The TakenBy: Sarah Pinborouch
Paperback: 323 pages
Publisher: Dorchester Publishing Company (April 3, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0843958960
ISBN-13: 978-0843958966
Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 1 inches
She's a beautiful little girl, only ten years old with pretty blond curls. Why, then, does she strike such terror into all who see her? Because she died thirty years ago—a horrible, agonizing death in the middle of a raging thunderstorm.
Tonight the storm has returned... and so has she; to exact revenge on those responsible for her death.
But there is more to the storm that carries her than even she knows, and as innocent Alex battles to save those she loves from the vindictive ghost of Melanie Parr, she discovers that terrible folklores can sometimes be true.
Sometimes, there are worse things to fear than death.
Excerpt:Chapter One
The air hung invisibly heavy, dragging downward from the sky, its weight almost humming with the tension of an approaching breaking point. There was a storm brewing, the kind that hadn't come to this sleepy part of Somerset for years, or so it seemed to Mary as she wheeled the last barrowful of mowed grass to the compost heap, or "compost mountain," as she liked to call it, glad that at sixty she was still able to do these things for herself without a twinge or an ache. She smiled. Well, maybe just one or two nagging aches that set in a little later, but never too painful to dull her warm glow of satisfaction; in a weird way, maybe they even heightened it slightly.
Despite the discomfort caused by sweat that clung to her like a second skin unwilling to be shed, Mary's spirits were high. After getting Paul's party decorations up, Alexandra would be making them both a cool gin and tonic, waiting for her aunt to come in and be amazed at what could be done with a few streamers and balloons if you had that special creative touch, and maybe her smile would light up a little like it used to in the days before Ian left. Twenty-seven was too young to be carrying that much pain around with you like lead on your back, and Mary feared the strain was beginning to show. Her niece had lost weight over the last few months, and it seemed at times that Alex had become a reserved shadow of her former self, all that beauty and brightness bound up inside, afraid to be released. Maybe Paul coming would do her some good; maybe she'd open up to him.
Pushing the low-hanging leafy branches aside, Mary wheeled the barrow forward into the hidden space that Paul had called "Pooh Corner" when he'd been little—a long time ago now, her bouncing boy was forty today—preparing her shoulders and thighs for the sudden push up the side of the heap of fresh grass to dump her load over the back.
Out of the corner of her eye, in that space where on clear winter mornings the light came pushing through the far side of the trees like one of those crazy laser shows, she could make out the worn shapes of the headstones in the graveyard on the other side of her land. Sometimes the peaceful sight of them would make her stop and think about the nature of time, and how it sped past so quickly, the questions bubbling in her brain. Where had those years gone between when Paul was ten and now, and would he bury her there amongst family and strangers when her race came to its inevitable end?
Yes, sometimes it would make her stop and think. But not this time. This time her eyes froze like the rest of her, confused for a moment, vision fixed on the pile of grass. No, not the grass at all, but what was on top of it, what hadn't been there ten minutes before when she'd emptied the lawnmower last, and what shouldn't, couldn't possibly be there. Her shaking arms released the metal barrow, which banged heavily into her knee as it dropped, and deep in her mind she knew there'd be a nasty black bruise blooming there the next day, but right then, right in that silent moment of stopped time, she couldn't feel a thing as the past raced forward to meet the silent, twisted present.
The small red sandal sat on the bed of sweet-smelling cuttings, polished and shining, untarnished by mud or blades of murdered grass, as if deposited from above, a gift from the angels. Staring at the shoe that had been out of fashion for thirty years, Mary felt her breath catch in her throat. So time was moving, not stopped at all, but pouring out slowly like glue, savoring itself, allowing Mary the possibility of seeing everything, every color in the trees, the leaves and the thousands of different shades in the leather. Who could have put it there? Who would have? No one. Not after all this time. Needing to touch it, needing to feel its reality, its dead flesh next to her skin, she reached slowly forward, her hand shakily stretching out into the tunnel of her vision.
The giggle slashed the silence and Mary spun round, a whimper escaping her. Branches rustled, first to her left, and then moving back behind her, back to the other side of the compost heap, where the long, tired limbs of the trees almost touched the ground of the graveyard, no hedge required to define the boundary. Slowly turning, her feet shuffling over the dead wood, Mary's eyes widened. It can't be. It just can't be.
