Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  “Mmmpphh,” I mumble. I wish she’d just leave me alone for a few minutes. Whether my mother can negotiate her way through this space in a wheelchair is only part of what I’m thinking about. I’m trying to picture her here. In my mind, I fill the rooms with the furniture from Tewksbury, I hang art on the walls. Will this place feel like home? Will she curl up and watch television at night, comforted by the lights of New Jersey across the river?

  “So what do you think?” The broker sidles up to me and rests her cool, manicured fingers on my arm. “Will Mom be happy here?”

  A flash of anger rips through me, and I want to lash out at somebody—but at whom? I see myself reflected in the broker’s sunglasses, distorted, moonfaced. I feel as if I’m disappearing, as if my sole purpose in life is being my mother’s daughter. Wherever I go, people ask me how my mother is. How’s Mom? Concern flickering across their well-meaning faces. How’s she holding up? They never ask me how I’m doing, how I’m holding up. No one seems to realize that I’ve barely begun to grieve for my father. Since the accident, taking care of my mother has fueled me. Now, I spend half my weeks in classes and AA meetings and the other half talking to doctors, lawyers, real estate brokers until I’m afraid I’m going to split in two.

  I stretch the tapemeasure across the entrance to the master bedroom. If we take the door off its hinges, she’ll be able to make the turn from the hallway and get her wheelchair inside. I look around the empty room and try to imagine a bed, a bureau, curtains on the windows overlooking the smokestacks of Hoboken. Will my mother be happy here? Who am I kidding? My mother may be moving into a three-bedroom apartment, but happiness is a luxury she can’t afford.

  “Fine.” I turn to the broker, who is furiously flipping through a large week-at-a-glance ledger. “We’ll take it.”

  The morning the movers arrive, I am standing under the awning of my mother’s new building, trying to quiet the little voice in my head that is telling me I’ve made a terrible mistake. My mother is going to hate her new apartment, and it will be all my fault. I think I’m an awful daughter, uncaring and ungiving. If only I had kept looking at another ten or twenty apartments, I might have found the perfect one.

  “Where do you want it, lady?” a guy calls from the back of the truck, pointing to a beige sofa.

  “I don’t know—let’s just get everything inside,” I say. I think about the way my friends talk about going home to see their parents. There will be none of that for me. The autumn sunlight is having a strobe effect on my vision, and everything looks jerky, like an old movie.

  I watch as the movers cart in the sofa, armchairs, television, coffee table, and bed. It’s all rented furniture—every last stick of it. My mother didn’t want to deal with the stuff in storage from the house in Tewksbury, so she asked me to rent everything. From the rolled-up rugs the movers are carrying inside to the flatware and china carefully packed in boxes, there isn’t a single object going into my mother’s apartment from my parents’ life before the accident.

  Once everything is inside and the movers have been paid, I begin to unpack my mother’s new things. I unroll the rugs, find the glasses, dishes, flatware, and put them where I think she’d want them. I check the phone to make sure it’s working, along with the gas, and the cable television. My mother is due to arrive by ambulette tomorrow, and as much as possible I want this place to look like home.

  By the time I’ve finished, the sun is setting over the Hudson River, casting an orange light across the living room, so intense I lower the blinds. I survey the room. Not bad, I think. It looks like an upscale motel room—probably because beige seems to be the rental-furniture color of choice.

  I take the elevator downstairs, and walk one block over to an outdoor market on the corner of Broadway. There are dozens of different colored tulips nestled behind crates of oranges, plums, grapefruits, nectarines. I grab a plastic basket and begin filling it up with fruit and flowers. I take it back to my mother’s house, locate a vase, and fill it with tulips. Then I dig through some wrapping paper and find a glass bowl for the fruit. I put the vase and bowl on the beige formica coffee table, turn out the lights, and close the door behind me.

  It’s time to order my father’s tombstone. A simple matter, really, since the other graves in the family plot are marked in a uniform way: small stones etched in Hebrew stand at the foot of all the graves, which are covered with ivy.

  My mother wants to plant a hedge on top of my father’s grave. Not only does she want a hedge but she wants his tombstone to have English on it—words that describe how we felt about him.

