Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

They never spoke as though they knew who they were, understood the bargain they had struck with life, but they often acted as though they knew. Shrewd, volatile, unlettered, they performed on a Dreiserian scale. There would be years of apparent calm, then suddenly an outbreak of panic and wildness: two or three lives scarred (perhaps ruined), and the turmoil would subside. Once again: sullen quiet, erotic torpor, the ordinariness of daily denial. And 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. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood.

My relationship with my mother is not good, and as our lives accumulate it often seems to worsen. We are locked into a narrow channel of acquaintance, intense and binding. For years at a time there is an exhaustion, a kind of softening, between us. Then the rage comes up again, hot and clear, erotic in its power to compel attention. These days it is bad between us. My mother’s way of “dealing” with the bad times is to accuse me loudly and publicly of the truth.

We don’t love each other on these walks, often we are raging at each other, but we walk anyway.

(It is only the present she hates; as soon as the present becomes the past, she immediately begins loving it.) Each time she tells the story it is both the same and different because each time I’m older, and it occurs to me to ask a question I didn’t ask the last time around.

That’s the main thing, I guess, about being a few among the many: it silences you.

She knew that, compared with the women around her, she was “developed”—a person of higher thought and feeling—so what was there to think about? “Developed” was one of her favorite words. If Mrs. Zimmerman spoke loudly in the hall on a Saturday morning, we, sitting in the kitchen just behind our apartment door, would stare at each other and, inevitably, my mother would shake her head and pronounce, “An undeveloped woman.”

Mama thinking everyone around was undeveloped, and most of what they said was ridiculous, became imprinted on me like dye on the most receptive of materials.

I leaned out the kitchen window with a sense of expectancy I can still taste in my mouth, and that taste is colored a tender and brilliant green.

Her running commentary on the life outside the window was my first taste of the fruits of intelligence: she knew how to convert gossip into knowledge.

Or she’d catch a fast exchange and diagnose a cooling friendship. This skill of hers warmed and excited me. Life seemed fuller, richer, more interesting when she was making sense of the human activity in the alley. I felt a live connection, then, between us and the world outside the window.

She played cards obsessively, chain-smoked, and was openly uninterested in her family.

How she loved saying, “Then we would organize, and carry on.” There was more uncomplicated pleasure in her voice when she repeated those words than in any others I ever heard her speak.

That summer my mother discovered that Pessy had “a real appetite, you know what I mean?” And Singer turned out to be a pain in the ass. “She was always fainting. No matter what happened, Singer’s eyes would start rolling, and she was going under.” And Kornfeld, well, Kornfeld was another story.

Another year my mother startled me by saying, “That Kornfeld. She hated herself. That’s why she did it.” I asked her to explain what she meant by “hated herself.” She couldn’t.

Love in my mother’s lexicon wasn’t love, it was love. Feeling of a high order, a spiritual nature, a moral cast.

Every neighborhood had a village idiot or a holy fool; we had three. There was Tom, the sixty-year-old delivery boy who worked for the butcher. He’d carry a package of meat on the run, stop suddenly, throw the package down on the sidewalk, shake his finger at it, and announce: “I’m not going to carry you anymore, you lousy thing you!”

She was a terrible housekeeper who never stopped keeping house. At all times she had a rag tied around her head, a feather duster in her hand, and an expression of confusion in her eyes.

My heart would beat faster as she spoke, my attention press itself against the unexpectedness of her details. Mrs. Kerner was a spellbinder. Hers was the power of the born storyteller—that is, the one for whom every scrap of experience is only waiting to be given shape and meaning through the miracle of narrative speech.

She is talking, talking at tedious, obfuscating length, about a cousin of mine who is considering divorce.

last, she feels interrupted. She turns to him. “What is it?” she says. “What do you want from me? Tell me.” He tells her. She hears him out. Then she straightens her shoulders, draws herself up to her full five feet two inches, and announces: “Young man, I am a Jew and a socialist. I think that’s more than enough for one lifetime, don’t you?”

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.”

My mother’s loyalty once engaged was unswerving. Loyalty, however, did not prevent her from judging Nettie; it only made her voice her reservations in a manner rather more indirect than the one to which she was accustomed.

“Don’t ‘oh, God’ me. That’s right. She’s his mother. Plain and simple. She went without so that he could have.” “Have what? Her madness? Her anxiety?”

“Hot,” my mother says to the heavy-lidded, black-haired waiter approaching our table very slowly. “I want my coffee hot.”

