Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

We are quiet together for a while. Then I say, “Ma, if it was now, and Papa said he didn’t want you to work, what would you do?” She looks at me for a long moment. She is eighty years old. Her eyes are dim, her hair is white, her body is frail. She takes a swallow of her tea, puts down the cup, and says calmly,“I’d tell him to go fuck himself.” Real surprise.

“Ah, leave me alone,” she says in deep trembling disgust. I stare at her retreating back. That dismissiveness of hers: it will be the last thing to go. In fact, it will never go. It is the emblem of her speech, the idiom of her being, that which establishes her in her own eyes. The dismissal of others is to her the struggle to rise from the beasts, to make distinctions, to know the right and the wrong of a thing, to not think it unimportant, ever, that the point be made. Suddenly her life presses on my heart.

We are each less interested in justice than we used to be. The antagonism between us is no longer relentless. We have survived our common life, if not together at least in each other’s presence, and there is a peculiar comradeship between us now. But the habit of accusation and retaliation is strong so our conversation is slightly mad these days.

When I see the furious self-pity vanish from her face I allow my own to evaporate. If in the middle of a provocative exchange she says, “Well, that’s the mother you got, it would have been better with another one, too damned bad this is the one you got,” and I nod, “You can say that again,” we both start laughing at the same time. Neither one of us, it seems, wishes to remain belligerent one sentence longer than the other. We are, I think, equally amazed that we have lived long enough to be responsive for whole minutes at a time simply to being in the world together, rather than concentrating on what each of us is or is not getting from the other.

This little bit of space provides me with the intermittent but useful excitement that comes of believing I begin and end with myself.

Life is difficult: a glory and a punishment. Ideas are excitement, glamorous company. Loneliness eats into me. When the balance between struggle and self-pity is maintained I feel myself one of the Odd Women—that is, I see myself on a continuum of that amazing two-hundred-year effort—and I am fortified, endowed with new spirit, new will. When the balance is lost I feel buried alive in failure and deprivation, without love or connection. Friendships are random, conflicts prevail, work is the sum of its disabilities.

“I’ve not been successful. Neither at love, nor at work, nor at living a principled life. It is also true I made no choices, took no stands, stumbled into my life because I was angry and jealous of the world beyond my reach. But still! Don’t I get any credit for spotting a good idea, Ma? That one should try to live one’s life? Doesn’t that count, Ma? That counts for nothing, Ma?”