"Poor, Gaby, time has run by like a shell shocked soldier, and she's accomplished nothing in her life but a bit of whoredom to keep body and spirit together. She wanted to be a revolutionary but has only followed the natural course of having gotten older."
"I became a mother. I can't call that nothing. There is some premature gray in my family but that isn't until one's late thirties— early forties. It won't happen to me. I'll have beautiful dark hair until they carry me off in a coffin—strike that, an urn for I will be cremated to go back to the elements immediately."
"Look at that once stalwart face in the mirror—is this a human face or a sponge that has sucked up too much water?" The ET's tone of voice was nurturing in spite of her words.
"I don't feel well."
"You've been overtaken by the mundane. Look out of the window at the volant clouds. Any frothy and floating substance natural or artificial will do: an ocean, trees waving in the winds, passing clouds, soap spinning around in a washer. Watching clouds in particular is instrumental to appreciate the infinite possibilities of colliding atoms in creation or the infinite possibilities of an unburdened life. Now look down at your mundane and sedentary world so bereft of possibilities, so insalubrious, so sickening. See your son on the steps. There he is with fingers of one hand down the cat's throat, and the other hand pinning it down. Hmm…now he's spoon feeding it something."
"Vegetable soup."
"Something. There's a bowl, a spoon, and something that looks like mud but okay, vegetable soup, " said the ET. "Vegetables for a cat? Strange! Well, even though your son is outside, his presence is still here. It permeates everything in the trailer, doesn't it? You couldn't walk a minute from one room to the next without thinking of him: his smell, his things, and messes are everywhere. His storybooks and color books are the only things neatly on his shelf because he doesn't like them. They aren't animated."
"He's always been partial to movement just like any boy." She paused and thought. "Yeah, even when he goes out to play he is still everywhere in here—every room. It was just a few years ago, sitting on this very pot, when he was yelling, 'Mommy come wipe me' or 'Gabey, come wipe me'—something like that."
"Truly the sentimental substance of long term memories," said the higher authority indifferently.
"I half way wanted to desert him in a pasture along the highway."
"I dare say. Never part from your better instincts as they say. You have, I must tell you my dear girl, failed your ideals. The big toy car running on D batteries, the matchbox cars he crashes into walls, and that gun that shoots out big plunger shaped bullets that stick onto car windows—all of these items you have succumbed to buying for him even though initially you said that you wouldn't. Yes, he is a creature of movement. You've known this all along. And yet, choosing to ignore the fact that he goes through such tirades in favor of thinking him as a partner leading you to the entity, you have succumbed to his tantrums and tears in supermarkets and five & dime stores. You continually buy him toys that aggravate his worse propensities and all those chocolate pacifiers."
"He is exploring his world. He's trying on new versions of himself."
"He is a demanding, egocentric creature of movement far from the worlds of contemplation and you give into his extortion. He gives ultimatums and runs away from you at the drop of a hat only to be hugged later. What sort of graduate psychology classes at Rice University taught you parenting techniques like that?"
She laughed. "It is a little pathetic, I know."
"It's inane: a woman like you limiting herself to reproducing and rearing young .You do this as though you can't find more purpose to life than this…someone like you deigning to define herself in mortal roles of birth, reproduction, and death to have someone to succeed you. Have you succumbed to being a woman, lost without a mommy role. Fool, experience your contumely now…Feel those wings that no one else has. You are innately volant if left to yourself. Cast him away. Let him fend for himself." All the time the higher authority was smiling and talking mildly like a mother reading a bedtime story.
"It isn't like that. I brought him into the world. I am responsible for him.Besides that, he has led me into—"
"Into leaves"
"Okay, into leaves; but now I have decided. There will be no school for this boy. I'll keep him here with me."
"You silly bitch!" yelled her higher authority vehemently. "I have better things to do than argue with you about things so boring and irrelevant to the scheme of things. The boy's already one year behind his peers. Being led to the entity is well and good but if the kid's your crutch you've got serious mental problems."
As if not hearing a word the higher authority was saying, Gabriele mumbled to herself, "Maybe I could avoid putting him into kindergarten again this year. Matter of fact, I'll teach him everything he needs to know throughout grade school and then he can go to school with his peers when he is 13. He wouldn't like being in kindergarten as the oldest one in the class anyway. I can't imagine it to be a kinder garden than what I have here in this home. Likewise, he wouldn't like first grade a year later because he'd be older than the other kids, or second grade, or the third—" The higher authority did not answer. She had vanished with the inhaling, coughing, and exhaling of a big puff of smoke; and meanwhile Gabriele was high and smiling widely. She was vertiginous with so much life running through her veins that she did not want to waste. It, like the atoms of the cosmos, was pouring, clotting, recycling, breaking up, and then flushing out into something new within her.
The marijuana had relaxed her and she was taking a piggy back ride on the shoulders of a Heraclitus shaped cloud. Opaque questions seemed interlinked and mysteriously solved: of motion versus contemplation; Parmenides versus Heraclitus; being the warm, soft, cuddly mother depicted in Harlow's monkey experiments so as to not have a traumatized monkey on her hands versus finding more purpose to life than reering one's young; attachment versus independence; and the containment of her son versus the release of him. What solved these questions was the analogy that just as solar systems in the spilling universe rarely have planets capable of sustaining life, few are the contemplatives in the movements of sociable and voracious man. She told herself that she had only one life and she would not dilute it for any "kid ." She thought, "I'll do my thing and let him do his" but what she really meant was that she doubted that she was capable of making him into a better person if she isolated him. With the exception of creative goddesses like herself, a mind was a photocopy machine and a file cabinet. Her son needed to go to school and copy external forces for good or for bad and she needed to pull away from motherhood to contemplate and create even if it meant going back to her lonely solitary ways.
He felt as if he were extirpated and then without roots replanted in foreign soil; but at the same time as if he were something less than a boy and shrinking exponentially every moment he was in school. Like any kindergartner, daily he yearned for the mother he departed from and could not understand why he was ushered so much of the week into a bus that took him away from her. He didn't protest despite being tearful. He went like any semi-cognizant lamb and camouflaged himself shyly in the thickets and brambles of himself. Mrs. Graham told them to drink their pints of milk and eat their graham crackers, pledge allegiance to the flag, skip around her desk happily or not, draw the lines that were the parameters of form and create form by means of color, bang sticks and rattles rhythmically like African Pygmies, lace and tie shoes neatly, say their ABCs and the sounds they symbolized, listen to stories and articulate questions about them, obey calls for mandated naps on mats where one could never sleep, and try not to interrupt these activities with requests to go to the bathroom while at the same time not wetting one's pants. Two years went by. He was in his second year.