At the bottom of the crippled tree in front of her, in the gap between branches and the hallowed ground, she could see the lower half of a small girl, dressed in a perfectly pleated green kilt, the upper torso hidden from view.
The scalpel of memory sliced into her brain, sharp and painful. The giggle came again as Mary's eyes dragged themselves down, past the pink skin of young almost-chubby knees, to the high white socks, and then downward, knowing what she was going to see, one foot shoeless, the other strapped up in a perfectly polished red sandal. Standing and staring at this surreal snapshot, something stirred inside Mary, a coiled snake waiting to strike, and if her frozen face could have moved, she would have frowned. The terrible familiarity of the clothes and the shoes itched inside Mary and she could almost taste the child's name in her mouth before she whispered it.
"Melanie Parr."
The giggle came again from somewhere out of sight, and Mary moved to take a step backward, to get help, help for or from what she didn't know. The voice that came through the branches lilted childishly.
"I lost my shoe, Mary. Have you got it? Have you got my shoe? I'm cold without it. You've made me cold, Mary." The reproach in the voice was clear, the sentiment jarring with the young giggle.
Shrieking, Mary stumbled over a branch behind her and fell forcefully to the dry ground, the shudder that spread through her bones making her bite down on her tongue, her mouth filling with the taste of metal as she bled.
"I've come back, can't you see?"
The quiet voice barely carried in the heavy air, but Mary flinched as she listened. "I've come back home. The Catcher Man brought me home."
As the giggles got louder and harsher, too harsh for a ten-year-old, a forty-year-old ten-year-old, Mary knew that if she didn't get away right then she never would, she'd go crazy, really never-come-back-down crazy, and squeezing her eyes shut, she dragged herself backward until she was out of the wall of branches and in the fresh air of her garden, pulling herself to her numbed, heavy feet and running like she hadn't in years, letting the scream trapped inside her out, giving it free rein in the humid air, knowing that no matter how hard she yelled, it would never be able to take all of the madness with it.
Author Website: http://www.sarahpinborough.com/index.htm
Forest BornBy: Shannon Hale
Reading level: Young Adult
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Children's Books (September 15, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1599901676
ISBN-13: 978-1599901671
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.5 inches
Rin is sure that something is wrong with her...something really bad. Something that is keeping her from feeling at home in the Forest homestead where she's lived all her life. Something that is keeping her from trusting herself with anyone at all. When her brother Razo returns from the city for a visit, she accompanies him to the palace, hoping that she can find peace away from home. But war has come to Bayern again, and Rin is compelled to join the queen and her closest allies--magical girls Rin thinks of as the Fire Sisters--as they venture into the Forest toward Kel, the land where someone seems to want them all dead. Many beloved Bayern characters reappear in this story, but it is Rin's own journey of discovering how to balance the good and the bad in herself that drives this compelling adventure.
Once again, Newbery Honor-winning author Shannon Hale brings readers to a world where great friendships, unexpected plot twists, and a little dose of magic make for incredible storytelling.
Excerpt:The first chapter
Ma had six sons. The eldest boy was big like his father, the middle boys were middling. By the time Razo was born, all the family's largeness must have been used up. The brothers called him runt and made him feel that word. He spent winter nights longing for a younger sibling, someone he could call runt, someone he could push and pinch.
Ma was longing too, but for a girl to share thoughts with, a daughter cut and sewn from her own soul.
When Razo was almost five, he and Ma both got their wish. The baby girl was born on a night so hot the wind panted and the summer moon blazed like the sun.
"Rinna," Ma named her.
"A girl," said the father.
"Rinna-girl," said Razo, peering over the side of the cot.
The baby blinked huge, dark eyes and opened her mouth into a tiny circle. All desire to push and pinch hushed right out of Razo.
He bent closer to her ear and whispered, "I'm going to teach you to climb trees."
Ma did not allow her baby girl into any timber, though Razo, with a trembling kind of impatience, looked her over each day to gauge if she'd grown big enough. The dark-haired baby cried if Ma put her down, so Ma did not put her down. She did chores with her daughter strapped to her side.
