The living room had the smell of light and stagnant smoke of Betty's cigars. Betty, she thought, must have recently gone to another final examination. It was best that way. With her gone Gabriele would not have to coerce some giggling and mild sighs as she packed her racket ball paddle with other items. There would be pleasant but vague and generalized memories of their racket ball entertainment together but, to be sociable, she would have to affect some maudlin sentiments of loss. She would need to feign loss particularly about them living together as if it had made them conjoined spiritually although obviously not Siamese twins. She would have to use the width of her arms to symbolize an embrace (a real embrace would have been impossible when a sexual embrace with a man was bad enough). She quickly entered the bathroom to take a shower that might wash away any odor of the man she had slept with; packed more of her things; saluted the new communism in her heart; snickered inside at the thought that Japan had out-capitalized the West the way it tried to out-imperialize the imperialists; turned off the television, and left with the remaining two boxes. She swerved off the drive, veering somewhat near the girls in her eagerness to leave.
"What's wrong with you, woman?" yelled the eldest one.
"What's wrong with you, nigga" yelled the little black girl full of energy. The girl did not know the full pejorative nature of the word nor the fact that Gabriele, being white, could not be a Negro unless one were to label her such for the black clothing she often wore. The other two stood with legs arched and bulging hominid-like—the eldest with right arm erect and out from her body and the hand half-clenched into a fist. Gabriele saw this from the mirror. She hadn't driven that close to the girls so she thought their reaction was unjustified. The fact that she thought they looked like hominoids had nothing to do with their skin color nor their nonstandard use of language but her own aversion toward children and adults based upon the sensitivities she had as a young child and the fact that these girls were pelting the top of her car with clods. She returned to the drive. "Hey!" she yelled from the window. "Your mother's insurance is gonna pay for any damage. You are lucky that I'm not opening my car door because if I were to get you I would -" she had to stop herself. Whatever she said under these circumstances could only put violence and hatred into their callow minds, exacerbating their nature as hers, so prone to its aggressive flares. She could only make it worse than what it would be if these children were merely left to glower and ponder in silence as she was now doing. And yet there was little delectation in self-restraint. A fully sociable being was one who liked to provoke responses positive or negative like billiard balls banging against each other. One felt alive based upon the vibrations gained from being knocked around; and as eremitic and misanthropic as she was, Gabriele was a girl who liked her fun. She saw the clods of dirt in their hands and the dirt on the windshield. She slowly got out of the door, which caused them to back away a few steps. She didn't look at them but instead walked around her car. Seeing that no damage had occured, she then returned to the driver's seat. She decided to leave the matter alone so she spit a cannon ball of chewing tobacco toward the girls and ventured onward. The cannon ball was the penalty phase. After all, she did not want them to think that they could pelt motorists with impunity. Still she imagined the sullied tribulation that she must have caused the younger one. She could feel the devastating humiliation that perhaps they all felt at a wad of snuff coming at them like a projectile. She hoped that they would not interpret it as racial hatred. She felt the horror behind what she had done and yet there was nothing she could do. If she were to stop the car and return to them to apologize they would probably pelt her and the car both with stones. She disliked egocentric children. She even disliked the refugee children whom she worked with part-time until two days ago although she camouflaged it in professionalism. She knew that if only human beings were able to pierce their protective bubbles they would find that one genuine love within, that innate tender need to be liked, cared about, and have one's human worth confirmed and an identification of this sentiment in other sentient beings. Still the world was what it was and she told herself that if she were to return she would be stoned or clodded based upon their whims.
