Fierce Attachments

by Vivian Gornick

  Dorothy kept asking if I remembered. Remember the abandoned house in the forest? Remember the berry-picking on the high hills far away? And the scratched asses from lying on the thorns to neck? Remember the warmth and vulgarity of the women on the porch on Sunday night? Dorothy’s memories were richly detailed, my own sketchy. It wasn’t just that she was eight years older. She was a Levinson. She had lived it more fully than I had.

  Meanwhile, I kept asking, How’s Sonny? How’re Larry and Miltie? And your father. How is he? (I didn’t ask for Mrs. Levinson, because she was dead, and I didn’t ask for Davey, now a rabbi in Jerusalem, because I didn’t want to know.)

  “Sonny?” Dorothy said. “All we do is analyze. Analyze, analyze. When Sonny was in the army Mama got sick. Papa had run out on her. Sonny came home. He got down on his knees beside the bed and he said, ‘I’ll take care of you, Ma.’ She said, ‘I want Jake.’ Sonny walked out of the apartment. Later he said, ‘When I realized she loved him more than she loved me I said to myself, Fuck her.’ But he never got over it. He’s got a nice wife, good kids, lives near me. You know we all still live downtown, don’t you? Sure you know. So now Sonny comes in the apartment, a friend is sitting on the couch, he looks the situation over, jerks his head in the direction of the bedroom, says, I gotta talk to you; my friend starts laughing. But that’s it. We don’t really share anything. He comes over, gets analyzed, goes home. Larry? He’s 240 pounds now. Got a girlfriend, but he still lives in the old apartment on Essex Street, she shouldn’t think he’s getting involved, he’s only been with her six years. Davey! Don’t you want to know how Davey is? Davey’s wonderful! Who would have thought my baby brother would turn out spiritual? But he has. He’s spiritual .”

  I nearly said, “That’s ridiculous.” Stopped just in time. But I couldn’t let it go, all the same. Silent throughout the recital on Sonny and Larry, now I felt I had to speak. “Oh, Dorothy,” I said, very gently I thought, “Davey’s not spiritual.”

  Dorothy’s eyes dropped to the table, her brows drew together. When she looked up again her eyes were very bright, her mouth shaped in an uncertain smile.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “If Davey had left Essex Street at eighteen he wouldn’t be spiritual today,” I said. “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.”

  Dorothy nodded and nodded at me. Her voice when she spoke was unnaturally quiet. “I guess that’s one way you could look at it,” she said. I laughed and shrugged. We dropped it.

  On we went, falling back repeatedly to stories of the bungalow colony. Dorothy did most of the talking. As the hours passed Dorothy did all the talking. She talked faster and faster, the sentences tumbling one after another. A mosaic of emotional memory began to emerge: how she had seen me, how she had seen my mother, how she had seen my mother in relation to her mother. I began to feel uncomfortable. She remembered it all so vividly. She had been so intent on us. Especially on my mother.

  She laughed heartily as she spoke, a strong rocking laughter. Suddenly she turned full face to me and said, “You never really enjoyed it like we did. You were always so critical. For such a little kid you were amazing. It’s like you knew you were more intelligent than anyone else around, and you were always seeing how silly or pointless or ridiculous—your favorite word—everything was. Your mother, also, was so much better than anyone else around. And she was, she was. Your father adored her. She used to walk beside him, his arm around her and she holding on to him, God, did she hold on to him, holding on for dear life, clinging like to a life raft, and looking around to make sure everyone saw how happy she was with her loverlike husband. It was as though she wanted to make every woman there jealous. And my mother? My father came up once during the whole summer. She used to cry over your mother: ‘Look how good he is to her, and look how Jake treats me. She’s got everything, I’ve got nothing.’”

  Dorothy laughed again: as though she was afraid to speak without laughing. “My mother was kind,” she said. “She had a kind heart. Your mother? She was organized. My mother would sit up with her own kids when they were sick, and she’d sit up with you, too. Your mother would march into the kitchen like a top sergeant and say to my mother, ‘Levinson, stop crying, put on a brassiere, fix yourself up.’”

