She wasn't married or engaged to Michael--matter of fact, hating her as she knew that he no doubt did, she wasn't in any type of relationship with him unless that envisaged by an overactive imagination off and spinning downhill like a rolling wheel of a flipped car-- and yet society's prudish stipulation that a woman be faithful to the partner she was with, or had been with, nonetheless had some sway of her movement and thought as it had at previous times when they lived together. Back then she would always try to restrain herself from those cans of beer that preceded her chewing tobacco snacks in order to be spared from his scowling, to continue to seem attractive to him, and to appear less extreme and headstrong than what she really was. Such was the influence of this mixing intimately: this blending of pathos and petulance blurring boundaries; this nastiness of prudish society inflicting one with guilt for pursuing more than the allotted share of the love it had espoused; and these incessant compromises of herself in order to keep a relationship with a man. She was but a tiny shadow of original and independent thought that was dwarfed and absorbed by the massive conservative shadow of America. Her shadow was poised like the Statue of Liberty -- the liberty which had inadvertently created her unorthodox perspectives, but hers was an inconsequential adumbration. Americans were a provincial people as all bullies of the world were provincial, and the thought of mixing with an American (even one as Italian as Michael) seemed nasty indeed. The nastiness of being here in his home came upon her like the sticky wetness of a man's semen. The nastiness of debasing herself from loneliness by coming here was to walk on the same spit and urine evaporating pavements within the swaths of mankind.