Ending Read online

  I reasoned that maybe it would be good to look pretty for Jay, that my hair could be a disguise for the disheveled state of my spirit.

  My mother and father have owned the beauty shop for so many years that it is as familiar as a room in which people live. The pink chairs are rooted to the floor in a tidy row, facing the long mirror like vain women. On the walls models showing the latest hairdos look down and smile with perfect teeth. The partnership in the shop was always more binding, more sacred than the marriage itself. There, pulling a comb through knots in customers’ hair, my mother remembers old grievances: women, real and imagined, lies, truths more painful than lies.

  My father, with an eye on himself in the mirror, pumped the pedal so that a customer ascended to his reach. He wore the latest style in jackets for hairdressers and a white ascot bloomed at his throat. The name Mr. B. was embroidered above the breast pocket. “Mr. B., am I dry?” called the women under the dryers.

  My mother wore white nylon that revealed only shadows of her body underneath. Her name, Rose, was in red on the swell of her right breast.

  All the sweet and bitter smells were still there, and the hum of the dryers and the dying and rising voice of WABC bringing the latest of the top one hundred songs in America. Most of the songs sounded alike in that drone of electrical equipment and no one really listened except once in a while when a particular song bleated through clearly and one of the women shouted, “Oh shh, quiet, it’s him! Listen to that, it’s my favorite song.”

  Then some of the other women would sing along, their eyes shut and their wet nails splayed in front of them.

  “Sandy,” my father said, coming to the door. “How’s my baby?”

  Oh, it was good to be that for a while, to be innocent with the plastic cape circling my body, to be led to the seat in the back where my father let warm water fall on my head like love. My mother came and went on rubber soles like a consulting physician during surgery.

  My father massaged my scalp and he hummed something discordant with the music from the radio, and I thought of Jay. With my eyes shut, I saw the room that he was in and the blurred image of all the rooms I passed on the way to his, and the clinical business of death, the death textures of plastic and rubber and steel, of tubes and wires. I sat up gasping, like someone just saved from drowning.

  “Isn’t that better?” my father asked, and he closed a warm towel over my ears.

  4

  I BEGAN TO BE jealous of Jay’s relationship to the hospital. It was as if he had moved to a new neighborhood without me and had made friends I didn’t know. He was familiar and easy with the terrain and the life-style, while I was a transient who came with clumsy packages of fruit and books and a restlessness to leave. It seemed to be some perversity on his part to be there when he could have been home, to be ill when he might just as easily have been well, to withhold the nature of his illness like some coy and precious secret.

  One morning I met Dr. Block in the lobby of the hospital. He said that all of the tests had not been completed, that he had to have a total picture. But he was concerned. He looked at me sternly as if it were my fault that Jay had done so poorly on some tests.

  “But, do you think …?” I began.

  “The tests are what count,” he said sharply, and I was reminded of cold teachers who care nothing for classroom performance. Jay would not be passed for his dear face, for a testimony from me or his mother or his children. Not for a petition signed by old friends in college, by aunts who still save letters he had written from camp. Not for old baby pictures, for his love of animals, his thin beauty, his watch ticking in my ear, for his dark hair, for the thumping of his love inside me. For nothing.

  But I smiled at the doctor as if I might yet win him over. Then I went upstairs and Jay and I sat holding hands in the solarium.

  “What I really need, kiddo,” he said, “I can’t get here.”

  “The cure.”

  “Don’t even talk about it,” he warned. “I’m dying.”

  I looked up, startled, but Jay was smiling at the union of our hands. “I’m dying for you,” he said.

  Across the room two elderly men in bathrobes played pinochle, slapping the cards against the table. Like Jay, they wore plastic identification bracelets, and I was reminded of banded birds.

  “Last night,” Jay said, “I woke up in the middle of the night. I was dreaming. I dreamed that I was in that old apartment in Brooklyn, with my father and Mona. Except that I wasn’t a kid.”

  I felt a terrible dread. “I thought that you dreamed about me,” I said.

