Ending

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Sid crawled stiffly across the floor and touched her arm.

  “Leave it to the old ones,” Sunglasses said. “The first ones to use their hands.”

  “But that’s what we’re here for,” said a skinny blonde in velvet dungarees.

  “Yeah, well,” said Sunglasses, not convinced.

  We incanted the names, lying on the floor with our eyes shut, with our eyes open, hands touching down the length of the room. “Sa-an-dy, Si-id, Is-a-bel, Cyn-thi-a, Bi-ig Joh-un.”

  “Say,” said Big John, “how’s about we do the one with the rocking back and forth. Remember that one, Pearl?” he said to the fat woman.

  Bunny shook her head. “Obviously Big John has been to other sensitivity sessions and wants to do something he remembers.”

  “So? He’s not the leader,” Little John said.

  “Bunny is our leader,” pouted a twin.

  “And she’s soft,” said the other.

  “God, are they for real?” asked Sunglasses. But no one answered her.

  “We all want to feel safe in this room. We all want to feel close to one another. Everybody stand up now,” Bunny said. “Stand up and we’ll form a circle.”

  The handsome boy in the mesh shirt hadn’t said anything, but he quickly took my hand and we moved into the circle. Isabel gave him a fast tragic look and reached for my other hand. A terribly cross-eyed woman in a flowered dress cut between the twins, who squealed in protest.

  “They don’t like to be apart, those two,” observed Little John.

  “Siamese twins,” Pearl said, as she stood and pulled her panties out of her crotch. She walked between the other two men, both middle-aged and wearing sweat socks, and took their hands.

  “Now shut your eyes,” Bunny said. “Shut your eyes and experience the darkness.”

  “Oh good,” Pearl said. “We’re going to do ‘blind.’ ”

  “Now,” continued Bunny, “are you experiencing the darkness?” Someone moaned softly. “Do you feel the density and the blackness and the silence? Do you see, even darkness has a texture.”

  One of the twins giggled and someone else said, “Shhh.”

  “Okay,” said Bunny. “Now drop hands and choose someone. Quickly. A partner. I’ll be someone’s partner, too, and we’ll come out even.”

  Sid and Handsome each took one of my hands and Sid looked sad and dropped the one he held. Handsome scratched across the palm with one finger.

  “Don’t,” I said, but he looked blankly ahead and waited for further instructions.

  “Now we’re going to pretend we’re blind, that half of us are blind. We’re going to experience the dark world of the blind, the very texture of it. But we’re going to feel safe and protected because one partner in each couple will be able to see. The seeing partner is going to lead his ‘blind’ partner around the room. Everyone will have a chance to be blind. Everyone will have a chance. Put your arm around your partner. Feel his presence.”

  “Say, that’s not my presence,” someone hooted. Someone else said, “Be serious. This isn’t a game.”

  It was my turn to be “blind” first and before I shut my eyes I looked around quickly and saw Izzy paired with Little John and the twins clutching one another. Then I shut my eyes and Handsome led me around the room, his hand too high on my waist and then too low on my hip. I hated the darkness. I shut my eyes so tightly that flashes of color broke the blackness. I hated the feel of his hand on my waist, not Jay’s hand. I wondered if I would fall, if I would plunge without stopping into some darker place than the one behind my closed lids. I felt relieved when Bunny instructed us to change places. But Handsome cheated, letting a slit of light in through the incredible mesh of his lashes.

  “Don’t you trust me?” I asked, and I could tell by his faltering step that he had finally shut his eyes.

  After everyone had been both “blind” and “leader,” we sat on the floor again. “Scramble up,” Bunny said. “Sit next to someone else.” Izzy drew Handsome and I sat next to Sid, who looked surprised, and smiled.

  “Now touch, go ahead and touch, gently now, no genitals please. Experience the texture of the partner: the hair, the skin, the body warmth. Touch and know that you are being touched, that we can reach one another in this simple way. Stroke, if it gives pleasure. Pat and stroke and touch.”

