Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

I—the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image—I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face.

‘Cessa, tell your father this is America, Cessa, America. You’re a free woman.’ She looks at me and she says to me, ‘What do you mean, tell my father this is America? He was born in Brooklyn.’”

She seemed never to be troubled by the notion that there might be two sides to a story, or more than one interpretation of an event.

“A woman knows if she loves a man,” my mother would say. “If she doesn’t know she doesn’t love him.”

Mr. Kerner, like my father, worked in the garment district. He was a handsome, silent man with thick gray hair and cold blue eyes, who lived in my imagination as a perpetual source of fear and anxiety. His wife and daughter welcomed his departure and dreaded his arrival. His presence not only put an immediate stop to afternoon good times in the Kerner apartment, it was perceived as threatening. When Mrs. Kerner went stiff and alert at five-thirty, put her forefinger up in the air, and said, “Quiet! He’s coming!” it was as though Bluebeard were about to walk through the door.

Divorce everywhere, and if not divorce, this. What a generation you all are!” “Don’t start, Ma,” I say. “I don’t want to hear that bullshit again.” “Bullshit here, bullshit there,” she says, “it’s still true. Whatever else we did, we didn’t fall apart in the streets like you’re all doing. We had order, quiet, dignity. Families stayed together, and people lived decent lives.” “That’s a crock. They didn’t lead decent lives, they lived hidden lives. You’re not going to tell me people were happier then, are you?” “No,” she capitulates instantly. “I’m not saying that.” “Well, what are you saying?” She frowns and stops talking. Searches around in her head to find out what she is saying. Ah, she’s got it. Triumphant, accusing, she says, “The unhappiness is so alive today.” Her words startle and gratify me. I feel pleasure when she says a true or a clever thing. I come close to loving her. “That’s the first step, Ma,” I say softly. “The unhappiness has to be made alive before anything can happen.”

“I was standing on the avenue,” she tells me, “waiting for the light to change, and a little girl, maybe seven years old, was standing next to me. All of a sudden, before the light changed, she stepped out into the street. I pulled her back onto the sidewalk and I said to her, ‘Darling, never never cross on the red. Cross only on the green.’ The kid looks at me with real pity in her face and she says, ‘Lady, you’ve got it all upside down.’” “That kid’s not gonna make it to eight,” I say. “Just what I was thinking.” My mother laughs.

Say what you will, children don’t love their parents as they did when I was young.” “Ma, do you really believe that?” “I certainly do! My mother died in my sister’s arms, with all her children around her. How will I die, will you please tell me? They probably won’t find me for a week. Days pass. I don’t hear from you. Your brother I see three times a year. The neighbors? Who? Who’s there to check on me? Manhattan is not the Bronx, you know.” “Exactly. That’s what this is all about. Manhattan is not the Bronx. 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.” “Call it what you want,” she replies angrily, “it was a more human way to live.”

“We are a cursed people,” the speaker announces. “Periodically we are destroyed, we struggle up again, we are reborn. That is our destiny.” The words act like adrenaline on my mother. Her cheeks begin to glow. Tears brighten her eyes. Her jawline grows firm. Her skin achieves muscle tone. “Come inside,” she says softly to me, thinking to do me a good turn. “Come. You’ll feel better.” I shake my head no. “Being Jewish can’t help me anymore,” I tell her. She holds tightly to my arm. She neither confirms nor denies my words, only looks directly into my face. “Remember,” she says. “You are my daughter. Strong. You must be strong.” “Oh Ma!” I cry, and my frightened greedy freedom-loving life wells up in me and spills down my soft-skinned face, the one she has given me.

Nettie accepted my mother’s labor not as a young woman might watching an older one in order to learn how to do it herself, but rather like a child being temporarily saved by a somewhat officious older sister.

I never daydreamed about love or money, I always daydreamed I was making eloquent speeches that stirred ten thousand people to feel their lives, and to act.

“Have you seen her?” I asked. “Sure,” he said. “Who is she?” “She’s a prostitute.” “A what?” “That’s a person without a home,” my mother said.

“Tell me something,” she says. “Is Maddy what they call a homosexual?” “Yes,” I say. “What do homosexuals do?” she asks. “They do everything you do, Ma.” “What do you mean?” “They fuck just like you do.” “How do they do that? Where?” “In the ass.” “That must be painful.” “Sometimes it is. Mostly it’s not.” “Do they get married?” she laughs. “Some do. Most don’t.” “Are they lonely?” “As lonely as we are, Ma.”

The tears fell and rose and filled the hallway and ran into the kitchen and down across the living room and pushed against the walls of the two bedrooms and washed us all away.

I never cried. Not once. I heard a woman murmur, “Unnatural child.” 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.

