Elsewhere: A Memoir by Richard Russo

Author:Richard Russo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography, Azizex666, Writing
ISBN: 0307959538
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2012-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

RETURNING TO GLOVERSVILLE yet again might have been a lunatic notion, but it was hardly a new one. The idea began to take form, as near as I could tell, in the camp we rented when we first came to Maine, after which it advanced and receded according to the cycles of her mind. The problem (and I’d been aware of this since she and I made that first journey to Arizona) was that to my mother there were two Gloversvilles—the one she was always trying to escape from when she lived there, and the other she nostalgically considered, every time she fled, as home. When she was actually in residence, it was a small, insular, uncouth, narrow-minded place that prevented her from being her truest self—free spirited, unconventional, and unfettered. Once she’d flown the coop, though, the very qualities she detested became more attractive. The smallness she so despised became cozy; it meant you didn’t need a car to live there. Your loved ones, the very people who intruded upon your privacy and always spouted unwanted advice, were a convenient block away. Seen from a distance, they weren’t so much nosy as thoughtful and caring, their concern now a safety net.

What took me longer to understand was that just as there were two Gloversvilles, my mother also had two sisters. In reality, she and Phyllis couldn’t have been more temperamentally different, and when my mother was living there it was always their differences that defined their relationship. She saw my aunt as conventional and interfering and judgmental, qualities Phyllis inherited, she thought, from their mother. There were many bones of contention, but it particularly infuriated my mother that neither her sister nor the local man she married, my uncle Mick, seemed to have any aspirations beyond the town line. To my uncle, who’d grown up on a farm and been too young to serve in World War II, Gloversville was the big city, and he made no secret of his affection for it. Their oldest son, Greg, my cousin and boyhood friend, had gone away to college but returned to marry a local girl and settled down to a life of deflated Fulton county wages. He and his wife lived next door to my aunt and uncle, and next door to them lived Mick’s mother, Beatrice, for whom my mother had even less use than her son. That three generations were all living in the same block struck my mother, back when she’d returned to live on Helwig Street with my grandmother, as beyond perverse. They all walked into one another’s homes without knocking, freely investigating the contents of the refrigerators and helping themselves without permission. Lacking even the most rudimentary notion of privacy, they saw no reason not to comment on everyone else’s lives and day-to-day decisions. Who could bear to live like this?

Once away from Gloversville, however, my mother immediately saw things differently, and as she grew older, her nostalgia for the very proximity that had always stifled her so became more pronounced.

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