Audio: Han Ong reads.
Hard to credit that the figure in front of him is a woman. The silhouette is huge and partly obscured by the screen door. He, on the other hand, is in plain sun, right in the middle of the gravel path—hesitant to go any closer—all of the New Mexico sky on top of him.
Finally the figure opens its mouth, but he still can’t tell what the voice conveys. Yes?
I’m looking for the famous lady, he says.
No famous lady here.
I’m looking for the famous lady painter, he says.
I’m a painter, the figure replies. What’s your business with me?
You’re the lady painter?
If it’s the painter you’re looking for, I’m the only one, the figure says, and then steps out, and there is no diminishment in stature, no feminization. The hair is short, in a pageboy cut, the gray like silver in the sun. And the face is scored by vertical lines, sun-dried, exactly what a mountain would look like—yes, he can see now, no lady here. But there are breast shapes under the overlarge and unclean T-shirt, and the exposed parts of the arms are flabby in a way that he’s familiar with from his mother’s old matron friends, women who gather in her kitchen once a week to spoon cornmeal into husks for the tamales that they sell on the street in tin tubs.
They told us the one who lives here’s a lady. Sorry.
Stop saying that word. I ain’t a man, but I’m not no lady, either. What’s your business with me?
My moms heard you need some help?
How old are you?
I’m four— I’m sixteen, he says.
I’m eighty-two. And you’re offering me help?
I’m strong, he says.
The painter doesn’t say anything, just looks at the boy and breathes. It’s the kind of breathing that you can hear; the belly and the chest rising and falling—it’s an event.
What’s your name? the painter says at last.
Javier.
Are you sixteen or fourteen?
Sixteen. I look younger than I am.
Because if you’re fourteen I can’t hire you.
I can cut firewood. I understand you got a horse? I can feed it. Look after it. I ride, I’ve rode. I see your pickup there. I can drive stick. Bring back some stuff you need from the grocery store, mail your letters at the post office. I can carry your paintings for you. I can carry your paint for you. Buy some more when you need it.
There is a sudden barking from behind the house.
That a dog? I’m good with dogs. I can make sure it gets fed. Make sure it’s home every night. Dogs trust me. I never had a dog, but I’m good with dogs. Looks like your front yard could use some cutting. I’ll cut the grass for you. I’ll clean. I’ll wash dishes. I can cook. I make Mexican food. I worked in a kitchen once, a diner. My father was the cook—they made me the second cook. That was in Las Vegas.
She stops him. All right, all right. How’d you hear about me?
In town. We heard some people talking.
We?
My moms. Just my moms and me. We live in Pueblo?
That’s twenty miles away. How’d you get here?
I walked, he says.
You walked twenty miles.
I told you. I’m strong. Eighty-two. You’re eighty-two?
That’s what I said.
You look strong, he says.
You’re not lying.
Even someone strong, they need help. I’m good. Give me a try.
You heard this in town—that I need help?
Just that you could use some. That we should ask. No hurt in asking.
Is your mom here with you?
No. Just me.
Who in town talked to your mother and you about me?
The old lady, she works checkout at the Robertson Grocery? And also one of the waitresses at the diner. The Stetson?
Lucky for you, you came on a good day, the painter says.
He waits for the painter to say more and he has to wait awhile.
Nobody touches my work but me. Not the canvases, not the brushes, not the paints. The rest, though—the rest I would like help with. Do you talk a lot? Like now—is this what you’re usually like?
I can talk.
I like it quiet. I live here alone.
I’ll be quiet.
If I send you away to come back later, are you going to walk twenty miles?
Yes.
Then walk back twenty miles?
Yes.
That’s a lot of walking.
I can do it.
You need some food in you for the walk back. Have you eaten?
That means you’ll hire me? Javier says.
I’m considering it. I got roast chicken and some sweet potatoes.
In the kitchen, which has windows that look out in three directions, he has to be told twice to sit down. He gladly takes a full glass of water. Helps himself to a huge chunk of the chicken and not much of the sweet potatoes.
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You make this? he asks.
I have someone who delivers food to my doorstep on Tuesdays and Fridays.
I can cook for you. You won’t be needing someone else.
One step at a time, she says.
What’s those boxes in your living room? Are you giving stuff away?
I’m supposed to be going to a retirement home. Like I said, I’m eighty-two.
Oh, he says. You’re not hiring me.
You’re like a bird with only one song, she says, laughing. I was supposed to go to the retirement home next week. I see the sense in it but I don’t really want to. If I hire you, maybe I can push it back for six months, maybe a year. I like this home. It’s been my home for fifty years—almost fifty. At first, I thought you were here for the dog. I’m giving him away. I thought you were with the family coming to pick him up. I thought I got the hour wrong.
