Hurry Down Sunshine by Greenberg Michael

Author:Greenberg, Michael [Greenberg, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781590513255
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2008-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

At Bank Street Pat is absorbed in a book of Piranesi etchings of “prisons”: vaulted imaginary spaces that suggest ruined basilicas, majestically cruel with their pulleys and drawbridges and iron posts with chains. Her notebook is open, filled with choreographic notations and phrase fragments that can be understood from inside Pat’s train of thought but not mine.

She gives me the clipped obligatory “Hi” of one who doesn’t wish to be interrupted.

The phone rings. It’s Robin.

“There’s a full moon tonight, Michael. I wish you could see it. Hanging right over the chicken coop. Like in a painting by Chagall.”

“What a nice picture.”

“A haunting picture. I’ve been trying to write down my memories. I want to collect them, to get in touch with happier times. Please tell me how our girl is doing.”

As best I can, I describe Sally’s recent forays into the dayroom. “She’s leaving her bed more than before. And Aaron’s visit seemed to cheer her. All positive signs, one would think. Maybe she’s getting better in ways I’m incapable of seeing.”

“Better is such a relative term. She’s turned herself inside out, Michael. She’s cast off all restraints.”

“She certainly has.”

“Well, if you’re going to be sarcastic.” She pauses. “Look, you’re on the scene with her. I can only imagine what you’re going through.”

“It can’t be any easier for you.”

“Thank you, Michael.” She makes me listen to her breath for a moment, gazing, I imagine, at the Chagallian moon. “Do you remember the year Sally was born and we rented that wonderful house in Maine? Sally was a month old. She was a terrible sleeper, I was beside myself, nothing I did to put her down for the night seemed to work. The other mothers I knew told me to let her cry, she would fall asleep on her own. It was the party line. ‘You have to protect yourself or there will be no end to it. You can’t let the child set the agenda. You’ll lose your identity. You’ll resent your baby. It’ll be a disaster for both of you.’ They were very convincing. So I gave it a try, and after half an hour that poor baby was shaking like a wet puppy, and shrieking too, in a way I’ve never heard anyone shriek, not before or after. It frightened me, Michael. ‘I don’t know this girl,’ I thought. ‘I’ll never know her.’ This may sound crazy, but do you think this could have been what did it to Sally? My leaving her alone that night, I mean, my letting her cry.”

“No. It’s impossible,” I say. Yet I too have difficulty bringing light to the past, let alone coaxing from it a reasonable explanation for Sally’s madness. Nothing seems directly connected to it; there is no event or even series of events I can point to that might have definitively forewarned us, no obvious cause other than the most obvious one that Sally, like Steve, has always been what she has become, that it was inside her from the beginning, incubating, waiting to mature.

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