Читать книгу The World Is the Home of Love and Death - Harold Brodkey - Страница 4

The hard rain sounds like a heartbeat. The heavy green canvas awnings around the three-sided screened porch buck and grunt and creak; they sag with the hard rain, and they drip, and then suddenly they rise and twist and water splashes out. Inside those passionate sounds, the porch glider squeals and the wicker chair squeaks. Ida Nicholson, Momma’s guest, in expensively crude, heavyish, wrinkled linen and with stylishly stately curls on either side of her head (her hair smells of hot iron even in the rain), sits with bossy nervousness in the wicker chair.

Momma has on rouge and eye shadow; and her lipstick is so bright in the damp air that it shouts in my eye. Ma’s porch grandeur. She is all dressed up. Her eyes are not fully lit; they are stirring like half-lit theaters. The lights never go on, the scenes are not explained. Her nakedness of but only half-lit soul puts a disturbance into the air—I feel shouted at by that, too. Her art is immersed in darkness. The floor of the porch—concrete with an oval straw rug—smells of the rain. Lila’s voice: “Ida, everything that I do on this matter, I do because S.L. loves this child—he’s pretty, isn’t he? You wouldn’t think he was just flotsam and jetsam. You know me: I may vote Republican yet; I’m not the maternal type—the child is S.L.’s pet project. S.L. makes the decisions; if he doesn’t call in a doctor because the child doesn’t talk, there’s an excellent reason: S.L. has thought it out: if the child is real sick, what are we going to do? How long can we keep him? Now he’s doing fine. S.L.’s in no rush: sufficient evil unto the day. I can’t tell you what to think, but I can advise. I recommend it to everyone, Let’s live and let live. I’m not an inexperienced person, Ida; in a lot of battles, I count for more than a man.”

Ida is delicately made but ungainly—that is a kind of sexual signal. It is an indication of will. Her movements and eyes are more for purposes of giving social and political and intellectual messages than sexual ones—this is a matter of pride as well as of defiance, a useful grotesquerie. Her alertness is a kind of crack-the-whip thing—not uncommon in the Middle West but uncommon there to the extent she takes it when she is not being folksy and Middle Western. Her style of dress, expensive and sportif, French, is obliquely sexual in the manner of women athletes of that day, golf players and tennis players, and is without the insolence that marks the project of the arousal of men: she is seriously chic, magisterially so, and that includes a mock dowdiness.

Lila does not try to compete with that: big-breasted Lila, in white with polka dots and a wide patent-leather belt, is sadly heterosexual—theatrical at it—but convincingly real, not even faintly a pretender. She has the gift, or art, or intrusiveness, of apparent personal authenticity.

Ida’s legs are thin—toylike almost—above flat shoes with fringed shields over the laces. Lila’s legs are those of a cabaret singer, in high-heeled patent-leather pumps, very plain and yet noticeable anyway. Ida has on a white-and-blue tie, Lila a white-and-black polka-dotted scarf caught with a diamond pin. Ida’s “polite” inexpressiveness, a powerful quality in her, and her social rank (her position in relation to what others want from her) add up to her being a dry person, someone with a dry wit, a wonderful person, really, and(to go on using Momma’s terms) she was in charge. Who was I? We were nobodies.

Ida has a pronounced quality of command—but it is not local-dowager stuff—it is charmingly in-and-out—taking turns, fair play (Ida’s phrases)—but (Lila said) she was always the referee and the judge (of what was fair).

Ida feels that nothing in the way of feeling or intellect is a puzzle for her. Her omniscience had lapses but she did not overtly confess to them: she could not have run her kingdom then. Her confidence came from her triumphs: her sister married a newspaper-and-magazine potentate in the East (Boston chiefly). She may have influenced the policies of the newspaper. She always said she did. She was a dilettante philosopher in public conversation and good at it. Then, there were her successes in Europe—social ones, with women: the most difficult kind. She divided feelings into those of pleasure—by which she meant feelings of self-love, the acknowledgment of merit and standing, of the powers of the self—and the feelings of emergency: hurt, rage, self-pity, the necessity for fighting.

Knowing Ida meant you were playing with fire. For Ida, incoherence is ill-health: she becomes an invalid from contradiction—in herself, by others of her. The fluctuation in others of contradiction, the foreign actuality of others’ thoughts, plus her ignored feelings when others show their strange thoughts, cause her nervousness. Ida feels as a Christian (lady) that historically the serious work has been done and that certain forgiveness obtains nearby for silliness—forgiveness overall and acceptance: a truce. For her, religion has altered into manners—through manners she has a high-speed connection to what she considers to be the tragic; and she has a tactful attachment to silliness (everything that is not tragic but is merely sad). She hungers for transcendence. This gives her a beauty that Lila is aware of, an ugly beauty of a sort, a real beauty, the kind men don’t know about: Ida is a someone. Ida’s moral illiteracy, her ethical inanity, are not anything unusual—they are the common human matter of power.

When Ida was on her high horse, you could forget she hated everybody and could do anything she liked and when she did it she didn’t apologize: there was a lot to her. If luck had gone her way, who knows what she could have done? She was a brilliant person who was also no good.

Ida—this is in a moment without men in it—asks, converting her full rank into tentative silliness, with a great deal of calm and yet nervous music in her voice, “Well, Lila—” Pause. “What do you think of the rain?”

Lila sits suddenly still on the porch glider. Her face seems to recognize a great many notes and possibilities in the question—this is sort of a joke—and she replies as if carefully, the false carefulness making an ambiguous music, “I don’t mind rain; my hair holds up in the rain. I’m lucky: I don’t get frizzy.”

Ida puffs on a cigarette. Momma suddenly—naïvely—poses as someone who is not watching Ida.

Ida looks at Momma’s hair—the widow’s peak, the shininess above and below and around, past the polka-dot bandanna (and its tail); and she says, “I’m a daughter of the pioneers, Lilly. I have prairie hair—I get frizzy; it’s a bane: I’m just a workaday person—Lilly—”

That’s special Midwestern talk, including Momma’s grade-school name.

