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Authors: Vivian Gornick

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BOOK: Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
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In the museum lobby I stop at the permanent exhibit of Alexander Calder’s circus. As usual, a crowd is gathered, laughing and gaping at the wonderfulness of Calder’s sighing, weeping, triumphing bits of cloth and wire. Beside me stand two women. I look at their faces and I dismiss
them: middle-aged Midwestern blondes, blue-eyed and moony. Then one of them says, “It’s like second childhood,” and the other one replies tartly, “Better than anyone’s first.” I’m startled, pleasured, embarrassed. I think, What a damn fool you are to cut yourself off with your stupid amazement that
she
could have said
that.
Again, I feel the space inside widen unexpectedly.
That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing.
Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion. I want to think. No, I mean today I
really
want to think. The desire announced itself with the word “concentration.”
I go to meet my mother. I’m flying. Flying! I want to give her some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my immense happiness at being alive. Just because she is my oldest intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her.
“Oh, Ma! What a day I’ve had,” I say.
“Tell me,” she says. “Do you have the rent this month?”
“Ma, listen …” I say.
“That review you wrote for the
Times,”
she says. “It’s for sure they’ll pay you?”
“Ma, stop it. Let me tell you what I’ve been feeling,” I say.
“Why aren’t you wearing something warmer?” she cries. “It’s nearly winter.”
The space inside begins to shimmer. The walls collapse inward. I feel breathless. Swallow slowly, I say to myself, slowly. To my mother I say, “You
do
know how to say the right thing at the right time. It’s remarkable, this gift of yours. It quite takes my breath away.”
But she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t know I’m being ironic. Nor does she know she’s wiping me out. She doesn’t know I take her anxiety personally, feel annihilated by her depression. How can she know this? She doesn’t even know I’m there. Were I to tell her that it’s death to me, her not knowing I’m there, she would stare at me out of her eyes crowding up with puzzled desolation, this young girl of seventy-seven, and she would cry angrily, “You don’t understand! You have never understood!”
 
 
 
