Fierce Attachments

by Vivian Gornick

  Papa’s love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety. Countless sentences having to do with all in her life she found less than satisfactory began: “Believe me, if I didn’t love your father,” or, “Believe me, if it wasn’t for Papa’s love.” She would speak openly of how she had hated to give up working when she got married (she’d been a bookkeeper in a Lower East Side bakery), how good it was to have your own money in your pocket, not receive an allowance like a child, how stupid her life was now, and how she’d love to go back to work. Believe her. If it wasn’t for Papa’s love.

  Everything from work in the kitchen to sex in the bedroom was transformed by Papa’s love, and I think I knew early that sex did have to be transformed. She did not hate sex, but she did seem to put up with it. She never said physical love was unimportant or distasteful to a woman, but sentences like “Your father was a very passionate man. Your father was always ready. Your father could use ten women a night” left me feeling: To take your clothes off and lie down with a man you had to really really love him—otherwise the whole enterprise backfired. I remember at sixteen, my virginity under siege for the first time, waking each day to the interminable battle being waged in my head and my body, and imploring my mother silently: But, Ma, how do I know if I really really love him? All I know is, I’m in heat and he’s pushing me, he’s pushing me. In the hallway, on park benches, every night in the kitchen while you’re tossing around on the other side of a wall eight feet away, safely behind the lines, I’m out here in the trenches … But there was no help forthcoming.

  Love in my mother’s lexicon wasn’t love, it was love. Feeling of a high order, a spiritual nature, a moral cast. Above all, feeling that was unmistakable when present and equally unmistakable when absent. “A woman knows if she loves a man,” my mother would say. “If she doesn’t know she doesn’t love him.” These words were delivered as though from Sinai. Interpretation of the variety of human behaviors said to derive from love was not necessary in our house. If my mother could not identify in another woman responses to a husband or a lover that duplicated her own, it wasn’t love. And love, she said, was everything. A woman’s life was determined by love. All evidence to the contrary—and such evidence was abundant indeed—was consistently discounted and ignored, blotted out of her discourse, refused admission by her intellect. Once, in my presence (I must have been ten), a friend told her she was dead wrong, that her notions of love were absurd and that she was a slave to her idea of marriage. When I asked my mother what her friend meant she replied, “An undeveloped woman. She doesn’t know life.”

  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!” There was Lilly, a mongoloid child of forty who wandered about in little-girl dresses, a pink satin bow in her greasy hair, crossing on the red light, cars screeching to a halt all around her. And there was Mrs. Kerner, a tiny, birdlike woman who ran around with her hair wrapped in a cleaning rag, her gestures wild, her manner crazily abrupt. She would stop people she didn’t know in the grocery store or the butcher shop or at the druggist’s, bring her hands together in a pair of loose fists in front of her face and, her brown eyes shining madly, say, “Oy, I was reading just today a bee-yoo-tee-ful story from Russian literature! A story of the heart to make the most miserable of souls cry out against the injustice of this life!” Then she would forget why she was in the store, turn and fly out the door.

  Mrs. Kerner was Marilyn Kerner’s mother. Marilyn was my best friend. The Kerners lived one floor below us, in the apartment next door, and were as different, my mother thought, from our family as it was possible to be. The difference eluded me. The Kerners were simply the family downstairs, and I thought: Well, that’s how they do it in their house.

  Marilyn was an only child. The Kerners had a three-room apartment. Marilyn and her mother slept on twin mahogany bedsteads in the bedroom; her father slept on a cot beside the couch in the living room. 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.

  I preferred spending the afternoon in the Kerner apartment to spending it anywhere else. It was like having no parent in the house. Mrs. Kerner might be masquerading as an adult out on the street, but Marilyn and I knew better. With Mrs. Kerner it was so obvious that authority was an acquired position I began to suspect that perhaps more than one mother was assuming it, not earning it. Mrs. Kerner was enchanting and irritating: more interesting to be with than any regular mother, and more oddly instructive. My mother’s presence was powerful, but Mrs. Kerner’s was touching. Her distress was so open, so palpable, I would feel a finger pressing on my heart as she laid herself open to the ridicule and dismissal of a pair of street-smart twelve-year-olds.

  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. She would wander around the house, aimlessly flicking the duster here and there. Or she’d drag out an iron monster of a vacuum cleaner, start it up with a terrific whining noise that made you think a plane was about to land in the living room, push it across the threadbare carpet a few times, lose interest, and leave the vacuum cleaner standing where she turned it off, sometimes for two or three days.

