Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  There’s an older man across the aisle from me and I think I recognize him from a sitcom I used to watch as a kid. He’s leaning forward, elbows on knees, intently listening to Mary. Everyone seems focused except for me. I count sixty-seven heads in this room. All the folding chairs are filled, and there are people sitting on the floor. This basement must be used as a nursery school during the day: the walls are covered with cutouts of trees and flowers. Each leaf is inscribed with a child’s name and future occupation: Jennifer wants to be a nurse when she grows up so she can help sick people. Zachary is planning to be an astronaut so he can fly on the space shuttle.

  I feel alien in this crowd—a terrible feeling, and a familiar one. What am I doing here? Okay, maybe I drink too much, but this is a little extreme. I can’t do things in moderation: either I drink until I’m falling-down drunk or I find myself at Alcoholics Anonymous. Isn’t there a middle ground? Can’t I just impose some self-discipline, cut back a bit? These people look like Moonies to me, with their shining eyes. I feel trapped. I look at my watch. Forty-three minutes and this meeting will be over. My chair squeaks.

  I try to listen to Mary. She’s saying something about white wine spritzers that makes people laugh. What’s so funny about white wine spritzers? A poor excuse for a drink, if you ask me. She talks about the way she used to break into a cold sweat in the middle of the night, and hate herself in the morning. I wake up in cold sweats all the time. Doesn’t everybody? Now she’s talking about how booze fueled her choices of schools, jobs, men. Lenny’s face appears before me. If I hadn’t been drunk whenever I was with him, would there have been any possibility I would have stayed with him for nearly four years? I try out this equation in my head: Lenny without alcohol. It doesn’t compute.

  I’m sweating in the sweltering heat of this basement. The people around me don’t seem to be as uncomfortable as I am. I run my fingers through my damp hair. I can’t sit still. Now Mary’s talking about how she’d notice black-and-blue marks on her body and not know how she got them. Everyone laughs, and I want to scream. I look down at my legs, wishing I hadn’t worn shorts tonight. I’ve been telling myself my bruises have to do with a vitamin C deficiency. Is Mary a plant? Did they somehow know I was coming, and hire an actress to pretend that this is her life, when really it’s mine? How does she know what’s been going on inside of me?

  When she finishes speaking, everyone applauds as if we’re at the Philharmonic. Then a guy in a baseball cap takes the microphone and announces that AA has no dues or fees, but it does have expenses, so he’s passing a basket around the room. Most people throw in some change or a dollar bill. When it comes to me, I put a crumpled dollar on top of the pile.

  “This is a closed meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous,” he says, reading from a card. “Attendance is restricted to those with a desire to stop drinking.”

  A desire to stop drinking. I think of the lists of resolutions I have scribbled in my journal each morning. Cutting down on my drinking has been at the top of the list for as long as I can remember. I can’t imagine stopping. But it seems that’s precisely what the people in this room have done.

  “Is anyone here for the first time who would like to say hello?” the baseball-capped guy asks.

  I feel that everyone is looking at me. I stare at a coffee stain on the floor.

  “Okay … how about anyone counting days?”

  A bunch of hands shoot up.

  “Hi, I’m Stan and I’m an alcoholic and today is fifty-three days,” says a guy behind me.

  Applause.

  “I’m Debby, alcoholic, and I have three days back,” a longhaired girl announces, smiling bravely.

  More applause.

  A dozen people introduce themselves and state the number of days they have, ranging from three to ninety.

  The meeting goes on for what seems like forever. People raise their hands, and Mary calls on them. The cordless mike is passed around the room like a baton. Words drift through my consciousness like passing clouds, words like powerless, denial, and worst of all, higher power. It’s as if there’s this whole other language in here, a blend of psychobabble and spiritual mumbo jumbo. I’ve spent enough of my life in stained-glass sanctuaries listening to rabbis ponder the meaning of God.

