Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

a book of essays. He lives in Brooklyn.

(It is only the present she hates; as soon as the present becomes the past, she immediately begins loving it.) Each time she tells the story it is both the same and different because each time I’m older, and it occurs to me to ask a question I didn’t ask the last time around.

That’s the main thing, I guess, about being a few among the many: it silences you.

Mama thinking everyone around was undeveloped, and most of what they said was ridiculous, became imprinted on me like dye on the most receptive of materials.

with a perpetual smell of summery green.

that taste is colored a tender and brilliant green.

Here, also, I learned that she had the skill and vitality to do her work easily and well but that she disliked it, and set no store by it.

Her running commentary on the life outside the window was my first taste of the fruits of intelligence: she knew how to convert gossip into knowledge.

Life seemed fuller, richer, more interesting when she was making sense of the human activity in the alley. I felt a live connection, then, between us and the world outside the window.

She was attached to Mrs. Roseman because she, too, had been a member of Tenants’ Council Number 29 ten years earlier in a building three neighborhoods away. I had known since early childhood that my parents were fellow travelers of the Communist Party, and that of the two my mother had been the more politically active.

My mother became the head of Tenants’ Council Number 29 in the Bronx (“I was the only woman in the building who could speak English without an accent, so automatically I was voted head”), and continued to act as head until shortly after I was born, when my father made her “stop everything” to stay home with the baby.

One particular memory of their time together in the council, remarkably unpolitical by their own lights, held them both, and they reminisced often about this incident, always with much head shaking and in an atmosphere of shared wonderment. In the middle of the Depression the women of the council rented rooms one summer, for themselves and their families, in a bungalow colony in the Catskill Mountains. Most of the families had taken two rooms in the main building (one for the husband and wife, one for the children), although some could manage only one. The women shared the kitchen, the men came up on weekends. They were fifteen women,

“But, Ma! You were both communists.” “Well, listen,” she says. “We had to save her life.”

She had made such an intolerable romance of her marriage, had impaled us all on the cross of my father’s early death, and here she was telling me that the privacy needed for sexual joy was given up for the good of the children?

but also by her status as a happily married woman. No, I haven’t said that right. Not just happily married. Magically married. Definitively married.

What it was all about was Mama’s worshipful attitude toward the goodness of her married life, accompanied by a sniffing dismissal of all marriages that did not closely resemble hers, and the single-mindedness of her instruction to me in hundreds of ways, over thousands of days, that love was the most important thing in a woman’s life.

If my mother could not identify in another woman responses to a husband or a lover that duplicated her own, it wasn’t love. And love, she said, was everything. A woman’s life was determined by love. All evidence to the contrary—and

was consistently discounted and ignored, blotted out of her discourse, refused admission by her intellect.

Hers was the power of the born storyteller—that is, the one for whom every scrap of experience is only waiting to be given shape and meaning through the miracle of narrative speech.

her the arts—music, painting, literature—were a conduit for pure emotion.

A person’s life was made rich or poor, worth a ransom or something to throw away in the gutter, if it was enhanced by or stripped of feeling.

So there were the Kerners, riddled with hate, secretly locked together in sexual spasm, and there were my parents, loving each other, while their bed rode chastely about in open space.

What did register was that both Mrs. Kerner and my mother adored romantic emotion, and both were married women.

People and all their belongings seemed to evaporate out of an apartment, and others simply took their place. How early I absorbed the circumstantial nature of most attachments. After all, what difference did it really make if we called the next-door neighbor Roseman or Drucker or Zimmerman? It mattered only that there was a next-door neighbor. Nettie, however, would make a difference.

In her eyes was an expression I would see many times in the years ahead but was seeing that day for the first time, and although I had not the language to name it I had the sentience to feel jarred by it. She was calculating the impression this scene was making on me.

“I’m saying that nowadays love has to be earned. Even by mothers and sons.” Her mouth falls open and her eyes deepen with pity. What I have just said is so retarded she may not recover the power of speech.

we become what we often are: two women of remarkably similar inhibitions bonded together by virtue of having lived within each other’s orbit nearly all their lives.