One spring morning when Rinna was two, her father went hunting in the deep Forest. Three days later, Ma sent her older boys to look for him. They found his pack and some bear prints, a reminder not to wander far.
That night in the one-room house built of pine, the brothers stared stiff-eyed at the darkness, the unfamiliar sound of their mother's sobs spooking them to wakeful silence. No one moved, except Rinna.
"Ma," she said. "Ma sad."
She crawled off her mat at the foot of her parents' cot and lay down by Ma, fitting into the curve of her body.
"My peaceful girl," Ma whispered. "My tender Rin." She kissed the top of her daughter's head and sighed before falling asleep.
Rin sighed too. She slept with her nose touching her mother's shirt, her dreams laced with the scent of the juniper berries Ma loved to chew.
Rin learned to crawl on moss and walk on pine needles, and by the age of four could climb a fir as easily as fall into bed. That was thanks to Razo, who never had worked up a reason to push his little sister. When Rin was not clinging to her ma, she was running after her brother. She talked some and laughed some, but mostly she watched--the faces of her brothers, the sway of the trees. She watched the world the way most people breathed air.
"That girl sees the bones inside birds," her ma would say. "That girl can see your soul."
It was early autumn after Rin's seventh birthday when Razo, who was almost twelve and old enough to earn real coin, announced he was going to the city. Rin had never insisted much of her nearest brother--she'd never had need. But now she flushed with indignation. Why should he go some place so distant and horrible that he could not take his baby sister along on his shoulders? She would ask him that, she would demand he stay. But she did not have the chance. Razo left during the soft side of day while Rin still slept. He did not said goodbye.
Four days had clomped by, pulling a knot of anger tighter in Rin's belly, when Ma left too, called off to help a neighbor deliver a baby.
Rin stood by her ma's house, her arms dangling at her sides. Never had she been without both Ma and Razo, and she felt like a fledgling perched on the rim of its nest. She stared first into the deep Forest, then back toward the city where Razo had gone--both directions frightened her.
Her niece Nordra was sitting on a log, her long black hair tied at the back of her neck. She was eight, one of several nieces and nephews who were older than their young aunt. Nordra hummed a tune, and Rin's heart cringed. Why was she just fine there, playing alone with no Ma or Razo, and why couldn't Rin be fine too? It was not fair. Rin hated how she felt, weak and forgotten and so scared. Her blood flashed hot in her face and insisted drum beats at the insides of her ears.
"I want that," Rin said, pointing to the stick Nordra was using to twist holes into the dirt.
Nordra shook her head. "I'm using it. Go get another."
Rin's cheeks blazed. With Ma and Razo, Rin rarely had to ask for anything. She looked hard at Nordra, her thoughts skipping toward an idea of what she could say to make her niece relent.
"If you don't give me that stick, I'll tell Ma you took it from me, and she always believes me." Nordra startled, and Rin could see that she knew it was true. "She loves me best, and she'll wallop you with her wooden spoon. So you better give me the stick."
Nordra gave up the stick, though her chin trembled.
Rin felt amazing, big as her brother Brun and powerful as Ma. So she demanded the doe-skin boots Nordra's da had made, and the bright red cloth she used to hold her hair, and her doll of wrapped sticks. Nordra gave each thing over, crying pitifully all the while, and with each new treasure Rin felt bigger, stronger, better--
"Rin! Rinna-girl, what're you doing to make Nordra cry?" Ma bustled through the clearing, her white-shot black hair frizzing free from her blue headscarf. She pulled Rin to her feet by the back of her tunic.
"I just asked her for the things and she gave them to me," Rin said, though the doll and boots felt treacherous in her hands, like a pet snake with a hissing mouth.
"Then stop asking for things that aren't yours. You just shut that mouth and keep it shut unless you have something nice to say. I'd never guessed you had such a bad core to you! I'm ashamed of my own daughter, making little Nordra cry. I'm right ashamed."
Rin had seen Ma's face red with anger, but never when she was looking at her daughter. Rin's bones shook. She wanted to flee from her body and claw her way into the sky to hide in the clouds where no one ever went. But Ma's stare pinned her, a bug under the point of a twig. At Ma's order, Rin gave everything back and asked pardon.