Touch football, soccer, gymnastics, and all realms of movement in PE class helped to compensate for this institutionalized life. The discomforts of confinement were also assuaged with the help of homeroom mothers like his who brought in treats. Gabriele's cheese and cracker concoctions once each month were woefully inadequate in comparison to preceding days of cupcakes; and cognizant of this she all the more emoted a self-confident poise in the distribution of her crackers. She was certain that no one yearned for things but experiences; and by believing in the pleasures he and his classmates would get from her little efforts, she made it so. Her presence was a lesson on the quintessence of reality where successful emulation in superficial ways could be bypassed if done confidently. He was glad for anything that would stifle the unpleasant but pervading shadow of Mrs. Dinosaur who often forced him to stand under a coat rack with his nose against the wall as coats and the shortage of breathable air encased him. These episodes happened for letting his imagination stow away on passing vehicles he could see from the window. She alone was not the gravamen of his long list of grievances. He hated having to keep track of paper and pens, Little Orphan Annie with her preponderance of fat who aimed dodge balls toward boys' balls, and Shirley and her hitgirls who, during recesses, would often pin him down on the merry-go-round for the smothering of kisses.
One day he was sitting in the classroom dreading another time of having his energy subjugated to the mat when out of nowhere came a mathematical question aimed and moving toward him as an arrow. He felt the sting, fidgeted worse than ever, perspired heavily, and began to blush. The corollary of looking stupid, he knew, would be his inevitable smothering within the heavy coats of the clothes rack for not being able to give an answer. He would be standing with his nose pressed against a wall while his classmates took their naps. He wanted to answer the question and yet he couldn't see how he could do this if he hadn't heard it. He was at a loss and he resented his predicament. He wanted both to cry and put more holes into the pothole-faced teacher with the aid of his rarely forsaken tools of rubber bands and quickly manufactured spit wads. His ethereal dreaminess, moving and emblazoned with the sun, was an unrecognized form of experience. Experience was knowledge as intangible and ineffable as daydreams probably were; and yet this dreaminess was being indicted by Mrs. Dinosaur and usurped by her mathematical abstractions. "I don't give a flying fuck about numbers" he told her with the honesty Gabriele extolled and espoused as well as her word choice. His two front teeth were missing at the time so as he literally spit out the opinion in a lisped and retarded noise the teacher was stunned to hear profanity of the worse kind not only coming from a boy that was her pupil but in the tone of Daffy Duck. Words, wisps of vibrating air, which should have been as fleetingly unreal as any passing wind, were such indelible things. They couldn't be dropped into one's shoes like doodled parodies of the teacher that he and his classmates often exchanged so that they could be perused later in the toilet and flushed away invisibly with urine and excrement. In ways, an idea in sound permeated another being immediately and non- retractably like a noxious gas.
Before school had started it was as if Gabriele and Nathaniel were completely alone except for the clients. It was as if in her remote choice for a home she had the idea that she could plant a society like a garden, water it nicely, and extirpate it of weedy or symbiotic associations. It was as if she believed that when left to her guidance, allowed to spin around happily in play according to his own benign whims, and following nothing but the occasional orphic music of the ice- cream truck, her son would be a self-contained paradigm of happiness. Back then when he was four and five she had two years of really believing that such bliss would go on perpetually and she half dreamed that if she succeeded with him, she could advocate Gabrieleism everywhere. It would be her movement—a philosophy of self-containment and human empowerment to ward off loneliness, curiosity, and hormones that always stunted intelligent beings from pushing onto the next species. Guarding against these foibles, according to her, would make one less of a sociable and hedonistic monster than he or she would be otherwise.
And yet, despite her conviction that her strange life was the way of truth, she had her misgivings about it. There were times she hated clients who had banged forcefully within her; and that tacit hate shot out like lasers from her eyes. It would be directed toward situations such as loud cellular telephone conversationalists interrupting her contemplative sketches in the park, and bank tellers who closed the counters to go to lunch once she arrived at the head of the queue with her non-taxable, ill-gotten gain. With the bank tellers in particular she wanted to snap off their noses like the ends of green beans. Also, there were times within her migraines when her stalwart ship felt puny and spun around in waves with all abilities to track its coordinates failing to operate. In illness she often wondered if her ideas about life were nothing but rabid madness. She wondered, at times, if denuding a human with her Gabrielism was like picking off the meat of the man or woman to get to the real human; and since she was smart enough to have reservations about her logic, everyday she continued to put her son on the yellow school bus. "Anyhow," she thought many times through these three years, "rightfully, there are laws against keeping children out of schools and breaking laws to live with an ignorant savage is more trouble than its worth." She was just sorry that she couldn't afford the time to home school him herself or send him to a private school.
From imagined ideas of Rita/Lily seemingly more real than the carbon-flesh copy, Gabriele drew her sitting on a bench in the mall admiring all the smiling facades of sociable creatures. According to Gabrielish logic, mall shoppers had such hobbies as retribution for having to prostitute a living and having to forsake the slow contemplation of truth and goodness in the fast pace monster called society. Gabriele drew anxious and hurried desperation in the smiles of her mallhoppers, depicting them with the rectangular forms of grasshoppers. She thought about the fact that, outside of clients, Lily was always her family's only peripheral link to society. She wondered if it had been for the fact that in her confused state and the changing labels that doctors pinned her with, Lily was a society that was not part of the society at large.
Gabriele was not intrigued with other people since she found herself to be her main subject of interest and wonder. Riding into the depths of herself was oceanic but floating on the rivers of others in conversation was like having to carry the raft half of the time because the river consisted mostly of nothing but sledge and rocks. Many were the years in which she preferred the companionship of herself; and from childhood her eyes became incrementally hard and cold to others. She had to admit that having a hard haughtiness did nothing to make the world into a gentler and more affable place. If one could shop for a character before acquiring it she knew that hers would not be her first choice; and yet she had it because it was the natural consequence of a military family. From her mother and then Peggy and her husband she had been assailed with criticism (where she sat, where she stood, how she sat, how she stood, what she put on her plate, why the quantity she put on the plate, the time she spent in her room, the antisociable tendencies that had to be inherent for anyone to go into a bedroom as much as she did, how she parted her hair, whose comb she had used to part it even though it was always her comb, what she wore, how she shouldn't be wearing it since she shouldn't be acting like a princess or a tomboy, why she chose idiots to associate with as friends…). Still, it had been to the glory of herself. She told herself that the war games within the boot camp of family had made her fortified. She did not need people in her life. There might be some level of social interaction that was psychologically indispensable but even this sustenance of sociability could be breathed in and released as air. She would cling to no one; and she continually told herself that one day she would go to Antarctica.
Gabriele thought again about her interaction with this woman, Rita/Lily, Lily/Rita, Rita/Rita, or whatever. Sometimes she was truly empathic with her. For the most part, she used her as that extra person out there with whom she and Nathaniel could mention from time to time. Mostly she didn't give a damn about her one way or the other. Gabriele rued and ruminated about this fact. "Oh well, it's the human condition," she told herself as if she had the perfect excuse. She wondered if Rita and all isolated halfwits needed to imagine someone as caring about them even if such people really did not care. Just by being that imagined benefactress, she argued to herself, she helped the girl without even having to do it in reality. As she was thinking this she heard knocking on the door.
