Chapter Fifteen
After washing her wounds and cursing the cat, she again picked it up by the neck. But this time she threw it outside into a light surface of snow that had fallen an hour earlier. Frothy top layers sometimes drifted about like desert sands in the occasional strong gusts. They went here and there as directionless as her mind that, in one respect, had become detached from traditional roles and responsibilities, and in another had sunk into the mire of motherhood. Inside closed doors, she was resistant against the cat's cries. Empathy, she told herself, was not in her vocabulary. But when the cat, named Mouse, could no longer be heard, she stood outside on the steps and called for it until it at last appeared from under the trailer. She warmed a bottle in one large pan and a bit of milk for the cat in a saucepan. She had never warmed milk for the cat before; but she decided that if she was doing it for one she might as well do it for the other particularly with the advent of the furriest one being subjected to the cold. When both animals were fed she watched the television but its senseless action and its fictitious and ludicrous sentimentalism were putting her into a numb and depressed apathy. It was deflating her of all energy to the point where she couldn't follow the characters or plot since the figures were now helter-skelter in the meaninglessness that was rife in her own mind.
To escape a stagnating and a somewhat discombobulating loss of herself, she grabbed her sketchbook and drew the exact likeness of her child with little time and effort. The book, like a photograph album, was filled with her sketches in chronological order: stoic and erect poses of her parents based more on childhood memories than some brief reunions when she was a teen-ager; a 13 year old friend in her bicycle club; the faces of drunken high school classmates when she was bar- hopping and ignoring most mandates of her aunt and uncle; some of a trip to Germany with her aunt; college friends; and yet some of unknown Antarctica, a dreamy non-asthmatic land of ice mountains and valleys. In such a place dreamed about and sketched from her asthmatic youth onward neither rivers of flowing pollutants nor mountainous landfills existed. Within its solitary and pristine nature, there would be no tacit or overt pressures to get a job and become someone. In Antarctica an exceptionally aware person would not have to go through the degradation of being compelled to reinforce the rules and procedures of a business or organization in order to have the income derived from a job. No professional, entrepreneurial, or common slaves would exist here.
In this place, which she fabricated as being no less habitable than Greenland, there would at least be a small ecosystem of fish and seaweed for food, and societies of walruses, seals, and penguins which she could watch and record their social interaction. Such a record would be exclusively for the one-person audience of Gabriele. That being the case, the purpose of an article to which author and reader were one person without the prospect of extending further seemed a futile waste of time; and yet if meaning in a record of the habits of species could only be gained by sharing this information with others or if the whole essence of meaning existed in edifying others and by shared experiences this would be the source of another research paper which she would conduct in Antarctica.
Daydreams gave movement and stimulation to housewives standing in line at supermarkets and provided an escape for mothers of infants who sat alone as inert and purposeless as rocks until becoming instruments to be used by their babies. To find the source of his discomfort and ease it was in a child's mind a woman's only role; and this particular one also felt that his mother could also be manipulated by slight smiles and the temporary end of tantrums. And in a sense she was manipulated to toss him in the air, albeit only in the physical gesture itself for only fools read expressions of love in these smiles and the cessation of screams. Gabriele accommodated him beyond what was necessary for his welfare only because of the horrendous nature of his cries if she didn't do so. Throughout these months of care giving she did not have any other world beyond the child. She tried to keep herself from being flattened by the perfunctory role of bathing, feeding him, and changing his diapers by telling herself that motherhood would pull her into the swathes of human experience and its interconnectedness, that it would be a novel learning experience on coexistence, that it might be a means of duplicating the ideas of respected child development theorists so as to corroborate or discredit them, and that he could be the specimen of an experiment on how the instincts and proclivities of a male child might be altered into more ethical variations although she wasn't quite able to isolate the exact nature of the experiment and its parameters. But really these ideas did little to counter this pauper's version of ennui that fogged over her perceptions. What sustained her were her daydreams and art. Once she drew a surreal image of her baby in a business suit with an attachZ case in his hand. It was a partially adult caricature of a being standing proudly alone on an ice mountain. She drew its contumely as master of itself in all of its avarice, ability to facilitate its own pleasures. It was a fragmented child glued back together as an enraged whole and she accentuated this by drawing myriad cracks within its porcelain skin. . When she finished the sketch she knew that charcoal was an ineffective tool for the ideas and the color that rushed inside of her. Still, the sketchbook was compact as an album, and a bit of paper and charcoal were affordable.
