Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  She locks eyes with me, waiting to see if I’ll do her bidding. After all, this is the first time in my life I’ve had power over my mother. Her hospital bed has become a crib, and I am the looming adult who can grant her wishes—or not. I am horrified by the responsibility. I can barely manage to pay my bills and keep fresh milk in my refrigerator.

  “Mom, you don’t look so good,” I say gently. “Why not wait until—”

  “I have a right to see my own face,” she says.

  Behind the icy bravado there is terror. It lurks just beneath her skin. Maybe whatever she is imagining is even worse than what’s actually there. I open the metal drawer of the dresser and pull out her handbag. It’s an old leather purse, black and quilted, and I remember it from my childhood. This must be what she was carrying the night of the crash. One of the few remnants of my mother’s chicken-farm roots is an inability to throw anything away. She keeps her cashmere sweater sets from college, her boots that have been resoled a half-dozen times, papers and clippings that have long since lost whatever relevance they may have once had. The cabinet beneath her bathroom sink at home was always stacked high with free department-store samples and cosmetics-company giveaways: hundreds of creams, lipsticks, mascaras—more than could ever be used in a lifetime—lined up next to dozens of unopened boxes of perfume bought in airport duty-free shops.

  I rummage through her purse for a compact. Rummaging through my mother’s purse is nothing new to me. As a child, my desire to find out the real truth (which I also defined as whatever I didn’t know) began with my mother’s handbag. The romance of little slips of paper, contents of wallets, to-do lists, lipsticks! At twenty-three, my mother’s purse has been replaced by Lenny’s briefcase. Whenever I get a chance, I look through his papers, bills, correspondence. I think I will be able to patch together a complete portrait of Lenny, if only I can find all the pieces.

  My fingers light on the smooth, round case of my mother’s compact. It’s small. She will only be able to see her face a fragment at a time. I hand it to her, then stand just behind her shoulder as she opens it, so I can see what she sees. I stroke the top of her head, the layers of her brown, blond-streaked hair.

  She doesn’t make a sound as she moves the mirror slowly in a circle, taking it all in: black-and-blue eyes, broken nose, fractured cheekbone. When she is finished, she snaps the compact shut.

  “Okay,” she says thickly. “Not too bad.”

  A week after the accident, my agent calls. He sounds excited, but then again, he always sounds excited. Good agents are brokers of hope, believers that this audition, this callback, this screen test, might be the one. He tells me that the head of nighttime casting at NBC saw my eight-by-ten and wants to take a meeting.

  “Just a meeting,” Sheldon says. “You know the drill. Just go up to his office looking like the traffic-stopping babe that you are, and charm his pants off.”

  He doesn’t mean this literally. Or does he? Sheldon has come around his desk more than once in the three years he’s been my agent and given me hugs and kisses that lasted a little too long. He’s a forty-five-year-old married guy who wears a gold pinkie ring and a mustache that usually billboards whatever he’s eaten for lunch. Sheldon handles me for film and television, not commercials—which means he hasn’t made much money off me so far. But he seems to believe in me, and he sends me up for everything: Broadway plays, feature films, sitcoms, soaps.

  I’ve told Sheldon about my parents, which elicited an offer to come over and give me a neck rub. His office sent flowers to my apartment, with a note written in the florist’s script: Our prayers are with you, from all of us at Entertainment, Inc. I guess he thinks a week is enough time for me to be back on my feet, ready to roll. What’s more, I seem to think so too. I tell Sheldon I’ll be at the meeting, no problem.

  Sheldon schedules me for three o’clock. He usually manages to make my appointments after lunch. Does he know how hard it is for me to pull it together in the morning? That on days I have auditions, I have to wake up early, take at least one aerobics class, and spend an hour on my hair and makeup before I begin to look halfway decent? Years from now, when friends see snapshots from this period, they will ask me point-blank whether I’ve had plastic surgery. My face is bloated from drinking, puffed full of air, and my body is incongruously thin. My parts don’t look as if they go together. Nothing fits. But somehow, on camera, it all sort of works. My big blond head fills the screen nicely, and I have bone structure that seems to come out when a video camera is pointed at me, contours emerging from beneath the bloat.