Momma has a drink clasped in a ringed hand; she keeps her eyes lowered even when her old name is uttered. Ida has a drink, too, and a cigarette. Momma sighs: so much deciphering—Ida’s clothes and money and voice and the moment—and then Momma shifts her posture and suddenly “gives up,” as if with overwhelmed innocence or naïveté or ignorance: this is her most common tactic with a powerful woman, to give in, give up, and not mean it: it’s a kind of wit—a kind of sexuality. Ma’s face shows she decides to be the hostess—ordinary. There is a question whether Ida will allow it. Will Ida insist on being at home in Lila’s house? Will she treat it like a pigsty? The particular music—the cast of voice, of face—with which Ma gets ready to do this marks her as worthwhile, as not a novice, as having social promise: “Ida, we have some little sandwiches; Annemarie put them together for you: she stayed away from the noisy lettuce you don’t like—I told her what you said that day at the governor’s luncheon. She made them especially for you—I told her you were coming. You impress—her.” Ma rose and walked across the porch—a sort of workaday hostess: a version of workaday to offer Ida a plate of sandwiches. Momma’s dress has birdlike lights in it and rustlings: she is enclosed in a watery aviary of small lights and small noises. She has a sweetish, and slightly sweaty, full-bodied smell—startling. Her red mouth is, too.

Ida blinks and takes a sandwich and tilts her head like a fragile queen who yet has a sinewy strength of mind. She says, in educated, rapid, smart tones of a kind that Lila has never heard from anyone else, never heard a version of in the movies or onstage: “And you, do I impress you?”

Lila recognizes the power and feels thrilled. She feels the “class” thing her way, as beauty and as enmity—the possibility is that she will be hurt; she is game.

But (in Ida’s terms) she is infinitely sly—Momma has her own fairly complete realm of knowledge and she has her own power: she hears not a complete woman (Lila’s term) but a girl bookworm and a woman who doesn’t smell like a rose: someone lonely, wooden, undemocratic, locally solitary—it’s the Christian snobbery: that mingling of truth and the ideal (Momma’s dichotomy), the truth being loneliness and a kind of poverty of life, of soul, and the ideal being a social reality, symbolized by Ida’s Parisian suit, with its man-cut jacket and pleated skirt, the real ideal (Ma’s term) inside the ideal being the satisfaction of the impulses of a woman of rank (in America, in imitation in this case of European examples): satisfactions, consolations, and rank. What Lila understood as the ideal was earthbound, but it was earthbound romance, self-loss—suicidal bursts of love and extravagance with money to make a real story, a legend around here. Not that she practiced that form of suicide, but she played at its edges. So to speak. What Momma meant by the ideal was the most advantageous human thing for a woman. In order not to be aggravated and go mad or give up: when Momma says she is not young, is not nineteen, this is part of what she means.

Ida feels herself to be a Christian warrior, Ida feels she is a vessel by blood, by blood lineage, for illumination and heroism as part of the matter of competing, as a mark of victory—i.e., of government. She is very stubborn about this.

Lila thinks that is banana oil.

But the fact is that at moments Ida is her ideal.

Ida knows that The Ideal Figure is the one that gets loved but not necessarily embraced.

Ida is impatient with reality and minds it that if you solve one problem, that does not solve all problems.

She has a very elevated notion of personal greatness as a social matter and as an aspect and reward of heartfelt, transcendent belief.

So Ida is often afraid she is being laughed at—terror and anger then display themselves at a distance—abruptly she embodies them and then drowns them in her usual courage and willfulness: this makes her vibrate and be nervous; this fills her with disgust and friendliness. (The more she is drawn to someone, the more disgust she feels. I think it is so she will not be pushed around by her feelings.)

Do I impress you?

Lila’s sense of Ida’s question goes deep in her: Why Ida was asking it was the question. Lila says, “It would hurt my pride to answer that—” Lila pauses. Really, if you have the time and a fine enough nervous system you can study what an elaborate pause it is, what detail work is in it. She says, as if she had not paused, “It would be a risk to answer that.”

Her tone is ineffably muted, respectful daring, and with a lot of heterosexual good sportsmanship in it. Homosexual women, in Ma’s experience, substitute gallantry for sportsmanship, and Ma does not like that. And Ma thinks she is attractive to Ida to the extent that she, Ma, is not homosexual. So Ma is maybe emphasizing this side of herself a lot.

Ida shivers. Ida, girlishly (but a ferocious girl), shows on her face that she admires Lila’s courage: it’s not tacked down (Lila’s phrase): nothing is said.

Ida never—never—detaches herself from considerations of power; neither does Ma, differently, starting from a different background. Ida never associates power with evil, although she says she does, but Ma really does. Ma thinks “goodness” is consolation for not taking the risks to be bad and a leader—i.e., wicked—a good conscience is your reward for avoiding leadership if you ask me.…

Both women can be comic. Ida thinks the stuff of this exchange so far is charming: she says, “I should have worn a hat and gloves.”

“Ha-ha,” Momma says. “That’s some song and dance—hat and gloves and pearls.” But her smile indicates she likes it, too.

So far, so good, Momma feels.

Ida’s sexual courage is limited—those shadowy reaches among the other’s desires and gusts of feeling—the robot courage, a boy’s humility is beyond her. Ida is too impatient with such ordinariness to know that stuff—her love of power forbids it. Lila is too ashamed of her physical self now (at the age she is) to be comfortable sexually: she would like to be like Ida.

They smile, eye each other, smile independently and at an angle without looking at each other; they sit and drink and smoke: a certain sort of physical punctuation.

Ida can sense the presence of the other thing in Lila—that aging sexual power—that power fascinates Ida and makes her a student: this is as docile as she gets, a rebellious student of Lila’s sexual reality, which is, according to Momma’s manner, that of someone whose duty is to be sexual—sexually generous.

