Fierce Attachments

by Vivian Gornick

  As the whys fell on me I was running, running through the streets of the city, the streets of my life. I sat chained to the desk, running. Breathless, exhausted, frantic. Sketch it in! Sketch it in! No time, no breath. Maybe someday there’ll be breath and time, right now just get the bare bones of the thing down. The rectangle is closing in. Work fast, faster. I can’t. There’s a pain in my side. I can barely sit at the typewriter. I feel ill, I’m about to faint, hanging on, another half hour at the typewriter and I’ll fall to the ground. I’d better chain myself to the typewriter, otherwise …

  Why, she asked. Why chained to the typewriter. Why fighting for time and breath. Why only that small bit of good writing inside a narrow space, and all around the rhetoric of panic and breathlessness.

  That rectangle, I finally explained. It’s a fugitive, a subversive, an illegal immigrant in the country of my being. It has no civil rights. It’s always on the run.

  “How about a woman with a husband?” she asked. “Is she the native citizen? The one with all the rights?”

  “I think … maybe yes … perhaps yes.” And I was surprised by the sadness in my voice. “You may be right. That may be it.”

  “Well, then, let’s get you married,” she said briskly. “Nothing easier than that.”

  “No!” I cried hotly. “No, no, no. A thousand times no.”

  “Well, then,” she said.

  “I can’t seem to do it.” I hit the palm of one hand with the fist of the other. “I can’t naturalize the immigrant.”

  Again she said why.

  And this time when she said why I saw myself standing in the foyer with Mama and Nettie, the pale light full of threat and anxiety falling on us. That foyer. It is an essence, a kind of perfumed ether. I breathe it in. It thrills and sedates me. I stand in the foyer, aroused and attentive, suspended and immobilized.

  Why, she said. I want to know why. Why will you not leave that dark narrow passage?

  My mother materialized in the air, her face soft, weak, sadly intelligent. She leaned forward intently. She was as interested in the question as I. But I remained mute. I had no answer.

  Then the analyst said, What about men?

  Men? I repeated blankly.

  Yes, men, she said calmly.

  Oh, for God’s sake! I exploded. I can’t do that one, too! I spoke more slowly then. I realized only as I spoke that what I had said was true. No, I said quietly, I don’t think I can learn to do that one.

  You must, she said even more quietly. You must do work, and you must do love.

  Mama and Nettie held me in a loose embrace. Yes, they smiled, wreathing their arms about me in the pale light, you must.

  The years are coming up thickly … forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight … There is no past now, only the ongoing present … seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty. Eighty. My God, my mother is eighty. We stand still, looking at each other. She shrugs her shoulder and sits down on the couch in her living room.

  She came to my house this afternoon. We had a drink, then went out to dinner in the neighborhood, then I walked her home. She made coffee and we talked, looked at pictures, some old (America, 1941), some older (Russia, 1913), and we read together from a batch of letters we have dipped into fifty times in my life; letters written to her in 1922 by one Noah Shecter, formerly a professor of literature in Rumania and at the time of the letter-writing manager of the bakery where my mother worked as a bookkeeper. The letters are remarkable: nineteenth-century romantic fantasy written by a lonely man living in the Bronx with an unintellectual wife and three needy children, his head filled with Ibsen, Gorki, Mozart, writing his heart out each night at midnight to a vain brown-eyed empty vessel of receptivity (my eighteen-year-old mother) who would read these impassioned outpourings at eight in the morning before she went off to work to see the man who had written them stiff and formal in a high starched collar, looking like Franz Kafka in the insurance company. Now, sixty years later, I hold these hundreds of yellowed sheets covered with thickly scrawled European handwriting, the black ink long ago turned brown, and read of Noah Shecter’s midnight desperation that my mother should understand how full his heart is, just having seen Ibsen’s Brand performed in a Fourteenth Street theater, and how necessary it is that he let her know how well the actors captured the essential meaning of this very great play. The letters and the pictures surround us (I see her as she must have looked when she first read them)—fragments, scraps, tales told and retold of the life lived and the life unlived. Especially the one unlived.

  A sad, silent weight hangs about my mother all evening. She looks very pretty tonight—soft white hair, soft smooth skin, the wrecked face looking wonderfully whole again—but the years are dragging inside her, and in her eyes I see the confusion, the persistent confusion.

  “A lifetime gone by,” she says quietly.

  My pain is so great I dare not feel it. “Exactly,” I say evenly. “Not lived. Just gone by.”

  The softness in her face hardens into definition. She looks at me and, with iron in her voice, says in Yiddish, “So you’ll write down: From the beginning it was all lost.”

  We sit together then, silent, not embroiled with each other, two women only staring into the obscurity of all that lost life. My mother looks neither young nor old, only deeply absorbed by the terribleness of what she is seeing. I do not know how I look to her.

  We always walked, she and I. We don’t always walk now. We don’t always argue, either. We don’t always do any of the things we always did. There is no always anymore. The fixed patterns are beginning to break up. This breakup has its own pleasures and surprises. In fact, surprise is now the key word between us. We cannot depend on change, but we can depend on surprise. However, we cannot always depend on surprise either. This keeps us on our toes.

  I come to see her one night with an old friend of mine, a man who grew up with me, someone we’ve both known for thirty years. I say known advisedly. This man is something of a lunatic. An inspired lunatic, to be sure, but a lunatic nonetheless. He, like Davey Levinson, is educated in a vacuum, and he speaks a kind of imaginative gibberish. It is the only way he knows how to get through the ordinary anxiety of the ordinary day.

