She questioned who this MF was. The boys were easier: the preferable one who had not come from her womb purred more often than he whined and the one with the demanding mouth railed and complained in less of a dual personality than the former but on the pettiest of things from her forgetting to buy him Pop Tarts to Hispanic Betty's abuse of toilet paper; however both could be easily characterized as egocentric toy soldiers who beat their drums chaotically when their batteries needed recharging or a TV advertisement had indelibly branded a "need" onto their brains. The other one (this Michael, this MF, this Mr. Phlegmatic) she knew in multi-interpretable bits for all her intimacies with him. She knew that he was glad that Rick now had a mother but this might have just indicated that he was glad to have some woman chauffeur his kid to after-school activities and take the kid clothes-shopping so that he did not need to do it. She knew that he claimed to be pleased that Rick now had a surrogate brother who might "toughen him up a bit" but this was ironic since the only one he beat with his belt was Nathaniel (except for occasional S&M sessions with her, and during that time she would struggle to gain the mastery of the belt, and it was she who more often then not would be the sadist). She knew that he had taken the boys to an amusement park a week ago when she was going through what she believed he thought of as an imaginary sickness, and yet she wasn't sure if it was from love that he removed all noise away from her or from simple indifference and neglect. Inconsequential facts littered her mind about Michael (facts like him giving his aunt a poinsettia every Christmas or that he liked to sodden his eggs with mustard), but was this inconsequentiality the real summation of the man? Was she, his woman, in such a needy state of mind that facts like this and the manipulative power of sexual pleasure so much more enhanced when with another should posed themselves as intimacy. Was this the epitome of a woman? It might be; but then, she told herself, she was a female and not a woman, and that she was a goddess and not a mere mortal. Her love of him, she judged, was a few facts mixed in fantasies begotten in neediness. What she asked and chose to know about him and the feeling of love she mixed as color on her pallet to spread around these facts were her own invention. She decided that she did not know him at all.