  “I do. You’re in all of my hot dreams. Whatever I have, that’s one of the symptoms.”

  “You’ve always had that,” I said.

  “But this was really strange. I was in my old bed. My father was alive. He was looking out through the window. My mother was cooking something. I wondered what I was doing there.”

  Later when we said good-bye at the elevator, Jay told me that the man in his room had gone home and that they had put a kid in with him. “I think it’s something serious,” he whispered.

  Everyone has something serious, I thought. Then I remembered his mother. “Listen,” I said. “Do you think I should mention all this to Mona, when I write to her?”

  He looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he tugged absently on my hair. “No. Why should we get her worried over nothing? She’s so far away and I’ll be home before she’d even get the letter.”

  I nodded, happy to be in on the duplicity, on this lighthearted view of things. Then the elevator came, and like two people who are hopelessly unable to end a long distance call, we said:

  “Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  “I love you.”

  “Me too.”

  “Let the children call.”

  “Tonight.”

  “You’d better go.”

  “We’re holding up the elevator.”

  “Call.”

  “I will.”

  “Don’t forget.”

  “Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  During the night I woke up in the wide expanse of our bed and I wondered, What if it’s true?

  5

  THE BOY IN JAY’S room had been reduced to an exquisite delicacy. His pallor, the drooping stalks of his wrists were like those of the saints in medieval paintings. I thought that if he were to take off his hospital gown we would find him transparent, and all of the intricate machinery pulsing inside him would be visible to the eye. He was a lovely boy. His name was Martin and when Jay introduced us, he pushed himself upright to shake hands with me.

  Martin’s hobby was photography and he couldn’t believe his good luck to be rooming with a cameraman. He had been worried that he would be put into the children’s ward with crying babies getting their tonsils yanked out. “This is terrific,” he said.

  “This boy knows something about lenses,” Jay told me and Martin lay back against the pillows with a satisfied smile.

  “Mr. Kaufman,” he said. “One thing is I talk a lot. It’s my bad habit. My mother says I’m like a phonograph. When you want to, tell me to shut up. It’s the only way to turn me off. I’ve always been like this, even as a kid. I drive my teachers crazy. Nobody can get a word in edgewise. So when you want to, tell me to shut up, and I will.”

  Jay told him that he was glad for the company, that he was lucky to have someone with the same interests in his room.

  “Boy,” Martin said. “What if I had some moody guy? You know, someone nervous. I’d drive him up the wall.”

  Martin seemed so sick that he made Jay appear well. It’s only a trick, I thought, like something done with a camera. I looked at Jay sharply to detect any changes. Was he thinner, had his color changed? Did I ever mark all the subtle changes that had taken place since I first met him? When do we become mortal?

  One day I walked into the room and something was being drained in through Martin’s wrist from a bottle. “My shutter
arm,” he said in mock despair.

  I brought an album of Jay’s stills and they talked into the afternoon about openings and zooms, their voices rising and falling in a soporific wave: f. 4.5, wide angle, f. 11. We might have been a family in our own home on a winter day. But the secret fluid ticked into Martin’s arm and the antiseptic stench was everywhere.

  Martin’s parents arrived. They were all thin people who seemed too old to have a child of Martin’s age. They both shook hands with us with a solemnity that might be reserved for formal occasions. The father had a hoarse rasp of a voice. The mother whispered, “Isn’t this nice? I was worried that he might have been put in with someone” (here she paused and. looked around cautiously), “someone very ill.” She explained that Martin was recovering now, that he had been sick with terrible complications after his appendix had ruptured. “He’s getting better now, but he was desperately ill.” She was in love with the sounds of those words. “Desperately,” she said. “Touch and go. In God’s hands.” Was I to learn a new vocabulary? “Life and death,” said Martin’s mother.

  “That’s right,” his father concurred at intervals in his terrible voice.

  “Martin is our only child,” the mother said.

  “That’s right,” said the father, as if we might not have believed her.