Lila’s rambunctiousness is Jewish “mockery” of that and not simple and not comprehensible to Ida. It is an ultimate defiance: a (Jewish) sacrilege. Ida trusts that Lila trades, as everyone does, in humiliations, that Lila’s defiance is that of a Jewess.

Ida puffed restlessly on a new cigarette. She sucked smoke in a French manner. She eyed Lila to see if Lila recognized the marvelousness of Ida’s style. She bit into a sandwich. She said, “But these sandwiches are good, Lila.”

“Praise from you is praise and a half and then some—did you taste both kinds? You haven’t tried the shrimp. The shrimp are from New Orleans. My momma says God will punish us for eating shrimp.” Sin. A Jewish woman entering the secular.

“This is a perfect cucumber sandwich. I adore cucumber sandwiches.” Ida is encouraging the secular but is respectful toward religion and does not mention shrimp.

“Oh, I’m a divine housewife,” Lila says, as if she weren’t being shocking about what she ought to be. “I know who to hire. Have you met our Annemarie? She’s a little on the fat side. But she’s a very fine person—she soaks our cucumbers in milk. It’s something she learned in France; she’s from France. She says it gets the acid out—is that important? I don’t know what I think of the acid in cucumbers: probably it’s important to get the acid out—”

“Lila, these sandwiches: I’m your slave.” (That is, lower me to your peasant level: let’s roll in the gutter for a while: No more religious issues. No more social issues. Lila worries that she looks at people too darkly; but she thinks that’s what Ida means by that remark—Ida doesn’t mean she’ll be obedient.)

Ida says, when Lila blinkingly and pointedly says nothing, “Your housekeeper soaks cucumbers in milk? I never heard of that.”

Lila says carefully, without in any way denying the double meaning, “Neither did I. But I guess I go along with it.”

“Really?” Ida says, looking triumphant in the face of Ma’s being a riddle.

“I’m not fooling—I’m not a fooler. I’m honest—you can trust me. I’m always impressed when a woman’s honest, I like to be impressive,” Lila says melodiously, unmocking (maybe) or mocking.

Ida breathes slowly and eats in a way that mingles considerable delicacy with cynical doubt—perhaps about eating and chewing in general but doubt eased maybe by the happiness of the moment.

Lila watches Ida eat, and she says, “You’d be surprised how honest I am. I have to be careful—you know what they say? Why be a martyr? I admit I like an opportunity to shine. I like to show what I’m made of. I like a chance to rise to the occasion.” The look in her face may mean she is saying she can lie, she can keep her mouth shut, she can rise to any worldly occasion, or it may mean something else: maybe she thinks two things at once and that enables her to say things that mean two things at least. She says, “But I wouldn’t want to be quoted on this.” She smiles—Momma had so many smiles that you might say, if you counted contexts, that she had an infinite number of them. “People don’t understand always what honesty is when a woman’s honest.”

“I think of myself as honest,” Ida says with a certain superior curvature of voice; and, having stopped eating, watches Lila through the smoke of another cigarette.

“You can say that—wherever you speak, you speak from a throne room,” Lila said, leaving the question open and yet speaking more directly than before. “A woman can’t say that who only has a porch. People don’t mind when you show your colors: you have two streets in this town named after your family.” It’s up to Ida to speak first about the happiness of the moment and about human affection, Momma means—maybe.

The set of her pretty mouth and unlit eyes means Lila’s both sad and cheerful that people sometimes think of her as a villainess (as not honest).

Ida has that sense of Momma as a pretty Jewish woman, a villainess: clever, ruthless, dishonest—foreign. What does it mean that Momma doesn’t mind? Is it that she’s letting Ida build up a debt and she will get even?

Ida is—naïvely—pleased that Lila knows Jews are unrooted opportunists, sly satirists, thieves of a sort—thieves of one’s comfort with oneself and one’s thoughts.

As well as of money often.

Ida says cautiously, blinkingly, now scoffingly friendly, “Everyone in town puts you on a pedestal, Lila.”

“Oh, that kind of pedestal is nothing,” Momma says in an old voice, watching Ida.

“No, it’s serious,” Ida says.

Her voice is firm—it is not her judgment so much as her temper, her nervousness, that dominates the moment.

The intelligence and shrewdness required to make one’s nervousness a sign of social class and an intellectual plane of discourse and a sign of emotion mark a leader—this is what Ma thinks, and leader is Ma’s term.

Lila said, “If a woman has flashing eyes, she can’t joke, she can’t make jokes, but name a street after me and maybe there could be a little comedy—you think a woman like me’s allowed to make fun? I’m a menace. I suppose you don’t know about me.”

She said it in such tones that flattery of the other woman’s fineness was intended and disparagement of her local standing in politics as a beauty worth listening to.

Her voice was musical. The voice was nakedly peeled; it gently crooned along.

Ida is abruptly amused—it is a matter of eligibility: Momma’s. Holding her head and shoulders and back in a pleasantly angular slouch, Ida says, “The women in my family have a motto: that the only foolish thing is to be frightened.” I.e., class equals bravery. So Momma to show class should offer affection first.

Momma purses her lips and says, very softly, “Well, we say nothing ventured, nothing gained in our family; it’s a good idea to look before you leap.” I.e., you go first: you act so superior.

“I’m a believer in real courage,” Ida said. “My great-grandmother saw her sister scalped; she did not lose courage; she stayed right where she was, hidden in the woodpile; she didn’t let out a peep.”

Momma tried this: “Do you think the world is getting better? Maybe it used to be worse. Or is it the same old thing? My mother thinks it’s still bad and going down—she had to hide in a cellar under rags while the cossacks killed her father. And five brothers. But she peeked. I can’t tell the story: some words put the smell of things right up my nose and I get sick. Those cossacks, they put Momma’s father and the five brothers in the ground up to their necks. Wait a moment: I have to catch my breath.” Momma gasps faintly. “They bury the legs and arms so the men can’t move; the beards are in the dirt. Then the cossacks make their horses gallop. She watched the horses’ feet kick them in the head. The brains would run out. Momma said their eyes fell out onto the ground.”