In this odd corner behind the skyscrapers and away from the Houston Symphony, the Meneil Collection with its engravings of Aten and Ptah, the Rothko Chapel, the Astrodome, the Miller Theatre in Herman Park, the University of St. Thomas, the University of Houston, and her Rice University, nothing touched her sense of imagination so much as the ghettos strewn around them. She admired the simple life burrowed away from the congested avarice of the city's center. She felt compassion for the poorest of the poor who had to be in bleak circumstances but she could not do anything in her two years in Houston but take photographs of the infamy of the free enterprise system and continue with her job working with refugees. She didn't do all that much. She sat with the Ugandans and the Kenyans on the porches of refugee houses and with them looked onto the skyscrapers at the approach of dusk. Driving in her car, she could remember the Vietnamese families clogging the sinks of the refugee houses with rice; the sight and smell of the blood of rotting vegetables in the refrigerators of those houses; the fire ants that stung her around the refugee houses; mowing the yards when she couldn't budge the refugees to do it; the disputes over whose food was in the refrigerators or how much clothing she was supposed to supply them with, and how the Ugandans tended to accumulate trash without ever emptying it. She remembered Senor Sanchez. Making a detour back into the city from the interstate, she decided to go to the refugee houses and say "goodbye" even though a couple days ago she had chosen not to tell the refugees that she was leaving in her usual obdurate opposition to sentiment. She could imagine herself telling Senor Sanchez about her immediate departure and him saying, "Heaven forbid, you are really leaving us now that you have a Master's in psychology from a great university?." She would say, "Yes, I always leave when I get Master's degrees. This one from a great university equalizes a not so great one in criminology at Emporia University." "Do you have two Master's degrees?" "Yes," she would say, "I collect them." "What will you do with your knowledge?" he would ask. "Be a better person for it and that is all. I'll sit on my butt in the future." "Oh, very good," he would say. "Maybe you can put Fidel Castro on your lap while you sit and get him to purr like a kitten." "Oh, what an excellent idea," she would say.
Senor Sanchez came from Havana. On that first day of their meeting she gave him clothes from the Welcome Center, which he took. She put food in the refrigerator and yet he would rarely eat it. "Necesito volver a Miami, orita! Esta lugar"-and there he rambled off in passionate Cuban speed which she did not understand. They sat on the porch to the Welcome Center. Gabriele handed him a pen and paper but his calligraphy was not legible. "Orita? Que significa "orita?" she asked. He snapped his fingers fiercely and then rambled incommunicably. Her eyes became stiff and large in her detest of his irascibility. Sanchez would always whistle for her attention. Then he would laugh at her hating eyes; whistle again; look up in the air, and flap his arms in an attempt to have her get him something. Partial or complete hunger strikes, she told him in Spanish would not hasten his trip back to Miami but only make his stay intolerable for everyone.
"But you buy shit for us to eat!" he stormed one time.
"I'd have trouble getting it down too," she admitted. "Suit yourself. If you die defiantly you will be my personal hero but the carcass will stay in Houston. We don't ship carcasses to Miami," she said. He was her personal favorite.
The Cubans told her one time that the U.S. was responsible for putting Fidel Castro into power since the Cuban masses needed to support any man whose rhetoric condemned American investments and the American control of their economy; and her response was, "Well, which is it-if you hate the guy so much it seems ridiculous to use such an argument even though it does have some truth. I know if I were to engage him he would be a pussycat purring on my lap and you guys could make any political cartoon on him you pleased." The Africans once said that the military cost of their civil wars were the result of Western colonial boundaries fusing incompatible tribes into nations, keeping Africa from being able to feed herself; and her response was, "Well, which is it— If you hate the idea of imperialism why are we speaking in English now; and why is your government trying to lure in foreign investment?" When the older Vietnamese individuals mentioned the war she listened to their stories intensely through a rough translation. She listened to life's horror and the ensuing trauma. That was all she could do. The past and the future did not exist but traumas of the past went on perpetually. Once she had to translate Thuc's "New House Rules for Immigrants" to the Latinos as they sat before her on metal seats. They were lectured that the food given to them should be put in boxes and set in the refrigerators so that they would know that the food was being distributed equally and without a cause for bickering. Thuc nodded her Vietnamese face at Gabriele's ostensible translations when really Gabriele was only giving a synopsis of what was being said with commentary disparaging of the YMCA treatment of its refugees and a system that was generally f—
There might have been poetic significance in having done this mundane job: having taken the refugee children to the zoo with seventy year old Jesus and the fifty year old Sanchez; having said the names of the animals in English and the girls giving the Vietnamese equivalent; having taken them to the social security office to get them cards with designated numbers; having taken the Cambodian boy into the clothes room of the Welcome Center to try on pants of various sizes but when he would not put them on and take them off with an adult sense of speed, having performed the unzipping and zipping herself; having taken the little Cuban girl to the Vietnamese doctor when she had a fever although the doctor only gave Gabriele the suggestion of Gatorade and crackers; and having often heard the little Laotian girl imitating Gabriele's growls through the tattered 1screen of a window although Gabriele's growls toward the girl were real ones. Still, all in all, she thought in the car, it had been a waste of time to have prostituted herself to such an agency. She liked these refugees for various reasons but one less altruistic reason was that she didn't have any other people whom she liked and thus she needed to like them. She chastised her maudlin disposition and returned to the interstate.