Chapter 21

Had it not been for her youth that allowed her to engage in prostitution, she would have been at the welfare office every month. Each month she would have spent a day slowly making her way through the queue to that ultimate goal of staring through a translucent partition and into the faces of intake workers. Necessity would have compelled her, each time, to submit her documentation of a driver's license, social security card, and statement of approval through a hole within the glassy wall. As a reticent and less than proud potential recipient of food stamps and Aid for Dependent Children, she would have silently deposited her artifacts depicting the reality of her existence and watched these worker bees document her documentation and re-scrutinize what had already been scrutinized and approved.

Monthly she would have been in a situation of needing to minimize her imperturbable haughtiness so as to give cordial answers to questions without being a formidable foe. She would have been in a situation of needing to be sociable enough to give gentle but feigned smiles that might have a hope of expediting the process of gaining benefits. In front of the intake personnel her eye contact would have needed to be constant but not so much so that it would have intimidated them. Poised and courteous, but with the intelligence of her eyes aimed like lasers for the incineration of the layers of their hearts, she would have wanted them to quail without realizing that she was the culpable one causing them to quail.

Had she gone into the welfare office each month she would have needed to check her haughty disposition above all else since the uneducated chattering clients, the wait, and the lowly workers abounded and it all was such an indignity. Her tacit repugnance of the apparatchik would not have been something that she could have restrained fully. She would have needed to let bits of it ooze out gradually and undetectably or the intake workers could have forced her to go back to the IM worker's office and explain why she hadn't gone on very many job interviews and why someone with a Master's degree from Rice University would need assistance at all. She would have hated them not for any petty personal grievance (she didn't "give a flying f--" what they thought of her) but for reasons totally outside herself: if it weren't for derelicts and freeloaders, these welfare workers would have been unemployed so it was outrageous of them to be condescending if not outright hateful to the monthly recipients; and if it were not for such do-nothings, breeders of illegitimate children, iconoclasts, and antisocialites (all which summarized her in such a unique blend) these client-intake workers would not have known the difference between being indolent and being industrious. Not having anyone to compare themselves to, they might have lived their lives in ignorance as to the meaning of such concepts, or worse, found their own paper producing jobs as the lowest tier of the caste.

Had it not been for prostitution, she would have been leeching onto public assistance as a menace to herself and society at large. Each month Gabriele Sangfroid's hard expressions would have probably intimidated the intake workers more than the useful amount and she might have found herself forced to wait all morning and afternoon on an income maintenance worker whose only wish would be to avoid dealing with such a mad woman. Then in late afternoon a supervisor might have called her name and she would have needed to encounter hateful stares for being a flagrant mutineer of the American work ethic. There might have been the undulating of the tongue reminding her that she was a Master's degree holder. Such a supervisor, or a brave IM worker, would have shot missiles of time consuming bureaucracy and lack of kindness at her and Gabriele's laser eyes would have needed to shoot them down gently, cordially, and politely. "I understand that someone with a Master's Degree from Rice University could be gainfully employed. I realize that there are professional jobs available to me. Right now I'm poor and I have a baby. I'm searching for the right job that will allow me to continue to devote as much care for him that I can do. You know the way it is with mothers. It is hard to find that employer who is sensitive to the fact that one is a mother." Something like that might have been what she would have communicated. It would have been coordinated with the usual amount of artful guile and smiles to get her through life.

She knew a little about the Department of Social Services from firsthand experience with them when she first moved to Ithaca. It was in a day in December as cold and merciless as February when she went there. Nathaniel or Adagio was a newborn at that time. Back then, resigned to the fact that she needed assistance so that she might continue with her contemplation of life, she went into the New York Department of Social Services with him in a bassinet. She discovered how her laser beams went through bullet proof glass separating the intake workers from the waiting area and seemed to set fire to the cubicles housing the IM workers.

