Harold Brodkey - The World Is the Home of Love and Death

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 die in this town without our—don’t repeat this— wickedness .”

Momma suddenly blows Ida a kiss. Everyone knows that Ida always gets even. Then Momma rises: a swirl of heat—the thin, finely curved legs, the pale, night-framed face, the paled, used lipstick (from drinking and smoking), the extreme prettiness of the woman—gusts around the porch. Ma hears a thump like that of a car door—she lifts her head toward the porch roof—then she swiftly bends over and kisses Ida on the mouth: light, quick, and real. A real kiss which can break the heart of the one who receives it and of anyone who sees it. “You are a hero, Lila,” Ida says.

With a swish of her skirt, Ma turns and walks back to the glider and sits down. She says, “Well, there, I don’t feel inferior now, no matter how smart you are, Ida.”

Ida moistens her lips for the first time. She smiles dimly—her eyes are filmed or curtained.

“You look Jewish like that,” Ma says.

Ida smiles more widely, complicatedly. Her eyes are in focus.

Ma says, “Let’s wait and see if the house shakes.” She means from S.L.’s footsteps on the wooden floors. She finds the noises men make menacing: they twang at her nerves.

The rain falls weightily.

Ma says, “We have another minute or two to be friends in.”

The first orchestral realization that something is up: Playing Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” on a spavined CD player. It was a gray day in early February and the sun came out; and I was thinking, “The Dry Cleaners, The Dry Cleaners, The Dry Cleaners, The Dry Cleaners.”

The first crocus: The Sunflower Market, Thai Vegetables and Seeds, 2809 Broadway, February 14th. Spindly and snow-flecked.

First cold, March 19th – April 2nd. My wife and I are on our way to our accountant’s. On the way I see two drunks fighting in front of the OTB on Broadway at Ninety-first; April is the duelists’ month. Tacitly flirting with my wife, I carry two small packets of Kleenex in my pockets—one for her, because of her allergies: she makes a small nifty nasal piccolo announcement of the annual change in her life. I make the second really bad pun of the season: We sound like Bruce Springsteen and accompanist doing Bach’s “The Cold Bug Variations.”

First episode of spring nosiness not having to do with allergies or nose-blowing: I don’t know why the soul’s primary mechanics should consider spying or snooping a natural attribute of renewed life, but in the office icebox I see a small gold-colored can, shaped like a shoe-polish can, of caviar, and I wonder, jealously, who is so happy and so bent on celebration (or self-indulgence), but when I open it, it is empty, and written on the bottom of the can, in pencil, is the phrase Hard Cheese.

First philosophical guess: My guess is that spring is a natural way of suggesting adolescence as something one should start to go through again: genetic duty and genetic activity are romance. Hmm.… Nature is as tricky as any politician.

The thought of George Bush leads to The First Depression of the Season.

First emotional detail: More light on the windowsill.

First piece of strange advice to one’s self: Lighten up.

First symptom of intellectual confusion (on waking after dreams of fair women and of various unspeakable acts with them; memory, those astonishing chambers of lost realities, becomes overactive, leaving a broad sensation of gambling.… Roué-lette): The enumeration of the bedroom furnishings—a nightstand, one-night stand, two-night stands, three-night stands.…

No, no.

In the bathroom, first session practicing smile.

First impulse of active love: A sloppy kiss while my wife is putting on her shoes.

She gazes at me. “Oh, it’s spring,” she says.

Shopping list for first three-day weekend in the country to rent a house for the summer: Contac, Kleenex, Beatles tape, citronella candles (to leave in the rented house if we find it), jump rope (for losing weight), walking shoes, jeans one size too small (to force oneself to diet), a handful of short-lived cut lilac to carry in the car as an aide-mémoire.…

First equinoctial death shudder and racial memory of human sacrifice for the sake of warmth and the return of summer: A roadkill on 32A outside of Saugerties—a no longer hibernating but probably still torpid, thin woodchuck.

Second such event after returning home: Cutting my thumb while using a new, Belgian, serrated-edge slicing knife that slipped on a small Israeli tomato, while I was thinking about Super Tuesday two years ago and whistling Dixie.

Am I unconsciously Angry?

First hysterical delusion: Advertised medicines that come to mind when seeing in a moment of stress spring flowers in the mind—Nuprin-yellow jonquils, tetracycline-colored tulips (red-and-yellow ones). Tylenol-colored clouds (Tylenol is Lonely T spelled backward). Advil-colored dirt. Theragran-M-colored drying blood.