Had she been there for him, fully engaged in motherhood from the beginning, she believed that his personality would not have been so recalcitrant and his behavior would not have been so petulant and flighty. Maybe, she fretted, her past peregrinations would aggravate the rest of her days in an opaque fog and malaise of her own making.
Instinct and social norm prompted her cousin in Kansas to become a statistic in suburbia: to get married immediately after high school; to have her 2.4 kids and a car in the garage; to daily doubt whether the 0.4 kid would "ever amount to anything;" to return from work at the cosmetic counter of Dillards to greet her cat with "Are-U-Hungary" and laugh at the pseudo nation; and to darn her husband's underwear and iron his socks (items that should have been done with reverse actions).
Really Gabriele knew nothing about this cousin of hers. For her own agenda she continually relegated her to a theory. She enjoyed the caprice, which if not true of her cousin (and it probably was), was true of this bored housewifey type. And she wondered if this vaguely remembered woman might right now be opening the refrigerator door and envisaging probable dates of her demise — sometimes right side up and sometimes upside down — printed on milk cartons; who, finding her conversations with her spouse stale was nonetheless considering them an indispensable part of the routine of her perfunctory movements; and who was probably returning from the kitchen to watch most of the Rosanne or Cosby show before collapsing into sleep. Gabriele imagined that each night this cousin would wake up and realize that it was time to go to bed so that she could repeat the day's failure again. The true reality of her cousin's felicity or estranged plight was not anything Gabriele knew or cared to know. It seemed an apposite probability and this was the only thing about her that Gabriele cared to contemplate.
So sitting in her studio (now with the prostitute paintings of the "Women at Work" series of the burgeoning Thai artist, Nawin Biadklang, on her walls — paintings that she had put away and forgotten following her involvement with Michael), she painted her cousin, albeit of a Mexican appearance and something more like a mannequin than a human being, while her thoughts continued to run rampant.
Dream after dream; illusion upon illusion; everyone was forced to play the game of musical chairs in which the people changed as well as the chairs but they all pretended that it was not happening — that everyone was stable and on stable ground. She did not want to rebel against the game. It was the indelible rules of nature thrust on man (this thing called change), and for most it was instrumental to their evolvement. Most people would be worse than the complacent and mostly non-changeable rock of her Aunt Peggy unless shaken up a bit.
"What's 'dead' mean?" Nathaniel had asked on that inauspicious day years ago when Michael had run over the neighbor's child in the trailer park — one of many odd coincidences that had engendered their union. It was a day that was as inauspicious as having given birth to Nathaniel in the first Gulf War and then returning to him in the sequel. Inauspicious events often seemed as a plan to rock the baby out of his cradle and then as now she vaguely sensed that something akin to doom would one day toss her from this bearable normalcy of a new husband and an old son that she seemed to return to like all other lost and clinging females. Was this malevolent rocker of the baby's body and soul God? Well, it certainly was not the gentle parental god devised by religion but there was indeed some coercer of change like Aristotle's concept of god without the god.
"Non-being. We wear our clothes for a time. Then they unravel and are made into something different."
"And heaven?"
"God, no! — a make believe story for reality dodgers. When you play dodge ball you run away from being hit by the ball, don't you? It is the same for heaven believers. The neighbor boy, I am dreadfully sorry to say, is dead as a doornail and his body and brain are unraveling. You don't need to think twice about it. Trust me on this one. But if that is too much reality to swallow, and it is for almost everyone I guess, it is better to live in your own lie than live in someone else's. What if we were to say that he is like a beautiful leaf skidding on the sidewalk because of a breeze; but he is not the leaf anymore but the breeze. You can feel him but you will never see him again…unless — "
"Unless what?"