A
s the gourds and pumpkins that would soon decorate porch steps and shop windows grew big, so did Valentine Kessler’s belly. She was huge. “You’d think she’s carrying triplets, with the size of her,” Miriam said.
Edith Zuckerman—having exchanged a Four Crak for a Seven Bam, which clearly pleased her—said, “It means she’s having a boy. When you carry big like that, it’s a boy.”
“You’re talking an old wives’ tale.” Sunny tapped the ash from her cigarette. “I carried big like that. Remember? With the two of mine. I thought I was going to give birth to elephants. Instead I had a boy and a girl, both normal sized.”
Judy Weinstein called mah-jongg, Edith Zuckerman said, “Dammit,” and while the tiles were being washed, Judy asked Miriam, “Where is she anyway?”
“Out in the backyard. Getting some sun.”
As she passed by him in the hall without so much as a nod of acknowledgment, Joanne Clarke noted, with a certain satisfaction, that, coming through the far window, a ray of sunlight like a pointer illuminated the bald spot on the back of John Wosileski’s head. In no time at all, she surmised, he’d have nothing but a fringe around the sides, like some monk. Joanne was not attracted to bald men. She liked a thick head of hair, with curls, soft curls, on a man.
The next man I get involved with is going to have gorgeous hair,
she decided.
As he passed by her in the hall as if they were two strangers as opposed to two people who had once been intimate, John Wosileski was slightly skeeved out at the sight of Joanne Clarke’s skin in the unforgiving direct sunlight.
More like boils than pimples,
he thought. He pondered the fact that he’d put his lips to that skin, and although he knew for sure that he had done so, when he tried to bring the image to mind, he could no longer picture it.
Memory is tricky. If there is no one or nothing to remind you of an event in your life, it can be like it never happened. And in that way, Valentine Kessler should have been erased from John Wosileski’s memory banks. For most everyone else at Canarsie High School, it was as if Valentine had never graced those halls. Only the guidance counselor was there to remind John of Valentine, not so much of the mess he’d so nearly made of his life—bless Mrs. Landau, as good as her word; never again was the subject of the letter so much as alluded to—but rather her presence kept fresh
in him the feelings of love and disgrace commingled. Still, he and the guidance counselor rarely crossed paths. He should have been able to forget Valentine. But as if her image had been burned indelibly into his flesh, she was with him always.
Valentine was in the backyard, but she wasn’t getting much sun. Having severed several small branches from the tree—not the simplest task for a very pregnant teenager—she gathered together foliage from hedges and bushes and made a mess of a half-assed roof for the
sukkah,
the temporary shelter that observant Jews build in celebration of Sukkoth, which is the Jewish version of Thanksgiving. Valentine’s
sukkah
was not built to specifications, although that she constructed the walls from the industrial-size Hefty plastic garbage bags Miriam kept under the kitchen sink for spring cleaning was not, in and of itself, an irregularity. Technically, the walls can be of any materials provided they can withstand the wind, which these walls could not.
After dinner, and already dark out, night coming sooner and sooner, the kids were upstairs doing their homework, and her husband was in the living room with the newspaper, Angela Sabatini was in the kitchen washing the dinner dishes. Although she had a dishwasher, Angela didn’t trust it; no machine could get the dishes as clean as Angela could, and frankly, for pots and pans, the dishwasher was useless. For that, you really had to scrub with steel wool and scalding water, which was why Angela wore rubber gloves.
After the dishes were washed and dried and put away, and just before turning out the light, Angela Sabatini kissed the tips of her
index and middle fingers, which she then pressed to the mouth of the picture of the Blessed Virgin that hung in her kitchen.
That night, the wind dismantled Valentine’s
sukkah
and blew the plastic garbage bags into the Sabatinis’ yard, which spared Miriam the knowledge of the
sukkah
’s existence, however brief. Had Miriam been aware that Valentine was not out sunning herself that afternoon, but building a hut from garbage bags and tree branches, what would she have done about it? Chalked it up to a phase, and this too shall pass? Justified it as a manifestation of Valentine’s fear of her future, and be glad she found some comfort? Who can say? Valentine was all that Miriam had in the world. When all that you have in the world is one person, you don’t want to rock her boat too hard. Besides, what could Miriam have done? How does a person alter the course of events?
