LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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