Ending

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Cautiously we examined one another’s knowledge and we mumbled words about the mysteries of the human body. Yet we did not say even one word that suggested good-bye. We stayed close to the room and Martin’s voice, avoiding any private place in which to lay out our feelings. We tried not to speak in very clinical terms either, keeping flesh in its proper place as an object of love. Yet when we spoke about the children, grief and longing showed plainly on his face.

  It was decided that I would bring them to the parking lot of the hospital so that Jay could see them from the window of the room opposite his. It would be an odd excursion for the children: to be at the hospital, but not allowed upstairs, to see Jay, but only as a remote hazy figure they could not really identify. Would they remember him?

  I helped them with their snowsuits and scarves and we drove to the hospital. I kept thinking, they’re very young, they won’t even remember this. What could I recall from those distant days when I was only three-four-five-years old? And what had I invented because it filled an empty space and satisfied longing?

  Paul was just coming out of babyhood. I looked at him quickly as I drove, at the baby softness of his features. You could not imagine bone under such delicate perfect flesh. His fingers were still tapered, cushioned at the base, and I saw that they were dirty, that there was dirt under the short papershell pink of his nails. He sighed and pushed them out of sight, into his mouth.

  He would look like Jay, I realized with a thrill of terror. Jay had looked like that when he was a baby. Those deep-set eyes, that sweet curling mouth. Only the flattened bridge of his nose saved him from beauty. People would say, “You look just like your father.” He would remind me, as his features, his final self emerged from this compressed beginning of a man. Maybe his voice would be like Jay’s too. They learn language from us. A year ago Paul had only a few words and he listened to us and then he began to string them together. He watched Jay and imitated gesture too. He tried to throw a ball, to run, to hold a fork the way his father did. Sometimes he shuffled through the apartment, endearingly awkward, wearing Jay’s shoes. And when Jay winked at him, Paul would try desperately to wink back, his mouth working, his whole face contorted with the effort and the ecstasy of imitation. “That’s good, honey,” Jay told him. “You’ve almost got it now.”

  But Paul would not consciously remember this day or the ones before it. There would only be a fragmented series of events, confused and distorted. A sense of the car’s motion perhaps, the pleasant joggling reminiscent of the cradle, and the peculiar taste of his own fingers. Going to see someone once, somewhere, and then coming home again.

  But Harry would be different. Five was a more established age anyway. He could write his own name in broad uncertain letters and he would be going to school in the fall. And Harry was like me, a hoarder of experience. He stood on the back seat of the car on his knees, looking through the window at the rushing landscape, gasping lightly at the corpse of a car-flattened animal and saying nothing. I was jealous for him because his brother had been favored by fate and would be more lovable for all time to come. Suddenly I wished that he too could look like Jay instead of like me, that I could will some of Jay’s gestures and features onto him, as if I were dividing property fairly and squarely among the heirs.

  Then we were at the hospital and they waited in the car while I went into the lobby. I called Jay on the telephone and he sounded breathless, excited. “The kids are here now? Great! Just give me a minute, Sandy.”

  “Which window?” I asked, and he said, “Three over from your left. Hey, you’ll know me. I’ll be the one with the red carnation.”

  “Ha ha,” I said, close to tears, but willing to play the game.

  Then I went back to the car and took the children out onto the melting filthy ice of the parking lot. “Where’s Daddy?” Paul asked.

  We looked up at the wall of windows, where figures and shadows appeared and disappeared. Then I saw him at the assigned place. At least I saw a man, appearing crazily tall and thin, who lifted his arm in the bold gesture of a monarch saluting his kingdom.

  “There he is! There!” I said, pointing, waving frantically.

  “I don’t see him,” Harry said.

  “Up there. Do you see, where the ladies are and the flowers? Now look up a little higher. Do you see the man waving?”

  Harry put one hand across his brow, shielding his eyes from the winter sun. “I see him,” he said, almost without expression.

  “Daddy!” Paul yelled.

  “He can’t hear you. The windows are shut.” But then I forgot too and when I waved again I said, “Jay.”

  Another figure appeared beside him. A nurse? A patient?

