by Dani Shapiro
I shudder at the memory of myself, hunched over her personal papers, letters from ex-boyfriends, family photos, tax returns. I desperately wanted to trade places with her. I thought of what she’d see if she looked through my desk drawers: unopened bills, undeposited residual checks, angry letters from Lenny, tiny jars of cocaine, an expired credit card I use to chop it up. In years to come, I will occasionally catch a glimpse of a familiar-looking redhead in made-for-television movies and realize where I know her from. I never closed my eyes that night. The rain stopped pounding against the side of the brownstone at some point, and the city was as still as I’ve ever heard it. And when the pale, thin light of dawn trickled through the bay window, I rose from the desk and looked out onto the deserted street. I wasn’t even sure I still existed. The whole world seemed empty, for a moment washed clean.
My mother is on the phone when I walk into her room. I’m carrying an enormous platter of cold cuts from Fine & Schapiro. I didn’t know what to get, so I got a little of everything: corned beef, pastrami, tongue, turkey, potato salad, coleslaw. Her eyes widen when she sees it all. There’s another platter in the trunk of my car, along with some big bottles of seltzer and Diet Coke, which I’ll bring up to her room later. People will be coming to sit shiva, and when Jews get together, food is important.
The blinds have been tilted open, and stripes of sunlight fall across the sheets and casts. There is a breakfast tray pushed to the side, with a half-eaten plate of eggs and a full glass of orange juice still on it. Angie is in the corner, knitting, and the television hanging from the ceiling is broadcasting a midmorning talk show.
This is your life, I think to myself as I look around the room. This is home, for now. I rest the platter on the windowsill, then remove a vase of dead gladiolas. The smell nearly makes me retch. The heating vent is next to the window, and it’s cooking all the flowers into stiff arrangements that crumble to the touch. There’s a basket on the floor, filled with get-well cards addressed to both my parents and condolence cards addressed to my mother.
She sees me looking at them and puts her hand over the receiver.
“We’ll have to order those cards you’re supposed to send,” she whispers.
I nod, and make a mental note to find out what cards she’s talking about. This morning I went to a bookstore and browsed through the shelves, looking for something, anything, to guide me through this process. I thumbed through When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I looked at a bunch of books with death in the title, until finally I settled on The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, a book that describes in great detail the way the body is prepared for Orthodox burial, the prayers that are said before, during, and after services, and the ritual of sitting shiva. Nowhere did it say anything about sending cards.
She hangs up the phone with a sigh.
“That was your father’s banker,” she says. “He called to say he’s very sorry, he saw the obit in the Times, and by the way he’s sealing the vault.”
“What does that mean?”
“The banks have to do that when someone dies, until the will has been probated,” my mother says.
Wills, vaults, probate. Words I’ve never used before. Made-for-television words uttered by actors playing lawyers. I feel that familiar get-me-out-of-here feeling, but there’s nowhere to go. I sit on the edge of my mother’s bed. She looks thin. I offer her the glass of orange juice, but she shakes her head and pushes it away.
The phone rings, and she doesn’t move to answer it. She is inert, staring straight up at the ceiling. Angie and I raise our eyebrows at each other. My mother seems flattened, as if the banker’s call has forced reality to seep in—just in case things weren’t real enough.
“Would you get it?” she asks on the third ring. “Just say I’m not here.”
Is she joking? My mother has never had much of a sense of humor. Or, at least, what’s funny to her never seems funny to me.
I pick up the phone.
“Irene Shapiro’s room.”
“Dan?”
“Susie?”
“Yeah, hi. Listen, I’m between patients, but I just want to let you know we’re sitting shiva at Gram’s tonight.”
“What do you mean?”
“It just seems easier, with everyone already in the city,” Susie says. “Shirl, Moe, and Harv—well, it’s asking a lot for them to make the trip out to Jersey.”
“Oh,” I say. “Oh, okay.”
My mother scans my face.
“Whose decision was this?”
I ask. “What?”
“Whose—”
“Oops, that’s my buzzer,” Susie says. “Gotta go.”
She hangs up, and I look at the clock. It’s precisely fifteen minutes past the hour. I picture Susie opening the door to her office and ushering in her ten-fifteen patient.
“That was Susie?” my mother asks.
“It sure was,” I reply, trying to keep my voice from giving anything away.
“What did she want?”
How do I tell my mother that shiva for her husband is going to take place in an apartment on West Fifty-seventh Street, many miles from here—that it appears my father’s family is abandoning her?
“Well, she called to tell us they’re sitting shiva at Gram’s,” I say slowly.
“I don’t understand.”
“The Shapiros are going to sit shiva at Gram’s apartment,” I repeat.
“Gram’s?”
My mother’s incredulity probably stems from the fact that my paternal grandmother has been comatose for the past two decades. They can’t possibly be doing it for her sake—she doesn’t even know her son is dead. My mother looks so small and lonely beneath her sheets, I would do anything to save her this.
“I can’t believe it,” she says, and her chin juts into an expression I haven’t seen once since the accident. “How dare they?”
“It doesn’t matter—” I try to soothe her, but she interrupts me.