  I close my eyes and think about my father. I do that a lot these days—think about him whenever I’m hurting inside. As usual, I can’t see his pre-crash face right away. I’m plagued with images of his vacant eyes, stubbly cheeks, wire-rimmed glasses askew on his face. I concentrate, focusing hard until he finally comes to me—until he’s so real that I can hear his voice and feel his touch.

  So what do you think, Dad? Your daughter’s in a church basement listening to people talk about booze. Pretty silly, huh?

  I’m not so sure, shnookie. His voice is as clear to me as the voice of the guy speaking into the mike. I’m not so sure.

  When the meeting ends, everyone applauds, then stands, and the people on either side of me grab my hands. Recoiling will only mark me as new, and I don’t want to give myself away. So I hold hands, and, for a moment, become part of this human chain as Mary says she’d like to close the meeting with something called the Serenity Prayer.

  “God,” the whole room intones, “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  I try to bolt the second the meeting is over, but my path to the door is like an obstacle course.

  “I haven’t seen you before. Are you new?” an older woman asks.

  “No, I’m visiting from California,” I mumble as I keep moving toward the exit sign.

  “Hi, I’m Brooke,” a pretty girl says. “This your first meeting?”

  How do they know? Am I wearing it like a sign across my forehead? People here seem to have my number. I keep my eyes on the scuffed-up linoleum floor as I make my way out.

  When I finally push the heavy doors open and escape into the night, I’m so glad to be out of there I barely notice the oppressive heat as I round the corner quickly and begin to walk down West End Avenue.

  Never doing that again.

  Why not, shnookie?

  They’re a bunch of loonies.

  Maybe those loonies can help you.

  I argue with my father in my head all the way home. I hated every minute of that meeting, and yet, now that it’s over I feel oddly lighthearted. Something about hearing all those stories. Never in my life have I heard so many people exposing themselves to one another, seemingly without fear. I felt like a voyeur while I was there, but now that I’m out on the street I feel comforted. It seems to me that the stories I heard in the meeting are part of a vast universe of stories. No one has it easy—not really. I think of the pretty girl who tried to be nice to me as I was leaving. Whatever brought her through the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous couldn’t have been pretty. I’m not the only one having a hard time.

  Maybe I’ll just try to stop on my own.

  You haven’t had much luck with that.

  But—

  No buts.

  My father’s voice is firmer than it was in life, somehow more full of conviction. On my way home, I pull the scrap of paper from my wallet to see what else is written there. Tomorrow night there’s a meeting at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on the other side of town.

  It is eight o’clock on the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend, and I’m in the garage in my building waiting for my car. I’m on my way to Sarah Lawrence College for the first day of classes, and I feel the way I did in seventh grade, when my parents took me out of the yeshiva and put me in prep school. There is a chasm in front of me, and all I can do is take a running leap. That I’m doing this without the aid or benefit of a few drinks makes me feel doubly exposed. I’m twenty-four years old, and the thought that I’m going back to college after everything that’s happened is the most terrifying thing I can imagine.

  I’m sweating, my whole body damp under the clothes I
carefully chose for today. I close my eyes and a wordless, formless prayer zips through my head, attaching itself to nothing. Please help is the gist of it. I don’t know whom I’m praying to: God? My father? They both seem out of reach today.

  I try to breathe deeply, but the fumes of the garage make me gag. I can see myself in the security monitor: I’m wearing jeans, cowboy boots, a navy-blue cotton sweater. Suddenly I feel like a complete dork. Does anyone wear cowboy boots anymore? It seems I’ve been out of college for a hundred years. When I tried to figure out what to wear this morning, I felt as if I was dressing for a role: college-girl type. By the time I left, clothes were strewn all over the bed: short skirts, sweaters, dressy pants, high heels, designer jackets.

