The Best American Essays 2014 (11 page)

 

8—My Childhood Enemy

 

My childhood enemy was not another child. My enemy was an adult, who wished me harm. She wished me harm because I was a child and she was unable to have children. Because she was a polio victim and my mother was as well. She could bear being childless if she could understand that it was a result of her handicap. But my mother's fecundity made that explanation impossible. Therefore she hated me. She wished to do me harm. The harm: she wished me always to be unhappy. She wished that I would never admire myself. She was determined to kill any love I might feel toward myself. She humiliated me regularly, publically and privately. She accused me of vanity and selfishness. I still fear that she was right.

 

When I try to understand regarding a child as your enemy, or considering yourself the enemy of a child, I cannot. But because I walked beneath the magic carapace of my father's extravagant love, that woman's enmity could not pierce me. But this was not her desire; her desire was that life should be a misery to me. Perhaps in that way she could convince herself that it was better never to have borne a child.

 

9—Rachel Carson

 

At a lecture on the environment, a scientist says to the audience, “I am now going to project the face of the person responsible for more deaths in Africa than any political tyrant.” He projects the face of Rachel Carson. He says that as a result of her campaign against DDT, millions of Africans have died of malaria.

 

Does that mean that Rachel Carson, friend of our fragile planet, is the enemy of millions of the dead?

 

10—Political Enemies

 

I grew up believing that Communists were my enemy. Many people would like me to believe that Muslims are my enemy. It is doubtless true that a certain group of Communists desired, in fact worked for, the destruction of America. The same is doubtless true of some Muslims. And I am American, and most of those dear to me, all of those connected by blood, are Americans living in America. Therefore, if those Communists who desired and worked for the destruction of America had achieved their wish, if the Muslims who desire and work for the destruction of America get their wish, I and those I love and have loved would have been in the past, and will be in the future, harmed. The work of my enemies. Though now I question what happens to the mind when it invites and houses the word
enemy.

 

What harm is done by that commonplace word? What distinctions will not, cannot be drawn where
enemy
holds sway? Is the concept “enemy” the enemy of clear thought, therefore of justice? What is gained by its invocation? Perhaps as important, what is lost?

 

11—Critical Enemies

 

I believe that postmodern theorists who say that beauty is a socially constructed category and a threat, who say that there is no such thing as an author and that fiction is an outdated artifact, are my enemy.

 

I think the same of a student who believes that all literature must be read in the service of Catholic doctrine. This one wants to read Emily Dickinson as a crypto-Catholic. I tell her that her reading practice must be more open, that she must leave aside her preconceptions when she approaches the text. She is a pretty girl, with full rosy lips, but when she hears my words, her lips thin; her mouth hardens. She will resist me with all her will. I see in the thinness of her lips, the hardness of her mouth a desire to do me harm. I try to tell myself that this is ridiculous; she is very young, quite unsophisticated; she probably isn't interested enough in me and what I value to want to take any advice from me. Yet I perceive that she wants—should want—to take something from the world, a practice of open reading, and so she stands in my mind for a category of people who want to destroy what I value.

 

If I am honest, I have to say that I want to destroy what she values: a practice of reading that insists that the work of art fit into and confirm her own little idea.

 

Am I her enemy? Or the enemy of something that could be called a habit of mind? But whose mind? And who is harmed?

 

Increasingly, the beautiful things I value seem to me fragile. Susceptible to harm. Harm at the hands of an enemy.

 

12—Shock and Awe

 

We were told that our military might would inspire in our enemies shock and awe. Shock, yes: this is not difficult to understand. But awe? Doesn't awe imply admiration? What does it mean to admire your enemy? Isn't it to understand that your enemy is, in some way you can't help feeling, desirable? That you understand that submission to him might be, after all, the best, the truest course?

 

13—“The Spring Is My Enemy”

 

A friend of mine has a son who experiences severe asthmatic crises, requiring hospitalization every spring. Not knowing this, I meet my friend on a beautiful spring day and say, “Isn't it splendid, isn't it wonderful.” She says, “Outside my office window there is a beautiful flowering cherry. It signals the arrival of spring. I look at it, and hate it; because of what it brings to my son, the spring is my enemy.”

 

14—My Enemy, My Adversary

 

In an essay by a psychoanalyst, the following proposition is presented: civilization turns enemies to adversaries. What is the difference? An adversary can change. And is that the only essential difference? For the moment I can think of no other.

 

15—Encounters with the Enemy in Sacred Texts

 

“You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies”: Psalm 23

 

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death”: First Epistle to the Corinthians

FROM
The Paris Review

 

F
OR NEARLY TWENTY YEARS NOW
Leonard and I have met once a week for a walk, dinner, and a movie, either in his neighborhood or mine. Except for the two hours in the movie, we hardly ever do anything else but talk. One of us is always saying,
Let's get tickets for a play, a concert, a reading
, but neither of us ever seems able to arrange an evening in advance of the time we are to meet. The fact is, ours is the most satisfying conversation either of us has, and we can't bear to give it up even for one week.

Why then, one might ask, do we not meet more often than once a week? The problem is, we both have a penchant for the negative. Whatever the circumstance, for each of us the glass is perpetually half empty. Either he is registering loss, failure, defeat, or I am. We cannot help ourselves.

One night at a party I fell into a disagreement with a friend of ours who is famous for his debating skills. At first I responded nervously to his every challenge, but soon I found my sea legs and then I stood my ground more successfully than he did. People crowded round me. That was wonderful, they said, wonderful. I turned eagerly to Leonard. “You were nervous,” he said.

