Read Online Fierce Attachments: A Memoir by Vivian Gornick - Free Book Online
Authors: Vivian Gornick
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hospital and the doctor who comes to help me is tall and so handsome, and kind and gentle, and he looks into my face and I look into his, and we can’t tear our eyes away from each other, it’s as though we’re glued together, we’ve been looking for each other all our lives and now we’re afraid to look away even for a minute, and he says to me, ‘I’ve been waiting such a long time for you, will you marry me?’ and I say, ‘But you’re a doctor, an educated man, and I’m a poor woman, ignorant and uneducated,
I’ll embarrass you,’ and he says, ‘I must have you, life is not worth living if I can’t have you,’ and that’s it, we’re together from then on.”
Sometimes, after an hour or so of this, she would say to me, “Now you say what you’d like to have happen.” And I would say, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a flood or an epidemic or a revolution, and even though I’m this little kid they find me and they say to me, ‘You speak so wonderfully you must lead the people out of this disaster.’” I never daydreamed about love or money, I always daydreamed I was making eloquent speeches that stirred ten thousand people to feel their lives, and to act.
Nettie would stare at me when I said what I would like to have happen. The sparkle in her eyes would flicker and her quick-moving fingers would drop into her lap. I think she was always hoping that this time it would be different, this time I’d come back with a story more like her own, one that made her feel good, not puzzled and awkward. But she must have known it was a long shot. Otherwise she would have asked me more often than she did to tell her what magic I longed for.
When I was fourteen years old, Nettie’s lace figured strongly in a crucial development in my inner life. It was the year after my father’s death, the year in which I began to sit on the fire escape late at night making up stories in my head. The atmosphere in our house had become morgue-like. My mother’s grief was primitive and all-encompassing: it sucked the oxygen out of the air. A heavy drugged sensation filled my head and my body whenever I came back
into the apartment. We, none of us—not my brother, not I, certainly not my mother—found comfort in one another. We were only exiled together, trapped in a common affliction. Loneliness of the spirit seized conscious hold of me for the first time, and I turned my face to the street, to the dreamy melancholy inner suggestiveness that had become the only relief from what I quickly perceived as a condition of loss, and of defeat.
I began sitting on the fire escape in the spring, and I sat there every night throughout that immeasurably long first summer, with my mother lying on the couch behind me moaning, crying, sometimes screaming late into the night, and my brother wandering aimlessly about, reading or pacing, the only conversation among us that of barely polite familiars: “Get me a glass of water,” or, “Shut the window, there’s a draft,” or, “You going down? Bring back milk.” I found I could make myself feel better simply by swinging my legs across the windowsill and turning my face fully outward, away from the room behind me.
The shabby tenement streets below our windows were transformed by darkness and silence. There was in the nighttime air a clarity, a softness and a fullness, indescribably sweet, that intensified the magical isolation I sought and that easily became a conduit for waking dreams. A hungry fantasizing went instantly to work as soon as I was seated with my back to the apartment, my eyes trained on the street. This fantasizing was only one step removed from Nettie’s “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” but it was an important step. Mine began “Just suppose,” and was followed not by tales of immediate rescue but by imaginings of “large meaning.” That is: things always ended badly but there
was grandeur in the disaster. The point of my romances was precisely
I’ll embarrass you,’ and he says, ‘I must have you, life is not worth living if I can’t have you,’ and that’s it, we’re together from then on.”
Sometimes, after an hour or so of this, she would say to me, “Now you say what you’d like to have happen.” And I would say, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a flood or an epidemic or a revolution, and even though I’m this little kid they find me and they say to me, ‘You speak so wonderfully you must lead the people out of this disaster.’” I never daydreamed about love or money, I always daydreamed I was making eloquent speeches that stirred ten thousand people to feel their lives, and to act.
Nettie would stare at me when I said what I would like to have happen. The sparkle in her eyes would flicker and her quick-moving fingers would drop into her lap. I think she was always hoping that this time it would be different, this time I’d come back with a story more like her own, one that made her feel good, not puzzled and awkward. But she must have known it was a long shot. Otherwise she would have asked me more often than she did to tell her what magic I longed for.
When I was fourteen years old, Nettie’s lace figured strongly in a crucial development in my inner life. It was the year after my father’s death, the year in which I began to sit on the fire escape late at night making up stories in my head. The atmosphere in our house had become morgue-like. My mother’s grief was primitive and all-encompassing: it sucked the oxygen out of the air. A heavy drugged sensation filled my head and my body whenever I came back
into the apartment. We, none of us—not my brother, not I, certainly not my mother—found comfort in one another. We were only exiled together, trapped in a common affliction. Loneliness of the spirit seized conscious hold of me for the first time, and I turned my face to the street, to the dreamy melancholy inner suggestiveness that had become the only relief from what I quickly perceived as a condition of loss, and of defeat.
I began sitting on the fire escape in the spring, and I sat there every night throughout that immeasurably long first summer, with my mother lying on the couch behind me moaning, crying, sometimes screaming late into the night, and my brother wandering aimlessly about, reading or pacing, the only conversation among us that of barely polite familiars: “Get me a glass of water,” or, “Shut the window, there’s a draft,” or, “You going down? Bring back milk.” I found I could make myself feel better simply by swinging my legs across the windowsill and turning my face fully outward, away from the room behind me.
The shabby tenement streets below our windows were transformed by darkness and silence. There was in the nighttime air a clarity, a softness and a fullness, indescribably sweet, that intensified the magical isolation I sought and that easily became a conduit for waking dreams. A hungry fantasizing went instantly to work as soon as I was seated with my back to the apartment, my eyes trained on the street. This fantasizing was only one step removed from Nettie’s “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” but it was an important step. Mine began “Just suppose,” and was followed not by tales of immediate rescue but by imaginings of “large meaning.” That is: things always ended badly but there
was grandeur in the disaster. The point of my romances was precisely
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