She put a wad of tobacco into her mouth. "Who is it?" asked Gabriele as if there could be infinite possibilities. "G-a-b-r-i-e-l- e," sang Rita. It was a sing-songey, monotonous, and lethargic tune. "Identify yourself," said Gabriele and then quickly began to move the canvas, tripod, brushes, and paint into her bedroom. The painting wasn't completed and she didn't want to respond to questions about it. More importantly, she did not want to be made to feel that she owed the painting or a replica of it to the unwitting model. "I'm Lily."
"Lily who?"
Lily giggled audibly through the closed door. "Lily Rita"
"Those are first names. What is your last name?"
"Nothing special. Just Smith."
"Kennedy Smith of the Kennedy dynasty—are you from the family of wealthy politicians?"
"No, nothing special. Hardware store."
"A hardware tycoon."
"Dad's a worker; but he supervises others—a manager. Nothing special."
"I think that is special." She opened the door. "Come in, Miss Kennedy Smith. Sit down over there while I pour you whiskey and cola without the whiskey." She had to admit to herself that she found her little friendship with Rita/Lily rather amusing. What more could one want from a friendship? It was fresh air in the stale cellar of one's mind.
As she took a bottle out of the refrigerator and poured the content into glasses on the counter, she looked onto this pathetic society that was hers. Rita/Lily's feigned smile was lasting an abnormally long time and waxed and waned awkwardly. "Man problems?" asked Gabriele.
"Sort of," she giggled bashfully. "Really, it's not having one. I feel lonely.I don't know what to do with myself."
"You're not supposed to date anyhow. Didn't you say that the group home got you a job waiting on tables in the concession area of the skating rink?"
"Semi-independent. I'm in semi-independent. Semi-independent counselors."
"Whatever. Same counselors; but okay, let's be precise: semi."
"I feel alone in the evenings."
"Read a book."
"Too tired to read. Gabriele, why don't you get married?"
Gabriele brought the drinks and sat down in her director's chair.
"I'd need a boyfriend first." She wondered if she had one, a hundred, or zero. She wasn't exactly sure what constituted a relationship with a man. Furthermore, she wasn't even remotely sure what a marriage was either: a couple of signatures on a sheet of paper, matching bath towels that said his and hers, or a declaration of two people as a unit which would then be naively believed and acknowledged by outsiders as having legitimacy.
"You are so clever and smart. Clever and smart guys would die for someone like you."
"What would I want with a man, Lily? I've already got the kid and he would fritter away my time every chance he could if he weren't in school. My god, after being a masseuse all day, it's bad enough to have one more male around here let alone two. I don't want to devote the time Adagio doesn't extract from me to fulfill more male demands. Then there are all those womanly things: to continually ask myself if some guy really loves me and how I can become slimmer and more desirable for him and all that crap. Worst of it all would be jealousy when he sleeps with someone else on a bad hair day. It always happens. I'd be eroded away and then I'd start asking myself who the hell I was"
"But love—not being alone."
"Perfect equation. Love is many selfish equations like that. I don't know. A female has to be a puppet taking back her own gossamer strings or she will follow the movements of love into the abyss. As for being alone, it is the only time to be free to sail in oneself without having to answer to anybody. A relationship is like trying to put on some fashionable pants that are a size too small with him trying to get into them too. No thanks." She spit out her tobacco in the trashcan and then drank the cola.
"Is that stuff good?" asked Lily.
"Snuff, Lilly. Not stuff! Do you want some chewing tobacco?"
"No…that is I don't think so…well, maybe a little." She laughed. Gabriele shared the substance. Lily began to chew for a few seconds and then reached her finger in to extract it from the crevices of her teeth.
"Do you have an empty beer can?" she panicked. She began to gag. Gabriele moved the trashcan near Lily and bent her face. She spit it out but didn't vomit.
"Maybe you should wash out your mouth and then drink your coke."
Rita/Lily ran to the bathroom, turned on the tap water, and then began gargling with water and then with mouthwash.
"That minty stuff sure has a good taste, Rita," yelled Gabriele toward the bathroom. "Make sure you don't swallow the damned stuff or we'll be doing this again."
Lily gargled, spat, repeated the process, and then yelled back towardGabriele,"Do you miss Nathaniel, your Adagio?"
"Lily, you ask the same old questions again and again forcing me to come up with new answers to everything from why I don't have a boyfriend to if I take a crap when I get up in the mornings."
Rita laughed awkwardly for both were subjects she often asked about. "I want…" She gargled again and spat the mouthwash out. "I like to find out if people's ideas change."
"This people doesn't change. I'm glad the little—" She was going to say "little fucker" but she censored it out. "…guy is in school as I've said for the umpteenth time."
Gabriele chortled when Rita/Lily came back looking battered and weakened from her experience with tobacco. "Rita," she said, "It will take practice but before long you'll get the hang of it. You'll be chewing tobacco just like one of the boys. Then after more years of experience…if you practice…you'll be a pro' like me. You might even begin to condition American Barbie dames in the proper ways to spit it out like a cannon."
Lily laughed diffidently since she was in a depressed state and words were running about nonsensibly in her head like the yelping cries of wild savages. She sat down stiff as lead and Gabriele could see the terror of visceral loneliness in her face. She was afraid that the girl would be anchored like that during the rest of the day as a hindrance of her painting. "Oh," said Rita/Lily suddenly out of her saturnine depths, "I nearly forgot. The call. In my room."
"What call?"
"Huh?" asked the obtuse girl
"What call?"
Rita tried to reign in her thoughts and focus on where she was at and her relationship with Gabriele. "The school couldn't reach you. You've got to call them. They said it was really important." From her pocket she pulled out a slip of paper that had a phone number on it and gave it to Gabriele.
"Hmm, okay," said Gabriele. She took her telephone out of a drawer and put it in the phone jack.
When she arrived at the door of the home room with a bag of treats dangling inside a fist, her son's teacher told her that she had go go to the principal's office. The word, "must," took some swallowing but she accepted it magnanimously. She could see that the teacher, Mrs. Recla, found her daunting. The proof was in the face that was being taxed by not being able to frown. She knew that she was emoting a more civil aversion than the teacher could muster. As Gabriele tried not to conceptualize her as "the dinosaur" or "Reclasaur," demeaning second grader terminology, there was a subtle smile on her countenance (feigned or not). In part, it was amusement about the word, Reclasaur, but it was mostly of one who was valiently beyond worldly matters. With her equanimity she also displayed an obdurate, formidable haughtiness no different than any engraving or statue from Akhenaten to Lincoln, or Joan of Ark to Eleanor Roosevelt.
