While John pulled up a chair, Mrs. Landau cleared away some of the folders, placing them on the floor so that there was a clean space on her desk between herself and the math teacher. On that space, she placed his letter to Valentine. “Do you want to tell me anything about this?” she asked.

  It felt to John as if every drop of blood in his circulatory system rushed to his face. Several drops of urine did escape from his bladder, and John’s hands went to his lap to cover the spot.

  “This is between us,” Mrs. Landau said. “No one else knows about this.”

  “Thank you.” He managed to get out thank you, a whisper, but he said it without falling to pieces, which was an accomplishment.

  “Well, don’t thank me just yet,” she said. “I’d like to keep it that way, between us, but there are no guarantees on that. You have some explaining to do. I have to ask you, John. Are you the father of that girl’s baby?”

  “No,” he said, truthfully, the truth as he knew it, what he believed to be true.

  “So what’s this about?” Mrs. Landau leaned back in her chair, prepared to listen, but nothing was forthcoming, and Mrs. Landau, who really was trying to give John every opportunity, said, “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

  One of John’s hands covered the other, as if he were consoling himself. “She’s just so sweet,” he said. “I miss seeing her face. When she was in class, I, I felt…” John swallowed hard, which did nothing to alleviate the lump in his throat. “Like someone cared about me.” Snot began to bubble at his left nostril. “Like I wasn’t completely alone.”

  Mrs. Landau knew what it was like to be alone in the world. She’d lost her husband four years ago to a heart attack in the prime of his life. Rachel, her daughter, was in New Guinea, in the Peace Corps, volunteering in a health clinic. Mrs. Landau filled with pride as she always did whenever she thought of her daughter dispensing medicine to those in dire need, but couldn’t she have found people in dire need closer to home? Although Gert Landau did know what it was like to be alone, she didn’t know what it was like to feel alone the way John Wosileski did. Mrs. Landau got up from her desk and put her arms around the sorry young man, held him in the way she’d not held anyone for a long time, not since her daughter was a girl. Touch, the warmth of human contact, acted like a hammer on an egg, and John Wosileski broke.

  Gert Landau held John Wosileski to her bosom until his blubbering subsided, until a hiccup signaled the end. Satisfied that this letter was a one-shot deal, that he had not snuck other letters in with Valentine’s homework, nor would he ever again do anything so foolish, and satisfied that there was no hanky-panky going on between John Wosileski and Valentine Kessler or any other student, in fact satisfied that there was nothing going on between John Wosileski and any person whatsoever, Mrs. Landau handed him a tissue and said, “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, John.”

  In the girls’ bathroom on the third floor of Canarsie High School, a group of three pretty girls clustered around Beth Sandler, consoling her, their glee in the high drama camouflaged in staunch loyalty. “No offense, Beth. But you could do better than him anyway. You’re too good for him. That’s the truth.”

  “She’s right, Beth. When she’s right, she’s right. You’re too good for him.”

  Torn and vacillating equally between genuine heartbreak and the genuine jubilation at being the center of attention, Beth had to make an effort to keep the tears flowing. As miserable as she was that Joey Rappaport had dumped her, out of the frigging blue he dumped her, she never saw it coming, this attention from the girls was more delicious than Joey had ever been.

  It was lucky for John Wosileski that Mrs. Landau was a compassionate woman, and it was lucky for him that this situation arose these many years before issues of sexual harassment and child molestation took center stage in the theater of social ills. If this had happened in, say, 1995, no matter what sort of person Mrs. Landau had been, John Wosileski would’ve been crucified. Rather than getting him fired from his job and then fed to the tabloids, Mrs. Landau picked up the letter from her desk and she tore it in half. John winced, as if some tender part of him were being slashed, but that was to be ungrateful. When the letter was torn to scraps, Mrs. Landau let go, and the bits of paper fluttered like doves in the air on the way into the trash can.

  Beth’s summer plans and her plans for the future in general were ruined. Graduation parties, afternoons at Brighton Beach with Joey, her Joey, evenings hanging out with everyone and then slipping away somewhere so that she and Joey could do it, Joey winning her a fuchsia-colored teddy bear at the Holy Family Summer Festival, and the heart-wrenching, highly emotive, near-to-tragic farewell as Joey left for college followed by the highs and lows of the long-distance relationship which was supposed to produce a preengagement ring before he went away, the real-deal engagement ring his senior year, and the wedding ring the minute he finished law school. Ruined. All ruined.

  What Beth had not factored into her life’s calculation was that the distance between Canarsie and New Haven was measured not in miles but in worlds.

  “No offense, Beth, but ever since he got into Yale, he’s been walking around like he’s God’s gift.”

  “We had such big plans for the summer,” Beth sobbed, and then sobbed harder, not from pain but from the humiliation when she realized it was she who had the big plans. Joey had never said boo about the summer, their summer. Plans for summer fun and summer love melted like ice cream under the summer sun.

  “Really, Beth. Don’t cry. We’ll have a great time. Us girls. You’ll see. I promise you. It’ll be the best summer ever. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.”