  We were standing and waving like fools, like people who walk toward the movie camera, closer, closer, balloon-faced and self-conscious, saying soundless words.

  I thought of Jay up there willing to admire us, to adore us for old time’s sake. But I wanted to entertain him, to dazzle him with the virtuosity of our style. He was entitled to that at least. And I wasn’t even sure that the children had really seen him, no matter what they said. They were restless, starting to shiver. God, it was boring for them to be there, where nothing happened, where all sound was cut off by glass, and everything, even our best intentions, was diminished by distance. I looked around, desperate for inspiration, for props, something to give Jay his money’s worth.

  “Boys,” I said. “Let’s show Daddy the snow. Let’s make snowballs.” We all bent, trying to scoop up the slush, scraping at patches of ice. “Look,” I cried, throwing into the air a thin wet mass that immediately splattered at my feet.

  “The snow is no good,” Harry said. “My hands are cold.”

  “Watch out now,” I said, trying to roll another one that began to melt in my glove and slip down into the sleeve of my coat. “I’ll race you,” I said to Harry. “I’ll race you to that green car. On your mark, get set, go!” And I began to run, slipping on icy places, regaining my balance and running again. I watched Harry, saw him with his chest thrust out, saw the blurred locomotion of his arms and legs, saw Paul, encumbered by the swaddling of his snowsuit and his need to stop and shout every few minutes, “Wait for me, I can’t!”

  How did they appear to Jay? Foreshortened and distant, two small bright spots of color; once known. People stepped from a car, carrying plants. They stopped to watch us, and to let us pass.

  I looked up at the window, was struck with vertigo, and had to look down again. Harry passed me, his eyes popping with the effort. I heard his panting and the slapping of his boots.

  We ran in and out between the parked cars, in some crazy choreography. Paul was whining, “Stop it, I can’t.”

  I was exhausted and the cold stung at my face and hands, and yet I felt invigorated. This is what it’s all about, I thought. Motion. The essence of life. “Huh huh,” I said, almost out of breath, and forcing myself to go on, until Harry passed me again and I found that I was only running in place.

  I looked up again slowly at Jay and saw that people had appeared at a dozen windows, waving, pointing to us. We were a veritable parade of life, as if we carried banners proclaiming ourselves, and I imagined ticker tapes and cheers falling on our heads like new snow.

  15

  THE COLD BEGAN INNOCENTLY enough: a few sneezes shattering night silence, an ache in the throat only vaguely different from the one I felt every day now. But by morning it couldn’t be denied or disguised and a cold was a dangerous weapon to bring to the hospital.

  Dr. Block was hearty. Here was something he could handle, something needing nose drops and a cough syrup and a few kind words. For good measure he prescribed an all-purpose antibiotic as well. “Take a little vacation,” he said. “Your resistance is low.”

  He meant a vacation from vigilance and grief, but I chose to listen with a literal ear and I decided that I would go away, if only for a day. Izzy said that she would be happy to have the boys stay at her apartment. I left them there in t
he morning and then I took the subway to the bus station. Looking back as I walked to the corner, I could see a mixture of faces at the window, her kids and mine, as if they were seeing me off on some long and doubtful journey.

  But I was only going to New Jersey. The bus station seemed the right place for my departure because it is so much more solemn than an airport. There is a distinct lack of adventure and joy. For one thing, people at bus stations are poorer than the people at airports. Their clothing is less festive and their luggage is shabby and dull.

  It was easy to imagine the contents of those pseudo-leather cardboard cases. More of the same dresses and jackets that the passengers themselves were wearing, in lifeless rayon that creases easily. Underwear with meager lace that shreds when laundered. The old ladies carried corsets rolled like diplomas, and Bibles, and reserves of food slyly hidden next to their shoes. The men had those magazines that are sold in stores on 42nd Street, to be taken out again in some drab hotel, hopeful they will revive fantasies and ward off loneliness.

  There were many black people, and people carrying their belongings from one place to another with suspicious care, straddling the suitcases when they paused, as if they were astride horses.