  More laughter, by now the taste of iron in it. Dorothy struggled with herself to stop, to get off my mother and her mother. Abruptly she took her memories back to a time before my time, and began to tell us of the Jewish mystics traveling around on the bungalow-colony circuit when she was eight or ten years old. “All the women would sit around in a circle in the dark,” she said, “with a candle on the table. The medium would close her eyes, tremble, and say, ‘Habe sich, tischele.’ Lift yourself, little table.” (“And would it?” “Of course!”) “Women would start to scream and faint. ‘Is that you, Moishe? Oy gevalt! it’s Moishe!’ More screaming, more fainting.”

  Dorothy threw me a sharp look and said, “Your mother would have marched in, turned on the light, and said, ‘What is this nonsense?’” Dorothy’s husband and I both stared open-mouthed at her. Before he could stop her she leaned toward me and hissed, “She never loved you. She never loved anybody.”

  The next morning I realized that although I had not said “That’s ridiculous” before I scored off Davey, Dorothy had nonetheless heard the words. The mother in her had heard the mother in me.

  I saw the man again today. This time it had been five years. My mother and I were on upper Broadway, looking for a shoe store recommended for its walking shoes. As we approached Eighty-third Street he turned the corner. Involuntarily I flinched. “What is it?” my mother asked. “Nothing,” I said. But her eyes had followed mine and she saw that I was held by the face of a man like that of fifty other derelict-looking men one might pass in a twenty-minute walk on Broadway.

  “Who is that?” she pressed me. “You know him?”

  “Remember the man in the doorway years ago? The one I see every now and then?”

  “Yes, of course. That’s him?”

  I nodded.

  She turned her bold urban stare directly on him.

  It happened twelve years ago. I was living on First Avenue at Twentieth Street in two whitewashed rooms flooded with eastern light, and a tree outside that filled the window in spring and summer with birds and foliage. Across the avenue Stuyvesant Town, one of the oldest middle-income housing projects in the city. On my side of the avenue Irish and Italian tenements where people had been born, raised, married, and raised families of their own in the same apartments. Binding us all together, the glittery noise and movement of First Avenue. When my aunt Sarah first came to visit she leaned out the window, breathed in the fumes, and said, “Just what I love. Rush, rush!” I felt the same. I deeply loved First Avenue. Loved it and felt safe on it. People sat in windows watching the neighbors all day long. Shopkeepers registered every foreign and familiar face moving past their storefronts. The equation was simple: you lost anonymity, you gained protection.

  One Saturday morning in June I ran down to the supermarket a block away to get a container of milk. The avenue sparkled in the early sun. The air was sweet, balmy, pollinated. Coming back from the market I suffered an allergic attack of “spring fever.” I sneezed so hard I couldn’t move: stood helpless on the street, holding myself against the rapid-fire seizure that had taken hold of my body. As the fit drew to an end, only one more sneeze in me, I could feel it, my head lifted in expectation of deliverance. At that moment my eyes locked with the eyes of a man coming toward me in the morning crowd: He was slim and Mediterranean-dark, in his forties, wearing a white shirt and black pants, carrying a brown paper lunch bag. A waiter, I thought, on his way to work. As the final sneeze was expelled my neck and shoulders lifted reflexively and I laughed, into his eyes, as it happened. Clearly, I was laughing at myself.
No other interpretation of the gesture was remotely possible. The man didn’t even smile back. His eyes flicked on me, off me. He kept going, I kept going.

  I crossed the street and turned into the doorway of my little building. As I was about to insert the key in the vestibule door I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned. The man in the white shirt and black pants was standing there, blocking me in. His eyes were pinpoints of rage. His mouth was twisted to the side, the lips white with strain. His neck was pulsing. “You tired of livin’?” he said to me.

  Omigod, I thought.

  “What do you mean?” I asked politely.

  “You were laughin’ back there. Ya tired of livin’, ain-cha?”