  Some of the teachers from Canarsie High School would teach summer school. They considered themselves fortunate to be asked to do so because the pay was good, but as far as Joanne Clarke was concerned, there was no amount of money that could tempt her to spend her summer trying to teach the losers, the discipline problems, the imbeciles who failed their exams, which were geared to the lowest common denominator to begin with. No, thank you, she would have said, had she been asked. She wasn’t asked because preference was given to those with seniority or some other favored few. Other teachers, the younger ones such as herself, took any old job they could get, minimum-wage jobs, just to make a few extra bucks. Joanne considered such work to be beneath her. A college graduate with a master’s degree in science education could hardly spend two months bagging groceries for chump change and still retain her dignity. Suppose one of her students saw her at the A&P wearing a red smock with her name embroidered over the breast pocket ringing up canned goods at the register? You know those little shits would point and snicker and tell the whole world and no one would ever respect her again. That’s assuming they respected her in the first place, which wasn’t a given. They, her students, knew not to cross her, but that was not the same as respecting her.

  Invitations to an afternoon swim, a day at the beach, a weekend at a country house, a backyard barbecue would not be forthcoming.

  Joanne experienced a pang of longing for her father, if only because caring for him filled the days. Now, on this first day of summer vacation, without him to tend to, she had nothing to do; literally nothing. She stood there in her living room, which she had already cleaned, and was struck by the emptiness as forcefully as if emptiness had heft. The summer, the prospect of July and August, stretched out like the desert. Hot and endless and without mercy. And you can be sure the humidity did nothing to improve her situation with the acne.

  For want of anything better to do, Joanne went to her bedroom to lie down.

  The bedrooms in the Kessler house had air conditioners, but you couldn’t spend your life in the bedroom. The heat affected Miriam terribly, and although she was determined that Valentine eat three nutrient-rich meals a day, it was getting to be too much for her to stand over a hot stove.

  Valentine’s offer to do the cooking was rejected. “You’ll faint,” Miriam said, “with this heat and the oven and in your condition. You know what I’m going to do? The butcher over on Flatlands has one of those chicken rotisseries. A roasted chicken. How bad could it be? I’ll pick up one of those chickens and I’ll make a salad and some Minute rice. For a minute, I can stand at the stove.”

  At the end of his first day on the new job—a summer job which paid minimum wage, which was better than nothing and so he tried hard to be grateful for it—John Wosileski had to wonder if he was ever going to get used to the stench. “Hey, be grateful,” his father had said. “I had to pull strings to get you in there.” There being Stanislawski’s Butcher Shop, where John was hired to clean up in the back, a revolting job at any time of the year but particularly so in the summer months, what with the blood and guts and bone and gristle and flies and that smell of rotting meat. Not that Stan Stanislawski ever in his entire career sold bad meat.

  John took a hot shower and lathered himself all over with Irish Spring soap, with the hope that it would eradicate the smell of death, but that, the smell of death, once inhaled, is not so easily washed away.

  Because it was still hot outside and would remain so even after the sun went down, and his apartment wasn’t air-conditioned, John was wearing only his underpants, which were the color of a squirrel by now, when he opened the freezer to see what he had on hand for dinner. He reached for a frozen dinner, and looked to see which kind it was. At the sight of the picture of the Salisbury steak, along with mashed potatoes and green beans, on the box of the frozen dinner, John’s stomach turned over. John made himself Kraft macaroni and cheese, which he ate while sitting in front of the television. During the summer months, all that was on television was reruns.

  John didn’t really mind reruns, though. Life is kind of like a rerun, John thought.

  Then John picked up a pad and pencil and calculated: forty hours per week times the minimum wage of $2.10 per hour comes to $84 a week times eight weeks equals $672 before taxes. Exactly the same number he’d come up with the day before and the day before that. Six hundred and seventy-two dollars and no cents.

  Six hundred and seventy-two dollars and no cents before taxes wasn’t the sort of money that could change a person’s life any. But really, no amount of money was going to change John Wosileski’s life in any way that mattered. Then, for lack of anything better to do, he slipped a hand inside his underpants, but desire wasn’t located there. Mostly to see if he could work up an appetite, he fiddled with himself, but when he got no response, he gave it up in short order.

  Having rapped twice on Valentine’s door, Miriam got no response, which is license for a mother to enter. Valentine was asleep in her bed on top of the covers and fully dressed.

  Miriam walked to the foot of the bed, where she took off Valentine’s shoes. Who can sleep comfortably with shoes on and never mind what sleeping in shoes can do to the circulation and a girl with child needed all the circulation she could get. Then Miriam sat herself down on the edge of Valentine’s bed and watched over her daughter. It occurred to Miriam how often she’d done this, watched Valentine sleep, how she did so without thinking, the way ritual evolves into a part of being. From the day Valentine was born, Miriam stood over her as she slept. And on this occasion, she did so for a long while, long enough so that the night came and moonlight came through the window. Watching her daughter who would soon be a mother too, Miriam, as she always did whenever she looked at Valentine, filled with love and then more love came, a flood of love, and Miriam began to fear it, so overwhelming the love was.

