Dani Shapiro - Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

Devotion: A Memoir

Black & White

Family History: A Novel

Slow Motion: A True Story

Picturing the Wreck

Fugitive Blue

Playing with Fire

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2017 by Dani Shapiro

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Alfred Music, Hal Leonard LLC, and Sony/ATV Music Publishing: Excerpt from Pieces of My Heart, words and music by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Russell. Copyright 1967 by Unichappell Music Inc., Sony/ATV Songs LLC, and Sloopy II Music, copyright renewed. All rights reserved. All rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights on behalf of Sloopy II Music administered by Wren Music Co., a division of MPL Music Publishing, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Music, Hal Leonard LLC, and Sony/ATV Music Publishing.

Counterpoint: Excerpt from The Country of Marriage from The Country of Marriage by Wendell Berry. Copyright 2013 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: Excerpts from Could Have from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems by Wisawa Szymborksa, translated from the Polish by Stanisaw Baraczak and Clare Cavanagh. Copyright 1976 by Czytelnik, Warszawa. Copyright 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

House of Bryant Publications LLC: Excerpt from Devoted to You by Boudleaux Bryant. Copyright 1958, copyright renewed 1986 by House of Bryant Publications LLC (BMI). Reprinted by permission of House of Bryant Publications LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shapiro, Dani, author.

Title: Hourglass / Dani Shapiro.

Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016029345 (print) | LCCN 2016048566 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451494481 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451494498 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Shapiro, DaniMarriage. | MarriageSocial aspects. | Women novelists, AmericanBiography. | Novelists, American20th centuryBiography. | Jewish womenUnited StatesBiography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. Classification: LCC PS 3569. H 3387 Z 46 2017 (print) | LCC PS 3569. H 3387 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029345

Ebook ISBN9780451494498

Cover photograph courtesy of the author

Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

v4.1

ep

This book is for M.

Let me fall if I must fall.

The one I will become will catch me.

THE BAAL SHEM TOV

F ROM MY OFFICE WINDOW I see my husband on the driveway below. Its the dead of winter, and hes wearing nothing but a white terry-cloth bathrobe, his feet stuffed into galoshes. A gust of wind lifts the hem of the bathrobe, exposing his pale legs as he stands on a sheet of snow-covered ice. His hair is more salt than pepper. His breath makes vaporous clouds in the cold. Walls of snow are packed against the sides of the driveway, white fields spread out to the woods in the distance. The sky is chalk. A rifle rests easily on his shoulder, pointed at the northernmost corner of our roof.

So. He bought the gun. I take a long sip of coffee. Our two dogs are sleeping on the rug next to my desk chair. The old, demented one is snoring. Theres nothing I can do but watch as M. squeezes the trigger. Bam! I start, and the dogs leap up. The windows rattle. The whole house shakes.

The woodpecker had arrived the previous fall. Once he chose our house he seemed quite content, settled in, as if he had every intention of staying awhile. At first, I had no idea where the noise was coming from. Rat-tat-tat. From my study, it sounded like a loose shutter banging, though we had no shutters. It was almost a city soundlike a faraway jackhammerout of place in the quiet of the country. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Of course, it seemed possible, too, that the infernal banging was entirely in my mind. My head, wrote Virginia Woolf, is a hive of words that wont settle. I couldnt hold a thought. It was as if an internal axis had been jarred and tilted downward; words and images slipped through a chute into a dim, murky pool from which I could not retrieve them.

Finally, I spotted the woodpecker from my sons bathroom window. Perched on a drainpipe just below the wood-shingled roof, he was a small brown bird with a tiny head and a pointy beak that moved back and forth with astonishing speed as he hammered away at what was already a sizable hole in the side of the house. Rat-tat-tat.

It had been a time of erosion. Id begun to see in metaphor. Wed lived in the house for twelve years, and things were falling apart. The refrigerator stopped working one day. The banister warped and the spindles on the staircase loosened and clattered to the floor. An old, neglected apple tree on our property split in two, its trunk as hollow as a drum. The house needed painting. The well needed fracking, whatever that meant. The front door was cracked, and on winter days, a sliver of wind could be felt inside.

Late that same fall of the woodpecker, as I sat reading at the kitchen table one afternoon, two large, mangy creatures loped across the meadow. One gray, the other a pale, milky brown, they were otherworldly, terrifying. My spine tingled. I grabbed my phone to take their picture, then texted it to M., who was in the city that day.

Wolves?

No.

Sure?

Yes. Coyotes.

Not coyotes. I know coyotes.

The basement regularly flooded. If the wind blew in a certain way during a heavy rainfall, we could count on a half inch of water in the workroom where M. kept projects in varying states of half-completion. On a long table, he had hundreds of photos cut into stamp-sized pieces. These, he planned to assemble into a photo collage. A finished one from years earlier hangs in our guest bathroom. I never tire of looking at it: our now-teenaged son as a toddler, hoisted on the shoulders of a friend, a smiling, radiant man whose daughter will later fall to her death from a Brooklyn rooftop; my mother in a hat to cover her bald head, months before she died; my mother-in-law before Alzheimers set in; the three of usmy little family and Ion the steps of our Brooklyn town house; then older, on the porch of our house in Connecticut. Alive. Dead. Lost. Like the names I refuse to cross out in my address book, I catalog those I have loved.

Honey! I called downstairs, keeping an eye on the woodpecker, who, if he noticed me, didnt seem to care. I need you!