by Dani Shapiro
“Did you see that?” Lenny asked me once we were seated.
“See what?”
“The way you turned every head in the place. Don’t tell me you don’t know your own effect.”
The truth was that I hadn’t noticed anyone looking at me, and I didn’t quite believe Lenny.
“Do you know what I told Jess the first time I met you?” Lenny asked huskily, then continued, “I told her you were a golden girl. A perfect angel.”
I flushed and looked down at my hands folded in my lap. I didn’t know what to say. My last date was with a senior named Adam who bought us a six-pack of Coors and tried to feel me up outside my dorm door.
Lenny produced a pair of bifocals, then skimmed his finger down the wine list, frowning slightly.
A captain appeared at his side.
“Can I be of service with the wine list, sir?”
“Do you have a ’59 Margaux?” Lenny asked. “I see the ’61, but—”
“I’m sorry, sir, we have only the ’61.”
“Very well, then.”
Lenny leaned back in his seat and smirked at me.
“This wine we’re about to drink is older than you are,” he said.
I knew what I needed to do. I knew that I would be sunk if I didn’t say something—and soon—about Jess, or about his wife. Not to speak up was to become Lenny’s accomplice in whatever it was we were doing. But I felt paralyzed, and beneath that paralysis there was a frisson of excitement, an awareness of doing absolutely the wrong thing.
Lenny sniffed the cork and watched the wine being decanted with all the fascination and reverence of watching a ballet. He swirled it around in his glass, took a sip, then gave a nod.
“Pour just a bit for the young lady,” he said. “It needs to breathe.”
When the captain left, Lenny lifted his glass slightly in my direction.
“To beauty,” he said.
I flushed more deeply and looked out the window at a boat moving slowly up the East River. I had an inkling of how much this excited Lenny: young girl, old wine. It was the first time in my life I felt my youth as power. (In years to come, Lenny will turn to me and ask how old I am: twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, I will answer with a perverse sort of pride, knowing my age acts as an aphrodisiac, knowing that his beautiful wife is too old for him at forty.)
I drank my wine and felt it slide smoothly down my throat, warming the tightness in my chest. I had no experience in the ritual of drinking fine wine. In Hillside, growing up, I thought of red wine as the sweet Manischewitz we sipped out of thimble-sized bechers on Shabbos.
After the muscovy duck, after the crème brûlée and cognac, Lenny leaned across the table and ran his finger down my nose in a gesture at once paternal and sexual.
“I’ll drive you home,” he said with a wink.
Inside his car, I sat all the way against the passenger door as he drove me back to Sarah Lawrence, my cheek hot against the cool window. I felt sick to my stomach. I thought of Jess, back at school. How would I ever tell her I had gone out on a date with her stepfather? Would she ever forgive me?
Lenny fiddled with the dial of the radio until he found a jazz station, a throaty trombone filling the quiet between us. Then, on a long straight stretch of road, he reached down, slowly and deliberately moved my long skirt up my thigh, and squeezed my knee. I knew I should tell him I couldn’t ever see him again, but somehow it already seemed too late.
Fast-forward two years. Something has gone wrong, terribly wrong, with my life. I don’t, in fact, think of my life as “my life,” but rather as a series of random events that have no logical connection. I am no longer a student. I dropped out of Sarah Lawrence after my junior year, supposedly to pursue acting. And I’m actually doing a pretty good imitation of an actress.
But I’m doing an even better imitation of a mistress. Lenny has been busy buying me things. I don’t particularly want these things—but they seem to be what Lenny is offering in lieu of himself. So, quite suddenly, overnight, really, I find myself driving a black Mercedes convertible. And just in case I might be mistaken for anything other than a kept woman, I wear a mink coat, a Cartier watch, a Bulgari necklace with an ancient coin at its center. The Mercedes is a step down from the first car Lenny gave me, when we had been going out for a month: a leased Ferrari. I didn’t know how to drive a stick shift, so the Ferrari was a bit of a problem. What I must have looked like! A twenty-year-old blonde dressed like Ivana Trump, stalled out in traffic, grinding gears, trying to find the point on the clutch to hold that ridiculous car in place.