“Beth,” her mother called to her. “Quit dawdling. You’re going to be late.” But Beth Sandler was in no hurry to get to school, where her star had fallen precipitously and who knew if it stopped there. Things could get worse yet. How did one short year bring about so much transformation and none of it good?
In the practice known as scapegoating, Beth blamed Valentine—
It’s all that frigging Valentine Kessler’s fault
—for the loss of Joey Rappaport’s love, and for Marcia Finkelstein dumping her as a best friend. “I think Valentine tainted you or something,” Marcia had said. “Because now you’re weird too.”
“I am not,” Beth protested urgently. “I am not weird. I am totally, completely normal.”
“I’m sorry to inform you,” Marcia said, “but you’re not totally, completely normal at all. You cry every time someone looks at you funny, and no offense, but you’re gaining weight. Also that Dorothy Hamill haircut of yours is not a good look for you.”
No wonder Beth was in no hurry to get to school.
It’s all that frigging Valentine Kessler’s fault
. She held Valentine responsible for all of her woes, including the accident which prevented Beth Sandler from becoming an ice-skating champion, from perhaps someday having a haircut named in her honor, which would’ve been more than enough to make Marcia Finkelstein and Joey Rappaport sorry as shit that they dumped her.
Along the way to putting up a pot of coffee, Angela Sabatini glanced out her kitchen window and out loud said, “What the hell is that?” On closer inspection,
that
turned out to be garbage bags, maybe ten or a dozen black Hefty garbage bags caught in her shrubbery and on her forsythia bushes and wrapped around the base of the birdbath. In her nightgown and barefoot, Angela darted out the back door and, on tiptoe because the ground was cold, she collected the black plastic bags, all the while baffled as to how they got there. A mystery.
On her way to the beauty parlor, Miriam Kessler dropped Valentine off at the library, where she sat alone at one of the tables looking at pictures in art books. A handful of senior citizens wandered the stacks.
Lucille Fiacco kept an eye peeled on Valentine. For one thing, although not due for another month, the kid looked ready to pop.
The librarian didn’t want to be far away from the girl in case she was needed. But that wasn’t the whole of it. Lucille watched the girl because she couldn’t seem to stop herself from watching her. Lucille found herself drawn to Valentine.
Jeez, I hope I’m not turning lezzie or something,
she thought.
Nah, that’s not it
. Lucille liked men. That much she knew.
Getting up from her desk, she went to the table where Valentine was intent on a picture of scribbles or something. “My nephew who is six draws better than that.” Lucille hoisted herself up and sat her bottom alongside the book. Her legs dangled. Although Valentine’s pregnancy was hidden beneath the table, Lucille gave a jut of her chin in that direction and drawing out the word as if there were a story to it, she asked, “Sooooo?”
Valentine looked at her blankly, something at which Valentine excelled, looking blank.
“So, what are you hoping for? A boy or a girl?” Lucille’s question was one often asked of pregnant women, but maybe not so often of pregnant girls.
“That’s not up to me,” Valentine said.
“Well, yeah. Sure. But you know, if you were able to pick.”
“But I’m not able to pick.”
“I know that.” A twinge of irritation shot through Lucille, like a raw nerve hit. “I know you don’t get to pick. You don’t have to be so literal about it. I’m just saying if you could pick, which would it be?” But this time, Lucille didn’t wait for an answer. Instead she went all airy, like she was sitting on a cloud instead of a Formica table, and she said, “I’d want a girl. A little baby girl. Ah, wouldn’t that be something? Dressing a little baby girl. Those outfits for baby girls are so cute. I mean, if I had a boy”—Lucille sobered somewhat—“I’d love him with all my heart, but it wouldn’t be the same
as having a girl. Of course I have to get married first.” She stopped short; she was not so far gone that she didn’t realize her faux pas. “Sorry,” she said. “No offense. It’s just that, coming from a Catholic family, I’d get disowned or worse. So I’d have to be married. I haven’t met the right guy, you know. Here, at the library, there’s no one except old geezers and weirdos. At night, my girlfriends and me go out to discotheques. I meet lots of guys at the discotheques. Oh, I meet plenty of guys. But losers, all of them. Losers and liars. Bullshit artists from the word
go
. Have you been to a disco yet? You really have to. So you know, I’ll dance all night with someone and he’ll buy me drinks and then after, sometimes we, you know, and then he says he’ll call, but he never does. What’s with these guys, promising to call? Maybe I shouldn’t, you know. To be honest with you, I’m getting a little worried about the whole thing because I’m twenty-eight years old.”
