Her current project, Canute Commands the Tides, was promising, completely different from anything she’d done before—more personal, more urgent. It was based on the legend of Canute, the Danish king of England, old fool, who, claiming he could stop the tides, ordered his throne carried to the waterline, where, predictably, it was swamped by waves. It seemed to Margaret there was something marvelous about Canute’s determination. Instead of submitting to the tide of life, letting old age drag him away and under, Canute had railed against it.
She’d started Canute Commands the Tides two years ago, after their daughter Charlotte relocated to Johannesburg. Margaret hadn’t even known they’d been considering a move until Charlotte and her husband announced they’d be packing up the girls and going clear across the ocean.
What had really shocked Margaret, though, was the stunning, paralyzing sense of abandonment she’d felt. When Harold was at work and Margaret had the house to herself, it seemed she couldn’t stop crying, and when she wasn’t crying, she wandered from room to room, feeling utterly without purpose. “I don’t think it’s nice,” she told Charlotte coldly, long-distance, hating herself. “We’re not young, you know. We need our granddaughters.”
The real problem, she realized, when she began to get hold of herself, was that all her life, she’d never really chosen, just allowed the currents to pull her this way and that. Even her art—especially her art—she’d just let happen to her. She’d never truly decided, thrown herself into it headlong, made it matter.
Canute himself was not in any of Margaret’s paintings: just his throne and the lapping white-tipped waves. In her first attempt, the throne was gilt-edged and red velvet, sinking in the sand, upholstery sodden. But the year was so early, 1015. She pictured what she knew of those feudal lords. Brutal battles fought with clubs and spears and seaxes. Thanes. Thralls. Feasting kings distributing the spoils of war among subjects in heavy-beamed mead halls. The next version of the throne was a plank-backed wood armchair, high and hard. In her next attempt, she downgraded Canute again, giving him one of the yellow-spindled kitchen chairs that had been in her childhood home in Marblehead. Still, the painting wasn’t right.
Now, in her new home, Margaret sliced the packing boards from her canvases and laid the paintings side by side on the floor, discouraged by the blank backgrounds, the crooked sketched lines, the paint that had been worked and reworked into mud. Daisy nosed the corner of one, and Margaret nudged her away with a toe, still studying her attempts.
Margaret rubbed her face with anxious hands, and the familiar and nauseating cocktail of emotions surged: guilt, impatience, dread, ambition. She must get herself organized: set up the studio, begin a strict schedule. She would tackle Canute; she would move forward.
THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS were spent unpacking. At Carmen’s insistence, they dealt with the house room by room, beginning with the studio. “Lord,” said Carmen, hands on hips, as she stood in the doorway. “Looks like you had pigs rooting around in here.” Margaret watched with admiration as Carmen’s quick hands sorted her materials into piles, filled toolboxes and coffee cans and bookshelves, made it all manageable so that after only one morning the studio was ready.
“This is what I’m working on,” Margaret confided, turning a canvas that was facing the wall, the painting of the kitchen chair.
Carmen, crouched by the bookshelf, looked over her shoulder briefly. “What’s that chair doing on the beach?”
“It’s based on a myth—”
“It’s a pretty picture. Reminds me of when me and my sister went to San Diego, oh, ten, twelve years ago. I love the beach.” Sigh. “What would I give.”
MARGARET HAD BEEN UNEASY about getting rid of things from the old house when they’d moved, so she hadn’t, the result being that the more she and Carmen unpacked, the more claustrophobic she felt. The cornflower striped couch, the one she’d loved and which had looked so elegant and Colonial in Connecticut looked terrible here: fussy and wrong. So many of their things were like that.
“You must miss your husband,” said Carmen as she unwrapped the stemware.
“Of course it’s hard, but he has work there and I have my work here.” It wasn’t good for men to be on their own, Margaret knew that. They suffered without their wives, died earlier. In those same studies she’d read that married women were unhappier than those who lived alone.
Carmen looked at her, head tilted, questioning.