  On the morning of the meeting at NBC, I skip my hospital visit, planning to go at the end of the day instead. It has been weeks since I’ve been on any kind of audition, and I’m nervous. I hate auditioning. Since I’ve started acting and modeling I’ve had to work on making my face as still and placid as the surface of a lake. This requires some effort. I remember, as a child, my mother telling me not to frown or my face might freeze.

  My mother has often claimed that I could have had a big career as a child model, but she pulled me out of it because she didn’t want me to turn into a messed-up kid. When I was nine months old I was the Beechnut Baby Food baby in the national commercials, and when I was two I was the Kodak Christmas poster child. My face was plastered all over the country, in advertisements, on billboards. When I asked her why I was doing it in the first place—it certainly wasn’t my idea at the age of two—she’s answered that it just sort of happened. Accidentally. I wonder what my father thought of his little yeshiva girl wishing the world a Merry Christmas. My mother claims he got a kick out of it.

  Jittery, I throw on a leotard, my mink coat, and sneakers, then walk down Seventy-second Street to the aerobics studio where I spend most mornings, when I’m not too hungover, taking a two-hour aerobics class called Fat Busters. I pass Fine & Schapiro delicatessen on my way to the studio, and the smell of fresh corned beef brings my father into such a sharp focus that for a moment I think I see him in the window, ordering his favorite sandwich from the guy behind the counter. I stop in and order a sandwich to sneak into the hospital for my father. Turkey, tongue, coleslaw, and Russian dressing, with a sour pickle on the side, and a Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda. It’s a meal only a Jew would order, and the deli guy looks at me slyly out of the corner of his eye as he slices the tongue. When I hand him my American Express card, I wait for the comment: Shapiro your married name?

  At the studio, I add my name to the sign-in sheet. I leave my coat, purse, and deli bag on the bleachers. My stomach growls at the smell of the sandwich, and my mouth waters. The class is packed with dancers, models, fitness-obsessed housewives. The lighting is low, and the moves are jazzy. I like to watch my body, given how hard I have worked to make it skinny. If I squint, I look like one of the dancers. I have remodeled myself, inside and out: the muscles in my arms are defined, and my legs are lean. I was meant to have hips and thighs and breasts, but I have done away with all that. Instead, I’m almost boyish.

  Aerobics is about me and the mirror. It’s also about sweating. I weigh myself before and after class, and when I finish I’m two pounds lighter than when I began. That these two pounds contain necessary minerals and will cause dehydration is not something I consider. I try to drink as little water as possible. I walk home from the studio light-headed, my ears still thrumming with the disco beat of Donna Summer.

  On the way to the meeting, I stop for a manicure. My nails are jagged, the skin around them bitten to the pink. Usually I get something subtle, but this time I go for a color called Gardenia. When I walk out of the Korean salon, my hands look foreign to me. When I studied classical piano, my teacher used to hand me a nail clipper if he could hear a single click against the keyboard. He would be horrified at these perfect, shiny talons. As I walk across Central Park South, heading toward the NBC offices midtown, I have the urge to stop people on the street and tell them that my parents are both in the hospital and neither of them seems to be getting bett
er. I wonder if they can see it on me—the fear, the shame—whether I’m wearing it like a sign on my forehead. All around me, people seem hurried, purposeful. I feel as if a layer of my skin has been peeled back, leaving me naked and raw. As I jostle through crowds of businessmen heading back to their offices after lunch, a thought skitters across my mind: You’re not up for this, it whispers, but I push it away.

  I smile at the guard who gives me a pass to the thirty-seventh floor, take a couple of jagged, deep breaths, and try to let myself fall away as the elevator ascends. There is a cacophony of voices rising in my head, each louder than the next. When the elevator doors open on the thirty-seventh floor, I cannot move. I push my back against the wall of the elevator, grip the rail, and wait until the doors close with a ding. I watch the floors light up in descending order. Spots are floating before my eyes. I can’t I can’t I can’t.

