Before school had started it was as if Gabriele and Nathaniel were completely alone except for the clients. It was as if in her remote choice for a home she had the idea that she could plant a society like a garden, water it nicely, and extirpate it of weedy or symbiotic associations. It was as if she believed that when left to her guidance, allowed to spin around happily in play according to his own benign whims, and following nothing but the occasional orphic music of the ice- cream truck, her son would be a self-contained paradigm of happiness. Back then when he was four and five she had two years of really believing that such bliss would go on perpetually and she half dreamed that if she succeeded with him, she could advocate Gabrieleism everywhere. It would be her movement--a philosophy of self-containment and human empowerment to ward off loneliness, curiosity, and hormones that always stunted intelligent beings from pushing onto the next species. Guarding against these foibles, according to her, would make one less of a sociable and hedonistic monster than he or she would be otherwise. And yet, despite her conviction that her strange life was the way of truth, she had her misgivings about it. There were times she hated clients who had banged forcefully within her; and that tacit hate shot out like lasers from her eyes. It would be directed toward situations such as loud cellular telephone conversationalists interrupting her contemplative sketches in the park, and bank tellers who closed the counters to go to lunch once she arrived at the head of the queue with her non-taxable, ill-gotten gain. With the bank tellers in particular she wanted to snap off their noses like the ends of green beans. Also, there were times within her migraines when her stalwart ship felt puny and spun around in waves with all abilities to track its coordinates failing to operate. In illness she often wondered if her ideas about life were nothing but rabid madness. She wondered, at times, if denuding a human with her Gabrielism was like picking off the meat of the man or woman to get to the real human; and since she was smart enough to have reservations about her logic, everyday she continued to put her son on the yellow school bus. "Anyhow," she thought many times through these three years, "rightfully, there are laws against keeping children out of schools and breaking laws to live with an ignorant savage is more trouble than its worth." She was just sorry that she couldn't afford the time to home school him herself or send him to a private school.