She told herself that since Hispanic Betty would be back at 5:00 she could spend the day recuperating in a park. She would not be missed. When he needed his bicycle fixed it was Hispanic Betty whom he turned to. Just the other evening she saw him drag a tent out of the garage. She asked if she could help him. "Hispanic'll do it," he said.
"Well, I'm rather good at such things—repelling, camping, and you name it as long as its outside the house."
"S'not an issue. She's good at everything. You're not needed," he said and the words resonated deep into the far reaches of herself where she remembered Peggy saying, "They don't want you so they pawned you here so quit blubbering for them. I opened our door to you; fought with my husband when I didn't want you here either—and look what you did to me. Look again! Pen marks on this upholstery.You ruined the sofa—a two hundred year old piece of furniture because you don't have sense enough to take pens out of your pants." She remembered all those years where she was this pariah absconding into her room. She remembered this second war where they laughed and ridiculed her every move and how Peggy never acknowledged it was happening. She remembered how Peggy's husband had one day come to her and tried to undress her and that she bit him which invited his fullest hatred of her. From that day onward there wasn't a comfortable moment. Even at Christmas this "uncle" excoriated her for sitting with the rest. She had to sit in a corner of the room and hide in books and distant places. She wanted to tell Peggy about how he had drooled over her with his wet slobbering eyes and then tried to undress her, the biting, and how the biting had led to more contempt. But she was wise. She knew that there was no use broaching this subject any more than shedding any feelings over the decapitation of the Turk. She was all alone in the world and the choices were to kill herself or to become immune to others and not let them affect her and she chose the latter path.
At the park she swam for a short time in the swimming pool. Gleaming studfish of the Spandex species were everywhere and their gleaming bodies magically invoked within her sexual feelings—each in his own way. Then she sat along a lake watching row boats stir the waters that were turned to silver in the sunlight and joggers running on a road that was to her right. Her womanly instincts wondered what life would be like to be involved with one of such studly apparitions. She disregarded such lowly inclinations by walking around the park. She followed loud pop music and then with a hundred others she did some aerobics according to the movements of the teacher on his wooden platform and then, exhausted, she lay in the shade of the trees. She became aware of feathery leaves, angular leaves, paddle shaped leaves and the fronds of palms and ferns. She briefly fell asleep and when she awoke those leaves had become a silhouette. She felt blessed to be in such beautiful variety and the ostensible plan that went into it, or at any rate, "one hell of a variety from adaptation"; and this healed and restored her. As she watched runners also fade into silhouettes she yearned for the mystery of their movement. She wanted to run to foreign countries and escape this God sanctioned superpower that school children were brainwashed into believing as better than all other countires. She wanted to peak inside these foreign lands and say "Hi" to its denizens.
She went into a bathroom in a McDonald's restaurant and changed into more formal clothes. Then she went shopping at Sax. The outlandish prices to the clothing of super rich snobs appealed to her, as it had before, but when she got back to her car she was reminded that they were just foder for covering nakedness.
By chance she saw that a travel agency was still open and she stepped into it. Photographs of Peru, Mexico, Egypt, Italy, and China graced her. Where would she go? Should she take her son with her as part of his education? No, she told herself. This would be a contemplative retreat.
A week later she went from New York to San Fransisco; San Fransisco to Tokyo; and then Tokyo to Bangkok. She took in temples and Buddhas via the river boat bus, the Chao Phraya Express. She saw opulent skyscrapers and she meandered through labyrinths of tackey tin and wooden cobbled shacks along the river. She saw two young boys with Butch haircuts in dark blue shorts and light blue shirts embracing each other as they walked closer than lovers, emaciated and fur-lost dogs beaten with sticks and then shoved into large racket and burlap bag instruments like butterfly nets. She watched the dog catchers dump the hounds into wooden crates, uniformed teenagers in sidewalk restaurants enjoying the process, coconut tonic vendors putting straws in the cut cocunut shells and fruit on a stick salesmen pushing their glass ice and fruit carts. She spent most of her time downtown. On the sidewalk she saw men's underwear sprawled on a table top that was balanced by one of those plastic stools used as chairs at sidewalk restaurants or those for tired sidewalk salesmen. "I wish I had the man in the undies" she said aloud to her amusement. Then she passed containers of raw fish on ice next to the sharkfin restaurant. A young man who gained a commission from bringing in the masses into the restaurant said, "Fish! good!" He was so palpable and so much in her reach. She turned toward him and stopped. She put her hand on his chest and slid it down to his waist. "Fish good, you say?" she asked and then giggled like an embarrassed school girl for she was embarrassed by her own temerity. "Fish very good!" said the google and glaze eyed fish salesmen. He put his fingers into the waste line of his pants and jiggled them in a couple seductive bounces. Outside of the fomenting of her own sensuality, she felt the imagined spirit of Buddha permeating everything like a warm wind.
After three days here she went from Bangkok to Rome. Her world was that other world, that etheral world consisting of the highest apogee of man, that which was least in his making and yet here it was manifest in tangible objects from one museum to another. This was her idea of heaven: to be fully in that small realm of one's mind where true beauty existed and within a city where others, some living and most dead, had also engaged in that area of the brain and produced objects so splendid. At a Burger King a block away from such a museum she bought a couple vegie-burgers, an apple pie turnover, and a chocolate shake. When they were deposited on her tray she turned and walked to an empty table. Near it she stopped with mouth agape. There at an adjacent table were Rick and his father, MF.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In Burger King words ensnared the artistic ascetic for she too succumbed to polite requests and smiles. For whatever chimerical ideas she had about isolation in Antarctica she knew that too little society, as too much of it, would be deleterious. She too would have been an incontrovertible loose canon had she not maintained some sociable traits; and so she sat down at their table despite not wanting to do so. "Rick, if you weren't seated with your father I wouldn't have recognized you. Heavens!" Heaven—it was a word that nobody believed in and everybody used. She put her elbow on the table, chin in a palm. Then she focused her intensity sociably, basking him with it gently in the rays of her orbs. She knew that her gesture was probably an affected one, oblivious to the fact as father and son might be, but she did not think its contrived essence as being all that important. Hers was like one of Peggy's few favorable gestures, only she had improved upon it. Instead of using this gesture for situations where there was an affinity of values she used it, on occasion, to further rapport. By pretending to care more than one actually did one couldn't help but emulate and believe in the skit, making the dubiously real in fact real. With a deep albeit contrived sense of caring, she said, "I haven't seen you for so long. Are you still friends with Nathaniel?"