The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  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 the illegal or bandit sacrament Lila offers, and it breaks Ida’s heart—so to speak—but she can’t pause or deal with it. She would say I can’t manage otherwise.

  Lila feels at home only among women, but it is alwa
ys 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 is said—it was the equivalent of five or six syllables. Her voice is not torn by love and desire—i.e., by folly. Nothing is implied of any state of feeling other than a sophisticated one—i.e., one in which it is known that attachments come and go. Her promise is a parody of promises, it has no human or
dinariness. 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.