The World Is the Home of Love and Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

be a pretty woman, but everything else is worse.
    Ida governs herself shrewdly.
    Momma is excited-looking: conscious-looking, alive, symmetrical—alight.
    Ida “loves” Lila’s temporary
brilliance
—perhaps only as a distraction. But Ida looks, and probably is,
happy for the moment
—but in a grim way:
This is where the party is.
Ida is game. She says, “Oh, Lila, I am happy to be here, deluge and all. Isn’t it nice that we are
neighbors?
What would life be without neighbors? A desert? A
bad
Sahara?” She smiles nervously—boldly. A kind of sweat breaks out on her upper lip; she doesn’t care.
    Lila, being so pretty, has lived with this kind of drama since early childhood and she has a peculiar air of being at home in it: Momma’s eyes and eyelids consider the speech, the praise. Momma looks
selfish
rather than surrendering—that means she’s not pleased as she studies Ida’s offer, its number of caveats. What it was was Ida is being
careful.
She should have spoken extravagantly, but she is too sure that Momma can be bought
reasonably.
Ma is a marvel of disobedience and a mistress of local manners carefully learned and fully felt. Her face is a somewhat contemptuous wound: comprehension and expressiveness tear her face when she
catches on
that Ida is smitten but impervious,
made of steel
, when that shows. It shows that
Ida has more class than I do; that’s where the battle lines get drawn, although I will say this for myself: I give credit where credit is due.
That’s a lie, often. Often she is destructive and fights the worth in other people.
This is a democracy, and who’s to stop me from doing what I think is best for me?
    Ida is enamored and is
immune
to her,
superior, la-di-da and all.
    Lila arranges her voice: “I’m glad you came to see me.” It’s not her being a femme fatale or whatever, or being amusing anymore—she is holding back. She sounds a little like Ida.
    Ida raises her head, blinks, puffs on her cigarette—looks at Ma, level-eyed, looks away.
    This is interwoven with Ma shifting her legs, then her torso, and its burden of breasts on the slender ribs.
    Both women are controlled—and full of signals—so many that I don’t see how they can keep track of what they are doing in the world, what with all their speed and knowledge and feelings and all the breaths they have to take.
    They avoid each other’s eyes, except passingly, for more than a minute—it is as intense as speech. Then they are still. Both have small smiles.
This is where the lions and the tigers walk.
    Momma has a dark light coming from her. She is a nervous star that gives a dreamer’s light
even at this late date.
    She says, “Did you come over in the rain to see me for a purpose? You wanted to see me all dressed up for a party, when I was nervous? A ready-made fool? All dressed up and no place to go.”
    Ida says at once, “Oh, Lila, no—no lovey-dovey.”
    She tramples on Lila’s music—that request for
sympathy.
“I hate lovey-dovey—
lovey-dovey
is brutal. It’s
terrible
.” A love speech, bossy, intent, deep-feelinged: Ida’s sort of deep feelings.
    Momma is perplexed by so much intensity, so much
style
, and all that energy, with none coming toward her—except maybe nibblingly, condescendingly—but directed at Ma’s flirtatious mockery. It was a love speech asking for rough play.
    Ida’s personal fires are alight and skeletal. They are not like the expansive whirlwinds and fires in which Momma is trapped and consumed; Ida’s have focus and great style. Momma feels Ida’s unforgivingness as character and strength, but it’s directed toward what Lila is—a beauty of a certain kind, a flirt and willful, a Jew—and that is unforgivable. But that’s how things are.
You have to take love as you find it.
    Ma’s tolerance and acquisitiveness and Ida’s nervousness—and her courage—are the paramount social factors, the strong movers in the board game, in the scene: both women tacitly agree