Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  “She won’t be alone,” he says, putting an arm around me. I want to shove him away—this anger seems to have taken over my body—but instead I stand there and contort my mouth into a smile.

  “Mom, you remember Lenny—”

  “Of course.” She holds out a hand, like Caesar’s wife. “Lenny, so good of you to be here for my daughter.”

  Somehow, Lenny, my uncle Morton and I end up in the back of the first limo, following the hearse. As a kid, I remember seeing funeral processions on New Jersey highways and asking my father why the limos and cars had their headlights on. He told me it was so that the drivers wouldn’t lose one another on their way to the cemetery. I remember thinking how awful it would be, getting lost on the way to the cemetery.

  Lenny and Morton are having a conversation about the one thing they have in common: yachts. They each have a yacht—Lenny refers to his as “the boat”—and they are comparing notes, talking across me, about teak finishes and the benefits of fiberglass. Lenny’s boat cost over a million dollars. It’s sleek and Italian and has everything imaginable built into it. Stereo piped through the walls of the cabins, marble showers, leather couches, and a big-screen television.

  “That Riva’s quite a machine,” says Morton, who is a real sailor, having spent most of his adult life on Hawaii. “You must really let that baby rip.”

  “I had a forty-two-footer before I got this one,” Lenny answers, “and I’ve got to tell you—”

  I fade in and out of their conversation, wavering between numbness and disbelief that they’re talking about boats on the way to bury my father. For Morton this is part of grieving, this grasping on to the tangible world—in this case, yachts—because after all, what good would it do to talk about anything else? But Lenny talks about his boat all the time. He could just as easily be on his way to a dinner party. I close my eyes, lean my head back, and try to summon my father’s face. I strain to hear his voice, to feel his touch—somehow knowing that these will be the first to fade. Years from now, I will no longer be able to feel my father’s hand on the small of my back, or hear the particular way he has always said my name, with traces of a New York accent. But today I still feel him all around me. I pull him closer, like a cloak.

  The hearse turns slowly off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and onto a wide, bombed-out boulevard in Bensonhurst. Overflowing garbage cans are piled along the sidewalks, wedged into dirty snowbanks. An el train rumbles overhead. I feel as if we’re taking my father to some godforsaken place, where he will be lonely.

  The funeral procession pulls into the gates of Washington Cemetery, and before I know it, Uncle Harvey has jumped out of his limo and is heading over to a small office. Clearly he knows his way around this place.

  “Paperwork,” murmurs Morton. “Let him take care of it.”

  We sit in the car and wait. Lenny and Morton have fallen silent. Yachts have no place here, amid the tombstones. A few minutes pass, and Harvey strides over to us, a muffler wound around his neck and the lower part of his face, even though it’s not that cold out. His eyes are glassy.

  “There’s a problem,” he says, addressing Morton.

  “What?” I blurt out. I can’t imagine, in this context, what could possibly constitute a problem.

  “They’ve opened the wrong grave,” Harvey says.

  “What do you mean?” I hear my own voice grow shrill.

  “Exactly what I said,” he answers.

  “But how could that happen? Whose—”

  “My mother’s grave,” he says wearily. “They dug up the grave reserved for my mother.”

  The thin membrane of self-possession that has gotten me through the morning crumbles, and I begin to weep uncontrollably.

  “How could they make a mistake? How?” I ask, the word stretching into a howl. I am an animal, incapable of thought, blinded by pain.

  “Snap out of it, Dani!”

  I stare at my uncle. Snap out of it?

  “So what’s happening?” Lenny asks evenly.

  “Well—the grave diggers are on their lunch hour.”

  “When are they due back?”

  “I’m not sure. There’s some question about whether they’ll be able to do it today.”

  “Have you tried to reason with them?”

  Lenny is firing off questions as if interrogating a witness.

  “They said—” Harvey’s voice is getting a familiar edge.

  “I don’t give a shit what they said. Surely they can be persuaded.”