  “How about ‘devoted husband and father’?” she suggests.

  “Ugh.”

  “ ‘Businessman and philanthropist’?”

  I shake my head so hard it rattles.

  “Well, what about ‘a learned man of Torah’?” she offers. “He would have liked that.”

  It all seems wrong to me, but I can’t quite put my finger on the problem. When my mother finally comes up with a novella-length epitaph—Truly the son of Joseph in his own time, he taught us wisdom, kindness, and above all, compassion—I agree, exhausted by the effort of trying to sum up a life in a few words. It will be years before I realize that what my father really would have wanted was a small stone etched in Hebrew, just like the rest of them. The hedge covering his grave will grow higher than the ivy-covered plots surrounding it—making a spectacle of my father in death, the way he was always careful not to be in life.

  The unveiling is planned for the last Sunday in October. Unveiling: a word I have heard before without considering its meaning. I imagine a scarf—sheer, filmy, white—floating above my father’s grave, settling on top of it like a butterfly net.

  “So who’ll be there?” I ask my mother.

  Now that she’s living in the city and wheeling herself around, she’s begun to plan things herself.

  “You and me, Morton and Shirley Sugerman, Roz, a few friends …” she trails off vaguely.

  The horror begins in my toes and moves slowly up my body, ice-cold and unstoppable.

  “Anybody else?” I ask.

  “Not that I can think of,” my mother answers.

  “What about Susie?”

  “Oh, yeah. Susie,” she says.

  My mother and half sister have stopped speaking altogether ever since Susie contested my father’s will. Eventually, Susie will lose this battle, but she will have held up my father’s estate for many months, costing my mother a lot of money. I should have known that for Susie this is largely an emotional battle; she is still the nine-year-old girl whose father went away, and she wants a piece of him, if only a financial one. And as far as my mother is concerned, she has never felt accepted or loved by my father’s family, and now that he’s gone there’s no reason for her to pretend she even likes them. Sometimes I wish I could lock them all in a room. What would be left of them? Bits of hair and bone?

  “And Shirl and Harv?” I ask. Surely my father’s sister and brother will be at the unveiling.

  “No,” she says. “They’re not coming.”

  “Not coming, or not invited?”

  “Not invited,” she says, looking just past me.

  How can you do this? I want to scream at her, but I don’t. Fighting with my mother gets me nowhere. She is utterly, absolutely certain that she is, in all matters, victimized and therefore entitled to retribution. The accident has deepened her belief that my father’s relatives are out to get her. For years to come, when their names come up, she will mutter, They almost killed me.

  “Are you sure about this?” I ask. “I really think—”

  “Not invited,” she repeats.

  “But, Mom—”

  “Your father wouldn’t have wanted them there. Not after what they’ve done to me.”

  “You’re talking about his sister and brother,” I say.

  “So what,” she says, her eyes dark and defiant. “They didn’t care about me, so I don’t care about them.”r />
  When I pull up in front of my mother’s building on the morning of the unveiling, she’s parked just outside the front door in her wheelchair, wearing sunglasses and a dark tailored suit. She waves when she sees me, smiling as if we’re going to lunch, not the cemetery.

  Without a word, I release the break on her wheelchair, then push her to the corner, where the curb flattens for handicapped access. I help her into my car, then collapse the wheelchair and put it in the trunk. As we drive to Bensonhurst, my anger at my mother all but disappears. I’m thinking that this is the first time she’ll be seeing my father’s grave. The rabbi has told me that the spiritual reason for an unveiling has to do with closure, but for my mother I’m afraid that seeing the grave will mark the beginning of grief—not the end of it.

  “Is there anything you want to say?” my mother asks as we whiz through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

  “You mean now?” I respond. I’ve barely spoken since we got in the car.

  “At the service. Do you want to say a few words?”

  “No,” I say quickly, without even thinking. I never considered the possibility that people might speak at this thing. “Why, is anyone else saying anything?”

  “Well, I’m planning to,” my mother says. I glance at her and notice for the first time that she’s holding some single-spaced typed pages.

