Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  “Where are you?” she asks.

  I look out the window at the arid landscape of Southern California. Heat waves rise up from the blacktop of the freeway. Billboards advertise condominium developments with names like Hacienda del Mar.

  “I don’t know,” I answer. “Where are you?”

  “I just got to Jersey.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Well, Irene’s going to be okay. She looks awful—like a caricature of someone who has been in a car crash—but Dad’s in pretty bad shape.”

  Susie’s voice is harsh and flat. As usual, my half sister minces no words. She’s furious that no one thought to call her until I did—that my mother’s family seems to have forgotten that she exists. The trouble between Susie and my mother goes back nearly thirty years to the time my parents first started dating each other. She’s a phony, nine-year-old Susie told my father. Don’t marry her. They have barely tolerated each other over the years—each has wished the other would disappear; my mother could be at death’s door and Susie would probably perceive her as all right.

  “I called Shirl and Harvey,” says Susie, referring to my father’s younger sister and brother. “I think they’d better get here.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut.

  “Do you think—?”

  I can’t bear to say the words. Since I’ve been old enough to contemplate loss, I have imagined losing my father. Whenever we have been together and said good-bye, I have wondered if that good-bye would be the last. Though he is a bear of a man, an imposing figure, really, I have seen him as physically fragile, vulnerable, picturing a fatal heart attack, an embolism, a stroke—my father falling like an old heavy tree to the pavement on Wall Street, where he works, or while walking to temple on a Shabbos morning.

  “The doctors are asking me what medication Dad’s on,” says Susie.

  I think of the possibilities: Valium, Percodan, Codeine, Empirin. My father pops painkillers like Tic Tacs; he has suffered from chronic back pain for as long as I can remember. In the center of our breakfast table back home, on a lazy Susan where most people might keep cereals he has collected an impressive array of plastic bottles, each prescription written by a different doctor.

  “I don’t know what he’s taking,” I say. “Why don’t you ask Irene?”

  It is a function of my relationship with my half sister that I call my own mother Irene in her presence. I am trying to ally myself with her, to let her know that I understand.

  “Irene’s stoned,” says Susie. “They have her on painkillers up the wazoo.”

  My head feels as if it’s going to explode. My mother stoned is another in a series of impossible images. My father, comatose. My psychoanalyst half sister, my father’s sister and brother, and my mother’s suburban New Jersey relatives convening in a hospital corridor, pretending to get along. The rifts between my mother and my father’s side of the family are deep. They go back at least ten years, to the time my father’s sister, Shirl, had the flu and didn’t attend my Bat Mitzvah. My mother was certain Shirl didn’t have the flu and wasn’t coming because she didn’t think the service would be religious enough. The night before my Bat Mitzvah, my mother called Shirl psychotic and hung up on her.

  “What’s the weather like?” I ask Susie.

  “Sucks.”

  “Am I going to be able to get home?”

  “Eventually.”

  I close my eyes and count to ten. I want to scream at her, tell her to stop answering me in monosyllables, that I’m her sister, not her patient. I want to cry out for help—to let her know that I’m only pretending to be a grown-up, that in fact I’m a complete and total mess. But perhaps she knows this already.

  “I’d better go,” she says. “The doctor just came out of the ICU.”

  “Okay.”

  We are both quiet for a moment.

  “Susie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  We are two only children, raised by different mothers, fifteen years apart. Half sisters, connected to each other by half promises and half lies. But today we are all each other has in the world—and the man who connects us is fighting for his life.

  I think she says “I love you too,” but there is static, and we are disconnected.

  My parents had three previous marriages between them. My father married Susie’s mother when he was in his early twenties. It was a marriage that worked on paper. Early photographs of the two of them show a young, happy if slightly baffled-looking couple on the beach in Miami or playing shuffleboard at resorts like Kutchers and Grossinger’s. But underneath her proper Orthodox surface, my father’s first wife was a rebellious, intellectual spirit, and he had no idea what to do with her. Where he came from, women didn’t aspire to more than a comfortable family life and perhaps some volunteer work at the temple sisterhood.

