The World Is the Home of Love and Death. Harold Brodkey
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feels at home only among women, but it is always for her as if she were in an earthen pit with them. Lila’s responsive mind and heat and Ida’s intelligence enlarge the space—the pit and its freedoms—with mutual sympathy but with rivalry and a kind of peace that was not the absence of pain or of striving but its being in a feminine dimension and made up of feminine meanings.
(The talk between women on which I eavesdrop is meanly hidden from me except for the musics in their voices and their gestures. I may have everything wrong.)
The rain seems to fall inside my head curtainingly. One must imagine the reality of Momma’s wet hips after a bath, breasts released from brassiere, unpinned masses of hair—this is hinted at: “Sit here by me, do you want to?” Ma says that to the woman who is already sitting there. Ma promises the thing that has already been done. It’s not a trick except in the sense that it makes things smooth, it suggests peace. She says this to the woman who can’t manage otherwise than to think Ma is a fiery idiot. Ma is not patient this way even with me.
Momma wants the ideal thing to be two women being together. “It’s like school and money to be two women,” Momma says in her most musical voice—the music means she is being deep.
Momma means the world of men, the surface of the planet, the topographies of violence and political sashaying around and quarreling are put aside, and one is as in a classroom with an admired teacher, or one is like a rich girl with a nice-mooded housekeeper or with a well-intentioned and intelligent aunt.
Ida, with her tigerish mind (Ma’s image: She has a mind like a tiger), seizes what Lila says (and does); what Ida thinks—in her summing-up way—is that Lila likes her.
Momma is familiar with not being listened to. And if her head droops while Ida now deposits a slew of quick, but sexually unquickened, kisses, safe kisses, boarding-school kisses, temporary, not those of love forever, love for all time, it is not in sadness but in temper and perversity.
“You don’t listen to someone like me,” Ma says despairingly—but like a joke, a parody of something or other—and she pushes Ida but with the side of her arm. Even that blunt touch makes Ma vibrate. Ma does not want kiddie kisses from a woman older than she is.
Ida is used to being punished—her word—for her virtues—her swiftness of mind, her boldness, her money, her social standing. Girlishly, victimized, her frizzed hair frizzier with personal heat now, Ida stiffens but persists boldly with her kisses.
Ma’s lips are twitching as she submits—to Ida’s boldness—as she holds her head where Ida can kiss her cheek, her temple, her brow, her eye.
Ida plants rhythmic, tiny, baby-syllable kisses—like stitches in good sewing in a schoolroom—a sexual baby talk, a parable of innocence, sanitary and commanding kisses. The kisses move toward Momma’s mouth.
Ma feels that the innocence is a bribe; it has to do with money-and-position, with false claims: this is a romance; and it draws Momma in a sad way to be plundered by Ida, who has real money-and-position (which Ma doesn’t have and enviously wants).
The skittery approach to her lips elicits anger sexually because it is not phrased seriously, physically. It is an assault—blind-beggar stuff—childish fiddling. Ma hates being touched if it is not expert—and, furthermore, if it is not an ultimate matter: life and death.
Or if it were innocent and reliable Ma could bear it. But she suspects—in a fundamental way, in her belly—that Ida wants to rip up and demean the actual; the evidence is the compression, the schooled conclusions in Ida, who clearly feels that a kiss is a kiss, when physically, of course, that is not true. Ma is grateful but irritated—and Ida seems absolutely evil to Ma, an evil child, blind, and contemptible—the mean one of the brood.
Ma has no frivolous abandonment in her. Her blasphemy and recklessness are not frivolous; they are costly and serious constructions. Lifelong.… She is tempted socially by Ida and her kisses, and she is repelled by the temporariness and by the sense of the world Ida shows in this kind of kiss at this moment.
Ida is full of temper. Her nakedness of affection has the temper of assault: sweet raping. But rape. Her nerves, her money, her wit back her in this.
Momma writhes and shifts with inner shouts—the seeds of temper, her own—and thinks of turning her mouth over to Ida. But then she can’t do it. She says, “Oh, you are chic. You are someone who travels. I have to catch my breath—”
Ida pants slightly—comically.
Momma, in her small-town privacies inside her, is horrified but resigned. She has never known anyone sexually who was not an astonishment—and in some ways a depressing oddity—animal-like, childish, nurseryish—and she sees in the panting that kind of overt animal mockery of the moment of intimacy. That is to say, she sees how Ida ends her stories: dissatisfaction and the decapitation of the favorite.
Ida wants to steal Ma—abduct her—win her from rivals, own her attention—but not only Ma—I mean Ida has a general theory of doing this—so the moment has a publicly romantic odor to Ma.
Ma looks pleadingly, sweetly, virginally, at Ida, beside her on the glider. Ma can claim sisterliness if she wants: “In some ways, we’re almost twins.”
“Oh, yes,” says Ida, as if delighted. “Twins, certainly.” She grasps Lila’s hand. Such will, such fine-boned will is in Ida that Momma smiles—inside her other moods she feels she is in a schoolyard again, a girl.
Ida’s sense of romance progresses by delicacies of parody—i.e., it is always two steps from the real—toward the heartier implications: commands, exploitations, secrets, alliances, bondages, rages: a display of self, an outbreak of darkness; she wants to bloom as a flower, a woman, a girl, a boy, a man. (Momma wants to bloom like that, too.) Ida names herself parodistically: “I kiss like John Gilbert, don’t I? Don’t you think so?”
Ma ought to say, Oh, yes, and lean back, and so on.
But Momma is not tamed, she is masochistic and flexible, and ashamed of that in relation to men, and crazy and vengeful as a result. Momma is crazy and vengeful freshly at every occasion of wrong. She is doing a thing: she is blooming as someone who cannot be tamed by sweat-mustached Ida.
She can fake being ladylike and distant from things and she can fake being commanding—she can imitate Ida. Her denial, her fakery are comic in her style. She sits facing forward, and she refuses to alter her posture.
A passionate woman being unmoved is funny.
Ida titters.
Momma dislikes comedy because of her sensibility—disgust and inner temper: a heat: distrust—these don’t turn into bearable jokes for her without contempt—for herself, for everyone—and she has too much physical merit still, although less surely, to hold herself, or romance, or the possibilities of a courtship moment, in contempt.
Momma’s outrageous and inwardly wretched comedy taunts Ida, who, childlike, then tugs at Ma’s shoulder.
But the tug is elegant—and startling. How startling Ida tends to be. Self-loving rather than making a gesture that actually included Momma: Ida needs to be loved as the good child whose every move embodies innocence and prettiness rather than as the active doer she is.
Momma resists all force applied to herself. “No,” Momma says. “Absolutely no.” She is not breathing at all. Then she is breathing lightly. Then heavily. She says, gently scathing, “Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo, I caught a Lila by the toe—oh, Ida …” Then, leaning, straight-backed, at a slant away from Ida, a summing-up: “No one can count on you.”
Ida, in her momentum, makes flirtatious offers of obedience: “Everyone can count on me. I am your slave—Lilly—you know that.” Then, owlishly: “You know you can count on me lifelong.” Then: “Ly—fff(i)ff—longgg—” The length she drew the word to was roughly the span of attention before one blinks mentally and registers what