Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

(It is only the present she hates; as soon as the present becomes the past, she immediately begins loving it.)

an exciting edge to things that was openly feared but secretly welcomed.

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

I felt a live connection, then, between us and the world outside the window.

Her eyes were everywhere at once,

Papa’s love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety.

the one for whom every scrap of experience is only waiting to be given shape and meaning through the miracle of narrative speech.

These she repeated ten or twenty times with no diminution of interest on either her part or ours.

They didn’t lead decent lives, they lived hidden lives.

“The unhappiness has to be made alive before anything can happen.”

I know from experience she will remember this afternoon as a deeply pleasurable one. I also know she will not be able to tell anyone why it has been pleasurable. She enjoys thinking, only she doesn’t know it. She has never known it.

My mother had never urged me not to lose pleasure, even if it was only the pleasure of the sunny street.

There was suddenly about her an aristocracy of physical being. Her beauty deepened. She was untouchable.

My hand was always threatening to shoot away from my body out toward her face, her arm, her side.

My mother’s wishes are simple but they are not negotiable. She experiences them as necessities.

When we stand as we do now, before a store window, forced to realize there are women who dress with deliberation, we are aware of mutual disability, and 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.

it was the way Nettie placed and arranged things, a gift she had for creating grace and beauty where there had been none before.

My mother, an expert walker in the city (not to mention seat-grabber on the subway), is elbowing her way free of the crowd, with me right behind her.

and his mouth would pull downward into the sullen silence he adopted as a permanent means of survival.

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.

The way I remembered it, Mama had center stage at all times.

Still, it was Mama who occupied the dramatic center of the event while the rest of us shuffled about in the background, moving without tears or speech through a sludge of gray misery.

Mama who must be watched and attended to, Mama whose mortal agony threatened general breakdown. Disaster seemed imminent rather than already accomplished.

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

On and on she’ll go, the way she does when she thinks she doesn’t understand something and she’s scared, and she’s taking refuge in scorn and hypercriticality.

On occasion, my head fails to fill with blood. I become irritated but remain calm. Not falling into a rage, I do not make a holocaust of the afternoon.

They were so beautiful it was hard to look directly at them.

She knew of no other way to make herself feel better than to make people want her.

I have agreed to walk with my mother late in the day but I’ve come uptown early to wander by myself, feel the sun, take in the streets, be in the world without the interceding interpretations of a companion as voluble as she.

We had been initiated, had learned the difference between hidden and expressed thought. This made us subversives in our own homes.

“He’s been pickled in alcohol for fifteen years.”

The way we slept was emblematic of our relationship: we lay curled around ourselves facing each other.

He found it unbearable to live in a world he could not make sense of. If he couldn’t make sense of things he couldn’t act, and to act was his necessity.

I told him how sometimes I wake spontaneously in the night and I sit up in bed and I’m alone in the middle of the world.

For the first time, what a lover did when he was not with me was of no real concern; in fact, it was none of my business. This was an experience. Imagine. I was living entirely in the moment, with no formal assurance beyond tomorrow morning’s telephone call, and I found myself interested; not sad tearful frightened or resentful, only interested.

I saw errant impulses die before they could make trouble. I saw reflexive anger give way to analytic understanding.

“I am the repository of your life now, Ma.”