Fierce Attachments: A Memoir by Vivian Gornick Page B

side, the lips white with strain. His neck was pulsing. “You tired of livin’?” he said to me.
    Omigod, I thought.
    “What do you mean?” I asked politely.
    “You were laughin’ back there. Ya tired of livin’, ain-cha?”
    “Oh, you misunder stood ,” I purred shamelessly. “I was laughing at myself. I’ve got sneezing fits. I was laughing because I was sneezing so hard I couldn’t move. I wasn’t laughing at you. Did you think I was laughing at you? Oh no!”
    He heard nothing I said. His face remained closed against me. If anything, the pinpoints of rage glowed harder. He looked at the keys in my hand. “You live here?” he said. His hand made an upward motion. “Come on,” he said. “Upstairs.”
    “No,” I babbled. “I don’t live here. I’m just visiting.”
    “Upstairs,” he said. “Come on, upstairs.”
    “I don’t live here. We can’t go upstairs.”
    In a motion of strength derived from terror I placed my open hand against his chest and pushed. He lost his balance and toppled backward into the street. I jerked past him into the crowd and ran. Ran to the end of the block, then into the next block, and into the supermarket. I stood there, just beyond the checkout counters, breathing hard. I didn’t know what to do, where to go, whom to speak to. Without warning, the familiar had passed into nightmare.
    I wandered around the market for thirty minutes, then made a break for it, walking fast, head down, away from my building, somehow the container of milk no longer in my hand. Hours later, thoroughly exhausted, I returned to
First Avenue and darted unmolested through my own doorway, not leaving the apartment for the rest of that day and evening.
    Three years later I saw the man in the white shirt and the black pants on East Fourteenth Street. It was late fall. He was wearing a thin leather jacket and hugging a brown paper parcel to his chest. I backed quickly into a doorway, out of the line of his vision. He looked exactly as he had three years before, but as he drew closer I saw that he stumbled when he walked, and his eyes were horribly anxious.
    Four years after that I saw him again, on West Eighth Street. His hair was heavily streaked with gray now, his skin yellow, his chin covered with white stubble. As he came abreast of me I stepped out of the doorway I had ducked into. He looked at me, through me. His gaze, as I had suspected, was fixed, unseeing.
    Now, five years later, here he was on Broadway, his hair iron-gray, his stare wild, his walk unsteady, his hands flailing at the air. His clothes were out of the men’s shelter, and his face so ill-looking you wanted to put him in a hospital for a month before we even discussed the situation.
    My mother looked curiously at me. “Why were you afraid of him?” she asked. “You could knock him over with one hand.”
    “Ma, he didn’t look like that twelve years ago. Believe me.
    She continued to stare after him as he shambled down Broadway, bumping into people left and right.
    “You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.”
     
     
     
     
    I’m fourteen years old. It’s an evening in late spring. I push open the door of Nettie’s apartment. The kitchen is steeped in a kind of violet gloom, soft, full, intense. The room is empty: bathed in the lovely half-light, but empty. I stop short. The door wasn’t locked, someone must be home. I walk through to the inner room. I stop on the threshold. The light is even weaker here. My eyes adjust. I see Nettie and the priest lying across the paisley-covered bed. She is naked, he is dressed. He is flat on his back. She lies half across him. His body is rigid, hers is spilling over. I can see her smiling in the half-dark. She moves across him like a cat, and like a cat watches closely even as she purrs. She arches her back and lifts herself, only to fall again toward him. Her breast drops into his nerveless hand. Vibrancy flows through me like electric