  The cross-eyed woman looked at her own nose and stroked Big John’s leg. “That’s wonderful, Sophie,” he said. “Sophie, you are wonderful.” And Sophie’s face opened in a smile.

  Sid’s hands were as soft as a girl’s, and he touched in brief, tentative pats. I touched his arm, and then I moved closer and put my hand across the creepy yellow skin of his neck and I heard a deep sigh of pleasure leak from him like air escaping from a tire.

  “Now what are you feeling?” Bunny asked. “Tell us what you are feeling.”

  “I feel relaxed,” the thin blonde said, as Bunny massaged her back in long, slow strokes.

  “Cynthia feels relaxed,” Bunny said. “Let yourself go limp, Cynthia. Let yourself feel free against the movement of my hands.”

  “I feel nervous,” said one of the twins. Little John paused in stroking her leg.

  “No, don’t stop,” Bunny instructed, and he continued to move his arm in mechanical strokes.

  Tears came to the twin’s eyes. “I still feel nervous, I can’t help it. I don’t think we should be here doing these things.”

  “Why don’t you go home then?” Pearl asked.

  “Because I like it,” the twin said, beginning to weep.

  Her sister jumped up and put her arms around her.

  “Don’t stop,” Cynthia said to Bunny.

  “Sometimes we feel guilt over receiving pleasure,” Bunny said, raking across Cynthia’s back.

  One of the middle-aged men was massaging Sunglasses’ feet. “I like it better when I’m done than when I do,” she confessed.

  “We want to be babies,” Bunny said. “We want to be free of worry and guilt. We want to have things done for us. We want to remember lying on the dressing table. Mother pats the powder here and there, touching secret places, making us quiver. Mother makes sweet cooing sounds and her soft hair tickles our bellies. How does it feel to have Mother doing these things for you?”

  “My mother is dead,” Little John said.

  “John feels sad, remembering his mother is dead.”

  I tried to remember being a baby, and my mother’s hands, but Sid’s stroking, monotonous now, abrasive, intruded.

  “She died when I was a baby,” Little John said. “My aunt brought me up. My father’s sister.”

  “Do you remember how it felt to have your aunt do things for you, John?”

  “She was a strict woman. She never touched anybody with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Poor John,” Cynthia cried out. She leaped from her place and ran to him, throwing her arms around his neck.

  “Cynthia feels sorry for John. She feels like mothering him.”

  Big John walked over to Little John. He patted his head. “We’re all with you, kid.”

  “Mother!” Little John cried. “Mother!”

  “Take it easy,” Pearl said, and she pulled his head onto her mountainous bosom.

  “Mother!” he cried again, but his voice was muffled.

  I looked across the room and saw that Izzy was lying back against Handsome’s chest, and that he was playing the nipple of her left breast as if it were a guitar string. Her eyes were shut.

  “Come on everybody,” Bunny said. “Let’s show John that we care about him. Let’s give him our support.” We crowded around John, who had worked himself into a breast-beating frenzy.

  “We love you, John.” “Take it easy, fella.” “You’re our boy, Johnny.”

  Then Pearl pulled away, letting his head drop with a dull thud to the carpet. “I think that’s enough,” she said. “I hate to say this, but I think that John is selfish.”

  Cynthia stood on her knees. “You only want to
call attention to yourself.”

  “Who, me?” Pearl asked. “Me?”

  “You!” the twins said in chorus. Then one of them continued. “You’re an absolute slob. You and fat man have been trying to take over all night.”

  “Do you feel threatened?” Pearl shrieked, and the twins cowered.

  “Why do you feel it necessary to resort to name-calling?” Bunny asked.

  “Because they make me angry.”

  “So you feel angry. Does your sister feel angry too?”

  “Yes,” one of them said. “We always feel the same things. It’s a psychic phenomenon.”

  “Bullshit!” Sunglasses said. “What a load of bullshit!”

  “Mother,” Little John moaned, but no one listened.

  “You have no right to attack my physical appearance, you little runt. This happens to be a thyroid condition.”

  “Bullshit, bullshit.”

