Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  Copyright © 1998 by Dani Shapiro

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., for permission to reprint eleven lines from “For an Album” from Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1989 by Adrienne Rich. Reprinted by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Certain names in this book have been changed. The altered names are Lenny Klein, Jess Marcus, John Feeny, and Special Agent Anderson.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shapiro, Dani.

  Slow motion / Dani Shapiro. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82800-2

  1. Shapiro, Dani—Family. 2. Women novelists, American—20th century—Family relationships. 3. Parents—Death—Psychological aspects. I. Title.

  PS3569.H3387Z47 1998

  818′.5403—dc21

  [B] 97-32667

  Random House website address: www.randomhouse.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Our story is of moments when even slow motion moved too fast for the shutter of the camera: words that blew our lives apart, like so, eyes that cut and caught each other, mime of the operating room where gas and knives quote each other moments before the telephone starts ringing: our story is how still we stood, how fast.

  —Adrienne Rich

  “For an Album”

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  The night before I receive the phone call that divides my life into before and after, my face swells in an allergic reaction to a skin cream, then blisters and chaps. I am at a health spa in Southern California, a place where wealthy older women go to rest and rejuvenate, where young matrons snap their bodies back into shape after pregnancies, where movie stars stretch out on massage tables in private Japanese gardens, offering their smooth backs to the sun.

  I am none of the above, and for the past three days, since arriving at the Golden Door, I have often paused amid cacti and rock gardens to wonder what, exactly, I’m doing here. I am twenty-three years old, and my life has become unrecognizable to me. I have slid slowly into this state the way one might wade into an icy lake, dipping a toe in at first, then wincing, pushing past all resistance until the body is submerged, numb to the cold.

  When the phone interrupts my post-hike breakfast of a half-grapefruit sweetened with honey, I am sitting cross-legged on my bed, listlessly flipping through the pages of the San Diego Herald, staring out the sliding glass doors at my private patio. I am upset about my face, which is itching and beginning to blister. My eyes are slits. I have never been allergic to anything before, and am worried that this rash might spread down my neck and across my chest, causing me to swell inside, my body choking on itself.

  “Hello?”

  “Dani, it’s Aunt Roz, darling.”

  “Hi, Roz,” I respond, confused. This aunt, who lives in suburban New Jersey, is not someone to whom I’m particularly close, and she would have no reason to know that I am at this health spa, much less track me down here at the crack of dawn. Though it doesn’t occur to me to be frightened, though no alarm bells ring in my mind, I watch as my thighs begin to shake for no apparent reason.

  “Dani, I’m calling because—”

  She pauses, speaking very slowly, as if to an imbecile.

  “The first thing you should know is that everything’s all right,” she says. And then, “Mother and Dad were in an accident.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “In their car, they—”

  “Where were they? Where are they? Why are you calling me?”

  “Now, Dani, if you’ll just slow down—”

  She keeps repeating my name, and she says it the way I hate, the way my mother’s family has always said it, with a sort of pseudo-classy soft “a,” as if we’re from England, not New Jersey. There is an edge to her voice, as if she’s somehow holding me accountable for being on the other side of the country at a moment like this. She thinks I’m a fuckup, a college dropout, a high-class drifter.

  “They’re both in intensive care,” she says.

  “Where?”

  “Overlook Hospital, in Summit. They were driving home from your mother’s office last night—”

  “Last night?”

  “It was late—there was nothing you could have done—”

  I file this away somewhere, under miscellaneous family insanity. I am my mother’s only child. My father has a daughter from his first marriage, my older half sister, Susie, who lives in New York City.

  “Has someone called Susie?”

  “No.”

  Jesus.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Your mother gave me the name of the place you’re staying.”

  “So she’s conscious—”

  Aunt Roz snorts, actually snorts into the phone.

  “Dani, your mother has two badly broken legs. Her tibia, her femur—”

  Roz is a doctor’s wife—the kind who thinks her marriage license includes a medical degree. Her husband, my uncle Hy, is a surgeon, and my favorite family member. I may be speaking to the wrong person.

  “Where’s Hy? I want to talk to Hy,” I say. My voice has begun to shake along with my legs. Hy will tell me the truth. His hoarse, pipe-smoking voice will soothe me, tell me this isn’t as bad as it sounds. I look wildly around my room at the sliding Japanese screens, the elegant, lacquered breakfast table upon which a fan has been set, detailing my day’s activities: 9 A.M. aerobics, 10:30 stretch ’n’ tone, 12:00 massage.

  “Uncle Hy is with the doctors.”

  “How’s my father?”

  “He’ll be fine—” Roz says flatly. “Not a scratch on him—and he wasn’t even wearing a seat belt. It’s your mother you should be worried about.”

  I don’t stop to wonder why, if my father is fine, he isn’t the one calling me in Southern California. My brain has gone numb, my instincts taking over. I will find out what has happened to my parents one small, manageable blow at a time.

