Three books with mothers
Mom got her first COVID shot on Friday. She’s been signed up in the Manatee County, FL public health authority’s lottery for nearly two months. At 80, she is good with her computer and for weeks has diligently logged on every time a trickle of appointments through Publix and other pharmacies came through. Nothing. She was frequently in touch with her physician, hoping for intel on daily leftover vaccines at a local hospital or other pop-up vaccination opportunities. She was stressed about not being able to get a vaccination despite her age, despite her diligence. And so was I. Then, this happened.
When she told me on Wednesday that she was feeling awkward about keeping her vaccination appointment because of the public criticism of how her community came to access it, I understood. I told her I didn’t think that canceling that appointment would serve any greater good. She got the vaccination.
I joke with my family—including my mother— that it’s a “velvet prison” where she lives, a place so nondescript yet comfortable that it feels like where the Chosen end up After the Rapture. Turns out, it’s an ideal place to ride out this pandemic, and not just for the the manifest political privilege. Despite living alone, she has nice neighbors that she sees outdoors during her daily walks. She can grocery shop within the gated community complex itself. Plus, she gets breaks: she and her boyfriend in Naples alternate at whose place they get together most weekends. I check in with her by phone or text at least a couple of times a week—as do other friends and family members. We set her up with Netflix during this year and she revels in binge-watching after dinner. I’ve had to reassess my own dismissiveness about the could-be-anywhere-ness of her location and how it has likely helped her survive.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that books featuring mothers have risen to the top of my stack in recent weeks.
My daughter sent Hot Milk by Deborah Levy for Christmas. I’d been wanting to read it since it came out in 2016, but hadn’t gotten to it. When I thanked her for it, she told me: “don’t read anything into me giving you this book.” Which I thought was generous. Still, I had to wonder if some of the barely controlled rage of Sofia, Hot Milk’s young protagonist, might be visited against me at some future moment. If you want a great “interiority” novel that writhes with mother-daughter codependence against a backdrop of Costa del Sol, with its jellyfish blooms, suffering dogs, and intercontinental smattering of tourists, Hot Milk’s got it for you. A favorite psychological thread of this book was “wrong water”—how Sofia could never manage to offer her mother Rose, an intermittent invalid, the right glass of water.
...Will I still be here in a month? I don’t know. It depends on my sick mother, who is sleeping under a mosquito net in the next room. She will wake up and shout, ‘Get me water, Sofia,” and I will get her water and it will always be the wrong sort of water. I am not sure what water means anymore, but I will get her water as I understand it: from a bottle in the fridge, from a bottle that is not in the fridge, from a kettle in which the water has been boiled and left to cool. When I gaze at the star fields on my screen saver I often float out of time in the most peculiar way…
Then came Fierce Attachments by Vivan Gornick. A re-read. Had to track it down at the library as I lent out my copy long ago and it never came back. I flagged many paragraphs for the pure beauty and mastery of emotional description in them. A book fundamentally about how women make their lives, with the women around them always challenging—for better and worse—challenging us to reckon with ourselves. At the center of Gornick’s making of her life, of course, is her mother. Her astute, wry, sometimes bitter, sometimes unguarded and compassionate, mother.
I don’t remember being so halted and electrified by this passage the last time, on p. 74.
However, in the past year an odd circumstance has begun to obtain. On occasion, my head fails to fill with blood. I become irritated but remain calm. Not falling into a rage, I do not make a holocaust of the afternoon. Today, it appears, one of those moments is upon us. I turn to my mother, throw my left arm around her still solid back, place my right hand on her upper arm, and say, “Ma, if this book is not interesting to you, that’s fine. You can say that.” She looks coyly at me, eyes large, head half-turned; now she’s interested. “But don’t say it has nothing to teach you. That there’s nothing there. That’s unworthy of you, and the book, and of me. You demean us all when you say that.” Listen to me. Such wisdom. And all of it gained ten minutes ago.
Last time I read Fierce Attachments, I was still making frequent holocausts of many afternoons in my own life, in my own interactions with my mother.
Later, toward the end of book, as Gornick has become solidly middle-aged, and her mother, solidly elderly, this passage also pushed some of those buttons that had not been pushed the first time.
Neither of us, it seems, wishes to remain belligerent one sentence longer than the other. We are, I think, equally amazed that we have lived long enough to be responsive for whole minutes at a time simply to being in the world together, rather than concentrating on what each of us is not getting from the other.
But it has no staying power, this undreamed-of equanimity. It drifts, it gets lost, flashes up with unreliable vibrancy, then refuses to appear when most needed, or puts in an appearance with its strength much reduced. The state of affairs between us volatile. Flux is now our daily truth. The instability is an astonishment, shot through with mystery and promise. We are no longer nose to nose, she and I. A degree of distance has been permanently achieved. I glimpse the joys of detachment. This little bit of space provides me with the intermittent but useful excitement that comes of believing I begin and end with myself.
I love how Gornick finds moments of benevolence, like the one that began with “neither of us…wishes to remain belligerent one sentence longer than the other…” and then refuses to leave them there to settle into nostalgia. I love how she pushes through to how these instances of greater ease with her mother, fractured and flawed as they are, bring her more alignment with her self.
I re-read Fierce Attachments this month easily 20 years after reading it the first time. Gornick’s own description of re-readings—in one story, of Natalia Ginzburg—resonates: “First time around, my eyes were opened to something important about who I was at the moment of reading; later, to who or what I was becoming. But then I lived long enough to feel a stranger to myself—no one more surprised than me that I turned out to be who I am.”
(I’m at Gornick stage two.)
I just began reading Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a book written as a letter to a mother who can’t read. The premise alone is heart-shattering, and I can already tell you that the prose is incandescent. Like Hot Milk and Fierce Attachments, there’s a wandering here, in and out of bewilderment, pain, and pushing toward something like freedom. More on Vuong’s book when I finish it.
I read a lot online this past week, but for now I’ll just share an excerpt from a Hilton Als essay in The Paris Review. It’s from an upcoming book called (Nothing but) Flowers. It’s called “The Garden.”
Ma wanted to make a garden—something that lasts—in a rental situation. That just occurred to me—we didn’t own the earth we were working. And yet, despite that fact, Ma wanted the last event of flowers to be ours. I have spent most of my life thinking about how she flowered with such hope despite the facts.
On Saturday morning, I had a near last-event scare. I knew Mom had made it home the afternoon before—after her vaccination. I texted her, then didn’t hear from her for several hours. It was early and she tends to have her cell phone with her, with alerts if she’s driving or otherwise busy. I took an online Pilates class, answered some e-mails, folded laundry, all while thinking, what if she’s not okay? What if she’s having a delayed reaction to her shot? What if she needs help? After three texts, a call to her cell phone, and then, finally, her landline, she picked up. “I was watching the Barefoot Contessa,” she told me. “I forgot my phone in the bedroom.”
Mom is halfway to vaccinated. She’s okay for now. I’m okay for now. Maybe we will see one another this summer, or sometime in 2021. The facts point to that possibility, but I also cling to hope for good measure.
What are you reading now?
