by Julie Mars
Rico dropped into the chair next to her, and she reached over and placed her hand on his forearm. That’s when the tears rushed in, like a violent storm. He had collapsed over his folded arms, wedging his mother’s fingers in, and while he sobbed and sobbed, mostly silently, he felt the warmth of her touch like an electrical current, pulsing into him in a steady way that after a long while calmed him down.
“Wait a little while,” she finally said. “Women go through things. Just wait a little while and see what happens.”
That was three years ago. Nothing had happened since. Until today.
Rico reached for the ignition key and turned it. He checked his rearview mirror. He could still see the corner of Margaret’s house, her mailbox, and one of those big trees in her yard, as he pulled out into the street.
1974
NOTHING. THAT’S what the days and nights are filled with. A thick, airless nothing that makes him afraid to move too much. An idea has developed in his mind: to preserve his sanity, if such a thing is even possible, he needs to stay completely still, his back pressed hard into the grey concrete wall. So hard that he might leave a permanent imprint in the shape of his upper body.
He draws his knees up, folds his arms on top of them, and rests his head there, where he can stare down into the dirt. After a while, it begins to swim before his eyes. He watches intently.
Molecules of brown dirt, helpless and trapped.
Everything helpless and everything trapped.
THE NEXT morning, Margaret and Magpie took a long walk by the river, and they saw their first coyote. They had gotten an early start, maybe six-thirty, plenty of time to get in three brisk miles and still have an hour, before the sun got too hot, for Margaret to collect sticks and stones and assemble them into a spontaneous sculpture on the riverbank, a pastime she had fallen into on their very first walk in the bosque. Magpie tended to find a shady spot under some giant cottonwood and sprawl as Margaret worked. Despite her size and her ferocious look, Magpie was a gentle dog—Buddha Dog, Margaret sometimes called her—and perhaps a little lazy. If there was ever an opportunity to stretch out and snooze, she took it. So when Margaret happened to glance in her direction and saw her sitting up, alert, her ears moving like radar to tune into some sound in the brush, she took note.
The bosque all along the river was designated as open space, forever wild, by the state of New Mexico. Margaret, who grew up in the city parks of New York, was astonished that the stretch of it by her little house was often empty in the early morning, no joggers swerving around her, no yuppies pushing high-tech strollers, no bums sleeping it off. She unhooked Magpie’s leash and they strolled along feeling like people may have felt when the world was less crowded and therefore less violent. But she had her years of wariness behind her, and she stopped what she was doing and followed Magpie’s gaze, reaching into her pocket for her keys, lacing them through her fingers like a weapon which she would use if it came to that.
But instead of a man, bent on causing trouble, she saw the coyote, or rather its head barely visible through the leaves and the splashing sunshine. Come out, let me see you, she thought, though she didn’t say a word. Instinctively, she knew that to try to make a friend of a coyote was wrong. Coyotes needed their distance from all humans. To learn to trust even one was a mistake. But she dropped to the ground, just sat there, her gaze focused just beyond the coyote so even eye contact was not an issue. Magpie remained alert, and Margaret noticed that there in that little triangle—her dog, herself, and a wild creature—she felt happier than she had in years, so alive in this moment, so sure that she was exactly where she needed to be, doing just the right thing.
The coyote moved forward into a small open space, gave them one more disinterested look, and took off downriver at a fast trot. Magpie’s head swiveled to follow, and after a few seconds, she dropped back down to the earth and sighed, as if the whole interlude had been a distraction from her nap and she was glad that it was over. Margaret closed her eyes and breathed it in, that final image of the scrawny untamed yellow dog, the way he fit into this landscape, matched it in color and even vibration so closely that he simply vanished. She felt a little fire had been lit in her heart, and it was warming her blood.