Ma looked at Rin once more, shook her head, and walked away.
That was when Rin ran. She ran because she hurt as if red coals glowed inside her chest, she ran until the trees swallowed sight of her mother's house. Always before when there was pain or sadness, Ma hugged or hummed it out of her--but this time Ma had walked away.
Rin stopped in a mess of unfamiliar trees, turning around, hurting so much, shaking and confused and not knowing where to go. She was bad. Her ma thought so. Home was lost somewhere in the trees, Razo was gone, Ma had turned her back. The coals in her chest blazed, the pain fierce and white hot. Desperate, Rin stumbled into a fir tree and hugged it as she would have hugged Ma.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm sorry I'm bad. I'm sorry."
She listened, wishing with a childish hope that her mother's voice would find her there lost in the Forest and say it was all right, that she was not really bad, that she was forgiven and to come home. She listened harder, trembling with a desire to hear. A space inside her opened.
No mother's voice. But something else.
Not a sound, not a smell, not even a feeling. If it had been a color, it might have been green. If it had touched her ears, it might have sounded rhythmic, like the creak of a rocking chair or drone of a bee. If it had a scent, it might have been sweet and drowsy, like fresh pine on the fire.
The place in her chest that had ached with panic now felt warbley and sweet, drowsy and green. Her heart cooled, her breathing slowed, her jumbled thoughts sorted themselves. Calmed now, she understood that Ma would not be angry forever. And Rin worked out her own fault--telling Nordra what to do, demanding what was not hers. It was true what she'd told Nordra--Ma did love her best. But she'd spoken those words not because they were true, but because it would hurt Nordra. And Ma's love was sure to change if Rin became for good that insistent girl who took Nordra's stick.
In the future, she would not demand anything, she would keep the harsh words inside. She felt sure she could do this, a peaceful confidence shushing the tremble from her limbs.
And suddenly she knew which way was home, as if the trees themselves had pointed the way.
Ma scowled at Rin over supper, but that night she made room on the cot. Ma's warmth stilled her fears, and Rin found she could sleep. But that night she had a dream that would stick to her in years to come--a huge worm curled inside her middle, and when Rin opened her mouth, dozens of tiny worms crawled free, dripping from her lips, covering Razo and Ma and her entire family in wriggling slime.
The next morning, the dream clutching at her head, Rin crawled out of her shared cot and tripped away from the house to the nearest grouping of aspens. Her cheek against the papery bark, her small hands gripping the slender trunks, she closed her eyes and listened again for that calming green. It was not really listening, not with her ears, but she did not know how to explain it to herself. Peace sluiced through her, and again she made the promise to keep in the hard words, to demand nothing, to be her Ma's peaceful Rin.
She returned to Ma working over the morning stew, unsure how to be or what to say. It had been so easy to hurt Nordra and almost lose Ma's love. What if she did that again?
Ma is good, Rin thought. Ma always knows what to do.
Rin had always watched her mother, so it was not hard to try to be like her. She felt her body take on Ma's sturdy stance, her hands always ready to work, her eyes watchful for who needed a hand.
"I can finish the bread," Rin said, working the dough Ma left on the table.
"There's my girl."
When Razo visited from the city a few months later, Rin trembled anew. She had not been Rin-with-Razo for so long, she could not remember what that girl did, and how to keep that girl from being bad.
Razo's good, like Ma, she thought. So she mimicked him, finding herself more talkative, eager to explore and wonder, always moving, always near to grinning. He did not seem to notice any change in her--rather, he seemed delighted. But when they were with the rest of family, she felt overwhelmed by all the voices and ways of being, and curled up quiet.
Trying to be like Razo or Ma helped some, but that unpleasant agitation only released her when she was alone listening to the trees. She never thought to ask Razo if he too made a habit of relaxing against a tree's bark and drawing in its calm. When the disquiet began to roar, it just felt natural to turn to the trees.
