"When's that shit on a shingle stuff gonna be done?"
"Don't know." She poured in her milk and flour. "What do you want with it?"
"Lasagna."
"Lasagna—always lasagna if not goulash. Well, we tried that last night." She thought of that mildly humiliating moment when his face had wrinkled and cringed. The face had crinkled like an old newspaper in the muscles of a palm. She, his heroine of all these years, had been regarded with disapproval. Sure, the pasta had been overcooked and the starch had dripped from it but she couldn't see that this was any more repugnant than a juicy hamburger. His repugnance had surprised her and his exaggerated expressions had not seemed a commensurate reaction.
Yesterday the behavior struck her with its impudence. Even more, she was struck that just by living together as they did, she could feel a twinge of pain so easily and so preposterously. She was worried then that she was becoming as ridiculous a human being as everyone else. It was just a twinge of pain lasting a moment but it was too much. The whole foray into obeying a cookbook was an unsuccessful attempt at imitating school cuisine which she dumped in the trash in a choleric gesture lasting no longer than his facial grimace. She took the plate from him, removed her own as well, and scraped the contents away in five seconds. It had been a little thing but it was hard for her to forget it now that she was cooking another meal for him.
"Rick's gonna come."
"Who's that?" she asked as she stirred her concoction while picking at the meat the way one might kick away dead bodies littering the street." She turned back to the window but he was no longer in that frame. Already the stilts were forsaken action and he was going off somewhere else on a bicycle. She could only see this diminishing figure from behind. She was irritated that so much of the time he went off without permission and yet she did not feel that she could chastise him for what she had done when she was his age. Even now she was doing it: she was dragging him into a shiftless domain of a trailer-whore hoping that something extraordinarily advante garde would happen to him here. Maybe she had a moral obligation to take care of one whom she had brought into the world but his coming from her womb did not mean a claim to him. At least, this was what she told herself. She could guide him the best that she was able but if he wanted to jump fifty feet from a top branch of a tree or ride on a bicycle head first into a bus it was his choice. If he wanted to run off without permission, she told herself, why should she feel any pang from it; and yet, like a ridiculous human being, she did.
Phallicly shaking out some Worchestershire sauce into a big black tempest, she wondered how the sanctity of monogamy existed with the tenet to be fruitful and multiply. If promiscuity were the natural order, monogamy had to be the unnatural one: and yet, paradoxically, monogamy had become a revered moral code of conduct. It was no wonder, she thought to herself, that people were frustrated and confused. She told herself that there had to be a reason for monogamy to be such a sacrosanct striving although she was having trouble figuring out what that reason could be. The tenet existed but within it most men were given the wink for indiscretions while some women were stoned to death for them. They were stoned, she theorized, for making other men question whether or not the children within their own homes contained someone else's peculiar genetic codes. They were stoned for implanting anxieties in the piece of mind that man had. They were stoned because of this competitive need engrained in the human psyche to survive as long as one could and to pass one's genetic codes to the next generation. The tendentious rationalist further theorized that if one were to live in a remote rural town he or she would not make compatability an issue. Knowing that there was no chance of finding anyone better than the person one was with, such a couple would grow apart, stay together, and plant trees. She couldn't prove it; and if she could it would be just one more empty fact. And yet now it was an empty theory. Sometimes it struck her how this dance with ideas was like awakening to the fact that one was all alone dancing in an empty room of a lunatic asylum.
The quantum theory of her life — the forces that drove her away from humanity (perhaps some inherent German characteristics, although she was but half German) and the circumstances that drove her back to humanity, the inherent need to be a social creature and the need for self-preservation within her own cloistered domain— were the making of a dilemma; and being in a dilemma (a soap opera of one's making) was like finding oneself in a beautiful garden of undiscovered geysers. A dilemma was the air of Thales, the water of Anaximenes, and the fire of Heraclitus.
These forces of withdrawing and shunning but needing people were like the peculiar components of atoms. They bounced off each other and made her. At times the atoms pushed away from society: and then they oscillated back, compacting her to the world of selfish people with their insatiable movements…cats with their insatiable movements…insatiable cries.