Ending (21 page)

I opened the drawer of the night table. Next to my diaphragm, to old check stubs and some loose pennies, was the vial of sleeping capsules. I took one and held it up to the bed lamp, trying to see through it. But its redness was as dense and mysterious as sleep itself. I could just take it and be done with it. It would be like a swift and painless blow to the head. But I hesitated. It would be the end of something that I dreaded to give up. The end of my control over things, that was one part. The end of memory as fantasy, of Jay entering this room through the magic of my will. His voice and his presence. It was a leave-taking in a way, a rehearsal for the real thing. Good-bye. Good-bye then, I thought, weary and sick with the knowledge.

I put the capsule on the back of my tongue and forced it down my throat without water. I gagged slightly and then it was gone. I climbed back into bed again, half sitting against both pillows, waiting for its journey and mine to begin.

“SANDY?”

“I’m here.”

“Sandy?”

“I’m here, Jay, I’m right here.”

“Okay. I was dreaming.” He smiles, sleeps, frowns. Dogs bark, phones ring. “If it’s for me …”

“Shhhh. It’s nothing.”

In the dream he drives a car, hands up to steer, foot braced against the sheet. He stops short, bed creaks.

“Don’t, Jay. It’s nothing.” Not wanting to touch him now. Those greenstick bones. What can we do to put flesh on those bones? Dem bones.

“Who’s there? Who came in?”

“No one. It’s only me.” The machinery of my brain. The hurricane of my breath.

“I keep dreaming.”

“I know.”

“Did the baby cry?”

“No. It was in your dream.”

The good nurse comes, leans over with her cloud of dark hair, mother hair. Brings a cup of tea. The cup rattles in the saucer.

I carry it out to the solarium, where daylight is dazzling. Why do we die in dark places?

The woman in the gray coat is inconsolable. “I am inconsolable,” she says, and cracks her knuckles. The report is as sharp as the noise from a fired gun.

My mother comes on tiptoe, her shoes squeaking. She grimaces in agony at their noise. “Lie down, tootsie.”

“I can’t. Lying down, I sink, I drown.”

The woman in the gray coat stretches and sighs. The sound is deafening.

We walk back to the room. Thundering hooves.

Jay is lying on his side with his back to the door. His hospital gown is loosely closed and the bones of his spine are like carefully placed white stones in a path. “Sandy?”

“I’m here, darling.”

Blood comes from Jay in an endless ribbon.

The bad nurse enters and stops it with the fierceness of her ability. Bad triumphs over evil.

I am inconsolable.

“Sandy?”

I
WALKED DOWN THE
hall toward the telephone booths. A black orderly moved, whistling, past me. He was wheeling a garbage cart. I reached into my purse and found a coin to call the operator. “Operator,” I said. “I want to make a person-to-person call to Honolulu, Hawaii.” My voice was clear and steady and reasonable. I told her to charge the call to my home telephone number. I even gave her Jay’s name and the address of our apartment.

Then I listened to a cacophony of sounds: bells, whistles, clicks, hums. Operators spoke to one another and their words were scattered, as if spoken in a strong wind. Outside the telephone booth, a man waited to make a call. He looked at his watch, he rubbed his nose, and looked at his watch again. Voices said numbers and names. They thanked one another.

The man began to pick his nose. On the wall above the telephone someone had written, Call Erica if you want it. This is an underwater call, I thought. Cables coiled like serpents on the floor of the ocean. Call Erica if you want it. The man outside did a nervous little soft-shoe step. There was no air in the telephone booth. The telephone booth was under water.

Then Mona said, “Hello? Hello?”

What time is it in Honolulu? What will I do when the water is over my head?

“New York?” Mona was incredulous. “Sam, Sam, hurry up, it’s the children!”

Then my voice began to speak, shattering sea life for miles and miles.

H
E DIED IN HIS
sleep, in my sleep, as I nodded, dozing in the waiting room. My shoes were off and my skirt twisted around so that the zipper was in the front. The nurse woke me, called my name. I could not, would not remember where I was. I chose to be dreaming or back in childhood, wakened by my mother for school, or anywhere that was not here. “No,” I said, sealing out the invasion of light with my heavy eyelids. I shoved against her, pushing away the reality of her presence, her inevitable news. Oh, I wanted to sleep, sleep.

They woke me after Harry was born. I had gone out in that last moment of creation. “It’s a boy! Look Sandy, it’s a boy. He’s fine. It’s all over.” I came awake to astonishment and pleasure. Jay, inflated with joy, my mother and father, transformed into grandparents. Plants, flowers, greeting cards that celebrated life.

“I won’t,” I said to this nurse, but she would not allow it. Her urging became less gentle and I had to open my eyes. The two brothers were huddled together in a corner, and the woman in the gray coat was asleep in her chair. Wake
her,
I thought. Let it be
their
news. Why did she pick on me?

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. The nurse sat next to me on the couch and she took my hand. “He’s gone,” she said. “In his sleep.”

Gone. But she meant dead. Gone was someone gone from a room, someone escaped from a prison. Dead was no breath, no pain, no pleasure. It was nothing.