We are so used to thinking of ourselves as a pair of women, ill-starred and incompetent (she widowed, me divorced), endlessly unable to get family life for themselves. Yet, as we stand before the store window, “family life” seems as much a piece of untested fantasy in her as it is in me. The clothes in the window make me feel we have both been confused the whole of our lives about who we are, and how to get there.

And indeed, Nettie sheltered with Richie as though they were both orphaned children: crooning at him, snuggling with him, hiding for days at a time with him under the bedclothes on the double bed

On the darkest of days the brilliant red, black, and green of the plant was an excitement.

Nettie was a talented lacemaker.

her fantasies were simple, repetitious, and boring.

It was the year after my father’s death, the year in which I began to sit on the fire escape late at night making up stories in my head. The atmosphere in our house had become morgue-like. My mother’s grief was primitive and all-encompassing: it sucked the oxygen out of the air.

was lace. A series of flash images confused me. I saw Nettie’s face cradled on a piece of her own lace. I saw myself and the prostitute and Nettie, all of us with our faces laid sadly against small pieces of lace. Not a mantle of lace for any one of us, only these bits and pieces, and all of us sorrowing against the bits and pieces.

I saw myself only as a prop in the extraordinary drama of Mama’s bereavement. I didn’t mind. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be feeling, and I hadn’t the time to find out.

I remember thinking, She doesn’t understand. Papa’s gone, and Mama obviously is going any minute now. If I cry I won’t be able to see her. If I don’t see her she’s going to disappear. And then I’ll be alone. Thus began my conscious obsession with keeping Mama in sight.

Disaster seemed imminent rather than already accomplished.

but these moments are without clarity or sharpness of outline. They pall in memory beside the brilliant relentlessness of Mama’s derangement.

Mama was where I belonged. With Mama the issue was clear: I had trouble breathing but I was safe.

I do not make a holocaust of the afternoon. Today, it appears, one of those moments is upon us.

“I’m jealous,” my mother blurts at me. “I’m jealous she lived her life, I didn’t live mine.”

As it was, it seemed to me that she lay on a couch in a half-darkened room for twenty-five years with her hand across her forehead murmuring, “I can’t.” Even though she could, and did.

It was as though she had worked all day to earn the despair waiting faithfully for her at the end of her unwilling journey into daily life.

Weekends, of course, the depression was unremitting.

For five years she did not go to a movie, a concert, a public meeting. She worked, and she suffered.

Widowhood provided Mama with a higher form of being. In refusing to recover from my father’s death she had discovered that her life was endowed with a seriousness her years in the kitchen had denied her. She remained devoted to this seriousness for thirty years. She never tired of it, never grew bored or restless in its company, found new ways to keep alive the interest it deserved and had so undeniably earned.

I saw that Mama had assumed her widowhood in much the same way. It elevated her in her own eyes, made of her a spiritually significant person, lent richness to her gloom and rhetoric to her speech. Papa’s death became a religion that provided ceremony and doctrine. A woman-who-has-lost-the-love-of-her-life was now her orthodoxy: she paid it Talmudic attention.

I woke up guilty and went to bed guilty, and on weekends the guilt accumulated into low-grade infection.

For years I thought the dream needed no interpretation, but now I think I longed to get my father across the threshold not out of guilt and sexual competition but so that I could get free of Mama. My skin crawled with her. She was everywhere, all over me, inside and out. Her influence clung, membrane-like, to my nostrils, my eyelids, my open mouth. I drew her into me with every breath I took. I drowsed in her etherizing atmosphere, could not escape the rich and claustrophobic character of her presence, her being, her suffocating suffering femaleness.

“You never really enjoyed it like we did. You were always so critical. For such a little kid you were amazing. It’s like you knew you were more intelligent than anyone else around, and you were always seeing how silly or pointless or ridiculous—your favorite word—everything was.