My parents know something is up. I am drifting away from them—and they are letting me. They know I’m going out with somebody. Lenny rents an apartment on a pretty little street in Greenwich Village, a furnished triplex with a garden, a fireplace, and a bedroom with a four-poster bed. He calls it “our house,” as if he doesn’t have another house with a whole family in it an hour north of here; he keeps a half-dozen suits in the bedroom closet and a brand-new silk robe hangs behind the bathroom door. There is an entire floor we don’t use, consisting of a large, airy children’s nursery.
One night, I invite my parents over for dinner, and I remove all traces of Lenny from sight. Of course, there are clues: a glossy brochure for Italian yachts; a humidor in the center of the coffee table; a man’s Burberry overcoat hung on a hook near the front door.
I have cooked up a storm, and the place is filled with homey smells. Garlic, basil, coriander. It is winter, and snow is piled up on the sills. Spotlights in the backyard shine on the landscaped garden, the redwood table and Adirondack-style chairs, and huge terra-cotta pots of last spring’s dead geraniums. I have my father’s favorite music—Dvorák’s symphony From the New World—playing on the stereo system.
My parents ring the doorbell. They look so solid standing on my front stoop, their cold, red noses poking out from above their mufflers. If nothing else, my parents look as if they belong together. They are elegant and rangy, similarly proportioned. (Unlike Lenny and me. Lenny is thick as a linebacker, and I have become so delicate the wind may pick me up and blow me away.) My mother strides into the brownstone as if this weren’t the weirdest thing in the world, visiting her daughter in a lavish apartment with no name on the outside buzzer. My father trails behind her warily, as if he’s setting foot on another planet.
My mother sings. She enters the living room, taking up space, flinging her arms wide and doing an impromptu little dance to the Dvorák symphony.
“Tra-la-la-la,” she trills.
I cringe inwardly, grateful that it’s just the three of us, that no one is here to witness this display. My father and I hang back and watch, our faces crumpled into awkward little smiles. We’re used to it, after all. In every family, there is room for only one Sarah Bernhardt, and in ours, my mother has assumed that role. I don’t realize that my mother is frightened—that this is a lot for her to take in, her college-dropout daughter living in the lap of luxury. All I see is her outsized self, twirling around my living room in her fur coat and boots.
All of a sudden, I want a drink. I walk over to my mother and put a hand on her shoulder, and she spins to a halt. I take her coat, and my father’s, and hang them above Lenny’s raincoat by the front door. For the first time, I notice that there’s a wreath made of twigs, a bit of Americana, on the wall near the kitchen, and I wonder if I can remove it quickly before my father sees it. Wreaths, under any circumstances, are as goyish as it gets. Which would be worse for my father? Imagining I’m with some powerful guy old enough to be my father? Or the possibility that the guy isn’t Jewish? Yes, Daddy. He’s Jewish. Twenty-three years older than me, a pathological liar, married to a woman who knows nothing of me—and a Jew.
I pour my parents two glasses of Chardonnay and a large vodka for myself. I figure if the vodka is in a water glass they won’t know the difference—especially if I drink it as if it’s water. My drinking has taken on a new urgency in the past few months. It’s
no longer a question of desire but of need. I cannot get through an evening like this without the armor of booze. I hand them their wine and direct them to the couch. On the coffee table, I have put out a vegetable plate and a bowl of olives.
“Quite a place,” my mother says brightly, her gaze darting around the room at the white brick fireplace with its wrought-iron tools, the glass wall overlooking the garden, the soaring ceiling. My father stares at the fringe of the rug, glassy-eyed. He needs to be as numbed out as I am to get through this night.
“Thanks,” I murmur, as if she’s paying me a compliment.