Ida is listening to the anecdote with an intelligent look—idle but taut and ready to respond although not by making the first move by declaring her interest, or degree of it, to Momma.

Lila says without transition but softly, vulnerably, “Are you always a careful talker? When the sky’s the limit? When the highfliers are around?” Then: “If there are any.”

Ida says—slowly—her voice has curlicues of clear inflection—“I’m a careful speaker. It’s an old habit. I don’t know that I’m so special.” Meaning that she was, since she was modest, meaning also Momma’s wit, of its sort, has made a point (of its sort).

Lila never understood the point of modesty for women. She said, pushily but melodiously, “If I talked like you, what would you think? Do you think I ought to talk like you? Would you like it if I did? You think we ought to talk alike?”

Momma mixed fineness with naïveté—a social brew—and took the lead.

Rather than be a mentor to Momma or ask for a twin or say no directly, Ida, electric, luminous, says, “In the matter of how people talk in this country, we need to be called to order.”

Momma smiles modestly, daringly: “I suppose I’m daring, I’m over people’s heads. I like to take a chance.”

The rainlight grows yellower, as if it were on its way to clarity, but the rain persists windlessly, moderating itself almost not at all in the sudden light.

“I mean in general,” Ida says, veiling her eyes.

Lila says, “In general, I do what I have to do; I prefer to look like a winner. I’m not someone who pleads her case.”

Ida peers at Lila and then quickly stops peering. She is richer, freer, and “smarter” than Lila—she is in command. She is someone who knows what it is to be top of the heap: for her, for both women, winning is equivalent to guiltlessness; victory represents virtue, blamelessness.

Regal and modest, as if simple and self-defined, Ida makes a move (Ma’s phrase). Ida smiles—her smiles tend to be fixed, grammatical—but her eyes shift from interest and bullying (or manipulation) into beauty.

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.

Ida’s fondness for women attracted women. Women saw her as an impressive friend humbled by caring for them. She knows this. Ida says, in a highly good-natured voice that is ironically moral, “Lila, I adore you.” She grins, openly foolish, as if declaring a truce on meaning. “And it’s lifelong.” She means it only in a way. She is suggesting laws of affection which she means to enforce.

Momma says, “I know everyone backbites.” She doesn’t mean backbites: she picked something Ida doesn’t do. She means backslides. She means people disappoint you. “I put a sweet face on it, but it hurts me. If you want to hate me, hate me for that, that I’m someone who puts being serious at the head of the list.” She wants to set up what the laws are and what the punishments are. “I’m silly, I know, but who knows how much time anyone has? I haven’t time to waste on getting hurt.”

Ida looks droll but firm: she knows Momma wants her to love her: Ida thinks, Well, this is war, this is war, and I’m a guest. She says in mostly a droll and clowning and smartly foolish way—richly superior, that is: I’m the one who is the lawgiver here—“Well, I don’t know how I feel about that. I’m always a loyal one.”

Momma feels Ida is lying all the time. Momma is drunk with consciousness. And purpose. “I’m a seeker, I don’t think I’m a finder. You know what they say? Still waters cut deep. But I’m telling you too much about myself. It’s a free-for-all. I’m going to ask you to be nicer to me. It won’t hurt you to be nice: you’re a first-family woman and I know I’m not, but there are still things for you to learn.”

“This is my nicest, Lilly. I am never nicer than this—”

“That’s all there is? There isn’t any more? Then you’re boring—if you have limits like that.” Momma says it with unfocused eyes. She thinks, I don’t care.

Ida says, “The jig’s up.” She sits straight, a narrow-backed, nervously elegant woman, cigaretted, alert—plain. “Well, this is—regrettable,” she says. Her eyes are shy and weird, then abruptly bold and fixed.

Momma flinches because she envies Ida her being able to use a word like regrettable without self-consciousness. Nerves pull at Momma’s face, at her eyebrows, at her eyes—her eyes have a startled focus. There’s no inertia in me, there’s nothing inert, and there’s no peace: I always take the High Road. She says, “Well, maybe it’s time I said I had a headache.”

Ida’s face is a shallow egg—with features scattered on it. A potent ugliness. Now she formally sees how proud Lila is, just how fiery (Ida’s word), and Ida’s heart breaks. She is suffused with sudden pain—sympathy—a feeling of grace—emptiness is dissolved—but she substitutes sympathy for herself instead of for women or for Momma, since she is more alone than Momma is; so the emptiness returns but it’s not entirely empty: it has a burning drama in it. Momma is in agony from the work of her performance and of creating feelings in Ida, but Ida is in pain, which is worse, but they are both enjoying it in an awful way, as Ida might describe it in a semi-grownup way.

“It’s raining too hard for me to go home just now, Lilly,” Ida says with a kind of gentle grandeur. Then, for the first time sharing her wit with Lila, taking Lila in as a partner in certain enterprises, Ida repeats from earlier, “What do you think of the rain, Lila?” And she gives a hasty smile and casts her eyes down to the porch floor, awake inwardly with the nervous unexpectedness of her own generosity and feeling it as love of a kind.

Momma wets her lips and says in a haphazard voice, “You know, some religious people take rain as a hint, but you try to have a good time anyway—and give a good time—did it wash away Sodom and Gomorrah, do you remember? Of course you remember, you like The Bible. I have no memory for those things. You know what they say, people and their sins ought to get a little time off for good behavior. I don’t think I know what good behavior is. Well, that’s enough: I’m not good at being silly: I don’t want to be silly in front of you.”

“Silly is as silly does,” Ida says—perched.

Momma says, “It’s not raining violets today—it’s more cats and dogs. The rain—well, the rain—you know these old houses is like arks. Are. All the animals two by two—I have a houseload of people coming in an hour.”