Indifferent to the fact that this was not her appointed time for being a homeroom mother and by the disposition of a teacher who was usually more affable (feigned or not), Gabriele officiously submitted her treats. Like a poorly written essay, they were glanced at and rejected snobbishly. She wanted to check up on her son who often sat in the back row but she was prohibited from looking into the room. She wanted to ask the Reclasaur what he had done to make her so "uptight" but Gabriele changed her mind. She decided that unless it were an emergency (and the teacher would have undoubtedly given the details of an emergency) she should defer knowledge as long as she could. She imagined that once she returned home there would be more to swallow than just cheese and crackers.
In the girl's room Gabriele lit a cigarette and stared at herself in a mirror. She didn't care what others thought of her but in a world where only appearances mattered she thought that wrapping up what little beauty she did posess would go further with a female principal. She did not believe in appearances but she was pragmatic enough to realize that appearances had their uses. Eyeglasses would make her look more intellectual if not outright erudite and opaque. Her turgid opinions would have more merit in such a look. She pinned her hair up into a bun and put on some tinted glasses that she rarely ever used. She smoked for a few minutes, staring in awe at this formidable higher authority being reflected from the mirror. Smoking like this in front of a mirror in the girl's room reminded her of her actions from the age of ten and as she chuckled inwardly to herself she then lifted the plug in the sink and lodged the cigarette down the drain untracably. In the principal's office she scanned an issue of Jack and Jill for 45 minutes. Then she became irascible and restless.
"Miss," said Gabriele with contumely toward the secretary who was the only visible party responsible for making her wait, "will it be much longer? I do have things to do and I can pretty well tell at this point that Jack and Jill is not very good reading—not for me, it isn't."
The secretary smiled painfully. "I'm sure that you won't have to wait much longer. I'm sure Mr. Quest will be with you shortly."
She wondered about waiting like this. Did authority figures believe that making others wait aggrandized their influence? For her, it lessened it. If such a person was not readily available to cater to her high ideals she assumed that he or she was a derelict in a back office playing solitaire or a lascivious Neanderthal playing footsie with one of the office staff. "Mr. Quest? Aren't I supposed to see Mrs. Simmons?" asked Gabriele.
"No," said the secretary.
"Who is this Mr. Quest?"
"Mr. Quest is the vice principal," said the secretary.
"Of course," she told the secretary. "Who else better to handle vice" Now she knew for sure that being invited here as this less than honorary guest would involve disciplinary matters. Quest's guest: there would probably be the abrading of both the son and the caregiver. She wondered whether this was about her son at all. Perhaps it was an inquest probing into her personal life to which she alone would be excoriated. It was a rather enticing thought to be under the spotlight as the pillory of ignorant people. It would give her the chance to refute their ideas to make these authorities realize that they were the ones strumpeting themselves as loud as trumpets. It was she who did it softly in her own little massage parlor in a trailer and only when in need of money and for as brief a time as she could manage. How many wives and husbands (wives most saliently) became such all of their lives to better their own fortunes: this was the idea that she wanted to haunt the corridors of their minds. If it would not besmirch her son and had no bearing on him, she would air her dirty laundry. She would submit a slutty biographical profile that would leave them irrevocably in a state of shock and awe but this would not be the case. She knew that this misbehavior (misbehavior being defined as action that was not sensitive to the feelings of others) would be detrimental to her son and so she did not want to go into the school to be scrutinized by these creatures.
"No," she thought again, "even if they have found out what I do for a living they wouldn't have arranged a meeting to confront me directly about it. The matter would go through social services." She foolishly released some of her desultory thoughts to the secretary as she stared at the Jack and Jill magazine. "How strange," she said, "that someone should wind up with such a grandiose name, but I guess it wasn't his choice to be named Quest. Good god, the images in Jack and Jill are so violent. What with little children waiting all morning for the inevitable paddling and picking up magazines which have cartoons catered to Charles Manson it is a wonder that there aren't more school shootings. Wouldn't you say so, Mrs….I'm sorry, I didn't get your name."
The vice-principal opened the door. If it hadn't been for the obscurity of her eyes behind her glasses it would have seemed that he was penetrating her eyes with intimate familiarity.
"Mrs. Sangfroid?"
"Yes, something like that," she said.
"That's not right?"
"Miss, if you don't mind; and even though I am a disciple of Freud, as much asI can be a disciple of anything, the pronounciation is "fraw" and not "Freud."
"Sorry."
"It's okay. I've been called worse things."
"Would you care to come into my office?"
"Sure," said Gabriele with a smile. She walked into Spiderman's web with great insouciance and sat down. "Hmm…I haven't been in one of these rooms since I was a little girl and got paddlings."
"Were you a rather naughty child," he asked facetiously.
Gabriele smiled at his boldness. She again thought it had a familiar warmth to it. "Not so bad. Actually, I was diligent enough. I just stayed to myself a bit much — a very German characteristic but kids hate that sort of thing—maybe not in Germany. Who knows? Hating my stand-offishness they blamed me for what they did. Well," she interjected with a laugh, "I was a bit of a rascal too. I didn't squeal on them but got even — putting bubble gum in girl's braids and things like that. I got the paddle on many occasions. I never cried though…but you don't want to hear about me way back then."
"No, it's okay. You don't have to stop so quickly for me. Learning about children's behavior is part of my job besides reinforcing student codes and the curriculum—understanding them—even kids as big as you with kids of her own— and making policies suited to them…being flexible. Paddling too if needed."
"So, I guess it was you who asked me to come here."
"Yes, right."
"Concerning Nathaniel?"
"Yes, in a way. As you know, Miss Sangfroid, children aren't sheltered from violence in images or words any longer. The effects of television violence are debated year after year and nobody does anything about it. The way children behave today at this school is the way they might have behaved in Harlem or the Bronx ten years ago. I see more and more children who aren't sheltered from baseness. It's more than just catching a couple older children smoking in the bathroom once every few months: drug addiction, brawls, foul mouths—fouler than anything I would ever have imagined. These base influences make the children something different than children and I suspect that not being allowed to be innocent they won't see anything good in themselves or the world when they are adults — just the baseness. Wouldn't you think so? They would become full of rage."
"I don't know," she said circumspectly. "Let's hear specifics if you are talking about Nathaniel."
"You are surely aware of him swearing the way he does or if he doesn't swear in front of you—"
"He does sometimes."
"Okay," he reaffirmed mildly. He found some satisfaction in the honesty. "Then maybe there are too many R-rated videos being played at home or other media where he might be hearing words like—"
"Fuck? From me, but he only uses words like this in choice situations."
"Lady, there are no choice situations for that," scoffed the vice- principal.
"I don't like the pejorative way you said the word, "lady." She stood up. She couldn't imagine being called a more vulgar word."
"I think we should talk about this. Sorry, I didn't mean to be disrespectful. You are obviously highly educated and I want to hear what you have to say. If we don't talk about it now sooner or later he'll get into trouble even if we ignore it this time."
She sat down. With unapologietic indifference she said, "Does it happen very often?"
"Not that I'm aware of but it shouldn't happen once. It was directed toward one of our teachers."
"Nathaniel's home room teacher?"
"Yes."