  At the entrance aisle to my bus, other passengers clutching tickets and shopping bags called back and forth about newspapers and babies and not forgetting to write. Good-bye, they called. Good-bye. We boarded the bus. In front of me a thin woman held an infant on her lap. She kept looking through the window and whispering with grotesque lip movements. “Defrost the refrigerator,” she said. “Don’t forget to defrost the refrigerator. The re-frig-er-a-tor,” and then she held the baby up and waved its little hand and the bus began to move in a fury of noise and exhaust fumes.

  I had never been to Atlantic City in the winter, though my mother and father and I had always gone there for our two-week vacation. A sign hung on the front door of the beauty shop, CLOSED FOR VACATION. WILL REOPEN ON JULY 23RD.

  My father would be frenetic with plans, while my mother laid our vacation clothing in little piles on their bed. He said that we would go swimming, that the waves would be taller than the Empire State Building. His arms became the waves, reaching above his head and then swooping down, surrounding me as I shrieked hoarsely for joy, as I would shriek again in the real ocean and hang onto the flesh of his back. My mother smiled too and hummed tuneless songs as she folded bathing suits and pajamas.

  Just before the bus started, a woman walked down the aisle. She was huge, fluid as an amoeba, flesh displacing flesh. Her breasts were so immense, so stretched from their starting place, that released from their hammocks they might slap against her knees. Inside tan leather shoes, her feet spread to capacity, the way that a goldfish grows to suit its confinement: I knew somehow that she would sit next to me. She hurled a small bag onto the luggage rack and then she ducked her head and lowered herself into the seat. Puffing frantic little breaths, her eyes rolling with the effort, she sat there, pale and quivering. I was jammed against the window but somehow it was not unpleasant. “Someone has to get me,” she said. “Are you traveling alone?”

  “Yes,” I said. She looked expectant and I realized that she waited for me to return the question. “And you?” I asked.

  She nodded, shutting her eyes for a moment. “Alone.”

  The bus picked up speed and I looked through the window, saw the rush of landscape in a continuous colored ribbon, and then I looked back at her again.

  “Alone,” she said again, this time with a significant wink. “My father died. I just switched off from a bus from Beaufort. In North Carolina, you know? That’s where he was born. That’s where I buried him.”

  I thought that she might have literally buried him herself, digging up the earth, tossing the coffin as she had tossed the suitcase, and then tamping the turned soil with those great feet.

  “He trapped me for thirty-one years. Do I look thirty-one?”

  She could have been fifty.

  “I have this glandular condition,” she said.

  Oh yes, I knew about that glandular condition. I knew what ailed that great floured chicken, how she ate her secret food, those dolly lips opening, cartoon style, into canyons. She ate instead of weeping, then she ate because she had not wept, and then she ate while she wept and everything had a salty taste.

  “That’s too bad,” I said.

  “He was a tyrant,” she said. “He pinned me to the house, like a butterfly to a card? On account of him, I never had a man in my life. In no sense of the word.”

  I rolled my eyes in sympathy.

  “I might as well’ve been locked behind bars. He was a very religious man. They all are,” she added vaguely. “He said that God would reward me. Now I guess he has. When he died, when I heard the rattle and all? I held the shaving mirror up to his lips. Nothing. I held a match close to the hairs in his nose. I stuck a fork into his arm. He never once moved. He never said a word. Now I’ve got my own life. Now that he’s gone, I can do whatever I want. It’s never too late, they say.”

  “It’s never too late,” I echoed, hating the irony of those words.

  But she smiled as if I had said something original and exactly to the point. “So I’m going to start a new life,” she said. “I’m going out to California.”

  I started and she laughed. “Oh, I’m not on the wrong bus or anything. First I’m going to Jersey to stay with my sister for a while. I’m going to work in her husband’s diner in Brigantine for a while. To help them out—my sister has trouble with her kidney. Then I’m going to start my new life. Of course I’ll have to get rid of some of this.” She rolled rubbery flesh against my arm. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Atlantic City,” I said. “To visit my aunt.”

  “Oh that’s nice. But you ought to go in the summertime. You could go swimming.”

