Hurry Down Sunshine

by Michael Greenberg

  Pat is still sitting in the tub.

  “Are you the lady who called?” one of the cops asks her.

  She nods, and they look her over, searching for bruises, blood, marks of assault.

  “She checks out fine.”

  I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, my hair wild, my eyes two bloodshot slits. I feel as if a train is running through me and sit down on the couch. Sally sits next to me, but sidles away when I try to comfort her. How can I comfort her? Her touchstone of sanity, as I thought of myself, has snapped.

  “Explain your relationship to this man,” one of the cops asks her.

  “She’s my daughter,” I say quickly.

  “I asked the girl. Are you this man’s daughter?”

  “Yeah,” says Sally. “But it’s not my fault.”

  I try to get Pat’s attention, but she won’t look at me. She is talking to the sole policewoman in the group, answering her questions in a voice I can’t hear.

  “Sometimes it’s best to walk out on each other when things get too heated,” says the cop who rescued Sally from Hudson Street, as he is leaving. “That’s what I do. I go out and take a long walk. And if the walk lasts all night, well, that’s better than doing something you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”

  We listen to them descend the stairs, gossiping loudly, our neighbors spilling out into the hall to find out what’s going on.

  “Are you getting divorced?” asks Sally.

  “No,” says Pat.

  The answer is meant for me as well. I think I detect a smile on Pat’s lips, then realize that her eyes are wet with tears.

  Sally slips her earphones back on and climbs up to the loft bed, while Pat and I stand in the living room like two people who have just watched their house burn down.

  I’m appalled at myself, and in shock that she felt she needed armed men to protect her from me.

  “Did you really think I was going to hurt you?”

  “I didn’t know what you were capable of or if you’d stop or even knew how. I was scared, Michael. I had to put an end to it. I didn’t recognize you. It was as if you didn’t care about me or even know who I was.”

  Her face is slightly stretched with emotion, but no streaming tears, just the telling moistness of her unnerving pale eyes.

  She goes to bed, and at around 1:30 I lie down next to her.

  We’re like two strangers bunking together who dare not touch.

  At about five, however, we wake up entwined in a stunned unconscious clutch. She quickly disengages.

  “I feel sick,” she says.

  “What are we going to do?”

  The question could refer to so many things—to where we will live, to our marriage, to Sally. Neither of us knows how to begin to answer it.

  “I won’t blame you if you’ve had it with me,” I say.

  “Is that an invitation for me to leave?”

  “God, no.”

  “Maybe you think it would be easier to go it alone with Sally.”

  “All I meant was, this whole mess, it must seem more than you bargained for.”

  “I wasn’t bargaining.”

  Her wounded imperious look reawakens a memory I have of her onstage at Bryant Park, performing a solo called Hiding with a buffalo skull strapped to the top of her head. Spotlit, Pat rose from under an army blanket in infinitesimal slow motion, a skeletal phoenix. The memory fills me with new feeling for her. I want to apologize, to erase last night, but under the circumstances it would seem a meaningless gesture—inadequate and too small.

  Instead, I run the risk of offending her further, as I tell her that I’ve been sensing her misgivings, that I could feel her retreat, that I’ve imagined her regretting the loss of the unblemished artist’s life she led before I came along, when she was content with a monastic bowl of capellini and Swiss chard at midnight. I tell her of my worry that the job of mothering Sally is more than she can reasonably accept; it will take too much out of her, she needn’t darken her life with what she’s not to blame for—and where will it lead, since she is not really Sally’s mother and never will be, as Sally herself is so intent on reminding her?

  “Do you actually think I’d bail on her? Or are you saying this because it’s what you would do if our roles were reversed?”

  “That’s not a very charitable interpretation.”

  “Michael, I’m here because I want to be here. I’m worried sick about Sally.”

  She seems even more disappointed in me than after my outburst of last night. Apparently I have completely misunderstood her, though I could reasonably argue that she expects me to divine telepathically the withheld subtleties of her inner life, and feels let down when I fail to do so.