"The one who puts him in the coats with his nose against the wall— the one they call the Reclasaur. Yes, I've heard about her. As a homeroom mother I've witnessed her. Matter of fact, I was planning to come to see the principal about this Mrs. Recla. You just gave me the incentive. Do you approve of teachers doing that to students?"
"Not really; but from what I've heard he never pays attention in class."
"Who would, with violence being perpetrated in the classroom. Would you pay attention to this discussion if I threw coffee in your lap? Of course, not. You'd be concerned about how you feel from coffee being spilt on you. We learn what we have to to learn to survive in our environment but if the environment is all bad than we withdraw from it. Daydreaming is one of many defense mechanisms not listed in psychology texts. It's used by children when old things like Recla don't know how to make them enjoy learning. It's used to escape if confined in violent environments. If he is stripped of daydreaming and is being coerced back into an unfriendly environment he'll use words—any words violently. Sure, with enough words being used violently as a teenager one then moves them into the concrete realm of actions. I really should remove him from school altogether. This is not the road I want him traveling on."
"I'll ask Mrs. Recla to not use him as an example in front of the class.Discipline like that can be humiliating to a boy."
"Damned right it can."
"Do you always use profanity in your home in what you call choice occasions?"
"I sometimes do. I like to feel free to let words gush out but I'm careful not to use them in violent ways."
"Well, he used the F word. I think of that as violent. Don't you?"
"No, I don't," she said. "Words aren't innately bad." She knew. The big bang was violent. Movement was violent. She knew too well that any sexual act was a violent shot at conception wrapped in pleasurable hallucinogenics. Virtually all music, movies, and other forms of popular culture were the celebration of sex, a celebration lasting much longer and more indeliably than the act being celebrated; and so culture was violent. Commerce was definitely strife. It was a competitive attempt to get the goods in a world of limited resources. A world with people tripping over each other in their competetive movements flooded one's senses. Noise was continually interrupting the contemplative assessment of what one has taken in with the senses or invented in the sacred domain of the mind. Movement and noise were the real culprits; and yet humans, sociable creatures of movement, would never indict them. Such beloved villians that brought them titilation were always allowed to go free. "Again, you seem to think that violence or love for that matter is in words instead of the love and hate moving them about. That is ludicrous especially with small children who experiment with language and haven't learned the appropriateness of words for various situations. When Nancy Sinatra sang, 'One of these days these boots are going to walk all over you' the word boot changed—maybe not indeliably but at least during the year of the popularity of the song. All words are sounds. Negative and positive connotations to words are constantly changing. 'Conversation' meant sexual intercourse in the seventeenth century and 'intercourse' meant conversation. Haven't you ever been on the bleachers at a great baseball game and yelled out, "What a fucking great hit."
The vice-principal laughed. "Well, all right, maybe well-meaning men with cans of beer in their hands might slip on occasion and say such things but again that is adults. I guess you don't see the problem."
"Listen, Mr. Quest. What is your first name?"
"Michael."
"Do you have a middle name?"
"Yes, but why do you want to know that?"
"I don't know. I do. I like to know who I'm talking with."
"Frasier."
"Well, Michael Frasier Quest, I apologize that my son said the F word to his teacher. All right? This was disrespectful and I'll talk with him gently, nose free and out of the coat rack, and we'll see if we can calmly detach this word from his lexicon. And I guess you will have a talk with his homeroom teacher about proper ways to discipline a child that can be reprimanding but reassuring. Now, do I think that being playful with the English language is a bad reflection on my son, no I don't. Creative people find creative and positive ways to use words. Still, as I said, I'll remind him that the use of this one in particular has its limitations in society…that it can be offensive in most situations. Children are intelligent creatures. They seek approval. If you explain the reality to them, they tend to emulate the instruction."
"Fine," he said. "I think we can leave it there."
"What is that?" she asked. She pointed to a file that had her name on it.
"Oh, it isn't really anything. Just some information I found— merely notes—to help me know you a little bit before you came here."
"May I look?"
"Well, okay. I guess that would be fine." She could see that his thoughts sank back with his eyes. She knew that he did not want her to see these notes and so she wanted to see them with more yearning.
She took out a sheet of paper. She was relieved that there was just one. She read: Gabriele Isabella Sangfroid — 32 — graduate of the University of Kansas; a Master's degree in criminology at Emporia State; a Master's degree in psychology at Rice University; worked for the state prison system in Kansas; and although not currently on public assistance such as food stamps and AFDC gained Federal Emergency Monetary Aid, FEMA, to pay utility expenses in January of last year; foodstamps once one month in 1990; no criminal record." She looked at him sternly. "This information is that obtainable?" she asked.
"Between state authorities and schools, it is."
"I don't care," she said indifferently but with a sotto voce of acerbity. "Make your little notes; type them up; publish them. People are amused by so little."
"It's just a note."
She nodded. "I know that but I'm not noteworthy." Even though she proudly scorned this bit of voyerism, she again felt relieved that there wasn't more.
She could imagine him having asked her how she supported herself and her child financially. This question would have forced her to explain how she had considered all prostitution that every human did in life and had chosen the physical version to be the most honorable. It would have brought her such sadistic pleasure to watch him squirm around in iconoclastic ideas the way a convict had to adapt to prison or a mouth to the wiggling substance of hideous tasting Jello. Fortunately for both of them, he did not ask. She got up from her seat thinking how ignorant he was of the earliest essays and arguments about education. Even centuries ago intellectuals believed that education should not be indoctrination or to learn a practical skill, but exposure to important ideas that would help to guide an individual's perceptions. "Well, Mr. Quest, it's been a pleasure," she said as she shook his hand. "Just remember that if you soften Recla's approach toward Nathaniel I can't exactly guarantee what he will say to her at all times but I can guarantee that the vowels and syllables he uses will be benign. They will be creative and not hateful. Please talk to this easily offended teacher and remind her not to put him in with the coats anymore. That is if she wants to not deal with me in any other way than with a smile on my face and cheese and crackers in my hands."
He had assumed the continuum of excitement in the exotic anomaly of living together with a man. In the first month of living with Seong Seob he believed (as much as his ruminations allowed) that a union with a man would be perennial splendor. Back then he thought it would be more emotionally and intellectually superior to what his parents felt toward each other. There would be no transfer of a wife's affections to the children; and not having shared property, lackadaisical rose, shrub, and tree plantings and the conversations thereof would not bury him alive in a landslide of the mundane.
One night in particular Sang Huin was bored with love making toward his friend. Love was yearning for what one lacked and now, with all this time of having him, he could not sense that wish to possess what he had months earlier obtained. And yet like all other times they nonetheless climaxed to sleep the way one might eat some leftover pie to wash a pan.
Somewhere into 2:00 in the morning the ghost of his sister, Jun Jin, eclipsed over his brain and he woke in the shadow and heat of its passing. He was thinking of her progressively less all the time. Indeed, she was passing into a realm no different than nameless, traceless ancestors diffusing out and away like the molecules that once composed a mist. But still she did not go easily. If not clasping onto him chokingly as one who, dead, was nonetheless drowning, she would slam him against the internal walls of his brain for trying to relegate her into oblivion. She would definitely not go easily.