All the while Lucille disburdened herself, Valentine neither uttered a word nor moved a muscle; as if she were carved from ice or marble or a block of Cheddar cheese like the rendering of Moses at Gerald Wolff’s bar mitzvah.
“All right,” Lucille said, as if compelled to own up to the truth. “I’m thirty. Going on thirty-one. What’s going to happen to me if I don’t get married and have babies? I can’t be a librarian for my whole life.”
“Why not?” Thus spoke Valentine.
“Why not? I’ll dry up like a prune. That’s not a life. I’m telling you, I’m asking you, I’m begging you…” And at that, Lucille got ahold of herself because she was losing it there, pouring her guts out to some kid who you know didn’t have two nickels’ worth of good sense otherwise she wouldn’t be knocked up in the first place. Lucille slid from the table and said, “I’ve got to get back to my
desk,” where, in fact, she had nothing much to keep herself busy when Valentine said, “Don’t worry. You’ll get married. Soon. You will.”
“From your mouth,” Lucille said, “to God’s ears.”
Three times in one day Joanne Clarke had the misfortune to set eyes upon John Wosileski. Twice in the hall and once in the teachers’ lounge. Then, during fifth period, somebody, that Noodleman kid, she suspected, farted and it was pandemonium; the way the kids carried on, you’d think it was cyanide. And now, at the nursing home, her father grabbed her and tried to put his tongue in her mouth. “Come on, baby,” he said, “you know you want it,” a flash of desire which flared and then extinguished itself in a flood of tears.
“Why are you crying?” Joanne Clarke’s patience was exhausted. “Tell me why you are crying.” Desire found and then lost again is enough to make any man cry, but that didn’t occur to Joanne. But even if it had occurred to her, there was nothing to be done about it.
At home, she plopped herself down on the couch. “That’s it,” she said to The Captain and Tennille. Although Joanne never came out and said so—never mind to whom she would say so—it was kind of okay having the birds around. Like now. Talking to the birds gave her voice. Talking to birds might be considered eccentric, but talking to yourself was considered pathetic. “I’m not going there ever again,” Joanne told the canaries. “What’s the point? The man is completely out of his mind. He has no idea who I am. He has no idea who anybody is. Tell me, what is the point of going back?”
Of course the birds did not respond, but still, Joanne had the
feeling that they were looking at her with beaks pursed in disapproval, with
for shame
in their black beadlike eyes. To get out from under, Joanne Clarke went to the kitchen and set about making herself something to eat.
Standing out on her front step, Miriam marveled at how dark the early night was, and quiet. So quiet that she could hear the dry leaves rustle as the wind swept them along the street. All of it—the night, the chill, the autumn wind—coaxed her memory, back to Halloweens of years before and Thanksgivings past and to one night in particular when she was six months pregnant with Valentine and stood on this very step on a night very much like this one waiting in vain for Ronald to come home for dinner; waiting and waiting, but instead of being hurt or angry, the waiting actualized into anticipation, anticipation that went hand in hand with desire. Oh, how she wanted him that night, her Ronald, how all of her erogenous spots wept for his touch.
Oh-such-desire now recalled put Miriam in something like a fugue state, and standing there, all these years later, on her front step, in the dark and quiet of an autumn night, Miriam Kessler unbuttoned her blouse and held it open wide as if offering herself to the moon. Then, just as fast and just as sure as if she’d heard a snap of the fingers, she came out of it. Looking down at herself practically half naked out in public, Miriam pulled her blouse closed and dashed into the house.
