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

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,