  Sophie ran into the center of the room and waved her arms for silence. “Why don’t you attack me?” she asked. “Why don’t you pick on my poor eyes?”

  “Nobody is even talking to you!” Pearl shouted.

  I looked around the room and saw that Handsome and Izzy were locked in an embrace. Poor Izzy, I thought. But then there was poor aging Sid, and poor motherless John, and poor Pearl. We were all such dreadful and pitiable creatures of this life that. I wanted to throw back my head and let out an earth-splitting howl. I pushed Sid’s hands away and opened my mouth, but it was Bunny’s voice that I heard.

  “Believe it or not—now hold it everybody, just for a second!—believe it or not, you’re touching. Now! With your voices, with your anger. Let the anger out. Let’s be animals and let the animal rage loose. On all fours, now! Growl! Roar! Let it out!”

  We prowled the room on our hands and knees, and I kept thinking at least this is making me tired, and later I’ll be able to sleep.

  “OWOOO!” The other animals circled me and grew tired too, until one by one we lay silent in a chaotic pattern on the floor. The green carpet was musty and rough against my cheek, but I pretended that it was grass, and that Jay was beside me in some early beginning place.

  21

  MY COLD WAS GETTING better. On Sunday, the last day of my exile from the hospital, I took the boys to the beauty shop for haircuts. My parents made the usual joyous fuss over them, commenting on their size although they had seen them only three days before, on their beauty, on the bliss they created simply by being. My father actually called Harry “Champ” and sparred with him, and Harry laughed and shut his eyes against the loving blows. I saw that my father was trying to be the masculine presence for my children in the absence of their father, and I was touched. I knew that in the future he would throw footballs and baseballs to them with the changing of the seasons, and ruffle their hair and speak to them in grave, deep tones.

  The boys spun on the chairs as I had done as a child and looked solemnly back at the reflection of their faces rising from the pink capes as my father cut their hair.

  My mother, not in uniform now, walked around the shop and out of habit rearranged jars and bottles and opened drawers and shut them. “Sweetness!” “Dollface!” she cried alternately to the children and pinched their cheeks and caught them with kisses. When their hair lay in wet, final grooves and their smells were flower sweet, she gave them money. Their fists overflowed with coins.

  “They don’t need money,” I said.

  But I was overruled. “Let them buy something,” she said.

  “What are you going to buy, Champ?” my father asked.

  “Let them buy toys. Let them buy candy.” They were spilling out their love in frantic lavish drifts and it made me feel sad.

  On the way home we stopped at the playground, even though it was a very cold day with a stinging wind. There were only three or four other children there, neglected children perhaps, or ones with crazy mothers like myself. They moved aimlessly, like bums, from one thing to another, sifted darkened sand in the sandbox, hung listlessly from the swings, and eyed one another as potential enemies. There is something dangerous about days like this, I thought. The wind was bitter and there were tears in my eyes that did not come from the grief hoarded and hidden somewhere below.

  Another woman came into the playground, and it was as if I had willed her there for distraction or companionship. She was overweight and cozily sloppy, with wildly windblown hair and what appeared to be house slippers on her feet. She was looking for her dog. A leather leash dangled from one hand and she whistled repeatedly, a rising, questioning sound. Then she walked to the bench where I was sitting and she smiled at me. “That dog’s going to drive me nuts,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Ninety bucks on training,” she said. “Forty bucks on shots. Fifteen on grooming.”

  “I know.”

  “Then he takes off like a bat out of hell. Males. I’ll never get another one, if you know what I mean.”

  I nodded again and she was encouraged. She sat down next to me. “Those your kids?”

  “Yes,” I said, too weary to explain that just two of them were mine.

  She whistled again, softly. “Some gang. God love them. No wonder you keep them out on a day like this. They must drive you up a wall.” She squinted at me, speculating. “You look tired.”

  “Well,” I said. “My husband is very sick.”

  “Ohhhhh. So you want to keep them out of his hair, huh?”

  “No, no, he’s in the hospital.”

  “Serious, huh?” She leaned close to me, so that I could feel her coat sleeve against my own.

