Free Ending by Hilma Wolitzer Page A

against the lower slats of the bench and swatted listlessly at each other.
    “Stop it,” the mother said from time to time, pinching the arm of the child who happened to be nearest to her. “Stop it for Christ’s sake.”
    The father dozed, snored, and woke occasionally, looking surprised to find himself there, with that particular wife and those squirming battling children. He’d rub his eyes and grunt, then settle his buttocks against the unyielding wood of the bench and sleep again.
    A loudspeaker announced the departure and arrival of buses—“Ventnor. Margate. Ocean City.” The father was startled awake again and he turned his glazed eyes to look at me. Now what? his face said. He lit a cigarette and all the children vied for the honor of blowing out the match, spittle flying, sparkling as dew on the fine hair of my arm, on my pocketbook. “Watch out for the lady, stupid!” Father blew smoke rings to encircle the frail waist of the youngest girl. Mother laughed, leaned over for a puff, and gave the cigarette back, lipstick-marked and moist. Oh, how dare they be so intimate in the face of everything?
    Their bus was announced and they rose at once like a flock of noisy birds. The last boy ran, tripping across my feet, and his mother yanked his arm with a pull that might have wrenched it from its socket and she smiled at me with an endearing smile full of bad teeth and apology.
    I yawned, growing luxuriously sleepy, and watched the continuing parade of passengers. A man rushed across the depot floor and his shiny black suitcase flew open. “Oh sh-it!” he cried in true despair and his life’s secrets tumbled out as if they had been shot from a cannon. I jumped from the bench to help him and other people stopped too and bent over, picking up the pieces and flinging them back into the open mouth of the suitcase. “Damn lock,” the man muttered, as I touched his jockstrap, his Ivory soap, his Modern Screen, his white shirt wrapped in laundry cellophane, his alarm clock, his pamphlets on the new world of computer programming.
    “Damn, damn,” he said, until the suitcase was filled to overflow. Another man gave him a length of rope and together they bound the suitcase as if it were a resisting prisoner. “Thank you, thank you all!” he called, waving his free arm and running toward the boarding gate. Then they announced the bus to New York.
    Boarding the bus and sitting down next to a middle-aged black man, I knew how really tired I was. Jay was dying and I dreamed of a warm bath and food, of cool and perfect sheets. It was as if I were too distracted by life to be concerned with death. Yet when I tried myself once more, letting in the thoughts of darkness and of separation, my heart took terrible plunges. And Jay, surrounded now by the enemy, with the enemy living inside him, did he have dreams of soup and bread and other beds for sleep and love instead of for dying?
    I began to die then, my mouth and nostrils and ears filling with black earth, and I wanted to pull on the sleeve of the man sitting next to me and confess that I could not stand it, that I would not. But in his dark, African inscrutability, he had turned away from me and fallen asleep.
    The bus moved urgently away from the delusions of childhood and back toward the real world. Going away hadn’t done very much, after all. Slowed time a little maybe, creating illusions like the ones in a slide show. Maybe I should have gone back to Jay’s beginnings instead. What happens to someone’s nostalgia when he dies? Jay, near the subway, waiting for his beloved and missing father. Mona, singing in her Bronx kitchen, polishing silver with a pink and pungent cream. Is it possible to reconstruct everything, if you go back? To change things? The neighborhoods were all changed. Buildings torn down. Nothing remained constant. Se habla español. Childhood, oh God. Elusive as this moment, now. The movement of the bus rocked and bumped me against the warm arm