Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (22 page)

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Authors: Vivian Gornick

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“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.
“What I’ve lived through,” my mother will sigh.
“You haven’t lived through anything,” I will retort.
“You have some damned nerve,” she will shout, “to say that to me.”
Silence. Anger. Separation.
Unexpectedly, her face clears and she says, “You know what farmer cheese costs now? You wouldn’t believe it. Two-fifty-eight a pound.”
And I’m willing, I’m willing. 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.
But it has no staying power, this undreamed-of equanimity. It drifts, it gets lost, flashes up with unreliable vibrancy, then refuses to appear when most needed, or puts in an appearance with its strength much reduced. The state of affairs between us is volatile. Flux is now our daily truth. The instability is an astonishment, shot through with mystery and promise. We are no longer nose to nose, she and
I. A degree of distance has been permanently achieved. I glimpse the joys of detachment. This little bit of space provides me with the intermittent but useful excitement that comes of believing I begin and end with myself.
 
 
 
 
It is August: New York under siege. A mountain of airless heat presses down on the streets of the city. Not a bit of summer sensuality in this heat. This heat is only oppressive.
Yesterday I sat with a friend drinking iced tea in Paley Park, recovering for a moment from the exhaustion of the day. The wall of rushing water behind us created a three-sided courtyard of miraculous cool. We gazed out at the street shimmering only fifty feet from where we sat.
My friend and I, usually quite talkative, spoke listlessly of this and that: projected work, work in hand, a movie he had seen, a book I was reading, a mutual friend’s new love affair. I thought I had been equally responsive to all of our small talk, but then my friend said to me, “You’re remarkably uninterested in men.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Every other woman I know, or man for that matter, if they’ve been without as long as you have, it’s on their minds constantly. First priority. Not you. You seem never to think about it.”
As he spoke I saw myself lying on a bed in late afternoon, a man’s face buried in my neck, his hand moving slowly up my thigh over my hip, our bodies striped with
bars of hot light coming through the window blinds. The image burned through me in seconds. I felt stunned by loss: the fun and sweetness of love, the deliciousness, the shimmer. I swallowed hard on empty air.
“No,” I said. “I guess I don’t.”
 
 
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.
Tonight I am hanging on by my fingernails, barely able to hold it all together. I sit at my mother’s kitchen table, drinking coffee. We have just eaten dinner. She stands at the sink washing her dishes. We are both edgy tonight. “It’s the heat,” she says. The apartment is air-conditioner cool, but we both love real air too much. We have turned off the machine and opened the window. For a minute the crowded noisy avenue down below invades the room, but very quickly its rush subsides into white noise, background buzz. We return almost without a pause to our own restless gloom.
My mother is conversant with all that is on my mind. She is also familiar with the usual order of my litany of complaint: work, friends, money. This evening yesterday’s
conversation in Paley Park seems to drift in the window on the sexy summer air, and to my own surprise I find myself saying, “It
would
be nice to have a little love right now.”
I expect my mother to laugh and say, “What’s with you tonight?” Instead, not even looking up from the dishes, she goes on automatic and says to me, “Well, now perhaps you can have a little sympathy for
me.”
I look up slowly at her. “What?” I say. I’m not sure I have heard right. “What was that you said?”
“I said maybe you can understand now what my life was like when Papa died. What it’s been like all these years. Now that you’re suffering from the absence of love yourself, maybe you can understand.”
I stare at her. I stare and I stare. Then I’m up from the table, the cup is falling over, I fly against the kitchen wall, a caged animal. The pot she’s washing clatters into the sink.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I shout. “What are you talking about? Again love? And yet again love? Am I never to hear anything but love from you until I die? Does my life mean nothing to you? Absolutely nothing?”
She stands at the sink rigid with terror, her eyes fixed on me, her lips white, the color draining from her face. I think I’m giving her a heart attack, but I can’t stop.
“It is true,” I rage on, my voice murderous now with the effort to keep it down. “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?”
Her fear dissolves into pity and regret. She’s so pliable these days, it’s heartbreaking. “No, no,” she protests, “it’s another world, another time. I didn’t mean anything. Of course you get credit. All the credit in the world. Don’t get so excited. I was trying to sympathize. I said the wrong thing. I don’t know how to talk to you anymore.”
Abruptly, the rush of words in her is halted. Another thought has attracted her attention. The line of defense swerves. “Don’t you see?” she begs softly. “Love was all I had. What did I have? I had nothing.
Nothing.
And what was I
going
to have? What
could
I have? Everything you say about your life is true, I understand how true, but you have had your work, you
have
your work. And you’ve traveled. My God, you’ve traveled! You’ve been halfway around the world. What wouldn’t I have given to travel! I had only your father’s love. It was the only sweetness in my life. So I loved his love. What could I have done?”
But mutual heartbreak is not our style. “That’s not good enough, Ma,” I say. “You were forty-six when he died. You could have gone out into life. Other women with a lot less at their disposal did. You
wanted
to stay inside the idea of Papa’s love. It’s crazy! You’ve spent thirty years inside the idea of love. You could have had a life.”
Here the conversation ends. She is done with pleading. Her face hardens. She draws herself up into remembered inflexibility. “So,” she reverts to Yiddish, the language of
irony and defiance. “You’ll write down here on my tombstone: From the very beginning it was all water under the bridge.”
She turns from the dishes in the sink, wipes her hands carefully on a towel, and walks past me into the living room. I stand in the kitchen looking down at the patterned linoleum on the floor, but then after a while I follow. She is lying stretched out on the couch, her arm across her forehead. I sink down into a chair not far from the couch. This couch and this chair are positioned as they were in the living room in the Bronx. It is not difficult to feel that she has been lying on this couch and I have been sitting in this chair almost the whole of our lives.
We are silent. Because we are silent the noise of the street is more compelling. It reminds me that we are not in the Bronx, we are in Manhattan: the journey has been more than a series of subway stops for each of us. Yet tonight this room is so like that other room, and the light, the failing summer light, suddenly it seems a blurred version of that other pale light, the one falling on us in the foyer.
My mother breaks the silence. In a voice remarkably free of emotion—a voice detached, curious, only wanting information—she says to me, “Why don’t you go already? Why don’t you walk away from my life? I’m not stopping you.”
I see the light, I hear the street. I’m half in, half out.
“I know you’re not, Ma.”
Approaching Eye Level
The End of the Novel of Love
The Situation and the Story
The Solitude of Self
Copyright © 1987 by Vivian Gornick
Introduction copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Lethem
All rights reserved
Published in 1987 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
 
 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
 
 
eISBN 9781466819009
First eBook Edition : April 2012
 
 
First Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition, 2005
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gornick, Vivian.
Fierce attachments / Vivian Gornick.
p. cm.
Originally published 1987.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52996-3 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-374-52996-5 (pbk.)
1. Gornick, Vivian. 2. Daughters—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 3. Jews—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 4. Mothers and daughters—New York (State)—New York—Case studies. I. Title.
HQ755.85.G67 20005
974.7’1043’092—dc22
2005048836

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