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?"