Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (7 page)
Read Fierce Attachments: A Memoir Online
Authors: Vivian Gornick
We’re walking west on Twenty-third Street. It’s late in the day and hundreds of workers are streaming out of the Metropolitan Life Building. My mother, an expert walker in the city (not to mention seat-grabber on the subway), is elbowing her way free of the crowd, with me right behind her. She is making fair progress when a man places himself deliberately in her path. She moves to the left, he moves to the left. She moves to the right, he moves to the right. She stares into his chest and then quickly, like a frightened bird, up into his face: after all, this is New York. For a moment all systems of response shut down. She stops reacting. She is simply there. Then all at once she’s in noisy operation again.
“Maddy!” she bursts out at the man. “Madison Shapiro. For God’s sake!”
Now it’s my turn to shut down. I know the name Maddy Shapiro very well, but I do not know the face in front of me. Ah, it hits me. It’s not that I haven’t seen Maddy Shapiro in more than twenty years, it’s that Maddy Shapiro has had a nose job. I’m amazed that my mother spotted Maddy inside this newly arranged face of his.
The man standing in front of us is fifty years old. His tight curly hair is brown and gray, his eyes are cold blue, his figure beneath the well-cut business suit is thin and sexy, and he is made beautiful by the straight narrow line of a lovely nose: a nose not too long, not too short, just
right. In another life that nose was a painful Jewish droop, forever dragging everything in Maddy’s sad young face down down down to the bottom of his soul. His mother, Mrs. Shapiro, who lived on the third floor of our building, was always running after him in the street with the glass of milk he wouldn’t finish. The kids would scream, “Drink-your-milk-Maddy-drink-your-milk,” and Maddy’s nose would grow longer, and his mouth would pull downward into the sullen silence he adopted as a permanent means of survival.
right. In another life that nose was a painful Jewish droop, forever dragging everything in Maddy’s sad young face down down down to the bottom of his soul. His mother, Mrs. Shapiro, who lived on the third floor of our building, was always running after him in the street with the glass of milk he wouldn’t finish. The kids would scream, “Drink-your-milk-Maddy-drink-your-milk,” and Maddy’s nose would grow longer, and his mouth would pull downward into the sullen silence he adopted as a permanent means of survival.
When we were teenagers Maddy surprised us all one night at a neighborhood party with his extraordinary foxtrotting (“A regular Fred Astaire,” my mother pronounced). Where had he learned to dance like that, we wondered. This was not the kind of dancing you learned from watching Astaire on Saturday afternoons in a darkened movie auditorium, or from moving about by yourself in front of the mirror. This dancing you got from
people
. But where? who? when? Did Maddy have a life somewhere
else?
The question was asked, but no one could wait for, much less pursue, an answer.
people
. But where? who? when? Did Maddy have a life somewhere
else?
The question was asked, but no one could wait for, much less pursue, an answer.
We hardly saw Maddy at all once he had begun high school, but one night when Marilyn Kerner and I were fooling around in my bedroom Maddy walked in and joined us. We began to play “What do you want your husband (or your wife, Maddy) to be?” I said mine had to be very intelligent. Marilyn said she didn’t really want a husband, but if she had to have one he had to let her do whatever she wanted. Maddy began to dance around the room, his eyes closed, his arms holding an imaginary partner. “She’s gotta be real cute,” he said, “and she’s gotta be a great daa-ancer.”
What he couldn’t say then, at least partly because he wasn’t yet sure himself, was that even more than a great dancer, she had to be a he.
What he couldn’t say then, at least partly because he wasn’t yet sure himself, was that even more than a great dancer, she had to be a he.
“I ran into your mother a few months ago,” my mother is saying. “She told me she never hears from you. What a bunch you all are!” I gaze at her in admiration. She hasn’t laid eyes on Maddy Shapiro in more than twenty years, yet she feels perfectly free …
Maddy bursts out laughing and hugs her as people push past us, annoyed that we are blocking their mindless trek to the subway. “What a bunch you all are,” he replies with something like affection in his voice. I look at him. I know that if Mrs. Shapiro was saying this his face would darken with anger and pain, but in
my
mother’s mouth these sentences are
warmly
awful,
richly
exasperating. Out of such moments of detachment comes the narrative tale we tell of our lives.
my
mother’s mouth these sentences are
warmly
awful,
richly
exasperating. Out of such moments of detachment comes the narrative tale we tell of our lives.