Soon the trees affected not only her mood but her understanding. Each year a trunk put on a new ring of growth, and within those rings she found the tree's own story. She listened to the scent of it, the feel, the sound, and her mind gave it words--soil, water, sap, light...And before, night and rain, dry and sun, wind and night...the drowsy stillness of leaves in a rainfall, the sparkling eagerness of leaves in the sun, and always the pulling up of the branches, the tugging down of the roots, the forever growing in two directions, joining sky and soil, and a center to keep it strong...
There were times when the trees' lives felt more real than her own.
Razo left again for the city, and Rin felt his distance every day. Ma seemed farther off too, since Rin no longer fit on her lap. Ma's family kept growing with five sons married, and Rin stayed busy. She was the most helpful girl, the children's best caretaker, and Ma's shadow. Her mother discovered Rin had a talent for reading the lie in a person's face and called her anytime one of the young ones made questionable claims.
When Rin was thirteen, her brother Deet's wife died birthing their first child. Deet had no end of family to comfort him, but he sought out Rin. For weeks they took slow walks or sat peeling roots together, Deet talking, Rin listening. She never said much, but in a couple of months he began to smile, and the following year he married again.
And Rin kept on listening, never asking, never demanding. Until Wilem.
Wilem only had one brother, who preferred sleeping to anything else. But Wilem liked to dirt wrestle with the Agget-kin, as Ma's children and grandchildren were known, and so made the twenty minute walk to visit several times a week. Once he wrestled Rin when she would not say no to a challenge, and after, victorious though sweating hard, he said, "Sisters might not be so bad if they're like Rin." His teeth showed their points when he smiled, reminding Rin of a fox.
The idea of Wilem entered her like a pleasant sliver she did not want to pluck. She considered him quietly until the day she spotted him climbing a tree alone. She shirked the wash duty to follow and pretended surprise at finding him up there, but stayed, and they threw pine cones at the nephews and laughed into their elbows. She felt a peculiar freedom in the top of that tree, hiding from work and becoming giddy from the scent of his skin. They were straddled between two branches, forced to lean together. The spring breezes were still salted with the chill of winter, and Wilem's warmth felt wonderful. She was fifteen years old, but it was the first time she'd been alone with a boy outside her family.
"You're wild, Rin," he said.
No one had called her wild before. She was Ma's shadow. But she wanted to be wild now, for him. Wild seemed more enticing than a bowl of berries.
She relished how she felt when she was imitating his careless, confident manner, falling into his quick pattern of speech, jumping from silence to silliness. He seemed to enjoy living. Wilem was someone she could stay with for a long time and not get weary.
Ever since she'd made Nordra cry, words of appeal or demand were thick wool in her mouth. But she was intoxicated by Wild, she was tipsy with living that brief life as a new Rin. So when Wilem climbed down the tree to go find her nephews, she felt as if her last chance to be wild Rin, to be desirable Rin, would run away with him.
She asked him to stay. She dared him to kiss her. She felt his warm, trembling lips against hers, and she wanted more, felt the want like a grumble in her belly, a sharpness in her chest. He was not going to kiss her again, so she spoke, saying anything she could think of to keep him close. And he did stay, for a while. They held each other awkwardly there under the tall pine while she talked to him and he clung to her. He kissed her again when she asked, and though his lips were soft and her middle thrilled, she could feel he did not mean the kiss.
They were not laughing anymore. The thrill cooled, and Rin was exhausted from trying to keep him. It was late when he left for home, his head bowed and shoulders stooped, and she was certain he'd never kiss her again.
The next morning, she felt wrong, as if day had dawned only partly-made, as if Wilem had taken half of her away with the kiss. She touched her lips. What had she said? She shuddered, an ache and a twisted stomach suggesting she had said too much. Something was wrong. She'd spied her older nieces share kisses with neighbor boys, and the next day they were full of sly smiles and giggles, not aches and shudders.
Coals burned inside Rin, hotter and hotter while she dressed and helped Ma with the morning chores. She did not understand why she burned, but she wanted to cry for the pain.
As soon as she could get away, she ran, falling into the arms of a fir tree.
Take it away, she demanded silently. Take whatever's wrong, cure me, make it right.