S
hortly before the game was due to break up for The Girls to get home in time to prepare dinner, while sitting on Edith Zuckerman’s still new white couch, Valentine Kessler’s water broke.
Thank God for the plastic slipcovers
was all anybody could think.
And in that instant, the dynamic in the room changed radically, but calmly, rationally. The Girls were old hands at things like water breaking and babies coming. There was no slapstick hysteria that would later make for a funny story. Rather, as if they were synchronized swimmers in a water ballet, Judy Weinstein and Miriam each took hold of Valentine, Judy on her left, Miriam on her right, and they helped her into Judy’s car, her emerald-green El Dorado, which was parked in the Zuckermans’ driveway because Judy didn’t care to walk no matter how short the distance. Miriam slid into the backseat next to Valentine and Judy drove, while Edith called the doctor and the hospital to notify them that Valentine
was on the way. Meanwhile Sunny dashed over to the Kessler house to get Valentine’s suitcase, where Edith Zuckerman, driving her slate-blue Nova, picked her up.
Smooth as satin, without a hitch, Valentine was checked into the maternity ward. A modern state-of-the-art maternity ward, with plenty of doctors and anesthesia and sterile conditions. In this time and place, natural childbirth was for women who didn’t shave their underarms.
In the fourth-floor corridor, Judy, Edith, and Sunny took turns at the pay phone on the wall alongside the soda machine. Each of these women called home to tell her husband and her children, “I’m at the hospital with Miriam. Valentine is having the baby. You’re on your own for dinner. Order up a pizza or Chinese.”
In Room 411, Miriam was at her daughter’s bedside, holding her hand. Valentine’s knees were bent and wide apart. Dr. Hammlisch poked his head up there like an old-fashioned photographer draped under the black cloth looking through the lens of the camera.
“Is everything okay?” Miriam asked, to which the doctor said, “Pretty as a picture.”
John Wosileski sat at his mother’s kitchen table while she stood over the stove keeping an eye on the potato cakes in the frying pan. Mrs. Wosileski was wearing a housedress. On her feet were terrycloth scuffs. John tried to picture his mother in real clothes, a dress and hose and leather shoes. He knew that she had such things. He’d seen her in them for church, and surely she didn’t attend his father’s funeral in a housedress and slippers. But he
couldn’t see it. All remembered images of her were as she was now, in a housedress flipping potato cakes.
The hot oil sputtered and spat, the pop of it punctuating the quiet. Neither mother nor son was able to say much to each other. They had things to say; in fact, Mrs. Wosileski had a lot on her mind. She had some problems. Big problems, which she would have to discuss with John, but because she didn’t yet know where to begin, she said only, “You want two cakes or three?”
“My
bubba,
” Judy Weinstein said, “could you believe, had five children, five.” She held up a hand with her fingers splayed. “Five on the kitchen table.”
“They all did then,” said Edith. “What did they know from hospitals? They were ignorant.”
Judy, Sunny, and Edith had settled themselves into chairs, like a trio of exotic birds all in a row, in the maternity-ward waiting room. The chairs were covered in orange vinyl. Magazines, worn and torn and out-of-date, were strewn across a glass coffee table. Two expectant fathers sat in chairs across from The Girls. One of the expectant fathers was obviously seasoned; he read a magazine,
Time,
and occasionally glanced at the clock. The other, it had to have been his first, what with the way he kept springing out of his seat like a jack-in-the box wound too tight. He paced and ate at his fingernails as if they were his dinner.
“Sweetheart.” Sunny Shapiro rose up and took the man’s hand from his mouth. “Calm down. Every day millions of women have millions of babies with no problems. Mother Nature knows the routine.”
Judy Weinstein and Edith Zuckerman nodded sagely, and the man wondered who the hell were these three old bats.
“Now go get yourself something real to eat,” Sunny told him.
John enjoyed the food, sliced ham and potato cakes, but his mother’s company, her very presence, her long-suffering face, left him queasy, as if he, the very fact that he was born, were somehow to blame for her wretchedness.
