The Painted Desert

"When I got to New Mexico that was mine. As soon as I saw it that was my country. I'd never seen anything like it before, but it fitted me exactly. It's something that's in the air, it's different. The sky is different, the wind is different." —Georgia O'Keeffe

When I woke up, people were peering through our bedroom window. It was barely seven o’clock in the morning. One had a pad of paper like Kevin’s reporting pad and was taking notes. Kevin slept naked while I wore a motley assortment of pajama bottoms and old t-shirts. I slid off the bed and did an army crawl on the floor to the window. I stood and pulled the blinds closed.

“What are you doing?” Kevin asked.
“People are looking in the window.”
“What sort of people?”
“I think it’s the yard sale people.”
“It’s seven o’clock in the morning.” Kevin started to go back under the duvet. “It starts at nine-thirty.”
“There’s a crowd outside.”
“Tell them to go away.”
“I’m not going out there!”
“Fine. I’ll go.” Kevin pulled on his clothes and picked up a tiny bat, the sort they give away at the ballpark.
“What’s the bat for?”
“In case anyone gets rude.”
“They were looking through the bedroom window, watching us sleep. I think rudeness is the least of it. Don’t hit anyone with that stupid bat.”

I heard the murmur of voices. Then the garage door opened. Kevin stuck his head in the room. “They aren’t leaving. We’ll just begin now.”
“Did you show them your tiny bat?”
“Put some clothes on. I think the baby’s awake.”

My elegant childhood denied me many things: Disneyland, Barbie, Velveeta, television, fast food, and yard sales. Yard sales were an exotic activity practiced by the less educated. When the Volvo died, my parents gave it to the cleaning lady’s son on the condition that he could start it.

“Are these all the baby clothes you got?” A skinny woman with brightly dyed red hair squinted at the clothesline, which held Luke’s outgrown outfits. The tiny onesies made me want to cry.
“Yes.”
“Well, I wish there was more! I got two grandbabies who need clothes.” The lady wore an expression of disappointed disgust as if it were my fault Luke hadn’t outgrown more of his clothes.

Meanwhile, several other yard sale attendees had stepped across the barrier, separating what was for sale from what was definitely not. They were sizing up a cooler, a push lawn mower, the bikes, and a tool chest.

“What’s the price of this stuff?” The tall and wide questioner was wearing cutoff jeans and a muscle tee.
“Those aren't for sale,” I said. “The sign says you aren’t supposed to go over the rope.”
“I’ll give you a hundred for the lot,” the man said, indicating the entire back of the garage.
“No.” I realized a yard sale was another one of the things that sounded like fun but was actually awful. “Please come to the other side of the rope.”
The man looked mad but stepped back over and picked up a hammer. “How much for this?”
“There’s a price on it.”
“Five dollars? That’s too much for a used hammer.”
“My husband hasn’t touched it.”
“Who doesn’t use a hammer?” the man asked, looking around for support.

Kevin came out holding Luke. “How’s it going?”
“That guy’s upset because you didn’t use the hammer. Also, Luke didn’t grow out of his clothes fast enough. That lady wants to buy the lawn mower.”
“We’re not selling the lawn mower.”
“I told her that.”

Kevin was arguing with a man wheeling a bicycle towards a pickup truck. Our garage sale was a flop, and now people were taking things. “Listen, you redneck motherfucker, that bike’s not for sale.” This was not the way Kevin normally spoke.
“That’s not what the lady said.”
“What, lady?”
“Her.” He pointed at the woman who had complained about the lack of baby outfits.
“I’ve never seen that woman in my life.” Kevin was still holding the unused hammer.
The woman in question turned towards Kevin. “You don’t have to be rude,” she said. “Wouldn’t hurt you to offer some refreshments.”
“Yeah,” a woman wearing one of Luke's sun hats and rifling through a basket of books straightened up. “The Nadicks on Henderson had lemonade and brownies.”

I could tell Kevin was about to say something unforgivable about how this fat lady didn’t need to stuff another brownie into her pie hole. So I walked over, removed the sun hat, and put my hand down on the not-for-sale bike. “You can’t have this bike,” I said. “It belonged to his dead father.” Kevin’s father was alive and had never owned a bike. The man looked startled and let go.

We made forty-nine dollars. “Here.” Kevin handed me a pile of sweaty dollar bills. “Gas money.”

I  wrote Luke letters for every day I would be in New Mexico. The letters talked about mommies and babies, how I would come home soon, and how much I  loved him. I put all the letters into an accordion file, marking each day. I recorded myself telling stories, singing songs like London Bridge, The Wheels on the Bus, and a classic of guilty mothering called My Mommy Comes Back with its chorus, “My mommy comes back, she always comes back, she never would forget me.”

I sprayed a t-shirt with my scent, a ginger-lemon combination and chose several photographs of us together. All of these items were reviewed with Kevin.
“Will you read him one of the letters every day?”
“No. But probably my mom will.”
“I don’t know what else to do.”
“Maybe not abandon your child.”
“Miserable mommies have miserable children.”
“Miserable mommies live in slums with multiple children and no help.”
“No one called Hemingway selfish. He had five wives and ignored his children.”
“He also shot himself in the head.”
“I’m sorry, Kevin. I have to go. Luke will understand.”
Kevin looked at me with eyes of flint. “I don’t understand.”
“You married a writer, a person who was basically fearless, a survivor. I need to get that back.”
Kevin didn’t answer.

