by Dani Shapiro
I truly hadn’t imagined Lenny might be in Europe with his wife. Before he left on this trip, he had given me a hotel number, and an associate in his law firm had answered the phone at the Ritz each time I called. (I later found out that Lenny had made a practice of this: he would fly a Harvard or Columbia Law School graduate across the Atlantic, check him into a hotel room, and give him instructions as to what to say if I called.) Lenny had often told me his European business trips were top-secret: meetings with Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street, fighting the threat of Russian spies.
That afternoon, I called my mother in tears.
“I found out Lenny was in Europe with his wife,” I said.
“Oh, darling, I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
“I don’t think so.”
A pause.
“Do you want me to call his wife?”
My mother and Mrs. Klein had met each other at a few functions for Sarah Lawrence parents back when none of this could have struck anyone as a remote possibility.
“Yes,” I said. “Call her.”
“I’ll do it right now,” my mother said.
I sat by the phone and watched the minutes tick by. I pictured Lenny’s wife answering the phone with a chirpy hello, and my mother’s slow, steady explanation of why she was calling. I had set in motion a chain of events that was now unstoppable. More than twenty minutes passed before my mother called me back.
“Well, I did it,” she said.
“You talked to her?”
The world felt unreal, hallucinatory.
“Yes. She called me a liar. She told me that she has a happy marriage to a man who travels a lot. That he’s on his way to California now. And I said, ‘No, he’s on his way to see my daughter.’ ”
My mother sounded proud of herself, immersed in the drama of the moment.
“How did she seem?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Lenny’s wife—was she angry?”
“No,” my mother answered slowly, “she just didn’t believe me, Dani.”
I spent the rest of that day in a state of awful excitement. Something was going to happen. And when Lenny showed up that evening at the apartment we were still sharing in the West Village, I was ready for him.
“How was Paris?” I asked as he put his bags down and gave me a hug.
“Exhausting,” he said. “Nonstop meetings.”
“Really.”
He looked at me oddly, but we didn’t have time to get into it. The phone rang. My mother had given Mrs. Klein the number at the apartment and suggested she find out for herself what her husband was up to.
Lenny picked up the phone on the kitchen wall.
“Hello?”
I watched him as his face went white, and for the first and only time in the years I knew him, he looked truly surprised. He didn’t say a word. He just listened for a few minutes, then hung up the phone.
“That was my wife,” he said.
I was silent.
“How did she get this number?”
I shrugged.
He looked around himself like a suddenly caged animal.
“I have to go.”
“I’d imagine,” I said faintly. My anger was giving me the fuel that I needed to stay strong, at least for the moment.
As Lenny slammed out of the apartment, I was certain I would never see him again. I knew the truth now. It was staring me in the face, in the concrete form of flight lists and photos. And besides, the whistle was blown. What could he possibly tell his wife? Knowing Lenny, he’d come up with something. No, this was it, I told myself. Absolutely, positively the end.
Of course, it wasn’t the end. And for the next year that we were together—three days here, four days there—I idly wondered what it would take to get me to finally leave Lenny. I wondered about this over bottles of chilled white wine, heavy glasses half filled with scotch. The more I thought about it, the more I drank. And the more I drank, the less I cared.
I was wondering about this at the Golden Door when the phone rang, and in a split second my whole life changed forever.
Dani? Pick up the phone, goddammit.
It is a year later, my father is dead.
No matter how many times Lenny calls, I don’t answer the phone.
“Notice anything different?”
My mother beams at me when I walk into her room. She is sitting up in bed, the sleeves of her pajama top rolled up around her biceps, lifting three-pound weights.
“You’re lifting weights,” I say dumbly.
“Not that, silly.”
I look around at the papers on the windowsill, the plant in the corner, the bulletin board that is entirely covered with photos of my father and me. In one of the snapshots, taken right before I started college, I’m wearing a pink sundress and I’m grinning as my father pulls me close for one of his bear hugs. It’s hard to believe that I’m only six years older than the girl in that picture.
“Look at me!” my mother says.
It takes me a minute to register the fact that, after two months, the cast has come off her right leg. I was not prepared for this, and when I first see it, my smile freezes. The skin on her thigh and shin is shiny pink like sausage casing, and her muscles have atrophied. Her right leg is half the size of her left. It doesn’t even look human.
I bend down to give her a kiss, then bury my head in her shoulder so she won’t see my fear.
“Mazel tov,” I murmur. We both know that this is only the beginning. My mother’s recovery is going to be measured in degrees: bed, wheelchair, walker, cane. She has not been out of bed in two months.
“I have to finish my exercises. Five, six, seven, eight …” she breathes, arms out to her side in a modified butterfly curl.
The hospital can’t do anything more for my mother, but she’s in no shape to go home. And besides, where is home? It is a question we haven’t even begun to explore. Though we haven’t said it out loud, we both know she isn’t going back to Tewksbury—not now, not ever. A house in the middle of the country with two flights of stairs is not in my mother’s future. I have sent away for information about facilities up and down the East Coast, and together we have flipped through glossy brochures depicting manicured lawns and communal television rooms, whirlpools, and state-of-the-art physical therapy facilities. There are no pictures of the residents.