  “Oh, you misunderstood,” I purred shamelessly. “I was laughing at myself. I’ve got sneezing fits. I was laughing because I was sneezing so hard I couldn’t move. I wasn’t laughing at you. Did you think I was laughing at you? Oh no!”

  He heard nothing I said. His face remained closed against me. If anything, the pinpoints of rage glowed harder. He looked at the keys in my hand. “You live here?” he said. His hand made an upward motion. “Come on,” he said. “Upstairs.”

  “No,” I babbled. “I don’t live here. I’m just visiting.”

  “Upstairs,” he said. “Come on, upstairs.”

  “I don’t live here. We can’t go upstairs.”

  In a motion of strength derived from terror I placed my open hand against his chest and pushed. He lost his balance and toppled backward into the street. I jerked past him into the crowd and ran. Ran to the end of the block, then into the next block, and into the supermarket. I stood there, just beyond the checkout counters, breathing hard. I didn’t know what to do, where to go, whom to speak to. Without warning, the familiar had passed into nightmare.

  I wandered around the market for thirty minutes, then made a break for it, walking fast, head down, away from my building, somehow the container of milk no longer in my hand. Hours later, thoroughly exhausted, I returned to First Avenue and darted unmolested through my own doorway, not leaving the apartment for the rest of that day and evening.

  Three years later I saw the man in the white shirt and the black pants on East Fourteenth Street. It was late fall. He was wearing a thin leather jacket and hugging a brown paper parcel to his chest. I backed quickly into a doorway, out of the line of his vision. He looked exactly as he had three years before, but as he drew closer I saw that he stumbled when he walked, and his eyes were horribly anxious.

  Four years after that I saw him again, on West Eighth Street. His hair was heavily streaked with gray now, his skin yellow, his chin covered with white stubble. As he came abreast of me I stepped out of the doorway I had ducked into. He looked at me, through me. His gaze, as I had suspected, was fixed, unseeing.

  Now, five years later, here he was on Broadway, his hair iron-gray, his stare wild, his walk unsteady, his hands flailing at the air. 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.

  My mother looked curiously at me. “Why were you afraid of him?” she asked. “You could knock him over with one hand.”

  “Ma, he didn’t look like that twelve years ago. Believe me.

  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.”

  I’m fourteen years old. It’s an evening in late spring. I push open the door of Nettie’s apartment. The kitchen is steeped in a kind of violet gloom, soft, full, intense. The room is empty: bathed in the lovely half-light, but empty. I stop short. The door wasn’t locked, someone must be home. I walk through to the inner room. I stop on the threshold. The light is even weaker here. My eyes adjust. I see Nettie and the priest lying across the paisley-covered bed. She is naked, he is dressed. He is flat on his back. She lies half across him. His body is rigid, hers is spilling over. I can see her smiling in the half-dark. She moves across him like a cat, and like a cat watches closely even as she purrs. She arches her back and lifts herself, only to fall again toward him. Her breast drops into his nerveless hand. Vibrancy flows through me like electric shock. I can feel them both. Inside me. I feel her, and I feel him. I am the breast, and I am the hand. I am her pleasure, I am his pain. I shiver. The shiver becomes a tremble, the tremble a shudder. The shudder brings me abruptly into contact with something close by. I look down. There beside me is Richie, five years old, strapped into a chair, staring at the scene on the bed. I retreat, moving back face forward to the front door.

  The next morning Nettie sits in a flowered housedress at her kitchen table, mending a skirt, her face lowered, smiling to herself. She looks up at me, her green eyes falsely innocent. “Did you come in here last night?” she asks. We are all her defeated enemies this morning. Calmly I think: She hates men.

  When did it begin? When did she start roaming the streets? Or sitting in the boat park? When did she first bring home the priest? Or a man from the park? When did the chicken-store owner who looked like Joseph Stalin appear at the door early in the morning? When did Whitey, the only serious delinquent on the block, first come up to the apartment? Mama said a year after Rick’s death. “For one year she was good,” she used to say. “And then she went to town.”