  She baked also: the most godawful stuff, a kind of bread-cake loaf, always the same unyielding mass of half-raw dough. She’d break off a piece, lift it dramatically to her nose, inhale deeply, declare it ambrosia, and feed it to me or Marilyn. “Tasty, isn’t it?” she’d say, beaming, and I’d nod, chewing as fast as I could to get it down (that took a good three, four minutes), knowing it would weigh on my chest for the rest of the day. But I wanted to get it down. I knew Mrs. Kerner would be more confused than usual if I didn’t (what was she doing wrong now?), and I think I felt protective toward her from our earliest time together.

  She never finished vacuuming because halfway through a push across the rug she would stop, jerk about (sometimes forgetting to turn off the machine), rush into the bedroom or the kitchen, where Marilyn and I were reading or drawing, and, with her hands on her face and her eyes shining, exclaim, “Oy, girls! Only this afternoon I was reading a story in the paper. A woman—poor, good, beautiful—was rushing across the street, her last penny in her hand to buy milk for a sick child she left upstairs, only a minute she left it, just to buy milk, a car comes rushing around the corner, hits her, knocks her down, crushes and destroys her. A gevalt! People come running. Blood everywhere! The world is drenched in her blood. They take her away. And guess what? You’ll never believe this. It is impossible that the human mind should have imagined what actually happened. Are you ready? An hour later they find her hand in the gutter. Still clutching the penny.”

  Marilyn, if she was drawing, would forget to put down her charcoal stick. I, if I was reading, would remain sitting with a page between my fingers. Irritated at first by her appearance in the doorway, we invariably found ourselves drawn in by her urgent, lilting voice. 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 t
he miracle of narrative speech.

  It wasn’t a philosophic need to make sense of it all that drove Mrs. Kerner to storytelling. It was, rather, that she treasured feeling, and for her the arts—music, painting, literature—were a conduit for pure emotion. She told stories because she pined to live in a world of beauty among cultured people who had feeling. And feeling, girls, was everything. A person’s life was made rich or poor, worth a ransom or something to throw away in the gutter, if it was enhanced by or stripped of feeling.

  Mrs. Kerner would generally deliver this impassioned speech about art, life, and feeling after she had told us a story. Sometimes she would then push up her sleeves and run to the piano, which had been bought for forty dollars over Mr. Kerner’s protest so that Marilyn who hated it, never touched it, would be able to bring into the house, right into the house, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Mozart. The piano stood unused in the foyer except for the two or three times a week Mrs. Kerner rushed at it, wiped the bench with her skirt, sat down with the exaggerated motions of an artist at the piano, raised her arms high in the air, and brought her fingers down hard into the opening bars of “The Volga Boatmen.” That was it. That was all she could play. The opening bars of “The Volga Boatmen.” These she repeated ten or twenty times with no diminution of interest on either her part or ours.

  The piano urge frequently overtook her during the last moments of the afternoon when, feverish with our shared storytelling rapture, she would lose track of the time. As she was crashing about on the piano keys the door would open and we would all freeze. Mr. Kerner would look silently at us. Then he would walk past us into the apartment, take a turn around the living room, come back into the foyer, hang his coat up carefully in the hall closet (he was the most fastidious man I ever knew), say, “The house is a pigpen. What have you been doing all day?” walk back into the living room, sit down in the one upholstered chair, and begin reading the paper. We would all scatter immediately: Mrs. Kerner to the kitchen, Marilyn to the bedroom, I out the door.

  One Saturday morning Marilyn and I were on our way to Tremont Avenue, the major shopping street in our neighborhood. Just out the front door, Marilyn remembered that she had forgotten her wallet. We ran back upstairs, rushed into the Kerner apartment, and pushed into the bedroom, Marilyn first, me right behind her. She stopped abruptly on the threshold and I rammed into her. With my hands on her back I looked past her shoulder into the room. Mr. and Mrs. Kerner were in one of the mahogany bedsteads, he on top of her, both of them covered with a blanket, only their naked upper bodies visible. His face was buried, hers thrown back, her eyes closed, her mouth twisted in a silent moan. Her hands pressed strongly into his back, his mouth sucked at her neck. The convulsion was violent and, I knew instantly, mutual. A rush of heat and fear went through my body from my throat to my groin. It was that mutuality.

