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

on that. The
soft surrenders
(Lila’s phrase) that go with
love when it works
are what Ida was forbidding in her love speech.
    Momma thinks of
two bones kissing
and sees how what is painful in emotion might be adjudged banal—or tedious—as
clattering—and you can get away with it
, loving and calling love boring. She isn’t really sure. She is a lively fire of spirit and mood, intention and will, and she can’t really do that herself, take love lightly.
    Lila knows
how to keep up a social air when things are tough.
It is not a new experience for her that there is
tragic
hatred in the moment; i.e., infatuation, and rivalry, a lot of failure—
love of a kind, of all kinds
 … women deal in love. Momma’s Theory of the Ego (
that everyone and her mother thinks she is the Queen of the Earth
) now holds, in this flying moment, that Ida cannot bear not being the prime example of
beauty
in the room, in the world:
She only chases me so she can be better than someone like me: she has to be the star; her husband, Ben, is the same way, but he kowtows to her because she has the money and he bullies everyone else.
    Momma calls a moment like this, this-kind-of-thing,
We’re getting in deep.
It is her form of mountain-climbing: exhaustion, danger, despair. The fires of mind and of physical courage in her are a working heat for
her getting her own way
—according to her Theory of the Ego—but in such an extravagantly putting-on-a-show fashion that it does not seem to her to be of the same family as Ida’s putting on a show, which is more measured, purposeful, meanly hammerlike, tap, tap, tap …
She’s like a machine. She has a position to keep up—there are demands on her all day long—she can’t give her all to any one thing
—that’s Lila being
fair … But she’s a fake:
that’s Lila being Lila.
    Physical desire in Ida is the trembling of nerves in a strong woman’s frequently disowned body. Ida is warm—or hot—but without
dignity
in physical negotiation,
a rich woman.
She maintains her value against Lila’s more and more immodest-seeming glamour: why is this woman still shining at the age she is? (Daddy would say Ma was on a rampage.) A wild pathos and self-pity invest Ida with an air of threat in her desirousness—she feels she
deserves
erotic reward. Ida’s class, her being superior to Momma in self-control and focus, her sexual abnegation
at times
, her hardness about defeat and the hurt of others oppress Momma as signs of
not
being infatuated with her is what I think. Whereas Ida feels love is one substance throughout eternity—that it shouldn’t matter what deformities that will and privilege and folly have forced on the softer tissues of the self in the course of your living the way you live if someone loves you.
    Momma feels that love is invented daily and that each person does it differently. Momma, in some wordless way,
trusts
herself in these matters. She is at home here.
    Neither woman intends to be a fool—being a fool is something only men do.
    Of course, if you contemplate these attitudes and consider the feelings they have, it is clear that at the moment Ida hates Momma, and Momma hates Ida. But they get along.
    Lila thinks of it this way, that Ida puts
a quick kibosh on anything she can’t run.
Ida does not know just how two-sided the thing of sex is—or how improvised it is. Momma feels that Ida is being “cute,” attractive in her way, even gorgeous—but not in the romantic vein. Momma often says, A
truth about me is that I fight back.
Momma is a brute. She would like to break Ida’s bones.
    To put a cast of reason on Ma’s brutality, she wants to hurt Ida in order to frighten her,
so that Ida won’t eat me up alive.
    Ma says, “I’m always lovey-dovey. I think I was born that way. Laugh, they say, and the world laughs with you, but sometimes when you laugh alone it gets very dark. Look how dark it’s getting—it’s turning into a thunderstorm.”
    The rain
is
getting