The World Is the Home of Love and Death. Harold Brodkey
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is a grin; it would be a grimace if Ida were less clever.
Ma, looking sideways at Ida, says, knowing it will upset Ida, “You’d be surprised what I think of you, you’d be surprised what I say when I’m not afraid of how I sound, what I say behind your back—I don’t think you can imagine it.”
Ida, victimized, girlish—i.e., girlish if victimized—says girlishly, “Tell me what you say about me. What do you say behind my back? I have to know. I have to know things like that—that’s so interesting. It’s important to me. Tell me, you must tell me, it’s not fair what you’re doing—I have to know.”
Ida’s style here is girls’-school stuff from a social class Ma is not in. Ma flinches, because she usually assumes people of that class will hurt her as much as they can, as much as they dare (she’s pretty)—she expects pain from that quarter.
Ma is evasive: “I let people know that you make me think about things in a new way: you have real power over me—I talk about that all the time … Then I have to think whether I want that or not, whether I want you to be such an influence or not, whether I can afford it—a lot of the time, I don’t know. You make me think, but I feel like crying. It’s too hard to say it now. I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not one of your critics—no, I’m not one of your critics at all—”
“Lila, you’re just impossible—you frighten me—” Then: “Tell me what you say about me. Tell me in the same words …”
“Oh, I quote you a lot—you’re interesting …”
“Lila, tell me what you say. ”
“I don’t twist what you say. I listen to you carefully. I feel I understand you. I feel you understand me.”
“I feel that, too,” Ida said decisively. She’s decided Momma boasts about knowing her. Ida decides to accept that. But her glance and manner shift everything from privacy to the Whole World, where she is the richer woman and Lila is the weaker of the two. It is always her deciding it—especially if I was looking good—in the interplay between them. Ma believes Ida doesn’t know how to take turns.
Ma says, “I’m sophisticated in many, many ways, amn’t I?”
Ida directs at Ma a large, cajoling, swiftly childlike (pleading) smile: it’s intent, it is ironic and sincere and clever—it seems to mean Ida does sincerely love Ma in some way even if she’s in control of herself and of the whole thing all-in-all despite Momma’s hard-won upper hand at moments. At this moment, Ma flinches. It makes her feel things, that smile. So Ma is raw, exacerbated, strained—alive—resistant; thinking well of herself is what usually seduces Ma—and she felt proud of herself for having elicited that smile; but she is not yet seduced. She is in control, too—for the moment.
Momma loves women’s responses. Men’s lives don’t interest her—they are out of reach, obscure, obtuse, slow, and wooden.
Momma breathes and resettles her breasts, and her face glimmers and is shiny and knowing—a weird thing. I suppose this is a moment of experienced affection for the two women. Momma hasn’t yet said to many people but perhaps feels, I’m thirteen years past the high-water mark of my looks, when I was the party and that was that; but I’m still going. My mother’s heartbeat was a constant lyric exclamation of ignorance and blasphemy, excitement and exacerbation, beauty and amusement of a kind. Ma “knows, as a matter of common sense,” that Ida believes that on the highest level only a Christian mind can matter.
To Ida seriously, Momma is like a dumb animal, without truth, but an enjoyable woman, fiery and a marvel—coarsely spiritual and naïve—a Jew. Momma, teased and tormented by life, is fascinated in a number of dark ways by being defined in this manner.
Ida is prompted to take charge firmly and openly of the seductive drama in Lila’s shifting glowingness. She jumps up, crosses to Lila in French-schoolgirl style—self-consciously wry—and sits beside her on the squealing glider. Ida is a big-city person, and can’t live in the moments the way Lila can. She abruptly kisses Lila on the temple, then rapidly adds a second kiss to the first, pulls back, looks at Momma’s profile, then sits straight and utters a watchful, shepherding laugh. The style is nervously a woman’s lawlessness that excuses itself as tenderness. A delicate joke. How can you mind it?
The risk and nihilism of stylishness jolts Momma with a sense of pleasure and of the abyss. I mean Ma’s life rests on contracts among women, sacraments between women, and everything Ida does is an example of freedom from that. Ida admits to no such freedom. Ma feels herself fall toward an abyss for what is merely a lied-about romp.
With weird perversity, in a slow voice, very melodic and undramatic, and not moving her body, but softening a little but not enough to be a real welcome, Ma says, “You’re being so nice to me, I feel like the farmer’s daughter …”
“Darling Lila,” Ida says, insulted but still puckered for another kiss: “Me, a traveling salesman?”
The elegance impresses Lila, who, like Ida, then calls on her inner resources—i.e., mostly temper—“Well, you do just breeze in and out—between trips.” But such sympathy is in Momma’s temper, as is not there when she speaks to men, and I cannot doubt that women are real, are vivid to Momma as no man is. Momma’s nerves and mind and experiences comprehend what a woman does, the sounds and tics and implications—the meanings. “Who lives like you?” Momma says. “You pack up and go when you want to go. Some people would kill to have your kind of life.”
It is curious how Ida comes into flower: the slow, cautious, shrewd small-town thing of her background shows first in her opened face, then the boarding-school-mannered thing of being mannerly shows next, and then comes Ida’s rebellion and good, sharp mind (her terms), and then these in a parade with the sophistications of New York and Europe (Ma’s terms) as part of a moment of stillness, of her looking inward while outwardly her appearance glistens and glows with her nervous parade in this manner.
But she is quick to be apologetic (to stifle envy): “It’s empty, Lila. Such emptiness …”
Ma said—crassly in the face of the fatuously self-regarding ego in so automatic a response—“That’s what they all say to me.” I.e., They all come to me to ease their emptiness.
Ida flinches, sits tautly; then Momma, looking Ida pretty much in the eye, touches Ida’s arm, in a way possible only to someone who is physically passionate: inside an intense doctrine of carefulness that implies all the machineries and aches and jealousies and spent bleaknesses of response—and it is pretentious in its way, perhaps self-conscious, like Ida’s elegance, that touch.
Then Momma puts her hand back in her own lap and stares straight ahead and not at Ida. “Look at us, sitting like those pictures of farmers getting married.” A countryside wedding-photograph.
Lila is sort of saying that the two of them are not lovers but are faintly married to one another by means of an American codification of women as neighbors—the idea of neighbors came to her from Ida earlier but she does not remember that. She feels a sacrament was in the nervous subtlety of minor touch that had in it a sincerity of person, the mark of individual sensuality, and that identified it as sacrilege—not a woman’s touch, or a daughter’s touch, or a lover’s touch: rather, it was Lila’s-touch-under-the-circumstances.
Ida is too tempo-ridden, too impatient to do more than guess at that, to do more than come to a summing-up: she knows there is little of ancient virtue or of chastity in Lila or in Lila’s touch—the touch is too minor a thing for her, although she recognizes the pride and knowledge and she saw that it stayed within certain ideal limits of the self. Momma wants Ida to be sincere and victimizable by touch to the extent that Momma is. What Momma senses as Ida’s summing-up is She would like me to be a fiery idiot. Ida wants Momma to be swifter and more allusive—I wish she were smarter.
Ida literally cannot deal with a real moment but runs across it on swift ideas of things: conclusions. She detects