  Lenny and Harvey stare each other down, and for a moment I wonder if they’re about to get into a fistfight. I feel as if I’m having a nervous breakdown. My body is flying apart—limbs shooting in opposite directions, head twisting off my spine. I look at the hearse, parked at an angle, the back door open, my father’s coffin inside. My cousins Mordechai and Henry are standing next to it, davening. How long does it take to dig six feet into the ground? I think of my mother, back at the hospital. What am I going to tell her?

  Without a word, Lenny hops out of the car.

  “Where are you going?” I call after him.

  “Be right back,” he says through the window.

  For the rest of my life, I will know that Lenny Klein paid off the grave diggers, that he reached out a hand with a neatly folded bill just the way he might to a maître d’ in a four-star restaurant. Lenny’s money got my father buried quicker. The rest of the men—Morton, Harvey, Henry, Mordechai—would never have thought of it. It takes a certain kind of mind to believe that anything can be bought.

  Within an hour we are shuffling down the narrow paths of Washington Cemetery, our coats flapping open on this unseasonably warm February day. I am walking with Susie and Shirl. My cousins carry my father’s casket on their shoulders. It sways like a small craft on a black sea. The path is slushy, with patches of ice, and the heels of my black shoes sink into the mud.

  It happens fast—terribly fast—once we are all gathered around my father’s grave. It is the first time I’ve ever been to the family plot—in fact, it’s my first funeral, period. I have no way of knowing that this Orthodox service is harsher than most burials. There is no Astroturf laid over the grave like a bright green carpet. No flowers in sight. Nothing to prevent me from watching as the pine box with my father inside is lowered into the ground with long cloth straps. It tilts violently from one side to the other, and I am afraid it will turn over and my father’s body will pitch to the bottom.

  Mordechai is singing El Malei Rachamim.

  Someone hands me a shovel.

  I dig the shovel into the mound of earth, which smells like the gardening gloves my mother used to wear when she planted tulips each fall. I hold the shovel above the hole, and even as I turn it over, I want to stop the dirt from falling, I want to freeze it in midair. I look around me at the stricken faces crowded around the grave like pale bulbs. I feel as if I’m doing violence to my father. The earth falls in slow motion. It hits the top of my father’s coffin with a sound like a snowball’s dull thud against the side of a house. I double over, holding myself up with the shovel, gasping for air. But then something inside me tells me to go on. Not to stop. To dig deeper, harder, faster.

  Others join in, and as more earth fills the grave the thuds grow softer, as if they’re farther away. Something about the physical exertion is comforting. After a few minutes Lenny tries to take the shovel from me, but I turn my back and keep going. Finally, I realize I’m shaking and sweating, and the mourners have formed an aisle down which Susie and I are nudged, because the nearest of kin must be the first to leave. I want to stay. There is an old bench in the family plot, and I want to sit there alone, still as stone, and guard over my father’s grave until the ground is level, until a hedge has grown above it. I want to spend the night here, listening as the wind whips through the graveyard and the el rumbles overhead. Instead, I do what I have to do. I walk away.

  Before I get back into the car with Lenny and Morton, I stop at a pay phone in
a gas station across the street from the cemetery and call my mother.

  “How was it?” she asks.

  A flock of pigeons scatters as a taxi hits a water-filled pothole, drenching the side of my black coat. I close my eyes.

  “It was beautiful,” I say. “It was just what he would have wanted.”

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  The night after we bury my father, the skies open up. Lenny and I drive back to the city in the pouring rain. We are listening to a cello concerto on the radio, a mournful piece I don’t recognize. My father and I used to listen to classical music and then try to guess the composer. Saint-Saëns. No way. Brahms. Hmm. Maybe Brahms. Through the windshield, I can barely read the highway signs or make out the Budweiser plant as we head toward the Lincoln Tunnel. The world is smudged, impressionistic. I keep picturing my father’s grave, water seeping through the earth and into his coffin.

