Come Sunday: A Novel by Isla Morley Page B

were his hands, claiming, to begin with, the inanimate parts of me.
    “Do you have children?” I asked, digressing.
    “No, but my wife—my ex-wife—and I talked about it. She said she didn’t want children, but I thought she’d come around . . . She has now, with her new husband,” he said, and his hands ceased moving, came to rest in a clasp in front of him. “They say children change your life one hundred and eighty degrees. Is that true?”
    I rolled my eyes in reply and nodded. “Yes. And when it’s not dizzying, you sometimes see that one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turns mean better views.”
    “Ah yes.”
     

     
    “I AM SO VERY SORRY for your loss, Abbe,” Sal now says. “This is for you.” Pressing into my palm a tarnished filigreed heart, he explains, “It was my mother’s.” It is heavy like a stone, and when I spring open the latch, the locket reveals a tiny pen-and-ink drawing of Cleo’s face. A view from a thousand miles away.
    “Didn’t you get my letter?” I ask.
    “Please,” he implores when I look up at him, ready to return the gift. “Take it.”
    Dizzying views. They don’t have merry-go-rounds anymore. Why is that? Playgrounds are static these days. Everything is safe, bolted down, rustproof. They’re paved with squidgy material so if there is a landing to be had by anyone, it is a safe one, no harm done. I’m all for that. But in exchange for safety we have given up merry-go-rounds. Cleo never knew the thrill of a merry-go-round. She never knew what it was like to hang on to a metal bar, one foot cemented to the circular wooden platform, the other kicking up speed till everything spun crazily, hanging on tight to keep from flying off. There were no thoughts of landing on hard concrete, of getting concussed or having the wind knocked out of you. There was only spinning trees and the blurred horizon, the still air suddenly whipped into froth; and the pull. A tug so hard it turned your knuckles white with the fighting of it. A tug that wrapped its invisible arms around you, its one hundred invisible arms, and tried pulling and prying you from that speeding platform. It was a pull that made thecells in your body pop with excitement, that made something race around under your skin, made percussion instruments of your internal organs. And instead of screaming in fear, you could only laugh, hysterically, the way you weren’t supposed to, inches away from being splattered. And when the world slowed down and the risk of falling ebbed, you stuck your foot back out on the earth and pushed and pushed and pushed till the world went around at a dizzying speed again. This time you’d risk a little more: lean out from the platform, tip your head back, close your eyes, and let the day contract into a single great battle between holding on and the tempting desire to let go.
    That’s what Sal was. My merry-go-round.
    Each time he came by my office, I heard that platform creak as I stepped on it. Each time I put out my foot and gave a tentative push. When he left, everything slowed, everything became so infuriatingly solid, immovable, predictable once again. Things didn’t move. Objects didn’t fly about. Not the cabinets or the desk or the house. Or Greg. Dear bolted-down, rustproof, net-protected Greg.
    If Greg was a piece of playground equipment, he would be the sandbox. It is hard to get hurt in the sandbox, and I had loved that about him right from the start. After my father, it was all I ever wanted in a man. If not happy, I might have been content within those boundaries if someone hadn’t had to go pointing out the merry-go-round.
    There’s been a death in the family , is what I thought when Sal and I were in the janitor’s closet. I was expecting sparks, not tears, but tears there were, surprising tears because there was nothing to cry about. A man was holding me with the tenderest of looks. And, not speaking, he reached across the spinning gap and wiped them with his thumb, the