I Was Asleep

Chapter One: The Last Seat

The night I told a man in a motel room that I had been asleep, I was more awake than I have ever been in my life.

I could have told him the dashboard lights were green. I could have told him which song was on the radio, and how the boy behind the wheel was singing along and slapping the steering wheel on the beat. I could have told him the exact sound a person makes when she meets the front of a station wagon on a dark road beside a river. I could have told him the driver's name.

I didn't. I said, "I was asleep." He said, "Of course you were." The whole conversation took less than a minute. I have lived inside that minute ever since.

It took me twenty-eight years to tell the truth about that night. When I finally did, I read it into a microphone at a long table in Los Angeles, in front of forty people who were being paid to listen.

But that comes later. First there was Scranton, and my father's hands.

---

My father, Sol Shapiro, ran a lace loom at the Lackawanna Lace Works on the west side of Scranton for twenty-two years. The looms were as long as train cars, and they made a sound like hard rain on a tin roof that never let up. My father could hear one broken thread in all that noise. He had big, square hands, but they were quick and careful, and he could tie a weaver's knot so small you needed his reading glasses to find it.

In April of 1981 the lace works laid off a third of its people. My father came home on a Thursday afternoon with his last check folded in his shirt pocket, and he set his thermos on the kitchen counter very gently, as if it might break.

"Well," he said. "That's that."

My mother, Harriet, was at the counter of Gold Star Cleaners until six. My brother, Mickey, was twelve and in the backyard throwing a tennis ball against the garage. It was just me at the table with my geometry homework, and my father standing in the kitchen in his work clothes at three in the afternoon, which I had never seen in my life.

"They'll call you back," I said.

"Sure," he said. "Sure they will."

They didn't. By June he had fixed every hinge in our house, including the ones that weren't broken. He re-grouted the bathroom. He took the lawn mower apart on newspapers on the porch and put it back together, then took it apart again. His hands didn't know what to do without the looms, so they did everything else. At night I would lie in bed and hear him in the kitchen, opening and closing the cabinet doors, listening for squeaks that weren't there.

I was sixteen. I had a mouth on me. My mother said so, my teachers said so, and Father Ruane said so the day I asked him in religion class why God needed a building fund. I was the girl who wrote the funny skits for the school assembly and then got sent to the office for the jokes about the vice principal. I read everything. I wanted everything. I didn't know what everything was, only that it wasn't in Scranton.

In May, Mr. Gorski, who taught drama at Scranton Central in a room that used to be a supply closet, put a flyer on my desk.

"Don't say anything smart," he said. "Just read it."

The flyer came from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. It announced the Keystone Young Company, a summer troupe of six high school students who would live together in the Mon Valley outside Pittsburgh, create an original play, and tour it through the steel towns of western Pennsylvania in July and August. Room and board provided. A stipend of six hundred dollars. Auditions in Harrisburg on the second Saturday in May.

Six hundred dollars was more than my father's last check.

"Why are you giving this to me?" I asked.

"Because you're too much for this town," Mr. Gorski said. "Go be too much somewhere else for a summer."

---

I took the Greyhound to Harrisburg with eleven dollars in my purse and a cheese sandwich wrapped in wax paper. The auditions were held in a conference room in a state office building, the kind with a dropped ceiling and a flag in the corner. Thirty kids sat on folding chairs along the hallway, mumbling monologues to themselves. A boy in a bow tie was doing vocal warm-ups that sounded like a cow giving birth.

When they called my name, I stood on a square of masking tape on the carpet. Behind a table sat two men in short-sleeved shirts with clipboards and a woman in her fifties with hair dyed the red of a fire engine. She was smoking a Pall Mall directly under a sign that said NO SMOKING. Her name card said HILDA BURKE.

I started my monologue. It was a speech from a famous old play about a small town, a dead girl saying goodbye to the world. Every girl did it that year. I had practiced it in front of the bathroom mirror forty times.

I got three sentences in before Hilda Burke raised her hand.

"Stop," she said. Her voice sounded like gravel shaken in a coffee can. "Honey, I've heard that speech eleven times today. You're not dead and you're not from New Hampshire. Tell me something true."

The men with the clipboards looked at their clipboards.

"Like what?" I said.

"Anything. What did your father do this morning?"

I don't know why I told her. Maybe because nobody had asked me about my father in two months. I told her about the hinges. I told her how he oiled the back door that already swung silent and then stood there opening and closing it, like he was waiting for it to tell him something. I told her I lay in bed and listened to the cabinet doors.

When I finished, Hilda Burke was watching me through her smoke.

"What would you write a play about?" she said. "If you could."

"About the people in the seats," I said. "Not about some girl in a graveyard. If you're going to drive a bus around to steel towns, do a play about steel towns. Otherwise you're just showing up to tell people their lives aren't worth a show."

One of the clipboard men made a small choking noise.

Hilda laughed. The laugh turned into a cough, a long one, and she pounded her chest with her fist and waved her cigarette at me.

"Thank you," she said. "We'll be in touch."

They weren't, for three weeks. Then, on the Friday before Memorial Day, the phone rang during dinner. My mother answered and held the receiver out to me with her eyebrows up.

"This is Hilda Burke," said the gravel voice. "One of my girls from Lancaster fell off a horse and broke her ankle in two places. You were seventh on my list. Now you're sixth. It's the last seat. Do you want it?"

"Yes," I said, before I knew what I was saying yes to.

"Good. Be in McKeesport on the twentieth of June. Bring sneakers. Bring a pillow. The convent pillows are like bricks."

"The convent?"

But she had already hung up.

---

My father drove me to McKeesport himself, in our brown Buick with the cracked dashboard. It was five hours across the state. My mother packed a cooler with sandwiches and a thermos of iced tea, and she cried in the driveway, and Mickey made me promise to bring him back a piece of steel.

My father didn't say much for the first hundred miles. Somewhere past Harrisburg the hills got taller, and he started to talk.

"You know what I liked about the looms?" he said. "At the end of a shift you could hold up a piece of lace and say, I made that. Nobody gave it to me. I made it."

"I know, Dad."

"You're going to make something, Ellie. I don't know what. But whatever it is, you'll make it yourself. Nobody hands a Shapiro anything." He tapped the steering wheel twice. "That's the one thing they can never take from you. What you earned."

I looked out the window at the hills. I was thinking about six hundred dollars and about getting out. I wish now that I had listened more carefully. He was giving me the only thing he had left to give, and I was watching the scenery.

We came down into the Mon Valley in the late afternoon. Smoke hung over the river, but less of it than there should have been. Half the stacks were cold. The mills ran for miles along the water, brown and black and enormous, and many of their windows were broken.

"Look at that," my father said quietly. "Look at all that."

I thought he meant the mills. Now I think he meant the end of something, and that he could see it far better than I could.