He felt a headache and imagined Gabriele's as well. He tried to shrug off both but was only able to dismiss what he imagined hers as being. He looked at the rising and falling of Seong Seob's chest within the silvery tinted shadows of twilight that fell through the curtain of their bedroom. The breathing of this friend was harmonic beauty and, at that moment, he halfway yearned for him.
Evading Gabriele motioning for him in the hallway as if he were supposed to go into the bathroom to help her vomit, he went into the living room and turned on the American military station, AFKN. New divisions of soldiers were being sent to Kuwaiti bases for another confrontation with Iraq. Pyongyang had recently dismissed nuclear monitors. The troops at the Itaewon base and at the DMZ were on a heightened alert to North Korean actions. They were the same old unresolved conflicts. "Feelin' good," said a soldier in military uniform before a television camera. "Feelin' the adrenaline. Glad I'm here to serve American interests and the people of South Korea, practicing war games and the like. I and my unit - all these great men from every division - are ready to go into action any minute we're requested to fight." Peace, thought Sang Huin, was not the natural state. Being titillated by the infinite possibilities in sexual liaisons with strangers and a propensity for violence were both the natural state.
Sang Huin turned on his computer. He could only jot down Nathaniel's thoughts. "The car is hot. He feels the burning sensation of his legs against the upholstery. He likes the heat. It prompts him to not delay by thinking, but just to move quickly. There is something pleasing in the car passing the world as wind. It almost makes him feel that he can pass through anything: through another car, or through the side of an embankment. He does not know where he is going." Sang Huin stopped. He was being taken downstream with his memories. They pulled him into them because they were the substance of who he was. As the founder of philosophy, Thales, stated, everything was made of water.
Sang Huin, this Shawn or Sean depending on how he spelled his nickname, had returned home from one of his last days of his senior year in high school to find his sister, Jun Jin, crying on the bottom step of the staircase. Her eyes were black and swollen and they were as dark as marble. She didn't seem real.
"Who did this to you?" he demanded, although he believed that he knew. He approached her slowly and solemnly. He pulled the strap of his book bag beyond his clavicle and allowed it to slide down his arm. He propped the bag against the side of the first step. It wasted a minute. He wanted to avoid this situation and a protective, invisible wall was around him. He felt as if he were watching a movie of quasi- real beings in an unusually personal situation that was just somewhat believable. He felt that both he and his sister were unreal just like the unreal situation he was facing. He was reluctant to broach the subject and he found his voice faltering when he repeated the question for a second time. The softness of an uncertain voice awakened her from the withdrawal in a capsule of non-being. She responded for she knew uncertainty and to hear it in another being coaxed her to come out of her own protective shell to acknowledge his suffering as well as her own.
"Help me," she said.
"How?" he asked.
"I don't know — I don't — just be with me now…that's all," she whispered. She gave to him what she had: a bit of a morose smile. But, water to cement, his expressions were hardening from it. She could see this and again crawled up into herself. She was languid and bent despite her stiffness but her feet were tilted to the floor and suctioned into the frontal base of the step like an upside down insect. One of her hands had such a firm tightness as if enmeshed in the railing and the other one dangled without movement.
There was a child within him who was uncertain, who would placate and comfort those in distress from the knowledge of distress himself; and thus for a splendid moment he wavered non-judgmentally. And yet it was his father's tone he wanted to emulate. Shawn was now the representative of family with its senior members away at work. He could listen, comfort this stiff battered being who like him was a puppet being pulled from all directions, fragmenting, searching for truth in void, and at a loss with radically different thoughts, feelings, and probable outcomes. And yet there was the tone he started from, a tone he could not diverge from now that his face was stern, the gift was despised, and she, this older sister was absconding into herself once again. He had to stay on one track if he wanted to be a man at all. He reinforced his earlier words, the words of manhood.
"Whoever did this to you — I'll kill him. You tell me now!" He blared his visceral rage. Alien manhood was disgorging out of him like a geyser as it did in all males when forced to forfeit being human for being men. The compounds being disgorged were obdurate, callous, and hard.
"Please don't tell mama or daddy!" she mumbled weakly.
"They'll see! Look at you!"
"I know." She pierced him with being lost. He was lost too but resented having it being mirrored onto him. It wasn't the model for being a man that he could pass onto his sons should he have sons, and he felt that he should have sons no matter what his sexual feelings were.
"What's happened to you?" he asked mildly. "For one year you've been a stranger. I can guess. I'm always left guessing."
"I've been ill — so ill."
"Ill?" He wanted to believe her. Strangely, he wanted to believe in viruses that blackened eyes. He wanted to believe in physical sickness, which often had cures. It wasn't a major divergence: sickness meant being overtaken by a virus that was alien and so with love it could be as unwanted as this. One could be inundated with pleasure- neurotransmitters like anyone whose consciousness succumbs to a knockout gas. This was his subconscious association; and yet consciously he wanted to believe that she was literally ill and despised her for not being so.
"Take my hand. Let's go upstairs."
"I'll die if I go up there."
"No! Mom, Dad, and I will help you to become well…if you're sick." He emphasized "if you're sick" doubtfully. Then he became aware of the fact that he was playing a game the way he had always been led around by childish games when he was a naive and gullible boy. He hated her for making him look foolish once again. "Go up, June!"
"Sang Huin, if I go to my bedroom I'll slit my wrist. I'll jump from the window headfirst. I don't know. I'll end it somehow."
"What are you saying?"
"Feel it!" She put his hand on her lap. "It's alive."
He took back his hand in revulsion of it being placed there. Then his face grimaced.
"You're pregnant with a guy that gives you this!" He lifted her lowered face in his palm. "What's the name of this guy?" he demanded. He knew and it wasn't just a guy whom she had bred with but the adrenaline of being with one who had power, the glitter of being with one who had money and influence, the love of a body, and the friendship with this man who was her boss. She had been seduced by the demonstration that some male birds give to prospective mates when dangling worms from their mouths. It was the American dream. He had always believed that womanhood and prostitution were the same thing. "Release your hand from the railing."
"No, please, I can't go up!"
"Who's to say anything about going up. We're going down, down to him. I'll give you to him since you are his second marriage. He signed it with that thing growing inside you. Maybe you'll be his wife's servant. You're definitely his whore. You've seen this home for the last time."
Absent of Christ, this Easter morning began like many of those secular Easters of earlier years: getting up to fix some scrambled eggs in her bosky bath robe only to find her attempts at providing a substance of animal protein/vitamin B12 rejected for the chocolate effigy of a rabbit in the refrigerator, feeding him more chocolate than he typically got on a given day, and fixing dye in bowls so that he could color his eggs. She fixed some breakfast for herself. It was a self-made Eucharist of thickly burnt whole wheat toast, some beer, and a grapefruit. When he finished dabbing eggs in various dyes and giving to each a distinct design, she poured out some cereal for him.
