Chapter Twenty-nine
Lightning flashed into Hispanic Betty's makeshift bedroom and she woke up to the artificiality of her life ensconced in a room that was not her own with things in it that she was a little uncomfortable to touch even with a dust rag. She was here and off the streets but the glitter of being such seemed dimmer as she woke up in the flashes of lightning.
Her first self-coerced thought was of Nathaniel and needing to be responsible for him. She was compelled to perform her newly delegated responsibilities of guardian despite not really knowing what they should consist of. This role of guardian, as she saw it, consisted of the same cooking, shopping, and cleaning she always did plus maternal functions that varied with each woman like checking on him at strange hours even if, fettered in language barriers and stumbling about in her illegality, she might not know what to do if something were really wrong.
Resenting the fact that this had been thrust upon her, she nonetheless was able to drag herself out of bed to see if he was okay for the maternal instinct to attend to the young during a storm was in the collective consciousness of all female fauna. She knew that the true challenge would be for her, who had no family or friends in this country, to perform this maternal role without caring for him inordinately. She put on a bathrobe and snuck down the hall to his door where light slid under the crack like an urgent note.
He was chatting with one of his Internet friends, seeking an affinity with those acrimonious others who construed themselves as being abandoned and neglected but hid it in cynicism of all other matters. But to her who knew nothing of chat rooms or anything in particular about computers the boy was simply writing a report for a class and so she was hesitant to knock on his door and tell him to go to bed.
Hearing the pecked tapping of the keyboard, she imagined the sliver of light at her feet as a computer printed note that said, "Mind your own business, Betty, and go back to bed"; and, smiling from an amusing end to her ambivalence, that was exactly what she did. From her bed, her lair (if she could call it hers), she ruminated about what had happened to her recently: Gabriele having picked her out of the homeless shelter from the other strays; the proud and sagacious confidence, if not hubris, which Gabriele possessed in bringing her into this home without even asking her to forfeit her passport; the loyalty generated from such trust; fear that the ringing of the telephone was the attempted connection of immigration authorities; barely getting around on the crutches of the English language, which she had ineptly cobbled together from scraps; the fear of the six and sometimes seven day a week servitude in this remote home diminishing what little chance she, a homely 22 year old, might have of creating her own family; this fear motivating her to get a cheap efficiency downtown although she was rarely ever there; and how the imposition of taking care of someone else's child was a calamity waiting to happen.
Over the course of the week she worried excessively. She worried that she hadn't heard from Gabriele to know when she would return. She worried about having this awkward tenderness for the child (this wanton thought of him) caused by having to care for him and make him her exclusive concern and pleasure. And she worried that she would resent Gabriele's return since it would inevitably pry away this maternal fusion. She also had specific worries of the present day: that this act of absconding in his room, not wanting to play cards or board games like Checkers and Monopoly, meant that he might not like her anymore; and that he was now in his room for two hours and she wasn't exactly sure what he was doing in there.
Then came more of those ideas that self-flagellated her flaccid mental skin throughout the week: if something bad were to happen to him she might not know about it or have the vocabulary to ask about it; if she were aware of it that she might not be able to explain it; and if she could explain it she might prevaricate or become twisted in mendacities since she would not know how to explain her connection to this Sangfroid family.
Still, no matter if these nightly ruminations made her placid or just got her stuck in rehashing the same worries, she was glad to have them. They resuscitated a self-concept that languished each day in being cognizant of her own babbling in this north-of-the-border language.
She heard Nathaniel's footsteps in the hall. She wanted to open her door and call to him and yet she knew it wasn't so much for him as for herself. For she was feeling the travail of loneliness and it was not imagined suffering but a physical assault on the body of the mind.
She did not want him to think that she was spying on him or that she, a servant, would have the effrontery or impertinence to tell him what he could and couldn't do in his own home; but still, she told herself, she needed to monitor him. She once again diffidently walked into the hall and sought the traces of the boy. He was downstairs in the kitchen as evident by the light. Listening closely from the stairs, she could hear the refrigerator door open and a pitcher of milk being drained.
Had she not felt like a florid group of cells shot out like random shells into the void that made up the cosmos, she would have been satisfied by this and she would have gone to bed and slept soundly. Instead, she went down the steps and into the kitchen.
"Knock, knock, Nathaniel."
"Oh, hi there, Hispanic Betty."
"You no can sleep none?"
"Haven't tried."
"I can to fix you food. Maybe you are hungry."
"No, I've got a plate of Betty cookies. You know, I ate shit before you came here."
"Es verdad?"
"You bet."
"Pobrecito. Well, your mother is smart, brilliant, wonderful artist. Everybody has something good they can do and some things they can't do none."
"You could put these cookies in packages and sell them," said Nathaniel. "You'd get more than working here for my stingy old mother." She smiled. She had been random matter rolling about in empty space moments earlier and now she was put safely back to earth snapped into society like an instrumental piece of life's daily puzzle.
