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(It is only the present she hates; as soon as the present becomes the past, she immediately begins loving it.)
That’s the main thing, I guess, about being a few among the many: it silences you.
Your mother didn’t die in her daughter’s arms because your sister loved her more than we love you. Your sister hated your mother, and you know it. She was there because it was her duty to be there, and because she lived around the corner all her married life. It had nothing to do with love. It wasn’t a better life, it was an immigrant life, a working-class life, a life from another century.”
two or three hundred Jews sit listening to the testimonials that commemorate their unspeakable history. These testimonials are the glue that binds. They remind and persuade. They heal and connect. Let people make sense of themselves. The speeches drone on.
With Mama the issue was clear: I had trouble breathing but I was safe.
Mourning Papa became her profession, her identity, her persona.
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 was living on First Avenue at Twentieth Street in two whitewashed rooms flooded with eastern light, and a tree outside that filled the window in spring and summer with birds and foliage. Across the avenue Stuyvesant Town, one of the oldest middle-income housing projects in the city. On my side
“You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.”
As I approach the museum some German Expressionist drawings in a gallery window catch my eye. I walk through the door, turn to the wall nearest me, and come face to face with two large Nolde watercolors, the famous flowers. I’ve looked often at Nolde’s flowers, but now it’s as though I am seeing them for the first time: that hot lush
The lines were drawn, and we did not fail one another. Each of us rose repeatedly to the bait the other one tossed out. Our storms shook the apartment: paint blistered on the wall, linoleum cracked on the floor, glass shivered in the window frame. We barely kept our hands off one another, and more than once we approached disaster.
Things happen, an attraction begins, you act on it. Sometimes, way in the back of your mind, for a fraction of a second, you think: Could this be serious? Is it possible this man will become my intimate? my partner? But mainly you push the thought away, because this is our life, Ma. Affairs. Episodes. Passions that run their course.
By now I’m not a character in a Doris Lessing story, I am a Doris Lessing story.
My husband was small (my size); blond (“insignificant-looking,” as Mama put it); foreign (he couldn’t defend himself in English). We were drawn to each other by a common love of the arts, but he was a visionary painter and in me literature had aroused the critical faculty. He was wordless, I was all words. In him repression was demonic, in me explosive. Most of the time he brooded, twice a year he drank himself into a stupor. I remained sober and a scornful tongue was my constant companion.
All the differences were negotiable except one: I talked better than he did and I used words like a weapon. That knocked us hopelessly off balance. I opened my mouth and power was mine: I could slice, cut, and pin; thrust, batter, and storm. He was helpless before the amazing siege.
Me, I was ready. It was they who didn’t want a wife who talked back, they who were afraid of a woman like me. The contempt poured into those words “afraid of a woman like me.” Such fear was low, cunning, perverse, scurvy and wormlike. A man who was afraid of a woman like me deserved the
kind of tongue-lashing that would leave him paralyzed from the waist down.
Mary McCarthy had written of the men her own fictional surrogate fell in love with: If they were clever they were funny-looking, if they were virile they were stupid. That equation read like hard-won wisdom to me, and to many of my friends. We quoted McCarthy at one another triumphantly. Her elegant phrasing elevated our condition from the level of complaint to that of fixed truth.
We cannot depend on change, but we can depend on surprise.
