They were returning to their apartments with the expectation that Hilda would, by tradition, dunk Gabriele 's face in a birthday cake. In the car she thought of Nathaniel and her property with deep homesickness. She thought of her liquid assets that were mostly embezzled by her ex-husband but were in part tied up in stocks and bonds. Something was amiss.
Chapter 37
Her ongoing separation from her house, land, and financial resources could have made her succumb to an emotionally mutable perspective of feeling, for a time, as if she had lost everything and then to a feeling that she needed to hurry back to New York State before what little she had was all lost to her. She didn't even know for sure the name of this lawyer of the ex-in-laws—in-laws who in their own elusive way were also nebulous figures. This lawyer of these Bassetes (ex-husband going under the name of Quest) supposedly diverted some of the interest of her savings to property tax, the maintenance of the house, and no doubt whatever the legal expenses were. It was property that, by now, could be razed to the ground and paved with a highway for what she knew of it; and such neglect at being responsible for herself, an aberration from who she was, kept disturbing her equanimity.
Her placid state of mind could have easily been ravaged by maudlin brooding, homesickness, maternal stirrings of instinct, and multifarious emotionally fueled reasons to return to Albany. And it would have been so without determined supercilious will that rebounded her back to her stoic, rational, and insular existence. There in her supercilious brain, amidst the endless walls of tidy, barren, and ostensibly eternal gray matter, she would soar within curtailed bounty and the journey within would seem as an ongoing discovery on the edge of a non-spherical universe. But sometimes without warning the eternity would become a constricted little room and then she would be nothing but a claustrophobic black bird that one day years ago got trapped in the living room of her trailer in Ithaca when she was cleaning a window. Like that sight-trusting bird ready to window-bang itself into oblivion rather than accept the conclusion of pain, obsessed with thought she would crash repeatedly against the walls of her brain. In such migraines she almost felt locked away in her cold, impersonal thoughts— locked away behind walls bigger than any the American government could envisage against Mexico. She would seem locked away in thoughts and only this, unable to conceptualize a higher and more unfathomable wall than this. Would not Parmenides have been abhorred to hear the "nous" so defiled. She didn't care. Heraclitus was now her unsung hero; and not even Plato or God himself, if there were one (which there wasn't), understood migraines except those who experienced them. And sicknesses of all types were exacerbated all the more in foreign countries even if one were lucky enough to have a native friend like Ms. Quest's Hilda who had held her head steady and tilted to the toilet on a couple occasions.
Property: she would define it as that claim on a person or thing to seem to oneself to be. It was like that idiot, Alan Shepard, putting an American flag on the moon; but it was from that idiot, Shepard, that, in girlhood one of her more original ideas was reinforced enough to become a calcified decision or at least a determined perpetual caprice. At the age of eight, seeing those rerun black and white images of this so- called "groovy" astronaut as he bounced around the moon with the stars and stripes (these declarative bounces of ownership and half expectations to encounter a whole host of mooners to pose his symbol to), and recently having learnt of a place on Earth not rife in human herds, she decided to stake her flag on Camp Gabriele, Antarctica in that self-declared city of one. Now, as then, she knew that she had never had anything but herself to begin with and that this was as she liked it.
Being divorced, she could have clung to these things that were hers, declaring them as such in her own mind to reiterate that she was a separate being from what was once her husband or was once believed to be her husband. She could have felt victimized and vulnerable from this chemical volatility of mixing with people and men, these two species that she might have enjoyed had she thought of them as pets. An emotional neediness could have rushed her back to motherhood and attempts at freshly burnt chocolate chip cookies. With less intelligence she might have even thought of it as her maternal calling to nurture him, her ungrateful son, and cater to his selfish whims under the guise of love and doing good. She could have feigned a contentment within the narrow parameters of this easily made/easily fumbled role without noting the hypocritical and selfish neediness that would have been therein especially for a woman like her, a returning child deserter. It would have been so had she believed in feeling something about anything and to allow feelings to drag her around; but for her even succumbing to numbness was a very peculiar state to be shaken off like a lint-ridden blouse.
She was the one who had been barely able to embrace the favored one, Rick, on that first severing of Michael and herself. On that day of the first, less consummated, closure to specious romance she had, in a sense, embraced him albeit no differently than the fall of a metal bar at a toll road. Parting from Rick on that day, internally she had been more like the lachrymose stirring of a statue of Mary, Mother of God, but the boy would not have known that. For him, who had lost his first mother to breast cancer, he would only have that memory that her arms came down on him and then raised up like that bar at a tollbooth.
And if she were to continue in this quest to remove herself from this ownership mania of this self-proclaimed American brand of the common herd, she would continue to do so with the same dry, permanent logic. If the means of defining ownership of property were a mutual claim of ownership by the person to the land and the land to the person the most recent contracts would have taken place in the 19th century when the deceased was united in the ultimate act of consummation: the decay into that plot of land which had sustained him or her. That being true, she reasoned, she owned nothing. It seemed to her that if it were true of the land the mutuality of the contract would be even more of an imperative condition in human relations.
On weekends in Japan such an enormous exodus of people would come out to do their shopping; whereas for her, having had no firmly set schedule that enslaved her and not needing to release an enslaved being in the unbound weekend freedoms of malls, she had found a more internal brooding in the Hokkaido cold. She had feasted on poets and philosophers. She had learnt of Japanese history, art, and traditional mask carvings.
Here in TJ, impecunious as she was, she couldn't have bought anything major had she wanted to. A portable black and white television, which she aptly called the "noise box" or "noise companion," had been her most expensive purchase. But this matching of circumstances to a repudiation of ownership, far from being a grievance against fate, was liberation like that felt at being naked and under a hot shower. It was an ablution from soiled things sticking onto her and she was glad it was that way.