Her fury, this last year, had been as debilitating as her depression, and it was directed squarely at Harold—and why? Because he’d married her? Because they’d had a lovely girl together and their lives had been blessed, and he’d had a purpose while Margaret had drifted through it all? Margaret couldn’t articulate her fury, and Harold wouldn’t have known what to do with it even if she could.
Instead, night after night Margaret initiated in bed, and usually Harold responded, laughing, joking about her new insatiability. She demanded that he fuck her—said those words, though she never had before—and he did, his face serious and intent above her. She came in silent, anguished rage, and each time after, she cried—another thing she’d never done. Poor Harold was solicitous and baffled. He stroked her hair and asked what was wrong; had he been too rough, had he hurt her?
Carmen had moved on to the wedding china, wiping each piece with a dishcloth. “I have a set like this,” she said, holding up a plate. “It was a door prize at the Golden Mesa.”
“Oh,” said Margaret, deeply embarrassed for Carmen. She gassed up at the casinos; gas was cheaper there, and the restrooms always clean. Once, on an impulse, she’d pushed through the glass door that separated the convenience store from the casino itself. Inside it was dark, air thick with cigarette smoke, walls lined with mirrors reflecting the rows and rows of old people sitting before the blinking slots. Jangling manic sounds, frenetic lights, and, suspended from the ceiling, giant pots painted in the black and white geometrics of the Anasazi. Margaret had felt profoundly depressed, too depressed even to flee, until a skinny red-eyed man offered to buy her a drink. She’d shaken her head mutely and turned to go, grateful and disoriented when she stepped into the bright sunlight. It was all so tasteless, she’d told Harold later on the phone, such a misguided cheapening of culture.
“It seems like the casinos could cause a lot of social problems on the reservations,” Margaret ventured.
“Oh, I know,” said Carmen, tucking a strand of hair into her ponytail. “They’re getting so rich.” Sigh. “Oh, well. The slots relax me.” Carmen stood, pressing herself up on her thighs, then carried the stack of plates to the kitchen.
Margaret smiled brightly and sliced the packing tape on another box.
Why had she never noticed how much fabric she’d been surrounded by in her old life? The plush towels, the brocade and rugs, all the throw pillows and merino afghans, all meant to swaddle and muffle. And her clothes—heels, tailored jackets, stiff leather handbags—boxes and boxes of the stuff.
Carmen held a silk charmeuse blouse by the neck, displaying the label. “Ooh, Calvin Klein. Fancy lady.” Daisy nosed Carmen, who rolled her over with a palm and rubbed the soft pink belly.
“Take it.” Margaret examined then tossed aside a herringbone skirt. “I can’t believe I wore all this.”
“Are you sure?” Carmen asked about each item as she folded it neatly and set it behind her.
“God, yes! Take it all.” There was no way Carmen would fit into most of the clothes, but perhaps she would make them over.
Each day when Carmen left, she swung full garbage bags into the trunk of her dented Chrysler LeBaron, and each day Margaret felt lighter. It pleased Margaret to think of Carmen using her things. It must have felt like a windfall for her. Most of Margaret’s belongings weren’t cheap, were probably nicer than the things Carmen bought for herself. And perhaps she sold some of it, though Margaret didn’t care for that thought nearly as much.
In the end, Margaret kept a few of the ornate mahogany burea
us and side tables—family pieces—and the dining room set. Harold’s brown leather chair and about half the books. In the end, it was mostly her things she got rid of. All she wanted now were clean surfaces and straight lines, mental and creative space.
She packed Charlotte’s old drawings and school papers, ceramic frogs and elephants, spent a fortune to mail the box all the way to Johannesburg. Just last year, she’d sooner have died than part with these wobbly self-portraits and plaster handprints. Standing in line at the post office now, though, it felt essential to shed the weight of them. Charlotte would be wounded, but she was grown now, and Margaret was not, after all, an archive.
CARMEN’S TECHNIQUES WERE pleasingly old-fashioned: she cleaned with scalding water, bleach, white vinegar, wiped the windows with newspaper, scrubbed the kitchen floor with rags on her hands and knees. “Mops don’t do nothing,” she declared. “They just move the dirt around.”