I check on dinner, using the opportunity to gulp some wine from the open bottle in the fridge. Vodka and white wine is a combination I know works for me. If I just stick with the formula, things shouldn’t be too bad in the morning. It’ll only become a problem if I switch to red or have cognac after dinner. I’ve learned to color-code my booze: clear (vodka, white wine) and colored (scotch, cognac, red wine) shouldn’t be mixed. Especially if I’m not eating.
I’ve prepared my signature dish, which has become my signature because it’s literally the only thing I know how to cook. A recipe out of The Silver Palate Cookbook, it’s a chicken stew of sorts, with white wine, olives, prunes, and brown sugar. I’m serving it with wild rice and a string bean casserole I bought ready-made at Balducci’s. For dessert, a tarte Tatin from Patisserie Lanciani. I have run all over the West Village preparing for this evening, thinking that maybe my parents will be impressed by my culinary efforts, so impressed that, by the end of dinner, patting their full stomachs, they’ll swell with pride at their only daughter who is, after all, living such a gracious and well-appointed life.
“Can I help?”
My mother is standing in the doorway. How long has she been there? Did she see me take the swig from the bottle of wine? My mind races with how to explain it. Thirsty is the only word I can think of. But then I realize that she hasn’t seen anything at all.
“Actually, I think everything’s under control,” I say, carrying the casserole to the table, which I have set with linen place mats and napkins. In the center of the table, there is a vase of drooping purple tulips.
The silverware, the pots and pans, the linens are all courtesy of the owner of this sublet place, a woman whom I might view—if I were thinking of such things—as a cautionary tale. A blond, stylish, whippet-thin, fiftyish real estate broker, she has lines around her mouth that aren’t from smiling. She occasionally stops by to fix something in the garden or the basement, and when I get near her I smell vodka and stale nicotine just beneath a cloud of L’Air du Temps.
The music has stopped by the time my parents and I sit at the dining room table, but I don’t notice. If I did, I would certainly change the tape, fill the air with something other than the tinny, lonely sound of our three forks scraping against plates. I push my chicken from one side of my plate to the other, my stomach clenching and growling in protest. I have allowed myself a glass of wine in front of my parents, using one of the crystal wineglasses Lenny bought me as a housewarming gift. It’s all I can do not to gulp it.
It seems my parents and I, after twenty-two years in one another’s company, have run out of things to say. They’re not talking about the political situation in Israel, and we can’t discuss my schoolwork, since I’m not in school. My father presses a corner of his napkin to his lips, and murmurs something about the food’s being delicious, and my mother energetically concurs.
“My wonderful daughter,” she says, shaking her head. “You’ve turned into such a little homemaker.”
I look at my parents across the table. Is that what they really think? How can they just sit there? Some small piece of me wants my father to fling me over his shoulder and carry me, kicking and screaming, to their car parked outside. I secretly wish they would drive me home to Hillside, deposit me in my childhood bedroom and feed me chicken soup and Saltines. I want to start my life over again, but I don’t know how.
I’m afraid I’m going to cry, so I walk into the kitchen and pull the apple tart from its box, arranging it on a cake platter. What did I expect from this evening? I thought I wanted my parents to be proud of me, to see that I’m living like an adult. But even I know that isn’t true. We’re all playing a game here, pretending this is a nice family moment: mother, father, and daughter eating an elegant meal.
I present dessert with a flourish. The tarte Tatin, and espresso fresh from the brand-new espresso maker. Finally, the conversation—or lack thereof—veers, like the tide, in the only direction it can.
“Can’t you tell us who he is?” my mother asks as I take one bite of the delicious, flaky apple tart, then another, and another. I’m ravenous like a starving dog. I’ll make myself throw up later.
My father clears his throat. “It’s been so long, Dani—it seems we really ought to know—”
I keep shoveling pieces of apple and crust into my mouth. I can actually feel my stomach closing around each morsel of food. My parents have been strangely passive on the subject of my dropping out of college and taking up with a mystery man. Since they are no longer supporting me, perhaps they feel they have lost parental control. To me, it just feels as if they’ve given up on me. Over the past year I have returned from trips to Europe bearing gifts for my parents: Charvet silk ties for my father, brightly printed Pucci scarves for my mother. They are gifts I couldn’t possibly afford to buy on my meager income from television commercials. Who do they think paid for those gifts? And why do they accept them? Part of me is screaming to tell them already, just get it over with. After all, they’ve met Lenny on Parents’ Day. They know who he is. Has he crossed their minds as a possibility?