  When did I begin to take it in? And what did I make of it? When was the first I knew something about her in a world where men were sex, but women?—weren’t we just supposed to get out of the way when we saw it coming?

  Marilyn Kerner and I were riding our bikes in Bronx Park after school one day late in May. This was our daily practice from early spring until late fall. We would enter the park two blocks from our house, near the entrance to the zoo, and start riding. Sometimes we’d ride hard and fast straight through to Bronx Park East, a good hour from home. Sometimes we’d ride to special places, some particular clump of rock and bush we had made our own. Sometimes we’d circle around just inside the park, talking, more interested in the conversation than the ride, but still in comforting motion on the bike. With the bikes under us we felt free and brave: intelligent explorers in a foreign land. The street, I knew, was mine—the street was human exchange, people smarts, on the street I held my own—but the park? Henri Rousseau’s paintings remind me of the way I felt about the park. I would glimpse the wild and the primeval in a landscaped piece of world carefully remade to resemble the original tangle, and there I’d be, flat against it, a little Jewish girl on a bike unable to imagine herself other than talking.

  Even so, we’d ride hard on those spring afternoons, the wind and stir we created matching the one just beginning inside ourselves, the light and speed irradiating, the ride an extraordinary rush, delicious and frightening, a burst of startled sensation.

  Across the road from the zoo the Bronx River had been dammed up and a small lake and waterfall created. On the lake were boats, rented by the hour out of a boathouse built at the end closest to the waterfall. The boathouse was gaily decorated and sat, at the edge of the lake, on a circular concrete patio that had been laid down by the Parks Service, with benches in tiers placed in a half circle at the edge of the patio. These benches were painted bright green each spring. From certain angles on the benches the lake looked as though it went on forever. I had been out on the lake a hundred times, I knew every curve of its outline, knew exactly how confined it was, and yet each time I sat on the benches I dreamed out at the water and imagined that just around the bend, out of sight, the lake suddenly lengthened into a mysterious channel and entered a place I’d never been before. I thought everyone who sat on the benches looking out at the water had similar thoughts, that the benches were filled with dreamers, that people came there to dream.

  There was a ride Marilyn and I took that ended at the benches. The ride was brief but so complicated it seemed a long day’s journey, and on short afternoons we took it so as not to feel cheated of
time on the bike. You’d take a path on the far side of the waterfall that climbed a rocky stretch of ground high above the river, twisting and turning away into thick, tangled underbrush, bending back across the woods, cutting through a hill of black rock flat and sinuous at the top, then curving swiftly around and down toward the lake, rushing heedlessly toward the boathouse through a stretch of high open meadow and tall grasses, the whole world under an empty sky and the wind in your lungs an excitement from which you would never recover, braking hard just as you were about to come crashing into the concrete patio. Joy. The whole ride was pure joy.

  On this afternoon in May Marilyn and I came riding down through the meadow, and just as we were braking I saw Nettie sitting on a bench on the lowest tier closest to the water. Not far from her sat a man I had never seen before. They seemed to know each other, and yet not know each other. The man was sitting with his arms extended across the back of the bench, his legs stretched out before him. He had a brown felt hat tilted forward on his head and a toothpick in his mouth. His face was not turned directly toward Nettie but, rather, angled at her. Nettie, too, seemed to be sitting peculiarly. The upper half of her body faced directly toward the lake but the lower half was twisted toward the man, her long midriff made even longer by her position. She was wearing a thin summer dress, although it was only mid-spring. Her red hair tumbled about her shoulders. Her legs were bare and on her feet a pair of high-heeled scuffs. She swung one leg back and forth, the scuff falling away from the heel each time her leg went out. I knew even before the bike had come to a halt that the two of them, sitting as they were, angled toward each other but not facing each other, said something. The posture was a kind of speech. I couldn’t read the message, but it slapped hard against the light in my eyes, the joy in my chest, the charge running through my arms and legs.