Closing the sketchbook on a mental catharsis, she did pushups and situps beside her director's chair and then aerobics to the televised instructors who glowed in a little box in front of her. It all helped to extract her from malaise. She really needed the physical exertion of games like racket ball, and in a very self-centered way Betty began to permeate her thoughts. The idea of her friendship became more palatable to reminisce over. Then she fell asleep with the ideas of Antarctica in her mind. When she woke, her thoughts were disconcerted and there was a forlorn neediness sticky as the baby's vomit. She needed a break from solitude and an exit away from the obligations of motherhood that tyrannized over her. For the first time in her months of doing this she needed an adult presence in her life and she yearned for the appearance of this Rita/Lily person who lived somewhat nearby and was adult in the sense that she could be spoken to. Lily (she was mostly that and preferred this label although she was really Rita) was supposed to have come earlier and Gabriele wondered where this Rita/Lily person was. She heard the baby crying. Maybe too much light in the trailer was irritating his eyes. A silver light from the glare of the snow with its power to make objects (even the baby) seem blindingly unreal was bleeding throughout the whole trailer. It captivated her and made her think that the baby and its needs were nothing short of a dream. She stared out of the window to confirm that an outside world did indeed exist. She saw a neighbor's car pull out of a rocky driveway and one young boy unsuccessfully trying to pull his brother on a sled in the superficial layer of snow and left over hail. Too many weeds were blocking their progress. Too many diapers were blocking her own.
She packed some baby food and disposable diapers in a bag. Imitating the witch's dogma of the sanctity of the earth, for a few months after Nathaniel's birth she had been adamant that she wouldn't use disposable diapers even though she had yearned for their ease. Back then she saw mothers with money and impunity buying boxes of them at the supermarket and she loathed these vile mothers who degraded the environment. Once, however, when she had a migraine headache while experiencing some asthma problems and he was suffering from diarrhea she had trudged over to the store with him in her arms and bought a box of diapers. From that point forward it became part of her habits. To not do so now would only inconvenience her. Not even if thousands of mothers went back to cloth diapers and their plastic over-panty counterparts would such thoughtfulness save the environment. It would merely postpone the inevitable. A slight postponement could not be achieved by one alone and, even if it could, she didn't see that it would merit her discomfort.
Giving up on the idea of Rita coming to her home, she fixed a tuna sandwich for herself and ate. Then she undressed the two of them; and they sank into a soothing bubble bath. Gabriele made soap castles for her son, and smacked top stories off of them, which caused his eyes to become wider with curiosity and his mouth to become circular in the wonder of all things new. She slowly sang a choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, emphasizing the accent of each German vowel and syllable exaggeratedly. She internally debated the merit of giving her child mendacities as she told him German nursery rhymes and lightly washed his small body. She supposed that the sparked imagination that could deliver him from being a somber, adult zombie, alive only in insatiable hungers, was important enough that she didn't have to think of such lies as bad. Besides, if reality and goodness were perceived differently by each individual, she didn't want to rush toward an indictment even if she would be a most willing judge in rendering a verdict in the Gabriele-made indictment of the past 7000 to 10,000 years of civilization.
Drying herself and the baby in front of the window she put her fingers into the crevices of the plastic blind. She pressed down on one rectangular piece of this thing called a blind and wondered what piece, if any, her blind life had in this thing called society. She looked at the outside world. From the relatively quiet trailer park, it was hard to imagine how much all the inhabitants of Ithaca spun around in life. As futile as it was to spin, she thought, humans were not meant for thought. They were creatures meant to expend energy and to overtake their world. Maybe this was needed for the evolution of a higher species than man to exist on the planet. Sexual reproduction was not thought but illusion and frenzy, which brought forth offspring. It was overtaking women. A human (women included although she found them a bit more repulsive than the average human) was mostly all energy conquering the planet, making it subordinate to human will. If care was not given toward the environment and humans overtook the planet too forcefully, the world would expunge them from the list of species. Any caretaker of a child needed to spin from time to time too and Gabriele needed to do this to fight off sensory deprivation. She pulled up the blind. Naked, she was in a pillar of light the way the so-called prophet, Joseph Smith had been-only, being atheist, her pillar was only silver. She knew that a personification of the sun was absurd, as was all religion, which she had dabbled in knowing about years earlier; and yet she did not want to believe that this was all there was. Television, movies, billboards, and music all recorded that the rich, and happy people who played in this survival of the fittest game so successfully did so by following their desires with confidence and unapologetic insouciance. These most capable people monopolized over the world's resources leaving the vast majority of humans destitute, hopeless, burdened by hard labor for sustenance, and in some cases famished. They chased around like mad men trying to buy up the planet. Some of the mad men did so while repudiating their own mortality. Others acknowledged their mortality and so they told themselves they would gormandize while the feast was on the table. There had to be more than this.
