By day Gabriele would make calls to her beloved so that she could get that rush in the pleasure receptors of her brain. Then, when warranted, she would go over to the site of the future school and Michael would always ask her what she thought of the construction up to that point. She would say her unvaried line of "It sure is coming along well," which of course it was invariably. Occasionally she would sketch her ideas of the interiors of faculty lounges, secretary offices, and other miscellaneous rooms. She would submit them to his blank stares and then she would have to admit that she did not "know the first thing about interior design." And yet the same aversion that she had toward holding hands in the day was making her into less of an active lover at night. Grateful to be made real by being pulled out of the stuffy chamber of her head, still it was sometimes difficult to repeat the same half hour rapture each night as if this hunger for merger and thoughtless ecstasy were to bring on intimacies and awareness that the previous night's half hour failed to do. This perspective was exacerbated all the more when she considered the fact that the urges had been no less poignant during all their other times together. Each night there was his hard thumping to please himself fully with little regard, now, for the best means of her arousal. Although still pleasurable, and even more of a gyrating release from thoughts, it now seemed more like being tossed in a blender, and each night her embraces became more like frozen fruit.
On weekends they often went to nurseries to buy shrubs and trees for the landscape of her home as well as that of the school; but one Saturday morning he got her to acquiesce to this yearning to find one's maker that was there in the collective consciousness of primordial modern man. At Mass she fidgeted with some beads in her lap and chanted Hail Marries. She chanted these archaic trifles although, tacit and hidden away amongst her private thoughts, she had her own version of a Hail Mary: "Hell Mary Juana, full of recalcitrance, the Lordess, Santa Gabriela, be with thee. Blessed art thou in the salubrious realm of illegal substances and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, beer and chewing tobacco. Hell Mary Juana, servant of the Gabriele goddess and her partner, the sun god, give us something sweet to hallucinate now and at the hour of our death. Amen." She looked over at Nathaniel there in her pew. He was barely able to keep himself from launching through the roof. This sententiousness and pomp was too much poop for him too. For the first time in months she felt a special cognate affection for her son that excluded the others. Feigning smiles only when cognizant of Michael glancing toward her and silent as death, she tacitly spoke to Nathaniel in an imaginary utterance, "I'll make this up to you—we must all play with the tinker toys of language in thought to have some degree of meaning within our petty lives; but God and heaven are empty make believe words of a feeble animal. They are a feeble species who need to look for external meaning and finding only tragic random chance within the mortality of the family and friends that have given them pleasure, and then their own mortality as well, resort to storybook scripture, churches, and chants. Their jargon of God, heaven, hell, and sin don't refer to anything— totally empty words—and to have to forfeit running around, celebrating life to sit uncomfortably in this dark Saddam Husseinish torture chamber—I'll make up for this. What can I give you? What about a dog or a gift certificate to Swenson's Ice Cream parlor? No, too much sugar. I wouldn't want you bouncing off the walls any more than usual."
Following the service the boys were sent to a Catholic version of Sunday school and she was paraded in front of a bunch of stiff strangers with eyes euthanized by talk of the heavens. He introduced her to various people but the introductions were an awkward mix. She was given their names with little else and they were given this spiel that she was an artist who had become his girlfriend and was now contributing some ideas for the interior design for his school, whose beauty was distracting him from building his version of a loosely affiliated Catholic school, and who might draw some "pictures" of the school's patron saint. He said it in various ways but each time she felt flaunted like a woman seeing the image of herself in a bra on a lit billboard in front of a bench at a bus stop only in her case bust size and her ability to wear lingerie beautifully did not matter. It seemed to her that he was trying to boast a vague connection of an artist to the school, which she couldn't quite figure out unless he had the idea that she would teach art there. The stout and husky figure that she was, she couldn't see that his introducing her as if she were Helen of Troy would grant him a lot more customers. A half hour into being introduced and memorizing names that she would forget once out of there (one young Russian who exercised with Michael at a fitness center and had the most forgettable name of all) she told herself that she did not want the four of them to stay there a minute longer. She used English like a crowbar, demanding that he remove the boys so that they could enjoy the remainder of the day; and from his saturnine expressions she could see that she was the condemned one. As the condemned one she knew that she would be free to implement whatever she pleased since he would be too sullen to have it any other way. She knew this for she had been condemned before.
Not needing to worry about being condemned since she was already such, she went ahead and argued that the boys should be left with Hispanic Betty if the two of them were still planning to go to the nursery. She didn't want to see them dragged through flowers, trees, and shrubs (Nathaniel spilling his incessant complaints and disturbing big Mr. Phlegmatic by making him morose) or kept in the hot truck the way they were on the previous Saturday. To be in the truck all alone with nothing to do but slap one another and pull each other's hair while she and Michael were plant hunting for verdant plantings, they would be nothing but prisoners and their apoplexy from incarceration would probably cause severe fraternal loathing. If nothing else, their whole day would be constricted by adults' self-centered preoccupation with contrived accomplishments since it was adults who ruled over them — adults who went contrary to the senses which implored that through contemplation one might celebrate the day.