  So there were the Kerners, riddled with hate, secretly locked together in sexual spasm, and there were my parents, loving each other, while their bed rode chastely about in open space. Downstairs the house was a shambles, the husband exiled to the living room, the wife a half-mad dreamer; upstairs all was barracks-clean, the husband at the fixed center, the wife impassioned and opinionated. These differences refused to imprint on me. They felt neither striking nor crucial. What did register was that both Mrs. Kerner and my mother adored romantic emotion, and both were married women.

  We’re walking up Fifth Avenue. It’s a bad day for me. I’m feeling fat and lonely, trapped in my lousy life. I know I should be home working, and that I’m here playing the dutiful daughter only to avoid the desk. The anxiety is so great I’m walking with a stomachache. My mother, as always, knows she can do nothing for me, but my unhappiness makes her nervous. She is talking, talking at tedious, obfuscating length, about a cousin of mine who is considering divorce.

  As we near the library an Eastern religionist (shaved head, translucent skin, a bag of bones wrapped in faded pink gauze) darts at us, a copy of his leader’s writings extended in his hand. My mother keeps talking while the creature in gauze flaps around us, his spiel a steady buzz in the air, competing for my attention. At 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?” The pink-gowned boy-man is charmed, and for a moment bemused. “My parents are Jews,” he confides, “but they certainly aren’t socialists.” My mother stares at him, shakes her head, grasps my arm firmly in her fingers, and marches me off up the avenue.

  “Can you believe this?” she says. “A nice Jewish boy shaves his head and babbles in the street. A world full of crazies. 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.”

  She stops in front of the library. She doesn’t want to hear what I’m saying, but she’s excited by the exchange. Her faded brown eyes, dark and brilliant in my childhood, brighten as the meaning of her words and mine penetrates her thought. Her cheeks flush and her pudding-soft face hardens wonderfully with new definition. She looks beautiful to me. I know from experience she will remember this afternoon as a deeply pleasurable one. I also know she will not be able to tell anyone why it has been pleasurable. She enjoys thinking, only she doesn’t know it. She has never known it.

  A year after my mother told Mrs. Drucker she was a whore the Druckers moved out of the building and Nettie Levine moved into their vacated apartment. I have no memory of the Druckers moving out or of Nettie moving in, no truck or moving van coming to take away or deposit the furniture, dishes, or clothes of the one or of the other. People and all their belongings seemed to evaporate out of an apartment, and others simply took their place. How early I absorbed the circumstantial nature of most attachments. After all, what difference did it really make if we called the next-door neighbor Roseman or Drucker or Zimmerman? It mattered only that there was a next-door neighbor. Nettie, however, would make a difference.

  I was running down the stairs after school, rushing to get out on the street, when we collided in the darkened hallway. The brown paper bags in her arms went flying in all directions. We each said “Oh!” and stepped back, I against the staircase railing, she against the paint-blistered wall. I bent, blushing, to help her retrieve the bags scattered across the landing and saw that she had bright red hair piled high on her head in a pompadour and streaming down her back and over her shoulders. Her features were narrow and pointed (the eyes almond-shaped, the mouth and nose thin and sharp), and her shoulders were wide but she was slim. She reminded me of the pictures of Greta Garbo. My heart began to pound. I had never before seen a beautiful woman.

  “Don’t worry about the packages,” she said to me. “Go out and play. The sun is shining. You mustn’t waste it here in the dark. Go, go.” Her English was accented, like the English of the other women in the building, but
her voice was soft, almost musical, and her words took me by surprise. My mother had never urged me not to lose pleasure, even if it was only the pleasure of the sunny street. I ran down the staircase, excited. I knew she was the new neighbor. (“A Ukrainishe redhead married to a Jew,” my mother had remarked dryly only two or three days before.)

  Two evenings later, as we were finishing supper, the doorbell rang and I answered it. There she stood. “I … I …” She laughed, a broken, embarrassed laugh. “Your mother invited me.” She looked different standing in the doorway, coarse and awkward, a peasant with a pretty face, not at all the gorgeous creature of the hallway. Immediately, I felt poised and generous. “Come in.” I stepped courteously aside in the tiny foyer to let her pass into the kitchen.

  “Sit down, sit down,” my mother said in her rough-friendly voice, as distinguished from her rough I-really-mean-this voice. “Have a cup of coffee, a piece of pie.” She pushed my brother. “Move over. Let Mrs. Levine sit down on the bench.” A high-backed wooden bench ran the length of one side of the table; my brother and I each claimed a sprawling place on the bench as fast as we could.

  “Perhaps you’d like a glass of schnapps?” My handsome, gentle father smiled, proud that his wife was being so civil to a Gentile.