  After Susie was born, the couple stayed very involved with both sets of in-laws, spending Shabbos dinners either at my father’s parents’ house on Central Park West or at his in-laws on Fifth Avenue. My father was on the road half the time, traveling to a small town in Virginia, where he was overseeing the family silk mill. Years later, my grandfather would shut down the mill for good, and lend my father the money to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. But back then, my father’s traveling must have taken its toll. When he was home, he and his wife fought viciously, or lapsed into tense silences. Still, my father may not have grasped or understood her growing frustration and disenchantment.

  When Susie was six, my father returned from a business trip to find an empty apartment, with only his clothes left hanging in the closet. His wife, daughter, and all their belongings were gone. There were rumors, of course, that she had run off with Susie’s pediatrician. This kind of thing just didn’t happen. In Susie’s class at Ramaz, an Upper East Side yeshiva for girls, she was the only child of divorced parents.

  My father waged a custody battle for Susie, and won ample visitation rights: Wednesday nights, every other weekend, and Jewish holidays. In the meantime, he was probably being fixed up on blind dates all over town. He was already becoming a tragic figure of sorts, ditched abruptly by his flighty, good-for-nothing wife. On the weekends he had Susie he sometimes took her to resorts in the Catskills, where they’d play a game: he’d go out on dates with young women, and Susie would narrow her little six-year-old’s eyes and give him her opinion.

  For his second wife, he chose another daughter of a privileged Orthodox clan. Dorothy Gribetz was a lovely, sweet-natured girl, and according to everything I’ve ever heard, my father was crazy about her. So was Susie. He proposed, she accepted, and plans for a wedding were set in motion. It wasn’t until a short time before their wedding that my father’s best friend told him a rumor that had been whispered throughout the Orthodox community: Dorothy had Hodgkin’s disease, which in those days was a terminal illness. She didn’t know it—her parents had kept it secret from her, and from my father as well.

  A few nights before their wedding my father paid a visit to Dorothy’s father. Was it true? Was she dying? Yes, he told him, Dorothy’s prognosis was that she had a year to live. He had kept it from my father because he saw how happy he made Dorothy, and he wanted her to have that happiness, even if only for a short time—even at the expense of my father’s, and of Susie’s.

  I picture my father now, standing beneath the chuppah on his wedding day. He is not the father of my memory, but of my imagination: he is a young man—perhaps he is thirty-two—but his eyes are already old. He turns to watch his bride walk down the aisle. She is a vision of innocence in her simple white gown. This should be the happiest day of his life. His eyes sting as she moves toward him, flanked on either side by her parents, and his heart is hollow. He is watching himself become a widower. He looks around the shul at the assembled guests and blinks hard against the thought that they will all be gathered here again in the not too distant future, that he and his bride will be together one last time in this sanctua
ry: he in the torn black clothes of mourning, she in a plain pine box.

  I grew up absorbing my father’s sadness without knowing where it came from. Sometimes he just disappeared. Not like other fathers—fathers I heard about, who drove off in their cars and never came home again—but just faded, as if he couldn’t really be there, not all of him. He would be sitting in a lawn chair smoking a Camel, and all of a sudden his eyes would grow vacant, his mouth would crumble, and he would stare off into the distance. I would follow his gaze to see what he was looking at, but I never saw what was making him so sad. I couldn’t make out the faint shadow of his first wife against the forsythia hedge in the backyard, holding a little-girl version of Susie’s hand. I couldn’t see Dorothy huddled in a blanket by the seashore, weak and pale in the final months of her life.

  There was defeat in the stoop of my father’s shoulders, or in the way he shook a few pills into the palm of his hand, then downed them in one gulp when he thought no one was looking. I thought that perhaps this was what it meant to be a grown-up; that along with growing big and tall, the pinprick of sadness that was inside me too would spread until it covered my insides like a stain.