  And then I remembered swimming again, the pull and thrust of the surf, and my mother waiting with towels like a handmaiden at the shore as my father and I trudged out onto the sand. I remembered the particular taste of sandwiches eaten on the beach and the brilliant striped wheel of the umbrella above us and the smell of salt and fish.

  The woman next to me said, “Maybe I’ll go to Washington, D.C., before I go to California. Maybe I could get a job in the government. I mean after I lose this weight. I saw where some man in a hospital lost three hundred pounds. Of course he must have been enormous. He slept downstairs in the parlor for twenty years. For twenty years he never saw the upstairs.”

  We were both silent in contemplation of that. I sneezed twice and blew my nose.

  “A cold,” she said sadly. “You want to take care of that. My father began with a cold. You want to drink tea and lemon and honey. Burning hot. You want to inhale the steam.”

  We each ate an Oh Henry! bar from a six-pack she had in her purse and then she put her head back and shut her eyes. Her face told me that she had thrust herself into the glorious future. Her father flew on paper wings toward the heaven reserved for righteous fools. Weight slipped from her like snake-skin. She was in the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal, looking as stylish as Irene Rich. She could do anything. Anybody could do anything.

  I was left alone in my corner of the seat. In my head I found a picture of Jay as I had seen him last and I felt the seat grow more cramped as I expanded in sorrow. Jay’s hair, Indian-black against the pillow, the flesh of his face and neck, ivory-white and vulnerable as a saint’s. Then I thought of other earlier times when we would lie embraced and about the human need to touch and be touched as if it had been an original idea of ours. Myself tracing the flattened bridge of Jay’s nose, the long and elegant bones of his body, and the renewable surprise of his sex filling my hand. How lucky we were that we had invented one another, that we had those bodies to use as tools of love, that we had a bed in which to be together.

  Like a penny movie, parts of our lives rolled behind my eyes. The dailiness seemed like something that might go on forever and eve
r. How slowly we did everything: ate our food and walked and picked things up and put them down again. I saw Jay’s hand on the steering wheel of the car, and his shimmering shadow behind the glass door of the shower. I wouldn’t be able to stand the simplest things anymore.

  In the bus, my seatmate moved, bringing me back to the moment. “I never had a man,” she said wonderingly. “Not in any sense of the word.”

  “There is only one sense of the word,” I told her.

  “By golly,” she said. “I can do anything I want now. I’m free as a bird.”

  I turned to smile at her in encouragement, but her face had collapsed into folds of grief, and tears ran through the maze. I took her hand and she squeezed mine. Then she fell asleep and she didn’t wake up again until we came into the bus station in Atlantic City. I held her hand all the way. In Atlantic City I stood on the platform and waved. She had moved next to the window and we shouted “Good luck, good luck,” to each other. She waved her hand at me and she was clutching an Oh Henry! wrapper.

  The colors were only variations of gray—filthy white in the distance above the ocean, gray towers of the hotels like cathedrals along the boardwalk.

  But I remembered color, in a defiant display, and I wondered if the facades had faded, washed pale by the dampness and the salt. Even the beach, once the yellow of sandboxes, was gray. No umbrellas now, no sunning bodies in the absurd colors of summer clothing. The wind blew in theatrical rushes, pulling at the sleeves of my coat like impatient children. I thought that I would probably get pneumonia standing on the boardwalk in the very arms of winter. I sneezed, I coughed, I turned my face directly into the wind and shut my eyes. But I knew that it was I who was theatrical and not the wind. If I wanted to die, there were easier and less devious ways to accomplish it. But I didn’t even entertain that idea on any but the most romantic level. Seeing myself after the fact, drowned, with splayed fingers of wet hair worn like a crown, or poisoned, with no more finality than Snow White, rising again and again from the soft coffin bed. Saw myself only later with the poor white feet of Caravaggio’s Christ, but never, never in the agony of the cross. So I wanted to live in the face of everything. To breathe in and out, sneeze, sleep, wake (ah, yes, to wake), even to suffer the end of Jay. Anything, not to suffer the end of me. I hugged myself, partly because of the cold that seemed to enter my bones and partly in celebration of my own flesh. Now I wanted to be warm again, to be fed, to talk to someone, simply to continue.