Gabriele and Michael returned with two German Shepherds as well as five or six tree roses in the back of the pickup. Caring less about the plants, Gabriele was eager to witness dog meets boy and boy makes dog into a friend but the joy was stymied in stepping inside the house. When they went in they saw mercurial Mr. Petulant executing punishment against the son of Mr. Phlegmatic. Nathaniel had Rick's head under the running water of the faucet. The crime was spilling a glass of milk; the punishment was a near drowning; and the perspective she chose to take for a fuller understanding of this situation, as Michael pulled off his belt, was Piaget's idea of the moral absolutist. As the brazen non- flinching boy was being whipped, she thought to herself that she would need Betty to monitor their every move from now on for children's system of government was more procrustean and draconian than that devised by adults in most, but not all, areas of the global jungle.
On a Monday built vapidly on the vacuous graves of wasted hours, she heard the school bus return and the barking of the two hounds. Curious about how Nathaniel related to his dog when she was not around, she went to the studio window to witness this interaction of dog and boy inconspicuously.
Outside the window there was the same rectangular wooden container where, at the trailer, she had planted a flowerbed which an owl then used as a domicile. Now it was fastened under the studio window with a different choice of flowers. She remembered the days preceding that move to Ithaca: having climbed onto a tree, which had been the umbrage of the trailer, with slow, surreptitious movements, shooting the owl with a tranquilizer gun, and pulling its body into a laundry bag without falling from the limbs of the tree. It had been a time consuming undertaking and at the time she had doubted whether it would actually succeed; and yet here the owl was well acclimated to its setting. Looking onto the bird now she was pleased: it had succumbed to the belief that the trailer had been nothing but a dream just as she had awakened or succumbed to the belief that her arduous efforts to paint visions imagined in her head had no substance and that only filling one's mind in the clutter of activity that involved others did one actually live at all. After all, contemplation involved having to contemplate something and what else was there but this ball, this planet of movement? A racket ball player was called such because she played racket ball and a rebel because she rebelled—all people had self-worth by defining themselves in words of action.
From the window she noticed that Nathaniel played with his dog when she was not around. He actually had some affection for it. Had she bought at least one of these dogs for the experiment of discovering his ability to care or to prompt that attribute? Was it for the companionship of both boys or was it for her own companionship? Maybe the dogs were bought to fill the hours when she wasn't taking the boys to their scout meetings, buying clothes for them, rooting for them on bleachers at baseball games (she had tried rooting for them as a voluntary concession stand worker, but her tacit words and supercilious coldness to the inconsequential and insufferable gossip of these motherly peers brought her a flurry of unfriendly glances not all that different than what she received in all the other days in the years of her life), tree planting, or going to the site of the school to say, "It looks like its really coming along well." It was all of this and more. So much that was selfish, altruistic, curious, and indifferent went into the simplest of acts.
She could see there, in this dog centering its actions on her boy and her boy responding by throwing out a shoe for him to fetch, a reason for all this carbon to be divided into so many organisms. Looking through the window at this interaction (saliva drooling from the mouth of one and smiling fangs from the other) she saw that the universe communicated with itself and that it's self responded in a distinctly varied perspective. It was by doing so that the universe was at last real. There was no doubt that there were other worlds like the Earth throughout the cosmos. Simple pleasures, simple interactions, were the entity, and she knew that the whole thing was good. She knew that this overlapping of the universe in carbon beings interacting with each other in their distinct ways were the talking heads that made the universe real. The sight of forty-dollar sneakers there in the drooling waterfalls of the dog's mouth caused her consternation. Still she did nothing. She just watched and recalled what had occurred yesterday.
Yesterday, Sunday, when she had approached this gathering of boy and dog Nathaniel had shoved the animal away and when it still pounced on his legs as he walked away from it, he kicked it on its belly. She didn't mind him showing that he disliked her. She saw it as a passing stage: a diminishing but still open animus toward her for the trip to Asia and Europe without him, resenting this distribution of her attention to include two other males, taking umbrage over her slight favoritism of the chosen over the natural members of family if he did indeed perceive it (certainly he saw and resented the grocery shopping with Rick that was done without him), this refurbishing of the whole of family within contrived Friday night croquet games of bonding regardless of the mood and wishes of individual family members at the time, and this slipping out of a boy's closeness to his mother so that he might fit into himself. She did not concern herself with that in the least. He could critically assess her and show his dislike openly so long as it was done respectfully. True motherly love was raising children and not needing to smother them in maternal, nurturing instincts or expecting understanding that their egocentric beings could not muster. The paddling yesterday was not as punishment for hostilities toward her (hostilities that existed because of issues he was trying to resolve in himself) or to oppose Skinner's belief that negative reinforcement accomplished very little. It was done as justice for the dog and a statement on behalf of it and all other animals that they weren't there to be targets of aggression. It wasn't negative reinforcement per se for none of that could work with him. She knew that skinned knees from bicycle accidents and the whippings he got from Michael (Whippings she was beginning to resent) were proof that the boy was somewhat stoic to pain. Outside of learning that Nathaniel did not dislike his pooch (only herself) she lost herself in Internet articles on owls until she and Rick began racing and banging their carts against each other down the aisles of the grocery store, and Monday went by uneventfully.