The World Is the Home of Love and Death. Harold Brodkey
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of promises, it has no human ordinariness. It has intelligence and cruelty, though, and longing.
Momma straightens her head and does this and that, and then it emerges, as in a charade, that she is listening in an ordinary human way: she listens to the promise—now a memory in the air. She is smiling dimly, unreadably, beautifully.
In the haze of illusions and realisms, female lawlessness and its codes, and female parodies, and female truths give way apparently, and Momma turns her head and smilingly, tacitly listens with the calm maternal-innocent set of her face, which then alters into a lover’s wicked stare—accusing and reckless. This hint at the humiliation of the mother by the lying boarding-school seducer, Ida, is a parody, too; but her being a lover and challenging Ida, that part, is not parody, so it’s all different now: it’s physical and remorseless, like some affairs that kids have in high school.
That makes her vulgar—i.e., blunt and obvious—and sexual. This is rebellion on a giant scale, to be so local with Ida. Ma is claiming to be a more serious person than Ida by bringing in this real stuff in this championship way.
Ida is jocular about rebellion. Ida treats all claims to leadership as childish, even her own. Ida puts a small kiss—shyly—on Momma’s jaw.
A gust of feeling whirls Ma around. But she is not a mother, not a child—those are not sexual beings. In this assignation, Momma’s sense of what is to be done is real; Ida’s taste, and sense of things, prefers the symbolic: the summing-up.
Ma feels that if she is honest with herself, she is, as a person (a sexual body and a quick mind), very little better off, if at all, with Ida’s understanding than she is with S.L.’s.
Ma tugs at the tail of her bandanna. “S.L. may be in the house,” she says, with almost rabid sorrow: she holds up that hoop for Ida to go through.
Ida grimaces—it’s a snarl: that was stylish back then, for a stylish woman to mimic a gangster or something. See, Ma is punishing Ida by invoking “a law” that makes Ida behave. Ida grabs Lila by the elbows and says, “You Garbo!” Elusive woman. Garbo isn’t married. It is Garbo-minus, so to speak, that Momma is. This is in Ida’s face as she moves back to her chair, thwarted, probably enraged.
Lila feels somewhat lower-class, however. Momma says, “I never paid attention in school, so I’m easy to know.” She says, “You want another drink? You want another sandwich?”
Ida says, “Does S.L. drink?”
“He’ll be sober—when he comes around the mountain.” It is truly jolting when Momma breaks her own style open and imitates Daddy with all the depth of knowledge she has of him physically.
Ida stares at her.
Lila says, “I can read your mind. I know what you’re thinking.” She swings her foot.
“What am I thinking?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” Momma says it seriously, in a musical voice. Ma does not know how small-town this is, but then—with gooseflesh and a sinking in her stomach and a light beading of sweat along her back—she can tell what a mistaken device it is in Ida’s opinion.
It is Homeric and not Tantric, the way the erotic and the spiritual merge in Ma; but if you use school ideas of things, the erotic is a matter of grasp and idea—that is, a demystification of feelings for the sake of excitement—and it is not spiritual at all: it is merely modern, then. Feelings reside in art and in sex but not in school, unless perceptions and illusions are counted as feelings, which is what Ida does and Ma wants to do—things coming out even, correct answers, being perfect: Ida wants those and the sense of those and the appetite for those to be counted as feelings. Ma is another type, but she has schoolish yearnings.
The reason school is the way it is is that in a classroom there is only one teacher, one power: a tyranny …
In life, there are always at least two people, or you can’t call it life.
“If I said now Ida is my friend, you’d agree, but if I acted on it, woe is me, and that’s where the trouble starts.” Ma says this hastily, as if S.L. might walk in any moment, but then she slows down and finishes saying it in a stately, melodious way. But her mouth and eyes are sultry—are gusty with feeling; she is so complicated now that no scientific theory can be as hard to unravel as her mood is. She is epically grownup in this way.
Ida, with a curious thwacking gesture of her knees against each other, matches Momma in complexity: she may now be the most grownup person in the world. “Let’s not go into what’s wrong. I don’t believe in diagrams,” Ida says. Lightly.
Ma says, “If we were a friend to one another, I could take you for granted and you wouldn’t put up with that for one second.”
Ida does not dawdle when she thinks. She takes the hurdle. “That’s brilliant. Your seeing that. Listen: You can take me for granted.”
“Now?”Now that I am brilliant. Ma thinks Ida ought to, and will, love her better after today.
Ida already “loves” her—that’s all been settled. Ida says in a dignified, faintly disgusted way, “I am your friend.”
Momma says, “Then I have no say in it—” Now she sees the trap clearly.
“Lilly—”
“I say someone is my friend when I say so. If you mean one word of it, tell me—you went to Switzerland with Colleen Butterson—that was the word that went out—what was that all about? Tell me if we’re good friends now.”
“Lilly—” Ida says, in a whole other voice. Don’t be silly. Don’t break the law (of discretion).
Ma bursts into an angry laugh—angry because she doesn’t want to be sidestepped. “You want me to sign a blank check. We have rules around here—and no one makes them up.” She makes them up, is what that means.
Ma knows from experience that the truth now between her and Ida (the atmosphere of rich equality) is that Momma is a fool for trying to impose her own sense of truth on a woman as firm-hearted as Ida.
Ida says, in an intelligently threatening (and wanly disillusioned) voice, “We don’t give pledges, Lilly. We trust each other.” A different law. A notion of law different from Lila’s. Then: “Are we mad?” Ida says, summing up and taking over. “No. Yes.” A witty joke. A party atmosphere. It is clear that in some ways Ida is a nicer person than Lila is. Than my mother.
Momma laughs. “I like the rain,” she says naughtily—it’s an intentionally clumsy imitation of Ida.
Ida doesn’t laugh right away. Momma starts to breathe defiantly; and she says meaningfully (her way), “It makes my pioneer hair frizzy.”
“Oh, Lila,” Ida says, relieved. Then she laughs.
Lila’s self-satisfaction begins to glow again. “I can’t keep up with you,” she complains. A touch of wit, maybe.
Neither has the sought-for command of the erotic at this juncture, but that works out in Ma’s favor, since Ma can live in erotic chaos and Ida can’t.
Momma’s momentum carries her along: “I’ve lived my life in small towns. You have Paris and St. Louis.”
Ida stares for a small second, locating what is meant, getting the point. Ida says, “What is wanting in Alton is naughtiness—madness—but there’s not much more in St. Louis. You’d find it dull, Lila.”
Lila thinks of Ida’s excitements and naughtiness as being open to her now as soon as she learns the passwords If I bother. Momma smiles faintly—maternally. Ma pants: It is an effort to keep up with Ida—she’s a real flier. “I’m not a dreamer,” Momma says aloud, almost idly, commenting on the contest.
Ida says, “It must be terrible to be without daydreams. We would