  Jay and I decided to go to the solarium, another occasion for handshaking. Even as we walked down the hall, the chorus of their voices followed us: the main theme of the mother, the tired rasp of the father, and Martin, piping, clear, asking questions, talking, talking, hanging on.

  At the elevator, Jay said, “I feel like a fool.”

  6

  IN THE MORNING HE called and said that the weather report was very bad, that the roads were slick already and that he didn’t want me to come. He whispered because Martin was sleeping. “That poor kid,” he said. “He was up all night.

  I found myself whispering back. “If I stay home,” I said, “maybe I’ll bake something. Or I’ll do hems. I’ll write to your mother.”

  Jay said, “You don’t have to do penance, Sandy. The roads are bad.”

  It was true. The matter was out of my hands. I didn’t have to go. I couldn’t go. I looked out through the window for reassurance and saw the whiteness and felt the windowpane shudder with the thrust of the wind.

  “Is my daddy in the hospital?” Paul asked, peering into the depths of his soup.

  “You know perfectly well,” I said.

  “Perfectly well,” he echoed. “Perfectly well.”

  Harry was drawing a picture for Jay. It was a scene of a summer’s day with V-shaped birds in flight across a blazing sky, and oval clouds, and in the corner a very small figure launching a kite.

  “Daddy will love it,” I told him. “That’s a wonderful picture. He’ll show it to everybody,” I said. “He’ll really love it.” When I went to see Jay again, I would put Harry’s picture on the nightstand next to the cards from friends and the plant from the camera crew. Everyone had sent get-well cards, the sort that ridicule any indulgence in sickness, that threaten you to get well quickly (or else!), that make wisecracks about expensive doctors and sexy nurses.

  In the afternoon I didn’t bake or sew or even write to Jay’s mother. I called my friend Isabel on the telephone.

  “Are you scared?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Sandy. I want to say maybe it will be all right. But I’m afraid you might hate me for it.”

  “I wouldn’t, Izzy.”

  “You might. False hopes are cruel, because they make you seem less than you are. Remember when everyone used to say that Eddie would come back, that it was only a fling?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wanted to believe them, but I despised them at the same time for fooling me. I wanted to believe anything. I loved stories about other people: distant cousins, old neighbors who had been through it all and survived. Men who came back with their tails between their legs. Wives who were celebrated with ticker-tape parades and monuments to their righteousness. But it is different for you, Sandy. There’s hope. I mean you don’t know yet.”

  “That’s right. Mrs. L., Joseph’s mother, knows hundreds of identical cases. They were all saved by Alka-Seltzer or something.”

  “How does he feel?”

  “Mostly tired. He wakes up tired. He looks lousy and his back aches.”

  “Do you want to come here? Do you want to stay with me?”

  I thought about Isabel’s apartment, of the four places set at the table for the three children and herself, the displacement of male character in every room. Like a liquid, she had spilled over onto all the places Eddie had been. Her papers and books were scattered on his old desk, her makeup in crazy disorder everywhere. Her belongings swelled in closets and drawers.

  “Thanks,” I said. “We’re okay.”

  Later I sat on the sofa and watched television, while Harry and Paul pushed toy cars across the floor and through the tunnel between my feet. I watched quiz programs and a woman from Ohio won two cars. She screamed, she wept, she banged her hands on the podium. “I never won anything in my life!” she cried. Tears came to my own eyes. The cars revolved slowly on a turntable and the woman applauded as if they were performers. Her husband ran up onto the stage from the audience and kissed her feverishly.

  I watched an old movie with a shaky sound track and a happy ending and the tears kept rolling down my cheeks. I snuffled and wiped them away with the back of my hand. Harry fell asleep with his hand across one of his toys and Paul climbed up into my lap and sucked his thumb with greedy pleasure. I watched two soap operas. In the second one, the scene opened in a hospital corridor and an orderly was wheeling a stretcher from the operating theater. There was a child on the stretcher. The child’s head was swathed in bandages. A young couple rushed from off-camera to the child’s side.

