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

And Ida says, “Lila—” with each syllable cut short and with a smile for each syllable, a differing smile, and a downward flash of the eyes for each syllable and a pause between. And then a still-facedness, almost a smile. It is very intelligent, perhaps it is rehearsed. (You can’t hang someone for how they say your name.…)

Momma sat very still, and then—making the situation mysterious—she said, in a largely unreadable tone , “Ida,” with a very long dwindle of breath.

The degree of irony—knowledge of the world as an activity concerned with self-protection—in Ida’s face altered into friendliness; and she said, “Lila, you are adorable, you know I adore you, I hope you know it—you do know it—Lila—you know I’m someone you can count on—lifelong—Lila—”

Because it had a rehearsed quality—Ida’s speech—Momma thinks she sees the symptoms of the local thing of having-a-go-round with Lila. Ma is ruthless but subject to being ashamed (her term).

Momma sits in a subdued and pale and cautious way, denying the sexual. She wants romance and feeling—Ida on a string. Besides, the movements of feeling between her and Ida have only irony and subtlety and powers of mind in them, only those—Ida has this effect on people often, and so she thinks the world lacks sexuality altogether.

Lila says, “Oh, lifelong isn’t necessary: twenty-four hours is enough for me. Where people are concerned, I’m not demanding.”

Ida says, with a certain twisted loftiness and down-to-earth whine or complaint, “Friendship is usually taken by serious people, Lila, to be something one can rely on.”

Lila says, “I’m someone who takes chances, but I’m a big frog in a little pond. If I ask someone seriously, ‘What are you doing?,’ people don’t ever listen even to the question; I fall flat on my face. I bet that doesn’t ever happen to you. I didn’t finish college, I was too wild, but actually I know a thing or two, even if I don’t get much credit for it. Well, take the cash and let the credit go—isn’t that how you expect a Jewish woman—a Jewess —to talk?”

Ida—knowingly, lyrically—says, “If Ida Nicholson were Lila Silenowicz, she would say here, I have to catch my breath …’ ” She did an imitation of Lila’s voice—one of Lila’s voices—she captured Lila’s mocking politeness.

Lila smiled a soft, plumy smile—dovelike. Then she said, “Ida, I wouldn’t say that: I would say, Ida, you may be too much for me .”

“I’m still an amateur at being Lila Silenowicz,” Ida says with an air of modesty, of wit that isn’t modest: it’s suffocating in its confidence—its confident pleading.

Momma doesn’t want to be darling; she says darkly, restlessly, “I think I probably am a streetwalker at heart .”

“Lila!” Ida waits.

“Look at us—drinking and smoking. Wouldn’t your mother say we were like prostitutes?”

Ida is genuinely puzzled, but she is also genuinely combative—not easily put off. What she sees, though, is someone who passed from initial invitation to some depth or other of guilt. Lila doesn’t seem to Ida to have any moral sophistication (Lila feels that way about Ida). Ida doesn’t know whether to keep matters “social” or not. She says with contemptuous readiness of wit (a further mistake sensually), “Oh, Lila, you? The way you change, it’s like the life of a tadpole.”

Lila feels it’s tomboy seduction that Ida offers—Lila was never a tomboy. She doesn’t speak—she waits to see what will happen (to see what her power is here).

Ida lifts her head and sort of moves it in a nursery way, of pride and mental energy, a brightness of thought. She is convinced of her own sexuality as a matter of argument, no matter what others think.

Lila is self-willed and illiterate, cruel and unstable. She is full of rivalry and caprice now.

“Oh, Lila, you are impossible, you are so brilliant, you are adorable,” Ida says. “Isn’t she adorable?” she asks the rainy air. She is bringing Momma to heel. She is aware Momma is jealous of her.

“My momma has always admired you,” Momma says. “She thinks you probably have tastes in common; Momma thinks men are awful—all except S.L. My husband. You never can remember his name.”

“Initials,” Ida corrected her.

Ida wants Momma to admit Ida’s authority.

Momma wants to be the authority.

“Samuel Lewis—S.L.” Momma thinks she has the authority here.

Ida makes a face. The look on Lila’s face is teasing, and not pierced and corrected by Ida’s power. Ida is inclined to think that the supposed intelligence of Jews is a mistake.

Ida raises her eyebrows and slowly expels cigarette smoke. Her nose and cheekbones are chic. She’s pigeon-chested but handsome-bodied all the same, clean, unwhorish—ungainly. She’s too proud to be pretty.

The damp gives Lila’s skin and her lips and lipstick and her eyes a luster. She sits and judges the silence. Then she puckers her mouth, too—to get a grip on what Ida is feeling. Lila says, “Oh, I’m not adorable; you’re being nice; you’re being too nice; you’re being way, way, way too nice to me.” Momma has pleasure and power shoved inside a-wildness-at-the-moment: “I’ll be honest, I’m out to be fancy today, so if you feel like that, that’s my reward. I like a kind word or three; I’m easy to satisfy; but everybody has their conceit; I certainly have mine; now you know everything: I suppose it’s more than you want to know.”

Momma bends her head down defeatedly— adorably. Momma is as brave as a brave child. She is determined—energetic. With her head down, she pushes her skirt lower on her fine legs. The world isn’t a hard place to have a good time in if you use your head. Play with fire and see what happens.

When she looks up, she has a freed, soft, hot-eyed face. She feels that she is throwing herself on a blade—she is wounded—inwardly startled. Seductive Momma. Momma’s tempestuous assault on the other woman: “I’m what you call reasonable if you decide to reevaluate; I’m a reasonable woman, but I won’t hold you to it, although I’m someone who likes loyalty.”

“Me, too,” Ida said in a giddy winning-an-argument way. Then, as if she’d thought, She’s not good-looking enough to ask this much of me (the defense of the sadistic mind): “I don’t think anyone thinks you’re reasonable, Lilly. Do you think so, that people do? Do you think people think that’s your type, the reasonable type?” She’s drolly shrewd—it’s what Lila calls Ida’s dry way. “I’m reasonable,” Ida says in humble summing up. A sad and modest Victory. Her mind is very quick but she never did anything with it except be quick.

“I don’t know,” Momma says. Momma aims her head, a complicated gun, at Ida: “I’m popular. You know what they say—I have papers, I have the papers to show it; you know what the statistics are. I’m reasonable enough. I shouldn’t be the one to say so, but I’ll take that risk: don’t let on I was the one to tell you, don’t let anyone know I was a fool wanting to make a good impression on you.”

“Fearless! Fearless!” Ida maybe girlishly shrieks.

A sudden, swift look crosses Momma’s face: You can never tell the truth to anyone to their face or ask it, either. Momma would like to belong to Ida, body and soul—up to a point: let’s wait and see. “Yes? Well, who knows which way the cat will jump tomorrow?” My mother is in deep. She is where the lions and the tigers walk. Perhaps what she is saying is clearer than I understand it to be.