Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

too. She had a way of walking up the block that had made me uncomfortable from the time I was ten years old. She walked like no other woman in the neighborhood. A woman’s walk might be brisk or lazy, but inevitably it was the errand-bound walk of a housewife; her legs were attached to her torso for the strict purpose of useful locomotion, she was not walking to feel her body in motion or to have its movement acknowledged or responded to. Nettie was. Her walk was slow and deliberate. She moved first one haunch, then the other, making her hips sway. Everyone knew this woman was going nowhere, that she was walking to walk, walking to feel the effect she had on the street. Her walk insisted on the flesh beneath the clothes. It said, “This body has the power to make you want.” There was nothing like her for a thousand miles around. Men and women alike hungered for her. It was awful. I could see she aroused strong emotion, but that emotion seemed bound up with punishment not privilege. The way people looked at her—the cruelty in the men, the anger in the women—made me fearful. I felt her in danger. Nettie walking up the block became woven into the fabric of early anxiety.

That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing.

A woman in the movement once said, “We were all either stars or groupies.” By groupies she meant the women who had swum in the orbit of the ordinarily accomplishing men they had married and stayed married to. By stars she meant the rest of us: those who bucked and kicked against the allotted destiny, could neither make a proper marriage nor walk away from marriage altogether. I remember entering graduate school at Berkeley and being confronted for the first time by the two kinds of women who conformed to this model. Later I realized it was all there, in that small tight world, relations between the sexes as I would ever know them.