Read Online Fierce Attachments: A Memoir by Vivian Gornick - Free Book Online Page A

that life is tragic. To be “in tragedy” was to be saved from what I took to be the pedestrian pains of my own life. These seemed meaningless. To be saved from meaninglessness, I knew, was everything. Largeness of meaning was redemption. It was an adolescent writer’s beginning: I had started to mythicize.
    Late in the summer a woman I had never seen before appeared in the neighborhood, and began to walk up our block, late at night, across the street from the fire-escape window where I sat. I never saw her during the day, but she appeared promptly every night at eleven. She was thin and white-skinned. A mass of tangled black hair framed her face. Her shoulders were narrow and bony. She wore makeup and high heels. Her nylon stockings were loose and wrinkled around her ankles, and there was in her walk some muscular disconnect, as though she had been knocked apart like a puppet and put back together again badly. Sometimes she wore a thin shawl of tropical print. She was an altogether peculiar creature to have appeared on those streets, brimful as they were with working-class respectability, but I accepted her appearance as unthinkingly as I did the other human oddities on the block. Or at least I thought I did.
    One night early in the fall as I was watching her walk jerkily up the block, I turned back into the living room where my brother was reading and my mother lying on the couch. I called my brother to the window and pointed to the woman in the street.
    “Have you seen her?” I asked.
    “Sure,” he said.
    “Who is she?”
    “She’s a prostitute.”
    “A what?”
    “That’s a person without a home,” my mother said.
    “Oh,” I said.
    In that moment I became aware that the woman on the street had moved me. I was stirred by her presence, her aspect. I felt her as a broken creature, broken and diseased, and I had begun to imagine myself healing her. This image now pushed through the scrim of half-conscious thought, and quickly developed itself. As I healed her she became changed, her shoulders widened, her skin cleared, her hair neatened; above all, her eyes became grave and purposeful. But still, the nights were growing colder and she shivered in her thin dress and torn shawl. I imagined myself draping her in some lovely material that was both warming and magically possessed of the power to increase the healing process. I couldn’t see the material clearly for the longest time. Was it thin or thick, solid or print, light or dark? Then one night I looked closely at it and saw that it was lace. A series of flash images confused me. I saw Nettie’s face cradled on a piece of her own lace. I saw myself and the prostitute and Nettie, all of us with our faces laid sadly against small pieces of lace. Not a mantle of lace for any one of us, only these bits and pieces, and all of us sorrowing against the bits and pieces.
     
     
     
     
    We’re walking west on Twenty-third Street. It’s late in the day and hundreds of workers are streaming out of the Metropolitan Life Building. My mother, an expert walker in the city (not to mention seat-grabber on the subway), is elbowing her way free of the crowd, with me right behind her. She is making fair progress when a man places himself deliberately in her path. She moves to the left, he moves to the left. She moves to the right, he moves to the right. She stares into his chest and then quickly, like a frightened bird, up into his face: after all, this is New York. For a moment all systems of response shut down. She stops reacting. She is simply there. Then all at once she’s in noisy operation again.
    “Maddy!” she bursts out at the man. “Madison Shapiro. For God’s sake!”
    Now it’s my turn to shut down. I know the name Maddy Shapiro very well, but I do not know the face in front of me. Ah, it hits me. It’s not that I haven’t seen Maddy Shapiro in more than twenty years, it’s that Maddy Shapiro has had a nose job. I’m amazed that my mother spotted Maddy