He sat down with his usual fidgetiness at having to sit at all and let his cornflakes get soggy as he picked at them with his spoon. Easters were for him like walking about mesmerized in a choclatey mist. He was preoccupied with catching the ethereal on his tongue; and Gabriele's bottle of beer looked more ethereal than the rabbit. His incessant whining for some of her beer caused her to doctor a bit of his orange juice in the hope that he would be satisfied if not happy in the last vestige of pure childhood.
As they consumed the putrid and execrable half-baked scramble of her macabre sense of a meal they heard church bells ringing superfluously at a distance in downtown Ithaca. Church bells were the metallic clanging for the assembly of superstitious tribes. Still, because she always heard more of them each Easter, they seemed melodious the way simple Christmas music fused with the happiness of being with family members while decorating a tree. And yet she knew that once he disregarded eggs, chocolate rabbits, and store-bought sugar cookies for more selfish pleasures, her Easters would entirely vanish. A child grew out of pleasures the way he grew out of his britches; and once this happened such clanging church bells would no longer have anything musical within them. They would only be noise. She sighed, thinking that all benevolent myths washed away like the sandcastle he had made for the sun long ago.
It was just a little over a year ago, while pinning damp clothes onto the clothes line, that he wanted to know the truth as to why his friends were repudiating Santa Claus. She explained that they were right in what they said; and that in a world such as this, what one saw was pretty much what one got. It was a testament in favor of empirical evidence. It was a statement that ideas were sometimes the copies instead of physical reality being copies of ideas. She told him, "Reindeer flying from house to house in a population of 6 billion people in 6 habitable continents just doesn't cut the mustard." Now she regretted that she had said it.
When they finished eating, she sent him out to play in the streets while she fornicated with a couple newly arrived clients. Following such extroverted activities that required all her acting abilities and social skills to be on target, she sank back into her hallowed, private domain. She drew a few freelance sketches for a local card company, cleaned the trailer hurriedly, and then began preparing lunch. It would be little bits of beef in gravy to be put on toast, which she so aptly and succinctly labeled as "shit on a shingle;" but for now it was butter in a skillet spewing anew in streams of orangish yellow sizzlings and sputterings like early components of galaxies swirling out into open space.
"Over here, Miss Gabriele. Howdy and top of the morning to you!" She looked toward this strange Southern and Irish sound and saw her son walking back and forth on stilts before the kitchen window. She looked at this freakishly elongated creature of ostentatious movements doing its dance. In ways she was envious of his sense of celebration in the moments, hours, and days of being but she couldn't help asking herself if this gyrating form had actually come from her although indeed it had.
"Howdy, over there," she said with the amicable indifference of cordiality.
"When's that shit on a shingle stuff gonna be done?"
"Don't know." She poured in her milk and flour. "What do you want with it?"
"Lasagna."
"Lasagna—always lasagna if not goulash. Well, we tried that last night." She thought of that mildly humiliating moment when his face had wrinkled and cringed. The face had crinkled like an old newspaper in the muscles of a palm. She, his heroine of all these years, had been regarded with disapproval. Sure, the pasta had been overcooked and the starch had dripped from it but she couldn't see that this was any more repugnant than a juicy hamburger. His repugnance had surprised her and his exaggerated expressions had not seemed a commensurate reaction.
Yesterday the behavior struck her with its impudence. Even more, she was struck that just by living together as they did, she could feel a twinge of pain so easily and so preposterously. She was worried then that she was becoming as ridiculous a human being as everyone else. It was just a twinge of pain lasting a moment but it was too much. The whole foray into obeying a cookbook was an unsuccessful attempt at imitating school cuisine which she dumped in the trash in a choleric gesture lasting no longer than his facial grimace. She took the plate from him, removed her own as well, and scraped the contents away in five seconds. It had been a little thing but it was hard for her to forget it now that she was cooking another meal for him.
"Rick's gonna come."
"Who's that?" she asked as she stirred her concoction while picking at the meat the way one might kick away dead bodies littering the street." She turned back to the window but he was no longer in that frame. Already the stilts were forsaken action and he was going off somewhere else on a bicycle. She could only see this diminishing figure from behind. She was irritated that so much of the time he went off without permission and yet she did not feel that she could chastise him for what she had done when she was his age. Even now she was doing it: she was dragging him into a shiftless domain of a trailer-whore hoping that something extraordinarily advante garde would happen to him here. Maybe she had a moral obligation to take care of one whom she had brought into the world but his coming from her womb did not mean a claim to him. At least, this was what she told herself. She could guide him the best that she was able but if he wanted to jump fifty feet from a top branch of a tree or ride on a bicycle head first into a bus it was his choice. If he wanted to run off without permission, she told herself, why should she feel any pang from it; and yet, like a ridiculous human being, she did.
Phallicly shaking out some Worchestershire sauce into a big black tempest, she wondered how the sanctity of monogamy existed with the tenet to be fruitful and multiply. If promiscuity were the natural order, monogamy had to be the unnatural one: and yet, paradoxically, monogamy had become a revered moral code of conduct. It was no wonder, she thought to herself, that people were frustrated and confused. She told herself that there had to be a reason for monogamy to be such a sacrosanct striving although she was having trouble figuring out what that reason could be. The tenet existed but within it most men were given the wink for indiscretions while some women were stoned to death for them. They were stoned, she theorized, for making other men question whether or not the children within their own homes contained someone else's peculiar genetic codes. They were stoned for implanting anxieties in the piece of mind that man had. They were stoned because of this competitive need engrained in the human psyche to survive as long as one could and to pass one's genetic codes to the next generation. The tendentious rationalist further theorized that if one were to live in a remote rural town he or she would not make compatability an issue. Knowing that there was no chance of finding anyone better than the person one was with, such a couple would grow apart, stay together, and plant trees. She couldn't prove it; and if she could it would be just one more empty fact. And yet now it was an empty theory. Sometimes it struck her how this dance with ideas was like awakening to the fact that one was all alone dancing in an empty room of a lunatic asylum.
The quantum theory of her life — the forces that drove her away from humanity (perhaps some inherent German characteristics, although she was but half German) and the circumstances that drove her back to humanity, the inherent need to be a social creature and the need for self-preservation within her own cloistered domain— were the making of a dilemma; and being in a dilemma (a soap opera of one's making) was like finding oneself in a beautiful garden of undiscovered geysers. A dilemma was the air of Thales, the water of Anaximenes, and the fire of Heraclitus.
These forces of withdrawing and shunning but needing people were like the peculiar components of atoms. They bounced off each other and made her. At times the atoms pushed away from society: and then they oscillated back, compacting her to the world of selfish people with their insatiable movements…cats with their insatiable movements…insatiable cries.