The central active meaning of Mom’s life is that in her, when everything is taut on an occasion that matters to her, self-approval when the evidence is in becomes pervasive in her, lunatic, a moonlight, a flattery of the world, as summer moonlight is. Her pleasure in herself becomes a conscious sexual power—the reflexive self-knowledge of a woman who attracts. For the moment, Momma has a rich willingness to be somewhat agreeable in her sexuality.

For Ida, Momma is the real thing—as if famous and European, of that order but in its own category: self-exhibiting, in some ways discreet; but talkative. Momma can give an impression—breasts and clothes and face—of supple strength and a crouching will and endless laughter and mind and martyrdom: a 1920s thing, from the movies. The drugged catlike weave of shadows on Momma’s belly, her being the extremely fragile and supple huntress—Ida sees this as extreme prettiness and a will to dissipate the megrims, boredom, and ennui, the kind that kill you.

Ida is here for a lot of reasons. Ida is a nervous collector and judge, but she is in Momma’s shoes when she is in Paris: there she has to perform for the women she admires. She feels she attracts as many people there as Lila does—Ida will compete with anyone.

That’s a high value to set on yourself, Ma thinks. Ida seems to Momma to be beautiful in her holding back—women’s beauties and abilities seem fearsome and of prior interest to Momma.

The sight and presence of Ida’s “beauty” (will and courage and freedom) excite Momma, who makes a mad offering of a devoted glance—Ma, who is painfully, flyingly awake with hope, and cynicism.

Ida has gooseflesh.

Ma says, “I’ll be frank; I’ll be brutally frank: I’m nervous, I’m nervous about you. You’re intelligent, you like books, but watch, I don’t have a yellow streak. If I make a fool of myself, I expect you to know you have only yourself to blame; you know where you stand in this town, you have genuine stature around here. It’s more than that: What you say counts. So, if I get tense, blame yourself … blame your own … stature. Will you do that for me?” She is being Brave Like Ida.

“Lila, are you someone who might be a good friend? I see that you might be that. Oh, it is unbearable.”

“I am a good friend. Don’t let the way I look fool you. I have the soul of a good friend.”

“You’re a darling!”

But the world is unbearable: a chill goes through Momma: in Ida’s voice is a quality of unyielding announcement on the matter. Ida is someone who has to run things—I wasn’t good enough for her to hold back and let me speak, too. I think what Momma sees is that her seeing Ida as having a realer “beauty” is not triumph enough for Ida—Ida wants to hurt Momma, so that Ida can know more satisfactorily than in Momma’s being merely temporarily agreeable that she, Ida, is splendid, is the more splendid creature. You can’t call Momma “darling” unless you do it with a note of defeat, or conspiracy, without causing trouble with her. To Ma, what Ida does seems romantically naïve.

This is what I think Momma saw: Ida owns everyone in sight. Momma is sexed angrily and ignorantly and is sexually fired by curiosity. And she did not marry for money. Ida sometimes to Momma seems only to have the shine and edginess and sharpness of calculation of money, and to be hardly flesh and blood at all. Momma feels that Ida is like her, like Momma, but is less well educated in love, that she is at an earlier and more dangerous stage: Ida is sexed ungenerously, like a schoolgirl.

Momma’s romantic standing is not a “safe” thing for her. A woman like me finds out love is a different kettle of fish—I should have been a prostitute. This stuff boils in Momma; it is her sexual temper—it supplies the vivacity in Ma’s sultry, wanting-vengeance prettiness. Tempestuousness and mind—Ma suspects everyone of cheapness when it comes to love—except S.L., her husband. Lila romanticizes his emotional extravagance, his carelessness—perhaps he is romantic.

She is alive and reckless and glowing now and does not seem devoted to remaining at home and being respectable—but she has been that so far in her life; and she feels clever in her choices. I think she is as morally illiterate as Ida, and as unscathed so far: this is what she claims by being so willful—that she is usually right, unpunished. This is what her destructiveness comes from.

Both women feel that women draw you in and are grotesquely lonely and grotesquely powerful in intimacies. Ida has a coarse look. What it is is that Ida has to be the star. Ida’s courage is self-denial and self-indulgence mixed.

Momma’s performance is ill-mounted, since it rests on Ida’s having a heart. Ma has risen from the void of dailiness and nobodyhood to flutter in the midst of her whitish fire, but she flutters burningly in avoid of heartlessness: it is worthless to 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 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 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 …” By her rules—of ego and selfishness and loyalty—never to give Momma an intense compliment is a sign of love. It is keeping things balanced. Ida lives deeply inside her own biography.

But Ma feels she doesn’t have enough money or standing and that she doesn’t have enough power with Ida to be satisfied with that. Momma is “infatuated” but cross; she is drunk—mostly with the ease of being with someone quick-minded, not male. She wants to show Ida how to be magnetic in courtship: “Oh, believe me, I’ll go on record as saying you’re better-looking than I am, in the ways that count. In the ways that really count, you have the kind of looks I admire most. I count you as the best-looking.”

Ida takes that as her due. She doesn’t see that Ma is enraged and being exemplary. She says primly, “You’re interesting-looking, Lila.” Ida thinks that is a witty way to be romantic. Lila feels Ida continues to be not romantic, not a squanderer. She is reading Ida’s mind: she thinks she sees that Ida thinks it an extravagance to care for Momma in the first place, a penniless no one.

This kind of selfish shenanigans dries Momma up physically, but she likes it on the whole. Momma laughs musically, yet she is disgusted. She says, in a mad way, “I have to laugh: What did you think the excitement was all about? What did you come to see me for?” Ma thinks it’s bad taste of Ida not to be more honest—heartfelt. Momma is called by some people The Prettiest Woman in Central Illinois. Ma is lighting up again, but it’s temper, a squall of will. In a frightened and careless and disobedient way (and in a hysterical and cold and experienced way), Momma knows that in a battle for personal power Ida is the local champion; Momma feels the tournament quality of Ida. Momma says again—odd, mocking, and tender, too, “I’ll go on record—you’re better-looking than I am in the ways that count. I wish I looked more like you.”

