Hurry Down Sunshine

by Michael Greenberg

  During the interview Steve is especially wily. He obviously wants to be admitted and knows how to play his hand. He tells the resident that he is hearing voices, and I am almost certain he is lying.

  “Can you identify the voices?”

  “It’s my sister-in-law, the wife of my brother Jay, our mother’s favorite. Am I right, Mikey? Tell him. Jay got everything. He’s the prince. And he got the princess and she’s jabbering in my ear.”

  Without warning, he pulls out his tongue with his fingers and offers it to the resident for close inspection, wagging it from side to side.

  “Do you see signs of rot? Sores? Cancer?”

  “Put your tongue away,” I say. And to the resident I explain: “He’s usually shy. Cleanly dressed, as gentle as the milk of God. You wouldn’t recognize him.”

  Sparing no detail, Steve describes his exploits with Junior on St. Marks Place. I wonder if he’s spreading it on too thickly as he talks about their “ho” Maxine, but he seems disoriented in a way that can’t be feigned—by turns emphatic, obnoxious, innocent beyond the precincts of blame.

  He is accepted into the hospital and we ride up together to the nebular safety of the locked psychiatric ward.

  A nurse feeds him his medication.

  “I’m a chemical experiment, Mikey. A living side effect. Remember Aldous Huxley? Brave New World? That’s where I’m at, little brother. Soma. I started taking these drugs in 1966.”

  I tell him I’ll be back to check on him in a day or two.

  I spend the next two days cleaning Steve’s apartment, throwing out the detritus of his binge, including the turntables and broken amps and computers that he and his cronies collected. I change the lock on his door, buy curtains for the windows, and hire a glazier to repair the broken pane.

  During one of my trips to the compactor room I hear the metallic jingle of a chain lock sliding into its slot. During subsequent trips, I sense the eye of the person behind that door watching me through the peephole as I pass.

  Finally, the neighbor steps out of her apartment and confronts me, a small soft-spoken woman in her sixties. “I know who you are,” she says. “You drop some care package off for your brother and leave right away, because you can’t stand to be here. But I’m here all the time, separated from him by a Sheetrock wall.”

  I apologize for the nuisance of the past two months and assure her that things will improve.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself, letting him live like this. You obviously don’t give a shit.”

  After three days, Steve is discharged from the hospital. He seems glad to return to his digs and pick up his life where it was before he embarked on his disastrous “social experiment,” as he has now taken to calling it.

  I present him with a new key, a fresh tin of tobacco, and his weekly groceries, which I have stored neatly in the fridge.

  In a matter of minutes he has reinstalled himself in his Barcalounger with his pickle jar filled to the brim with Lipton’s tea.

  “I’m going back to work for the Greeks,” he tells me. “The busy season is about to kick in. Ten, twelve deliveries a day. You’ll see. High times are around the corner. I heard it on the radio. Clinton’s going to be reelected president. A new boom.”

  On September 9 school is to begin, and as the date approaches Sally is filled with dread at the prospect of reentering the world, let alone facing her classmates. She is ashamed of what she might have done in the late spring when she was gearing up for her manic gallop. Imagining the worst, she has taken to crossing the street to avoid facing neighbors and shopkeepers whom she barely knows, convinced that she disgraced herself with them. The fact that she can’t remember how only serves to sharpen her retroactive shame.

  “I don’t know who I was,” she says. “What if people ask me to explain the weird things I did?”

  “What kind of things?” asks Pat.

  “I don’t know!”

  Robert Lowell felt that talking about a manic attack after “the froth of delirium has blown away” is like “a cat trying to explain climbing down a ladder.” Sally is that cat, laboring downward after her fleet heedless climb. The vividness of mania has left her unsure of where her thoughts ended and her deeds began. It doesn’t seem possible to her that the high drama of her projections weren’t actual events, and that gray ordinary life went on as usual while she was mad.

  “It was all happening inside you,” I tell her. “No one could see it, until you boiled over with Cass. And that was already in July.”