Valentine’s face was scrunched up rather hideously at the onset of another contraction. Miriam kept a cold compress pressed to her daughter’s brow, although she couldn’t say what good it did. But she kept it there nonetheless and whispered, “Okay, baby. It’s going to be all okay. Shhhhhh,” and cooed at her daughter, her own baby girl. “Shhh,” she said, but Valentine let go with a wail which pierced Miriam’s eardrums as well as her skin, in the way that it cut right through her, like light through glass. She gave Valentine her hand to squeeze,
hard, harder,
and for the first time in years Miriam believed in God, or at least believed enough to pray that He watch over them on this night because no matter that this hospital was state-of-the-art, giving birth was no walk in the park.
Mrs. Wosileski cleared away the dishes and poured the coffee and cut John a slice of cinnamon crumb cake. Then she sat back down and said, “I have to talk to you about something. It’s not good.”
It’s not good
. His mother was ill. That had to be it. Cancer. She was going to tell him that she has cancer, and John realized he’d
been expecting it for years now, that every time he saw her he expected to be told that she had cancer, cancer that had spread, cancer that was eating her up alive, that she had only months, maybe weeks, left to live.
But his mother did not have cancer. What she also did not have was money. “I have no money, John,” his mother told him. “Your father’s insurance policy covered the funeral expenses, but there wasn’t much left over.” There was a small savings account. Very small, and already it was close to depleted. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Mrs. Wosileski put her hands over her throat, as if to protect herself, as if she thought her son might throttle her. Which was ridiculous. John Wosileski would never have throttled his mother, no matter how much he hated her.
“I can get by for another month or two. But that’s it.”
After dinner—Romanian skirt steak and roasted potatoes and peas and carrots from a can—Beth Sandler went to her bedroom. Sitting on the floor, which was covered with baby-blue shag carpeting, she took in hand her Princess phone, also baby blue, and she dialed the number with the 203 area code. The area code for Connecticut. New Haven. It rang twice, and when Joey Rappaport said, “Hello,” Beth hung up. She wanted only to hear his voice.
Valentine, bathed in sweat, her hair matted from perspiration, let go with a bellow, a roar that sounded primal. Who knew she had such a set of lungs on her? The doctor took another look and said, “Relax, there’s plenty of time yet.”
Relax?
Cheese sandwiches with margarine on white bread, that was their dinner; a dinner the likes of which Sunny Shapiro wouldn’t have fed to a dog, but what can you expect from a vending machine in a hospital. Then The Girls recruited the nervous Nellie expectant father as a fourth for a friendly game of hearts. Edith Zuckerman never left the house without a deck of cards in her purse because you never know when you’ll need them. A deck of cards can be a lifesaver. The other expectant father had already gone home. It was his fourth child and his wife’s delivery was no more arduous than blowing her nose.
A teacher’s salary can support one household, but barely. There was no way John Wosileski could pay the rent for two apartments, never mind gas, electric, and phone. Thus he was faced with two choices: he could give up teaching and find a job which paid more, or he could give up his apartment and move in with his mother. Either way, it was too much to ask, and Mrs. Wosileski did not want to do this, to ask her son to make sacrifices for her. He was a good boy, her John. She wanted more for him, better, but what could she do?
Seated on opposite ends of the couch, Mrs. Wosileski and John watched
Wheel of Fortune
on television. “You can win a lot of money on that show,” Mrs. Wosileski said. The host of that show, Pat Sajak, was Polish.
For what might have been the first time in her life ever, Miriam Kessler gave no thought to dinner.
When the nervous Nellie expectant father was down forty-five cents, a doctor came to tell him, “A boy,” the doctor said. “You have a son.”
“Mazel tov,”
The Girls cried in unison.
The man’s broad grin faded slowly, as if he didn’t quite understand when the doctor said, “We need to talk.”
During the commercial break, John Wosileski got up from the couch and headed toward the bathroom. He was halfway there when his mother called out to him, “Don’t forget to jiggle the handle on the toilet. Otherwise it runs.”
