Chapter 26

She could guess that the quick entrance into the trailer park, if it were such, was a reaction to her, the nefarious whore, whom he had ridden in sync to a female's need for pleasure many years earlier. Maybe as an afterthought to the decision of allowing his son to go off with Nathaniel, Rick's father recognized the address his son had gone to. If that were the case she supposed that she was in some way culpable for him driving quickly, if it were indeed done quickly, to remove his son. The inescapable fact zipped her up into its body bag: the removal had lead to the neighbor girl's ill fate and early demise.

She wasn't sure who was to blame. Perhaps it was fate itself. She parsed this concept of fate. She asked herself what it was and it seemed to her that in most situations it was the selfishness of myriad individuals who, together at a convergence, unintentionally brought about another person's harm. She rued over the unfairness of those who thrived for a time and those who seemed bound to perish from their inception. She could become engrossed in her own quasi-pleasant little world and not think about the bigger picture. By comparison to many others suffering from starvation, disease, war, and menial labor her life was that of a contumacious child who refused to leave the amusement park for fear of no longer having such a dizzy perspective of it all. She could become a bit religious (anything from a witch to a Christian) and further the vertigo. Within the lotusland of America, so removed from intense pain and hunger, she could hide to have a brighter perspective where some god or another was still keeping the whole creation, if not each and every individual, safely in his pocket. She did not, however, want self-deception. As much as she was able to do so, she wanted to know reality. Justice was equity but equity was not in the natural order and so the natural order was unjust. What justice there was existed as the creation of man; and so, in ways, society was more righteous than the natural order.

A day before the funeral she could sense a malaise so palpable it seemed to flatten her under its foot like a bug. While her Adagio was at school (if he were indeed hers, for she doubted the tenet of people belonging to each other as it was action and clutter of small earthly creatures who needed to fill their time and the vaccum of their minds no differently than her son and this Rick when they had played with a soccer ball, plastic and air, to gain a connection that bypassed one's lonely domain), she went into the bathroom. She stared at the mountain of his and her clothing beside the washer, which she had crowded into the stall of her shower. The molecules of their stink seemed to bang against each other in the musical vibrations of Eric Satie's musical composition, Gymnopedies; and with the dead heap of morose and musical laundry, her lethargy, and the horror of being a domesticated woman as all womanly slaves since the beginning of time, she couldn't bring herself to do the laundry.

She told herself that she was indeed a silly woman. Nine years ago she had entertained herself in this mental challenge of being desired by one whose orientation was not so inclined to women, spun herself in a specious illusion of intimacy when, in youth, sex was such a novel and believable medium of intimacy, and given birth in the belief that aborting an embryo was barbaric. Now she was struck by how this connection that she brought into the world would be an ongoing frittering away of her days. She cachinnated at her absurdity, which caused Mouse to jump on top of the washer and stare at this mad woman inquisitively. "Hi there, Mouse. Haven't you ever seen a woman laugh while doing the laundry before? You really must get a life." She chuckled at the cat.

She told herself that there were too many people in her life when really there was just one. She told herself that contrary to her precept that people should be breathed in and out she was cluttering up her life with them although really a neatly isolated and Antarctic existence would have given her nothing to contemplate. Still, she again entertained the idea of dumping her son at Peggy's for he had become too indespensable to her life and this was a deep vulnerability. Still the quandary persisted: there was no way that she could allow him to be damaged by the disparaging animadversion of a family no different than a "boot camp" or military training camp. The internecine war games in this so called family of which she had extricated herself brought most damage onto outsiders like herself and she did not want to perpetuate it to the next generation.

Gabriele heard a thump in her mailbox. She received a letter telling her that she was terminated from the local greeting card company. She rummaged though her sketches and found one of her impish ones, less pertaining to social etiquette, missing from the rest. She must have mailed it in by mistake. She guessed that this was similar to what she might have done to be ignored by Hallmark. With Hallmark she wasn't quite sure what she had done but this local greeting cards publishing house was clearly piqued. Did the subconscious, like an empress dowager, make its maneuvers on conscious reality behind the scenes? She had played such games for so long. It was no great wonder they had dismissed her. Only an idiot would have been surprised by this playing with the fates. She also realized that she could not prostitute herself more in her other occupation to rectify the lack of incoming finances. Sanity only allotted so much prostitution per week. "Oh, well," she thought. "Maybe I could sell my paintings."

