Chapter 33

And for those who never had epileptic seizures or other afflictions as young children and never witnessed their weaknesses mocked by cousins or other "family," their blessings were to be content to emulate others in their society and to follow the desires that were innate in human instincts.

But for outsiders like Gabriele, who when very young survived their mothers and fathers running over them in tanks and their forging of mutinous lives in the distant east only to then briefly succumb to spells of seizures following the witnessing of state sanctioned and individual applauded barbarity (in her case a couple weeks after the Turkish man's decapitation), their only blessing was a key to the discontent of their days.

Abhorring the cold and cruel functioning of Turkey's legal system and the world at large, this little Kansas girl, Gabriele, became sick upon her return to the States. When her sickness and flaccid sensitivities were vehemently ridiculed by "family," it was through the determination of her will that she willed herself well; and the seizures that mysteriously came mysteriously vanished.

Realizing that she had gone from one group of belligerents to another, and that this particular family was no less akin to war than the other one, she tried to think how best to survive being in her aunt and uncle's domain. This family's attempts to hurt her could not be controlled but being hurt resided in her domain. The latter was her choice. She told herself (it was really more of a feeling since, as precocious as she was she could not reason so well) that she would not allow herself to be destroyed in deliberately planted psychological landmines in this temporary coming together of family. In her own way, despite her young age, she felt the equivalent of "Why should I be a casualty in a make-believe war when the real landmines are real indeed and wide-spread in far reaches of the planet." And so she walked through back corridors of herself until at last she was in the outside world staring back at a gigantic cage. All alone in the outside domain she read her books like a good scholar, and watched some of the six billion spider monkeys within that cage. She saw how they obeyed their hungers to eat and so they did some tricks to get their food, hungers for sex and so they stole monkey mates which looked similar to themselves (monkeys were notorious xenophobes who only desired non- threatening monkey mates from nearby trees), hungers for stability so they clung to the same sets of branches and ate the same brands of bananas, made sacrosanct rules for themselves like never defecating on a tree, and developed little routines for themselves as to when one must eat (the arbitrary concoction of breakfast, lunch, and supper given appointed times) and when to swing to a new branch. So, it was with true chagrin that despite her obdurate snobbery at having to live beside such opprobrious creatures that she should find herself as one of the myriad monkeys.

The four of them had just returned from an American football game and she was still numb all over like someone who had been kidnapped, blindfolded, and finally freed with no explanation. She would have been less discontent to sit in a world football game (this thing Americans referred to as soccer). When young, she liked playing the game herself so sitting through continual action, even if it were continually boring, would not have been so bad. Better, she would have eagerly challenged Michael to a racket ball or tennis competition or played badminton or croquet with the whole family. Instead, like Patty Hearst taken from relaxation in front of her TV at gunpoint, she had been carried off and put on bleachers at an American football game. The boys, whom she nicknamed Mr. Placid and Mr. Petulant (Michael, formerly MF, being Mr. Phlegmatic), had willed this to happen. She couldn't have opposed them. It was her son's tenth birthday. It was one of her presents to Adagio that she should sit there on the bleachers stuffing these frankfurters or weenies into her mouth and staring onto this little sea of intermittent tackle and throw action (the object being thrown like an irregular, phallic weenie). There were crueler fates than the desire to jump out of one's skull. She had to continually remind herself that it was her son's tenth birthday and that she was doing this for him. These reminders helped her to construct a florid and baroque facade of smiles and chatter. Her chatter was a repetition of their ideas about the players and the plays. Since she hadn't really observed a thing and they seemed to like womanly creatures who would parrot their ideas, parrot them she did. The game being one and then two hours relegated to the past, it still seemed to go on incessantly in their imaginations.

Here she and Nathaniel were 8 years removed from patty cake. Here they were now nestled together for his blowing out of the candles on the Betty Cake made from a Betty Crocker cake mix. Here they were as part of something larger--four birdies and a Betty in the nest. Because of the random bird droppings of fate these people were somehow hers (or at least it seemed so according to her feelings).

She told herself that in her promiscuous years in Houston she had been a crazy woman defying her repugnance of physical touch to play seductress games, half wanting to conceive a clump of clay in whom she could shape her animadversion of life, her gentle contemplative preoccupation, and her glint of disdain. However, these two--father and son-- were born through the sanity of her head in a feeling of love. These relationships conceived in the art and beauty of Rome were of friendship and a shared exploration.

In both how she conceived Nathaniel and how she had auspiciously gained the other two she had to applaud the unconventional way it all came about. It was much better than boy meets girl, boy and girl hunger for each other, boy and girl claim each other to have something solid in a world of passing shadows, boy and girl in part briefly dream up a romance for themselves to escape their solitary enclosures, and boy and girl in part become victims of a delusive mist the making of one's selfish genes which say, "Mortals, reproduce so that we, the genes may go on in perpetuity."