She watched television while she worked. First the news programs, then the morning game shows. Soaps, talk shows. They worked their way through the day. Margaret found herself looking forward to some of the programs, talking about the personalities as though they were common acquaintances. “Bob Barker must be a million years old.”
“Oh,” said Carmen knowingly, “he’s had work. Just look at that neck.”
Of course, Margaret thought afterward, these television personalities were the only common acquaintances she and Carmen had.
If Margaret went for a walk, when she returned, the channel was often switched to a Spanish station, where women with bright makeup and clothes too sparkly and tight wept and ranted at surly, hard-jawed men. “Sorry,” Carmen would say and change it back to one of the English networks.
“No, no,” Margaret protested, but Carmen waved her away.
“It’s more fun if we can talk about it,” she said.
And talk Carmen did. Instead of painting, Margaret spent the mornings with her, sometimes paying bills, sometimes working alongside, sometimes just watching. Carmen’s own grandmother had been a traditional healer, a curandera.
“Oh, she was mean. The other kids were scared of her because she always wore black dresses down to here, and, my God, did she complain. She used to tell us stories to make us behave, about how La Llorona was going to go drown us in the river.” Carmen laughed. “Me and my brother ran away from her when she was watching us one night. We ran to our cousins’ and slept on their porch. All night on the porch, up against each other like puppies. Were we spanked when they found us!” She laughed and wiped her forehead with her arm, holding the wet rubber gloves over the sink so the water wouldn’t drip down her sleeves.
Sometimes during the soap operas, if a character was particularly charming and incorrigible, Carmen mentioned her troubles with her son. It seemed she supported him entirely. “Ruben tries, poor baby, but those supervisors. You know how people can be when they get power, and if they treat him so terrible, of course he’s going to get mad. He’s doing good now, though, got himself a new job, driving equipment to the road crews up there in Raton and all over.” Carmen snapped a towel, folded it exactly without even looking. “He tells me in the break room they got a sign that says DRINK ON THE JOB AND KISS THE JOB GOODBYE. My daughter, she says if he’s good for six months, really serious, she’ll help him pay for long-term therapy.”
Carmen’s daughter Vivian was a high school teacher. She’d married well and lived in Albuquerque in a house with two sinks in the kitchen and three and a half baths. Every month or so Carmen visited, and her daughter took her to dinner and various touring performances. “Oh, the play was beautiful,” Carmen told Margaret after Lord of the Dance. “You should have seen the clothes.”
“Has he tried rehab before?” Margaret fingered the laundry piled between them on the couch. She wished she could have been the one to offer to pay for Ruben’s therapy. These sorts of thoughts had begun to occur to her—that she’d like to give Carmen something, do something to make her life easier.
“The state paid for an eight-day detox just last year after his DUIs. And some therapist sessions. I just pray to God this time he’ll get better.”
“It can be hard,” Margaret said, “but sometimes the best way to help someone like Ruben is to cut him off. Let him know that you trust he can pull it together on his own.”
“I know, I know.” Carmen sighed. “That’s what Vivian tells me, but he’s my baby, you know. And the law sure don’t make it easy for him—like last year, they take away his license and still they make him show up once a week to meetings. Plus he has work. Well, how’s he supposed to get there if he can’t drive?”
“Ah,” said Margaret.
“You got to help your kids until you can’t. Besides, there’s Autumn to think about. She can’t do without, just to teach Ruben a lesson. Maybe he won’t make good of himself, but at least I can try. Autumn’s mom never gave him the emotional support he needs, and now she’s talking about trying to take his custody. It’s terrible. Nothing’s ever come easy for him, not one thing.”
Carmen put the stacked towels in the basket. “You know, Ruben’s real good at fixing stuff.” She glanced around the room, as though looking for items that needed fixing. “You give him an engine, and he can figure out what’s wrong with it in no time. He retiled my whole bathroom. Anything you need done.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Margaret, and wondered if there were some outdoor jobs she could give the boy. Maybe it would encourage him to stay on the right path. She imagined getting to know the family, being invited to their big parties, then caught herself and blushed. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
That afternoon, as she was leaving, Carmen said, “Honey, you don’t need me every day. You don’t make near enough mess.”
