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

stronger, brackish and threatening; and wind flings the dampness around.
    It genuinely hurt Ida to be cornered—to be straightforward—to admit to having feelings. Her hurt is
coldly
stormy at the moment.
    But she looks Ma in the face and smiles one of her top-grade, friendly, large-area smiles and says in a tragically rebuking manner, “You’re wearing your diamond bracelets—I suppose that means you mean business today.”
    Momma says stubbornly, “Did you get wet? Did you ruin your shoes? Coming through the rain to see me? Did you do that for me?”
    Ida says, “You don’t show any damage from the rain—you show no damage yet, at all—Lila.”
    Ma’s radiance is skittery in this light.
I can keep it up until the cows come home.
But that’s not true. Some centrally human element gets worn out in these skirmishes. Why does Ida
lie
—i.e.,
avoid things?
Does Ida
know things
(about the world)
that I don’t know
? So Ma gets depressed about herself. The effect of Ida’s will and style on her. When this sort of thing happens to Momma, she becomes ill. She dies. She becomes stern.
Perhaps everything will be all right, I can handle this, I’m not nineteen.
    Ida is relentlessly enthralled and ruthless still, and makes no promises, even with her eyes; her escape will be part of Lila’s comeuppance.
    And this: the beauty Ida feels (and shows) has subsided and is more memory than immediate fact, and that imprisons Ida, who can’t hold back from agonized nostalgia about her own great moments in the same way that Momma can from hers. For a moment, Ida can’t act at all. Ida is not exhausted but she is
slain: You have killed me, Lila.
    In exhaustion, Momma is partly set free from her own radiance. Momma doesn’t
care at all about anything at all
, and Ida is stilled in some ways but is nevertheless a restless spirit and unsoftened and is trapped. So the smart and powerful one has become the stupid and powerless one.
    Opposites flitter and dance
in the fairy light:
women’s enchantments are eerie. The story is in their eyelids and in the obscure or clear glances they send to each other. Also, they breathe meaningfully. It seems that Ida will not let
someone without much education and breeding, who is wild and careless
, run things at the moment. Skinny Ida has a
don’t-tread-on-me
wonderfulness of carriage, plus Very Good Manners and a Christian cheerfulness. A Christian sense of secular silliness, tender just now but hard-souled, too.
    Lila thinks,
Ida hasn’t beaten me down. My luck is good. Ida is really very approachable—of course, you have to approach her on your hands and knees.
    The two women continue to breathe meaningfully in each other’s company—this is more or less at a level of happiness, but
you can never tell
(Lila’s phrase).
    Ida says, “The rain—it’s all water over the dam.” She has a creaturely tension,
like a thoroughbred.
She means,
Let’s forgive ourselves.
    Lila is close enough to sexual giddiness that she blushes spectrally. “It is spilt milk,” Momma says. “Ha, ha, well, well, well, said the hole in the ground—” Momma does a very small version of what she thinks a rich Gentile woman’s intellectual madness coming out as nonsensical talk and a laugh is like.
    Mindlessness seems well bred to Ida, but, of course, not in Momma—Ida does,
deliciously
, voluptuously, hate Momma. Hatred is
elegant
in Ida.
    Momma
feels ruthless right back.
Momma feels apprehension inside, but she doesn’t show it.
    The two women laugh, complicitously.
    Lila says, “And more well, well, well—you know me, Ida, I’m a wife and a mother and a devil, a Jewish devil!”
    Ida says, “Yes, yes. Don’t be hard on yourself, Lilly. It’s hard enough as it is. We don’t need trouble—isn’t that right!”
    Momma says, “Yes, that’s right! That’s just right!”
    Ida, a little drunk, says to herself,
Lila is a black torch of a woman.
Out loud, she says, “You were always
pretty
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