I find it strangely hard to say good-bye to Overlook Hospital. On my mother’s last day, I wander through the lobby and into the empty auditorium, where my father’s funeral was held. Slats of dusty sunlight crisscross the darkened room as if from a movie projector. I walk up to the podium and stand in the spot where my father’s casket was. I remember the rabbi’s thick glasses and long white beard, and the sound of his voice reciting the Twenty-third Psalm. Though I have heard the words only once in my life, they pierce my consciousness like the first few notes of a long-forgotten childhood lullaby. And even though it’s not my father’s yahrzeit, even though there’s no religious reason to do this—and in fact it may be sacrilege—I find myself reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish.
My father seems a part of this hospital. It was the last place I saw him alive. I’m afraid that when I leave here for good, I will lose him forever. Like the Hebrew words of the Kaddish, what happened in this place will eventually seem both familiar and foreign to me. I will try to hold on to these two months at Overlook Hospital almost as hard as I will try to let them go.
When I drive back to the city on that last night, it’s as if my car has a mind of its own. Instead of heading straight for the Lincoln Tunnel, I get off the Turnpike at exit 14 and make my way through the streets of Hillside and pull up outside my childhood home. Don’t do this, don’t do this, I mutter, even as I flick on the blinkers and get out of the car. It’s been less than a year since my parents sold this house and moved to Tewksbury. This is the only home I’ve ever known. Now, as I walk around a row of hedges and peer into the backyard, I see a child’
s swing set and a station wagon in the driveway where my father’s car should have been. The new owners have planted rosebushes along the side of the pool, which is covered by a dark green tarp. A fresh layer of white paint coats the shutters and front columns, making them look too bright against the red brick.
As I stand in front of 885 Revere Drive, time bends and I am a child again. I can see my mother in the backyard doing her needlepoint, my father hanging in traction in the den. There is a pot of goulash simmering on the stove, a housekeeper in a white uniform ironing sheets in the laundry room. I hear the rustling of the elm against the kitchen window, the creak of the bird feeder hanging from its lowest branch, the thwack of the mail falling through the slot in the front door. It is as quiet as a museum inside the house of my childhood. I am alone in my room, writing a story about a girl who is already grown-up. I imagine the bright future she has: she is a glamorous doctor, perhaps, or a famous actress. When I finish the story, I shred it into a dozen pieces so my mother won’t be able to read it.
The sprinkler system sputters on, and a fine mist blankets the front lawn. I hug myself, shivering in the mild spring breeze as I stand in front of the house in Hillside. It’s all gone forever, I think to myself. My father’s life—so much of it spent in pain inside these brick walls—is over. My mother is a crippled, angry widow.
The weather has turned warm the morning my mother is transported by ambulance to the Burke Center for Rehabilitation in White Plains. They’re moving her at the crack of dawn, so she tells me not to bother driving out to Overlook. When I wake up and look out my bedroom window at the clear, blue sky, I imagine my mother being wheeled on a stretcher through the sliding glass doors of the hospital, and what the air must feel like against her face.
For the first time in a long while, I have the morning to myself. I have nowhere to be and nothing to do—and I’m not sleeping off a hangover. I haven’t exactly stopped drinking since that night at Lox Around the Clock, but a subtle shift has taken place inside of me. I want to stop drinking—something I’ve never wanted before. I just don’t know how to do it. Every night I go to sleep sober is a small victory.
My phone rings while I’m making coffee. I don’t answer it. I never answer my phone. There’s still a possibility that it will be Lenny. I know he calls and hangs up all the time, and every once in a while he leaves an angry message. Goddammit, Dani, I would appreciate the common courtesy of a return call. So I keep the volume down. I’ve got a Marlboro in my mouth, a mug of coffee in my hand, and a muffin heating up in the toaster oven before I even remember to check and see who called.
I press the playback button and raise the volume.
“Dani, it’s Sheldon.” He sounds pissed. Another good reason not to answer the phone. “Listen, kiddo, you didn’t even show up at Grey Advertising yesterday for that Special K spot. What the hell is going on with you? Call me.”
Sheldon’s message drives home the point I’ve been thinking about for a while now: I can’t do it for one more minute. Ever since my parents’ accident, the thought of putting on a bathing suit and parading in front of a camera with twenty other girls who all look as if they could be my first cousins seems like the stupidest thing in the world.
I pick up the phone and dial a number in Westchester I still know by heart.
“Sarah Lawrence College,” a receptionist answers.
“Dean Kaplan’s office, please,” I say.
Sarah Lawrence is a small enough school for Dean Kaplan to remember who I am when she gets on the phone.
“Dani, how are you?” she asks warmly.
“Fine,” I say.
My voice feels as if it’s coming from my toes.
“How’s the acting going?”
I close my eyes tight, and my father’s face appears. Not the green, haggard postcrash face, but the creased grin I remember from my childhood. Go ahead, I can almost hear him whisper. Take a leap.
“I’d like to come back,” I say. “I know it’s been a while, but a lot has happened.”