  “I would do anything for that girl. I’m amazed that you could think otherwise.”

  She goes out to the living room, at a safer distance from me now.

  The first light of day pushes through the window like an exhalation of white steam.

  I rummage about for a large garbage bag and start filling it with the shorn scraps of the bathroom door. Part of the door is still hanging from its hinges, looking as if it has been broken open with an ax. I diligently sweep up the ancient layers of paint chips that have scattered across the floor. The pitiful after-mess of my tantrum.

  “Such a pretty sight,” cracks Pat.

  She has made coffee for herself and is sitting at the table, not indignant or disapproving of me, as I had expected her to be, but depleted and lost. It is clear that we have passed into a new space, a flimsier, more provisional one that seems almost comically epitomized by the sheet I am struggling to hang over the bathroom doorway—to afford us a modicum of privacy until I can replace the door.

  In a confessional, almost hypnotized monotone Pat is telling me about her closest friend when she was in her early twenties, a woman I have never heard of until now. “We lived together. We talked about everything. No subject was off-limits between us. She had this shining brilliance, you believed in her importance somehow, it was the most exhilarating friendship. She went mad, but it took me weeks to notice. We were too close for me to accept that anything was wrong. It wasn’t unusual for us to say the same thing at the same time. And there was a point when even my dreams seemed to be a version of hers. We lived so deeply in the same world I thought her delusions were normal, they were okay—I have a high tolerance for aberrance, I suppose, we both do, Michael, or we would have realized the distress Sally was in before it was shoved in our faces.

  “With my friend, it never occurred to me to step back, I was inside it with her. And when she started claiming that she had invented the alphabet, and drew diagrams on a pad to show me how she had done it—I felt destroyed. Suddenly, everything we had shared was meaningless, all our talk about art and the future and our plans—it was all nonsense.”

  I finish filling the garbage bag and drag it out into the hall. Then I lift out the pins and remove what is left of the door from its hinges and carry that out to the hall too.

  “I want to take care of Sally and I want to get as far away from her as I can at the same time,” says Pat. “When you think of how terrified and cut loose she must feel, it tears you apart. When she’s her most vibrant wonderful self, she’s in the most danger. That’s the trick life has played on her. Just when you think you’re beginning to understand her, that you’re finally on the same wavelength, she says something that makes you realize you’re not. You can feel how much she wants to be heard, even though it’s nonsense, it’s her nonsense, it has meaning to her. That’s what I learned from my friend. I don’t care if I’m not her mother. I am her mother in a way. I can give myself to Sally, like I give myself to my dance company. It’s a tropism, I guess, my weakness for devotion that you like to poke fun at.”

  The opening of Pat’s show is drawing near and her rehearsal schedule intensifies. She seems always to be rushing off to meet costume and lighting designers, or to root out props from the discount bins alon
g Canal and Fulton Streets for the elemental Beuys-like sparseness she favors. One day five galvanized steel washtubs are sitting in the living room; on another occasion, an enormous industrial fan. She is “making movement,” she says, the way one says, “I’m making money” or “making art.”

  She treats her dancers much the way she treats me, with a strategic elusiveness that seems to keep them guessing and off balance. She resents having to explain in words what to her seems obvious. Overhearing her on the phone, I recognize the exasperation in her voice when she tries to describe to one of her dancers the distinct characteristics of a lunge, a dive, a slide, a flop. She wants the movement to be “less nervous,” she says. “But not casual.” Praise is measured out in small, avidly consumed portions, like a dessert that has to be stretched to go round.

  With Sally she is attentive, guiding her through her disjointed monologues, and her visions of future accomplishments and glory. “I think she’s improving,” Pat says to me. “But I’m holding my breath. I don’t want to jinx it.”

  Sally doesn’t mention our fight, and for a while I have the impression that she doesn’t remember it, until, after I beg her to calm down during one shrill postmidnight jag, she retorts: “Oh, like you didn’t almost murder Pat the other night.”