  “I’ll get the next flight home,” I say, calculating how long it will take to get to the San Diego airport.

  “Good idea, Dan,” says Roz.

  I sit on the edge of the bed and dial a number in New York. There is a high-pitched buzz in my head: sounds, thoughts, language itself distilled into a single note of terror. I float out of my body and watch myself from a corner of the ceiling; this is something I do often—watch myself as if my life were a movie, as if I were only acting a role in this moment, as if it can be played back, cut, edited later.

  His office phone rings once, twice, then is answered by his secretary, Marie, a woman who knows me—and my role in his life—well.

  “Mr. Klein’s office—”

  Her voice is low and sexy, modulated within an inch of its life.

  “Marie, it’s Dani.”

  “Dani, how are you? How’s California?”

  I have often wondered how she keeps it all straight: wife, daughters, girlfriend.

  “Is he there? It’s an emergency.”

 
; She puts me on hold and I close my eyes, try to quiet the buzzing in my head. My heart is skipping beats, thumping irregularly in my chest. Years from now, when this happens, I’ll wonder if I’m having a heart attack. But at this moment in my life, at twenty-three, I think I’m indestructible. I figure I have until I’m thirty. At thirty I’ll expire, like a bright flame burning itself out.

  “Hello, cupcake.”

  Lenny’s voice pours through the phone lines, across the country, into my ear. The last time I spoke to Lenny was three days ago, when we were staying in Los Angeles at the Bel-Air Hotel, and we had such an ugly fight that I asked him to leave me alone for a few days—and he actually did.

  “Lenny, something bad’s happened.”

  “What?”

  I can almost hear his head clicking off the possibilities. Something bad could mean virtually anything at this point: police, drug bust, vehicular manslaughter, God knows what.

  “My parents—were in a car crash—it sounds pretty serious—”

  The words are coming in gulps of breath. Saying it out loud, saying parents and car crash in the same sentence, saying it to Lenny Klein—it’s all too much. My system is shorting out, and suddenly I’m panting.

  “Honey, do you have any kind of bag,” Lenny says gently. “A paper bag, a plastic bag—”

  “What for—”

  “Just do what I tell you. Do you have the bag? Hold it over your nose, and take some slow, deep breaths. In and out … in and out. Good girl.”

  I hold a piece of Saran wrap with bits of grapefruit still clinging to it over my nose and mouth, improvising a bag, and try to do as I’m told. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the bureau: I’m in gray sweatpants and a sweatshirt, my hair pulled back in a ponytail, my face red and swollen.

  “I’ve got to get back,” I say. “Could you have Marie get me on the next flight out of San Diego to Newark?”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a fucking blizzard in New York,” says Lenny. “They’ve closed the airports.”

  I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home, a home where Sabbath was observed, my father wore a yarmulke, and we kept meat and dairy separate, according to religious dietary laws. Though I’ve strayed far from that home, in moments of pain, or shock, Hebrew words fly into my mind like a flock of blackbirds, foreign and unintelligible. They ride the crest of memory—these words and prayers—a whole other language I once spoke so fluently I even thought in it, and now no longer understand. Sometimes I think I have locked it deep inside myself and thrown away the key. Other times, I think it’s accessible if only I know where to look: a language within my language, a heart within my heart.

  So when I get off the phone with Lenny and dial my half sister’s office number in New York, there is a tune drifting through my head, a prayer sung at the beginning of Sabbath services. Avinu Malkenu, Harenu v’anenu … I have not attended shul since leaving for college six years ago, at seventeen, but no matter. I can identify the song, sing every syllable the way, as a teenager in the 1970s, I knew every Springsteen lyric.

  Susie, a psychoanalyst, is in session. Her machine picks up, and for a split second I almost blurt it out—Dad and Irene were in a car crash—but then I think of my half sister sitting in her office in Greenwich Village, surrounded by the accoutrements of her life: volumes of Freud, Oriental rugs, framed Ferenczi letter, burgundy velvet analytic couch. I picture her wearing her granny glasses and ethnic jewelry, her long wavy blond hair almost to her waist, a patient lying on that couch. I say it’s urgent, to call back the minute her session ends.

  If I am twenty-three, Susie is thirty-eight. She is a grown woman, certainly more grown than I am. She is an esteemed shrink, author of a book on schizophrenia, exotic traveler, and recently divorced from her psychiatrist husband. Her life, at least compared with mine, is sane and stable. Still, I somehow feel protective of her. I want to hold back the tide. She would say it is projection—that it is myself I am trying to protect here, flinging up my arms, shielding my face from the shards of a life swirling around me like broken glass.

  I try to imagine my parents, but have virtually no information to go on. Which car were they in? My father’s little sporty Subaru? My mother’s Audi 5000? Where did it happen? What, exactly, happened? How is it possible that I don’t know, at this very moment, whether my parents are alive or dead, in critical condition or just a bit banged up? Lenny said there’s a blizzard. Was it the weather? Did their car skid off the highway? Were there other cars involved? I squeeze my eyes tightly against it all, but the images churn, they don’t stop. I want a drink, a pill, anything. I methodically dig my nail into the palm of my hand. I want to move the hurt. I don’t know how long I sit there—a minute? an hour?—before the phone rings again.