 
Mama and Nettie quarreled, and I entered City College. In feeling memory these events carry equal weight. Both inaugurated open conflict, both drove a wedge between me and the unknowing self, both were experienced as subversive and warlike in character. Certainly the conflict between
Nettie and my mother seemed a strategic plan to surround and conquer. Incoherent as the war was, shot through with rage and deceit, its aims apparently confused and always denied, it never lost sight of the enemy: the intelligent heart of the girl who if not bonded to one would be lost to both. City College, as well, seemed no less concerned with laying siege, to the ignorant mind if not the intelligent heart. Benign in intent, only a passport to the promised land, City of course was the real invader. It did more violence to the emotions than either Mama or Nettie could have dreamed possible, divided me from them both, provoked and nourished an unshared life inside the head that became a piece of treason. I lived among my people, but I was no longer one of them.
I think this was true for most of us at City College. We still used the subways, still walked the familiar streets between classes, still returned to the neighborhood each night, talked to our high-school friends, and went to sleep in our own beds. But secretly we had begun to live in a world inside our heads where we read talked thought in a way that separated us from our parents, the life of the house and that of the street. We had been initiated, had learned the difference between hidden and expressed thought. This made us subversives in our own homes.
As thousands before me have said, “For us it was City College or nothing.” I enjoyed the solidarity those words invoked but rejected the implied deprivation. At City College I sat talking in a basement cafeteria until ten or eleven at night with a half dozen others who also never wanted to go home to Brooklyn or the Bronx, and here in the cafeteria my education took root. Here I learned that
Faulkner was America, Dickens was politics, Marx was sex, Jane Austen the idea of culture, that I came from a ghetto and D. H. Lawrence was a visionary. Here my love of literature named itself, and amazement over the life of the mind blossomed. I discovered that people were transformed by ideas, and that intellectual conversation was immensely erotic.
We never stopped talking. Perhaps because we did very little else (restricted by sexual fear and working-class economics, we didn’t go to the theater and we didn’t make love), but certainly we talked so much because most of us had been reading in bottled-up silence from the age of six on and City College was our great release. It was not from the faculty that City drew its reputation for intellectual goodness, it was from its students, it was from us. Not that we were intellectually distinguished, we weren’t; but our hungry energy vitalized the place. The idea of intellectual life burned in us. While we pursued ideas we felt known, to ourselves and to one another. The world made sense, there was ground beneath our feet, a place in the universe to stand. City College made conscious in me inner cohesion as a first value.
I think my mother was very quickly of two minds about me and City, although she had wanted me to go to school, no question about that, had been energized by the determination that I do so (instructed me in the middle of her first year of widowhood to enter the academic not the commercial course of high-school study), and was even embattled when it became something of an issue in the family.
“Where is it written that a working-class widow’s daughter
should to go college?” one of my uncles said to her, drinking coffee at our kitchen table on a Saturday morning in my senior year in high school.
“Here it is written,” she had replied, tapping the table hard with her middle finger. “Right here it is written. The girl goes to college.”
“Why?” he had pursued.
“Because I say so.”
“But why? What do you think will come of it?”
“I don’t know. I only know she’s clever, she deserves an education, and she’s going to get one. This is America. The girls are not cows in the field only waiting for a bull to mate with.” I stared at her. Where had
that
come from? My father had been dead only five years, she was in full widowhood swing.
The moment was filled with conflict and bravado. She felt the words she spoke but she did not mean them. She didn’t even know what she meant by an education. When she discovered at my graduation that I wasn’t a teacher she acted as though she’d been swindled. In her mind a girl child went in one door marked college and came out another marked teacher.
“You mean you’re not a teacher?” she said to me, eyes widening as her two strong hands held my diploma down on the kitchen table.
“No,” I said.
“What have you been doing there all these years?” she asked quietly.
“Reading novels,” I replied.
She marveled silently at my chutzpah.
But it wasn’t really a matter of what I could or could
not do with the degree. We were people who knew how to stay alive, she never doubted I would find a way. No, what drove her, and divided us, was me thinking. She hadn’t understood that going to school meant I would start thinking: coherently and out loud. She was taken by violent surprise. My sentences got longer within a month of those first classes. Longer, more complicated, formed by words whose meaning she did not always know. I had never before spoken a word she didn’t know. Or made a sentence whose logic she couldn’t follow. Or attempted an opinion that grew out of an abstraction. It made her crazy. Her face began to take on a look of animal cunning when I started a sentence that could not possibly be concluded before three clauses had hit the air. Cunning sparked anger, anger flamed into rage. “What are you talking about?” she would shout at me. “What
are
you talking about? Speak English, please! We all understand English in this house. Speak it!”
Her response stunned me. I didn’t get it. Wasn’t she pleased that I could say something she didn’t understand? Wasn’t that what it was all about? I was the advance guard. I was going to take her into the new world. All she had to do was adore what I was becoming, and here she was refusing. I’d speak my new sentences, and she would turn on me as though I’d performed a vile act right there at the kitchen table.
She, of course, was as confused as I. She didn’t know why she was angry, and if she’d been told she was angry she would have denied it, would have found a way to persuade both herself and any interested listener that she was proud I was in school, only why did I have to be such a
showoff? Was that what going to college was all about? Now, take Mr. Lewis, the insurance agent, an educated man if ever there was one, got a degree from City College in 1929, 1929 mind you, and never made you feel stupid, always spoke in simple sentences, but later you thought about what he had said. That’s the way an educated person should talk. Here’s this snotnose kid coming into the kitchen with all these big words, sentences you can’t make head or tail of …
I was seventeen, she was fifty. I had not yet come into my own as a qualifying belligerent but I was a respectable contender and she, naturally, was at the top of her game. The lines were drawn, and we did not fail one another. Each of us rose repeatedly to the bait the other one tossed out. Our storms shook the apartment: paint blistered on the wall, linoleum cracked on the floor, glass shivered in the window frame. We barely kept our hands off one another, and more than once we approached disaster.
One Saturday afternoon she was lying on the couch. I was reading in a nearby chair. Idly she asked, “What are you reading?” Idly I replied, “A comparative history of the idea of love over the last three hundred years.” She looked at me for a moment. “That’s ridiculous,” she said slowly. “Love is love. It’s the same everywhere, all the time. What’s to compare?” “That’s absolutely not true,” I shot back. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s only an idea, Ma. That’s all love is. Just an idea. You think it’s a function of the mysterious immutable being, but it’s not! There is, in fact, no such thing as the mysterious immutable being …” Her legs were off the couch so fast I didn’t see them go down. She made fists of her hands,
closed her eyes tight, and howled, “I’ll kill you-u-u! Snake in my bosom, I’ll kill you. How dare you talk to me that way?” And then she was coming at me. She was small and chunky. So was I. But I had thirty years on her. I was out of the chair faster than her arm could make contact, and running, running through the apartment, racing for the bathroom, the only room with a lock on it. The top half of the bathroom door was a panel of frosted glass. She arrived just as I turned the lock, and couldn’t put the brakes on. She drove her fist through the glass, reaching for me. Blood, screams, shattered glass on both sides of the door. I thought that afternoon, One of us is going to die of this attachment.
 
 
Compounding our struggle, stimulating our anguish, swelling our confusion was sex. Me and boys, me and maidenhood, me and getting on with it. Safeguarding my virginity was a major preoccupation. Every boy I brought into the house made my mother anxious. She could not but leap ahead in her thoughts to the inevitable moment when he must threaten her vital interest. But she knew the danger came not so much from them as from me. With all her extraordinary focus on romantic love, and her sure knowledge that my generation of girls was made as miserable as her own over the loss of virginity before marriage, she nonetheless knew that something was loosed in me that had never been loosed in her; that she and I were not allies here in a common cause. If I came in at midnight, flushed, disheveled, happy, she’d be waiting just inside the
door (she was out of bed as soon as she heard the key in the lock). She’d grasp my upper arm between her thumb and middle finger and demand, “What did he do? Where did he do it?” as though interrogating a collaborator.
Once, when she was positive I’d slept with the boy I’d gone out with, she pinched my arm until my eyes crossed in pain. “You’ve tasted him, haven’t you,” she said, her voice flat with accusation and defeat. That was her favorite euphemism for intercourse: “You’ve tasted him, haven’t you.” The phrase never failed to shock. I felt it in my nerve endings. The melodrama of repression, the malice of passivity, the rage over an absence of power, all of it packed into those words and I knew it from the first time I heard them. When she spoke them we faced each other across a no-man’s-land of undefined but unmistakable dimension.
BOOK: Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
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