She tried to throw herself in the soothing thoughts of the tree and seize its peace, but she could not forget Wilem. What had she said? She did not want to remember. The harder she worked to shut that out, the more twisted and dark her feelings. Had she simply outgrown her connection to trees? Or was it possible the trees were shunning her for what she'd done? After making Nordra cry, her mother had thought Rin bad and turned her back. After kissing Wilem, it seemed the trees did the same.
Rin ran to another tree, leaned against it to listen, and was accosted by a greasy darkness. She fled to the aspens, and in place of green calm, she felt clutched and pulled down. She sat on the Forest floor with her arms over her head, too lost and confused to cry. If the voice of the Forest was simply silent to her, then she should feel nothing at all, not this loathing as if all the trees in the Forest spat hate and disgust at her. Her stomach turned, her head felt hot, her arms too weak to lift. She wished she could die.
When evening came and she still had not died, Rin stood up, brushed off her skirt, and went home. It would not be too hard to hide her misery. Lately, no one took much notice of Ma's shadow.
Visit the author's website: http://www.squeetus.com/stage/main.html
Hurry Down SunshineBy: Michael Greenberg
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (September 8, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307473546
ISBN-13: 978-0307473547
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches Hurry Down Sunshine tells the story of the extraordinary summer when, at the age of fifteen, Michael Greenberg’s daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sally’s visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city’s most sweltering months. "I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to," Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not dream of or imagine. Hurry Down Sunshine is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to her–her brother and grandmother, her mother and stepmother, and, not least of all, the author himself. Among Greenberg’s unforgettable gallery of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary dreams. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine holds the reader in a mesmerizing state of suspension between the mundane and the transcendent.
Excerpt:
On July 5th, 1996, my daughter was struck mad. She was fifteen and her crack up marked a turning point in both our lives. “I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,” she said in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place I could not dream of or imagine. I wanted to grab her and bring her back, but there was no turning back. Suddenly every point of connection between us had vanished. It didn’t seem possible. She had learned to speak from me; she had heard her first stories from me. Indelible experiences, I thought. And yet from one day to the next we had become strangers.
My first impulse was to blame myself. Somewhat predictably, I tried to tally up the mistakes I had made, what I had failed to provide her, but they weren’t enough to explain what had happened. Nothing was. Briefly, I placed my hope in the doctors, then realized that, beyond the relatively narrow clinical fact of her symptoms, they knew little more about her condition than I did. The underlying mechanisms of psychosis, I would discover, are as shrouded in mystery as they have ever been. And while this left little immediate hope for a cure, it pointed to broader secrets.
It’s something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that on one level it is. But there were moments with my daughter when I had the distressed sense of being in the presence of a rare force of nature, like a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too.
July 5th. I wake up in our apartment on Bank Street, a top floor tenement on one of the more stately blocks in the West Village. The space next to me in the bed is empty: Pat has gone out early, down to her dance studio on Fulton Street, to balance the books, tie up loose ends. We have been married for two years and our life together is still emerging from under the weight of the separate worlds each of us brought along.
What I brought, most palpably, was my teenage daughter Sally, who, I’m a little surprised to discover, isn’t home either. It’s 8:00 AM and the day is already sticky and hot. Sun bakes through the welted tar roof less than three feet above her loft bed. The air conditioner blew our last spare fuse around midnight; Sally must have felt she had to bail out of here just to be able to breathe.
On the living room floor lie the remains of another one of her relentless nights: a cracked Walkman held together by masking tape; a half cup of cold coffee; and the clothbound volume of Shakespeare’s Sonnets which she has been poring over for weeks with growing intensity. Flipping open the book at random I find a blinding crisscross of arrows, definitions, circled words. Sonnet 13 looks like a page from the Talmud: the margins crowded with so much commentary the original text is little more than a speck at the center.
Then there are the papers with Sally’s own poems, composed of lines that come to her (so she informed me a few days ago) like birds flying in a window. I pick up one of these fallen birds:
And when everything should be quiet
your fire fights to burn a river of sleep.
Why should the great breath of hell kiss
what you see, my love?
Last night at around 2:00 AM she was perched on the corduroy couch writing in her notebook to the sound of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations in a continuous loop on her Walkman. I had come home late after celebrating the completion of a job: writing a two hour video about the history of golf, a game I have never played.