In her first hour there she considered this agency a demeaning place in all respects and that she shouldn't be partaking of services here; and yet her feelings were muted by logic. and Gabriele was, after all, a very logical person. She told herself that being here with illiterate, drug dependent, and lethargic characters was not all that different than her work as a staff psychologist in parole assessment at the state prison. Encountering client abuse or being in the thickets as one of the worms were just two equally uncomfortable situations. It was really nothing more than a substitution of one form of abhorrence for that of another. Examined further, she couldn't see any difference between being a freeloader and a worker apart from the worker's obsession to think that his manner of wasting time was respectable. Since they were the same apart from the means by which they chose to fritter away their existence-the bums wanting to spend their time getting something and the workers in producing it--she couldn't see any sense in feeling more abhorrence from being behind the glass than in front of it. Besides, this experience here also provided her with a new perspective of what life was like to be one of the besmirched masses on the opposite side of the fort. Knowing multiple perspectives made her contemplate the entity like Parmenides and contemplating the entity brought her more in the realm of truth.

Looking onto it now, she did not think that these clients of hers were any more or less degrading than collecting food stamps or in having worked as a counselor in social services. It had only been the need for money that made her deign to any of this prostitution.

She owed a lot to the male need to be touched, to dive into the high of an orgasm, and to have innate aggression exorcised by thrusts within a subservient woman. It was a good profession that took little time and no mental prostitution thereby allowing her to contemplate God when the kid wasn't crying for bottles, changed diapers, and swift rides in her arms. It was also useful for society since men needed to be exorcised of aggression. After all, an excess of testosterone had kept the planet in a type of marginal nightmare. It certainly did not need to be plunged into it further by a lack of prostitutes. Before she ever worked again as a psychologist avowing the criminality of criminals or giving nice little labels on Lilys, she would go back to the bad girl group home. Before she returned to the click-of-the-heels logic of girls, she would become a janitor, a supermarket cashier, or a digger for bottles in trashcans. And to keep away from all of it she would continue with the present line of work as long as Adagio wasn't traumatized by strange men drifting in and out of a trailer. A child needed the illusion of stability more than anyone else; but bills also had to be paid.

And so time ran on like a shell-shocked soldier. Already the boy was four years old and precocious regarding one thing: the emotional state of perplexity. Strangers continued to come into his mother's domain and like always he watched these unknown men come in and mysteriously pat him on the head in passing. Many of her men felt a twinge of awkwardness as if they had to go through a premature and impotent little sentinel to get to her. He was not sagacious enough to understand that. He just wanted them to stay to talk with him instead of always passing on to her. Ostensibly she looked more pleased to see them than she did him. He noticed this, but little did he know that after having changed diapers for three years and having given him baths, she was as disinterested in the male anatomy as a female could be; and so not wanting sex, love, or godly companionship from them, all they had to give her was money.

He was her human subject: and she wanted to keep all primitive and barbaric impulses of pop-culture and unoriginal dogmatic religious premises from influencing his brain. She did this partly from the wish to make him into a good person and partly from a scientific curiosity about what would happen if she mixed strange chemicals together. She was very curious about the outcome of child rearing; but more, there was fun in the manipulation and fun in the unknown of what he would become each year.

She trashed her television set into the back of a closet and in his bedroom she began daily puppet shows of a simplified self-made Hamlet or King Lear adaptation and she would have him dance to the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven in unique movements she called the sangfroid. She grew pumpkin gardens and allowed him to feel the weight of the largest ones against his small frame just as she had done for the past two years. Now, for him, they had become gigantic balls that he couldn't pick up to bounce or the wheels of tanks. They were no longer the objects of wonder they had been a year earlier. She knew this inevitable truth but she didn't mind it terribly. Losing the wonder of small things in ones adventure to know bigger truths was the act of growing up and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She knew: the loss of wonder came upon a child's innocence like a Turkish beheading. She hoed around the 10 feet patch of garden and imagined the texture of one pumpkin she had detached for him recording itself onto his psyche as he rolled on it and scooted it around. She grew flowers so that molecules of smell and sight could make sketchy replicas of flowers in his brain. She wanted benign if not benevolent influences to make him special. "There will be no battery operated cars for this boy," she often told herself, for they would lead to a preoccupation with movement, and from movement to targets. She did not want to nurture the hunter within him. Instead she wanted to make him into a god for being alone in the celestial realm was lonely business. The materialistic, hedonistic, shallow specimen of movement had to go.

