Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

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.