“Let me see the paper,” she says.
I hand her a folded copy of The New York Times and she flips through it until she finds what she’s looking for.
“Hand me my glasses,” she says, not looking up.
Once her bifocals are perched on her nose, she runs a finger down the small print of the paid obituaries.
“Here it is,” she mutters. “I knew it, I just knew it. Damn them!”
“What?”
“Take a look for yourself.”
“ ‘Paul Henry Shapiro,’ blah, blah, blah”—I read out loud—“ ‘shiva will be held at the home of Beatrice Shapiro, 345 West Fifty-seventh Street—’ ”
“Don’t you see?” my mother asks.
“What are you talking about?”
The edge in her voice, the way her pupils jiggle almost imperceptibly behind her bifocals—it’s all too familiar to me. I have been afraid of my mother’s temper all my life. When she flies into a rage, she will say anything to anybody. She once called my childhood dentist a pig in front of his whole waiting room because he was late for an appointment.
“They must have phoned this in yesterday,” she says. “They’ve known all along.”
I can barely bring myself to think about the fact that my father’s family is abandoning not only my mother but me. Though they’re probably not even aware of it, they are forcing me to make an impossible choice: sit shiva for my father or stay here with my mother.
As my mother’s daughter, I have relinquished my rights to be a part of their world. I am as foreign to my father’s family as they are to me. My mother always ridiculed their lives as small and pious, and made sure we didn’t have anything to do with them. All these years, I never realized that I might be missing something. But now that my father is dead, I see that they are the invisible thread that connects me to him. I need them, and they are nowhere to be found.
It is the last day of shiva—almost a month since the accident—and my mother’s face is beginning to look normal again. The swelling has
gone down, and the bruising around her nose and jawline has faded and become mushy and banana-colored. She’s looking altogether better, and whenever anyone comments on this, she attributes her speedy healing to good genes.
“My side of the family heals well,” she tells me proudly. “Your father’s family scars like nothing you’ve ever seen, but we’re survivors. We snap right back as if nothing’s happened.”
She tells me this as if I were not also my father’s daughter, when the fact is, I have inherited that particular trait from him. I am not as physically strong as my mother, and I don’t bounce back as if nothing’s happened. If I had been in the passenger seat of the Audi that night, I doubt I would have lived.
But I tell my mother none of this. Instead, I unpack today’s bag of gourmet goodies I brought from the city. I’m trying everything I can to inspire my mother to eat: raspberries, crème fraîche, brownies, cheddar quiche. There’s a tiny specialty store in my neighborhood, and each morning, before I leave for the hospital, I double-park my car on Columbus Avenue and run inside to see what looks good.
“Mmm, berries,” my mother murmurs.
“There are fresh scones, too,” I say.
My mother turns to Angie, who is sitting in a chair between the bed and the window, watching the muted television.
“Angie, look at how my daughter takes care of me.”
Angie smiles at me, and I wonder what she really thinks. She’s seen it all: my father, my mother’s family, Lenny, and the way I come back after lunch each day smelling like vodka and Velamints. I am taking care of my mother, it’s true, but I am not taking care of myself. Does Angie worry about my driving back to the city late at night with a few vodkas under my belt, the car window cracked open, flicking my cigarette ash into the darkness?
I haven’t spoken to Lenny since I left him on the street, and I’ve shown up at my mother’s room each morning to spend every minute of shiva with her—but I haven’t been able to stop drinking. Every morning I wake up and tell myself I won’t drink, but when lunchtime rolls around and I drive into Summit to take a break, the pressure in my head grows so unbearable that it seems only a drink will make it go away. And it does—for a little while—until it returns with a vengeance.
“Listen, Dani.”
My mother’s voice has that I-have-something-important-to-tell-you-and-you’re-not-going-to-like-it edge.
“Susie and Shirl want to go out to Tewksbury.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, they need papers of Dad’s. There’s some Shapiro Foundation business, and some insurance policies Shirl seems to feel only she can recognize—”
Her voice falters.
“And?”
“I want you to go with them.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just leave it at that. I want you to go with them, and be with them while they’re going through Dad’s things.”
“You want me to spy on them?”
My mother looks at me, stricken.
“No! I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“You wouldn’t put it that way, but that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“Dani, there are some things you just don’t understand,” she says.
“And when is this stealth mission supposed to happen?”
“Tomorrow.”
I make a bargain with myself. I will do my mother’s bidding, and keep an eye on my half sister and aunt as they go through my father’s things. But in exchange for this, I will spend tonight in the city with my father’s family. I will sit on low benches with them surrounded by fruit baskets and smoked-fish platters, and I will think of my mother, alone in her hospital room. No matter which way I turn, I am a traitor. Tomorrow I will betray Susie and Shirl. Tonight I will betray my mother.
