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

basketlike thing—and she takes another towel from the chair seat and wraps me in it. She plays her eyes on me, self-reflexively; she is contemplating the dangers before she lifts me: “Don’t throw up now,” she says.

      Her eyelids blink rapidly. This softens her stare, makes her very pretty—greatly pretty. Lila says, getting ready—she is very hesitant—“I can’t let it simmer on my back burners all day. I’m the last of the red-hot mommas. My motto is ‘strike while the iron is hot and get things done.’ I’m the executive type.” She moistens her lips, squints blindly, pushes her hair behind her ears. She stands flat-footed. She sets her breasts with her left hand. Her breasts have a powdery largeness. A constant nervousness is worsened if she has to touch someone. She bends near; her shadow is an imported dusk; her arms are around me; she lifts me, the giant woman, owl-fluffy Momma and her large, owl-soft breasts. And then, over that, the nearness to her is a moonish glare that tugs tidally at my breath and at my mind.

      “Phew, you stink, pretty baby,” she says.

      Her voice is troubled, vaguely storm-lit, spotted with lurid light: she has an innate melodrama.

      She ferries us past the obstreperous transparency of the windows—mostly a curious shine but still knowable as part of the outer, widening morning.

      “Well, another day, and you’re still sick, don’t you know it? Don’t you always know it?”

      She is sad; she is out of breath; charmingly, conceitedly, she is drudgery-minded. She picks on me: “Hold your head up; don’t let your head do that; straighten it; stop looking like an idiot: I warn you, I’m not good with idiots—once you lose my sympathy, you lose me.… Listen, I’ll tell the world: I’m not a nursemaid; that’s not what I’m good at.” Heavy-fleshed, small-town Lila walks, and I shake with the rhythms of her body. Her movements are interfered with by me—my weight and looseness and indiscipline of posture.

      In the bathroom, she sits me lankly on the sink. My feet are in the white basin; she props me with her shoulder and unwraps the outer towel, shifting me, and slipping it out and throwing it on the floor. And then she unpins the other towel, the one that I slept in, the diaper towel: “What a mess: don’t look innocent; you do it, you’re the mess: you’re worse than a horse. You’re lucky you don’t get thrown out with the diaper. You could learn to handle your bowels: it wouldn’t kill you. I hope you’re listening. Cooperation, they say, is the mark of a leader. Don’t make me wear myself out.” Her fingers are clumsy but neat, shy then bold—she has a glidy, pinchy, nervous touch. It is a touch that seemingly can easily be frightened off, like a fly. My eyes have grown flimsy with nerves—an obscure physical crowdedness of sensation in skin and mind.

      “Are you looking at me? I can’t tell what you’re up to; you’re one of the crazy ones; you’re a crazy little meshuggener, a meshuggener sheikh. Are you getting better? I think you’re improving. My guess is you’re sitting there and you know what I’m saying: tell me if I’m right.”

      She’s bluffing, partly bluffing, mostly bluffing. As she speaks, she stops believing herself, because my eyelids are so unblinkingly dulled—I am masked in lostness in the vividly glaring bathroom light. She has turned on the lights, a bulb overhead, and bulbs alongside the mirror so that reflected everywhere on the white walls are melted foil, blurred gilding, moonish flares. The mirror shines outward, and morning light bulges in at the window. Against my back are her breasts, sleeping, stirring animals, slick lambs vaguely furry with sensations; and, as in a dream, like masses of very pale pigeons or piles of silent whitish leaves.

      Her large, moonish female face, with lines and vistas focused with her curiosity about my illness, about me, has a foreign meaning, like paths in a strange garden. She unpins and strips me down below.

      I am a half-lifeless drowsiness and limp and boneless, but I am an inward mass of tense amazement. Moving my head, my chin into my chest, I cannot understand what I see down below—myself or her hands.

      I am too ignorant, too embarrassed. Sightless with embarrassment, perhaps with rage among unreadable meanings. Although I don’t move, the woman says, “Hold still …” Life and consciousness are hard to bear.

      The terrible preliminary sensations of nakedness, tickling birdlike glitter of the nerves, cut the moment into strange shapes and spaces; Momma’s eyes are as large as a sparrow, the sparrow being at an unreadable distance from me in meaning if not in real inches. Fluttering bird breath. Eyelid-bird-wings. A thin fabric shimmer-noose followed by a tube rises over my face and wraps my head—it is smelly; and light pierces the web that, as it ascends, hauls at my eyelids, blocks my nose, and opens my mouth so that I breathe a forced indraft of air—silvery, silent, shiny, bathroom air.

      Naked. My amazement and dullness are aflame. I am all hurting pleasure and nauseating pain. My no-longer puritan mother, a lawless sensibility, neat-handed and oppressively new, says, “Are you playing tricks? You’re hiding something from me—believe me, boys playing tricks are not news to me.” This one has a dark-and-light face, a fanatic’s fervor: a form of nervousness: she quivers with distinct but distant shamelessness—like a bird. This is especially distant from me, and is as if holy and wrapped in light, in speculative mercy, this thing of sharing a moment of life.… The only meaning one knows lies in the distinctions between mercy and the limitlessness of mad, veering pain. She is electric and unbridled and she is acuity and an impatient will-toward-mercy, a fanatic of uncertain persuasion.

      She is tentatively and then recklessly fearless: she has a fearless prettiness. She is being a disciplined other self—other from her usual self—maternal: of course, a challenge. I do not recognize it, but I can hear the ticking of her waiting for me to recognize her. I have never been seduced before.

      My mind moves into and out of thickets of shadow—the changing complexions of liking and not liking are sickly in the motions of the moment: this woman bristled with prettiness; her thin and mobile wrists, the lacquered fingernails, the shaped lines of eyebrows plucked in a very round curve jabbed like love before there was love: I spied on her; I could not look; at moments I did not even spy. I submitted and was angry and mocking and interested, but perhaps only another child would have known that I was interested. I mean, the dictionary had been torn, and while all the words remained, nothing was attached in the same way to anything else, up and down, Momma or me. Meaning was a sharp and even a tearing issue.

      The child starts to tremble. The sudden life in his ears, and in his mind, as well as the crawling and swarming creature-thing—things, sensations—on his skin (the porcelain beneath his feet, the shift, geometrical, not fractured, of glare in the mirror when he shifts his head), makes him pale and shuddery—he is a tense shuddering and a fixed pallor.…

      “I know you’re sick. See, I’m being careful. I know I’m not real careful: you make me nervous, I admit it: I do things too hard. I pulled your shirt too hard, didn’t I? See, I know what I’m doing—you can trust me. I admire good nursing. You don’t know me, but charity is my middle name. I know some very, very good nurses. They say that with some people you have to treat them like being sick is an honor. I know you’re in the right, but I want you to know I’m not a good nurse first thing in the morning. I just want to know on my own hook, Are you lying to me? Listen, I like your looks—you’re a Baby Sheikh. You’re pretty. If you ask me, it’s a shame what happened to you. I’m all ears—I’m sympathy itself, on a monument.… Tell me, are you snapping out of it or not? I know you’re better. I know you’re a little better.”

      The child didn’t know what she meant; he didn’t know her intentions. He sagged immediately; he meant to hide in his illness.

      “Be a nice child—don’t play tricks on me,” she said. “Are you back in the land of the living? Tell me. Let me know if you are. Are you going to throw up? You look like it. You better give me some warning. I’m not good about people throwing up. Listen, I’m starting a fuss with you: don’t throw up.”

      But she says this in a voice of such intense melody, so supple and enticing, that the child is torn open … He has no formal means for knowing anything about her. His mouth opens wide—it is distorted.