  I walk through the lobby, past the guard, and onto Forty-eighth Street, every cell in my body focused on putting one foot in front of the other. The cold air slaps me in the face, and I breathe it in, hoping to freeze this panic, to stop it from growing. The tension in my body feels as if it’s going to shoot through my fingers, out the top of my head. I hear Sheldon telling me to charm the guy’s pants off, my mother saying Eza bat yesh lee, my father asking me where he is. My own voice is loudest of all, screaming in my head, convincing me that there’s no one, nothing that can help me. I can’t make it on my own. Like my mother’s bones, like my father’s brain, I’m going to shatter into a million pieces. There will be no trace of my family left at all.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  February. A blustery Sunday. The sky is the color of ash, and the wind whistles and whips across the turnpike. I have begun to drive my father’s Subaru back and forth to the city, playing only radio stations he has preprogrammed. I imagine this brings me closer to him, as if listening to Bach cantatas on WNCN, or a sports update, or 1010 WINS News Radio will allow me to enter his interior world—or rather, the world he now inhabits. My father may be a mystery to the doctors, but how can he be a mystery to me? I tell myself that if only I love him enough, I will be able to find the place inside both of us where we share a common language.

  And so I try to hear what my father has heard, see what he has seen. I leave the gray velour interior of this car just as I found it. The carefully folded maps inside the glove compartment, the unopened rolls of tokens. I tell myself my father will find everything just as he left it when he gets better. I wonder what he thought about as he drove this car to the train station every morning. I try to recover his thoughts, the images that spun through his mind. Was he happy with my mother? Was he worried about me? Did he see the way I was gulping my wine at dinner, or the way I excused myself from the table and spent long stretches of time in the bathroom? Did Hebrew words and the melody of prayer fly into his head out of nowhere? Did the pills he took make him feel better—or just make him feel nothing at all? The more mangled his brain becomes, the more I try to magically unravel it. The psychic mystery of my father has taken on tangible proportions. Who is the real Paul Shapiro? The gentle, elegant man who used to withdraw behind the gauzy film of self-medication? Or the one who now curses violently and throws his bedclothes across the room?

  When I first picked up the car in Tewksbury, an old nubby orange cardigan of his was tossed on the backseat. I have worn it ever since, holding on to it like Linus’s blanket in the Peanuts comic strip. I am also wearing my mother’s wedding band. She has asked me to keep it for her, and so I wear it on the fourth finger of my left hand. I have married my parents for the time being.

  A week after the crash, my family has gathered in the lounge on the eighth floor of Overlook Hospital. They are an unlikely assortment of people, together only because they are related by either blood or marriage. Hy, Roz, Morton and Shirley Sugerman are huddled in a corner of the room, gray heads bent together. My father’s brother, Harvey, his sister, Shirl, and Susie are camped out near the doorway of the fluorescently lit room, murmuring quietly, breathing into their Styrofoam cups of coffee. Perfect, I think. My mother’s family is on one side of this small room, my father’s on the other, and I am in the middle.

  My cowboy boots have announced me, clickity-clacking down the hall. As usual, I am wearing sunglasses—it’s not quite noon, and my eyes are still puffy from whatever I was doing the night before. Memory fails me here. Was I with Lenny at some restaurant, trying to slide oysters Rockefeller down my cocaine-parched throat? Or perhaps Lenny was off getting a chemotherapy treatment, and I had gone out to a Tex-Mex bar with some girlfriends, where three frozen margaritas landed me cheek-down on the bathroom floor? No matter. I do remember this: I have forgotten to wear gloves on this freezing day—for years, scarves and socks and gloves were for other, more practical people—and my fingers are tinged with blue as I take the warm hands of my family and exchange kisses.

  “What’s going on?” I ask. I am the only person here who is related to everybody. Basically, it boils down to this: very few people in this room can stand one another.