“Yes, I do.” Margaret was surprised by the insistence in her voice. “There’s so much that needs to be done. The windows. And the linens need to be rewashed. The van must have been stuffy.”
IN THE AFTERNOONS, after Carmen left, Margaret found herself taking frequent stock of the kitchen cupboards, looking for a reason to drive into town and away from her studio, a mission for the day that was both achievable and time-consuming, anything to keep from having to be alone with her painting. There was so much to do, but Margaret didn’t know what, and she couldn’t sit still long enough to let it come. So instead, she organized her supplies, cleaned her brushes, made lists of colors she needed.
One afternoon, on one of these errands, she drove with Daisy to Santa Fe, bought lunch downtown and ate it on a bench on the Plaza. As the shadows of leaves shifted around her, she watched the faces of the other women. Perhaps she would meet someone—for some reason the black and white photographs of Georgia O’Keefe always rose in her mind—with whom she could talk about her art. But they all seemed to be tourists. She wished there weren’t so many people, wished the Five & Dime didn’t just sell disposable cameras and plastic chile ristras and cheap postcards and souvenir scorpion magnets. She would have liked it all to be a little more real, and felt a pang of regret for not having moved out here twenty, thirty years ago.
Two elegantly dressed women her age walked toward her with shopping bags in their hands. They didn’t gaze in shop windows or photograph the Native Americans under the portico of the Palace of the Governors. They walked like they belonged here. One wore a silver squash blossom necklace over a black silk shift.
As they approached, Daisy spied a hot dog wrapper in the path. She strained on her leash, whining.
The squash-blossom woman smiled as she passed. “A beauty! I have two Yorkies of my own.”
Margaret tugged Daisy back sharply, irritated. These women were the kind of people Carmen would despise, the kind of people Margaret might be mistaken for.
WHEN SHE DID FORCE herself to pour out linseed oil and squeeze paint onto the palette, Margaret took a great deal of time over the preparations, and for every dab of paint on the canvas, she stepped back and considered. The perspective was off on
one of the chair legs, the waves looked sculpted in plasticine, there wasn’t nearly enough contrast. It was so hard to get into her work; she pushed tiny bits of paint across the edge of the canvas, avoiding, avoiding, avoiding. After only twenty or thirty minutes, she wanted to stamp her foot and whine like Charlotte had when she was four and frustrated over her shoelaces: It’s too hard.
Early one morning, however—Sunday, Carmen wouldn’t be in today—Margaret awoke thinking of the sandstone formations along the highway to Santa Fe and decided she’d integrate them into her piece. After all, this place had changed her, and Canute Commands the Tides should reflect that. Old Canute would not be on the Maine coast, but on a mythical desert-like beach that had never existed, a beach ringed with cliffs and red sandstone balanced like meringue.
Without brushing her teeth or putting in her contacts, Margaret ran to her studio in her nightgown, exhilarated. She stepped out on the cold patio in bare feet to scoop sand, which she drizzled through her fingers onto the palette. Oranges and reds and browns, paint mounded thick. All morning she worked, chilly, yet sweating along her sides and at the back of her neck. Under her feet, sand gritted.
When she stepped back, the euphoria was lost. It’s true her cliffs resembled Camel Rock and the others, but the whole effect was self-consciously mystical, like an image on a new-agey Taroh card. And this kind of textured painting had already been done, and done better.
How to capture it? How to convey what the story meant to her, what Canute meant? Margaret looked with despair at all her attempts, lined up around the studio. It wasn’t fair. She tried and she tried, but this rot could be hanging in any motel, except with a yellow kitchen chair dropped in. And now the metaphor was becoming tangled in Margaret’s mind. Was the story about admirable gumption, Canute’s resolve to determine his destiny in the face of mighty, indifferent reality? Or about his foolish, maniacal arrogance? Some sources, insisting on his wisdom, said Canute had actually ordered his throne carried to the sea to prove to his admiring courtiers the absurdity of arguing against God and nature. Perhaps this is what her subject should actually be: gracious yielding to the forces that had shaped her life. Or maybe the whole thing was just a joke and the story was about nothing more than plain old defeat.
Night at the Fiestas: Stories Page 20