Chapter 23

As the first days of the school year came and went, Gabriele still vied for time through the sheer act of forgetting. Whatever apprehensions or misgivings she was experiencing about sending her child to school, they were such that she, nonchalant, would never claim them to be fears nor acknowledge any malaise about the inevitability of external influences on her son. And yet subliminal fears were pulling her away unaware like a sleeping motorist who gets towed away with the vehicle for the impounding. She simply forgot about the date for the school registration even though school buses were roaring about everywhere in the city. Hearing buses from a distance, she should have easily remembered failing to enroll him in kindergarten the previous year when he was five; but her denial was a thick opaque fog and what she didn't do last year slipped from her no differently than enrolling him into school this year. The higher authority of self remained her goddess; and it was keeping her wrapped in swaddling innocence. It was innocence consisting of a belief in the present moment that she had serendipitously fallen into the previous autumn.

During last autumn, Adagio was particularly insistent on getting her to do what Chuck's parents had done. Restive, she had to bite her lip and say nothing. Emulating or just imitating someone else, even if it were done for her son, made her feel awkward and look disconcerted if not gauche; and yet, thinking about it for a moment, she had to admit that raking leaves into piles was not a big request. She knew that it would take some scavenging to pull together a pile or two of leaves but she decided that she could do this in her own unique way. She didn't mind simple challenges like this as long as she did not have to rake someone else's yard. She didn't want to meet neighbors for their small talk would be too unbearable. Those she had met before never used small talk as a step in the ladder toward more engaging topics. Each conversation was as if the previous ones never happened. Also these neighbors would pose personal questions to her and ask why she had so many male friends coming to the trailer at all hours. They would be pure hypocrites as if they weren't having sexual relations in their own trailers; and she would be there smiling at them but looking totally baffled as to why these superficial matters of what one did (action) instead of who one was (entity) were all that germane. She knew her relations were more innocent than theirs. Hers were for that needed substance called money but theirs were for the sleaze and pleasure of the moment; and if they were monogamous that showed an unnatural behavior indicative of psychological dependency. She could state boldly, "I think you are trying to ask what I do with these men who come to the trailer. Right? Of course, it is what you think. I'm a prostitute. Be sure to tell all your buddies." She could look them in the eyes and smile during the ensuing discussions. She would be able to declare such things and then talk affably about one neighbor's burgeoning tomatoes with superb poise but such frankness might wind up with a policeman on her doorstep, a short jail term, and a fine. She told herself that she would rake only in her own confined space clearly demarcated by a wooden fence and that such action would involve just a little imitation. She told herself that a little imitation was fine. After all, she could not claim herself to be 100 percent original. Even she imitated other people in myriad actions she never even considered from buying fashionable shoes to not running butt-naked in the streets.