She dressed him and herself warmly and when she was outside she realized that she had overdone it. The temperature was already above freezing and the traces of snow were evaporating tracelessly, later to be sucked up into a Heraclitus shaped cloud. The odd weather, which was becoming less odd annually, concerned her especially after the United Nations report that the world temperature would rise two degrees over the next three decades. She knew, however, that there wasn't "a damned thing" she could do about it. She supposed that she might be able to stand in front of Cornell University with placards advocating that human beings go back to being the hunters and gatherers from whence they came. She could stand there like a madwoman denouncing the past 7000-10,000 years. Nothing would come out of it but 12 hours of sitting in a jailhouse and then paying a fine.
After waiting over forty minutes for the rare and irregularly timed buses to come by within this small city, she got on a bus with her baby pouched onto her back. A seat near a young man with a plain face who was thumping his foot to the music of his portable radio was the only one left. She took it. She was grateful to have it. Having to balance herself and a baby to the movements of a bus was something she had mastered like a sport but it wasn't a preferable hobby. Adagio liked the bounces but she doubted that he would care to bounce off of a window. After the door of the bus was shut and the vehicle was beginning to roll without any sudden speed it was rapped by a hand. The driver stopped the bus and folded the door again. A woman around 20 years old entered. She smiled and greeted Gabriele with diffident childishness after shouting her name triumphantly to the back of the bus and by a wave of her hand. Then as the vehicle picked up speed her expressions became more diffident and she stumbled to the back of the bus. "What do I do?" she said. "I don't see anywhere to sit."
"You'll have to stand," said Gabriele.
"What do I do?"
"Hold onto the railing," she scoffed.
Lily grabbed it and began to dangle there like a leaf on a tree. "I guess you forgot me," she said timidly.
"No, you said that you would come in the morning. I thought maybe you had decided against coming." Her expressions were hard. It wasn't her idea to get this Rita/Lily person to come with her but she didn't own the services so she couldn't tell her to not come. "Really, you know, it isn't for everyone, Lily"
"Rita," she said.
Gabriele could never empirically detect the existence of a second personality that the girl purportedly had, and as such she could not believe that one personality came out in manic stages and the other during depression. When the Rita/Lily person called herself Rita and when she called herself Lily she was both timid and fragile, and tended to lie or imitate language like a parrot within her stages of depression. When she called herself Rita and when she called herself Lily she was even a little timid and fragile within contumacious manic fun. A month earlier she had contradicted herself by saying that she had not been sexually abused when she was young and that the patriarchal abuse she was "always talking about" was infrequent sexual abuse experienced as a teenager. The abuser was also amorphous: at one time a stepfather and another time a biological father. Gabriele again thought, "Once didn't she claim that her mother and father would soon be experiencing their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary? And yet there is a stepfather? What an interesting little liar." These contradictions were performed consistently by both of the "personalities." Furthermore, she talked of enjoyable times that she experienced with her parents. These times seemed to be ongoing. At any rate she spoke of them happily instead of looking onto happy but deceased memories sadly. It didn't appear that emotional trauma or abuse was bedizened as sexual abuse in a display to get others to empathize with her tattered past. It didn't seem that she was fabricating a happy family life scenario like someone extirpating weeds to plant flowers. That would be trauma- induced schizophrenia that would not be attributed to a manic-depressive who was being prescribed lithium. She claimed to have had a hysterectomy although neither childhood molestation nor cancer was claimed as the culprit. Gabriele thought that having advised Rita to go to a gynecologist once a year for a checkup might have brought on this comment. Maybe the Rita/Lily person fabricated information to keep a conversation ongoing. Maybe she needed continual conversation because it blocked out the moods that were a catalyst for divergent and erroneous perspectives and ideas. Gabriele's conjecture was that the split personality was nothing but the Rita/Lily person's own way of justifying why she had shifts in moods.
If she were sexually traumatized, it didn't come across with any more poignancy than her reactions toward not knowing what to do when she could not find anywhere to sit on the bus. She only became taciturn if she felt that too many questions and too much scrutiny were being paid toward her statements. None of the pieces added up. Gabriele thought that she did not know this person at all. She thought that she did not know any person at anytime in her life really. A person was never quite known. All one had were one's concoctions of plausible scenarios about the person's history and how he or she might behave from empirical personal experiences or what was witnessed when with others. It wasn't the person. The fact that one never knew anything didn't bother her. It was more of a mystery to walk around the planet in a loose blindfold.
"It isn't for everyone," Gabriele repeated.
"I want to go," said Rita. Will they tie me up until I make a vow of secrecy by signing my allegiance in blood? Something like that was on TV."
"Hmm," said Gabriele. "One takes chances in this life for sure. Still, I'm afraid it's more mundane-boring— than that. You need to keep away from that TV set, don't you think."
She giggled as if manic. "No spells?"
"No spells," said Gabriele, "and vegetarian recipes afterward. It is really quite boring."
"It is just like any church?"