The air is sweeter than before, warmer, fuller, with a hint of rain now at its bright gray edge. Delicious! A surge of expectation rises without warning in me but, as usual, does not get very far. Instead of coming up straight and clear it twists about, turns inward, and quickly stifles itself to death; a progress with which I am depressingly familiar.

When we stand as we do now, before a store window, forced to realize there are women who dress with deliberation, we are aware of mutual disability, and we become what we often are: two women of remarkably similar inhibitions bonded together by virtue of having lived within each other’s orbit nearly all their lives.

Periodically, Mama would wade into Nettie’s kitchen and in two or three hours of concentrated labor make order and shining cleanliness. Then she’d turn to Nettie as though to say, “Now you’re all set. Start your life.”

(there was no moment when Nettie wasn’t recovering from motherhood).

“Who is she?” “She’s a prostitute.” “A what?” “That’s a person without a home,” my mother said. “Oh,” I said.

Still, the difference between the living room and the kitchen was the difference between suffocation and survival. The living room was all monotonous dread, congealed and airless. Here you took a deep breath, held it until you were smothering, then either got out or went under. In the kitchen there was pitch and tone, the atmosphere fell and rose, dwindled away, churned itself up again. There was movement and space, light and air. You could breathe. You could live.

“Can you ladies let me have a thousand dollars for a martini?” he inquires. My mother looks directly into his face. “I know we’re in an inflation,” she says, “but a thousand dollars for a martini?”

That’s ridiculous. Sometimes I think I was born saying, “That’s ridiculous.” It shoots out of me as easily as good-morning-good-evening-have-a-nice-day-take-care. It is my most on-automatic response.

“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.”

His clothes were out of the men’s shelter, and his face so ill-looking you wanted to put him in a hospital for a month before we even discussed the situation.

She continued to stare after him as he shambled down Broadway, bumping into people left and right. “You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.”

“It’s not a monastery, Ma.” I said. “It’s just a church near Gimbel’s.”

Everyone knew this woman was going nowhere, that she was walking to walk, walking to feel the effect she had on the street.

Nettie walking up the block became woven into the fabric of early anxiety.

A glorious day, today: New York hard-edged in the clear autumn sun, buildings sharply outlined against the open sky, streets crowded with pyramids of fruits and vegetables, flowers in papier-mâché vases cutting circles on the sidewalk, newspaper stands vivid in black and white. On Lexington Avenue, in particular, an outpouring of lovely human bustle at noon, a density of urban appetites and absorptions.

Mama and Nettie quarreled, and I entered City College. In feeling memory these events carry equal weight.

But secretly we had begun to live in a world inside our heads where we read talked thought in a way that separated us from our parents, the life of the house and that of the street.

At City College I sat talking in a basement cafeteria until ten or eleven at night with a half dozen others who also never wanted to go home to Brooklyn or the Bronx, and here in the cafeteria my education took root.

Here my love of literature named itself, and amazement over the life of the mind blossomed. I discovered that people were transformed by ideas, and that intellectual conversation was immensely erotic.

but certainly we talked so much because most of us had been reading in bottled-up silence from the age of six on and City College was our great release. It was not from the faculty that City drew its reputation for intellectual goodness, it was from its students, it was from us. Not that we were intellectually distinguished, we weren’t; but our hungry energy vitalized the place. The idea of intellectual life burned in us. While we pursued ideas we felt known, to ourselves and to one another. The world made sense, there was ground beneath our feet, a place in the universe to stand. City College made conscious in me inner cohesion as a first value.

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. She was taken by violent surprise.

I was seventeen, she was fifty. I had not yet come into my own as a qualifying belligerent but I was a respectable contender and she, naturally, was at the top of her game.

We were all indulging ourselves. Nettie wanted to seduce, Mama wanted to suffer, I wanted to read. None of us knew how to discipline herself to the successful pursuit of an ideal, normal woman’s life. And indeed, none of us ever achieved it.

But in New York nothing gets separated out, so people’s lives are also being delivered up on the street. A man standing at an open phone booth kicks insanely at the side of the booth while he shouts into the receiver, “I told you I’m coming! Didn’t I tell you I’m coming? Why do you keep asking me if I’m coming?”

When I was a child the feel of things went into me: deep, narrow, intense. The grittiness of the street, the chalk-white air of the drugstore, the grain of the wooden floor in the storefront library, the blocks of cheese in the grocery-store refrigerator. I took it all so seriously, so literally. I was without imagination.

It would be years before I learned that extraordinary focus, that excluding insistence, is also called depression.