The action of raking was at first a begrudging fulfillment of a simple request. Then it became merely using the scanty resources of the tiny plot surrounding the trailer to indifferently concoct what Chuck's father had done easily in the yard of that new double-wide trailer with its many and varied trees. A half-hour into the raking it refreshingly became an eagerly anticipated foray into childhood, which so many years ago had been smashed under the metal belt wheels of a metaphorical tank. With her son, she dived into piles, which she had raked for him in tandem. Inferior to the mellifluous smelling orange piles at Chuck's home (so she was told), these smaller, much greener, and dirtier mounds were a scanty mixture of dried leaves with freshly mowed weeds, sparse grass, and a couple bags of mulch. The piles were concocted but the experience of falling into them was anything but concocted. Her son, and the summons of fulfilling her role as a mother, inadvertently led her to the feel, taste, and smell of the present moment. During those times of last autumn, not yet experiencing the anxiety about necessarily having to send him off to school, she fell into the entity; and surprisingly, it wasn't something that one stared at from a beach. Mouth half open while plunging head first into the itching and asphyxiating pile of elements as dark as death, this ostensible foray into childhood belied the fact that the dive was really into the main artery of the heart of the entity. In that moment of seeing, feeling, smelling, and accidentally tasting the present moment other aspects of it were equally enlightening. She was surprised that for all her walks on various beaches, trying to make sophisticated judgments about life to match the thickets of her adult neurological connections, by comparison these had been wasted hours. Such attempts at staring at the ocean had never brought her as close to the entity as this. They didn't give her much peace of mind. The oceans might have untangled some of her twisted logic but they always tangled her in a new set like seaweed adrift. Surprised that the entity had not been in the string of sacrosanct words one concatenated silently in the corners of the mind to catch truth the way a spider makes a web to catch its prey, she had found it to be in simple experiences gained from one's senses. What was even more surprising was that the entity could be sensed, for this empirical experience refuted the theories of Parmenides and Plato. Also, she was surprised that it was her son who, by this leaves-jumping, was leading her into a Gabrielish discovery and yet she told herself that being so surprised was rather foolish in a way. After all, how surprised should one be that the entity was grounded in simple pleasures? To be any merit at all to a life, truth had to be more than mere abstraction. And considering that insatiable and avaricious desires of adulthood for higher and more intense pleasures was a loose debris of discontentment only in the realm of the child (only of running to the feel of the wind, grass poking through the toes of the feet, the fascination of changes of division in light and shadow, and all considered in the pejorative as childish and foolish) was one on a solid form of happiness.

"Is it as simple as jumping in a bunch of leaves?" she posed to herself incredulously. But it was inevitable that with having had craven parental defectors and deserters march in and out of her nativity, having been run over by a tank, and having seen a Turkish beheading, the simple pleasures had eluded her. Violence had caused her to build her fort and look onto the world as a sentinel and sentinels were not equated with childish sentiments." She laughed in that strange Gabrielish mixture of profound and morbid levity after rising up from her second plunge into the pile and brushing off the leaf, grass, and weed concoction.

Now, with four days into the school year already passed, she was still avoiding the purchasing of groceries in the afternoons. She told herself that her artwork was more poignant when the sun was at its fullest; but really it had been from an avoidance of the yellow school buses that she would have encountered. Subconsciously she wanted to spend as much time with him as she could so she began to disregard the policy of him going to bed at 9:00. She would allow him to play games until he fell asleep on the sofa forcing her to carry him off to his bedroom. Since that autumn of a year ago she was living in the present moment through most of each day and disregarding the future as entirely as a mortal could. She repudiated any reality that went contrary to the motif of finding the entity through simple pleasures of the senses experienced in the present moment. She told herself that simple pleasures were the real and the true foundation of happiness but from them arrogant and greedy man made preposterous edifices--complete skyscrapers of selfishness and avarice that would fall down from any jet being slammed into them (any life crisis that tenuous carbon creatures of mortality were always bound to have).

[Sang Huin was seated on his bed with a laptop computer burning his skin. He realized that the World Trade Center metaphor was an anachronism for the story of Gabriele and yet it seemed to him that an omniscient and omnipresent narrator might well be 6 or 7 years ahead of the time.]

On this day, as all others, she was mixing various vegetables into a potpourri of soup that required as little culinary sense as an undomesticated female needed to have. With vegetables being dumped in a crock-pot with a bit of water and pepper, it seemed to her that it was impossible for much to go awry. The lunch might have been monotonous but having little else from which to make a negative judgment, her son didn't complain about this point. His only experience was soup, pasta, and scrambled eggs that usually came out all right and pancakes and French toast that had a 50 percent chance of being burnt beyond recognition or going awry in the most unforeseen ways. Outside of giving objections about burnt comestibles, he was a truly ignorant savage; and concerning matters of culinary taste that was how she cared to keep him. When she asked him to wash his hands he went over to the sink and exclaimed, "Oh wow, chocolate."

"Get your hands out of that water! That's nasty looking stuff. Diarrhea looking, it seems to me."