She means it, but she’s saying it’s better, it’s safer not to have real looks.

She’s praising Ida and saying Ida is trash.

I don’t shut my eyes and give up; I’m not a goody-goody two-shoes.

Ida half understands the category she’s being put in and she thinks: She owes me one for that. She leans down and touches, with one finger, Momma’s shoe, Momma’s foot. Then she sits back.

Momma’s face, brownish, ill-looking, with lines of nervousness on it, now, in her sensitivity, her speed, her strangeness and as a soul in the cosmos and in her strength—and maybe in wickedness and charity—smooths out.

Ida is big-eyed, calm-faced—but sweaty—full of her own fund of fidgety and fanatic self-approval. She crosses her legs—coarsely—in front of Ma’s now obtuse face. She would argue, I don’t deserve this, I have done nothing to deserve this.

Momma’s eyes go from Ida’s eyes to Ida’s wrists (fine-boned) and Ida’s nails (bitten). The trick for Momma as she smiles a little inside her attractiveness at the moment is to show she is really clear about what Ida is worth as a person. “I have a good time now and then,” Momma says, unable to be innocent and awed. She says this with her head tilted.

The force in Ida’s soul makes her surface twitch a little with puffs of waitfulness. “We deserve a good time,” Ida says, not looking at Momma and then looking her full in the face. Ida sinks down in her chair. Then she sits upright. Like a countess—that took strength of will.

Momma says, in a presumptuous and urgent tone, “Around here you’re supposed to go to special cities to have a good time. I’m from the provinces. But I’m having a good time right now—it’s because of you.”

Ida sighs narrowly and says, “You’re not very Jewish; you’re not like Hamlet.”

Not mild? Not moderate?

Ma is determined to tack down a triumph. She says, “I’m always interested when we talk, I’m always interested in the things you have to say.” Mild. Moderate.

Ida looks at her, aslant, smiling—it really is a grin; it would be a grimace if Ida were less clever.

Ma, looking sideways at Ida, says, knowing it will upset Ida, “You’d be surprised what I think of you, you’d be surprised what I say when I’m not afraid of how I sound, what I say behind your back—I don’t think you can imagine it.”

Ida, victimized, girlish—i.e., girlish if victimized—says girlishly, “Tell me what you say about me. What do you say behind my back? I have to know. I have to know things like that—that’s so interesting. It’s important to me. Tell me, you must tell me, it’s not fair what you’re doing—I have to know.”

Ida’s style here is girls’-school stuff from a social class Ma is not in. Ma flinches, because she usually assumes people of that class will hurt her as much as they can, as much as they dare (she’s pretty)—she expects pain from that quarter.

Ma is evasive: “I let people know that you make me think about things in a new way: you have real power over me—I talk about that all the time … Then I have to think whether I want that or not, whether I want you to be such an influence or not, whether I can afford it—a lot of the time, I don’t know. You make me think, but I feel like crying. It’s too hard to say it now. I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not one of your critics—no, I’m not one of your critics at all—”

“Lila, you’re just impossible—you frighten me—” Then: “Tell me what you say about me. Tell me in the same words …”

“Oh, I quote you a lot—you’re interesting …”

“Lila, tell me what you say. ”

“I don’t twist what you say. I listen to you carefully. I feel I understand you. I feel you understand me.”

“I feel that, too,” Ida said decisively. She’s decided Momma boasts about knowing her. Ida decides to accept that. But her glance and manner shift everything from privacy to the Whole World, where she is the richer woman and Lila is the weaker of the two. It is always her deciding it—especially if I was looking good—in the interplay between them. Ma believes Ida doesn’t know how to take turns.

Ma says, “I’m sophisticated in many, many ways, amn’t I?”

Ida directs at Ma a large, cajoling, swiftly childlike (pleading) smile: it’s intent, it is ironic and sincere and clever—it seems to mean Ida does sincerely love Ma in some way even if she’s in control of herself and of the whole thing all-in-all despite Momma’s hard-won upper hand at moments. At this moment, Ma flinches. It makes her feel things, that smile. So Ma is raw, exacerbated, strained—alive—resistant; thinking well of herself is what usually seduces Ma—and she felt proud of herself for having elicited that smile; but she is not yet seduced. She is in control, too—for the moment.

Momma loves women’s responses. Men’s lives don’t interest her—they are out of reach, obscure, obtuse, slow, and wooden.

Momma breathes and resettles her breasts, and her face glimmers and is shiny and knowing—a weird thing. I suppose this is a moment of experienced affection for the two women. Momma hasn’t yet said to many people but perhaps feels, I’m thirteen years past the high-water mark of my looks, when I was the party and that was that; but I’m still going. My mother’s heartbeat was a constant lyric exclamation of ignorance and blasphemy, excitement and exacerbation, beauty and amusement of a kind. Ma “knows, as a matter of common sense,” that Ida believes that on the highest level only a Christian mind can matter.

To Ida seriously, Momma is like a dumb animal, without truth, but an enjoyable woman, fiery and a marvel—coarsely spiritual and naïve—a Jew. Momma, teased and tormented by life, is fascinated in a number of dark ways by being defined in this manner.

Ida is prompted to take charge firmly and openly of the seductive drama in Lila’s shifting glowingness. She jumps up, crosses to Lila in French-schoolgirl style—self-consciously wry—and sits beside her on the squealing glider. Ida is a big-city person, and can’t live in the moments the way Lila can. She abruptly kisses Lila on the temple, then rapidly adds a second kiss to the first, pulls back, looks at Momma’s profile, then sits straight and utters a watchful, shepherding laugh. The style is nervously a woman’s lawlessness that excuses itself as tenderness. A delicate joke. How can you mind it?

The risk and nihilism of stylishness jolts Momma with a sense of pleasure and of the abyss. I mean Ma’s life rests on contracts among women, sacraments between women, and everything Ida does is an example of freedom from that. Ida admits to no such freedom. Ma feels herself fall toward an abyss for what is merely a lied-about romp.