“Do you want something?” she asked. “A sedative?”

But I shook my head. I had been asleep, sedated when Harry was born, so that I would not feel the final and earthshaking thrust of his head. “Give me something. Hurry up!” I had ordered. Who wanted to be a martyr to the birth of a stranger? The mask came and I rose to meet it, grateful and greedy.

But now it was necessary to be alert, to know everything. The others in the room stared at me, their eyes like the watchful eyes of small animals in a forest.

“Did he say anything?” I asked the nurse, thinking of an urgent message, last words that would unravel the mystery.

But she said, “No, quietly, in his sleep. I was with him.”

Not me, ear cocked for final sounds, but this strange and gentle woman, who was there because it was her job. At the end of the week she would get a paycheck, with deductions, for sitting with my husband while he died. It was the strangest thing to think about, as if I were trying to understand the mores of another culture.

“Would you like to see him?” she asked, and I drew away from her for a moment. Of course not. Of course I didn’t want to see him. All the terrible death words rushed into my head. Corpse, body, remains. God. But I had promised myself that I would know everything. The ritual would be completed. I stood, light-headed and uncertain. The tiled floor was cold under my stockinged feet, and she led me, holding my elbow, like a mother leading a child to the bathroom during the night.

The room had been emptied of all the paraphernalia: the tubes, trays, the machines that defied this terrible and natural process of life. I hoped for a moment that he would appear to be sleeping, that I could be comforted by all the American phrases of solace. He is just away. He is only asleep. He is out of it now. At least his suffering is over. See how peaceful he looks.

But he didn’t even look like Jay anymore. It was the right room. There was the yellow water stain under the windowsill, the familiar whorls in the wood of the door. And there on the bed was a dead body, nothing more. The nurse was right. Gone was the right word after all. The force of life, gone. The miracle of emotion, gone. Nothing.

I left the room, padding silently down the hall to get my shoes and coat. I wanted to go home and get on with the real business of mourning. But it wouldn’t wait. The others in the waiting room made the first ovations. “Sorry. Out of pain now. At peace. So sorry.” They murmured, fluttered and flapped near me until tears burned in my throat. Don’t, I warned myself. What did those stock phrases have to do with Jay, with me, with our real lives? I would not let them enter me and take hold. And yet the texture of that gray coat against my skin, the whispering chorus of their voices, the real and human smell and warmth of their breath invaded me and I passed among them weeping.

I went home and I let myself into the apartment, going quickly past the dumb, expectant faces of my parents and the children. I went into the bedroom and I shut the door. They called timidly. “Sandy? Are you all right? Sandy?” They knocked on the door. But I would not answer. I lay down on the bed, the only place where it was possible to begin.

Hilma Wolitzer (b. 1930) is a critically hailed author of literary fiction. Her work has been described by the
New York Times
as “often hilarious and always compassionate.” Born in Brooklyn, New York, she began writing as a child. She was first published at age nine, when a poem she wrote about winter appeared in a local journal. She was voted the poet laureate of her junior high school, but after graduating from high school at sixteen she worked at various jobs, from renting beach chairs under the boardwalk in Coney Island to pasting feathers on hats in a factory and holding a position as an office clerk.

Wolitzer married at twenty-two, and though her family consumed most of her time, she began writing again. Her first published short story, “Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket,” appeared in print when she was thirty-six. Eight years (and several short stories) later, she published
Ending
(1974), a novel about a young man with a terminal illness. The
New York Times
called it “as moving in its ideas as it is in its emotions
.” Ending
was released when Wolitzer was forty-four years old and she was dubbed the “Great Middle-Aged Hope.”

She followed this success with
In the Flesh
(1977), a well-received novel of a conventional marriage threatened by an affair. Since then, her novels have dealt mostly with domestic themes, and she has drawn praise for illuminating the dark interiors of the American home. In the late seventies and mid-eighties, Wolitzer also published a quartet of young adult novels:
Introducing Shirley Braverman
(1975),
Out of Love
(1976),
Toby Lived Here
(1978), and
Wish You Were Here
(1984).

Following her novels
Hearts
(1980),
In the Palomar Arms
(1983),
Silver
(1988), and
Tunnel of Love
(1994), Wolitzer confronted a paralyzing writer’s block. Unable to write more than a page or two a day—none of which ever congealed into a story—she did not publish a book for more than a decade.

After working with a therapist to try to understand the block, she completed the first draft of a new novel—about a woman who consults a therapist to solve a psychic mystery—in just a few months. Upon its release,
The Doctor’s Daughter
(2006) was touted as a “triumphant comeback” by the
New York Times Book Review
. Since then, Wolitzer has published two more books—
Summer Reading
(2007) and
An Available Man
(2012).

In addition to her novels, Wolitzer has published nonfiction as well, including a book on writing called
The Company of Writers
(2001). She has also taught writing at colleges and workshops around the country. She has two daughters—an editor and a novelist—and lives with her husband in New York City, where she continues to write.

A three-year-old Wolitzer poses for a portrait, taken in 1933.

Wolitzer with her mother, Rose Liebman, and sisters, Anita and Eleanor, circa 1943.