“Nothing ever changes, does it.” Maddy is shaking his head.
“Not true,” my mother says shrewdly.
“You’ve
changed. I don’t know what it is, but you’re a completely different person.”
“You’ve
changed. I don’t know what it is, but you’re a completely different person.”
“Not completely,” Maddy retorts. “After all, you
did
recognize me, didn’t you? Inside the brand-new Maddy you knew the old one was still there, and
you
spotted him. Couldn’t fool
you
, could I?”
did
recognize me, didn’t you? Inside the brand-new Maddy you knew the old one was still there, and
you
spotted him. Couldn’t fool
you
, could I?”
Well, well, Maddy.
One more question-and-answer routine and we’ve reached the limit of mutual interest. We exchange telephone numbers, promise to remain in touch, and part knowing we will not meet again.
My mother and I continue walking west on Twenty-third Street. She grasps my forearm between her fingers and leans toward me, confidentially. “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.”
Now she is silent. She stares off into the middle distance in an odd, abstracted manner that has developed in her over the past year or so. She’s alone inside that faraway look on her face, but this alone is different from the alone I’m very familiar with, the one that distorts her features into a mask of bitterness, the one in which she’s counting up her grievances and disappointments. This alone is soft not bitter, full of interest, not a trace of self-pity in it. Now when her eyes narrow it is to take in more clearly what she knows, concentrate on what she has lived. She shakes herself as though from a penetrating dream.
“People have a right to their lives,” she says quietly.
My father died at four o’clock in the morning on a day in late November. A telegram was delivered at five-thirty from the hospital where he had lain, terrified, for a week under an oxygen tent they said would save his life but I knew better. He had had three heart seizures in five days. The last one killed him. He was fifty-one years old. My mother was forty-six. My brother was nineteen. I was thirteen.
When the doorbell rang my brother was the first one out of bed, Mama right behind him, and me behind her. We all pushed into the tiny foyer. My brother stood in the doorway beneath the light from a sixty-watt bulb staring at a pale-yellow square of paper. My mother dug her nails into his arm. “Papa’s dead, isn’t he? Isn’t he?” My brother slumped to the floor, and the screaming began.
“Oh,” my mother screamed.
“Oh, my God,” my mother screamed.
“Oh, my God, help me,” my mother screamed.
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.
Wailing women and frightened men surrounded my mother all that day and night. She clutched at her hair, and tore at her flesh, and fainted repeatedly. No one dared touch her. She was alone inside a circle of peculiar quarantine.
They enclosed her but they did not intrude. She had become magic. She was possessed.
They enclosed her but they did not intrude. She had become magic. She was possessed.
With me they did as they pleased. Passing me among themselves in an ecstasy of ritual pity, they isolated me more thoroughly than actual neglect could have done. They smothered me against their chests, choked me with indigestible food, terrified my ears with a babble of numbing reassurance. My only hope was retreat. I went unresponsive, and I stayed that way.
Periodically, my mother’s glazed eye would fasten on me. She would then shriek my name and “An orphan! Oh, God, you’re an orphan!” No one had the courage to remind her that according to Jewish custom you were an orphan if your mother died, only half an orphan if your father died. Perhaps it wasn’t courage. Perhaps they understood that she didn’t really mean me at all. She meant herself. She was consumed by a sense of loss so primeval she had taken all grief into her. Everyone’s grief. That of the wife, the mother, and the daughter. Grief had filled her, and emptied her. She had become a vessel, a conduit, a manifestation. A remarkable fluidity, sensual and demanding, was now hers. She’d be lying on the couch a rag doll, her eyes dull, unseeing, tongue edging out of a half-open mouth, arms hanging slack. Suddenly she’d jerk straight up, body tense and alert, eyes sharp, forehead bathed in sweat, a vein pulsing in her neck. Two minutes later she was thrashing about, groveling against the couch, falling to the floor, skin chalky, eyes squeezed shut, mouth tightly compressed. It went on for hours. For days. For weeks, and for years.