  Is this teasing momentary glimmer of lucidity what Pat means by Sally’s “improvement”?

  She paces the apartment, evil-eyed. “I’m trying to get to the bottom of who I am,” she tells me.

  We’ve grown accustomed in the middle of the night to the serrated scrape of the window when it’s lifted on its rusted chain, alerting us to the fact that Sally has climbed out onto the fire escape to smoke a cigarette. I get out of bed to keep an eye on her. According to Lensing, she’s not experiencing “suicidal ideation,” but I can’t bear to have her sit out there fifty feet above the street unwatched.

  “Did you take your meds?” I ask, pestering her to ingest the very drugs I’ve grown to despise.

  “I can’t stand this! Do I seem crazy to you right now? Do I? I’m not a child. And if I was a child, I would be blessed and you wouldn’t even know it!”

  She dips up and down, in and out of psychosis. Neither of us knows who she will be from one minute to the next, and this lack of continuity is what is most difficult to bear. Ground down, she ceases to be an individual, not only to us, but to herself too, I suspect. There is no I, no reliable self to retreat to or upon which to stand.

  The constraints my anxiety imposes on her are suffocating, but I can’t stop myself from hovering over her—the jailor, the watchdog, a one-man crack-up prevention squad. I worry that in trying to calm her I am actually causing more agitation. And by the same token, when Sally tries to show me through some gesture that she is okay, I mistake it for yet another sign of disturbance.

  She leafs through Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Yeats’s poems, and the King James Bible, staring at pages she marked when she was manic, as if to recapture the feeling of the person who put them there.

  “I can’t read,” she says. “I’ve forgotten how to read.” And she begins to weep.

  And when all should be quiet your fire burns a river of sleep, wrote Sally before the dopamine blockers erected a dam against the free flow of language in her brain.

  My own mood and feelings toward her are erratic, shifting several times in the course of a day. During the worst moments, I think of her as my disease—the disease I must bear. In my notebook I scrawl in a furious hand: “I am intoxicated with Sally’s madness in both senses of the word: inebriated and poisoned.”

  One morning, while Sally and I sit on the front stoop of our building, our neighbor Lou from down the street comes by walking her sheepdog. It’s the first time we’ve seen her since her stinging retreat from Sally on the day we took her to the hospital, an incident I’ve replayed several times in my mind; before that day, Lou had treated Sally with a special sympathy.

  My impulse is to avoid her so as to spare Sally the humiliation of being shunned again, but with a friendly overhead wave Lou comes loping across the street to greet us, pulling her mild sheepdog behind her.

  “Sally! I’ve been thinking of you. You look so much better than the last time I saw you.”

  “I do?”

  “You do, darling. But you must take care of yourself. Listen to your father. Now more than ever.”

  Sally strokes Lou’s dog. “It’s just like a child.”

  “She’s my child,” says Lou.

  She obviously is aware of what happened to Sally. But how? I walk her to the corner. “Did the story get out somehow? Are people talking?”

  “No one’s talking, Michael. I just knew. I’ve lived. I know about these things.”

  I remind her of the way she fled from us. “Like we were lepers. It shocked me.”

  “All I can tell you is I know the state she was in. From my sister. My grandfather. I recognize it when I see it, and always have. I have my reasons for turning away. Now, God bless you.”

  When I return to the stoop, Sally says: “She’s been listening to me. She can hear what I’m thinking.”

  By mid-August Lensing is speaking of Sally’s “measurable steps toward real recovery.” “Remission” is the word she often uses, to keep us from nursing unreasonable expectations.

  “It wouldn’t be obvious to you who are with her all the time, but it’s happening. I can see it clearly.”

  When Sally is in the bathroom, she tells me: “I persuaded her to visit the coffee bar on Greenwich Avenue where she had some of her most disturbing moments while manic.”

  “I wasn’t aware of this.”