  But the blank spots in her memory continue to haunt her. “I was out of my mind. But I don’t know what that really means.”

  Lensing tells me that her anxieties are to be expected. “‘Better old demons than new gods,’” she says, quoting the Chinese proverb. “The mind flies back to the storm it’s familiar with. There’s a certain brittleness to Sally right now. A tendency to self-manufacture stress.”

  She increases Sally’s antipsychotic medication, though it remains well below what it was when she left the hospital. “Just for a few days, to help her over the hump,” Lensing explains.

  But then Sally frets that her friends will know she’s sedated.

  “What if I don’t pass the lunch counter test,” she says, referring to the ability to be in public without one’s mental illness being detected.

  Under Lensing’s guidance she is keeping a “mood journal,” chronicling, with worrying meticulousness, every shift of her heart. I wonder if she is overdoing it; shouldn’t she be encouraged to look away from herself, to look outward?

  Four days before school is to begin she says, “I think we’re rushing it. I’m not ready. I haven’t had a chance to deal with what happened. I’m sorry. Will I ever stop disappointing you, Dad?”

  She plugs along bravely, however, delivering her mood reports to Lensing, though she herself harbors doubts about their reliability. She is the sole source of information about herself, and that’s the rub. “I have a knack for fooling people into believing I’m in control. They go along with me, when I’m a total mess. It’s a little scary.”

  Lensing isn’t worried about being fooled. “The spectrum is narrowing,” she tells Pat and me. “Her mood swings are less radical. She’s an exceptional writer. It just pours out of her. She draws you in. It has…”—she pauses, searching for the word—“…immediacy.”

  She places Sally on a strict regimen, “the manic-depressive diet,” she calls it, designed to keep Sally firmly planted on the ground. “As little refined flour as possible, but potatoes are okay. Lots of vegetables and protein. Two tablespoons of flaxseed oil per day, nine hours of sleep without interruption, and no naps.”

  Alone at dinner with me, Sally has the jitters of a bride just before her wedding, unsure of whether she is throwing in her lot with the right man. “I can’t go through with it. Why don’t we just accept the fact that school is something I can’t handle.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that things might work out?”

  “Possibilities don’t help me. I need to know.”

  “No one can be sure about the future.”

  “Yes. But it’s different with me. If my mind turns on me, I won’t even know it’s happening. I won’t know I’m being a freak. But everyone else will.”

  I think: how fragile she is. Yet the unstoppable force of her being is the opposite of fragile. I wish I could stop her from overidentifying with her illness, but how can I when the very mechanism of managing it requires a self-scrutiny that constantly reinforces it in her mind?

  When I suggest that she take it slow and wait a few more weeks before starting school, she says with horror, “And be a dropout? Are you serious?”

  Around midnight Pat returns from rehearsal. Sally has gone to bed. Pat sits down a few feet from me on the couch, silent and intense. It’s been almost a month since our blowup, and we are still tentative with each other, halting, careful about what we say, and physically shy. It’s as if we’ve been waiti
ng for a new order to declare itself, a new way of being that we know instinctively not to force along.

  Pat sits with her knees pressed together, on the edge of the couch, as if she’s about to spring up at any second. I put down the book I’ve been reading.

  “I think we should have a child,” she says.

  It is clear to me that this is not a suggestion, that Pat has already made up her mind, and my first overriding impulse is to argue against it. Would it be wise for us to do such a thing now? Shouldn’t we wait at least until we’re resettled? Eric is impatient for us to move, nudging us out the door with a steady stream of hints and unpleasantries. And although we have spent the better part of each weekend looking for an apartment, we’ve yet to find one we can afford.

  “Can we handle a baby when everything is so uncertain?” I ask.

  “Things are always uncertain,” says Pat, inadvertently paraphrasing the platitude I delivered to Sally earlier in the evening. She brusquely rises, obviously offended.