We had packed up the house and a strangely silent couple had offered the asking price. I would leave for Taos the next morning while Kevin stayed through the weekend and then drove to Missouri with Luke. We would reunite in Chicago in a month or less. When I constructed the plan, it made sense, but Kevin’s anger and Luke’s face made the idea seem preposterous. I was a monster mother.

When I stopped drinking, I realized, I rarely made decisions as a drunk. Things just happened: relationships, jobs, car crashes. Kevin was a choice, Luke was a choice, and going away for a month to write was also a choice, less popular than marrying or having a baby, but I wasn’t doomed to weave straw into gold fading away in a Texas subdivision. 

Leonard Cohen wrote, “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in” which sounded like a good thing, but light also illuminates flaws and faults while the soft glow of the early days of our marriage, the crisis of the birth, had kept most of our problems in the shadows.

Unlike the past, this trip was not a kamikaze flight into the unknown. I was a sober wife and mother with a new Neon and a Triple A membership. This time, I would stop and sleep on the way and not depend on coffee and amphetamines to keep me awake. It was six hundred and seventy-six miles to Taos. In Tucumcari, I checked into a motel next to the highway. Someone was in the back room watching the news on television.

“Howdy,” the woman said. “You need a room?” She was about forty, wearing a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt and flip-flops.
“Yes.”
“You hear about the plane?”
“Was there a crash?”
”Taking off from Miami. Crashed right into the fucking swamp. Excuse the French, but seriously, that’s gotta suck with all the alligators.”
“No survivors?”
“Not so far. “You can watch with me if you’d like. I ain’t going nowhere.”

I didn’t want to see the wreckage, the television cameras scanning the ground, framing what looked like a child’s shoe. The room behind the office was hung with twinkling Christmas lights, and an air conditioner blew cold air into the room. The color television was in one corner with a couch facing it, the couch upholstered in a light purple velvet. On the wall were several framed prints of big-eyed children and a big-eyed kitten. It was a hideous room. I sat down and listened as the reporter described the salvage operation. There was no hope of finding anyone alive.

“Hello?”
“Hi. I made it to Tucumcari.”
“Good for you.”
“Is he okay?”
‘So far. You left this morning.”
“I know, but I’m usually there at bedtime.”
“He’s fine.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Seriously, who leaves their child?”
“Fathers.”

On first impression, Taos was a hot, dusty, desert town. After several wrong turns, I found the foundation’s main office and picked up my key, the welcoming sheet, which was mainly a list of recommended local restaurants and a bottle of water. The foundation’s director held my hand after the initial handshake and said, “Welcome, Molly. I know you struggled for this." I wasn’t prepared for his comment. After driving nonstop, I felt a terrible pain in my chest, a psychic hangover of massive proportions. “This is a magical place. Try to allow things to happen.”

I followed the map to my casita, a small pueblo house set off in the woods. When I saw the empty back seat, I felt a stab of pain, which was replaced with wonder. Luke’s’ birth brought noise into my life, the cry of a hungry baby, the babble of a child learning how to talk, the constant questions, precious but so insistent. Why? How? When? In contrast, Kevin had grown quieter. Someone in an Al-Anon group had called this quiet “the violence of silence.” It wasn’t a tranquil pause, but many unspoken words hung in the space between us.

Now, there was quiet. I felt the peace that had eluded me since my pregnancy ended. Somehow, I had lost myself again, a self I struggled to protect from my father’s criticism and my mother’s scrutiny, a self that had existed only for others because the alternative was desertion or death. From the outside, leaving might appear utterly selfish, but knowing my son needed a mother I knew I had made the right choice.

The casita was one room with a bed in the far corner, a kitchen equipped with a two-burner stove and a sink, a wood-burning stove, and a writing/living area with two comfortable chairs, a desk, and an upright wooden chair. The Pueblo style walls were smooth and made of sun-dried mud. Heavy wooden beams crisscrossed the entire room, and for such a compact structure the ceilings were high and the windows provided a fair amount of light. Since leaving my apartment in New York City I had struggled to find a home. The London apartment was starting to reflect my essence, but the Dallas house was too big and badly designed to transform. We rattled around in that house, Kevin rarely home while Luke and I were regulated to the kitchen and his play area off the kitchen, the rest of the rooms remaining empty of life and nearly empty of furniture.

I blamed myself for lacking initiative and failing in my role as a wife and mother. Apparently, it was my responsibility to create a warm and welcoming refuge for my overworked husband. Still, looking around the small space of the casita, I recognized the impossibility of that task. People could not be inserted into a property, a life, or a marriage and manipulated like puppets. 

photo by Lisha Riabinina

Just after sunrise, silence was the first wave and then the sounds of birds and small rustles in the trees and bushes that surrounded the casita. I absorbed the slow unfolding of the morning, standing on my front steps, the air chilled by the desert night, colors that didn’t exist in Dallas, the lilac of the distant mountains, the ochre tones of the closer hills, an explosion of clouds, the sun pushing through, drenching the landscape, sweeping back the moon and stars, nature in all its bossy glory, I had forgotten how to breathe. 

—Molly Moynahan