“Aren’t you tired?” I asked.
A vigorous shake of her head, a cease and desist hand gesture, while the other hand, the one with the pen in it, scuttled faster across the page. Stinging rudeness. But what I felt was a pang of nostalgia for that period in my own life when I did something similar with the poems of Hart Crane: looking up all those alien jazz-blown words, immersing myself in the sheer (and to me virtually meaningless) energy of his language. I hesitated in the living room doorway, watching her ignore me: her almond-shaped Galician eyes, her hair that doesn’t grow from her head so much as shoot out of it in a wild amber burst, her hunger for language, for words.
These studious nights, I am convinced, are the release of frustrations that have been building in her since the day, almost nine years ago, when she entered first grade. It may be for the sake of symmetry that I think of that as the day Sally’s childhood faded, like the frame in a silent movie where light shrinks to a pinprick at the center of the screen. But that was the way it seemed. She wasn’t learning to read, but her difficulties went deeper. The alphabet was a cryptogram: “R” might as well be a mouth of crooked teeth, “H” an upended chair. She had as much success reading The Cat in the Hat as she would a cat scan. The trick of agreement, of shared meaning, upon which most human exchange is based was eluding her.
It pained me to see this submerged look come over her, as if she had lost her sense of joy. And yet the same words that her eyes could not decipher on the page, her tongue, freed from the fixed symbols of language, mastered with a deftness that allowed for puns, recitations, arguments, speeches, if she deigned to deliver them — all attesting to a bewilderingly sharp intelligence.
One day when I went to pick her up at school, the entrance was mobbed with reporters and news crews. A girl in Sally’s class had been murdered by her father. With a jolt, the crime reawakened me to the fragility of my six year old daughter, the more so because the murderer, Joel Steinberg, and I shared a rough physical resemblance. We were both Ashkenazi Jews, same coloring, same height, same glasses. Tribally, I felt implicated in this crime, guilt by affiliation. In the demonic way that once-unimaginable occurrences have of making their replication inevitable, I felt that Sally and I had been hurled into a new level of danger: in America, Tevye’s great grandchildren were murdering their daughters.
I pushed through the news crush and found her standing in the middle of the throng holding a classmate’s hand. A reporter had thrust a microphone at the girls, fishing for reactions. Sally’s eyes rolled up at him. Her coat was on backwards, her shoelaces untied. Her barrette was dangling uselessly from her hair like an insect that got caught there. I gathered up the girls and shoved a path through the crowd.
It was around this time that Sally’s mother and I split up. We had met in high school and our divorce was like the overly delayed separation of twins: necessary and wrenching. After the upheaval of those months, Sally and I drew closer. I became her advocate, tediously defending her to her teachers, to other parents, to members of our own family flummoxed by the chasm that existed between the way Sally and most everyone else saw the world. Isn’t this chasm the very place where imagination thrives? I argued. Isn’t it the expression of her access to that sublime region of the mind where none of us matches up ever?
“You’re as bright as the rest of them,” I assured her. “Your intelligence is native, it’s inside you, just get through these years, life will change, you’ll see.”
And it did change. We traipsed to learning lab, to affordable specialists at a community center in Chelsea. Admitted to Special Ed. she studied rudimentary word sounds and numbers with the tenacity of a scholar trying to learn a lost language. She seemed to be fighting for capacities inside herself that would die if she failed to crack this code. She succeeded and, seizing on the confidence this inspired, was returned to “the mainstream,” a success of the system. Here the going got rough again, but my promise that sooner or later her dormant talents would spring to life had become credible.
And now it was happening! Bach, Shakespeare, the bubbling hieroglyph of her journals… If she’s up all night it’s because she’s savoring every minute of victory after the trials of those years.
I leave the apartment and head downstairs, five flights through a series of paint-gobbed halls that haven’t been mopped since anyone in the building can remember. July 5th. Independence Day weekend. The Village feels like a hotel whose most demanding guests have departed. Those of us left behind know who we are: the sideman, the proof reader, the lady in the straw hat with plastic grapes dripping from it who saves neighborhood dogs… With their owners on vacation, the burnished townhouses look comatose. Bank Street has succumbed to a state of slow-motion splendor.
