Slow Motion by Dani Shapiro

Author:Dani Shapiro [Shapiro, Dani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82800-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

Somehow, Lenny, my uncle Morton and I end up in the back of the first limo, following the hearse. As a kid, I remember seeing funeral processions on New Jersey highways and asking my father why the limos and cars had their headlights on. He told me it was so that the drivers wouldn’t lose one another on their way to the cemetery. I remember thinking how awful it would be, getting lost on the way to the cemetery.

Lenny and Morton are having a conversation about the one thing they have in common: yachts. They each have a yacht—Lenny refers to his as “the boat”—and they are comparing notes, talking across me, about teak finishes and the benefits of fiberglass. Lenny’s boat cost over a million dollars. It’s sleek and Italian and has everything imaginable built into it. Stereo piped through the walls of the cabins, marble showers, leather couches, and a big-screen television.

“That Riva’s quite a machine,” says Morton, who is a real sailor, having spent most of his adult life on Hawaii. “You must really let that baby rip.”

“I had a forty-two-footer before I got this one,” Lenny answers, “and I’ve got to tell you—”

I fade in and out of their conversation, wavering between numbness and disbelief that they’re talking about boats on the way to bury my father. For Morton this is part of grieving, this grasping on to the tangible world—in this case, yachts—because after all, what good would it do to talk about anything else? But Lenny talks about his boat all the time. He could just as easily be on his way to a dinner party. I close my eyes, lean my head back, and try to summon my father’s face. I strain to hear his voice, to feel his touch—somehow knowing that these will be the first to fade. Years from now, I will no longer be able to feel my father’s hand on the small of my back, or hear the particular way he has always said my name, with traces of a New York accent. But today I still feel him all around me. I pull him closer, like a cloak.

The hearse turns slowly off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and onto a wide, bombed-out boulevard in Bensonhurst. Overflowing garbage cans are piled along the sidewalks, wedged into dirty snowbanks. An el train rumbles overhead. I feel as if we’re taking my father to some godforsaken place, where he will be lonely.

The funeral procession pulls into the gates of Washington Cemetery, and before I know it, Uncle Harvey has jumped out of his limo and is heading over to a small office. Clearly he knows his way around this place.

“Paperwork,” murmurs Morton. “Let him take care of it.”

We sit in the car and wait. Lenny and Morton have fallen silent. Yachts have no place here, amid the tombstones. A few minutes pass, and Harvey strides over to us, a muffler wound around his neck and the lower part of his face, even though it’s not that cold out.

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