Gabriele thought of the Wicca services. They always reminded her of Catholic masses but without the Eucharist. However, they tapped into a mystery of spiritual forces without putting a human face on the creator or creation that was continually reinventing itself with each new generation of flora and fauna. She knew the guilt and fear of pouring oneself from the container of traditions he or she was raised with. Most people needed to change containers to get any perspective on how all of these beliefs were equal expressions of a wish for more than one's silly temporal domain. Still, someone who was definitely insecure and probably needed to project herself as crazy did not seem like someone suited for an experience at Wicca. In Gabriele's judgment, Rita/Lily was not in need of changing containers but rather, someone in need of finding the liquid to put into a given container.
"Sort of," said Gabriele.
"They believe in God, don't they?"
"Heavens, you wondered whether they were devil worshipers a minute ago. Some might believe in God and gods. I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't."
"And the devil?"
"No. No, I've been certain of that since I was 4 years old. People cause their own evil."
"Why don't you believe in God?"
"The reason for not believing. The why," she spoke out loud although the thoughts were really ones she meant to keep inside. She thought on this issue. "Well, if my life is good-and I guess it is. I'm healthy, well-educated, have food in my stomach and a roof over my head."
"And Adagio…your baby, Nathaniel"
"Him too," she sighed. "And my friendliness with you." It was often a stretch to even say "friendliness" in association to the Rita/Lily person but she did not know what else to call their association. "Well, if I am a happy solipsistic person I might well believe in God and appreciate my dizzying blessings but in doing this I'd be guilty of saying that this god cared about me but didn't care for those he allowed to starve or be eaten by a cannibal or forced into a predicament of having to jump out of a burning building-whatever. I suppose he could care about some of us and not others, but wouldn't that lower him to human levels? If I really believed in God, then this is the only god there is; and yet to be such a god it is quite obvious that he or she is no different than you or me…and I don't know about you, but I certainly can't create the Earth and the universe no matter how hard I try, and believe me I try." The baby began to scream. It pierced all the air of the bus. "I'll be lucky if I make it to 90 and don't have to wear diapers. There is a chance he, she, or it exists as a being that is not sympathetic about me or anyone else. If he is this, he is so large and so eternal, with no sense of human time, that a human life and its brief series of short-lived motions on one obscure planet would be inconsequential. If so, he doesn't think about me any more than you think about that last second you picked your nose. Yes, I'm watching." The Rita/Lily giggled manically despite her depression. "Also, he isn't one I can grasp so there isn't much sense in considering him. I'm just a fire ant stinging anything that threatens me, cognizant of nothing least of all the man that is there to squash me because of my sting. An ant might know about being threatened but he knows nothing about the being that threatens him. So it is with us and such a God." She could tell that the Rita/Lily person was not understanding much of the conversation but her eyes seemed to register that she was in a godless universe for fear had dilated her pupils.
Gabriele thought about this subject or quasi-subject of philosophy. She wasn't even a philosopher and yet in a minute and a half she had formulated a treatise and had proven it as much as was possible. She hadn't exactly proven that there wasn't a god. She assumed that would take an additional three minutes. But she had proven that it was not a worthwhile pursuit for humans to undertake. Smoking marijuana from morning until wee hours of the night seemed a more constructive use of one's faculties. She wondered how it was that Socrates could lose himself for hours in a question that perplexed him when really all he needed was just a few minutes.
"What did you eat today, Rita?"
"Lily."
"Whatever."
"I ate well."
"What?"
"Oh…" Lily said in a contemplative pose. A minute passed. Then, taking pride in thinking of an answer that would satisfy Gabriele she said, "I did have an apple…and I did have some peanut butter. That was good. Nutritious."
"Maybe it would be better if you went home to get something to eat. I don't think you'd understand the implications of the ceremony anyhow."
"We are…we are still going, aren't we to…"
"The baby and I are going there," Gabriele interrupted, hoping to stop Lily from saying the word "witch" on a public bus and relegating her life to strange stares. "Maybe I'm wrong about God. I'm sure I am. What you can do for me right now in my ignorance is to go home and think of different ways to discover him like smelling a fragrant flower or putting coins into the Salvation Army tin cans. If you were to hear someone preaching at you for two hours you would be two hours from telling me all those ways to find God." Rita/Lily agreed and began to get off of the bus. Gabriele got up and yelled toward her. " Wait a second. Remember, you have to stand on the other side of the road to go home." Rita/Lily smiled. Someone cared about her. Indeed there was a god.
Gabriele went to the service, which was held at the house of the new High Priestess. However, being there, she found that the paternal yearning to perform chants to Mother Earth and Father Sky a bit too much for her taste. Tarot, crystals to ward off negative energy, the black attire, the candles, the chants, and those god awful vegetarian recipes seemed outrageous. The only dogma her contumacious mind could obey were her own ideas. Feeling at odds with the day, she went home earlier than she had expected.