  “Dan-Dan?”

  It’s my uncle Hy. Talking to Roz made me numb, talking to Lenny made me hyperventilate, and talking into Susie’s answering machine made me mute. But hearing Hy’s voice, filled with love, and with something else—something I can’t yet identify—makes me weep.

  “God, Hy, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” he says quietly, this man I have always counted on to know. I decide to take it a parent at a time.

  “How’s my mother? Roz said she has broken—”

  “Dani, your mother may never walk again.”

  A door slams shut inside me, then another, then another.

  “And my father?”

  “We don’t know what’s wrong with your father.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s in a coma, Dani.”

  “What happened?” I whisper.

  “He passed out at the wheel. It may have been a stroke—we just don’t know.”

  I finally recognize the unfamiliar note in Hy’s voice: he’s treating me like an adult, telling it to me straight.

  “Get home,” he says. “Get home now.”

  It’s ten in the morning. My best bet seems to be the red-eye out of LA, which doesn’t take off for another thirteen hours. Lenny arranges for a limo to take me from San Diego to LA, and has Marie book me on three afternoon flights to New York, just in case. I even try Boston and Washington, but it seems this blizzard is blanketing the entire East Coast. Lenny Klein is a man who can make virtually anything happen—that is, anything money can buy: center-court seats at the U.S. Open, oceanfront villas on the Côte d’Azur, Cuban cigars that arrive each month wrapped in plain brown paper—but he can’t cut a path through a snowstorm. He has been known to charter private jets when commercial airlines didn’t conform to his schedule. But all the money in the world won’t get me home faster. No planes are landing anywhere, period.

  The limo—stately, elegant, dark blue—pulls up to the gates of the Golden Door. Everything Lenny does falls just to the south side of flashy. It’s the mid-1980s after all, and flash is in the air, but as my mother has put it, Lenny has taste. “After all, he chose you,” she has said more than once, placing me in the same category as his vintage Ferraris, his homes in Bedford, Jamaica, Martha’s Vineyard. Lenny is a collector of fine things, and I am a thing. A girl in Lenny’s girl collection. I guess my mother feels that if I have to be carrying on with a married man, at least I’m doing it with somebody rich and powerful, somebody who will show me the world.

  I fold myself into the back of the limo, my single piece of luggage in the trunk. In the back of the limo there are assorted tapes, a sound system, and a telephone. What there is not—what I had been secretly hoping for—is a crystal decanter filled with something amber: scotch, brandy. I need to sedate myself for the three-hour drive. My body has not stopped shaking. I think about my mother and shudder at the degree of impact it must have taken to snap a thigh bone in two. Try as I might to imagine her with shattered bones—Hy mentioned both legs, pelvis, ribs, nose—I have always seen her as indestructible. A therapist once told me my mother reminded her of Mary Tyler Moore in the fi
lm Ordinary People. She is angular, energetic, fiercely private, imperious. How is she handling being flat on her back, in traction, at the mercy of doctors, nurses, and orderlies? Is she telling them what to do? My mind zings back and forth between my mother and my father—the words coma, femur, critical, stroke forming, dissolving, then forming again—as we pull away from the Golden Door and head north to Los Angeles.

  I summon up my nerve. “Is there any scotch back here?” I ask the driver. The bright morning sun is muted by the tinted windows.

  “No, ma’am,” he answers, then pauses. “Would you like me to stop at a liquor store?”

  “No, that’s all right, thanks.”

  It is the first time in my life I have been called “ma’am.”

  The limo speeds north on the San Diego Freeway, and the fact of motion itself is a relief. We are going somewhere—moving fast in the wrong direction. I should be heading east on a plane right now, circling above Newark airport, waiting for a break in the sky, a small ripped-open seam that would allow us to land. I snap a Carly Simon tape into the cassette deck, lean my cheek against the cool dark leather as the car fills with the opening drumbeats of “You’re So Vain.”

  The car phone rings. It’s Susie. I had given her the number when she called me back at the spa.

  “Dan, it’s me.”

  Months sometimes go by without any communication with my half sister. I have no idea what she thinks of me—if she thinks of me at all. I always feel small around her; small, and stupid. I have looked up to her all my life. On top of being a shrink, she’s a serious classical pianist who has studied for many years. I have listened to her play Liszt études and Chopin nocturnes, watched her graceful fingers flying over the keys, her brow furrowed in concentration as she transformed notes on a page into something that moved me. I have also studied piano since I was a child. I wanted to be like Susie. I have perfect pitch, and the music always came easily to me, but by the time I was in high school the last thing I wanted to do was spend long hours practicing alone, and so I tried out for the cheerleading team instead.