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

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