  “Maybe Susie will want to say something,” I say casually. Out of the corner of my eye I watch my mother stiffen and feel a momentary rush of satisfaction, immediately followed by guilt.

  We drive through the gates, where Roz, Morton, Shirley Sugerman, and a few of my mother’s old friends are standing in a cluster. Off to the side, Susie is leaning against the office wall talking to the rabbi. Her hair whips around her face in the warm breeze, her mouth tight and grim. She almost didn’t come to the unveiling when she found out my mother excluded Shirl and Harv.

  “Hi, Dan-Dan,” Roz chirps.

  “Dan-o,” Morton kisses me on the cheek.

  They’re acting as if nothing is wrong. Don’t they realize that the ties connecting me to my father are being systematically snipped? To them, the conspicuous absence of my father’s family seems to be a small, incidental fact. I tell myself I’ll go talk about this in an AA meeting later. I’ll raise my hand and share about how my mother banned my father’s family from his unveiling, and the strangers in the room will nod their heads sadly, letting me know they understand.

  I lift the wheelchair from the trunk, snap the safeties into place, then help my mother out of the passenger seat and into the chair. She has begun to take a few steps with a walker, but this is no time to experiment. Gravel crunches beneath the wheels and my heels sink into the ground as I push her down the narrow pathway leading to my father’s grave.

  When we reach the family plot I unlatch the chain dangling across the entrance, then wheel my mother through. I wish I could spare her this. Surrounded by graves marked by weathered stones, my father’s brand-new tombstone looks out of place, like a skyscraper erected in the midst of an old city.

  My mother inhales sharply.

  “Oh, Paul,” she murmurs, reaching out a hand, letting it drop.

  The rabbi begins singing and swaying over the grave as we gather in a semicircle. There are far fewer people here today than there were at my father’s burial eight months ago. Lenny flies into my mind and buzzes around for a moment before flying back out. I try to conjure his face, but I can only see certain features: moist brown eyes, the side of his thick neck.

  My mother is struggling to her feet.

  “What are you doing?” I whisper, bending over her.

  “I want my walker,” she says.

  “It’s in the car—”

  “Then help me stand,” she insists.

  I hold my mother’s elbow, steadying her as she rises. She fishes for the pages in her jacket pocket, puts on her bifocals and begins to read. The words are a blur, vaporous as they float through the air. I watch her mouth move, I watch the pages flutter in the breeze.

  A few months from now, my father’s brother will die suddenly of a heart attack. The smooth ground that now lies next to my father’s grave will be dug up, and a plain pine box will be lowered into it. My mother will not be welcome at Harvey’s funeral, but I will attend. I will stand off to the side, apart from Shirl, Moe, all the nieces and nephews. No one will speak to me. Even Susie will turn her back. As my mother’s daughter, I have been tried and convicted for her sins. My chest will feel torn open and empty, and I will wonder whom I’m mourning. My uncle? My father? My mother? Myself?

  But today—as I gather a few pebbles and rocks from the earth near my father’s grave and place them on top of his tombstone—I tell myself that I’ll try to hold on to them all. Surely Shirley and Harvey will understand that if it were up to me, it wouldn’t have turned out this way. They’ll realize that I have no choice but to stand behind my mother. After all, if I don’t stand behind her, she’ll fall.

  “We’re all going back to my house,” my mother announces, folding the pages neatly into her pocket as I wheel her from the family plot.

  “Of course we are,” I say softly. “Of course.”

  I am walking up Madison Avenue on my way home from getting my hair cut when I see Jess moving toward me. I almost don’t recognize her. She’s dressed like a grown-up: suit, heels, her hair swinging just above her shoulders. She’s carrying a briefcase. I, on the other hand, am a college student once again, wearing jeans and holding a dog-eared paperback of a nineteenth-century novel. By the time I realize it’s Jess, it’s too late to avoid her. I lower my eyes and hold my breath as we pass each other, and suddenly I feel a hand grabbing my arm, and the force of that hand shoving me hard into a mailbox on the corner. I whip my head around and stare at her, stunned. Passersby slow down and watch. Jess keeps walking, then turns around, still in motion.

