Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  My father’s useless brain, my mother’s useless body. Together, they are two halves of a ruined being.

  “Hi, Paul-o,” says Hy.

  “Hello,” my father responds vaguely.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Of course I know who you are!”

  He looks crestfallen and slightly angry, like a kid caught with his elbow halfway into a cookie jar.

  “Okay, then tell me who I am.”

  “I don’t have to.” His chin juts out.

  “That’s fine, that’s fine, buddy,” murmurs Hy.

  Hy pulls a pinpoint flashlight from his jacket pocket and shines it into my father’s eyes.

  “Paul, do me a favor, just look at me a minute,” he says.

  My father glares straight at the brother-in-law he has adored for twenty-five years. I watch Hy’s face. He moves the flashlight from one of my father’s flat green eyes to the other. Hy is the real thing, a talented doctor, and his hunches are often more accurate than the results of all the technology in the world. Behind his soft brown eyes set into their hooded, wrinkled sockets there is something utterly serious, something I cannot name, but which frightens me. (Years later I will wonder if Hy knew it all in that moment: about my father, about himself. Seven months from now, he will be dead of pancreatic cancer.)

  I follow him into the hallway.

  “What?” I practically beg him. “Please—what? Just tell me.”

  He shakes his head.

  “I think Mom and Dad should see each other,” he says. He trails off, leaving the end of the sentence unsaid: before it’s too late.

  Shabbos. It came each Friday night, falling over our house at 885 Revere Drive like a pitch-black blanket. There was nothing I could do to stop it. I was not allowed to ride in a car, do homework, play piano, ride my bike, touch lights or any other electrical appliances like toasters, televisions, stereos. My mother spent Friday afternoons cooking meals for the weekend—heavy meat meals like flanken, London broil, pot roast—preparing Friday-night dinner and a cold Saturday lunch, which was my least favorite meal of the week.

  Saturdays, after my father returned from shul, my parents and I would sit at one end of the long mahogany dining room table, while on the other side of the window I would see the neighborhood kids flash by on their bikes. I knew they were headed for the woods, where they’d smoke reefer and lie on the damp ground, watching the autumn branches play against the sky. I felt myself twitching under the table, but I knew there was no way I could join them. Instead, I sat quietly in my chair—always the same chair, next to my father at the head of the table, my mother across from me—and dug my nails into the soft flesh of my palm, biding time, my parents’ conversation fading away until it was just beyond my reach.

  I created a place inside my head, a psychic treehouse. While we ate leftover brisket, sliced challah, and room-temperature vegetables, my parents would talk about Israel—particularly in ’72, and again in ’76, during the raid on Entebbe—or the stock market, or news of the latest crisis with the Hillside school board. I became good at pretending to listen. It seemed to me that they were really talking in code—about something else entirely. There was tension at the table, a constant abrasiveness between my parents, but when I was around they never, ever, talked about it. I knew some of their battle was being fought over me. My father wanted me to be a good little yeshiva girl, and my mother wanted me to be a pretty, popular teenager. They had agreed when I was born to raise me Orthodox, but that agreement had begun to fray at the edges.

  I felt their tension inside me. So I would arrange my features into something resembling interest, and a blankness would settle over me, numb and hazy. It was years before I drank or did drugs, although I knew from watching my father with his pills that there was a chemical solution to the way I was feeling—that someday, when I grew up, I’d be able to find easy ways to disappear. During the years growing up in Hillside, I was there and not there, so far gone that now, when I reach for a concrete memory, some sort of toehold on those Shabbos lunches, my mind fills with white noise just as it did back then.

  The Sabbath rules left not too many options: reading was okay, and thinking, praying, walking the dog. We had a black miniature poodle, whose name I’m sorry to say was Poofy, and I would walk him around the block dozens of times, until both of us tired out. Poofy would strain at his leash, and I’d finally take him home, then go up to my room, close the door, and read books I found hidden under my father’s night table. The most memorable of these was called Seven Minutes. If this book was to be believed—and for a long time I believed—it took exactly seven minutes for a woman to reach orgasm.

