The four of them had just returned from an American football game and she was still numb all over like someone who had been kidnapped, blindfolded, and finally freed with no explanation. She would have been less discontent to sit in a world football game (this thing Americans referred to as soccer). When young, she liked playing the game herself so sitting through continual action, even if it were continually boring, would not have been so bad. Better, she would have eagerly challenged Michael to a racket ball or tennis competition or played badminton or croquet with the whole family. Instead, like Patty Hearst taken from relaxation in front of her TV at gunpoint, she had been carried off and put on bleachers at an American football game. The boys, whom she nicknamed Mr. Placid and Mr. Petulant (Michael, formerly MF, being Mr. Phlegmatic), had willed this to happen. She couldn't have opposed them. It was her son's tenth birthday. It was one of her presents to Adagio that she should sit there on the bleachers stuffing these frankfurters or weenies into her mouth and staring onto this little sea of intermittent tackle and throw action (the object being thrown like an irregular, phallic weenie). There were crueler fates than the desire to jump out of one's skull. She had to continually remind herself that it was her son's tenth birthday and that she was doing this for him. These reminders helped her to construct a florid and baroque facade of smiles and chatter. Her chatter was a repetition of their ideas about the players and the plays. Since she hadn't really observed a thing and they seemed to like womanly creatures who would parrot their ideas, parrot them she did. The game being one and then two hours relegated to the past, it still seemed to go on incessantly in their imaginations. Here she and Nathaniel were 8 years removed from patty cake. Here they were now nestled together for his blowing out of the candles on the Betty Cake made from a Betty Crocker cake mix. Here they were as part of something larger--four birdies and a Betty in the nest. Because of the random bird droppings of fate these people were somehow hers (or at least it seemed so according to her feelings). She told herself that in her promiscuous years in Houston she had been a crazy woman defying her repugnance of physical touch to play seductress games, half wanting to conceive a clump of clay in whom she could shape her animadversion of life, her gentle contemplative preoccupation, and her glint of disdain. However, these two--father and son-- were born through the sanity of her head in a feeling of love. These relationships conceived in the art and beauty of Rome were of friendship and a shared exploration.