  As I pull out of the garage a black Mercedes sedan is pulling in, and I see a woman’s tanned arm resting against the open window, a gold watch on her wrist. The watch catches my eye—it’s the same as the one Lenny bought me in Monte Carlo a few years back. The woman’s face is partially hidden behind enormous tortoiseshell sunglasses, but the clean line of her jaw and the brown sweep of her pageboy are unmistakable. It has been seven months since Lenny and I broke up, four months since the last night we spent together, and today I am looking at the cold, well-kept beauty of his wife.

  What the hell is she doing here, in my garage? I drive down Seventy-third Street and double-park outside the Korean deli on the corner of Columbus. I have an awful feeling that Lenny may have moved his family into the city. I fumble for a quarter, then call directory assistance and ask for Leonard Klein. And when the operator reels off a Central Park West address one block from where I live, I hang up the phone, shaking. Am I going to run into Mrs. Klein at the greengrocer? See Lenny taking his kids for Sunday walks?

  In the deli, as I wait for my coffee and bagel, I imagine Lenny as a giant boulder, then heave him away from me with all my might. I picture him rolling downhill—fast, faster. So what if he’s moved his whole family a block away from me? I deserve nothing less. I get back into my car and make the twenty-five-minute drive to Sarah Lawrence, my mind racing. Did he do this to get to me? Is it possible that the only perfect apartment in all of Manhattan was one from which he could toss a stone and hit my bedroom window?

  The sight of the George Washington Bridge stretched across the Hudson River and the majestic buildings of upper Riverside Drive does nothing to lift my spirits. My rage at Lenny turns into a boomerang, which I level back at myself. As I press my foot to the gas and push the Subaru to seventy, I know it’s my own fault this is happening. And this great idea of going back to college—it’s a waste of time and money. What am I going to do with my life, after all? I should turn the car around and go home. I want to pour myself a drink and get back into bed. All I am is a pretty girl who has used her looks to get into a whole lot of trouble—and that’s all I’ll ever be. I spent four years with a married man, and God is going to punish me.

  It’s all I can do to keep my car pointed in the right direction. I drive past the bridge exit, through two tollbooths, and before I know it I am on the campus of Sarah Lawrence College, where once, not a very long time ago, I was young.

  I park the car and walk up a narrow path to a Tudor building shaded by an enormous old tree, its back windows overlooking a clay tennis court with a sagging net. This is the dorm where I was living when Lenny Klein first showed up in my life. This is where Jess and I used to stay up late at night and help each other with term papers. I see her slouched on the floor of my room with loose pages of research spread around her, her hair pulled back in a rubber band, the soles of her feet dirty from running barefoot across campus.

  I lean against the side of the building and try to calm myself. It’s been two weeks since my first AA meeting, two weeks since I’ve had a drink, and my inner life is like a battlefield, scarred, unrecognizable. I can’t seem to stop my feelings, whatever they are, from taking over my body. I feel great sweeps of rage, fear, impatience, guilt, anxiety.

  I shake my head hard, trying to get rid of the images flooding through me. Before I open the front door, I imagine myself, four years younger, running through it and into Lenny’s waiting car. I walk through the lobby and into the back of the building, where there are faculty offices. There’s one class I promised myself I’d try to get into, taught by Ilja Wachs, one of the most popular and respected professors on campus.

  What makes me think I have a prayer of getting into his nineteenth-century literature class? My reading for the past four years has consisted of bad scripts and Women’s Wear Daily. But I have so much to prove to myself—everything, in fact—and this seems like a good place to start: Flaubert, Tolstoy, Eliot, Dickens. His course description made clear that his class will read a book a week.

  Even though I think he’ll probably laugh me out of his office, even though I can smell the fear on my own body, I knock on his open door and poke my head inside.

  “Come in, come in.”

  The large, white-haired man hunched over his desk doesn’t look up as he waves me into his office. He’s looking for something on his desk, which is covered with papers, ceramic coffee mugs, an overflowing ashtray. There are bookcases lining the walls and knee-high piles of books all over the floor. The room smells as if he’s already smoked a pack of cigarettes this morning.