  After Shabbos lunch, at precisely two in the afternoon, my mother would curl up on the velvet couch in the living room, surrounded by the modern paintings she had collected through the late sixties and seventies: a moody Milton Avery of a green island surrounded by a dark purple sky; a somewhat cheerier Joseph Stella pastel, a strong black-and-white de Kooning in a heavy gold frame. To the left of the couch was a glass case filled with ancient Judaica and pre-Columbian artifacts. She would take off her shoes, rest her feet on the low marble coffee table, and close her eyes. Then, as if by magic, the lights on the stereo would begin to glow, and an afternoon broadcast of Rigoletto or La Bohème would fill the room. This was made possible by something we called the “Shabbos clock.” The Shabbos clock was a switch set on a timer that allowed opera to be played, the television to be watched, lights to be turned on and off at designated hours.

  I didn’t get it. It seemed to me that the Sabbath was supposed to be a day of rest. It made no sense to me that a timer could turn on the lights but I wasn’t allowed to practice the piano. Didn’t these rules originate back when illumination involved the hard work of rubbing sticks together? Was playing the piano or riding a bike really considered hard work? I would argue these fine points with my father, but he never argued back. Instead, he hired a tutor to instruct me in Talmud, and to prepare me for my Bat Mitzvah.

  The tutor, improbably named Miles, was a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan. He took the train out from the city each Sunday, and my father picked him up at the station in Elizabeth. They tootled up the driveway in my father’s Citroën, and even from a distance I could see the white crocheted yarmulke perched on top of Miles’s dark curly hair. (My father’s bald head was almost naked in comparison; he didn’t wear yarmulkes except on Shabbos.) My mother greeted Miles with a bit too much noblesse oblige, as if he were a valued but indentured servant. She offered him coffee and a bagel, but he never took her up on it.

  Instead, he and I got right down to business. My heart sank as I watched yet another Sunday afternoon bob away, but I knew there was an end in sight. I had struck a deal with my father: as soon as my Bat Mitzvah was over, Miles would be banished. This was something I knew and Miles didn’t, which filled me with a secret, evil pleasure. We spread the Book of Ruth over the dining room table, and he sat right next to me, close, so he could point to specific places in the text. He was teaching me to sing the Book of Ruth according to signs that looked like hieroglyphics, keys to ancient, melodic chanting. Years from now, while walking down Broadway minding my own business, or standing in line at the dry cleaner, I will hear a few notes that will slice through my grown-up self like a knife through the tender meat of my heart.

  I hated Miles. His skin was pockmarked, his breath sour, and big flakes of dandruff dusted the collar of his dark jacket. He had no sense of humor—at least none that I could find during these tutoring sessions—and whenever he got excited his left eye twitched. He was everything I feared my future to be, and I was determined to reshape that future at any cost. I didn’t know what my options were, but increasingly they seemed to have something to do with my looks. Other people told me I was pretty all the time. I had become aware that the blond, blue-eyed shiksa-goddess fluke of genetics that had Miles and other nice Jewish boys all nervous and flustered was th
e thing I had going for me. And I certainly didn’t think I could rely on my brains: Susie had the brains in the family, after all—and a fat lot of good it was doing her. She was approaching thirty, had a Ph.D., and all my parents talked about was how she wasn’t married. They didn’t seem to be proud of her academic accomplishments. She doesn’t do a thing to enhance herself, my mother would complain to my father. She wears those dreadful glasses.

  The message was loud and clear: I wasn’t supposed to turn out like Susie—an unmarried intellectual—and I certainly didn’t want to be trapped like my mother by the harsh rules of Orthodoxy. I was beginning to be interested in sexiness, at least as a concept, and Orthodoxy wasn’t sexy. Miles wasn’t sexy, with his thick, garlicky breath. My father wasn’t sexy when he was davening in shul, but when he put on his suit and got on the train to Wall Street with the other men, something in him changed and became powerful. It seemed fairly obvious: if I was going to have the life I wanted—which was defined entirely by the life I didn’t want—I would have to focus on being a pretty girl. Somewhere in the upper reaches of Westchester, in a farmhouse surrounded by his wife and children, Lenny Klein was already waiting.