  Overhearing us, Sally climbs down from the loft bed, stricken. “I knew this would happen. You’ll never love me as much as your own baby. It’s the biological law. You’ll say you do, but it will be a lie, not because you want to lie, I don’t think you ever lie, Pat, but you won’t be able to help yourself, I’ll always be second.”

  She sits on the couch where Pat had been sitting, her feet curled under her, wide awake, worrying.

  “Pat will be an amazing mother,” she says to me in a whisper, so as not to be overheard.

  During the weekend we visit friends in Woodstock in upstate New York. They have a healthy five-month-old baby girl. Sally grasps her fists and talks quietly to her, and our friends remark at how absorbed and tranquil the baby is in her presence.

  At lunch, the new father props the baby in his lap and his wife trains a video camera on the scene.

  Impulsively, I jump up from the table, throw my arms around Sally, and say, “This is my baby. Video us too!”

  Sally turns her head away, and Pat gives me a scalding look from across the table.

  “One is always a baby to one’s parents,” says our hostess kindly.

  She turns the camera on us for a few seconds before politely putting it away.

  I sit down, burning with shame.

  The night before school is to begin, Sally is supernaturally calm. She is annoyed at the fuss Pat and I make as we prepare her for the big day: a special compartment in her backpack for her noontime meds, and a note to remind her to take them.

  In the morning, Sally makes fun of my checklist of “things to remember.”

  When I ask her if I’m being overprotective, however, her sarcasm dissolves. “God, no. I’m terrified. That’s the problem. I need this.”

  The familiar simmering apprehension comes over her. “What am I going to say when people ask what I did over the summer?” She throws her voice into a high-pitched mimicry of chitchat. “‘Oh, I spent July in the loony bin. I found out I was psychotic. What about you?’”

  I advise her to keep the events of the summer to herself. “People won’t understand. Or very few will. You don’t know what kind of prejudice you’ll run into. Best to work it out with us, and with Lensing.”

  But am I right about this? Is it really better for Sally to conceal what happened? It may not be possible. And what of the burden such a secret will place on her?

  Too preoccupied to work, at three o’clock I’m sitting outside on the stoop waiting for her to come home.

  “How did it go?”

  “Fine,” she almost snaps. Then, in a softer voice, “I didn’t get eaten. No one ran away from me or noticed anything strange, except that I gained weight. But everyone looks different than last year.”

  We celebrate at dinner. Robin phones to congratulate her. Then Aaron calls to cheer her on. “Nothing happened!” he says triumphantly. “Never have those two words sounded so good.”

  To be congratulated for nothing is “pathetic,” insists Sally. But I can see that she is pleased.

  The school week ends and nothing continues to happen.

  Lensing pulls back the antipsychotic medication again, and by the end of September Sally is only taking a tiny dose before bed. Her lightning wit returns—her verbal precociousness, and her intense feeling for people, including those she encounters in literature and in movies.

  She forms a tight group with three girls from her class, and often, after school, they happily colonize the apartment. Evenings, I listen to her on the phone with them, intimate, biting, gossipy—the buoyant sound of health.

  After a long discussion with Pat and me, she tells them about her crack-up. They readily accept the news. Being an alumna of the psych ward confers social status on Sally. It’s a kind of credential. She has been where they have not been. It becomes their secret.

  On October 23, the day before the opening of her dance performance, Pat calls me late in the afternoon. “Tech rehearsal was a disaster,” she says as if what she suspected all along has finally been confirmed. “The piece looked terrible. The dancers forgot everything I taught them. They started posing, moving in time with the music. It was deadly.” She apologizes for not inviting me to rehearsal as she had promised. “I realized you were too close to the material. You wouldn’t be able to see it with your best critical eye.”

  She hasn’t told me anything specific about the piece, and I have the sense that she dreads showing it, though this may be just her normal pre–opening night panic.

  At home, she confers with the dancers for hours by phone. “They need to be a little scared,” she tells me. “There’s no compromising now.”

