Having made arrangements for their date, Ronald walked off, and the girls at Miriam’s table fell upon her, carrying on as if Miriam had just been crowned Miss Sheepshead Bay.
Beth changed back into her street clothes—Levi’s, navy-blue Shetland sweater, Stan Smith sneakers, and the bunny jacket, which was also known as a junior fur and the first in a series that would climax with a full-length mink—before going to get Valentine who was still seated in the bleachers and humming away.
“Hey. Earth to Valentine,” Beth asked. “Are you ready? Let’s go.” Yet Beth made no move to walk home. Instead, she sat alongside of Valentine and said, ““Valentine, we need to have a serious talk.”
A serious talk from a teenage girl was never going to be good news or any kind of a compliment.
“I have to be honest,” Beth said, “because you’re my best friend. And it would be wrong of me if I wasn’t honest with you. Because that’s what best friends are for. Right?”
And serious talks that were honest were the worst kind possible. Beth was bound to tell her something like her breath stank or maybe, like Laura Volkman was told, she had an obnoxious laugh and that she should do something about it.
Valentine crossed her arms in front of her chest. “So?” Her voice went squawklike. “What is it?”
“Now, don’t be mad at me,” Beth said. “Promise you won’t be mad,” and then, without waiting for the aforementioned promise,
she came out with it. “No offense, but I think maybe you need to see a psychiatrist.”
“A psychiatrist? Why?” Valentine asked. “Because I liked that church music? That makes me crazy?”
“It’s not just the church music,” Beth said, although, in her book, it was a good place to start. “It’s that, I don’t know, you were always quiet, but now it’s like no one is at home in your head. And then when you do talk, you say weird things.”
“What weird things?”
“Well, like before when you said I looked like the Little Dipper. That’s not a normal thing to say.” Ah, normal. Such faith Beth had in
normal
. It was the only way to be. Normal. “You seem weird lately. Everyone says so.”
As if she had been a hundred times stung, as if
everyone says so
were a swarm of hornets, the bloodletting of the vicious attack of adolescent girls telling the truth for your own good because you should know all the hateful things being said about you, Valentine’s big blue eyes filled with tears. “Fuck you, Beth,” Valentine said. “Fuck you.”
“Yeah, you wish,” Beth retorted because that was the known response to
Fuck you
.
Fuck you.
Then
Yeah, you wish,
and that should’ve been the end of it, but instead, as Valentine fled, Beth called after her, “I was just being honest.”
W
hen Valentine stopped running, she found herself back at the Church of the Holy Family as the last Mass of the day was breaking. The priest was at the open door, shaking hands with the Catholics as they made their way out. Valentine glimpsed inside to the altar, splendiferous and rococo to the hilt, cherubs and angels carved and painted in gold leaf. The sunlight, coming in from behind stained glass windows, etched sharp lines in the red carpet.
Gloria Tibi, Domine
.
For the duration of their Sunday breakfast together, not one word was spoken. It was that kind of quiet, if it fell on you, it could kill you. John Wosileski’s father signaled he was done eating by pushing his plate away.
While his mother washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen, her husband drank a Schlitz beer straight from the can—
hair of the dog—and then turned to his son. “So when are you going to give up that pansy job of yours and come work with me?”
“I like what I do,” John Wosileski said. “It’s a good job.”
His father got up, beer in hand, and left the table.
His mother dried the frying pan.
The women, the Catholic women, who had emerged from the church to congregate on the sidewalk, had their heads covered. Not the way the Orthodox Jews covered their heads with hats or
schmattes
or even wigs that you could spot from a mile off. These women wore delicate squares of lace draped over the crowns of their heads. The grown-up women wore mostly black lace, like mantillas from Spain. The young girls all wore white lace like the paper doilies Miriam put between the cake and the plate when she served company. They looked so lovely, these Catholic women, with that lace, it’s not impossible that Valentine felt a twinge of envy.
At school, while changing for gym class, the way a toddler reaches for a butterfly, Valentine once reached out to finger the powder-blue enameled medal of Mary that Theresa Falco wore on a fragile silver chain around her neck, and the way Valentine went dumb at the lights at Christmastime—not so much the green and red lights, but the white ones, those little white lights strung on bare trees so that they looked like tiny icicles—it was as if they stole her faculties away. After having sighted a pair of nuns she was moved to ask her mother, “Don’t you think it’s romantic, the way they give up their lives for God?” to which Miriam said, “Romantic? No.
Meshugge?
Yes.”
Given that her name, Valentine, was a saint’s name, coupled with the fact she did look exactly like the Mary on the prayer card,
it wouldn’t have been far-fetched for Valentine to wonder if maybe there’d been some kind of celestial mix-up, maybe she was supposed to be a Catholic.