I walk toward the coffee shop on Greenwich Avenue where Sally likes to hang out in the morning, then almost collide with her as she rounds our corner. She seems flushed, annoyed, and when I routinely ask her what her plans are she turns on me with a strangely violent look that catches me off guard.
“If you knew what was going through my mind, you wouldn’t ask that question. But you don’t have a clue. You don’t know anything about me. Do you father?”
She rears back her sandaled foot and kicks a nearby garbage can with such force its metal lid clangs to the ground. A neighbor from across the street raises his eyebrows as if to say What have we here? Sally doesn’t seem to notice him or care. There’s something oddly kinetic about her presence, though she’s standing still, staring at me, her fists clenched at her side. Her heart-shaped face is so vivid it alarms me. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I’m out of my depth with a daughter. I grew up one of five brothers in a demimonde of half wild boys. My father spent most of his life dealing scrap metal from a warehouse near the waterfront in Brooklyn. In our home the feminine side of the world was almost non-existent.
When she goes to kick the can again, I place a hand on her shoulder to stop her.
Irritably she shakes me off.
“Do I frighten you, father?”
“Why would you frighten me?”
“You look afraid.”
She bites her lip so hard the blood goes out of it. Her arms are trembling. Why is she acting this way? And why does she keep calling me father in this pressured, phony voice as if delivering stage lines she has learned?
Our neighbor Lou approaches with her even-tempered sheepdog. A welcome sight. Lou’s fondness for Sally dates back almost ten years, when she noticed her instinctual feeling for the vulnerable beings of this world. The more helpless a person, the more Sally poured out her heart to him, sitting with stroke and Alzheimer victims outside the Village Nursing Home, delivering a slice of pizza to the drunk sprawled on Seventh Avenue. Her strongest empathies were reserved for babies. An infant to Sally was cause for reverence. It was as if she understood how easily their lives could be shattered, in some watery moment before memory perhaps, when, on a molecular level, the temperament that is our fate is formed. Given the chance, she would hold a newborn in her arms for hours. It was an affinity I sometimes worried about, as if what she really saw in those babies was the key to some fugitive force in herself that she needed to grasp onto and repair.
Lou would have none of that. “You know what nacchus is? Well, you have it in that girl. She’s a giver, Michael. In a world of grabbers and shitheads, she gives. ”
Which is why Lou’s behavior now is so disturbing. She waves to us from down the street, draws within ten feet and pulls up short. Catching an eyeful of Sally, she thrusts out her hands as if to ward off some evil spirit, yanks the leash on her sheepdog and hurries away.
Her retreat leaves me dumbstruck. I look at Sally who seems unfazed. Her normally warm chestnut eyes are shell-like and dark like they’ve been brushed over with lacquer. From lack of sleep, I assume.
I ask her if she’s okay.
“I’m fine.”
And I think: Lou must have thought we were having an argument and didn’t want to intrude.
“Are you sure? Because you seem really tense. You haven’t been sleeping, and I’ve hardly seen you eat all week.”
“I’m fine.”
“Maybe you should take it easy tonight, lay off the Shakespeare for a while.”
She presses her lips together in an explosive clench and gives a shuddering nod.
Visit the author's website: http://michaelgreenberg.org/
Dewey: There's a Cat in the LibraryBy: Vicki Myron
Reading level: Ages 4-8
Hardcover: 40 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown Young Readers (September 15, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316068748 ISBN-13: 978-0316068741
Product Dimensions: 10 x 9.9 x 0.5 inches The story of Dewey the celebrated library cat is now available for the youngest of readers in this new, fully-illustrated picture book adventure.
When Librarian Vicki Myron finds a young kitten abandoned in the Spencer Library return box, she nurses him back to health, deciding then and there that he will be their library cat, and naming him, appropriately, Dewey Readmore Books. Dewey loves his new home, but once he discovers the littlest library visitors-who like to chase him, pull his tail, and squeeze him extra tight-Dewey begins to wonder if he's truly cut out for the demands of his new job. In the end, he is triumphant as he realizes that helping people big and small is what he is meant to do, and that by sharing his special brand of Dewey love, he can be the best library cat of all.