  The living room floor is covered with sheets of tracing paper—Pat’s latest prop. I hear her cutting the paper as I drift off to sleep.

  At 5 A.M. she is sitting on the edge of our bed, pale with apprehension.

  Good news: the show is sold out. I arrive with Sally and watch the audience drift in with a sharp expectant rush. The seats around us fill. The chatter grows louder. I spot Helen wearing a purplish dress woven to a brocaded finish. She embraces Sally, introducing her to the two friends she has brought along as “my gorgeous granddaughter.”

  “Congratulations to the husband,” says one of Helen’s friends. “You must be very proud.”

  Sally grips my hand. I feel a triple panic: hers, Pat’s, and mine.

  “Pat is so brilliant,” Sally says, after my mother and her friends have gone off to their seats. “She held on to her creativity. I feel so lucky that she loves me. I do believe she does. Do you think she does?”

  The house lights go down and we are plunged into Pat’s psyche, but also, astonishingly, into a mirror of our own. Clinical Data the piece is called. The dancers lunge and flop, jerky and raw, while two actresses follow them spouting poisoned rapid-fire phrases—“…we’re here to take out the useless parts of your brain…”—their haunted whispery voices overlapping. They’re the voices inside the dancers’ minds.

  Sally seems mesmerized. I watch her watching: her still face and large black eyes. The dancers look as if they have been caught by surprise, ungainly and vulnerable within their invented world. The tracing paper that Pat had been cutting in our living room the night before has been assembled into fifteen dresses which hang on fishing lines from the rafters, each with a yellow sash. An enormous fan, its steel blades glinting, sits upstage center like a bull’s-eye.

  The fan is switched on, blowing almost violently through the theater. The dresses have a feathery look suspended in midair. The dancers slip into them, the paper rustling loudly as they move, crumpling on their bodies and falling off in shreds that sail randomly around the stage. The effect is of sloughed skin, as the dancers in their torn dresses assume a ravaged, fashion catwalk appearance. The action may be taking place in a prison from which the effort to escape is comical, because even when they think they have broken free the dancers are still there.

  “What’s your diagnosis?” asks one of the voices, th
e way a prisoner might ask, What are you in for?

  A Colombian saxophonist, whom Pat met while he was playing for quarters in the subway, plays boleros he composed. The dancers blow bubbles at each other that land like psychic bombs. It comes to me that we are in the dayroom of the psych ward, reimagined as a kind of lunatic ball.

  So this is what she has been doing all summer, I think. I have the urge to get up and leave. It’s too intense. I take Sally’s hand. She seems delighted and amazed.

  When it’s over, the audience is momentarily stunned. A few seconds pass before the applause gathers momentum.

  The dancers take their bows, spent and euphoric. I glance at Pat, standing in the back of the theater, her face swollen from lack of sleep, cheering for them with her hands over her head.

  Helen congratulates her on her way out of the theater. “You captured it, Pat. You showed us something profound.” She embraces Sally again. “There was a lot to think about out there tonight, sweetheart. But don’t think too hard.”

  Her friends seem bewildered and moved. “She’s a quiet girl,” I hear one saying of Pat as they head toward the exit. “A lovely girl. You don’t expect this from her.”

  At home, Sally says, “It was like watching my episode from the outside. It was beautiful. You showed it to me. I just hope we didn’t scare anyone. All those people in the audience, I mean. And how they were cheering for you, Pat!”

  She attends the second performance, hanging around the dancers afterward, sitting backstage next to Pat with her head in her lap.

  Two weeks later, she receives an A—her first ever—on a paper about James Baldwin’s essay The Fire Next Time. “He wrote this book so he wouldn’t go mad,” she tells me.

  The shelf on her loft bed is piled with new books she has acquired: Women and Madness, The Myth of Mental Illness, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

  Sometimes, after school, she retreats to her loft bed or takes long wandering walks in the Village. I can sense her contending with what she knows is inside her now, bewildered and brave, negotiating with it, as if trying to reach a truce with herself.