Fierce Attachments

by Vivian Gornick

  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.

  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.

  “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.

  “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.”

  “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?”

  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.

  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 yea
rs 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.

  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.

  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.

  At the funeral parlor she tried to climb into the coffin. At the cemetery she tried to fling herself into the open grave. There were other moments at the funeral worthy of permanent record—my brother passed out, I looked so long into the casket I had to be pulled away, a political comrade announced at the grave that my father had been a wage slave in this America—but these moments are without clarity or sharpness of outline. They pall in memory beside the brilliant relentlessness of Mama’s derangement.

  The day of the funeral seemed to go on for ten days. There were never less than a dozen people wandering around the apartment. My mother lay on the couch weeping and fainting. One by one, each man and each woman in the apartment took a turn at her side, stared helplessly at her for a few minutes, assured her the worst that could happen had indeed happened, and then instructed her. This was life. There was nothing anyone could do. She had to gather herself together. And go on. That said, he or she would rise in relief and head for the kitchen, where there were always two to four women waiting to serve a cup of coffee, a bowl of soup, a plate of meat and vegetables. (I remember no cooking. Prepared food appeared magically every day. )

  The kitchen was by far the most interesting place to be. Invariably, two of the women were my aunt Sarah and Mrs. Zimmerman, each of whom had less than a loving attachment to her own husband and certainly considered marriage an affliction. Both, however, had been silenced by my mother’s awesome performance. Except every now and then irrepressible Mrs. Zimmerman, stirring her own soup at the stove, would mutter, “She lays there crying like a lunatic. If I would come home and find mine dead, it would be a blessing.” Sarah would remain silent but someone else in the kitchen, another aunt, a cousin, a friend (why did it always seem to be a woman in a black hat with a dotted veil?), would reprimand Mrs. Zimmerman. “Please, missus!” she’d say. “She is not you. And a little respect for the dead, if you don’t mind.” Mrs. Zimmerman would flush deeply and open her mouth wide, but before a sound came out Sarah would lay a hand on her arm and beg that there not be a scene. I’d be at the table, sitting on the wooden bench, often in the crook of Nettie’s arm. Animated by the exchange, I’d be disappointed by Sarah’s interference. Then Nettie’s head would drop, and I’d feel her mouth smiling into my hair. It was as good as if Mrs. Zimmerman had spoken. And shortly, Mrs. Zimmerman did speak. And another tart response cut the air.

  I didn’t know that not every woman who had lost a husband would be carrying on like Mama, but I did know that the conversation in the kitchen was immensely interesting. One spoke sharply, another speculatively, a third imperiously. The talk was hard and bright, gave the room charge and intensity. Nettie, of course, hardly spoke at all but her body, often in close contact with mine, spoke for her, its speech hidden, restless, amused. I couldn’t figure out what was going on in the kitchen, but the responsiveness among the women told me this was a live issue. And the way they dived in! I loved it. Felt nourished and protected, delighted and relieved by it. I remember, especially, the relief.

  There was no softness anywhere, not in the kitchen or in the living room, no bland or soothing element on which to heal yourself, or even rub a wound. 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.

  Nettie was around much of the time. Around me, not Mama. She hovered in the doorway or the foyer, sat down shyly in the kitchen, but rarely did she enter the living room. All those respectable Jewish women: she couldn’t make her way past them to Mama. Once in a while she’d cross the threshold and stand there like a child, twisting her hands behind her back. My mother would have to spot her, stretch out her arm and wail, “Nettie! I’ve lost my beloved!” before Nettie felt free (that is, commanded) to rush over, fall to her knees beside the couch, and burst into tears herself.

  With me, however, she felt not only free but equal and necessary. She sat with me on the kitchen bench, her arm slung around my neck in an easy embrace, combing my hair with her long fingers. We both knew she had neither the wisdom nor the authority to ease my anxiety (she wasn’t even a confidante, she’d always talked more easily to me than I to her), but she could become another orphan, snuggle down companionably with me as she had with Richie, give me the consolation of her warm, helpless body.

  Something else began to happen during those funeral-week hours we shared on the kitchen bench. When the women talked about men and marriage, and I felt Nettie’s secret smile in my hair and she stifling her laughter against my back, a disturbing excitement ran through me. She knew something no one else in the room knew, and I could feel her wanting to pull me into her knowledge, have me join her there, become
her true friend.

  The invitation lay in the movement of her body against mine, its freedom and its intimacy. Her motions were rhythmic, her embrace reassuring. She stroked my hair and my shoulder. I felt soothed and sedated. I leaned into her. Her touch began to seem insistent. I felt myself being pulled. Toward what I didn’t know. It was as though Nettie stood at the mouth of something dark and soft, drawing me on, her body saying to me: Come. Don’t be afraid. I’ll pull you through. A dreamy, spreading blur dissolved in my head, my chest. I drowsed against her: open willing aroused.

  Suddenly terror prickled on my skin. I felt myself pitching forward, headfirst. The soft dark place was a black void. And she? Who was she? Just a secret-smiling girl-woman, a big kid herself. When we traded fantasies I always felt older. If I went into the dark with her we’d be two kids in there, alone together. How could I trust her? She was no one to trust. My body stiffened in her embrace. She started up, as lost in the hypnotic moment as I, bewildered and alarmed by the suddenness of my withdrawal.

  “I want to go see Mama,” I said.

  Easy as a cat, Nettie’s eyes went opaque, her neck grew long, she rearranged her arms and legs. I was free to leave the table.

  In the living room I sank to the floor beside my mother, who immediately pressed my head into her breasts. Her strong arms held me, her moans convulsed me. In a matter of seconds the power of Nettie’s drowsy allure had been dissipated. I shivered inside myself as though I had made a narrow escape. My anxiety felt cold and scummy. I let Mama crush me against her hot chest. I did not resist. Mama was where I belonged. With Mama the issue was clear: I had trouble breathing but I was safe.