"Hispanic Betty, do you think school is like that?"
"What?."
"I mean good for some people and not others."
"So-so. Your madre, Gabriela, may probably kill me for saying it but I think you're right. I mean you need kid school and teenager school. Nobody should to be a dummy—but some maybe they find that special thing not in classes. You go to bed soon?"
"Pronto."
"Pronto. Excelente. Necesitas dormir las horas bastante para tener un dia grande por la manana. I go to bed now. You do it too after to eat your Betty cookies."
"Hey, Hispanic Betty, why do you have two names?"
She laughed. "Because of Santa Gabriela. Como se dice? Nickname- -it's a nickname. Your mother has told you when she comes back?"
"I don't know" the glutton said evasively as he devoured a cookie. "Buenos noches."
"Buenos noches, Nathaniel."
In the morning Nathaniel took a bus to the facade of the school and then meandered downtown as obscurely as he could. His virtual friend twenty years his senior had told him that summer school wasn't "all that important" and since this reinforced his own ideas about the matter, there was a guilt-ridden conviction in his movements as he splashed through puddles in effusive kicks of vexation. Nathaniel, who was less than a decade from the womb, had his mother as his conscience; and this conscience chastised his every deviation. And yet it was she who had made herself inaccessible. And when she had the chance to make it up to him with a summer trip abroad it was she who had departed alone.
For a couple hours in front of a computer he used a joystick as an extension of the arms of virtual boxers, and the flights of airplane bombers. With it he could also maneuver entire armies according to his sense of viable strategies not that his age and turbid thoughts at present could offer much beyond the contribution of his reflexes. When his body felt stiff he paid, left, and then lit a cigarette in the back alley. Stealth in front of the back wall of the internet cafe and computer game arcade and crouched behind a trash barrel, he tried to release clouds of smoke in various shapes the way in earlier years he had blown bubbles of various sizes into the air. He coughed as much as he smoked and the shapes of his smoke were nebulous; but his cigarettes were a self-taught rebellion in back alleys like this one and lacking male influences both good and bad maleness was an awkward stumbling of trial and error.
Coughing inordinately, not able to master smoking a cigarette with that insouciant fortitude and confidence seen in movies, he went into a Ben Franklin dime store. There he twirled the plastic sunglass rack.
"Hey kid, stop that," said a clerk "It's not a merry-go-round." But in fact he had been imagining it as such and his mother strapped there by the clasp of Lilliputian schoolboys the way Shirley and her friends had fettered him on merry-go-rounds and besieged him with kisses. Only in this daydream there were classmate enemies from a couple years earlier accosting Gabriele directly with their ridicule. Simultaneously they reviled, scoffed, and guffawed the culprit instead of her son with, "Dirty lady bringing men to your trailer drinking their pee like a toilet. Our fathers know of you personally. In the Laundromats our mothers talk of rationing water because one of your spells has caused the lack of rain. "
"Kid!"
"I'm buying," said the boy with his mother's contumely. He pulled out a twenty-dollar bill waving its voluble greenness as the true emblem that conveyed everything about his country and his world. Restricted from spinning the rack, he sought less mindless thrills. He tried on various pairs of sunglasses before slipping one pair in his underwear and then walking up to the cash register to pay for the other pair. It was a test of nonchalance and despite palpitation and sweaty palms he passed it successfully.
He waited at the movie theater for the form behind the emailed image to come to him.
"Nathaniel?" asked the man.
"Yeah," said the boy.
"Hi, I'm Tom." The boy began to reach out his hand toward this urbane form of manhood he wistfully hoped would befriend him. A handshake was a guise of strangers with amicable intentions; but he had to withdraw his hand awkwardly when the man did not reciprocate. "Hope you haven't been waiting long—I went to get some snacks for us. Every boy likes chocolate." He smiled but it waned insincerely as he guardedly looked around the empty parking lot. "So you ran away from school?" He bantered and then shoved a cigarette in his mouth. It jiggled in his chuckle.
" Sort of. So, you ran away from work?"
"Sort of." Tom grinned sheepishly. "We've still got a few minutes until the movie. I'd offer you a smoke but I probably shouldn't out here."
"I had one a few minutes ago."
"Oh, okay— take off the sunglasses. Can't use them in there." Nathaniel pulled them up on his head. "You look just like your photo minus the glasses. What about me?"
"Older in person," said the boy.
"Oh," said the man. His tone, as his word choice, was vapid as life, to him, was vapid. The thought of age slowly gnawing on him while he engaged in life unawares made him want to evade conversation and entomb himself with youth in the movement on a screen in a dark room.
"Let's go in if we can. I've got the tickets already. You sure you can get into something R-rated this way?"