  We are having coffee and cake. I am eating too much cake. I am, in fact, wolfing down the cake. My mother is getting crazy watching me. She cries, “Stop it! For God’s sake, stop eating like that. Don’t you care at all that you’ll gain two pounds and hate yourself tomorrow? Where’s your motivation?”

  My friend, sitting at the table beside me, his head thrust forward and down and twisted to the side, looking at her like the madman that he is, starts going on nonsensically about motivation. “You know, of course, that motivation is life,” he says. “Life itself. Taken from the Latin motus, it means to move, set in motion, engage …”

  My mother looks at him. I can see in her face that she does not understand the construction of these sentences. She feels put down: if she doesn’t understand something she is being told she is stupid. Her expression becomes one of glittering scorn. “You think you’re telling me something I don’t know?” she says. “You think I was born yesterday?” No surprise here.

  One week later I’m sitting in her apartment drinking tea with her, and from out of nowhere she says to me, “So tell me about your abortion.” She knows I had an abortion when I was thirty, but she has never referred to it. I, in turn, know she had three abortions during the Depression, but I never mention them, either. Now, suddenly … Her face is unreadable. I don’t know what has stirred the inquiry and I don’t know what to tell her. Should I tell her the truth or … ? What the hell. The truth. “I had an abortion with my legs up against the wall in an apartment on West Eighty-eighth Street, with Demerol injected into my veins by a doctor whose consulting room was the corner of Fifty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue.” She nods at me as I speak, as though these details are familiar, even expected. Then she says, “I had mine in the basement of a Greenwich Village nightclub, for te
n dollars, with a doctor who half the time when you woke up you were holding his penis in your hand.” I look at her in admiration. She has matched me clause for clause, and raised the ante with each one. We both burst out laughing at the same moment. Surprise.

  Yet another night I am sitting at her table and we are talking of the time she went to work when I was eight years old. This is a story I never tire of hearing.

  “What made you decide to do it, Ma? I mean, why that time rather than any other?”

  “I always wanted to work, always. God, how I loved having my own money in my pocket! It was the middle of the war, you threw a stone you got seven jobs, I couldn’t resist.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I read the want ads one morning and I got dressed, took the subway downtown, and applied for a job. In ten minutes I had it. What was the name of that company? I’ve forgotten it now.”

  “Angelica Uniform Company,” I instantly supply.

  “You remember!” She smiles beatifically at me. “Look at that. She remembers. I can’t remember. She remembers.”

  “I am the repository of your life now, Ma.”

  “Yes, you are, you are. Let’s see now. Where were we?”

  “You went downtown and got the job.”

  “Yes. So I came home and told Papa, ‘I have a job.’”

  “How did he respond?”

  “Badly. Very badly. He didn’t want me to work. He said, ‘No other wife in the neighborhood works, why should you work.’ I said, ‘I don’t care what any other wife in the neighborhood does, I want to work.’” She stares into this memory, shaking her head. Her voice falters. “But it was no good, no good. I didn’t last long.”

  “Eight months,” I say.

  “Yes, eight months.”

  “Why, Ma? Why only eight months?”

  “Papa was miserable. He kept saying to me, The children need you.’”

  “That was silly,” I interrupt. “I remember being excited that you were working. I loved having a key around my neck, and rushing home every afternoon to do things that made it easier for you.”

  “Then he said, ‘You’re losing weight.’”

  “You were twenty pounds overweight. It was great that you were losing weight.”

  “What can I tell you?” she says to me. “Either you were going to make a hell in the house or you were going to be happy. I wanted to be happy. He didn’t want me to work. I stopped working.”

  We are quiet together for a while. Then I say, “Ma, if it was now, and Papa said he didn’t want you to work, what would you do?”

  She looks at me for a long moment. She is eighty years old. Her eyes are dim, her hair is white, her body is frail. She takes a swallow of her tea, puts down the cup, and says calmly,“I’d tell him to go fuck himself.”

  Real surprise.

  We’re in the Lincoln Center library for a Saturday afternoon concert. We’ve arrived late and all the seats are taken. We stand in the darkened auditorium leaning against the wall. I start to worry. I know my mother cannot stand for two and a half hours. “Let’s go,” I whisper to her. “Sh-h-h,” she says, pushing the air away with her hand. I look around. In the aisle seat next to me is a little boy, tossing about on his seat. Beside him his young mother. Next to her another little boy, and next to him the husband and father. The woman lifts the little boy in the aisle seat onto her lap and motions my mother to sit down. My mother leans over, gives the woman her most brilliant smile, and says coyly, “When you’ll be eighty, and you’ll want a seat at a concert, I’ll come back and give you one.” The woman is charmed. She turns to her husband to share her pleasure. Nothing doing. He stares balefully at my mother. Here is one Jewish son who hasn’t forgotten. His response pulls me up short, reminds me of how seductive my mother has always been, how unwilling she is to part with this oldest trick of the trade, how dangerous and untrustworthy is this charm of hers.

  On and on it goes. My apartment is being painted. I spend two nights on her couch. Whenever I sleep over I like to make the coffee in the morning, because she has gotten used to weak coffee and I like mine strong. Meanwhile, she has become convinced that her weak coffee is the correct way to make coffee, and although she has said to me, “All right, you don’t like my coffee, make it yourself,” she stands over me in the kitchen and directs me to make it as she makes it.

  “It’s enough already,” she says as I spoon coffee into the pot.

  “No, it’s not,” I say.

  “It is. For God’s sake, enough!”

  “Look for yourself, Ma. See how far short of the measuring line it is?”

  She looks. The evidence is indisputable. There is not enough coffee in the pot. She turns away from me, the flat edge of her hand cutting the air in that familiar motion of dismissal.

  “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.”