  I was sixteen years old before I heard about Dorothy. Susie let it slip—when Dad, Dorothy, and I were upstate one time, she said—and when I looked puzzled, she stopped and stared at me. You don’t know about Dorothy? Susie was by then a thirty-one-year-old psychoanalyst, and on some level, she must have known what she was doing. Perhaps she felt I needed to know. There were already danger signs—signs that I was fading fast myself.

  And then there was my mother. Over the years, the story of my parents’ courtship and marriage has acquired a delicacy that has kept me at a distance, like an ancient hand-blown piece of glass that might disintegrate if I got too close.

  What I was told as a child was this: they first met on East Ninth Street in Manhattan, where they were across-the-street neighbors. It was a Saturday, the Shabbos, and my father was walking home from shul with nine-year-old Susie. My mother was returning from the hardware store, where she had just bought a hammer. Hammers and Shabbos are two things that don’t go together: for Orthodox Jews, the Sabbath is a day of rest, when no work is to be done, certainly not manual labor. So when my father met my mother, he must have known she wasn’t from his world.

  It is a story my mother has often recounted feverishly, slamdunking the metaphor of the hammer. He knew I wasn’t observant. He saw the hammer. He knew what he was getting himself into. She was a career girl with her own advertising agency, who had left her first husband when she was thirty. My father was so taken with my mother that, the following Sunday, he pored over the Manhattan phone directory, searching for her. He knew only her first name—Irene—and her address on East Ninth. I can only imagine what he was thinking, the way his heart must have been racing. Who was the dark-haired beauty from across the street? She looked to be in her early thirties. What had she been through? Why wasn’t she wearing a wedding ring? Why was he tracking her down despite his better judgment? He ran his finger down each column in the White Pages, looking for Irenes or the initial I on East Ninth Street until he finally found her in the F’s, under Fogel, a surname left over from her first marriage.

  In a photograph of my parents I have hanging over my desk, they are walking down the aisle of Young Israel of Sixteenth Street on their wedding day. My father is dashing in a well-cut dark suit, and my mother is elegant in ankle-length ice-blue. Their arms are linked as they walk together toward the chuppah, and my mother is smiling triumphantly at whoever is taking the picture, a thin cloud of netting floating over her face. My father is smiling too, but now, if I look beyond the smile, I see that he is haunted. There are ghosts in his mind, ghosts swirling all around my father and my mother in the moment before they take their vows.

  I am not yet born, and there is already a piece of my father that is dead.

  I am drunk, halfway home.

  Or rather, I should be drunk, but nothing seems to be working: not the two vodkas I had in the airport bar, not the bad airplane wine I have been drinking since takeoff. I’ve recently reached a point in my drinking where one drink can get me drunk or ten can have no effect. But it isn’t tipsiness I’m after. I’m looking to anesthetize myself from head to toe, which is why I’m mixing red wine and vodka—a very bad idea and I know it. All I want to do is stop feeling. I want the images of my parents in my mind to fade until there’s nothing but a warm, sickening haze, until I get just dizzy enough to pass out in my seat.

  I always drink on airplanes—I consider them a sort of timefree zone, an endless cocktail hour. Besides, I’m terrified of flying, and after a few little bottles of Smirnoff and cans of Mrs. T.’s Bloody Mary mix, I can usually forget that I’m in the air, at least for a little while. Forgetting is what it’s all about—forgetting that I’m twenty-three years old and have nothing to show for it. Once I’ve had a few drinks I can convince myself that I have a lot to show for it. Who needs things like college degrees, nice hometown boyfriends, starter jobs at advertising agencies? My friends are all playing a game, and I have stepped to the sidelines. I have chosen to sit this one out.

  Instead, I am playing house with Lenny, zigzagging across the country at his beck and call. I have something resembling a career, halfheartedly modeling and doing television commercials. For the moment, I think I want to be an actress. I dropped out of college three years ago after being cast in a York Peppermint Patties commercial, and now I feel that I’m stuck with it—acting and Lenny—as if, having taken a wrong turn, I have had to make a commitment to follow this road wherever it takes me. Retracing my steps has not felt like an option. I have run faster and faster in the wrong direction, eyes squeezed shut, hoping that somewhere along the way the road will loop around again.

