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.

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.

mother had been distinguished in the building not only by her unaccented English and the certainty of her manner, but also by her status as a happily married woman. No, I haven’t said that right

My mother might have been silenced, too, had she remained living among the Italians, might have snatched her children up in wordless anxiety when a neighbor befriended one of us, just as Mrs. Cassidy did whenever a woman in our building smoothed the hair of one of the “Irish blondies.” But my mother was not one

I had known since early childhood that my parents were fellow travelers of the Communist Party, and that of the two my mother had been the more politically active. By the time I was born she had stood on soapboxes in the Bronx pleading for economic and social justice. It was, in fact, part of her deprivation litany that if it hadn’t been for the children she would have developed into a talented public speaker.

My relationship with my mother is not good, and as our lives accumulate it often seems to worsen. We are locked into a narrow channel of acquaintance, intense and binding.