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

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