After dinner—reheated tuna casserole from the night before—Joanne Clarke sat at the kitchen table grading the pop quiz she’d given that day. “Clear off your desks,” she had announced, and there was a collective groan from the students. They knew that
clear off your desks
meant a pop quiz, an exam for which they had no opportunity to study. “That’s not fair,” one of them, one of the pretty girls, had complained.
“That’s right,” Miss Clarke said. “It’s not fair. Life is not fair. Get used to it.”
While Miss Clarke went along putting big red
X
s next to incorrect answers, The Captain and Tennille began to sing. Sing as
she’d never heard them sing before, chirping and warbling melodious trills and tweets. She got up from her chair and draped the cloth cover over their cage.
Screaming, howling, swearing, as if curses were javelins, Valentine hurled maledictions at God and at her mother and at the nurses, the doctor, and the world at large.
Fuck. Fuuuuuuuk. Fuck you all
. It would seem that the Demerol had little effect on Valentine’s pain. Miriam was not horrified at her daughter’s language the way she would have been had Valentine used the F-word in other circumstances. Miriam knew, as all women know, that giving birth induces a kind of temporary Tourette’s syndrome.
Like dominoes, in the orange vinyl chairs, The Girls dropped off to sleep, each of their heads turned to the right. Sunny Shapiro snored loud enough to wake the dead, but Edith and Judy slept through it.
There must have been something off with Sunny’s septum because, on top of the snoring, she snorted when she laughed. And still, she had a husband and children who loved her.
John Wosileski got up from the couch and stretched. “I ought to be getting home,” he said to his mother.
Mrs. Wosileski extended her neck, proffering her sallow cheek for a good-night peck, and her son recoiled. Just a flinch, but she saw it. John could not kiss his mother good night, not even a quick peck on the cheek. Mrs. Wosileski wanted to ask her son,
What happened? What went so wrong for us?
but she could not because,
although curious, what would she do with such knowledge? Or rather, what would such knowledge do to her? It was a wise decision, not to ask, because had she asked, John would have said,
We got born. That’s what went wrong for us. We got born.
Instead Mrs. Wosileski said to her son, “Good night, John. Safe home.”
“Push,” Miriam told her daughter.
“Bear down,” the nurse instructed.
“Fuck you,” Valentine said.
At the second stage of labor, Dr. Hammlisch administered a local anesthetic, but Miriam couldn’t see that it was doing much good either. “She needs something else,” Miriam, distraught at the suffering of her child, snapped at the doctor.
Despite a slightly chaotic ambience, everything was
status quo
. As it should have been. Nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Every day babies were born in Brooklyn by the dozens.
“Fuuuuck. Ah, fuck,” Valentine cried out, and Dr. Hammlisch went for the nitrous oxide, and then he went in with the forceps, which looked like the sugar tongs at one of Alice’s tea parties. In those days, the forceps were an obstetrician’s friend. Who needed all that yelling and carrying on when a little nitrous oxide and the forceps could, barring complications, extract a baby as easily as a rotten tooth.
In the middle of the night, Joanne Clarke woke up as if struck by a bolt from the blue. Her heart was beating fast. In the dark, her fingers fumbled for the chain on her bedside lamp. Her eyes adjusted to the light, and nothing seemed awry.
I must have had a nightmare,
she reasoned with herself. She looked at the clock, which read two fifty-six. As long as she was awake, she might as well go pee.
Sometime around three in the morning, Miriam came into the waiting room. Miriam shook Sunny Shapiro awake first, and then Judy and Edith.
On her way back from the bathroom, Joanne stopped to check on the birds. She lifted the cover and, sensing something was wrong, she turned on the overhead light to discover The Captain’s head on the floor of the cage near to, but not attached to, his body. Tennille, Joanne surmised, had pecked off The Captain’s head. Now Tennille sat on the perch alone, gazing off in the direction of the window as if expecting someone.
“A girl,” Miriam told them. “A beautiful baby girl.” And The Girls fell over one another, hugging and laughing and crying. As if the infant belonged to them all, they were joyous over the birth of the child. A girl.
A girl?