The cat had once again dragged its prey to the metal steps that went up to the door of the trailer. She could hear that specific songish whine that it repeated for the acknowledgement of having made its capture. She looked out the window and saw her son and another boy standing there listening to these cries. The cat was wanting their praise for its work. From the cat she realized what work was: it was feeling self-worth from believing that one had gained something special in one's movements and demanding that other's acknowledge these captures for to not do so would relegate them back to the insignificance of just movement.
All creatures needed some type of work and yet she had none and she wanted none. Outside of the obligation of motherhood, all that she engaged in were art and prostitution. Neither one of them were movement in the strictest sense and so as such they were not work: the former was not action but contemplation and the latter one involved lying on a bed. In both art and prostitution she did not need or want praise from others for she had nothing to capture in movement since she was not moving. Even in motherhood, she was not trying to obtain some being to fill a void in her life. There was no void. She had been accepted as an FBI profiler prior to finding herself pregnant. She could have gone to that or to nothingness; and with the obligations of motherhood she had slowly chartered a path into nothingness. She did not need anyone telling her that she was beautiful or that her art work was worthwhile. Matter of fact, she did not need them at all. Others could come and go from her life through the revolving door in her castle if anyone had the power to budge it after crossing her moat. They could come and go and she would inhale and exhale them like respiration so long as they made no claim on her as she made no claim on them. Breaking definitions of work, how to make a living, and sociability, she told herself that she was a macro- human living with mere earthlings she could not fully identify with. Her mind was a bit scrambled in what she was thinking. Maybe she was saying that she was pure contemplation—someting like that. She wasn't a hundred percent sure of any of her ideas. They changed with the moment even though ideas should be permanent and immutable when the physical world was neither. Being profound was like driving one's car through potholes for the hell of it and hoping to not get a flat. Maybe contemplation was movement.
If the cat wanted to follow its instincts, contribute to her pathetic meals, and gain a bit of praise, she did not mind. She or Nathaniel could praise it; but this sport of playing with one's eventual meal, however, was loathsome. It was hard to revere Mother Earth and Father Sky, or nature as a whole, when it was essentially barbaric. She hated Mouse when it allowed its half dead prey to escape so that it could recapture it again and slap it around with the stiff rackets of its paws. She opened the window.
"Who are you?," she asked.
"I'm Rick," said the other boy.
"Do you have a last name?"
"Quest," said Rick.
"Quest as in Mr. Quest at the school?"
"One and the same," said Nathaniel.
"What's with the cat?" she asked
"It got a black bird."
"Not the owl?" She was anxious that it not be the owl that had nested itself in a wooden flower pot that hung beneath her window.
"No, your owl is okay I guess."
"Good." She turned to Rick. "Are you staying for lunch?" asked Gabriele.
"We will if your cooking doesn't make anybody sick," said Nathaniel.
"I'm sorry. What did you say?"
For a few seconds he hesitated fearfully but he pushed himself and let his temerity ooze out. "I don't want anybody to get sick eating it!" Her eyes became hard and haughty. She smiled a hateful smile for that son of hers "had balls." Gabriele shut the window on the opinions and personality formulating within this son of hers. With the window fully closed, she could still hear that whining of the cat wanting the payment of praise for having made its capture. "God," she thought. "Why does it have to play with its prey? If society is barbaric, the nature of an individual is worse." She wondered where she could move under the sun without projecting a shadow. She wondered if by finding a mission in life for the benefit of herself and others in the hope of making the world a less obscene place she would become more indecent than what she was. She wondered if she could even learn anything from a world where the nature of things wasn't exactly evil but was definitely cold, crude, self-centered, and merciless. She supposed that this question was the predominant experiment of her life, and it incorporated Nathaniel into it. The redundancy of the cat's disharmonious songish cries grated her gray matter. She filled up a bucket with water and threw it onto the steps to cause Mouse to abscond to happier fields.
As if both were very young boys, she wanted to make playdough for her son and this other little entity that he had dragged back with him. She yearned to foster in a small way those who could still mingle within the solitary wanderings of the mind. From this malleable substance of flour children could be encouraged to continue as solitary units of the present moment where just the peculiar aspect of being alive would be enough to totally enthrall them. And yet she realized that she would be fostering that which was tepid in all of them for boys grew older and more sociable by the day and she, a maimed and hurting soul, was sour to the world. This sour quality ricocheted its dour force on her inner harmony forcing cynical ruminations and recondite perspectives. The railing, in her own head, about "the prostitution of work" was merely an excuse for not being more contemplative and productive. The reality was that she could not reside comfortably in the inner world even if she had all the time in the world. All that she could do would be to conjure oil paints and malleable pottery clay if not playdough in the hope of retaining an inner depth in a child capable of perceiving the entity in a unique way. Maybe the wish to make him once again interested in playdough was from the yearning to retain the earliest aspects of him. Through him she could have a childhood vicariously. After all, with Mother and Father riding off into the sunset in a tank, the beheading, and the disparaging comments by the Peggyites in the bootcamp of Peggy's Kansas home, she still needed innocence vicariously. She rejected the idea of making playdough. "I don't want to confuse the playdough with the meal," she told herself but really she didn't want to feel that malaise of one foolish enough to have a 7 and 8 year old do activities that they had outgrown. Her grandmother still thought that Peggy's thirty year old children collected coins and she still sent commemorative coins from every new state that she visited. After so many years Gabriele still felt blessed to be out of that fray because nothing was worse than trying to feel close to a bunch of hostile strangers whose only closeness was proximity and blood.
Glancing from the window at these boys competing with each other in a game of soccer, she was reminded even more of the way things were. Her son was a social animal now and all meaning would be in others. She tossed a salad. Unfortunately, as she was reaching for the burning toast she set the bowl on the bar with a bit too much thrust of the wrist, tossing it everywhere. She cleaned up her mess, raised the window, and tried to avoid being controlled by the roaring negative irascibility that strummed discordantly within her. Restraining herself, she said mildly, "Okay fellows, better put the game aside and eat this stuff or I'll feed it to the Mouse." Nathaniel picked up his ball and raced his friend to the door. The meal might have made him procrastinate were it not for hungers and thoughts of a chocolatey allure.
"Do you have mice inside there?" asked Rick as the two boys entered the kitchen.
"No, that's just her name for that old cat."
Gabriele interjected, "I take it that the 'her' might be in reference to me, your mother. And as for Mouse, what other name has it ever had? I wouldn't call it old either if it is still able to hunt." She disliked her son's disparaging tone towards a member of her family that had been with her longer than he had. She thought that the words were rather treacherous and scowled; and yet she was cognizant that gender neutral pronouns akin to a chair and having thrown water at her furry child weren't outward symbols of love although they might be equivalent to how she was treated in Peggy's home as one of their family. "Are you hungry, Rick?" she asked.
"Yes, please."
"Good." She scooped up some lettuce, apple sauce, and cottage cheese and put them on a plate for him next to the shit on a shingle. "Here, Rick. This'll put some hair on your chest. "Tell me, with Easter and all, don't you and your family go to church?"