to imagine being so very pretty and not being conceited about it. Moreover, the prettiest girls were never nice. The plain girls and the homely ones knew this for a fact.
Because Valentine was one of the prettiest girls in the school, if not
the
prettiest girl depending on whose opinion was solicited, it baffled everyone who knew her that Valentine did not have a boyfriend. In this world, boyfriends were the center of the universe. Indeed it seemed as if the boys paid her no attention at all, but they did. From afar, the boys at school mooned over Valentine and sometimes, if she walked by when they were in packs, they were inspired to say things like
She can suck on mine any day,
but never loud enough for her to hear and not one of them had confidence enough to approach her, having convinced themselves that she must have a boyfriend, maybe one in college or one who lived in the city, which was what they called Manhattan. Vincent Caputo flirted with her on occasion, but even he dared not attempt to take it further.
Mr. Wosileski—as they called him because this was Brooklyn in the 1970s and not some cockamamie Montessori school in the city where kids were on a first-name basis with their teachers—came into the room, and the class settled down. The way he did every day, for he was a responsible but an uninspired teacher, he said, “I need five volunteers.” Five volunteers, one for each homework problem, to go to the blackboard. Six hands shot up like bedsprings. The same six hands that always went up, eager, waving, convulsing almost, as if they were raising their hands to be chosen from the studio audience as contestants for a game show.
In no particular order the Suck-up Six were: Joel Krotchman (need more be said?); Amy Epstein, who later, consumed by radical
politics, the aim of which was understood by no one, actually—get this—robbed a bank; Mario Carlucci, a slight and bright boy whom no one messed with because he hinted at family connections, which, in fact, were a fabrication but an indication as to how clever he really was to come up with such a solution for keeping the bullies at bay; Robert Frankel, later infamous for having stabbed his freshman roommate at MIT with a Swiss army knife (the roommate survived, needing only six stitches in his arm, but Robert was expelled); and Peter Janski and Richie Weissbart, the crown princes of Queerdom,
queer
as defined then as
nerd, geek, dork,
or as an adjective for anything unfashionable, such as
That is such a queer shirt, queer jacket, queer pocketbook, queer haircut, ad nauseam
, and entirely unrelated to sexual orientation except for the firm conviction that queers, who invariably wore queer shirts, shoes, etc., would never get to have sex of any sort except with themselves.
Valentine’s hands remained folded on her desk. Not inclined to ask questions or to volunteer the answers, Valentine was nonetheless a good student, even if she did dot her
I
’s with little hearts, hearts which she erroneously referred to as her
mascot
as opposed to her
emblem
.
Indeed she was something of a model student, but it must be allowed that the recitation of formulae and dates and vocabulary words is not the same as knowledge. Unbridled curiosity appeared to be neither a vice nor a virtue for her. In that way she was a good student, which says nothing about greater or lesser intelligence in either direction. She did, back in the third grade, along with the rest of her class, take the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, but those records are sealed.
While the solutions to the five geometry problems were going
up on the board, Valentine’s head bowed as if she were reading or in silent prayer.
To the casual beholder, it might have seemed that Valentine Kessler wanted to be invisible, and indeed, given her ways, John Wosileski might not have taken notice of her except that whenever his eyes fell upon her, his heart skipped a beat.
Oh Valentine.
She of the oval-shaped face, eyes blue and big, lips drawn in a bow, as if a red ribbon were tied by angels. And her skin. What skin. Despite the hormonal upsets of adolescence that so often result in dermal eruptions, her skin was like peaches and cream. Valentine had long brown hair, parted in the middle and shimmering with incandescence.
Truth be told, when at home alone, at night, when he touched himself—which he did confess to Father Palachuk and for which he had to, the same as always, do a penance of three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers but it was worth it—John Wosileski envisioned Valentine Kessler. Not consciously, but rather, as he neared his climax, in his mind’s eye appeared her face, and not even in the throes of ecstasy did he shift focus below the neck. Fixed on her face alone as if viewing her studio portrait, he would groan and shoot his load into the tissue he kept in his other hand expressly for this purpose.
That he masturbated to the image of a beautiful student whose visage nagged at him as if she reminded him of someone, but who it was he couldn’t put his finger on, was omitted from his confession. Even to himself, John Wosileski refused to own up to the effect Valentine Kessler had on him. She was a student, a teenager, and it was deviant for a twenty-four-year-old man to be hung up on a
fifteen-year-old girl even if she was a heavenly creature, so exquisite he sometimes thought he would perish from the sight of her.
At the close of this particular school day, Beth Sandler was leaning up against her locker tapping her foot impatiently as she waited for Valentine, and waited. Two minutes. Three minutes. The two girls had been walking home from school together since kindergarten, and never once had Valentine, Miss Punctuality herself, kept Beth waiting. Until now. Another girl might’ve been worried when Valentine failed to appear, but Beth wasn’t much of a worrier. Besides, just then Marcia Finkelstein happened by and said, “Hey, you want to go hang out at the mall?” Marcia Finkelstein had frosted hair and was too cool for words.
Teachers were required to stay for forty-five minutes after the last bell rang to give extra help to any student who might want it. But students who would expend the effort to ask for extra help were invariably the ones who didn’t need it. And those who did need it didn’t care enough to ask, so most teachers used the time to draw up the next day’s lesson plan, which was what John Wosileski was about to do. He reached for a pencil, and there, across from him, separated by the width and bulk of his desk stood Valentine Kessler. He hadn’t heard her come in. She was just there, like a vision. It took every ounce of his fortitude, all his reserve, not to melt into a puddle.