For years to come, when I think of this moment, I will sense my father’s hand in this. Until now, going back to college at twenty-four seemed impossible. But I’ve begun to realize that maybe I can turn back the clock. It’s too late for my father, it may be too late for my mother—but I can start over again.
“Well, we’d love to have you,” Dean Kaplan says. “Are you thinking of starting this September?”
“Yes.”
As she takes down my address and promises to send me registration materials right away, I realize that this is the first thing I’ve done in years that has made sense.
My mother is sitting in a wheelchair near the parking lot of the Burke Center for Rehabilitation. I’m still not used to seeing her upright. She has a blanket over her lap, and her head is tilted back, angled toward the late afternoon sun. I approach her, casting a shadow over her face. Her eyes blink open, and I see they are filled with tears.
“Where have you been?” she wails.
“I—”
“You’re almost two hours late!”
Her mouth is twisted, her face contorted like a child’s. When I was a little girl, she was always late picking me up from school. The other kids would leave in their carpools or buses, and I would be left waiting, alone, near the parking lot of a low brick building, scanning the distance for her chocolate-brown boat of an Eldorado to glide into the school’s driveway.
“I’m sorry, first I got caught up with some stuff at home, and then I got lost—”
“I’m helpless like this,” she sputters. “Can’t you see?”
How can I not see? Her legs are immobile beneath her blanket, and her feet are propped onto the metal footrests of the wheelchair. Despite all the weight-lifting, her upper body is thin and frail; she probably couldn’t even wheel herself up the gentle slope of the sidewalk if she had to.
“Take me inside,” she says, imperious as a toddler.
I release the brake on her wheelchair, grip the plastic handles, and begin to push her toward the entrance. It isn’t as easy as it looks—the thin wheels sink into every concrete crack—and I feel my mother’s weight in front of me as I lean forward, afraid we will hit a bump and she will go flying onto the gravel.
“I want to go to my room,” she instructs once we’re through the sliding glass doors. She points down a long corridor. Everything at Burke is designed like one big wheelchair-access ramp. The doors are wide, and there are no stairs anywhere. As I wheel her slowly past administrative offices, then turquoise-tiled physical therapy rooms filled with enormous tubs, I keep having the strange sense that something is missing. This place feels eerier than Overlook ever did. After all, Overlook is a hospital—and good things sometimes happen in hospitals. Babies are born and go home. Here, there is no noise, no urgency, no sense of life-or-death. Anyone who has checked into Burke is here because he or she has already survived something unsurvivable. As I push my mother toward her room, we pass fragments of human beings: a quadriplegic boy, a girl whose waist ends in a stump.
“I’m in here,” she says, and I turn her wheelchair into what looks like a generic hotel room except for the rails on the bed. She has already attempted to make herself at home, wedging pictures of my father and me into the corners of the mirror. Three small, tattered books are stacked on her nightstand—my father’s prayer books from when he was in the army.
“I’m tired. I want to get in bed,” my mother says flatly.
I move the wheelchair right to the side of the bed, park it, then come around front and lift her like a rag doll. She is almost too heavy for me; she can’t help herself at all. I get her onto the bed, then lift her legs up and swivel her around until she’s lying down. I’m panting by the time I’m through, and she is still looking at me with an expression of ineffable sadness. Anything but this, I think. Let her rage against me, let her scream and yell. But this exquisite blame is more than I can bear.
“Mom, I’m really sorry.”
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She shakes her head.
“It won’t happen again,” I say.
I think about telling her about my phone call with the dean at Sarah Lawrence. I know, on some level, that nothing would make her happier than my going back to school. Or would it? I sit at the side of her bed, stroking her hand. The late afternoon light filters through the drapes, casting on everything in her room a yolklike yellow. I open my mouth but the words just don’t come out. I can’t bring myself to say it: I’m going back to college, Mom.
It’s bad enough that I will rise from this bed at some point and walk out of here on my own two feet. I will stride down the hall, get into my car, and drive away. But what about my mother? Where will she go, once they have taught her to walk again—if they even can?
I push her hair off her face, and stroke her cheek. Her skin is surprisingly soft.
“I’m going back to college, Mom,” I say softly. “I spoke to Dean Kaplan today.”
I feel like the sole survivor, emerging dazed from a wreck. Why should I get to walk away? What have I done to deserve a second chance?
“Oh, Dani,” she cries, then pulls me toward her so I can’t see her face. “Oh, honey, that’s the best news in the world.”
The phone rings and I pick it up, for once.
“Hello?” I say gingerly.
There is a beat of silence on the other end, and in that split second my heart sinks.
“Well, well, well. If it isn’t the Fox.”
“Hi, Lenny,” I say faintly.
“You never take my calls,” he says, sounding wounded.
“I—”
Why do I need to explain myself to Lenny Klein? I look around at all four walls of my bedroom, as if to remind myself that I’m home, in my own apartment. My door is double-locked, and the doormen downstairs are under strict instructions not to admit Mr. Klein. Even though I know he isn’t here, it feels as if he’s lurking somewhere in the room.