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

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 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.”