His name is on the tip of my tongue. It would be so easy. It’s Lenny Klein, I could say, then watch the chips fall. Would they be horrified—or relieved? What can they possibly be imagining? I am woozy from the vodka, wine, and two helpings of apple tart. Okay, I think to myself. Okay, just fucking say it.
“Is it Teddy Kennedy?” my mother asks. I can tell she’s really considered this. She looks at me eagerly. Does she want it to be? An image of the bulbous-nosed, red-faced senator from Massachusetts flashes through my head. My mother is staring at me, wide-eyed, poised for an answer, and I can’t say anything at all.
It is two and a half weeks since the accident, and Lenny has talked me into going with him to London. The Concorde can have me back in four hours, he reasons, and it seems my parents have both stabilized. I don’t have to be here every minute of every day.
“Look at you,” he says. “You need a break.”
He points out the dark circles under my eyes, my pale, drawn face. On my upper arm, where I was given an injection of cortisone for the allergic reaction, my flesh has withered into a fist-shaped indentation, as if someone punched me hard and I just haven’t bounced back. He says I may even have become too skinny—something, for Lenny, almost unimaginable. I prefer to see myself as newly tough, a featherweight fighter blasting her way through this terrible winter on sheer grit.
I tell myself that a break is just what the doctor ordered. That taking care of my parents every day for two and a half weeks has been a valiant effort, and that I need—deserve!—a vacation. Roz can spell me, I think. Or Susie. I have become resentful of Susie in the last weeks, the way the sick resent the healthy. She dashes into the hospital at the end of her workday, her skin dewy, flushed from the drive out, important-looking papers stuffed into a heavy briefcase. These papers must be notes on her patients, case histories, life stories condensed into a few terse diagnostic sentences. I can only imagine what my half sister would jot down about me: spoiled brat, most likely. Wish she’d never been born. I think it’s safe to say Susie and I are not getting along. We are each playing our roles perfectly: she’s the responsible, serious older sister, and I’m the flighty, unreliable younger one.
Except that the lion’s share of taking care of my parents has fallen on my shoulders. My mother is not Susie’s mother
, after all, and our father seems to have lost all sense of time. Three days can seem like three hours to him. He doesn’t keep track of our comings and goings. All he seems to be able to focus on is when he’s seeing my mother. My parents have established a routine over the past week. At lunchtime my father is wheeled into my mother’s room, and they eat together, their trays side by side. My parents used to love fine restaurants, particularly fish restaurants where they were able to eat kosher meals with little compromise. Gloucester House, Le Cygne, Sea Fare of the Aegean. Now they sit in their green cotton pajamas, my mother removing the cellophane from the top of my father’s Jell-O.
And so I actually manage to convince myself that a trip to London is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It will not be the first time I’ve flown on the Concorde. Lenny and I have zigzagged across the Atlantic a half-dozen times; for years to come I will find British Airways and Air France shaving kits, slippers, toothpaste buried in back drawers like loose glitter.
The morning we are supposed to leave, I drive out to Overlook to say good-bye to my parents. It is a Sunday, and the sky is a bright, almost iridescent blue—a blue I will remember. I will also remember what I am wearing on this particular morning. To fly to London on this February day, the twenty-third of February 1986, I am wearing a silk blouse borrowed from my friend Diane, a Sarah Lawrence girl who works in a trendy Soho boutique where she gets discounts on high fashion. The blouse is notable for its color (gold) and design (slit all the way up the back). The blouse is tucked into a short black skirt. I don’t remember my shoes, stockings, or bag. I assume there’s a winter coat in the picture, but this may be assuming too much. I can supply the moment with bright lipstick, to be sure. Red, perfectly outlined lips painted on the blank palette of my face.