  “She went there yesterday. During one of her fifteen-minute outings. The idea is for her to demystify these places, to see that they are ordinary, that the things she believes happened there were all in her mind. When I asked her what it was like to be there, she said, ‘What kind of question is that? It’s a coffee shop. I had a cup of coffee.’ I loved that answer. I’m going to lower her haloperidol, starting today. If all goes well, it will be the beginning of a gradual tapering off.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “We can’t be too careful about this. The adjustment will be slow. She’s still having psychotic flashes. Short in duration. Sometimes no longer than a minute.”

  “What kind of flashes?”

  “She thinks a neighbor is watching her or that she’s being followed. That sort of thing.”

  It occurs to me that Sally has been having these sorts of “flashes” all of her life. We just didn’t know what they were. I remember Aaron teasing her when she claimed that people were talking about her on buses or at restaurants.

  During the next two weeks, Lensing fiddles with Sally’s medication, adjusting and readjusting her chemical regimen as if Sally is some delicate technological invention that Lensing is preparing to launch. Haloperidol is scaled back, as she promised it would be, and valproic acid is increased. At first, Sally appears even more placid than before, spending an entire Sunday in silence on the couch, forgetting even to go out to smoke.

  She is now permitted to leave the apartment alone twice a day for an hour at a time. Her longer absences are a relief to both of us. We need this respite from each other.

  One afternoon, she returns from the coffee bar with a woman in her late fifties who claims to be the former Miss Georgia.

  “What an absolutely amazing young lady is your daughter,” she says in a homemade accent that is two parts Southern belle and one part Westminster London.

  Sally has already begun to emulate her speech, turning supercilious and comically patrician.

  “Roseanne says I’m a midfork beauty,” she says.

  “That’s what we call a woman who, when she walks into a restaurant, people freeze to behold her with their forks midway to their mouths,” explains Roseanne. “All Sally needs to do is melt off a few pounds. She could have a splendid career as a model.”

  Twirling, Sally checks herself out in the mirror.<
br />
  “This is not what we want Sally to be focusing on right now,” says Pat frostily.

  Roseanne gets the hint, delivers three loud smooches to Sally’s cheeks, and hurries off.

  A week, ten days pass and Sally and I are still unable to sustain a rudimentary conversation. When we do talk, it’s as if we’re shouting at each other across a crowded expressway: what I hear most clearly is the vast roar between us.

  Then, one evening in late August, everything changes. Sally and I are standing in the kitchen. I have spent the day at home with her, working on my script for Jean-Paul.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” I ask.

  “That would be nice. Yes. Thank you.”

  “With milk?”

  “Please. And honey.”

  “Two spoonfuls?”

  “Right. I’ll put the honey in. I like watching it drip off the spoon.”

  Something about her tone has caught my attention: the modulation of her voice, its unpressured directness—measured, and with a warmth that I have not heard in her in months. Her eyes have softened. I caution myself not to be fooled. Yet the change in her is unmistakable.

  I put on the kettle and we stand together by the stove. The opulent town house below our kitchen window is lit up for a party. Sumptuously dressed guests spill out into the yard where tuxedoed waiters carry around trays of hors d’oeuvres. A scene from Gatsby.

  “I’m glad we weren’t invited,” says Sally.

  The kettle boils. Sally leans toward me, resting her body against mine. “You and Pat saved my life. It must be hard for you.”

  It’s as if a miracle has occurred. The miracle of normalcy, of ordinary existence. Following Sally’s lead, I act as if nothing unusual has happened. And by all appearances, to her nothing unusual has happened; she seems unaware of the change.

  I think to myself: I’ll remember this conversation—this seemingly insignificant exchange—as the moment when Sally returned.

  It feels as if we have been living all summer inside a fable. A beautiful girl is turned into a comatose stone or a demon. She is separated from her loved ones, from language, from everything that had been hers to master. Then the spell is broken and she is awake again, “surprised to have eyes.”