"How am I to tell if you suffocate me?"
"I'll be extraordinarily careful when I get up to the face. Don't worry."
"I've rested enough. Let the games begin," Hilda giggled.
"Not right yet. Give me the answer to my query and this stiff mummy will rise again."
"I was thinking at the time that you shouldn't be with me. It isn't like we are a couple. I was thinking to myself that you should be playing volleyball with your son. I worry about him not having a mother."
"Do you want me to leave you, Hilda?" Despite the withdrawn and impassive eyes her lips were compressed into a smile and she was ready for any answer. Any answer would have amused her, but she was betting on a particular muddled response. Having a keen enough discernment of human behavior that she could be flawlessly "scientific" in predictions remained Gabriele's goal, and she wanted it to be ongoing unlike all other forms of epiphany.
"I don't own you. Come, go, or stay for life. It's all the same to me. Well, all right not fully. Maybe I care some but to tell you the truth, I don't know what you think of me or what you want; and the reality is that you are a mother — I'm not — so do what you have to do."
Gabriele had predicted each meandering and sinuous thought with accuracy. Still she said, "No prevarications. Frankness, feeling comfortable to be such, doing it in respect, and measuring in other realities in as objective manner as possible — a relationship is relating and we do it with the perfection that only goddesses can do in such matters." She knew that her positive summary was from the overall relationship rather than this moment in time. A more myopic perspective would not have produced a full rendering of truth. Reality in any sense was more than any conscious registering of it. It was more convoluted. Although perhaps no different than the jealous remarks of Hera to Zeus, Hilda's acrimonious tone seemed boringly uncelestial. She was to some degree saying that if it were the ending of their intimacy then she, Gabriele, might as well head across the border back to the wealthy of San Diego. One aspect of their relationship had been an appreciation of self-containment, but here Hilda was jealous of it. "About my son, I don't know where he is."
"That's never made any sense to me."
"Either he's still with my aunt and she doesn't want to admit this fact or he's with my untraceable sister-in-law in the domain of her maternal possessiveness; but he is okay wherever he is at, and by now not so keen to play games with me."