Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  And when he picked me up on a prearranged corner in his white Rolls-Royce, and his arm slid familiarly across the passenger seat, just brushing the back of my neck, what was preventing me from opening the car door and getting out? I was twenty years old, and the idea that a friend’s father—a friend’s married father—would try to seduce me was something I found unfathomable. And yet, at the same time, I felt thrust into a parallel universe, one I had never known existed. Everything I knew about right and wrong seemed to vanish inside that car.

  The truth is, Lenny repelled me before he attracted me. I went through the motions that night, let him take me to an elaborate dinner where I consumed the better part of two bottles of wine, but I had no intention of ever seeing or speaking with him again. I would have some explaining to do to Jess—or maybe she didn’t need to know. After all, I thought that would be the end of it. A little adventure, an honest mistake. And even when he started calling me several dozen times a day, even when he drove to my dorm and parked his car outside, I held my breath, just praying Jess wouldn’t walk by. He sent me flowers and cards—the floor of my old dorm room was covered with vases of yellow roses, the constant faint scent of decay in the air.

  Another twenty-year-old might have called the campus police, filed a complaint. But secretly, Lenny’s attentions made me feel like the most special girl in the world.

  The in-flight movie is Gorky Park—a film I auditioned for a couple of years back. I watch the tail end without headphones. The actress they cast looks a whole lot better as a Russian spy than I ever would have. I try to focus on the screen, but I’m seeing double, so I close my eyes. Beneath my lids, another film is taking place: My parents’ Audi collapses like an accordion against a concrete highway divider, my father’s head is flung in slow motion into the steering wheel. His eyes close, glasses crack, lenses pop out from the impact. My mother screams, an unearthly sound, as her legs are mangled beneath her. Steam pours from the hood. All around them, giant flakes of snow drift silently across the nearly empty highway.

  I open my eyes, blink hard, and gasp for air.

  “You all right?” my neighbor asks. He has moved from wine to Baileys Irish Cream, and his face is the color of sunset.

  “Yeah,” I lie. “I’m fine.”

  I make my way down the aisle to the lavatory and splash cold water on my face, then examine myself in the mirror. The rash is getting worse. My cheeks are streaked with tears, and my lips and eyes are all puffy.

  The captain’s voice pipes into the restroom, announcing that we’re about to begin our final descent into the Newark area. The weather in Newark is a bracing eighteen degrees and we should be touching down at approximately six-fifty, local time. Before I return to my seat, I meet my own gaze evenly. The words of the Sh’ma, a Hebrew prayer, tumble through my mind.

  You are alone in the world, I whisper to the poor, pathetic girl in the mirror, preparing for the worst.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Newark airport. The crack of dawn.

  My breath tastes like sour milk, and there is an acidic tightness in the back of my throat. My sinuses ache. I half run, half walk to baggage claim, where Lenny told me the driver would be waiting. My mink coat is flung over my shoulders, and the heels of my black boots, which are worn down to metal nubs, make sharp, staccato clicks against the airport linoleum.

  As I run through the near-deserted terminal, past closed duty-free shops and newsstands, my heart slams against my chest. Now that I’m here, only a half hour’s drive from the hospital, it’s as if I’m being pushed from behind. Nothing is happening fast enough. I want to run through the sliding doors, head north on Route 22, jog all the way to Route 24 which leads to Summit. I will be a speeding black blur, a cartoonish smudge against banks of freshly fallen snow. I will get to my parents under my own steam, and then I will do whatever is necessary. I will knit my mother’s bones back together. I will kiss my father’s cheek and he will wake up.

  Even though Lenny did not say he’d meet me at the airport, I scan the bank of drivers holding up handwritten signs in the baggage claim area, not looking for my own name, but searching for Lenny. After all, shouldn’t he be here? Isn’t this a big enough deal? It occurs to me that I didn’t ask Lenny to come. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to accompany me to the hospital, where I would have to explain his presence to my relatives. Aunt Roz, Uncle Hy, this is Lenny Klein is an introduction, all things considered, I’d just as soon never make. Not to mention Uncle Harvey and Aunt Shirley, my father’s Orthodox brother and sister, who barely accept the idea that I don’t keep kosher. But a married man, twenty-three years my senior? Lenny makes eating a bacon cheeseburger look like a mitzvah.