Another time I went to Florence with my niece. “How was it?” Leonard asked. “The city was lovely,” I said. “My niece is great. You know, it's hard to be with someone twenty-four hours a day for eight days, but we traveled well together, walked miles along the Arno; that river is beautiful.” “That
is
sad,” Leonard said. “That you found it irritating to be so much with your niece.”

A third time, I went to the beach for the weekend. It rained one day, was sunny another. Again Leonard asked how it had been. “Refreshing,” I said. “The rain didn't daunt you,” he said.

I remind myself of what
my
voice can sound like. My voice, forever edged in judgment, that also never stops registering the flaw, the absence, the incompleteness. My voice that so often causes Leonard's eyes to flicker and his mouth to tighten.

At the end of an evening together one or the other of us will impulsively suggest that we meet again during the week, but only rarely does the impulse live long enough to be acted upon. We mean it, of course, when we are saying goodbye—want nothing more than to renew the contact immediately—but going up in the elevator to my apartment, I start to feel on my skin the sensory effect of an eveningful of irony and negative judgment. Nothing serious, just surface damage—a thousand tiny pinpricks dotting arms, neck, chest—but somewhere within me, in a place I cannot even name, I begin to shrink from the prospect of feeling it again soon.

A day passes. Then another. I must call Leonard, I say to myself, but repeatedly the hand about to reach for the phone fails to move. He, of course, must be feeling the same, as he doesn't call either. The unacted-upon impulse accumulates into a failure of nerve. Failure of nerve hardens into ennui. When the cycle of mixed feeling, failed nerve, and paralyzed will has run its course, the longing to meet again acquires urgency, and the hand reaching for the phone will complete the action. Leonard and I consider ourselves intimates because our cycle takes only a week to complete.

 

Yesterday I came out of the supermarket at the end of my block and, from the side of my eye, registered the beggar who regularly occupies the space in front of the store: a small white guy with a hand perpetually outstretched and a face full of broken blood vessels. “I need something to eat,” he was whining as usual. “That's all I want, something to eat, anything you can spare, just something to eat.” As I passed him, I heard a voice directly behind me say, “Here, bro. You want something to eat? Here's something to eat.” I turned back and saw a short black man with cold eyes standing in front of the beggar, a slice of pizza in his outstretched hand. “Aw, man,” the beggar pleaded, “you know what I . . .” The man's voice went as cold as his eyes. “You say you want something to eat. Here's something to eat,” he repeated. “I bought this for you.
Eat it!
” The beggar recoiled visibly. The man standing in front of him turned away and, in a motion of deep disgust, threw the pizza into a wastebasket.

When I got to my building, I couldn't help stopping to tell José, the doorman—I had to tell
someone
—what had just happened. José's eyes widened. When I finished he said, “Oh, Miss Gornick, I know just what y'mean. My father once gave me such a slap for exactly the same thing.” Now it was my eyes that widened. “We was at a ball game, and a bum asked me for something to eat. So I bought a hot dog and gave it to him. My dad, he whacked me across the face. ‘If you're gonna do a thing,' he said, ‘do it right. You don't buy someone a hot dog without you also buying him a soda!'”

 

I have always lived in New York, but a good part of my life I longed for the city the way someone in a small town would, yearning to arrive at the capital. Growing up in the Bronx was like growing up in a village. From earliest adolescence I knew there was a center of the world and that I was far from it. At the same time, I also knew it was only a subway ride away, downtown in Manhattan. Manhattan was Araby.

At fourteen I began taking that subway ride, walking the length and breadth of the island late in winter, deep in summer. The only difference between me and someone like me from Kansas was that in Kansas one makes the immigrant's lonely leap once and forever, whereas I made many small trips into the city, going home repeatedly for comfort and reassurance, dullness and delay, before attempting the main chance. Down Broadway, up Lexington, across Fifty-Seventh Street, from river to river, through Greenwich Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, plunging down to Wall Street, climbing up to Columbia. I walked these streets for years, excited and expectant, going home each night to the Bronx, where I waited for life to begin.

The way I saw it, the West Side was one long rectangle of apartment houses filled with artists and intellectuals; this richness, mirrored on the East Side by money and social standing, made the city glamorous, and painfully exciting. I could taste in my mouth world, sheer world. All I had to do was get old enough and New York would be mine.

As children, my friends and I would roam the streets of the neighborhood, advancing out as we got older, section by section, until we were little girls trekking across the Bronx as though on a mission to the interior. We used the streets the way children growing up in the country use fields and rivers, mountains and caves: to place ourselves on the map of our world. We walked by the hour. By the time we were twelve we knew instantly when the speech or appearance of anyone coming toward us was the slightest bit off. We knew also that it excited us to know. When something odd happened—and it didn't take much for us to consider something odd, our sense of the norm was strict—we analyzed it for hours afterward.

A high school friend introduced me to the streets of Upper Manhattan. Here, so many languages and such striking peculiarities in appearance—men in beards, women in black and silver. These were people I could see weren't working class, but what class
were
they? And then there was the hawking in the street! In the Bronx a lone fruit-and-vegetable man might call out,
Missus! Fresh tomatoes today!
But here, people on the sidewalk were selling watches, radios, books, jewelry—in loud, insistent voices. Not only that, but the men and women passing by got into it with them: “How long'll that watch work? Till I get to the end of the block?” “I know the guy who wrote that book, it isn't worth a dollar.” “Where'd ya get that radio? The cops'll be at my door in the morning, right?” So much stir and animation! People who were strangers talking at one another, making each other laugh, cry out, crinkle up with pleasure, flash with anger. It was the boldness of gesture and expression everywhere that so captivated us: the stylish flirtation, the savvy exchange, people sparking witty, exuberant response in one another, in themselves.