  “We’re trying to figure out what to do about Dad,” Susie says. “The doctors are saying there’s not much more they can do for him here—that he needs a special facility—”

  Susie looks like an overgrown flower child this morning—which I suppose she is—bundled in her heavy winter coat, sneakers and leggings poking out the bottom, long blond hair twisted into a messy bun at the nape of her neck.

  “What kind of facility?” I am amazed at how quickly my stomach begins to churn, my eyes to swell.

  “Rehabilitation,” says Harvey, not quite looking at me. I realize with a small shock that his breath smells familiar: an amalgam of vodka and mints.

  “Places like Burke in White Plains, or Rusk in the city,” says Shirl. She is still holding my hand in both of hers, rubbing it absently. Her pretty face, with its wide flat features and widow’s peak, seems to take all this in unblinkingly. One of her brothers is lying down the hall with crossed wires in his brain, her other brother is drunk, and I am standing in front of her wearing no gloves and sopping-wet cowboy boots, reeking of stale nicotine.

  Roz walks over to us, wedging herself between Shirl and me. She’s wearing a pale yellow sweat suit and improbably bright pink lipstick.

  “Dan-Dan,” she says. “How’s my girl?”

  Her face is an inch away from mine, and she scrutinizes me maniacally, just as my mother does. She looks hard and sees nothing. Reflexively, I take a step back. This kind of inspection has always made me wildly uncomfortable. I smile stiffly at Roz, and move to the back of the lounge where Morton, Shirley Sugerman, and Hy are conferring quietly. Like a child, I plop myself onto Hy’s lap. He is holding an unlit pipe in his hand, and he smells like tweed and tobacco.

  “Sweetie!” he exclaims, jovial as if we were on his La-Z-Boy, settling in to watch a football game. He pats my back, reaches both arms around me and gives me a light squeeze around the middle. Hy is the only one who gets it, I think. I feel him hesitate, about to say something about the way my ribs stick out, my concave belly, but he decides against it. Hy is the one who prescribes diuretics for me. He is an old-fashioned doctor, a surgeon who has been decorated with two Purple Hearts from World War II. Does he have any idea that I take three or four of those diuretics at a time? That I empty out my insides until there’s nothing left? It cannot be within the realm of his imagination that I might choose to starve and abuse myself, even as my mother is being fed through tubes and my father fights for his life.

  “Let’s go see your dad,” he says.

  Hy and I take the elevator down to the sixth floor, leaving the others in the eighth-floor lounge. My father has been moved to a single room and has private nurses around the clock. The decision to hire outside help was made after one of the hospital staff put him in a straitjacket after he tried to climb out of bed a few nights ago. Ever since, the image of my father thrashing with his arms pinned to his sides has fil
led my dreams—his face damp with perspiration, eyes wild, his whole body undulating like a giant fish until he finally tires himself out. I have awakened in the middle of the night gasping for air, sweat soaked through my nightgown, hair plastered to my scalp, and for a brief, merciful moment thought this has all just been a nightmare.

  My father is slumped in a chair near the window of his room, running an electric razor over his stubbled chin. His glasses are folded on a small table next to him, on top of a stack of magazines, and without them his eyes look close together, angry red marks on either side of his nose.

  “Hey, Dad—whatcha doing?” I ask, trying to keep my voice light. I’ve begun to talk to my father the way I might address a child: slow, cheerful, self-conscious. And he looks at me with the guilelessness of a child, his ability to sense bullshit razorsharp. Each time I have lied to him (Mom’s not here right now, she’ll be back) he’s growled at me to stop it, just stop it! A moment later, he might be laughing, or fast asleep, but in that brief moment of clarity I realize that he knows the truth.

  Every time I see him doing something normal—reading, praying, shaving—for an instant my heart lifts and then crashes. I have to constantly remind myself that just because he looks normal doesn’t mean he is normal, that if we were to deposit him on the corner of Broad and Wall and ask him to find his way home, as he has ten thousand times over the course of his life, he would be as lost as a puppy.