She added a long dry stick, twisted and gray, and a few black seedpods she didn’t recognize to her sculpture, and wrapped part of it in reeds from the river until it felt finished. Then she and Magpie walked home before the traffic heading over the bridge toward Avenida César Chávez had even revved up. When she got in, Margaret made a pot of strong coffee, and while it was brewing she was suddenly seized with a desire to hang up the paintings she had shipped from New York. The wooden crate, which had arrived three days ago, left in the yard while she had been at Coronado Wrecking, still remained in the same place—too bulky and heavy to move inside by herself. She went outside and dug through the tools she had stashed under the front seat of her Dodge, finally wrapping her fingers around the crowbar she had packed for just this purpose. She pried the lid off the crate and carried the paintings inside, one by one. Having no success at driving a nail into the adobe, she leaned them up against the walls in the places where they would later hang. She sat in the middle of the living room floor and looked around the perimeter of the room. So much of her life was suggested in the colors and textures, the images and backgrounds. She could get very lost in them.
On impulse, Margaret picked up the phone and dialed Nicolas Brandao, her first painting teacher at the School of Visual Arts, where she had studied for seven years. He’d been a part-timer then, barely out of art school himself, though now he was a full professor—and respected in the art world of New York too, which was no easy thing. His machine picked up on the second ring.
“Nick? It’s Margaret Shaw. I’m actually calling from—”
“Margaret, hello.” His voice sounded sleepy, though it was close to eleven in New York. “Calling from where?”
“New Mexico. Albuquerque. I moved here.”
“Really.” It sounded like a statement, not a question or a verification of fact.
“Really.” A few seconds of silence passed, fairly comfortably.
“When? What brought this on?”
“A couple weeks ago. And I don’t know. It was an impulse.”
“Shit, I wish you’d called me before you left. I would’ve tried to talk you out of it.”
“I know. But that didn’t happen.”
They both laughed, and Nick said, “Just one more of the many things that didn’t happen between us.” Margaret heard him inhale sharply and knew he had just lit a cigarette. She could picture him settled into his old leather reclining chair, positioned so he could see a small section of the Manhattan Bridge and a patch of the East River through the buildings outside his window. “So how’s it going?”
“Good. Different. I feel inspired. I want to learn to weld.”
“And your painting?”
“Back burner for the moment, I think.”
“Margaret . . .”
“Don’t start, Nick.”
“You have so much talent. When are you going to give yourself a chance?”
“That’s what I’m doing in New Mexico. Taking my chances. I’m okay, Nick. Be happy for me.”
“Well . . . if I must.” He took another long, audible drag on his cigarette.
They had never slept together, not once in the nineteen years since they first met. Both had wanted to, but never at the same time. They were circling close in the early days, but then Donny died, and Margaret had gone into a lengthy tailspin that seriously scared Nick. Just as she was recovering, Nick fell in love and got married, a mistake it took him nine years to undo. Margaret had refused all advances during that time, a matter of principle. Meanwhile, his art star had begun to ascend, along with his ego, and Margaret, with her blue collar mistrust of sudden success, found him pretentious and phony. By the time he snapped back to reality, she was involved with a saxophone player. And so it went.
Once, long ago, he had introduced her to a gallery owner, a woman famous for jump-starting art careers. This woman had encouraged her, talked seriously with her for a whole hour, but ultimately said no, which crushed Margaret. It made no difference when Nick reprimanded her. “You know how many galleries rejected me before I got a show. Thirty-one! In three cities! So stop acting like you’re the only artist who ever got knocked down. Get up.”
But Margaret couldn’t.
It had been hard labor for her to put herself forward, collect her slides, and present herself at a gallery so revered by painters she barely felt she had the right to enter it. The owner, a woman in her late forties, wore a Dutch boy haircut and a pair of delicate Italian boots that obviously cost more than Margaret made in a whole month of full-time bartending. She had led Margaret into her office, where a projector was permanently set up. An assistant had come in to pour two glasses of sparkling water and drop Margaret’s slides into the tray. The gallery owner dimmed the lights using a switch built into her desktop. Margaret felt actual physical pain, a deep ache shaped like doubt, press into her throat as the first slide came up.