  “Whore,” she tosses over her shoulder.

  I hear people snickering.

  “Jess!” I call after her. “Wait!” But she doesn’t stop. I stand there, watching as her back recedes into the crowd.

  I head home in a daze, the word whore ringing in my ears. I walk across the park, hating myself. She’s right. I’ll never live this down. No matter what I do, what I accomplish, for the rest of my life this will never go away. When I get to my apartment, I flop on the bed and stare at the ceiling. Jess looks as if she’s gotten her life together—or rather, that she never let it fall apart the way I did. With her briefcase and sharp little suit, she might be a lawyer or an investment banker.

  The phone rings, and I have an instinct that makes me answer it instead of letting the machine pick up. She doesn’t even identify herself. It is the first time we’ve spoken since the night of her twenty-first birthday party, four years ago.

  “You’re through with him, aren’t you?” she asks.

  I sit up in bed.

  “For a long time, now,” I answer.

  “I could tell when I saw you on the street. You looked healthy. Beautiful. You have color in your cheeks.”

  Her voice, lilting and musical, is as familiar as if we’ve suddenly slipped back to our Sarah Lawrence days.

  “Why did you set me up like that at your party?” I ask. “I told you I didn’t want to see Lenny again—why didn’t you tell me he’d be there? What started that night came close to ruining my life.”

  I can hear her breathing. I don’t want her to hang up.

  “It’s hard to explain,” she answers slowly, “but I had my reasons.”

  “I never meant to hurt you,” I say, as if my intentions could possibly matter. And for a moment I imagine that all things, even terrible, twisted things, can somehow be healed. “Listen, can I see you? Can we talk?”

  “I don’t think so,” she says gently, almost as if she were trying to forgive me. “You’ve gotten rid of him. Be grateful for that. He’s married to my mother, and he’s the father of my little sisters. I’ll never be rid of him for the rest of m
y life.”

  On the campus of Sarah Lawrence College, I keep my head down and carry my notebooks close to my chest. It’s near the end of the second semester, and even though I’ll be graduating in May, I still expect someone to tell me I have no right to be here. I spend most of my time alone in the library or in the cafeteria, drinking coffee and eating cookies. It has been eight months since my last drink, and one thing I’ve noticed is that I crave sugar all the time. I keep a big bag of plain M&Ms in my freezer and grab a handful every hour or so while I’m studying.

  Ilja Wachs was true to his word: his nineteenth-century literature class has required about a thousand pages a week of reading. We’ve been doing the French recently, and I’ve been introduced to Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert. But more important, I’ve discovered a way of reading and interpreting that is entirely new to me. I spend hours in conference with Ilja, hashing out ideas about how the metaphors in Madame Bovary might find their roots in the French culture of the time. Ilja has me reading a biography of Gustave Flaubert as well as some nineteenth-century French history.

  In the meantime I’m writing. My creative writing class meets Wednesday afternoons, and today we’re discussing the third short story I’ve written this semester, called “Sonata Quasi una Fantasia.” I don’t know enough to be embarrassed by the title. I have fallen in love with language, with the sounds of words, much in the same way, as a child, I heard the pattern of piano music in my head. I have been returning to the same character again and again: a young woman I’ve named Carolyn in my stories, who is based on Jess.

  Jess has become a part of my internal landscape, an object of longing and obsession, and the only way I’m able to even begin to make sense of her is through the writing of fiction. I try to enter Jess’s consciousness, to imagine what must have been happening inside her. I have so many questions; I examine each facet through my writing, as if I were holding a hard stone to the light.

  In the workshop, I’m nervous as the students assemble around the large, round table, each holding a marked-up copy of my manuscript. My two earlier stories haven’t gone over so well. They were too elliptical, just skimming the surface. So this time I’ve dug deeper, thought harder. I didn’t want to turn this work in for the class to read, but the professor pushed me to do it. She’s a published novelist—the first I’ve ever met—and I have an academic crush on her. She’s a middle-aged woman with flowing black hair who wears kimonos and baggy pants. When she talks, her hands flutter by her sides.