Fierce Attachments

A person’s life was made rich or poor, worth a ransom or something to throw away in the gutter, if it was enhanced by or stripped of feeling.

I already knew I had hopeless trouble with the Marks of this world, trouble I thought originated in their insecurities, their fears, their defences. Me, I was ready. It was they who didn’t want a wife who talked back, they who were afraid of a woman like me. The contempt poured into those words ‘afraid of a woman like me’. Such fear was low, cunning, perverse, scurvy and wormlike. A man who was afraid of a woman like me deserved the kind of tongue-lashing that would leave him paralysed from the waist down.

Not so with Nettie. Her incapacity would have ingratiated her with the women, created a natural opening into their world – ‘Oh, teach me, tell me, is that how you do it, thank you, Mrs Zimmerman-Roseman-Shapiro-Berger, you’re so wise, I’m so ignorant, so glad to learn what you have to teach’ – but she couldn’t do it, didn’t even know where to begin. She felt exposed before the women, remained silent, unconfiding, hiding her need from all of them.

‘I’m saying that nowadays love has to be earned. Even by mothers and sons.’

‘That’s the first step, Ma,’ I say softly. ‘The unhappiness has to be made alive before anything can happen.’

She felt exposed before the women, remained silent, unconfiding, hiding her need from all of them. All except my mother.

The words act like adrenaline on my mother. Her cheeks begin to glow. Tears brighten her eyes. Her jawline grows firm. Her skin achieves muscle tone. “Come inside,” she says softly to me, thinking to do me a good turn. “Come. You’ll feel better.”

two women of remarkably similar inhibitions bonded together by virtue of having lived within each other’s orbit nearly all their lives. In such moments the fact that we are mother and daughter strikes an alien note. I know it is precisely because we are mother and daughter that our responses are mirror images, yet the word filial does not seem appropriate. On the contrary, the idea of family, of our being family, of family life seems altogether puzzling: an uncertainty in her as well

My mother gazes steadily at me across the table. “So what are you saying, my brilliant daughter?”
“I’m saying that nowadays love has to be earned. Even by mothers and sons.”

It wasn’t that I wanted to see her with Rick: his was a sullen beauty, glum and lumpish, and there was nothing happening between them that interested me. It was her I wanted to see, only her. And I wanted to touch her. My hand was always threatening to shoot away from my body out toward her face, her arm, her side. I yearned toward her. She radiated a kind of promise I couldn’t stay away from, I wanted … I wanted … I didn’t know what I wanted.