Ending (7 page)

“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 ever. 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.

We had not always stayed at the same hotel: my mother’s idea, I suppose, to keep my father on the move and away from lasting relationships. One of the hotels had been torn down, and rising from the ruins was a low modern motel. Another was boarded up and shut for the winter. But a third, thrillingly familiar, was open to the public. I wondered who came there to bask in the cold winter sun. There had been only a few figures on the boardwalk, hunched against the wind, and at least one of them had been a derelict, stumbling, perhaps in the delusion that it was summer.

Who lives here? I wanted to shout, as I entered the lobby of the hotel. Everyone there was old. An old man slept in an overstuffed chair that seemed to embrace him. Two old women sat poised on the edge of a love seat. Even the desk clerk was stooped and wrinkled, and he rested his head against the quiet wall of the switchboard. It seemed to be merely a stage set, a place on which the actors, my mother and father and myself, would soon appear. On the worn red carpet of the staircase, perhaps, in woolen bathing suits and beach robes, with pail and shovel and newspaper and lunch basket and towels and blankets; so encumbered as to almost stagger.

Why had I never asked Jay to come here with me so that I could show him a small piece of my history? He always used imagery in his photographs as a silent language. He would have understood. One memory is worth a thousand words!

I knew that I came back here now because I believed it had been a place where my parents and I had truly loved one another, where we had been a perfect triumvirate of love. This was safe ground in my mind, where somehow we had been all and enough for my father. I could remember no quarrels. I was even included in their room to lie on a cot unfolded by a colored maid who seemed to approve of us. Had it all been in my imagination? It didn’t matter. It was only important that I believed it, that I continued to believe it even in the face of all evidence.

I walked around the edges of the lobby, saw that the barbershop and the gift store were closed, saw the arrows that pointed to the direct passage to the beach, saw the paintings (the same, the same) of waterfowl, of sheep, of brown ships on a brown sea.

The dining room was open for lunch. Only a small cluster of tables was set, still with white cloths and frosted pitchers of water and silverware that would be heavy in the hand. White napkins stood in pyramids at every setting. It was early and only one table was occupied. An elderly woman sat there, wearing a fur-collared coat. She held the massive menu in front of her as if it were a hymnal.

There were no waiters in the dining room. I stood in the doorway and waited and then the woman looked up over her pince-nez and nodded, as if she expected me.

I nodded too and even smiled. How would a voice sound in the quiet of that room?

She raised her water glass to her lips and drank. Then she cleared her throat in three harsh sounds and said, “Are you meeting someone?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Would you care to join me?”

I walked through the hoop of light thrown by the crystal chandelier. “Thank you,” I said. When I removed my coat and sat down, she handed the menu to me.

“Your nose is all red,” she said accusingly.

I raised a wrinkled tissue to it. “A cold.”

“Soup,” she said. “Fluids.”

Then, as if on cue, the waiter came on the sides of his collapsed feet, and teetered above us until we ordered.

It seemed that she would accept me without question, as if I were Alice, entering her world through a dream.

“I came here as a child,” I said.

“I came here before then,” she answered.

“It seems smaller now.”

“Everything shrinks.”

“I know. Schoolrooms. Old houses.”

“I came here on my honeymoon,” she said, and I knew that her husband was long dead.

“I came here with my mother and father.” Somehow she had aroused a competition between us.

“We had filet of sole for our wedding lunch. The manager sent a bottle of wine.”

“We were very happy here,” I said. Was it true? I remembered ordering food in the dining room. It was a serious business. The waiters came to know us and would wait a long time before they came to the table to take our order. My father would say, “The veal looks good. Chops sound nice.”

My mother would nod. “How about the filet of haddock?”

“I don’t know,” he’d answer. “I don’t feel like fish. Do you want soup?”

“Do you?” my mother would ask.

“I don’t know,” my father would say, and on and on through the vegetables du jour, the salad dressing, the beverage, the dessert.

Now the waiter came with bowls of soup in trembling hands.

She lifted her spoon and said, “I’ve come back here every year for forty-five years.” Her chin was raised triumphantly and I knew that the contest was over.

“Then you were here when I was a child.”

“There were so many children.” She dismissed them with a wave of her ringed fingers. “My children hate this place. They always say, ‘Why do you come back here? It’s rotting. It will fall into the sea.’”

We ate our soup in silence for a while.

Then she put her spoon down. “Once, last year, I think it was, I was eating breakfast right here, and a woman came into the dining room. She looked deranged. Her coat was buttoned wrong. Her hat came over her eyes. She began to shout. ‘How can you sit here eating rolls and butter when children are starving all over the world?’

“ ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked her.

“ ‘It’s your decadence that’s killing them, that’s swelling their bellies!’

“The manager came running from the kitchen. ‘I’m an old woman,’ I said. ‘I hardly enjoy my food anymore.’

“But she only repeated herself. ‘It’s your decadence that’s killing them!’ The manager waved his arms at her. ‘Out! Out!’ he shouted.

“ ‘Just listen,’ I told her, ‘my teeth don’t even fit right. I can hardly chew. They irritate my gums.’

“ ‘Decadence, decadence!’ she said. The manager grabbed her sleeve and pulled her toward the door. On the way out she knocked over water glasses and she took rolls from the last table.”

“The world is changing,” I said, selfish, meaning
my
world.

“It’s true, though,” she said. “I can’t eat a steak anymore.”

“People are desperate.”

“I can’t even breathe well. I sleep on three pillows.”

The waiter came and removed the soup bowls and brought the main course.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Next year I might go to Miami.”

Out on the boardwalk again, fortified by the food, I saw two brown horses carrying riders along the shore. I walked past closed amusement places and frozen custard stands. At the barred entrance to the steel pier, shredding posters announced the world-famous diving horse and Stars! Stars! Stars! The wind lowed and the water licked around the legs of the pier. Coming soon! the posters said. A Galaxy of Stars For Your Entertainment!

Further down the boardwalk, a voice beckoned from a sheltered arcade. “THIS IS THE PLACE FOLKS HERE IT IS COME IN TO CURL YOUR TOES TICKLE YOUR FANCY AND WARM YOUR NOSE THAT’S FANCY F-A-N-C-Y NO OFFENSE TO THE LADIES THIS IS THE FREE-EST SHOW ON EARTH GATHER AROUND ME CHILDREN BECAUSE I HAVE TO HAVE YOUR CLOSE AND UNDIVIDED ATTENTION!”