  Crammed into a booth at Junior’s, home of the famous Junior’s cheesecake, six teenage boys were making lascivious comments about the four teenage girls in the booth across the aisle. Although they could not hear what the boys were saying, the girls were very well aware of being the center of the universe, at least as far as these boys were concerned.

  Leah Skolnik leaned over to Beth Sandler and said, “That cute one with the Yankees cap on, he is definitely giving you the eye.”

  Beth looked up. He was kind of cute, the one in the Yankees cap. Nonetheless, Beth said, “I’m not interested.”

  “Beth,” her friends squealed in exasperation. “Quit being a martyr here.”

  “Don’t start with me,” Beth warned. “I’m not over Joey. I still love him. I’m not ready to be seeing other guys.”

  Brooklyn was not a place for false optimism, and Leah Skolnik, in particular, was a daughter of the soil. “You got to face it, Beth,” Leah said. “It’s over. You got to wake up and smell the caw-fee.”

  Joanne Clarke woke with a start. Disoriented, she reached for the clock on her night table. It was almost ten-fifteen, but morning or night? It took a moment for her to connect the dots, to ascertain that it was dark outside, therefore it was ten-fifteen at night, barring the improbability of a full solar eclipse or the world having ended.

  She tried to remember when did she get into bed; certainly it was well before dinnertime. She hadn’t had dinner, but she wasn’t hungry.

  John Wosileski stared at the television, although, if he was asked, for the life of him he wouldn’t have been able to tell you what show he was watching.

  Miriam Kessler bit into a cold chicken leg, and when she’d eaten all the meat from it, she sucked on the bone.

  Right there in the booth in Junior’s, right in front of her friends and the cute guys in the booth across the aisle, Beth Sandler started to cry and couldn’t stop crying.

  Only Valentine, so it seemed, was spared.

  Nineteen

  Summer days somehow operate on a different equation for time than the other seasons. They move languidly, lacking definition; they meld together, so that effort is required to keep track as to whether today is Wednesday or Friday. When Miriam Kessler thought about the days passing, about keeping track of them, she did not picture drawing big, red Xs with a Magic Marker on a calendar on the wall. Rather, as if the calendar were a bingo card and, instead of plastic chips, time was marked with pebbles and stones.

  Miriam did need to keep track of the week. There were appointments with the beautician, appointments with the obstetrician, Fridays were for heavy cleaning, and on this Tuesday the game was to be played at Edith Zuckerman’s house, and so under the noonday sun Miriam and Valentine walked there; Miriam schvitzing profusely, and a thin line of perspiration broke out on Valentine’s upper lip.

  “Do you believe this humidity? It’s the humidity, not the heat.”

  Miriam took a tissue from her purse and mopped at her face and around her neck.

  Edith was standing at the door to let them in when her attention was directed beyond them. “Hey, look at that.” Edith pointed into the branches of a white birch tree.

  “What?” Miriam said. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Oh. They’re gone now. But there were two birds, pinkish-yellow ones, beautiful,” Edith said. “Do you believe it?”

  “I believe it,” Miriam said. “Would you believe I saw them once before. In the winter, and I was worried about them. Canaries. They must have flown out a window.” Miriam took this as a good omen, that the canaries survived, maybe flourished even. An omen that let Miriam feel lucky as she took her seat at the table.

  Valentine sat off to the side of the game, on the couch. At this stage of things, Miriam preferred that Valentine not be left alone any more than necessary. Suppose there was some prenatal complication requiring emergency medical attention and Miriam wasn’t there? Then what? Better Valentine should come with her and sit and read a magazine or just stare out the window, which was something Valentine could do for hours on end.

  On the morning of the twenty-second of July, Pete Wosileski, John Wosileski’s father, was loading crates from the warehouse onto a truck, the man was an ox, and then the next thing you know, bam! He was lying on the ground with his skull broken.

  While at work in the butcher shop, John got word that his father was dead, killed by a loose stone that fell five stories from an abandoned building, as if hurled from the heavens, to hit him square on the head. This was the high point of John Wosileski’s summer, in so far as it broke the monotony.

  The butcher, Stan Stanislawski, gave John a week off from his job, and he promised to provide smoked meats for the gathering after the wake, which would be attended by John and his mother and, of course, Father Palachuk, and perhaps a few of Pete’s bowling buddies, but that would be it. “Tell your mother not to worry about food. I’ll send over a ham,” Stan said. Maybe some of John’s fellow teachers would’ve attended the wake, had they known. But with school not in session, who would’ve spread the word? The former Plattsburgh relatives were his mother’s family, and they were too far-flung to make the trip regardless, and they never liked Pete either. But they would send flowers, carnations mostly, and mass cards.

  John Wosileski took off his bloodied apron and went to the bathroom to wash up before going to his mother. He looked in the mirror and said, “My father died.” He said, “My father died, my father is dead,” several times over not because he didn’t believe it was true, but because he had a need to say it out loud, as it, my father is dead, is a turning point in a man’s life. So to speak, John was now the man of the house. Because his father died on a Thursday and therefore was likely to be in a state of mortal sin, John prayed for his eternal soul, which was in purgatory at best, assuming all went according to what they’d been taught.

  Mrs. Wosileski did not pray for her husband’s soul; she was content to keep him where he was.

 

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