"What's that?"

"The runs, my dear, the runs."

"The sink has the runs? It's sick?" She chuckled at his animistic thinking. Everything was alive in his judgment and, apart from some wild untoward behavior, he was a creature who was sensitive to the feelings of the whole world. She wished that she could keep him like this forever. The water pressure became inconsistent and unevenly went on and off in thrusts. "Diarrhea and constipation at the same time-- hard life for the poor sink. Well, until they solve the problem here-- whoever the they are--use bottled water. Scrub with soap." As she stirred the soup she saw a yellow school bus drive into the trailer park and a kindergartner leaving it. Her half-day was over. "Do you know that girl?" she asked.

He looked out of the window. "No, she's new; but anyway, I don't play with them girls. They don't know how to play catch. They don't know what to do with balls of all sorts."

"How would you know that?"

"Chuck told me."

"Is that a fact? Well, you haven't seen your mother play racket ball before. It isn't exactly Olympic material but it's close. Hmm...oh, my, we got so carried away with God only knows what and it looks like we've missed the first day of classes once again. Mama Gabriele would teach you herself through all your twelve or thirteen years if she didn't have to make a living. Well, I don't know. Let's ponder this situation a bit longer." She stared at the yellow bus through her little kitchen window. She abhorred it. She stared at it with the intensity of a female version of Zeus wanting to strike it with lightning but the lightning backfired. She felt a migraine headache coming on. "Honey, do me a favor and share some of this soup with Mouse. The two of you can eat outside. Then take mouse for a walk in the trailer park. Go talk to the little Girl and see what she's up to. All alone, not knowing anybody in the trailer park, you should say hello." Her sentences were dangling modifiers; but she did not care about grammar since she had a headache. "Most people if left all alone will come to no good so go talk to her and save civilization." This idea went contrary to her life's model but she didn't care about the contradiction. She just wanted to stop the headache. "Mommy's got to think now. Okay, scoot, scoot. Take the bottle of water with you. It will be like a picnic." She handed him the leash for the cat. When he was outside she locked the door. She felt the migraine intensifying like the footsteps of a wrathful god incrementally approaching her. She went into the bathroom and lit a joint. She watched a cloud of smoke rise into the fan that had been installed in the door. She inhaled her cannabis again and again.

"Miss Sangfroid--yes, you," said the higher authority with a sound and derision of her Aunt Peggy's voice, "look at yourself cowering in a toilet." The form was inconsistent. It subtly wavered between an appearance similar to that of Peggy from long ago and her own ideal form.

"Motherhood was giving me an excruciating headache." Gabriele chuckled at herself like a bashful girl and smiled painfully. "So I took a sabbatical where I could get one--the little girl's room. I'm sorry." She felt as if she were apologizing to her aunt for running away to Ithaca and not letting her see Nathaniel.

"You're sorry. You have your son walk the streets so you can cower in here smoking pot on the pot and you are sorry. Is that the only thing you can say?"

Gabriele chuckled at the dual meaning of the word, pot, but she was finding it more difficult to concentrate and she was beginning to feel guilty for being, or at least being perceived as being, a negligent mother. She, the philosophical dictator of herself, was unlike her hero, President Clinton. She inhaled before Puritanical scrutiny and admitted the inhalation. "Sometimes the pot works better than the pills at stopping the migraines, and sometimes as a mommy, a female needs to get high wherever and whenever she can. Please try to understand. Don't be so critical--not now. If you could speak less loudly, I'd appreciate it. I'm in pain here."

"Gabriele, such a lone soldier and yet so vulnerable," said the form gently. The form had become less blurry. The higher authority was now more distinct and Peggy was fading fast. This goddess or extraterrestrial of some kind had more of a peaceful countenance and a more self-confident temerity than before. Also, there was a halo about her head since sick people needed their mothers, gods, and saints.

"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 toward Gabriele,"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 as I 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."