  “Smile!”

  I am standing next to my mother’s bed, aiming a Polaroid camera at her, trying to get her whole body in the frame. She tries to smile, and it makes her face look even more strained than it already is. Her eyes are black pools, cheeks pale despite the blush and lipstick she has applied. These pictures will survive for years to come, and one day, while I am rummaging through her bookcases, a single Polaroid will fall to the floor, and in an instant, time will disappear. I will return to this moment: the harsh winter sun streaming through the tilted venetian slats of her room, the flowers that have begun to pile up everywhere—colorful bunches of peonies, wilted roses, mums, freesia—the clanging inside my head that just won’t let up. Since the crash, I have become accustomed to this cacophony. Sometimes I think of it as a voice, other times I imagine it to be pure dissonance, an atonal broken record. I try to drink it away, but drinking only dulls it for a little while, as if it were coming from another room in the same house.

  “Beautiful, baby, beautiful!”

  I try to joke as I move around my mother, taking her picture from a few different angles. Her nurse, Angie, who is sitting in the corner doing needlepoint, looks up and grins. Angie is in fact beautiful, with auburn curls and a wide, open smile. She is my mother’s afternoon nurse. There are three of them—morning, afternoon, and night—and Angie is the best of the lot. The night nurse doesn’t do extra things like fluffing my mother’s pillows or rubbing cream into the tender places around her wounds. Angie is our angel, the one ray of light in the fluorescent darkness of this place.

  The camera spits out green-gray images, blank as television screens, and I flap them in the air until my mother begins to emerge, her black-and-blue cheekbones and thick white casts slowly coming into focus like an image from a dream.

  “How do I look?” she asks.

  “Like yourself,” I say, glancing quickly at Angie, who gives me a thumbs-up sign. “See you in a little bit.”

  I walk out the door carrying the photos, pausing in the hall to take a deep breath. I have no idea how I’m going to do what I’m about to do. I start moving down the corridor, my feet propelling me toward my father’s room. The doctors think that we need to prepare him before he sees my mother, and these photographs are how we’re going to do it.

  My father is ready. This is the moment he’s been waiting for, the only thing he’s been able to think about with anything resembling clarity. He’s been asking the same question every day—bellowing, begging, weeping, in a white-hot fury—Where’s my wife?

  He is freshly shaven and is wearing the paisley silk robe I brought him from the house in Tewksbury. Although he has lost some weight, he’s starting to look healthier. He has some color in his cheeks. He beams at me when I walk in the room, dimples flashing. His nurse—he has not been as lucky as my mother with nurses—barely looks up from her National Enquirer.

  “Okay, let’s go!” he says.

  If I could see inside his head, past the swollen blood vessels, the invisible clots forming and dissolving, then forming again, I imagine I would see the sheer power of a twenty-seven-year marriage. He can’t remember what day of the week it is, or who’s president (when I told him it was Ronald Reagan he looked at me, dumbfounded, and said “No shit!”), but he knows that he has a wife and he needs to see her. This has become the driving fact of his existence.

  “Before we go, there’s something I need to show you,” I say slowly.

  He looks at me uncomprehendingly. What could possibly be important enough to cause a delay?

  “My wife,” he says, his voice rising in a whine. “I want to see my wife!”

  He says my wife, not your mother. I have ceased to exist for him. There is only so much room left in his brain, in his heart.

  I hand him the Polaroids, which I have been holding behind my back.

  “This is what Mom looks like right now,” I say quietly. “She’s a little banged up.”

  He glances at the photographs, eyes sliding over them impatiently. I can tell that he’s not taking in what he’s seeing. Then, with the grace of a former ballplayer, he tosses them across the room, where they slap against the wall, then scatter.

  “Okay,” he repeats, his jaw tense and bunched. “Let’s go.”

  Hospital regulations have it that he has to be transported in a wheelchair. He submits without a fuss, almost meekly. I arrange a blanket over his lap—as much for his comfort as for fear that his robe will fall open and he’ll expose himself—and begin wheeling him down the hall toward the elevator, his nurse walking alongside us, pushing his IV pole.