And yet they were not sedentary Buddha statuettes sitting on shelves and so she often took him to an outdoor pool or a heated indoor pool depending on the season. In earlier years, splashing in a baby pool large enough that he could not easily see an end to its greatness achieved the same aim as the oceans her father had taken her to. Within a large body of water one could always find Parmenides' entity and Aristotle's Prime Mover as one pursued that innate human need for physical movement. The realization that he was distressed about older boys going into the large pool when he wasn't permitted to do so caused her to lead him into deeper waters. He floated on a swimming board and sometimes on her palm under his chest as she treaded water beside him and allowed him to experience the tide when the whales of human bodies plunged in toward them

They also found mother and son bonding activities when lugging plastic containers into an environmentally friendly grocery store. From her example she wanted to nudge onto him a respect of Mother Earth, or at least a reluctance to be reckless with her. She wanted him to gain the habit of being the least environmentally destructive that was humanly possible. One of the bins had animal crackers and she would fill a small plastic container with these dead carcasses. She abhorred the drug of sugar and its impact on him but then she did not like enduring the choleric displays of a drug addict who was being blocked from getting his fix. He always craved for them like oxygen and there was little one could do with cookie or animal cracker cravings but succumb to them in the hope of getting some peace of mind. Always following the grocery expedition she would take him to the zoo and feed him the cracker carcasses only after he matched the animal cracker replicas to the beasts they were approaching and could say the names of the zoo animals in English, German, and Spanish. He couldn't sputter out the Latin so she had to give up on pushing that language into his head since she couldn't pull it out of his mouth. They spent Sunday mornings listening to church bells chime from their seats in a Laundromat. Around 10:30 the adjacent diner opened for business and from a window in one of the walls they would place orders for French Cream Cheese sandwiches. They were the oddest creatures in the Laundromat, dancing the sangfroid to a cassette recording of Evard Grieg's Peer Gynt with bread and cream cheese gushing in their mouths as they waited for their laundry to dry.

One day they went downtown to pay utility bills and afterwards they walked around the campus of Cornell University. At a bookstore she became intrigued by a biography of Alfred Adler and for a couple minutes she became fully immersed in the reading. During this time he bypassed her despite the fact that she had been trying to keep him tracked in the corners of her eyes. Imagining ethereal voices calling to him, he veered out the door and went to follow the Sun god that was descending into the crevices of buildings. The display was, for him, an obvious invitation of hide and seek. Pursuing the joy of the present moment, his imagination interwove him in the tangle of one's sense of direction and the deception of nature whose beauty belied its true disinterest in man since it had no intention of obeying any mortal calls. Each building became a whole forest, which overwhelmed him in vastness and darkness.

For over an hour she ran around like a mad woman frantically asking strangers if they had seen a child. She felt like Achilles chasing the tortoise and she scolded herself for not having put him on an arm leash the way she had when he was three. When at last she saw him staring down at a gas lamp god reflected into the waters of a lifeless fountain she at first wanted to pull down his pants and give him a beating with her hard, powerful palm but she was taken off guard by his emotional embrace and by her own unusual reactionary embrace of him. She held onto him tightly even though she had never wanted to hold onto anything. A lucid and excoriating speech was in her parched mouth but she could not say it. She only said the idea in her mind:" A bad man could have taken you. Don't you know that you can't run away from me?" A tear even slid down a cheek. She was a needy creature enmeshed in another being, vulnerable and susceptible to his actions. It was an uncomfortable state that she had never wanted.

At last she said, "You little scoundrel."

"Yes," he said. "I am your little scoundrel," and she laughed. It was as if he had read Nathaniel Hawthorne and he had cast himself into the part of Pearl.

That night she had dreams of Achilles chasing a tortoise and of different geometric shapes that were before her soon eluding her. She woke up the next morning in a cranky mood. Everything seemed to be aloof and impalpable. She burnt the pancakes like Rita Lily and called him to breakfast indifferently. His wishes that the orange juice be put into his new Mickey Mouse mug were fulfilled. It was just the dumping of one liquid content into another container. She did this without saying a word. She ate with him but she was hardened to his complaints about the taste of the meal. She was frowning and despondent the whole time.