The World Is the Home of Love and Death (5 page)

In exhaustion, Momma is partly set free from her own radiance. Momma doesn’t
care at all about anything at all
, and Ida is stilled in some ways but is nevertheless a restless spirit and unsoftened and is trapped. So the smart and powerful one has become the stupid and powerless one.

Opposites flitter and dance
in the fairy light:
women’s enchantments are eerie. The story is in their eyelids and in the obscure or clear glances they send to each other. Also, they breathe meaningfully. It seems that Ida will not let
someone without much education and breeding, who is wild and careless
, run things at the moment. Skinny Ida has a
don’t-tread-on-me
wonderfulness of carriage, plus Very Good Manners and a Christian cheerfulness. A Christian sense of secular silliness, tender just now but hard-souled, too.

Lila thinks,
Ida hasn’t beaten me down. My luck is good. Ida is really very approachable—of course, you have to approach her on your hands and knees.

The two women continue to breathe meaningfully in each other’s company—this is more or less at a level of happiness, but
you can never tell
(Lila’s phrase).

Ida says, “The rain—it’s all water over the dam.” She has a creaturely tension,
like a thoroughbred.
She means,
Let’s forgive ourselves.

Lila is close enough to sexual giddiness that she blushes spectrally. “It is spilt milk,” Momma says. “Ha, ha, well, well, well, said the hole in the ground—” Momma does a very small version of what she thinks a rich Gentile woman’s intellectual madness coming out as nonsensical talk and a laugh is like.

Mindlessness seems well bred to Ida, but, of course, not in Momma—Ida does,
deliciously
, voluptuously, hate Momma. Hatred is
elegant
in Ida.

Momma
feels ruthless right back.
Momma feels apprehension inside, but she doesn’t show it.

The two women laugh, complicitously.

Lila says, “And more well, well, well—you know me, Ida, I’m a wife and a mother and a devil, a Jewish devil!”

Ida says, “Yes, yes. Don’t be hard on yourself, Lilly. It’s hard enough as it is. We don’t need trouble—isn’t that right!”

Momma says, “Yes, that’s right! That’s just right!”

Ida, a little drunk, says to herself,
Lila is a black torch of a woman.
Out loud, she says, “You were always
pretty
 …” By her rules—of ego and selfishness and loyalty—never to give Momma an intense compliment is a sign of
love.
It is keeping things balanced. Ida lives deeply inside her own biography.

But Ma feels she doesn’t have enough money or standing and that she doesn’t have enough power with Ida to be satisfied with that. Momma is
“infatuated”
but cross; she is drunk—mostly with the ease of being with someone quick-minded, not male. She wants to show Ida how to be magnetic in courtship: “Oh, believe me, I’ll go on record as saying you’re better-looking than I am, in the ways that count. In the ways that really count, you have the kind of looks I admire most. I count you as the best-looking.”

Ida takes that as her due. She doesn’t see that Ma is enraged and being exemplary. She says primly, “You’re interesting-looking, Lila.” Ida thinks that is a witty way to be romantic. Lila feels Ida continues to be
not romantic, not a squanderer.
She is reading Ida’s mind: she thinks she sees that Ida thinks it an extravagance to care for Momma in the first place,
a penniless no one.

This kind of
selfish shenanigans
dries Momma up physically, but she likes it on the whole. Momma laughs musically, yet she is disgusted. She says, in a mad way, “I have to laugh: What did you think the excitement was all about? What did you come to see
me
for?” Ma thinks it’s bad taste of Ida not to be more honest—
heartfelt.
Momma is called by some people The Prettiest Woman in Central Illinois. Ma is lighting up again, but it’s temper, a squall of will. In a frightened and careless and disobedient way (and in a hysterical and cold and experienced way), Momma knows that in a battle for personal power Ida is the local champion; Momma feels the tournament quality of Ida. Momma says again—odd, mocking, and tender, too, “I’ll go on record—you’re better-looking than I am in the ways that count. I wish I looked more like you.”

She means it, but she’s saying it’s better, it’s safer not to have real looks.

She’s praising Ida and saying Ida is trash.

I don’t shut my eyes and give up; I’m not a goody-goody two-shoes.

Ida half understands the category she’s being put in and she thinks:
She owes me one for that.
She leans down and touches, with one finger, Momma’s shoe, Momma’s foot. Then she sits back.

Momma’s face, brownish, ill-looking, with lines of nervousness on it, now, in her sensitivity, her speed, her strangeness and as a soul in the cosmos and in her strength—and maybe in wickedness and charity—smooths out.

Ida is big-eyed, calm-faced—but sweaty—full of her own fund of fidgety and fanatic self-approval. She crosses her legs—
coarsely
—in front of Ma’s now obtuse face. She would argue,
I don’t deserve this, I have done nothing to deserve this.

Momma’s eyes go from Ida’s eyes to Ida’s wrists (fine-boned) and Ida’s nails (bitten). The trick for Momma as she smiles a little inside her attractiveness at the moment is to show she is really clear about what Ida is
worth
as a person. “I have a good time now and then,” Momma says, unable to be innocent and awed. She says this with her head tilted.

The force in Ida’s soul makes her surface twitch a little with puffs of waitfulness. “We deserve a good time,” Ida says, not looking at Momma and then looking her full in the face. Ida sinks down in her chair. Then she sits upright.
Like a countess
—that took strength of will.

Momma says, in a presumptuous and urgent tone, “Around here you’re supposed to go to special cities to have a good time. I’m from the provinces. But I’m having a good time right now—it’s because of you.”

Ida sighs narrowly and says, “You’re not very Jewish; you’re not like Hamlet.”

Not mild? Not moderate?

Ma is determined to tack down a triumph. She says, “I’m always interested when we talk, I’m always interested in the things you have to say.” Mild. Moderate.

Ida looks at her, aslant, smiling—it really 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.