  Finally I see a sign with my name on it. Well, not exactly my name. Lenny has an embarrassing nickname he likes to call me, and he’s decided to be funny: a uniformed driver is holding up a sign that reads Ms. Fox.

  I tell the driver about my parents’ accident. He heard about it on the radio. It must have been pretty bad, he says. The police closed off a whole section of Route 24 near the Short Hills Mall—they do that only in the worst cases. He asks me what happened, eyes darting at me in the rearview mirror, but I shake my head. I have been awake and traveling for twenty-two hours, and I still don’t know.

  As we leave the airport, traversing the loose gray tangle of highway ramps, I breathe in the acrid, familiar scent of northern New Jersey. These oil refineries, suburban malls, and the jagged, graffiti-covered cliffs of Jersey City are the landscape of my childhood. The neon Budweiser eagle slowly flapping its wings over the Anheuser-Busch plant in Newark has always signaled a return home.

  Snow is piled along the sides of the highway in great big banks, and the few cars negotiating the roads at this hour are moving very slowly. There is an abandoned Volkswagen near an exit ramp, its round roof covered with at least a foot of powder. The blizzard did not end until the early morning hours, and even in the weak light of dawn, it is unbearably, monotonously white. I feel as if I have returned to the country of my childhood only to find it altered, subterranean.

  We pass the exit for Hillside, where I lived for the first seventeen years of my life. Hillside is a small town near Newark and Elizabeth—the part of New Jersey the jokes come from. I grew up in a red-brick Georgian Colonial with white pillars and slatted shutters. On breezy days the putrid smoke from the refineries and landfills would waft over our flagstone patio, forsythia hedges, and kidney-shaped swimming pool. There were rumors of toxic waste and mysterious diseases. My parents kept the windows shut; the air could kill you. Even the air inside the house was regularly tested by men who went down to the basement wearing gas masks.

  There were families who had lived in Hillside for generations, like the Peabodys and McCarthys, who drove old station wagons and wore threadbare cashmere cardigans. Then there were Jews who wished they were like the Peabodys and McCarthys, and who sent their daughters for nose jobs and their sons to golf camp. There was a smattering of concentration-camp survivors with thick accents and numbers burned into their wrists, families who were, for the most part, related to one another. The Wilfs and Resnicks had settled in New Jersey after the war and started building shopping malls. They had tennis courts in their backyards that were used by everyone in the neighborhood except them.

  And then there was our family. We never quite fit in. My father’s religious observance set us apart, although my mother tried to make a place for herself in the community, doing volunteer work, joining the temple sisterhood. She had a regular doubles game with three other women, and once a week, off she’d go in her tennis whites, the decorative pom-poms on the backs of her socks bobbing as she ran to the Cadillac or Lincoln tooting its horn in front of the house.

  On Shabbos, when my father returned home from shul, a few of the neighbors with thick Eastern European accents would sometimes pay an afternoon visit. Sipping iced tea out of green plastic glasses, the adults would sit in the backyard on yellow-and-white stri
ped chaises longues, while I’d stand on the toilet and spy on them from my second-floor bathroom window. Eventually my mother would call for me to come say hello, and I’d slink uncomfortably into the backyard. I knew what came next: We could have used you in the camps, little blondie, they’d say, patting me on the head. The soldiers would have given you extra bread.

  In Hillside, I grew up alone in a room. I went to a yeshiva in another town; my school friends were a driving distance away. I was the only child in my mother’s entire family—there were no cousins around, no children at all. I spent my early life surrounded by silence, thinking my thoughts, dreaming my dreams, inventing a self out of thin air. I had no one to reflect this self back to me. Not my father, who was already retreating behind a wall of pills and prayer. And not my mother, who dressed me in pretty clothes and treated me like a breakable doll. Our house was as still and quiet as a wax museum. Behind the closed door of my room, I wrote stories that I shredded when I finished and let float like confetti into the wastepaper basket, stories of a girl with brothers and sisters, a healthy father, a happy mother. I felt tangled up inside myself like a weed. But I didn’t know what to do about it. It seemed my parents were tangled up too.