  “Serious,” I repeated. “He’s dying.”

  She moved away slightly as if I had startled or offended her. Her head was cocked to one side. “Doctors don’t know everything,” she said. She stood and cupped her hands to her mouth. “Rusty! Rusty!” she bellowed, and then she sat down again. “Maybe I’d be better off if he never came back,” she confided.

  “He has cancer,” I said, unrelenting.

  “That so?”

  “He’s thirty-two years old.” I stared at her, pressuring her for a response. Why shouldn’t she know? I wanted her to know.

  But she was crafty, evading my evil eye. “My husband doesn’t believe in doctors,” she said. “He says they’re all crooks. Hocus-pocus. And who do you think pays for all those fancy offices? For those nice leather couches and all? And those vacations they take! Do you think there’s a doctor in New York on a day like this? No, they’re smart. They’re in Florida, in Arizona. They’re out on the golf course, taking life easy. On your money,” she added, pointing an accusing finger.

  “He’s dying,” I said again, believing it myself in a terrifying swell of knowledge. I wanted to shake that woman until she said yes, acknowledged the truth about Jay, about me, about herself.

  But she moved farther away on the bench, her face closed against me. “Even vets,” she said. “Fifteen bucks every time that lousy dog gets a sniffle. Do I have to pay for his wife’s fur coat?” Her voice was shrill and plaintive with all the unsaid words. Is it my fault? What do I have to do with death?

  I had an urge to hit her, to punch her in the face, as if the infliction of pain would be the first step in the right direction. But rage and pity rose up in conflict. Poor stupid woman, plump as a bird in her brown winter coat, the leash coiled in her lap.

  I stood. “There’s your dog,” I said, pointing into the distance past the playground.

  She jumped up, shading her eyes. “Where? I don’t see him.”

  “There,” I said. “He’s just turned the corner.”

  She was willing to be convinced. “A big fellow, black?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said, wanting her to be gone, feeling the tears frozen in their tracks on my cheeks. She went off finally, whistling again, and I called to the boys, telling them it was time to go home.

  In the apartment Paul dropped his coins carelessly on the first surface he encountered, but Harry buried his
as proper treasure in the bottom of the toy box.

  I lay down on the bed and listened to dance music on the radio. From the apartment next door, I could hear sporadic bumping noises of life. I hummed along with the tune on the radio and then I thought about tomorrow and I wondered if Jay would look different after the few days we had been apart. When would we finally look directly at one another in affirmation of the terrible truth? And what would we say?

  Harry came in and watched me from the doorway. I jumped from the bed and swept him into my arms and began to dance around the room with him. He made himself rigid, throwing back his head and howling in what might have been either pleasure or despair.

  Hearing the noise, Paul rushed into the room and began to cry, “Me! Do it to me!” He hung on to my legs, dragging his weight.

  We danced and whirled and lurched around the room to some innocent bubbling tune of the fifties, until I was exhausted and we fell onto the bed in a warm tangle of the children’s arms and legs. “What’s going to happen?” I said. “What’s going to happen?” Nobody answered.

  22

  FRANCIS SAID, “I WONDERED what happened to you.”

  “I had a cold. I haven’t been here for a few days.”

  “Well, I’m only passing through now myself. I’m on my way home.”

  If he was going home, why didn’t he leave then? But he was a man in no hurry, open to any possibilities. I was afraid that if he spoke any longer, I might learn something about him, that he would reveal his history and his pathos to me. Yet I stood there with my hand poised on the lucite handle of the hospital door. With a single gesture I could let myself inside and leave him on the other side of the thick glass. And yet I waited, delaying the confrontation with the odors that frightened Eddie, with the rat’s maze of corridors, and finally with Jay.

  “A cold is dangerous in Jay’s condition,” I said.

  “It must have been hard to stay away.”

  “Yes.” My hand curled over the handle. “I don’t know if he’s changed.”

  “Try not to be afraid. He’ll see it in your face.”

  “Do you see it?”

  He studied me carefully. He smiled and put a hand on my shoulder. “I see a lovely face,” he said.