James Romberger's response to Hep

[Anonymous]

#582

In “Hep,” Mary Pinard’s child self reacts to the truth about her mother’s deadly ejection from a car as it was flipping, by obsessing on the idea of the body in flight through trapeze acrobatics, an activity that can certainly itself be seen as risky, or at worst life-threatening. Of course so many of us dream of flight (I myself have long had recurring dreams along those lines), but these are fantasies that generally do not intrude on our waking life. In Pinard’s case, these fantasies persisted into her adulthood and in the essay, she describes finally in middle age taking trapeze lessons at an open-air training facility on Manhattan’s West Side piers, a specific location I am very familiar with from my time at BMCC downtown—I would often walk out along the riverside during class breaks and many times I watched as budding trapezists made their first tentative forays on the swinging bars high over the nets.

The problem, I think, was not just that Pinard was orphaned, but that her aunts waited so long before informing the child of the truth. Instead they made up flimsy, deceptive tales that her mother was delayed with the angels “for a while” and would return soon. Indeed, much of Pinard’s essay is taken up with poetic descriptions of the act of flying on a trapeze and the talking about birds etc. seemingly in avoidance of the salient causal factor. In fact, the key issue of her mother’s death isn’t brought into the essay until halfway in, echoing the time-lag before her aunts told her the truth. Again, this is an example of the damage done by family secrets, in this case strange fixations that can develop when a child is left to speculate about a tragedy, by adults who should have known better.

[Website Services Admin]

#590

James, your response made me think that it would be so interesting to write a piece where the narrator is a person watching/enjoying Pinard’s specific class, and describing Pinard from an outsider’s perspective. Both because it would be interesting to write her experience from a witnessing standpoint but also because it may be able to deal with this issue that you bring up about adults who should have known better. The narrator could be the adult who knew better, without knowing it!

Does that make any sense?

[Anonymous]

#615

I wonder if that’s to say she isn’t a reliable narrator? She states her interest predates her mother’s death, or at least discovering the truth about it. “Ever since I can remember, I wanted to fly. And not with the help of anything mechanical or pharmaceutical- I wanted my body, on its own, to fly. I understood very early on that this presented certain obstacles, and I began to imagine ways to overcome them.” But, her young self also has an innate distrust of adults (“I also understood that these flights of fancy were better kept to myself. There was no telling what kinds of limits the adults in my life might impose on me should they discover what, literally, I had going through my mind”), which does beg a question about trust between her now adult self and 1) the reader and 2) herself about the truth of her own interests.

[Author]

Posts