  The driver points to some skid marks on the highway, and blue-black paint marks for several feet along the center divider. There are shards of glass still winking in the snow and orange-and-white barriers pushed to the side of the road.

  “This must be where it happened,” he says.

  As we pass the scene of the accident, I crane my neck, searching for clues, for meaning. My eyes sting, and I open and close my fists, wishing for someone’s hand to hold. I have never longed for a brother or sister the way I do at this moment. So as I move toward my parents, afraid of what I might find, I should not be surprised that I’m alone. Though I have a handful of good friends and a quasi-boyfriend, I am going through the most frightening moment of my life without solace, without witness. I make a bargain with God: Let them live and I’ll leave Lenny. Let them live and I’ll go back to college. Let them live and I’ll stop drinking.… Hillside is a blur, just as it is in my memory. I try to picture myself as that girl standing by the open bathroom window, watching her parents on the chaises longues below. I hear the rattling of ice in green plastic glasses, and I see the woven disk of my father’s yarmulke on top of his bald head. I have run so far and so fast away from that girl that I barely know who she is anymore.

  Lenny’s stepdaughter, Jess, and I met each other on Accepted Students Day at Sarah Lawrence. Neither of us had decided to go there—I was debating between Sarah Lawrence and Barnard, and Jess was waiting to hear from Vassar—but somehow, during that initial meeting, a silent pact was forged between us: I’ll go if you go. We liked each other that much, based on nothing more than a first impression.

  Jess had swingy brown hair cut into a pageboy and a thin, intelligent face. I thought she was beautiful. She was my physical opposite: Dark, angular, mysterious. I was sitting with my mother—it was Shabbos, and my father had not accompanied us to this event—and Jess was across in Reisinger Auditorium. Of all the students in that room, and there must have been two hundred of them, I focused on Jess Marcus. I barely noticed the man next to her.

  After the business of selling the college to us was over, Jess and I met on a sprawling lawn where there was a reception for prospective students and parents. As I recall, she approached me.

  She came right up to me and stuck out her hand.

  “Hi, I’m Jess,” she said. “I noticed you in the auditorium, and thought you were someone I’d like to get to know.”

  I couldn’t imagine why. I saw myself as a formless, shapeless blob from New Jersey. I had gone to a yeshiva until seventh grade, and then to prep school; by the time I was looking at college, I was in the middle of a full-blown identity crisis. I was wearing an Indian-print skirt, an orange cotton blouse, and a matching Indian shawl—my stab at looking like a bohemian Sarah Lawrence type. Jess was cool, classy, her voice lilting and musical. I developed an instant crush on her.

  Now, when I think of Jess, it is in still images, moments that remain frozen in memory. It is freshman year, just after winter break, and we are walking arm in arm to the pub after studying in the library. Jess is wearing a short down jacket, jeans, and boots. Somehow everything she wears looks elegant—even a down jacket. We order beers and sit in the corner at a small round table, our backs to the room. When I’m with Jess, I don’t want to be with anyone else. Jess laughs at the boys who come over to talk to us, snubbing them with a sweep of her dark eyes. She touches me when she talks, her fingers resting on my arm for an instant or brushing my hair off my shoulders.

  I have never had a friendship like this one, which borders on the romantic. I emulate Jess in every way. Her clothes, her voice, her sense of mystery. Of course I am nothing like her, but that’s precisely why, at this moment, I wish I could blink and become her.

  She is saying something to me, leaning forward, whispering. If I strain back through the years and quietly listen, I can almost capture her voice.

  “That guy over there keeps staring at us,” she says.

  I turn around and glance at a kid on the burger line who does indeed seem to be focused on our table.

  “He’s looking at you,” I say.

  “No, you,” she replies.