  We go to La Caravelle for dinner. We have a reservation under Dr. Klein. Lenny thinks doctors get better tables. Why we are out at a fancy French restaurant, why we aren’t home with my family, is a question I don’t think to ask, much less answer. This is what we do, what we have always done, Lenny and I: we go to dinner, get on airplanes, check into hotels for no apparent reason. For a minute, it seems life isn’t going to change at all, even though I feel as if someone has come along and spilled out my insides.

  Leaving my mother alone in the hospital tonight was almost as difficult as leaving my father alone in his grave this afternoon. I have always imagined my mother will live forever, and now I am convinced that she won’t make it through the night. The doctor’s words earlier have stayed with me: Your mother is a very sick woman. She may not survive this. She has to survive this, she just has to. If my mother dies, she will take with her the only reason I have to live.

  Lenny pours me a third glass of Puligny-Montrachet. I have pushed bite-sized pieces of poached salmon around on my plate, hiding them beneath dill sauce and lettuce leaves. I’m slumped against the banquette, trying to summon the energy to lift the wineglass to my lips. I have had enough to drink. The world is at a remove—just far enough away so that I think I can’t touch it and it can’t touch me. When I was a child, it was discovered that I had a weak eye—and in order to strengthen it, a gray filmy patch was put over my stronger eye so that my vision would correct itself. Now, it is as if I have two of those gray filmy patches over both my eyes, softening the edges of my thoughts. But no matter how much I drink, it doesn’t change the facts: my father is dead, my mother may be dying.

  The waiter clears my plate.

  “Was the salmon not to mademoiselle’s liking?”

  “No, no, it was delicious,” I say, trying to smile.

  “Does mademoiselle not have an appetite?”

  “Mademoiselle would like a Rémy Martin and the chocolate soufflé,” Lenny interrupts.

  “But I’m not hungry,” I protest.

  “You’ll eat what you want,” he says.

  I excuse myself from the table and walk very slowly to the ladies’ room. Blood is rushing to my head, my knees are rubbery, and for a moment I think I might faint. Each step feels precarious, as if I were on ice, as if I were an old woman and if I fall my bones will splinter. I’m wearing the black suit I wore to the cemetery today; I’m supposed to wear it for the entire week of shiva. The lapel of the suit was torn at the funeral by the rabbi, directly over my heart. I must be quite a sight, here among the patrons of La Caravelle. I inhale sharply and smell dirt.

  In the ladies’ room there is a pay phone. I dial the number for Overlook Hospital, which I now know by heart, and ask to be connected to my mother’s room.

  “Hello?”

  My heart leaps at the sound of her voice.

  “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Hi, sweetheart.”

  She sounds utterly exhausted.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Pretty good, pretty good,” she says. “Where are you?”

  “At dinner with Lenny,” I say.

  “That’s nice. Say hello for me.”

  I brace myself against the wall and close my eyes.

  For as long as I can remember, my mother’s energies, at least regarding me, have been misdirected: intrusive at all the wrong moments, passive when she shouldn’t have been. She has been stunningly silent about the important things: my dropping out of college and taking up with Lenny.

  My parents met Lenny after we had been together about a year. He took them to the Harvard Club—even though he didn’t go to Harvard—for drinks, and told them that his intentions toward me were honorable but his wife was mentally ill and it would take some time for him to disentangle himself. After all, there were children involved. As parents themselves, he said, he was sure they’d understand.

  I watched as my father scrutinized Lenny. What must he have thought? Whatever my father felt that night—disgust? fear? numbness?—he kept to himself. But my mother smiled encouragingly at Lenny across the table and asked him questions: Where had he gone to law school? (University of Chicago.) How large was his firm? (Two hundred partners.) Where was his house on Martha’s Vineyard? (Edgartown.) With each exchange I felt myself shrinking. I could see she was impressed by his credentials, charmed by his suave, flirtatious manner. I glanced at my father, but he was staring at the ice cubes in his drink. At the end of the evening, as the four of us left the Harvard Club, my mother turned to me as we were about to go through the revolving doors: He’s so cute, she whispered. And whatever small part of me that had held out some notion that my parents might rescue me faded until it was gone.

