Kirstin Valdez Quade - Night at the Fiestas - Stories

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.