With weird perversity, in a slow voice, very melodic and undramatic, and not moving her body, but softening a little but not enough to be a real welcome, Ma says, “You’re being so nice to me, I feel like the farmer’s daughter …”

“Darling Lila,” Ida says, insulted but still puckered for another kiss: “Me, a traveling salesman?”

The elegance impresses Lila, who, like Ida, then calls on her inner resources—i.e., mostly temper—“Well, you do just breeze in and out—between trips.” But such sympathy is in Momma’s temper, as is not there when she speaks to men, and I cannot doubt that women are real, are vivid to Momma as no man is. Momma’s nerves and mind and experiences comprehend what a woman does, the sounds and tics and implications—the meanings. “Who lives like you?” Momma says. “You pack up and go when you want to go. Some people would kill to have your kind of life.”

It is curious how Ida comes into flower: the slow, cautious, shrewd small-town thing of her background shows first in her opened face, then the boarding-school-mannered thing of being mannerly shows next, and then comes Ida’s rebellion and good, sharp mind (her terms), and then these in a parade with the sophistications of New York and Europe (Ma’s terms) as part of a moment of stillness, of her looking inward while outwardly her appearance glistens and glows with her nervous parade in this manner.

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.”

“Oh, yes,” says Ida, as if delighted. “Twins, certainly.” She grasps Lila’s hand. Such will, such fine-boned will is in Ida that Momma smiles—inside her other moods she feels she is in a schoolyard again, a girl.

Ida’s sense of romance progresses by delicacies of parody—i.e., it is always two steps from the real—toward the heartier implications: commands, exploitations, secrets, alliances, bondages, rages: a display of self, an outbreak of darkness; she wants to bloom as a flower, a woman, a girl, a boy, a man. (Momma wants to bloom like that, too.) Ida names herself parodistically: “I kiss like John Gilbert, don’t I? Don’t you think so?”

Ma ought to say, Oh, yes, and lean back, and so on.

But Momma is not tamed, she is masochistic and flexible, and ashamed of that in relation to men, and crazy and vengeful as a result. Momma is crazy and vengeful freshly at every occasion of wrong. She is doing a thing: she is blooming as someone who cannot be tamed by sweat-mustached Ida.

She can fake being ladylike and distant from things and she can fake being commanding—she can imitate Ida. Her denial, her fakery are comic in her style. She sits facing forward, and she refuses to alter her posture.

A passionate woman being unmoved is funny.

Ida titters.

Momma dislikes comedy because of her sensibility—disgust and inner temper: a heat: distrust—these don’t turn into bearable jokes for her without contempt—for herself, for everyone—and she has too much physical merit still, although less surely, to hold herself, or romance, or the possibilities of a courtship moment, in contempt.

Momma’s outrageous and inwardly wretched comedy taunts Ida, who, childlike, then tugs at Ma’s shoulder.

But the tug is elegant—and startling. How startling Ida tends to be. Self-loving rather than making a gesture that actually included Momma: Ida needs to be loved as the good child whose every move embodies innocence and prettiness rather than as the active doer she is.

Momma resists all force applied to herself. “No,” Momma says. “Absolutely no.” She is not breathing at all. Then she is breathing lightly. Then heavily. She says, gently scathing, “Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo, I caught a Lila by the toe—oh, Ida …” Then, leaning, straight-backed, at a slant away from Ida, a summing-up: “No one can count on you.”

Ida, in her momentum, makes flirtatious offers of obedience: “Everyone can count on me. I am your slave—Lilly—you know that.” Then, owlishly: “You know you can count on me lifelong.” Then: “Ly—fff(i)ff—longgg—” The length she drew the word to was roughly the span of attention before one blinks mentally and registers what is said—it was the equivalent of five or six syllables. Her voice is not torn by love and desire—i.e., by folly. Nothing is implied of any state of feeling other than a sophisticated one—i.e., one in which it is known that attachments come and go. Her promise is a parody of promises, it has no human ordinariness. It has intelligence and cruelty, though, and longing.

Momma straightens her head and does this and that, and then it emerges, as in a charade, that she is listening in an ordinary human way: she listens to the promise—now a memory in the air. She is smiling dimly, unreadably, beautifully.

In the haze of illusions and realisms, female lawlessness and its codes, and female parodies, and female truths give way apparently, and Momma turns her head and smilingly, tacitly listens with the calm maternal-innocent set of her face, which then alters into a lover’s wicked stare—accusing and reckless. This hint at the humiliation of the mother by the lying boarding-school seducer, Ida, is a parody, too; but her being a lover and challenging Ida, that part, is not parody, so it’s all different now: it’s physical and remorseless, like some affairs that kids have in high school.

That makes her vulgar—i.e., blunt and obvious—and sexual. This is rebellion on a giant scale, to be so local with Ida. Ma is claiming to be a more serious person than Ida by bringing in this real stuff in this championship way.

Ida is jocular about rebellion. Ida treats all claims to leadership as childish, even her own. Ida puts a small kiss—shyly—on Momma’s jaw.

A gust of feeling whirls Ma around. But she is not a mother, not a child—those are not sexual beings. In this assignation, Momma’s sense of what is to be done is real; Ida’s taste, and sense of things, prefers the symbolic: the summing-up.

Ma feels that if she is honest with herself, she is, as a person (a sexual body and a quick mind), very little better off, if at all, with Ida’s understanding than she is with S.L.’s.

Ma tugs at the tail of her bandanna. “S.L. may be in the house,” she says, with almost rabid sorrow: she holds up that hoop for Ida to go through.

Ida grimaces—it’s a snarl: that was stylish back then, for a stylish woman to mimic a gangster or something. See, Ma is punishing Ida by invoking “a law” that makes Ida behave. Ida grabs Lila by the elbows and says, “You Garbo!” Elusive woman. Garbo isn’t married. It is Garbo-minus, so to speak, that Momma is. This is in Ida’s face as she moves back to her chair, thwarted, probably enraged.