  A red-faced, middle-aged man is sitting next to me, matching me drink for drink. I’ve noticed him sneaking glances at me. A thick annual report is spread over his tray table.

  “I’ll bet you’re an actress,” he says. “Am I right?”

  “Right,” I say faintly.

  “Have I seen you in anything?”

  I reel off the list of my most recent commercials. Hess Gasoline, Coca-Cola, Scrabble. My words are slightly slurred. Although I think I don’t show it, I am always flattered and surprised when people ask if I’m an actress or a model. As far as my looks go, I am seething with insecurity, a bottomless pit into which compliments fall for a brief, shining moment, then disappear. The whole notion of physical beauty has grown increasingly important to me as my intellectual curiosity has vanished. A few years ago I was studying music and literature at Sarah Lawrence, diagramming Mozart concertos and reading Tillie Olsen. But why struggle with a term paper on the elements of foreshadowing in Bleak House when I could be cavorting on the beach in front of a camera and getting paid for it? Why deal with caked-over tubes of toothpaste, smelly refrigerators filled with old cartons of labeled food and turned milk when Lenny Klein has handed me keys to an apartment high above Central Park South? I have used myself as a physical instrument, slicing my way through the world with nothing but youth, long legs, and long blond hair. At times I think I have chosen the easy way, but every once in a while I realize that this may be the hardest way of all.

  “So, are you heading to the big city on business?” my traveling companion asks.

  “No.”

  I pause and take a gulp of wine.

  “My parents were in a car crash. They’re both in intensive care.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” he says, recoiling slightly.

  “I actually don’t know if they’re alive or dead. It looks like my father had a stroke while he was driving.”

  I look at the bloated lines of his jaw, his thick hands, a gold insignia ring encircling his stubby pinkie finger.

  “Tough luck,” he says. “But you’ll get through.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” I murmur, more to myself than to him.

  “
Yeah. Well, shit happens,” he says.

  We bump through the air, and the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign lights up with a ding. Usually this would be enough to send me into a panic, but not tonight. What are the odds of a car crash and a plane crash in one family in one day? I turn away from my traveling companion and cover myself with a thin airline blanket. My wineglass is empty, I wedge it between an airsickness bag and an in-flight magazine in the pocket in front of me. Shit happens. Is there some sort of hard-won middle-aged wisdom in that notion?

  The captain announces that we’re experiencing some turbulence. I curl up in my seat, trying to find a quiet place in my mind where I can rest, if not sleep. I’m afraid to drink any more. My head is spinning, and each lurch of the plane turns my stomach. Lenny has arranged for a car and driver to pick me up at Newark, and I’m planning to go directly to my uncle Morton’s house in Summit, only a few blocks from the hospital.

  I try to conjure up Lenny’s face, but he fades in and out of focus: a thatch of dark hair, big brown eyes, a thick wrestler’s body gone soft around the middle. His most expressive feature is his voice, which is deep and raspy, a tool he uses to great advantage in the courtroom. Lenny is a name partner in one of the largest law firms in the city—a firm whose other partners include three former U.S. senators. Fortune recently listed him as one of the top five litigators in the country. I suppose he also uses his physical self as a tool—striding, pausing dramatically, rolling his eyes, raising his voice to a thunderous pitch or lowering it to a whisper. He used that voice to seduce me three years ago.

  I met Lenny Klein at Sarah Lawrence. He was the stepfather of one of my close college friends. The first time he called me, that hoarse voice asking for me on the dormitory phone, he said he wanted to get together, something to do with Jess. Would it be absurd to say I believed him? There must have been an odd feeling in the pit of my stomach, but I ignored it. I agreed to meet him one evening in the city—and I agreed not to tell Jess. Her birthday was coming up; I thought maybe he wanted my help in planning a surprise party.