But to so much as wonder such a thing, if she had so much as wondered such a thing, would be to betray her mother, her grandparents, her ancestors, and all the Jews, and hadn’t they been through enough? Valentine had read
The Diary of Anne Frank
. She’d heard plenty about how the Jews suffered, from the very beginning, about the Pharaoh and then the Cossacks and then Auschwitz; Miriam left out nothing. “We were chosen to suffer,” Miriam explained. “Don’t ask me why. I have no idea. But we were, and so we try to make the best of it. Supposedly, it’s a gift from God, to be a Jew.” And a gift from God is likely to come with a policy:
No Refunds, No Exchanges.
Joanne Clarke transferred the chocolate-chip cookies from the white bakery bag into a plastic baggie. A nod to the authenticity of the claim of homemade, that plastic baggie.
Crossing from the kitchen to her bedroom, she passed by her father, who was watching television. A golf tournament, maybe. Or
Bowling for Dollars
. Who knew? Who cared? Certainly not her father, who could’ve been watching little green men land on Flatbush Avenue for all he was aware. And Joanne didn’t give an owl’s hoot what he watched as long as he was quiet and remembered to get up and go to the bathroom if he had to pee.
Although she was only twenty-six years old, which was still young in most anybody’s book, based on her life thus far, Joanne Clarke had concluded that John Wosileski was her last chance at
something which resembled happiness. She had a lot riding on cookies.
Valentine found Miriam in the kitchen having a donut with a cup coffee. “Where’s Beth?” Miriam asked, because always the girls returned together, to go to Valentine’s room to listen to records and to gab about who knows what, boys, most likely.
Valentine shrugged a shrug which implied
I don’t want to talk about it
rather than a shrug which said
who knows?
The way some cultures use hand gestures to speak volumes and in some languages inflection conveys meaning as well as nuance, this subset of Brooklynites shrugged. Seated in the chair across from her mother, Valentine picked at the chocolate icing on the remaining donut in the box. Then she asked, “Am I weird?”
“You’re beautiful.” Miriam reached over and placed her hand on Valentine’s. “Quit picking,” she said. “Eat the donut or leave it alone. You’re the most beautiful girl in the world.”
“I didn’t ask if I was ugly, Ma. I asked if I was weird.”
“Did Beth say you were weird?”
Valentine nodded.
One thing about Miriam, and she was the first to admit it, was that she was incapable of lying.
You want to know the truth, ask me
. Plenty of times, she wished she could lie, but that’s just not how she was made. Miriam was as honest as the day is long, except of course, now and then when she lied to herself. “You’re special,” she said to her daughter. “Special. Very special. Maybe Beth thinks that’s weird, to be special. There’s something extraordinary about you,” which was a bold assertion of faith on Miriam’s part because
thus far, other than the resemblance to the Blessed Virgin, about which Miriam was blessedly ignorant, there was nothing extraordinary about Valentine. No obvious talents, no rare gifts. Moreover, she seemed as shallow and superficial as the next teenager. Nonetheless, Miriam insisted, “I knew it even before you were born, that you’d be extraordinary.”
Every woman should know a night like that, like the night when Valentine was conceived. That was the night Miriam decided she would say yes, yes, yes, instead of repeatedly taking Ronald’s hand out from her panties and saying no, no, no. A summer night, a full moon, water lapping against the shore, Miriam and Ronald in a rowboat moored to a dock in Sheepshead Bay. That night it would be yes, yes, yes, oh please yes, Miriam wanted to do it all. She wanted to try the different positions; she wanted to put his thing in her mouth; she wanted him to put his mouth down there. She wanted to do all the dirty things she’d heard whispered of in the girls’ room, the sexy things she’d read about, the warm and wondrous things she conjured up when she was alone with her hand between her thighs. So there in the rowboat with Ronald Kessler who loved her—didn’t he say as much?—his left hand up her shirt, the other tugging at her underpants, her body quivering, her breath short, it was
yes, yes, everything
. And even though they didn’t do one-tenth of what Miriam had hoped they would do—who knew that it would be over faster than you could blink—Miriam had been under the mistaken impression that it was something which took at least an hour’s time start to finish—it was beautiful. It was the most beautiful night of her life, and no one, not even Ronald Kessler the rat-bastard could take that away from her, how beautiful that night
was, how she would remember it always, how she could hold on to it because no matter that now she was big as the
Hindenburg,
so what that no man had touched her in over fifteen,
fifteen,
lonely years, she’d had her night under the stars.
Miriam had missed two periods before breaking the news to Ronald. They were—
oh thank you God for this joy
—in the backseat of Ronald’s powder-blue 1958 Chevy. Miriam lifted her bottom off the seat and pulled up her panties and Ronald zipped his khakis, and she took a deep breath, and said, “Ronald, we have to talk about something.” Far greater than her fear that he would not marry her was the fear that he would ask,
How do you know it’s mine?
Her fear was that he might doubt her love, her devotion. And that he might have found out about the one night when she and her girlfriends went to a party at that Catholic college in the Bronx and Miriam got so drunk—who knew that the punch was mostly vodka—so she didn’t remember a thing, only that she came home without her bra, this is what frightened her. “I’m pregnant with our child,” she said, and she saw that Ronald’s face, illuminated by the streetlight, was blank. Miriam held her breath, and then Ronald grinned. “Really? I hit a home run? Really? Wow.” Ronald equated this with his other athletic accomplishments, as if he’d placed first in a competition of darts.