  And with our heads bent together, our backs to the room, she looks at me queerly, as she often does, with a small Buddha-like smile. When I ask her what she’s thinking, she just shakes her head at me with benign amusement, as if I were a beloved but slightly daffy pet. It is her secretiveness that fascinates me, that pulls me in. I feel like an open book, a fresh-faced, innocent little kid next to Jess. I want some of her sophistication to rub off on me.

  Years later, Lenny would remind me that he introduced himself to me while I was talking to Jess that first day at Sarah Lawrence. Hi, I’m Lenny Klein, Jess’s stepfather, he might have said. I have no such memory. If I remember Lenny at all from that first day, it is as a caricature: a stocky, middle-aged guy, a flash of gold watch, a pair of faded jeans that looked silly on his body, as if he really belonged in a suit. If you had told me back then that one day, in the not too distant future, I would be walking down a Paris boulevard with Jess’s stepfather, that I would be lying in bed with him in a Cannes hotel room, that he would lean back in the upholstered chairs of haute couture salons, puffing on a cigar and choosing dresses for me—I would have laughed. I would have told you he was old enough to be my father, that he wasn’t even cute, that there was no way.

  Uncle Morton does not raise an eyebrow when I am deposited on his doorstep. He opens the door, looking tired and drawn in a silk bathrobe and pajamas, his breath clouding the bitter cold. He’s been expecting me since yesterday. He takes in the hour, the limo, my one-piece black unitard more appropriate for dinner on Melrose than breakfast in New Jersey. He hugs me hard, strokes my head, says, They’re both alive—then leads me into the kitchen and pours me a cup of coffee without another word.

  Morton is my mother’s older brother, and though I don’t know him well, I feel at home with him. He looks like a male version of my mother, with the same almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and regal bearing. How my mother and her siblings picked up this haut monde manner on a New Jersey chicken farm is beyond me. Morton has been married for many years to his third wife, Shirley Sugerman, a woman who has always been referred to in my family by her first and last name. Morton is coming to dinner with Shirley Sugerman, my mother might say, as if to differentiate between that Shirley and all others. Morton is a retired college professor and Shirley is a psychoanalyst, a profession my mother disdains, particularly in family members—which, in my family, is a problem. My half sister, Susie, also doesn’t think much of Shirley Sugerman. Susie, who received a doctorate in clinical psychology, feels superior to Shirley, who received a doctorate in philosophy and then did psychoanalytic training. And my mother, who has a master’s degree in s
ocial work, doesn’t believe in psychoanalytic mumbo jumbo, but rather in the practical, behavioral tenets of family therapy. All this academic squabbling is over my head, of course. In a family of Ph.D.s, I am a college dropout.

  “Visiting hours start at eight. You really ought to eat something,” Morton says, popping an English muffin into the toaster oven. “Did you have anything on the flight?”

  I wonder if he can smell wine on my breath. I bought Velamints at the airport newsstand and chewed half a package on the way here, not so much to mask my breath as to keep my mouth busy. I’m wired, as if I’ve been up all night snorting coke. My mouth feels tense, and my jaw aches.

  Early morning light filters through the kitchen window, the sill piled high with snow. Icicles hang like daggers, and the branches of the old blue spruce in the backyard are sagging. One of the two Volvos in Morton’s driveway is nearly plowed in, but the other has seen some action in this blizzard. I imagine Morton’s receiving the phone call that his sister and brother-in-law were in the ER at Overlook, and making his way gingerly, disbelievingly, through the storm.

  Overlook Hospital is on a hill, though what it looks over is nothing to speak of. There is a driveway and ambulance ramp in front, a large parking lot, scattered houses in the distance. The people who live in these houses must be used to the sound of sirens puncturing their nights. In LA, I once saw a woman make the sign of the cross behind the wheel of her car as an ambulance sped by on the freeway. Do these neighbors of the hospital say a prayer each time they hear a siren, or have they gotten used to it? When my parents were raced to the emergency room, were they taken in separate ambulances, one wailing behind another? A string of questions tightens in my head, stretching my brain to the snapping point, as Morton pulls up to the main entrance of the hospital.