As Nathaniel blew out the candles, Michael began to cut the cake. He did so within the last remnant of light within dusk while obtruding a cloud of cigar smoke into the room. Cigar smoke and clouds of it over her food was especially loathsome to Gabriele; and yet she didn't say anything. She bit her tongue and ruminated on what this thing called a relationship was. Her higher authority said, "It is an intangible bridge of one person to another that seems more real than the people who make up the relationship. It is keeping one's opinions concerning a man's nasty habits in shackles."

"Fire! Something burns in the kitchen," said Hispanic Betty as she returned into the darkness of the dining room after going to the bathroom. She had a handkerchief half wadded up in her hands but bits of it still fluttered in her gestures.

"No, he's puffing on an old man's turd." Gabriele's wanton words galloped away like a wild stallion.

"Gabriele, why don't you try to be a little more crude if you can," Michael interjected. "Betty, hit the lights if you will."

"Turn?" Betty saw the cigar as she turned on the lights. "Turd. Oh!" She realized that which was spoken about was "turd" and not "turn."

"Sorry, Hispanic Betty," said Gabriele. "Nathaniel didn't want to wait for you. He had to blow out the candles immediately so that he could inhale his cake."

"I waited ten minutes, Betty. How long does it take to piss, anyhow?"

"Adagio, women don't just lift the lid and spray. There is delicacy in it." Gabriele hoped to break him of his misconception.

"Well, she doesn't make a trickle. I think she puts TP in there to clog up what she thinks is bad sound because I don't hear nothing and we're always running out of toilet paper."

Gabriele laughed. "Double negatives are for Spanish, dear heart."

Michael said, "My mother would have taken dish soap and washed my mouth out with it if I had said something like that."

"Would have?" Gabriele laughed derisively. "Either she did or didn't. If she didn't clean your mouth you wouldn't know that she was a profanity policewoman ready to strike you with her bottle of Ivory dish soap. Am I right? To say 'Would' you would need to know about her doing it so that's proof of you saying something wrong to provoke her to do that outrageous action. What did you do?"

"All right, Smarty. Once—just once and I learned my lesson; and no, I'm not telling it."

"Scared that Mom might come over with the Ivory soap once again, eh?"

"Maybe."

"Please get that smoking turd out of my face."

"Gabriele, you are going to stop that crudeness right now! Here, give Betty some Betty cake!"

"Que cosas oir! What things to hear." She sat down between Nathaniel and Michael. "And smell."

"Betty," said Nathaniel, " Put your snot rags up your holes and you won't need to know we are around."

"I taked care of you when tu madre was not here and this--you dices cosas malvados a mi." Betty got up with her Betty cake and moved to a chair near Rick who just ate and withdrew from the world of commotion.

Gabriele hit him on the head. "You. Apologize."

"Sorry, Hispanic Betty."

She hit him harder on the head and the smack made his ear burn.

"Sorry, Betty." True repentance, Gabriele assessed, was such a coerced thing. A person naturally saw only his own perspective. To have empathy for others was such a chore and in some cases was only gained with the crack of a whip.

Here he was at ten with at least a tenth of his life completed. Once an infant content to have his feet played with, each year he needed more explosive pleasures and a larger array of them and this would continue into insatiable hungers of money, power, property, sex, and love. But she knew discontent was in all things -- When she had picked up Mouse from the inhumanity of the Humane Society it --

She could feel a nascent migraine swelling within her, and like Betty and her allergies, she absconded to the bathroom.

A few minutes later Michael knocked on the bathroom door. She wanted him to go away but at the same time she wanted him inside to hold her head and to pin her hair back from the rim of the toilet. She wanted him to understand her pain and console her in empathy.

"What's wrong? You alright in there?"

"Sure."

But he heard her strenuous efforts to vomit like the cries of stretched muscles. They were as empty as yawns. "You're sick. Are you sick? What am I smelling in there"

She turned on the fan.

"Smelling?" she asked idiotically.

"Open up the door."

She opened it and smiled painfully. "Don't freak out. It's a joint."

"It's illegal."

"It's necessary. It's preventive pot—sometimes when used responsibly. See, once in a while, I feel a migraine coming on. Michael, darling, it isn't homeopathy but it relieves symptoms for lots of illnesses and migraines too."

"Flush it down the toilet. What if the boys were to see you smoking that?"

"What if they did?"

"Flush it down the toilet," he commanded. She did as she was told. She watched her tiny higher authority wave goodbye to her sadly as she was sucked into the whirlpool with her ship.