The thought of herself as an artist the way some might proclaim the title as a full summation of themselves was never something that Gabriele did. She could admit, "I paint" to herself. This was an obvious fact, but she never went beyond that. This added relevance of a bleak economic situation, however, made her say, "I could possibly be an artist."

Evading the menace of time consuming laundry, she sat in front of her canvas but found herself thinking about the neighbor woman and her deceased child. That woman would have pillaged through hell for the opportunity to wash clothes for her daughter. Gabriele felt ashamed of herself for groaning about domestic chores and she felt deep empathy for her neighbor. She went to the grocery store and then brought over a packaged basket of fruit for the grieving mother. She knocked and the woman opened the door slightly.

"What?" she murmered numbly.

"Hello. I hope you don't mind. I was worried that you might not be eating."

"They let him go, you know."

"Quest?"

She took the basket. "More food. People always give food, energy." She laughed bitterly. "Yes, Quest, and I don't know why."

Gabriele released a sympathetic interjection of "Oh, my!"

"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now. If I'm alone for a minute I keep hearing her everywhere I go but there-there just isn't anything. It doesn't seem real. I don't seem real. I make movements but it doesn't seem like me. I'm talking to you now but it seems like there is somebody else talking who isn't me. You aren't you either. I'm just watching you like from a distant seat at a movie theatre or something is watching that isn't me. "

"That's natural. It will be that way for some time. Feel it your way as long as it takes."

"How would you know?" the woman asked bitterly.

"I don't. I just imagine it is," Gabriele said softly. She did not want what she knew to intrude. She just wanted to listen.

"The police say nobody saw him when he entered the trailer park. Nobody knows if he was speeding. According to the police, Sally ran in front of him to get a ball some boys threw to her." Gabriele couldn't imagine her boy wanting to play with a girl. Then a cold feeling shot through her body: what if her son had thrown the ball at the moment that the car was coming into the trailer park in the hope that the girl would run after it and get killed. "What if this is a reaction to Little Orphan Annie?" she thought. The idea was too chimerical and grotesque to take seriously. She dismissed it but the cold still streaked through her body.

"Have you had breakfast? I know it is the same food idea. It is an empty gesture in an empty world. Would you like for me to stay with you for a while and help you get something to eat - I'd stay for as long as you'd like."

"My mother's here. I've got to go now. Thank you."

"Sure, but take this" said Gabriele. She wrote down her telephone number on a sheet of paper that she pulled out of a pocket. "Call me anytime, any hour, if you need a listener."

"All right," said the woman. She shut the door.

Gabriele went back to bed. The sun dominated through the covering of the drapes. She took her quilt and draped it from the curtain rod. She could not see the point in anything other than sleep. The experience of the senselessness of the girl's death had just fused into other elements of the void and stunted her. If her son were here and continued to be absolutely unaffected by what had occured she would have been tempted to allow him to bring in orange juice and burnt poptarts to show sympathy for herself who was a woman in a philosophic void. She might have done this despite knowing that he would never be empathic to such philosophic quandaries. He was a product of motion and he hadn't experienced enough of life to understand something like this. Like now, each time when the void descended upon her she told herself that she could not fight it off anymore than one could avoid inclement weather. She would just have to ride through the fog that permeated it all. She let the void devour her energy, and then she fell into the sleep that the Ancient Egyptians thought of as the death of the soul. When the quilt fell from the curtain rod she woke up to a tepid rejuvenation.

She got up to fix herself something to eat. The cat was on the table eating the left-over pancakes that she had fixed for her son before he went off to school. Instead of shaking the cat in the air, making it appear to be in the midst of convulsions, she just sat down and watched it eat. Then she tossed the dirty plates into the sink--a function that was not habitual to her, but one that she didn't mind taking on this day when washing them would add to her mental void.

She didn't have him go into school for any part of the day even though the funeral wouldn't take place until 5:00. Instead, long before sunrise she loaded up kid and canvases into her old car. Then they began a long ride that would take them briefly into Syracuse, into Albany, and then back to Ithaca in a circuitious meandering of interstates and main streets. She had that pivotal expectation that if she were able to find the addresses of art galleries the curators there would guide her toward various amateur art fairs so that she could sell her work. There was, however, that less realistic hope that they would have customers who might like the "sui generis" of a Gabriele Sangfroid enough to ferret out the libertine creator from obscurity with this needed substance of money. For their purchases such members of the apparatchik would find a link back to originality and freedom that would assuage their banal and stressful existences.