Like a vision, but no vision ever had an accent like Valentine Kessler’s, a thick-as-thieves Brooklynese, as if her larynx were lodged on the roof of her mouth instead of where it belonged, and coming down like a sledgehammer on the consonants, as if
T
’s,
K
’s,
S
’s
were rocks to be split apart,
R
’s and
W
’s added where there weren’t any, and dropped where they were. It was an accent for which elocution lessons were designed. “Mis-Ta War-sil-eS-Ki,” she said.
“Valentine,” he said, and he was trembling. “Valentine,” he repeated; he yearned to say her name again and again, as if each articulation were indeed a heart-shaped bubble sent off with a kiss.
For the stars to align for this unlikely pair, some great feat was required. Something like slaying a dragon or finding the foot to fit the glass slipper. Like that, but not exactly like that. But something like that. Something beyond the two of them. Something neither of them had yet to dare. So for the time being, they remained where they were; he tucked behind his desk, hidden from the waist down, for which he was grateful lest he get a hard-on, which wasn’t entirely out of the question. His elbows were pinned to his sides to keep covered the dark wet circles of perspiration that had spread under his arms. Valentine was positioned on the far side of the desk, as if the desk were a chasm, a wide and fathomless grin in the earth’s surface, and the two of them were frozen, no doubt from the terror of possibilities, until Mr. Wosileski pulled himself together well enough to ask, “So, what can I do for you?”
Valentine might have imagined saying such things as
You can awaken me with a kiss, you can shower me with rose petals,
but she did not say anything of the kind. Instead, she shrugged and said, “Nu-thinG. I just came to say hi.”
At a loss as to how to cope, indeed how to survive this moment, a moment he never allowed himself to imagine could happen, forbidding himself such a daydream for fear as to where it would lead, John now feared the end of the moment. To prolong it, he attempted to make light conversation. “So?” he asked. “No cheer
leader practice today?” It was a natural assumption, that Valentine was a cheerleader because in his day in high school all the prettiest girls, the girls who would not have given him the correct time had he ever worked up the nerve to ask for it, were cheerleaders.
“I’m not a cheerleader,” Valentine said.
“No? So, what then? Marching band?”
“Marching band?” There was indignation in her voice. The high-school marching band was composed of scrawny boys with Adam’s apples like erections who played the tuba and the French horn and bucktoothed and cross-eyed girls who beat bass drums and crashed cymbals. “I don’t do any after-school activities,” Valentine said. “Usually, I go straight home and do my homework. My mother wants me to go away to one of those good colleges with all girls, so I have to keep up my grades.”
John vigorously nodded his head; yes, ship Valentine off to a nunnery until it was time for her to marry. Keep her locked behind iron gates, spiked iron gates, a virginal novitiate in a filmy white nightgown.
“But why one of those girls’ schools?” Edith Zuckerman took a sip of coffee gone cold. “Two Bam. Those schools are for
goyim
and lesbians.”
“She’s right,” Sunny Shapiro said. “Six Dot. My niece went to that Bryn Mawr College, and she told me Protestant lesbians were coming out of the woodwork there.”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she wound up doing something creative.” Judy Weinstein studied her tiles as she spoke. “I could easily see your Valentine as an art teacher or something with children’s books. One of the creative fields.”
“Well, whatever she does, Four Dragon,” Miriam said, “she’ll need college first.”
Miriam’s only real regret in life was that she didn’t get to finish college. She would have liked to have had a college diploma. A college diploma in art history, given her flair for decorating. Or maybe psychology because she was interested in people. Other than that, Miriam didn’t regret much and definitely not what people would have expected her to regret, namely putting out for Ronald Kessler.
Dreams Miriam once had had for herself were now pinned on Valentine, passed on to her daughter, as if hope were a baton or a pearl necklace.
John Wosileski was itching to ask Valentine what did she do on evenings and weekends, once her homework was done. Did she have a boyfriend, and if so, then who was the surely unworthy but abundantly fortunate vulgarian? No teenage boy was good enough for Valentine Kessler. Still, Mr. Wosileski would’ve bet his bottom dollar that Valentine dated the athletes, those handsome, Adonis-like baboons, simply because she was too young to know better. Maybe he could talk to her about saving herself for a man who would really appreciate her special qualities, although even he was not entirely certain which qualities those were. Opportunity for further inquiry and discussion, however, was denied him.
Having run a comb through her hair and having adjusted her panty hose which had begun to sag at the day’s end, Joanne Clarke, unable to hold off another minute more, barged in on John
Wosileski and Valentine Kessler and, in the process, shattered something, something as fragile as a flicker of promise.
Miss Clarke taught biology in 215, the room directly across the hall from Mr. Wosileski’s, which Miss Clarke considered fortuitous indeed. The proximity of their rooms resulted in a fast, but casual, friendship. Right from the get-go, her sights set on the math teacher, Miss Clarke began working steadily and stealthily to make the congeniality something more.
Back when she was in high school, Joanne Clarke must’ve had a whopping case of acne. Although the pimples had since dried up, her face bore red scars and pockmarks, the by-product of zits the size of dimes. Not that anyone much looked beyond her complexion, but her features, especially her eyes, were alarmingly without zip. What might have rendered her a “poor thing” was offset by a body that wouldn’t quit. Five feet seven inches tall, she was a perfect 36-24-36 and both the thirty-sixes were firm and perfectly round. All that was atop a long and shapely pair of legs. From the neck down, Joanne Clarke was a knockout.