I’m a divine housewife,” Lila says, as if she weren’t being shocking about what she ought to be. “I know who to hire. Have you met our Annemarie? She’s a little on the fat side. But she’s a very fine person—she soaks our cucumbers in milk. It’s something she learned in France; she’s from France. She says it gets the acid out—is that important? I don’t know what I think of the acid in cucumbers: probably it’s important to get the acid out—”
“Lila, these sandwiches: I’m your slave.” (That is, lower me to your peasant level: let’s roll in the gutter for a while: No more religious issues. No more social issues. Lila worries that she looks at people too darkly; but she thinks that’s what Ida means by that remark—Ida doesn’t mean she’ll be obedient.)
Ida says, when Lila blinkingly and pointedly says nothing, “Your housekeeper soaks cucumbers in milk? I never heard of that.”
Lila says carefully, without in any way denying the double meaning, “Neither did I. But I guess I go along with it.”
“Really?” Ida says, looking triumphant in the face of Ma’s being a riddle.
“I’m not fooling—I’m not a fooler. I’m honest—you can trust me. I’m always impressed when a woman’s honest, I like to be impressive,” Lila says melodiously, unmocking (maybe) or mocking.
Ida breathes slowly and eats in a way that mingles considerable delicacy with cynical doubt—perhaps about eating and chewing in general but doubt eased maybe by the happiness of the moment.
Lila watches Ida eat, and she says, “You’d be surprised how honest I am. I have to be careful—you know what they say? Why be a martyr? I admit I like an opportunity to shine. I like to show what I’m made of. I like a chance to rise to the occasion.” The look in her face may mean she is saying she can lie, she can keep her mouth shut, she can rise to any worldly occasion, or it may mean something else: maybe she thinks two things at once and that enables her to say things that mean two things at least. She says, “But I wouldn’t want to be quoted on this.” She smiles—Momma had so many smiles that you might say, if you counted contexts, that she had an infinite number of them. “People don’t understand always what honesty is when a woman’s honest.”
“I think of myself as honest,” Ida says with a certain superior curvature of voice; and, having stopped eating, watches Lila through the smoke of another cigarette.
“You can say that—wherever you speak, you speak from a throne room,” Lila said, leaving the question open and yet speaking more directly than before. “A woman can’t say that who only has a porch. People don’t mind when you show your colors: you have two streets in this town named after your family.” It’s up to Ida to speak first about the happiness of the moment and about human affection, Momma means—maybe.
The set of her pretty mouth and unlit eyes means Lila’s both sad and cheerful that people sometimes think of her as a villainess (as not honest).
Ida has that sense of Momma as a pretty Jewish woman, a villainess: clever, ruthless, dishonest—foreign. What does it mean that Momma doesn’t mind? Is it that she’s letting Ida build up a debt and she will get even?
Ida is—naïvely—pleased that Lila knows Jews are unrooted opportunists, sly satirists, thieves of a sort—thieves of one’s comfort with oneself and one’s thoughts.
As well as of money often.
Ida says cautiously, blinkingly, now scoffingly friendly, “Everyone in town puts you on a pedestal, Lila.”
“Oh, that kind of pedestal is nothing,” Momma says in an old voice, watching Ida.
“No, it’s serious,” Ida says.
Her voice is firm—it is not her judgment so much as her temper, her nervousness, that dominates the moment.
The intelligence and shrewdness required to make one’s nervousness a sign of social class and an intellectual plane of discourse and a sign of emotion mark a leader—this is what Ma thinks, and leader is Ma’s term.
Lila said, “If a woman has flashing eyes, she can’t joke, she can’t make jokes, but name a street after me and maybe there could be a little comedy—you think a woman like me’s allowed to make fun? I’m a menace. I suppose you don’t know about me.”
She said it in such tones that flattery of the other woman’s fineness was intended and disparagement of her local standing in politics as a beauty worth listening to.
Her voice was musical. The voice was nakedly peeled; it gently crooned along.
Ida is abruptly amused—it is a matter of eligibility: Momma’s. Holding her head and shoulders and back in a pleasantly angular slouch, Ida says, “The women in my family have a motto: that the only foolish thing is to be frightened.” I.e., class equals bravery. So Momma to show class should offer affection first.
Momma purses her lips and says, very softly, “Well, we say nothing ventured, nothing gained in our family; it’s a good idea to look before you leap.” I.e., you go first: you act so superior.
“I’m a believer in real courage,” Ida said. “My great-grandmother saw her sister scalped; she did not lose courage; she stayed right where she was, hidden in the woodpile; she didn’t let out a peep.”
Momma tried this: “Do you think the world is getting better? Maybe it used to be worse. Or is it the same old thing? My mother thinks it’s still bad and going down—she had to hide in a cellar under rags while the cossacks killed her father. And five brothers. But she peeked. I can’t tell the story: some words put the smell of things right up my nose and I get sick. Those cossacks, they put Momma’s father and the five brothers in the ground up to their necks. Wait a moment: I have to catch my breath.” Momma gasps faintly. “They bury the legs and arms so the men can’t move; the beards are in the dirt. Then the cossacks make their horses gallop. She watched the horses’ feet kick them in the head. The brains would run out. Momma said their eyes fell out onto the ground.”
Ida is listening to the anecdote with an intelligent look—idle but taut and ready to respond although not by making the first move by declaring her interest, or degree of it, to Momma.
Lila says without transition but softly, vulnerably, “Are you always a careful talker? When the sky’s the limit? When the highfliers are around?” Then: “If there are any.”
Ida says—slowly—her voice has curlicues of clear inflection—“I’m a careful speaker. It’s an old habit. I don’t know that I’m so special.” Meaning that she was, since she was modest, meaning also Momma’s wit, of its sort, has made a point (of its sort).
Lila never understood the point of modesty for women. She said, pushily but melodiously, “If I talked like you, what would you think? Do you think I ought to talk like you? Would you like it if I did? You think we ought to talk alike?”
Momma mixed fineness with naïveté—a social brew—and took the lead.
Rather than be a mentor to Momma or ask for a twin or say no directly, Ida, electric, luminous, says, “In the matter of how people talk in this country, we need to be called to order.”
Momma smiles modestly, daringly: “I suppose I’m daring, I’m over people’s heads. I like to take a chance.”
The rainlight grows yellower, as if it were on its way to clarity, but the rain persists windlessly, moderating itself almost not at all in the sudden light.
“I mean in general,” Ida says, veiling her eyes.
Lila says, “In general, I do what I have to do; I prefer to look like a winner. I’m not someone who pleads her case.”
Ida peers at Lila and then quickly stops peering. She is richer, freer, and “smarter” than Lila—she is in command. She is someone who knows what it is to be