  “After you left, I had some company,” my mother is now saying. “The Alenicks stopped by, and Dorothy and Bernie Quentzel. They’re coming out of the woodwork. And they’re all asking about you, Dani. They all send their love.”

  “What can I bring you tomorrow morning?” I ask. “I’ll be there first thing.”

  “Nothing, darling. Just you.”

  “You know we’re sitting shiva in the evening,” I say. “I should probably order some platters from Fine & Schapiro.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “So … you’re going to get a good night’s sleep, right?”

  “Right-o.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll be here for you. You’re not alone,” I say, and suddenly the gray patches are gone, and I’m choking back tears. No matter what has gone on between me and my mother, there is a fierce love between us. When I was eight, I spent two weeks in the hospital with pneumonia. My first few nights there I was petrified, and my mother slept on an empty cot in my room. Even though there’s no place in my mother’s room for me to sleep, I feel that I should be standing guard over her. I should station myself in the doorway of her room and watch her through the night.

  I blow my nose, splash cold water on my face, and head back to the table. I can already tell from the look on Lenny’s face halfway across the room that something’s wrong. He’s holding my glass of cognac, and the chocolate soufflé is almost finished.

  I slide into the banquette.

  Lenny glares at me, his nostrils flaring.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he asks.

  I stare at him.

  “I called my mother,” I say.

  “Do you realize,” he enunciates each word clearly, “that you’ve been gone fifteen minutes?”

  “I—”

  “Your soufflé is getting cold.”

  I feel as if someone has peeled back my eyelids. It is impossible to blink. And what I’m seeing is this: a middle-aged man with a trace of chocolate around his upper lip and a linen napkin riding up over his belly, his face flushed like an angry toddler’s.

  “My soufflé is getting cold?”

  “How dare you leave me sitting here like this?” he continues.

  I start to laugh. It may well be the most awful sound I’ve ever made, this laugh. The couple at the next table both turn
to look at me. I either have to laugh or take the dull silver butter knife still on the table and ram it into Lenny’s heart. I grab my bag and begin to slide out of the banquette, squeezing between tables.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Lenny asks.

  I smile and keep moving. There is a Hebrew word in my head, shiva, which translates into the number seven. I am at the beginning of the seven sacred days of mourning, and to shed even a single tear over Lenny Klein seems like a sin for which I will never be able to forgive myself.

  “Where are you going?” I think I hear him call behind me, but stopping is out of the question. I walk through the restaurant, past the bar, out onto West Fifty-fifth Street. It isn’t until I am standing on the sidewalk in the torrential downpour that I realize I don’t have a penny in my handbag, that all my money is in my coat pocket, and I left my coat in the restaurant. I stand still for a moment, raising my chin to the sky, the rain soaking through my thin suit. It feels as if the world is crying.

  Lenny slams out of the restaurant, my coat under his arm. He is breathing heavily, and his eyes are wild.

  “That’s the last time you ever walk out on me!” he screams.

  I gaze at him calmly. There is nothing happening inside my body. No fear, no rage, no regret. I hold out my hand. At first, Lenny must think I’m reaching out to him, but then he realizes it’s my coat I’m after.

  “How dare you?” he bellows.

  He hurls my coat at me.

  I catch it, wrap it around myself, and walk away. I hear the melody of the mourner’s Kaddish with each step I take as I head for Sixth Avenue, where the white on-duty lights of taxicabs float above the slow-moving traffic. Without turning around, I know that Lenny is right behind me. I can hear his labored breath. When I reach the corner, I stop and wait until he catches up with me.

  “I’m sitting shiva for my father, Lenny,” I say, looking deeply into his eyes, seeing nothing there.

  “Yeah, I’m with you, Fox,” he says. “Listen, I’m sorry, I—”

  “No, you’re not,” I interrupt him. “Yes I am, I’m sorry—”