They married in the rabbi’s office at Temple Beth Israel, and for a wedding gift, Ronald’s parents bought them the house.
It was very generous of Ronald’s parents to buy the young couple a house, but it was no hardship. Ronald’s father did well, very well, in wholesale foundation garments. He was the Baron of Brassieres, and although business fell off dramatically in the late sixties when those nutty women burned their bras and let their bazooms bounce and flop to kingdom come, he’d already amassed a
small fortune, so it wasn’t the end of the world. But back when Ronald and Miriam married, Sy Kessler was still raking it in, and it was his pleasure to support the young couple while Ronald finished his education because his Ronald was going to be a dentist or a CPA. A somebody. And indeed Ronald did continue his education. He continued to study economics, he continued as third baseman for the Brooklyn College baseball team, and he continued to
schtup
a variety of big-breasted girls while Miriam quit school to take care of her husband,
her husband,
her Ronald, to cook for him, to keep the house clean, to rub his back, to take his thing in her mouth, to prepare for the baby’s arrival, and to grow fatter by the hour.
Who knew that Ronald Kessler wasn’t happy? And whoever said happiness has anything to do with anything anyway? The pursuit of happiness is not guaranteed for couples with the responsibilities that come with marriage and a baby.
So, what kind of man abandons a wife and baby daughter? What kind of self-centered skunk would pick the morning of February 14, Valentine’s Day
and
their daughter’s first birthday, to pack his bags while his young wife was out buying extra cone-shaped paper hats and another box of devil’s food cupcakes just in case she ran low at the party? What kind of man would leave a note on the kitchen table that read
I deserve to be happy
for his young wife to find when she got home, bags in one arm, baby in the other? What kind of man would break his young fat wife’s heart into so many pieces?
After Miriam had found and read Ronald’s note
I deserve to be happy,
she pressed it to her cheek, and she wept. She wept her
kishkas
out, and after that, she wept more.
Being married to Ronald was like having heaven on earth, and then God opened the trapdoor and Miriam fell from grace.
Even Ronald’s own mother,
his mother,
would come to spit at the mention of her son’s name,
like Sy’s father, Willy, may he rest in peace, a criminal
. Such was the disgrace Ronald brought upon them. The
goyim
do things like that. Not Jewish men. Jewish men were good husbands. Good fathers. Family men. Didn’t Miriam learn so, a golden rule, at her mother’s knee? And wouldn’t she, despite the glaring evidence to the contrary, tell Valentine the very same thing? The way Miriam explained it, there was one lemon in the apple orchard and she picked it. What she would never tell anyone, but what was ever so true, was that, given the opportunity to live her life over, she’d pick the lemon again, and again, and again. The lemon that was yellow like the sun.
In the kitchen shrouded in the deep purple of the November night, Miriam and Valentine sat at the table and ate dinner: bananas and sour cream sprinkled with sugar. The sour cream was rich enough, thick enough, to fill some need, but only temporarily.
Just as Miriam put out the dessert, a honey cake with almonds, the phone rang. It was Beth calling.
“Hold on,” Valentine said. “I’ll take it in my room,” and she took the stairs two at a time.
Teenagers. One minute they’re wallowing in the pit of human suffering; the next minute they’re walking on air.
Valentine picked up the extension and called down, “Ma. Could you hang it up?”
The girls waited for the click which ensured their telephonic
privacy, and then Beth said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, but promise me something.” Thus, having extracted the promise that Valentine would make a concerted effort to act more normal, Beth was willing to forget the entire incident because she was dying to talk about Joey Rappaport. In fact, it was that desperation to talk about her beloved Joey Rappaport which prompted Beth to call Valentine in the first place. Marcia Finkelstein wasn’t at home and Leah Skolnik was in the middle of dinner and couldn’t talk. Valentine got the call by default.
Any chance that Valentine might have talked about Mr. Wosileski the way Beth talked about Joey had to have been obliterated by the promise to try to act more normal. Just the fact that she was in love with someone she called
Mr.
Wosileski precluded normal, and never mind all the times Beth had said to her, “Is Mr. Wosileski the biggest queer you ever saw or what? The man is so not normal.” But what girl doesn’t want to coo about her beloved’s dreamy coefficient, even though in this case she’d be hard-pressed to find it.
“I definitely want to
do it
with Joey,” Beth told Valentine,
it
being the big
it,
“but I’m going to wait until Hanukkah.” For Hanukkah, Beth was expecting Joey to give her a gold heart-shaped locket with a diamond chip in the center, which was the precursor to the preengagement ring, which, unlike the engagement-engagement ring was not a diamond, but a pearl or an opal or an amethyst maybe. The gold heart-shaped locket meant you weren’t anywhere near ready to be talking marriage, but it was some kind of commitment. “I mean,” Beth said, “Joey is so adorable and I am so in love with him. It’s really tempting to
do it
now, but you know how it is. No one buys the cow if they can get the milk for free.”