"I've done it before. Here: I bought you a gift." He took them from his underwear.
"Ah…Children's sunglasses with a ninety nine cent price tag on them. You shouldn't have." He sniffed them. "Although I do love the smell."
The boy gave a full hearty laugh.
"Do you always keep things in there like that?" He was careful about his words and glanced around the sidewalk. The boy did not understand him and said nothing. "What do I do with these things?"
"Give them to your son."
"I don't have one."
"When you have one"
"I won't have one," he mumbled evasively. He opened the door and they went in.
Seated together, they consumed contraband chocolate peanut butter cups and cola that the man pulled out of his bag. The man told himself that the boy was like a nephew. He did this to allay guilt that was burdening his positive self-image and so that he might restrain himself from a touch that could cause him to lose his prey so soon. His hormones boiled and steamed like the rolling levity of atoms and yet he did not reach for the succulent young flesh there beside him. The boy told himself that the stranger was like an uncle for there was a dull aching within him of one needing to believe that somewhere he would find a man's interest in him — one who would take him to baseball games and whom he could confide in, one who could teach him how to become a man.
When the movie ended the man said he had a better film in his apartment and they went away together to his furtive domain.
On his sofa bed, which had not been pushed back into a sofa, they were propped up on pillows. They were half sitting and half lying on a bed watching a movie and eating grilled cheese sandwiches and potato chips. Somewhere into the video was a car chase. Apoplectic expletives of the driver being chased—words that were part of the lexicon of American culture but ones to which he did not understand fully — puzzled and intrigued him. He was eager to know jargon that he assumed was linked to this thing called sex (whatever it was) and abbreviations like S&M and MF that were stranger yet. The ideas within these abbreviations were so hidden there that he got a sense that they were the conduit for experiencing great things. He felt that by cogitating all of these mysterious words and abbreviations long enough he would be able to transcribe them as if the English that was chiseled on the walls of his brain were a Rosetta stone. As he was pondering this Morse code of the adult cabal, there was a feeling of a hand under his buttocks — a hand that then passed through the border of the elasticity of his underwear to direct contact with his flesh. Nonplussed, he turned to the trespasser and saw for the first time an erection that seemed such a freakish abnormality (here it was poking out of jogging pants that had been slid down to his hips). Even more fey was that mesmerized and fixated look of yearning for absolute pleasure on the face of this stranger called Tom. Nathaniel removed the hand.
" What are you doing?"
" Can you help me? Pull down your underwear. "
"Why?"
"Don't worry. I won't tell anyone you came here to my apartment—you won't get punished if only you help me a little. Put your mouth on it or let me enter."
"Enter?"
"Your butt hole."
He asked himself it this was sex. He had assumed that it was a moonstruck look and a bewitched yearning of adult lunatics for kisses from the opposite sex.
He wanted to scream, "No!" and to whine that he wanted to go home. He was hurting and feeling diminished in years and he wanted to cry. He was scared despite his interest in how this freakish penis augmentation was linked to sex. He wished that he had never been so foolish as to come here or even gone to the movie theatre with this stranger. And yet he tried to hold onto his senses. He realized that to oppose a man trying to get his fix of exhilaration might be risky. He tried to figure out the most innocuous or least deleterious path that his childish mind could concoct. It was mostly a feeling since he was not all that logical. He remembered that mesmerized and fixated look of yearning for absolute pleasure on the face of this stranger. It was proof that although sex was linked to another person, it was mostly an internal function. To disengage himself and yet fulfill his curiosity, he returned one of the stranger's hands on his buttocks and placed the other long hand onto the stranger himself. Then he watched the stroking and pumping that lead to a whitish disgorging. With its passing the stranger went into the bathroom to urinate. A few seconds later, Nathaniel quietly exited the apartment for the first city bus he was able to descry. He kept wistfully hoping for his mother's return. He missed her.
With all windows open and at top legal speed, the wind dishevels his hair .His sunglasses are so dark that they make the day into dusk. His car is strewn with myriad CDs but he repeats the same song from one that belongs to his mother. He sings along with Led Zepplin.
"I've made up my mind to make a new start./ I'm going to California with an aching in my heart./ Someone told me there is a girl out there/ with love in her eyes and flowers in her ha-ir./ La la la la/ I took my chances on a big jet plane./ Never let them tell you that they are a-l-l the same."
He beats the steering wheel to the remainder of the tune until he glances at the gauge and decides to pull into the next gas station that he encounters . He has to laugh and that laugh comes out in a bitter and cyical drool. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. His California girl lives in Sante Fe, New Mexico where her husband recently divorced her. She isn't a girl but a woman who last week, after recuperating from her face lift, emailed a photograph of her new face. She is just Hispanic Betty but he doesn't mind. Older women are more appealing to him and this one has always cared about him. He will use whatever she has to give to him. He has no compunction.