"Oh, I see them now. I bet so," he lied blandly. "A lot of them seem to be clustered over there, don't they?"
"It's got to be nests," she said as she rolled down her window to gain fuller clarity. Sitting in there with his mother, it occurred to him that their relationship was merely a spoken list of adventitious occurrences recorded by the other's senses. On this day, it was ornamental designs engraved on tombstones, xanthic blooms of Magnolia trees, the flight of birds observed from the car, and now nests under a bridge. Yesterday it had been the number of buds on her rose tree, the clothes he had not brought with him and needed to purchase at Wal-Mart, sheets and pillow cases that she needed to buy there, grass that needed to be mowed, food that they wanted to eat, a bathroom that needed to be cleaned, and other incidentals that they happened to relay to each other. As such, there was nothing personal in it at all. Still, she had nurtured him when he was young. She had been the one who had fed and clothed him, made him soup and gave him a wet washcloth for his hot forehead when he was sick, had him get out of thunder storms, told him to never walk across the street unless in consort with the masses and only at green pedestrian lights or when incoming traffic was stalled at red lights, and given him a sundry of unrecalled, commonplace items that forged the early bonds of affection. Even though she was not interested in him now, she was his mother, and he wanted to at least feign an interest in her, for feigning often became believing if acted persuasively enough. Thais thought that altruism was the impetus of parental love, the purest of love, and he told himself that regardless of the veracity of the claim he should go on thinking it was true for if he were to cease believing in its goodness, all other forms of love would be instantly rendered as mendacious counterfeits. Also, the superficial evidence of words and facial expressions often belied the inner feelings and sensitivities that might be active within these guarded human creatures. He always felt her disapproval of him even in the most favorable situations, but with the intangible and often erroneous nature of feelings, how would he know that it was not his own imagination? Furthermore, how could he on any day, let alone a day of returning from a cemetery, look into her haggard countenance and pass judgment on her as unloving? If shopping, meticulous housekeeping, gardening, and commentary on nature were her only subjects of concern and her only crimes, it seemed to him that they were rather innocuous ones. If she fortified herself by clogging her mind with these activities it seemed to him that the impalpable self needed them for definition and that human beings had to clog the space of their brains with at least some nugatory issues in order to have any degree of sentience. And yet, in her curtailed life, which was so fortified by the distractions of the plants she grew, domestic chores that needed to be performed, and diurnal trips to and from Wal-Mart, he knew that she immured herself from self-reflection. She, an active defiler, had to know the stench of her former family and yet it always seemed to him that she pretended the rot and her role within it did not exist. And more importantly, the absence of a mutually agreed past left them bereft of a present, rendering talk on the most trivial matters arduous if not ineffable.
Silence overtook them until at last he concocted something to say. "You know, birds like that quickly abandon their newborn. They have so many of them that they can leave their survival to chance."
"What do you mean by that?" she asked pugnaciously, as if comments on the maternity of birds were an oblique critique of her role as a mother. Then, sensing the absurdity of the association, she tried to modify his perception of her. "I mean you don't know anything about pelicans, do you?"
"Just an article which I looked at before we left the house." He lied. He had not read anything. It was just that he did not know what to say to this human being who was reliving a former role as a maternal autocrat, a mother whom he had outgrown long ago. This had been his lie, his benign artifice, to connect with her somehow, although the benign contained its own acerbity.
"You always did like to read."
"Yes," he smiled.
"Books and paint but rarely doing any work. That's the way it has always been with you, hasn't it?"
"I am a famous artist now. I make more money than—"
"You are nobody. You are no better than the rest of us."