  “Here it is,” he mutters, extracting a single sheet of paper from beneath a mountain of pages just like it. Only then does he look up, his blue eyes piercing and kind.

  “And who are you?” he asks.

  I stutter my name.

  “What can I do for you, Dani Shapiro?”

  He leans back in his chair, arms clasped behind his head. The buttons on his oxford shirt spread apart, a pale, gray crescent of skin peeking out.

  “I’m interested in taking your nineteenth-century literature class,” I say.

  He smiles, his face crinkling.

  “Why?”

  Why? I wasn’t expecting this. I feel as if I’m on an audition, but I don’t have a script. What does he want to hear? I’m so used to telling people what I think they want to hear that I have no idea how to talk about my own thoughts and feelings. I feel my cheeks flush, and I wish I’d just sink through the floor and disappear.

  “I—”

  I don’t know what to say. I trail off, staring out the open window. Two women in shorts and sweaters are swatting a tennis ball back and forth.

  Ilja doesn’t take his eyes off me, nor does he help me out. But somehow I know I’m in a safe place. By walking through the door of his office, I seem to have put myself in his care. I remember that he was the adviser of my freshman-year roommate. She would come back from conferences with him, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy, after telling him her problems academic and otherwise.

  “Well, what have you read recently?” he asks.

  “I’ve been out of school for a while,” I say.

  He raises his eyebrows.

  “I dropped out in ’83,” I say, “to work as an actress.”

  “And did you?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Did you work as an actress?”

  “Yes,” I respond, and then begin to reel off my list of credits until it occurs to me that I’m talking to someone who isn’t going to be impressed by my SAG card or string of national television commercials. He probably doesn’t even own a television.

  “What made you decide to come back to Sarah Lawrence?” he asks.

  “My father died seven months ago,” I answer haltingly.

  Ilja leans forward in his chair, suddenly, completely, focused on me. The room is very quiet. All I hear is the rhythmic thwack of a tennis ball, a few chirping birds outside the window.

  “Tell me everything,” he says.

  And so I begin. I tell this man I’ve never met before the story of my life. I tell him about my dead father, my crippled mother, my relatives who now communicate with one another only through lawyers. I tell him about Lenny Klein, and about how I feel I’ll never be young again
. He pushes a box of Kleenex across his desk, papers flying to the floor, and he rests his chin in one hand, listening, his white hair flipped to the side like an inverted comma. I feel that he’s actually interested in me, that I have all the time in the world. There are places in my story where he barks with laughter, others where shadows cross his face.

  “Oh, my dear girl,” he says simply, when I’ve finished.

  I’m expecting him to refer me to the school shrink or suggest I rethink my college plan. I bow my head, shredding a piece of tissue balled in my hand.

  “My class meets Tuesday and Thursday mornings at nine,” he says.

  I look up at him.

  “It isn’t going to be easy for you,” he says. “But we’ll work together. Can you come see me once a week, for an hour before class?”

  “Yes,” I answer. What must he see in me? I cannot even begin to ask the question, much less answer it. I stand up, dizzy on my feet, and he clasps my hand between his two warm palms, cupping it like a leaf in the wind.

  “Welcome back,” he says.

  “Three bedrooms, river view,” pronounces the real estate broker, who is standing in her Nancy Reagan–red suit in the center of an empty living room, her heel tapping against the parquet floor.

  This is the sixteenth apartment she’s shown me this week, and she’s beginning to get impatient. I’m looking for an apartment for my mother, and I have a list of her specifications: door wide enough for a wheelchair, no stairs in the lobby, a kitchen and bathroom she can use without too much trouble, and enough space for a live-in nurse. My mother is used to a suburban house. She needs a big apartment—and not just any big apartment. She also wants central air-conditioning, a twenty-four-hour doorman, and an Upper West Side location. She wants to live near me.

  I pull out my tapemeasure and prowl through the rooms, checking the dimensions of the doorways, the height of the counters.

  “It’s certainly bright,” says the broker. She puts on her sunglasses to make her point.