“Very Brice Marden,” said the woman. But all Margaret saw projected on the wall was her breath and blood.
“I have my influences, like any painter,” Margaret replied, her fingers closing into little fists in her lap.
“I see that,” said the gallery owner as she clicked through three more slides. “These are somewhat derivative, Margaret.” She stopped to sip her water. “Are they early work?”
Margaret forced herself to remain calm. She held her ground, knowing that art was all she had, and she could not let this businesswoman, not an artist herself after all, take it, or make it shrink and fade. But when she’d left the gallery, she’d had to lean against a nearby building for balance. The streets felt mushy and the faces of the trendy passersby were mocking. All she had to hold onto was the handle of her black leather portfolio, an expensive gift from Nick. Margaret was a person who needed—desperately—a yes, not a no. Her whole life was a wall of no: no mother, no father, no brothers, no sisters, no husband, no children, no Donny, no money to speak of, no sense of direction, no degree, no surprises, no sense of belonging, no belief in herself, no idea of the point, no power, no air in her lungs. And now, no art show, either.
It was too much for her, that’s all. And, given her reaction to that very polite rejection, she had to add fragile and weak to the rest of her list of problems, and that slim chance of a yes somewhere in the future wasn’t worth it. Yet she stayed in touch with Nick, and he stayed in touch with her, for years—just in case. Just in case so many things.
They talked for twenty minutes, Margaret sprawled on her couch with her leg flung over the back and the sun streaming in, before she was distracted by a knock on the door. She looked out the kitchen window, and there was Rico.
ON THE way home from the incident at Margaret’s the night before, Rico had stopped at Modelo’s Take Out on Second Street and bought a whole bagful of tamales. He enjoyed being the provider of these little treats that made everyone happy and kept Rosalita out of the kitchen after a long day on her feet at Albuquerque High, where she worked in food prep in the school cafeteria. The aroma of green chile filled the cab of his truck with a certain type of security. It kept his mind off the trouble he felt brewing inside him, despite his efforts to make sense of it all and thereby make it disappear.
The silver lace and the scarlet trumpet vines on the chain-link fences along Riverside Drive had filled out, but not yet reached the point of spilling over. Rico liked that moment, the last days before the long spurt of chaotic growth inspired by the summer monsoons turned everything ragged at the edges. He slowed down and waved as his neighbor’s son, Wilfredo, a lively boy of eleven who reminded Rico of himself at that age, trotted by on the old nag that had lived on this block just one year less than Rico. Wilfredo rode that horse bareback along the river every evening, winter or summer. He was a boy with a big imagination who probably thought Negrita was a black stallion instead of a prime candidate for the glue factory.
Rico drove through his gate, noting that both Rosalita’s and his daughter Maribel’s cars were parked under the ramada he had built for shade. He pulled in next to them and turned off the engine. Sometimes living surrounded by women—his wife, three daughters, a granddaughter, and his mother—Rico felt comforted; other days he felt smothered. Such loveliness came with a high price. For every time he received an unexpected kiss on the cheek, a door was closed along the hallway and behind it was a daughter sobbing over something inconsequential. For every time they sat at the dinner table, all together, and he looked from one pretty face to the next—four generations represented right there in his kitchen—the bathroom door was closed while somebody primped behind it, for hours it seemed, sending him outside to do his business in an old outhouse on the far corner of his property, attached to an ancient one-horse barn-shed that, thank God, he had not knocked down when he bought the place. Sometimes he felt that marriage and family were nothing more than a long row of closed doors, blocking him from something far more interesting. When those moods came upon him, he found some work to do outside and just sweated it out.
“Tamales para todos,” he called out, as he maneuvered himself around a tricycle that his granddaughter, Jessica, had abandoned next to the front door. “Vámonos. Let’s eat.” This produced a flurry of activity: Rosalita quickly setting out silverware and plates, Maribel heading out the back door to collect her abuelita, Lucy rounding up Jessica and putting her in a high chair, and Ana closing up the big nursing textbook she was studying on the couch and slowly making her way toward the kitchen. Rico washed his hands in the kitchen sink, and dropped into his chair at the head of the table as all the women in his life settled like dust around him.