However, in his untoward behavior characterized by argumentative insubordination about getting in either the car or the school bus, restless climbing over the front seat within the first 15 minutes into the ride, being told to go to a theme park every ten minutes, and claims of car sickness, she could not feel that anything auspicious would happen to her.

"I don't know why you dragged me here with you," he complained early into the morning when they were approaching the city limits of Syracuse.

"Drag, my dear, would be to tie you to the back of the car and pull you on that sweet behind of yours." She gave a wry but playful smile. "Would you like that?"

"Sure. It'd be like water skiing."

She remembered the time that she had taken him to a lake along the Addrionick Mountains to bring to him the entity, the best that she could, since jumping into leaves had been construed as child's play. From a restricted area used for paddle boats and used by swimmers they had rowed along and watched sailboats and water skiers within a bloody orange sunset. She added,"Yes, but with no water or skis--only hard pavement worse than being throttled by a vice principal."

"Mr. Quest?" he asked.

She did not say anything. She no longer spoke of him. The police had not charged him with manslaughter and as far as she knew, the boys had lost their ball, the girl had gone after it, and MF had just turned into the trailer park at a normal speed. She had tried several times to engage her son about his feelings and experience being present at the girl's death and yet then and now he did not seem particularly bothered by it. He never said anything depicting blame and confusion over Mr. Quest's role in the tragic incident.

"Sure, I'd like to be dragged that way" he reiterated.

"Hmm," she said as she pulled out a bag of chocolate from her bookbag. In most occasions she was so conspicuously purseless."Here, have some chocolate and peanut butter things and eat them in the back seat-and be careful that you don't drop part of one and sit on it. I don't want that stuff squashed into the vinyl , or worse, to have to scrub it out of your clothes."

"You need a new car like Chuck's mom. She rides around in a shinny big red van and not like this stinky old thing."

"That ostentatious woman again. Well, I'm delighted for her. I guess if her van is not stinky she must have a son who is neat and doesn't smash chocolate and peanut butter things into the vinyl."

"What is stinkiness?"

"What is stinkiness? I guess it's the decomposition of matter, molecules dancing around in the air or beginning to come apart like the chocolate in one's mouth. Chocolate, however, isn't stinky. Maybe the decomposition of things falling apart and going back to elements like hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon can either stink or be rather fragrant"

"Why isn't the chocolate stinky?"

"Good question. I hope that you become a scientist who specializes in that very thing."

"I hate the smell of those deCOMosing paintings in the trunk. I can smell them from here."

"To each his own," she retorted.

"Why do they smell so bad."

"So that you won't eat them."

"But the smell is so bad I might think they're trash and throw them in the trash."

"No, you'd know better than that because you'd find yourself in the trash.We're searching for buyers of these paintings so that way we won't offend that dainty little princess nose of yours."

"I don't have a princess nose. I have a manly prince nose."

She smiled. She liked the bantering especially at times like this when it wasn't a distraction from a higher contemplation but a distraction from a monotonous one. The minutes went by and soon they were in Syracuse. She presented some of her less preferred paintings and three of them were taken on consignment. In Albany two of her best paintings were offered a showing this way; but as she was insisting on cash, they aquiesced to a paltry pittance of $300.00, which she, in her ignorance, was delighted to gain. She vowed to attempt Rochester and New York City at a later date. After eating some vegeburgers and hamburgers from a fast food restaurant, they returned to Ithaca for the funeral.

During the funeral she saw that sadness had flattened over the bagginess of MF's sleepless face. She felt sorry for him. She realized that he was a sympathetic character who could not be made into the abhorred culprit. It occured to her that the four of them were a microcosm of the human family-each unwittingly doing its small part in the harm of others and each insecurely cuddling in the blanket of themselves where they might dodge feelings of compunction. They would not be alone: there too Little Orphan Annie, the company of executives in charge of manufacturing dodge balls, and the males who had harmed the poor girl, might also abscond.