The following afternoon, when I get to Tewksbury, Shirl is there, waiting for me. She tells me Susie isn’t coming; she couldn’t reschedule her afternoon patients. At first I’m relieved, but then I realize this probably means I’m going to have to make another trip out here to spy on Susie separately. It doesn’t dawn on me that I can say no to my mother—that I don’t have to take part in what seems like paranoia. What, exactly, is she afraid of? I know my mother doesn’t trust my father’s brother, Harvey—but Shirl has always struck me as good and decent. Even though she and my mother have kept an icy distance over the years, I cannot imagine Shirl doing anything to hurt her brother’s wife. I fiddle with all sorts of unfamiliar keys until finally I get the alarm turned off and the back door open. Shirl has never been here, and it’s only my second trip. It almost feels as if we’re breaking into a stranger’s house. (Many months from now, it will in fact be a stranger’s house. My mother will sell it, and movers will come in and pack up all my parents’ art, furniture, books, and clothing and put everything into storage. My mother will never see this house again.)
“Dani,” Shirl’s voice lifts and falls over my name and turns it into something musical. “Why don’t we have a cup of tea.”
I put up some water to boil in the kettle. I rummage through drawers, looking for tea bags, coming across evidence of each of my parents’ idiosyncrasies: my father’s papaya enzyme tablets, hundreds of my mother’s yellowed clippings of Jane Brody’s pieces on health in The New York Times. The house seems alive, waiting for them to come home. Shirl sits at the kitchen table, staring out the back window at the desolate backyard, the dark-green pool cover sagging with the weight of melted snow. She looks so sad that I come over and give her a kiss on the cheek.
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” she says.
I swallow hard, fighting back tears.
Shirl grasps both my hands.
“I told your father I would take care of you,” she says. “I promised him I’d never lose track of you.”
“Of course, of course not,” I say. But I am thinking of the few times I have seen Shirl or her family over the years, usually at huge family weddings or Bar Mitzvahs. We visited them in Boston once, when I was a little girl.
“It isn’t going to be easy, Dani, but I really want us to be friends. There have been a lot of misunderstandings over the years. Your mother …” She trails off, shaking her head sorrowfully.
Shirl looks at me then, and I realize that she knows. She knows why I’m here, that I am my mother’s agent, sent here to make sure that she doesn’t steal one of my father’s cashmere sweaters or lift the de Kooning off the wall.
“Come on. Let’s go upstairs and get this over with,” she says, giving my hand a little squeeze. And as she follows me up the curved staircase to the second floor of my parents’ house, past the blown-up head shot of my tousled, smiling self, I tell myself that it won’t be a problem. I don’t have to take sides. I’ve lost my father, and that’s enough. I don’t have to lose the rest of his family.
Little do I know that it’s only just beginning. The bad blood that has existed between my mother and my father’s family all these years is seeping through the generations. In his absence, it spreads like a stain. There’s no place to run. I can only stand here, helpless, watching as it covers me.
I remember that fall day when I returned to Sarah Lawrence after my drive with Lenny, I felt jelly-legged, drugged. He winked as I got out of the car and said he’d call me soon, and I had a pretty good idea that for Lenny, soon meant hours, if not minutes. I felt like a different person as I climbed the stairs to my room. I would forever be a girl who had kissed the married stepfather of her best friend on the side of a Westchester road. I could never undo that.
There was a folded note pinned to my door, my name written in the bold, black strokes of Jess’s fountain pen; I took a deep breath as I grabbed it. Meet me at the pub at seven. It was unsigned.
I checked my watch. It was nearly seven. I had been out with Lenny since noon. My world was completely turned upside down, and I didn’t know what to do. My cheeks were scraped raw by his thick stubble, and my mouth felt swollen. I wanted to run away. For the first time since le
aving home to go to college, I wanted to call my parents and ask them to come pick me up and take me back to New Jersey. On some level, I knew I was in way over my head, that the events of the previous weeks were beyond my understanding. But I was twenty, and I felt too old to ask for help. I had made a mess of things, and now I had to pay the price.
I walked to the pub. Through the window, I could see Jess at our usual corner table. She was leaning on an elbow, her hair practically falling into her beer. I tried to read her face, the way she was holding herself, but she seemed purposely blank, affectless.
“Hi,” I said softly, sliding across the table from her.
She just sat there and looked at me, her usual little smile playing around the corners of her mouth.
I felt like sliding through the floor.
“Say something,” I pleaded. “Anything.”
She shook her head slowly from side to side.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I never meant for this to happen.”
Silence.
“He tricked me,” I went on. “I met him because I thought he wanted to talk about you.”
“Have you done anything with him?”
Her voice was uncharacteristically shrill, and it was the only thing that gave her away. Other than that voice, she was the picture of languor.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Today,” I answered, “I kissed him.”
She pushed back her chair from the table, and I was afraid she was going to leave.
“Jess, he disgusted me,” I said quickly. “I was completely grossed out.”
She stopped, that familiar, amused glint returning to her eyes.
“Really,” she said.
“I swear to you, it will never happen again.”
In the weeks that followed, I kept my word to Jess. I didn’t answer my phone, and I left my dorm through the back entrance in case Lenny was spying on me. I told no one—not my other friends, certainly not my parents. Jess allowed me back into her life; we never talked about it. It was as if it had never happened.
Then one afternoon Jess invited me to her twenty-first birthday party, which was going to be held at the Westchester home of her mother and Lenny.