  My father’s bald head looks soft, slightly ruined. I bend forward and sniff, as if he were a baby, as if I might inhale some piece of him and never exhale it again. He is focused straight ahead, not looking around at the corridor, the elevator bank, the nurses’ station. He is staring into the middle distance. I wonder if he is playing out visions of a sun-dappled day on East Ninth Street, a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty carrying a hammer on Shabbos.

  The elevator doors open and I maneuver his wheelchair inside. Before I have a chance to press the correct floor number, my father has pushed every single button. Then he grins up at me with the glint of mischief I’ve almost gotten used to by now. I refuse to completely accept that this is my father. I still believe he’s going to snap out of it, that any day now I’ll walk into his room and be greeted with a warm, grown-up smile and a Hiya, darling! and together we will nurse my mother’s broken body back to health.

  As we pass the nurses’ station, I feel their eyes following us—they all know what’s going on—but I look straight ahead. I can’t stand seeing their sympathy. For years, vital parts of me have been frozen, and since the accident I feel myself thawing, dripping, becoming more human than I can bear. My palms are damp, my heart hammering in my chest, as I push my father’s wheelchair through the door of my mother’s room.

  Her head is turned away from us. She’s looking at the corkboard near the window, which is covered with thumbtacked photos I’ve brought her from Tewksbury: a snapshot of my parents at my mother’s graduation from social work school; a picture of my father in a dark suit and tie, a white yarmulke on his head, his face creased into a big sweet smile; the eight-by-ten head shot of me, Dani York, hair tousled, eyes unnaturally bright.

  “Look who’s here!” I announce, trying to keep my voice from quavering.

  Slowly, she turns her head. She has applied more lipstick, the coral shade incongruous against her paper-white skin.

  “Wahoo,” she says weakly, her mouth trembling.

  My father is staring at her. His eyes are round. Everything about him is round: eyes, head, stomach, mouth. I push his wheelchair right up to the rail of my mother’s bed. I’m tempted to say something, anything, to break this silence, but it feels someh
ow sacred and essential.

  “Wahoo,” she repeats like a mantra, a prayer.

  My father grabs her hand almost spasmodically, then hunches over and begins to weep, his forehead pressed against the rail.

  “How the hell—” he chokes, gulping air.

  “Ssshhh,” she murmurs. She is crying too, big silent tears rolling from the corners of her eyes, down her temples and onto the pillow. “It’s all right now. I’m here.”

  Does she really think it’s all right? My mother has always been a hybrid of sorts, combining equal amounts of terror and optimism. Has optimism won the day?

  “We’re fucked,” my father spits out.

  “No, Paul,” my mother says firmly. She doesn’t flinch, or even raise an eyebrow at his language. And then, with strength I didn’t know she had, she releases the rail between them. My father moves closer, and she strokes the top of his head.

  “Look at you,” he moans. “What happened?”

  My father actually seems lucid. Every cell in his body is straining to keep it together, to understand. It has been nearly two weeks since the crash, the longest my parents have ever gone without seeing each other in twenty-seven years. Their hands are entwined, and his head rests gently on her one good shoulder. They cling to each other like two broken dolls.

  My mother looks up at me, flushed, triumphant. On her ruined, tearstained face, there is absolute determination.

  “You see? We’re going to be just fine,” she says, her voice fragile as an old wishbone.

  On our first date, Lenny Klein took me to the River Cafe, an expensive, elegant restaurant in Brooklyn with sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline. It wasn’t until we were halfway there, driving downtown in Lenny’s Rolls-Royce, that I allowed myself the thought that I was on a date with Jess’s stepfather and we weren’t going to be planning a surprise party for her.

  At the River Cafe, Lenny handed the maître d’ a folded twenty-dollar bill. I had never seen anyone do this before. My father had always made reservations at restaurants and waited patiently at the bar if his table wasn’t ready. Lenny and I were led to a window table with a candle flickering next to a small vase of pale pink roses.