I saw myself only as a prop in the extraordinary drama of Mama’s bereavement. I didn’t mind. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be feeling, and I hadn’t the time to find out. Actually I was frightened. I didn’t object to being frightened. I supposed it as good a response as any other. Only, being frightened imposed certain responsibilities. For one, it demanded I not take my eyes off my mother for an instant. 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.
It began to snow in the middle of the first night Papa was in the ground. Twisting about on her sodden couch, my mother caught sight of the falling snow. “Oh, woe is me,” she cried. “It’s snowing on you, my beloved! You’re all alone out there in the snow.” A new calendar had begun marking time in the apartment: the first time it snowed on Papa’s grave, the first time it rained, the first green of summer, the first gold of fall. Each first was announced in a high thin wail that to begin with acted like a needle on my heart, to end with a needle in my brain.
The funeral. Twenty years later when I was living as a journalist in the Middle East, I witnessed Arab funerals almost weekly—hundreds of men and women rushing through the streets, tearing at their clothes, uttering cries of an animal-like nature at a terrifying pitch of noise, people fainting, being trampled, while the crowd whirled screeching on. Westerners who might be standing beside
me in the street would shake their heads in amazement at a sight so foreign it confirmed them in their secret conviction that these people were indeed not like themselves. To me, however, it all seemed perfectly familiar, only a bit louder than I remembered, and the insanity parceled out quite a bit more. The way I remembered it, Mama had center stage at all times.
me in the street would shake their heads in amazement at a sight so foreign it confirmed them in their secret conviction that these people were indeed not like themselves. To me, however, it all seemed perfectly familiar, only a bit louder than I remembered, and the insanity parceled out quite a bit more. The way I remembered it, Mama had center stage at all times.
When I woke on the morning of the funeral she was tossing on the couch where she had lain forty-eight hours in clothes she refused to change out of, already crying. The crying was rhythmic, repetitious: it began in a low moan, quickly reached a pitch of shrillness, then receded in a loss of energy that recouped into the original moan. Each cycle was accomplished in a matter of two or three minutes and repeated without variation throughout that interminable morning, while eight or ten people (my brother and I, a few aunts and uncles, the neighbors) wandered aimlessly about the apartment: in and out of the kitchen, in and out of the living room, in and out of the bedrooms.
I remember no conversation; nor do I remember even a wordless embrace. True, explosive behavior was common among us while tender comfort was a difficulty, but it was Mama who had plunged us into muteness. Mama’s suffering elevated Papa’s death, made us all participants in an event of consequence, told us something had occurred we were not to support, not to live through, or at the very least be permanently stunted by. Still, it was Mama who occupied the dramatic center of the event while the rest of us shuffled about in the background, moving without tears or speech through a sludge of gray misery. It was as though we had all been absorbed into her spectacular abandonment,
become witnesses to her loss rather than mourners ourselves. It was Mama who was on our minds as we roamed the gloomy apartment—who could think of Papa in the midst of such tumult?—Mama who must be watched and attended to, Mama whose mortal agony threatened general breakdown. Disaster seemed imminent rather than already accomplished.
become witnesses to her loss rather than mourners ourselves. It was Mama who was on our minds as we roamed the gloomy apartment—who could think of Papa in the midst of such tumult?—Mama who must be watched and attended to, Mama whose mortal agony threatened general breakdown. Disaster seemed imminent rather than already accomplished.
At noon the house was suddenly spilling over with people who instead of going straight to the funeral parlor as they had been asked to showed up at the apartment. These people took us to the edge. As each new face placed itself directly within her view, my mother felt required to deliver up a fresh storm of tears and shrieks. My terror leaped. Now surely she would spin off into a hysteria from which there would be no return.
The time came to lift her from the couch, straighten her clothes, and get her out the door. No sooner were her legs over the side than she became spastic, began to twitch convulsively. Her eyeballs rolled up in her head, her body went limp, her feet refused to touch the floor, and she was dragged out the door like one headed for execution, carried along on a swarm of men and women crying, pleading, screaming, fainting in mimetic sympathy.
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