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

“If Davey had left Essex Street at eighteen he wouldn’t be spiritual today,” I said. “He’s looking for a way to put his life together, and he’s got no equipment with which to do it. So he turned religious. It’s a mark of how lost he is, not how found he is, that he’s a rabbi in Jerusalem.”

When was the first I knew something about her in a world where men were sex, but women?—weren’t we just supposed to get out of the way when we saw it coming?

It’s not what she wears, one would say, it’s the way she wears it. It’s not what she says so much, it’s the way she says it. It’s not the expression on her face, it’s sort of the whole face. You know what I mean?

She doesn’t know I take her anxiety personally, feel annihilated by her depression.

it wasn’t really a matter of what I could or could not do with the degree. We were people who knew how to stay alive, she never doubted I would find a way. No, what drove her, and divided us, was me thinking. She hadn’t understood that going to school meant I would start thinking: coherently and out loud.

The lines were drawn, and we did not fail one another. Each of us rose repeatedly to the bait the other one tossed out.

One Saturday afternoon she was lying on the couch. I was reading in a nearby chair. Idly she asked, “What are you reading?” Idly I replied, “A comparative history of the idea of love over the last three hundred years.” She looked at me for a moment. “That’s ridiculous,” she said slowly. “Love is love. It’s the same everywhere, all the time. What’s to compare?” “That’s absolutely not true,” I shot back. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s only an idea, Ma. That’s all love is. Just an idea. You think it’s a function of the mysterious immutable being, but it’s not! There is, in fact, no such thing as the mysterious immutable being …” Her legs were off the couch so fast I didn’t see them go down. She made fists of her hands, closed her eyes tight, and howled, “I’ll kill you-u-u! Snake in my bosom, I’ll kill you. How dare you talk to me that way?” And then she was coming at me. She was small and chunky. So was I. But I had thirty years on her. I was out of the chair faster than her arm could make contact, and running, running through the apartment, racing for the bathroom, the only room with a lock on it. The top half of the bathroom door was a panel of frosted glass. She arrived just as I turned the lock, and couldn’t put the brakes on. She drove her fist through the glass, reaching for me. Blood, screams, shattered glass on both sides of the door. I thought that afternoon, One of us is going to die of this attachment.

That was her favorite euphemism for intercourse: “You’ve tasted him, haven’t you.” The phrase never failed to shock. I felt it in my nerve endings. The melodrama of repression, the malice of passivity, the rage over an absence of power, all of it packed into those words and I knew it from the first time I heard them.

who was I to doubt what all around subscribed to? Wasn’t my mother as good as saying with every breath she drew, “Life without a man is unlivable”? And wasn’t Nettie actually saying, “Men are scum but you gotta have one”?

When a woman can’t tell a man to go to hell, I have noticed, she is often crazy.”

The knowledge that work is patient, sustained labor—no more, no less—was not a wisdom he had as yet taken in very much better than I had.

These were years when women like myself were being called New, Liberated, Odd (myself I preferred Odd, I still do), and indeed, I was new, liberated, odd during the day when I sat at the desk, but at night when I lay on the couch staring into space my mother materialized in the air before me, as if to say, “Not so fast, my dear. All is not done between us.”

His intelligence was like a piece of railroad track severed at either end from the main connection, with a single train car riding it back and forth between stations, imitating motion and journey.

I realized it was not me he was adoring, I knew it was the hungriness that had awakened in him, yet I lay back on the bed smiling secretly to myself, exactly as though what I knew to be true wasn’t true at all.

This appetite we had for arguing the point right down to the ground was a measure of how fundamental a weapon we both conceived the articulating intelligence to be. If we could each persuade the other to see the truth as we saw it, the world would somehow turn on its axis and all that thwarted us would be emptied out into harmless space. We paid no real attention to the fact that we quarreled continuously.

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.

Then a day came when I also saw that learning to live without a future is a sterile exercise: what looks like life within a walled garden is really life inside a renovated prison yard.

Joe was the most socialized man I have ever known. His sense of life was generic: at any given moment any one of twenty-five people could fill the spot for the wife, the lover, the friend. He considered it childish to think human happiness devolved on a particularity of attachment or circumstance. He said the point is to make as much world as possible in whatever small clearing is allotted one.

It was the tone of his voice I never forgot. The slightly puzzled irritation in it. As though he had, of course, already given me this information and he couldn’t understand how it was I had forgotten it. I remember afterward thinking: gaslight.

“Your mother. She thinks because onions don’t grow on top of her head she’s the rabbi’s wife.”

However much I sought to differentiate myself, I seemed always to end up like Mama, lying on the couch staring into space.

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.”

“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?”