Florence Gordon Read Online Free PDF Page A

crossing the street, a trim and businesslike and wholly intimidating seventy-five-year-old woman. She was leaning to the side because she had a heavy laptop bag hanging from a strap over her shoulder.
    She was, as usual, lost in her thoughts. She walked past Daniel without seeing him.
    Janine watched him: he was still on the phone, but he lifted his hand to wave to his mother, and smiled wryly after she passed him.
    “It’s good to see you again,” Florence said, as Janine got up to embrace her.
    If she hadn’t been a polite person, Janine would have laughed at this. She and Florence had talked on the phone just after Janine got to New York, and they’d exchanged pledges about getting together soon, and then neither of them had been in touch with the other until Janine saw a notice for the Town Hall panel discussion and wrote to Florence to say that she and Emily would be there.
    Janine had often thought about calling her, but she stopped herself each time, remembering at the last minute that being with Florence was never what you hoped it would be. Florence never let you relax. She was always asking Janine if she’d read this or heard of that, and the answer was usually no. After it was over, Janine would feel as if she’d endured a sort of intellectual pummeling. Florence was vaguely insulting even when she didn’t mean to be. She always made Janine feel as if she hadn’t lived up to the promise of feminism. Janine couldn’t quite understand how she was being made to feel that way, since she was about as feminist as you could get without being an actual activist. She had her own career, which had kept her fascinated for almost twenty years; she’d earned a living at the same time as she’d raised two kids. She didn’t know what the problem was, but evidently there was a problem.
    During her first few years of being married to Daniel, Janine used to try to engage Florence in conversation. She had so many questions she wanted to ask. Are you working on a book? What did you mean by that line in your last book of essays where you seemed to be insulting Susan Sontag? Did anybody ever give you a hard time about the fact that in that essay about the people who’ve influenced you the most, more than half of them were men? But she had found that questions like these invariably met with impatient responses. A few times Janine had asked Florence about key passages in her work—passages that Janine considered key—and Florence didn’t remember them or didn’t think they were important. Janine started to feel like a pathetic fangirl, like one of those people who show up at sci-fi conventions wearing Vulcan ears, so finally she stopped asking Florence anything about her work at all.
    She never fared any better with other subjects. Once or twice, during the early years of their marriage, Janine had been by herself in New York and had given Florence a call, and when they went out to dinner she tried to use Daniel as a conversational icebreaker. But whenever she told Florence something about what Daniel was up to, Florence seemed remarkably uninterested.
    When Daniel got back to the table, Florence started in on him.
    “So how are you, my son? Have you locked up any perps lately?”
    “That’s not really what I do, Mom.”
    “Really? Aren’t you still with the police force?”
    “Yes, Mom, I’m with the police force. But I don’t lock up perps.”
    “Do you lock up mopes?”
    “Mopes?”
    “Mopes. That’s what you call the perps if you’re a po-lice.”
    “Someone’s been watching
The Wire,
” Emily said.
    “Vanessa gave me the DVDs for my birthday,” Florence said.
    “It sounds like you know more about police work than I do,” Daniel said.
    Florence seemed to feel a perpetual urge to needle her son. Janine didn’t understand it, but she had a theory. Her theory was that Florence—both of Daniel’s parents, really—still couldn’t comprehend how he, the child of two certified New York intellectuals,