But his mind was elsewhere.
It kept drifting back to the moment when Margaret had appeared in the doorway of his shop, how the sun had conspired to place a halo around her; and he had felt, though he didn’t articulate it, that his destiny had finally found him. And later, the way she looked, so cute in the middle of all those useless engine parts laid out like precious gems. Her hair was black, her skin was pale with a few freckles even, and her eyes were as green as the leaves on the Chinese elm trees above her. He thought she was beautiful. So what if she looked half worn-out. Lots of women did.
The platter of tamales was passed from person to person, a green salad appeared on the table, and diet soft drinks were poured into colorful plastic glasses from two different sixty-four ounce bottles. When this group got ready to eat—before the chewing started—the clatter was intense, and sometimes Rico experienced it like a fog of noise over the table. Just as it would begin to clear, one voice would rise up, and it was always Rosalita’s and she always said the same thing. Rico knew it was coming. “So how was everybody’s day?” she would ask, her voice animated as if she really wanted to know, and maybe she did. But tonight Rico didn’t want to answer, and before the fog had even begun to subside, he blurted out, “Who believes in destiny?”
To Rico, it seemed as if all activity stopped for a heartbeat, the platter pausing in midair, glasses freeze-framed on their way to lips, even the disk jockey on the oldies radio station that Rosalita always had blaring took a little silent swallow before he started up again. And they all turned their heads to face him, even little Jessica.
“Rico,” Rosalita said with a curt little laugh, “eat your tamale.” But Maribel, who was optimistic by nature, her eyes wide, asked, “Papi, did you win the Roadrunner Cash?” and he had to shake his head and say, “Sorry, mi hija, not today,” to which she replied, “Shit,” and everybody laughed.
“I believe in destiny,” Lucy announced, somewhat urgently.
“You’ve got your destiny right there in that high chair,” Rosalita said, and Rico didn’t want to admit he heard bitterness in the words, but he did. He saw Lucy turn toward her mother, saw the way the blood moved in
to her neck, turning it crimson in just a few seconds. But before she could say a word in retaliation, Elena leaned over and kissed Jessica on the top of her head and said, “She’s everybody’s destiny,” and Rosalita looked down into her plate and focused all her attention on cutting her tamale.
“Why do you ask, Papi?” This was from Ana, who was looking at him curiously, as if he were a specimen in one of those medical laboratories at UNM that all the nursing students had to march through from time to time in their biology classes.
“I was thinking about it today while I was working,” he said truthfully. “Why do things happen the way they do?”
“You going philosophical on us, Papi?” Ana asked.
“It’s a fair question,” Rico replied. Part of him regretted even bringing the matter up, but a stronger part wanted to push it farther, so he added, “I want to know. Who here believes in destiny—besides Lucy?”
“It’s official,” Ana said in a loud stage whisper. “Papi’s in his midlife crisis.” Everyone laughed, and Rico did, too.
“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked.
“I’ll look it up in my psych book and get back to you,” Ana responded.
“God is in charge,” Maribel suddenly contributed, a strange intensity in her voice. “There’s no such thing as destiny, just God’s will.”
“And I think everyone has the same destiny,” Elena said. “The grave.”
Silence descended over the table like a light snowfall.
“Elena, mi madre, you sure know how to wreck a party,” said Rico, though he said it with a big smile in his voice.
But that night, long after everyone had gone to bed, Rico stretched out on the couch, and for the first time he thought about dying. His father had died young. His mother seemed to be well on the way, and she was only in her sixties. What words would he want etched into his gravestone, he wondered. Here lies Rico Garcia. He worked hard all his life? He never cheated on his wife? He had a madman inside him and he never let him out? He wanted more than “Beloved husband and father” and the dates of his birth and death.