Lila feels somewhat lower-class, however. Momma says, “I never paid attention in school, so I’m easy to know.” She says, “You want another drink? You want another sandwich?”

Ida says, “Does S.L. drink?”

“He’ll be sober—when he comes around the mountain.” It is truly jolting when Momma breaks her own style open and imitates Daddy with all the depth of knowledge she has of him physically.

Ida stares at her.

Lila says, “I can read your mind. I know what you’re thinking.” She swings her foot.

“What am I thinking?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” Momma says it seriously, in a musical voice. Ma does not know how small-town this is, but then—with gooseflesh and a sinking in her stomach and a light beading of sweat along her back—she can tell what a mistaken device it is in Ida’s opinion.

It is Homeric and not Tantric, the way the erotic and the spiritual merge in Ma; but if you use school ideas of things, the erotic is a matter of grasp and idea—that is, a demystification of feelings for the sake of excitement—and it is not spiritual at all: it is merely modern, then. Feelings reside in art and in sex but not in school, unless perceptions and illusions are counted as feelings, which is what Ida does and Ma wants to do—things coming out even, correct answers, being perfect: Ida wants those and the sense of those and the appetite for those to be counted as feelings. Ma is another type, but she has schoolish yearnings.

The reason school is the way it is is that in a classroom there is only one teacher, one power: a tyranny …

In life, there are always at least two people, or you can’t call it life.

“If I said now Ida is my friend, you’d agree, but if I acted on it, woe is me, and that’s where the trouble starts.” Ma says this hastily, as if S.L. might walk in any moment, but then she slows down and finishes saying it in a stately, melodious way. But her mouth and eyes are sultry—are gusty with feeling; she is so complicated now that no scientific theory can be as hard to unravel as her mood is. She is epically grownup in this way.

Ida, with a curious thwacking gesture of her knees against each other, matches Momma in complexity: she may now be the most grownup person in the world. “Let’s not go into what’s wrong. I don’t believe in diagrams,” Ida says. Lightly.

Ma says, “If we were a friend to one another, I could take you for granted and you wouldn’t put up with that for one second.”

Ida does not dawdle when she thinks. She takes the hurdle. “That’s brilliant. Your seeing that. Listen: You can take me for granted.”

“Now?”Now that I am brilliant. Ma thinks Ida ought to, and will, love her better after today.

Ida already “loves” her—that’s all been settled. Ida says in a dignified, faintly disgusted way, “I am your friend.”

Momma says, “Then I have no say in it—” Now she sees the trap clearly.

“Lilly—”

“I say someone is my friend when I say so. If you mean one word of it, tell me—you went to Switzerland with Colleen Butterson—that was the word that went out—what was that all about? Tell me if we’re good friends now.”

“Lilly—” Ida says, in a whole other voice. Don’t be silly. Don’t break the law (of discretion).

Ma bursts into an angry laugh—angry because she doesn’t want to be sidestepped. “You want me to sign a blank check. We have rules around here—and no one makes them up.” She makes them up, is what that means.

Ma knows from experience that the truth now between her and Ida (the atmosphere of rich equality) is that Momma is a fool for trying to impose her own sense of truth on a woman as firm-hearted as Ida.

Ida says, in an intelligently threatening (and wanly disillusioned) voice, “We don’t give pledges, Lilly. We trust each other.” A different law. A notion of law different from Lila’s. Then: “Are we mad?” Ida says, summing up and taking over. “No. Yes.” A witty joke. A party atmosphere. It is clear that in some ways Ida is a nicer person than Lila is. Than my mother.

Momma laughs. “I like the rain,” she says naughtily—it’s an intentionally clumsy imitation of Ida.

Ida doesn’t laugh right away. Momma starts to breathe defiantly; and she says meaningfully (her way), “It makes my pioneer hair frizzy.”

“Oh, Lila,” Ida says, relieved. Then she laughs.

Lila’s self-satisfaction begins to glow again. “I can’t keep up with you,” she complains. A touch of wit, maybe.

Neither has the sought-for command of the erotic at this juncture, but that works out in Ma’s favor, since Ma can live in erotic chaos and Ida can’t.

Momma’s momentum carries her along: “I’ve lived my life in small towns. You have Paris and St. Louis.”

Ida stares for a small second, locating what is meant, getting the point. Ida says, “What is wanting in Alton is naughtiness—madness—but there’s not much more in St. Louis. You’d find it dull, Lila.”

Lila thinks of Ida’s excitements and naughtiness as being open to her now as soon as she learns the passwords If I bother. Momma smiles faintly—maternally. Ma pants: It is an effort to keep up with Ida—she’s a real flier. “I’m not a dreamer,” Momma says aloud, almost idly, commenting on the contest.

Ida says, “It must be terrible to be without daydreams. We would die in this town without our—don’t repeat this—wickedness.”

Momma suddenly blows Ida a kiss. Everyone knows that Ida always gets even. Then Momma rises: a swirl of heat—the thin, finely curved legs, the pale, night-framed face, the paled, used lipstick (from drinking and smoking), the extreme prettiness of the woman—gusts around the porch. Ma hears a thump like that of a car door—she lifts her head toward the porch roof—then she swiftly bends over and kisses Ida on the mouth: light, quick, and real. A real kiss which can break the heart of the one who receives it and of anyone who sees it. “You are a hero, Lila,” Ida says.

With a swish of her skirt, Ma turns and walks back to the glider and sits down. She says, “Well, there, I don’t feel inferior now, no matter how smart you are, Ida.”

Ida moistens her lips for the first time. She smiles dimly—her eyes are filmed or curtained.

“You look Jewish like that,” Ma says.

Ida smiles more widely, complicatedly. Her eyes are in focus.

Ma says, “Let’s wait and see if the house shakes.” She means from S.L.’s footsteps on the wooden floors. She finds the noises men make menacing: they twang at her nerves.

The rain falls weightily.

Ma says, “We have another minute or two to be friends in.”