  “Not now, Mrs. Burns, not now,” said a voice, and they looked up imploringly at the face of the surgeon. “It’s going to be all right,” he said, and the camera panned to his beautiful scrubbed hands as he stroked the cheek of the unconscious child.

  “Thank God!” bawled Mrs. Burns. “Oh oh thank God!” She wept into her white gloves.

  “Thank you, Dr. Peters,” said Mr. Burns.

  Organ music swelled inside my breast. My throat was thick with tears.

  I watched a situation comedy with canned laughter, about a mix-up in party invitations. Someone fell over a kid’s bicycle and down a flight of stairs. Someone brought a monkey dressed as a little girl into the house. The laughter went on and on and I couldn’t stop crying. Even when Paul looked up and said, “Don’t!” Even when I smiled and made laughing noises and pointed at the screen. “Look at the s-silly monkey,” I sobbed. “Oh God, look at the f-funny m-m-monkey. Oh ha ha oh God,” gasping and gagging until the commercial when I blew my nose and began to grow calm again.

  The next day there was a letter from Jay’s mother. She lives in Hawaii with her second husband. They are semi-retired now, working part time in a plant that packages tiny orchids in plastic vials and then ships them to California for distribution at the openings of gas stations and supermarkets. They’ve lived there for six months and so far she has sent a grass skirt for me, toy ukuleles for the children and a record with instruction book, called The Beautiful Language of Hula Hands.

  January 5th

  Dear Children,

  Aloha! How are you? Fine I hope. We are fine living the life of Riley and enjoying ourselves. You can’t imagine the interesting people we are meeting from all walks of life. Sam says what difference does it make what you are if you are a good person in your heart. You know him he is soft.

  Seventy nine degrees here today can you believe it I am wearing only a sleeveless cotton dress in January. Please look out for a package I am sending for the children how are they? Fine I hope. Give them a big kiss. Sam says Aloha too. He is becoming an artiste in his old age and does nice paintings of t
he scenery. We will send you a good one to hang up. There are some girls here with bathing suits like diapers. Sam says he will come back here in the next life. You would not recognize us we are black.

  Love,

  Mona

  7

  I HAVE EARLY SENSUOUS memories of my father: the scratch of his moustache when he feasted at my throat, the exotic scent of the beauty shop that clung to his clothing and his skin, the resonance of his voice and the resultant joy in his chest at the sound of it. There was also the stern glance of my mother, frowning on frivolity.

  Did I imagine their quarrels on the other side of the wall? How does a child learn such things? My mother made no mystery of them. There is a language specifically for that sort of quarrel. And I observed my father in the shop, touching the women as he spoke to them, his hand on someone’s shoulder, his fingers stroking pleasure into another’s scalp. I sat on a chair spinning around and around, catching myself in the mirrors everywhere, in love with my blond hair, with my own known face.

  I imagined then that my father’s affairs were those of the heart, in the romantic sense induced by movies I had seen and magazines I had read after school in the beauty shop. In my mind he did harmless things, necessary to his sentimental spirit. I believed that he clinked wine glasses with pretty women, and danced intricate tango steps and laughed a great deal over innocent jokes.

  But the language on the other side of the wall was more specific. “Tramp.” “Bum.” “Whore.”

  Yet they were serious business partners. When they checked the day’s receipts, when they studied the hair-dye charts or the inventory on shampoos and rinses, there was a harmony and order that never existed in their other life.

  One night, shortly after we were married, Jay and I were lying in bed together. We had come from a party an hour before and we floated in that limbo between wakefulness and sleep. I don’t remember the series of thoughts that brought me back to those former nights, but I was there again, lying in that white narrow bed, in a room that harbored different dreams. I heard the routine noises again: the dropping of a shoe with a weary thud, the sliding of drawers, the rise of my mother’s voice, my father’s answer extended into a yawn. The restless creak of bedsprings, another shoe. I was home in my own bed, lulled by the anesthetic of familiar sounds.