I expect my mother to laugh and say, “What’s with you tonight?” Instead, not even looking up from the dishes, she goes on automatic and says to me, “Well, now perhaps you can have a little sympathy for me.”
I look up slowly at her. “What?” I say. I’m not sure I have heard right. “What was that you said?”
“I said maybe you can understand now what my life was like when Papa died. What it’s been like all these years. Now that you’re suffering from the absence of love yourself, maybe you can understand.”
I stare at her. I stare and I stare. Then I’m up from the table, the cup is falling over, I fly against the kitchen wall, a caged animal. The pot she’s washing clatters into the sink.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I shout. “What are you talking about? Again love? And yet again love? Am I never to hear anything but love from you until I die? Does my life mean nothing to you? Absolutely nothing?”
She stands at the sink rigid with terror, her eyes fixed on me, her lips white, the color draining from her face. I think I’m giving her a heart attack, but I can’t stop.
“It is true,” I rage on, my voice murderous now with the effort to keep it down. “I’ve not been successful. Neither at love, nor at work, nor at living a principled life. It is also true I made no choices, took no stands, stumbled into my life because I was angry and jealous of the world beyond my reach. But still! Don’t I get any credit for spotting a good idea, Ma? That one should try to live one’s life? Doesn’t that count, Ma? That counts for nothing, Ma?”
Her fear dissolves into pity and regret. She’s so pliable these days, it’s heartbreaking. “No, no,” she protests, “it’s another world, another time. I didn’t mean anything. Of course you get credit. All the credit in the world. Don’t get so excited. I was trying to sympathize. I said the wrong thing. I don’t know how to talk to you anymore.”
Abruptly, the rush of words in her is halted. Another thought has attracted her attention. The line of defense swerves. “Don’t you see?” she begs softly. “Love was all I had. What did I have? I had nothing. Nothing. And what was I going to have? What could I have? Everything you say about your life is true, I understand how true, but you have had your work, you have your work. And you’ve traveled. My God, you’ve traveled! You’ve been halfway around the world. What wouldn’t I have given to travel! I had only your father’s love. It was the only sweetness in my life. So I loved his love. What could I have done?”
But mutual heartbreak is not our style. “That’s not good enough, Ma,” I say. “You were forty-six when he died. You could have gone out into life. Other women with a lot less at their disposal did. You wanted to stay inside the idea of Papa’s love. It’s crazy! You’ve spent thirty years inside the idea of love. You could have had a life.”
Here the conversation ends. She is done with pleading. Her face hardens. She draws herself up into remembered inflexibility. “So,” she reverts to Yiddish, the language of irony and defiance. “You’ll write down here on my tombstone: From the very beginning it was all water under the bridge.”
She turns from the dishes in the sink, wipes her hands carefully on a towel, and walks past me into the living room. I stand in the kitchen looking down at the patterned linoleum on the floor, but then after a while I follow. She is lying stretched out on the couch, her arm across her forehead. I sink down into a chair not far from the couch. This couch and this chair are positioned as they were in the living room in the Bronx. It is not difficult to feel that she has been lying on this couch and I have been sitting in this chair almost the whole of our lives.
We are silent. Because we are silent the noise of the street is more compelling. It reminds me that we are not in the Bronx, we are in Manhattan: the journey has been more than a series of subway stops for each of us. Yet tonight this room is so like that other room, and the light, the failing summer light, suddenly it seems a blurred version of that other pale light, the one falling on us in the foyer.
My mother breaks the silence. In a voice remarkably free of emotion—a voice detached, curious, only wanting information—she says to me, “Why don’t you go already? Why don’t you walk away from my life? I’m not stopping you.”
I see the light, I hear the street. I’m half in, half out.
“I know you’re not, Ma.”
ALSO BY VIVIAN GORNICK
In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt
The Romance of American Communism
Essays in Feminism
Women in Science: 100 Journeys into the Territory
Approaching Eye Level
The End of the Novel of Love
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The Men in My Life
Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life
The Odd Woman and the City
Copyright © 1987 by Vivian Gornick
Introduction copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Lethem
All rights reserved
Published in 1987 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
www.fsgbooks.com
eISBN 9781466819009
First eBook Edition : April 2012
First Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition, 2005
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gornick, Vivian.
Fierce attachments / Vivian Gornick.
p. cm.
Originally published 1987.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52996-3 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-374-52996-5 (pbk.)
1. Gornick, Vivian. 2. Daughters—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 3. Jews—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 4. Mothers and daughters—New York (State)—New York—Case studies. I. Title.
HQ755.85.G67 20005
974.7’1043’092—dc22
2005048836
Fierce Attachments Page 18