He can hear the dog. As soon as she took the chicken out of the oven, it renewed its barking and it hasn’t stopped.
He’s tied to a stake in the back yard, she says. I didn’t want him to see me when they came for him. Will you go and let him loose? He’ll follow you. We can give him some chicken. And—she looks at the untouched sweet potatoes on Javier’s plate—your sweet potatoes.
A black dog with a sleek, short coat, a young face, and an attractive, aggressive snout licks at the places in Javier’s hand that taste of chicken.
Come here, dog, she says, a strip of chicken held low.
The dog takes the food and goes to a corner, where it lowers itself and takes its time eating.
You don’t have to give him away, Javier says. Like I said, I can take care of him.
I already gave my word. The family has a boy who’s waiting.
Where’s the retirement home? Javier says.
It’s two towns over. I’d be living in a separate apartment. Have my meals by myself. I was planning to make the drive back here every day so I could work.
What work? he says and then understands. Oh. You mean painting?
I mean painting. Studio’s out back.
Finished eating, the dog remains on the floor, its tongue hanging out, looking from one to the other, as if the alternating voices were balls being thrown back and forth.
She unpacks only a third of the boxes, mostly clothes, although she wears the same T-shirt and jeans each time he sees her. Sometimes she’ll switch the T-shirt for another, and sometimes she’ll wear one underneath the other. She has a washer and dryer in the studio, and it seems that she washes her outfit at the end of each day, only to put it back on for bed, and it’s what she has on when she opens the door to greet him in the morning.
They have turned the garage into his room, where he stays during the week, going home to his mom on the weekends. He puts the pay, which is in cash, in his pocket. His bed is a folding Army cot topped by an old twin mattress, and his bedding is soft, softer than anything he’s used to, with a design of parallel lines that look like the lines she paints over and over again, on canvas after large canvas.
Watching her work is calming, hypnotic. At first she doesn’t allow him to be in the studio. I can’t work while being watched, she says. A few hours later, going to find him, she says that it’s O.K. for him to observe if he has nothing else to do. There is no horse, as there is no dog—both animals given away to prepare for her entrance into what she thought would be her new frontier, her last, momentarily stayed by his miraculous appearance on her doorstep.
When she’s ready to move on to a new color, he refills the murky buckets of water. He makes sure that there are always a few more buckets than she needs—to clean her brushes with, to throw at the feral cat (which is black, like the disappeared dog) when it violates the no-studio-visits rule, to stick her swollen feet into late in the afternoon, after eight straight hours of work. She does not stop for lunch. She eats it very late, around three or sometimes four. He brings it to her in the studio. She gives the impression that she would be entirely happy if the world ended right at the periphery of this converted barn. He makes lunch and also dinner, while breakfast is her terrain, made for both of them. Oatmeal with jam and compote that she bottles herself, from fruit delivered by an orchard a few towns over. Sometimes there are omelettes with stewed tomatoes that she has also bottled and peppers plucked from a dried garland that hangs on one wall of the kitchen, by a window. Despite all this, she has not terminated the food delivery every Tuesday and Friday. She says she doesn’t want to deprive the woman who cooks for her of the income. Even though the woman had been prepared for the painter’s retirement.
Because the garage has been repurposed as his home, they have parked the truck on the front road, a half mile from the property, and on the dashboard she has put a letter stating that the driver is in her employ and that he is of legitimate driving age—a lie, of course, but her signature is vigorous and very large. She has done this because he’s told her that he’s afraid of the police. They are always stopping him when he makes forays into town on foot. Can you imagine the shitstorm if they find him behind the wheel of a vehicle known to be the property of the famous lady painter—sorry, woman painter. Or, rather, per her preference, painter; just painter. In his mind, the letter is a talisman: it has properties that extend from its having been touched by her hand, and from her anger when she heard his stories of police harassment. Because he’s made at least four nerve-racking drives into town, twenty to twenty-five minutes each way, and he hasn’t yet been bothered by the cops—so it must be the letter.
What’d you tell them about yourself those times they stopped you? she says.
What do you mean?
They ask your name?
Yeah.
You told them your name?
Yeah.
Your real name?
My only name, Javier says.
What else they ask you?
What am I doing here? I tell them I’m just sitting. Or a couple times I tell them I’m looking for a job. They tell me to move along. Sometimes they put me in the back of their car, like they’re bringing me to jail, and then they just drop me off in the desert, make me walk all the way back. I think sometimes the people in the shops—they complain.
They don’t ask you why you’re not in school?
They don’t care. But, if they do, I’d tell them homeschooling.
Is this true? Does your mother homeschool you?
She’s too busy working. I homeschool myself. He takes a beat before deciding on more honesty. Sometimes, he says.
I know you read, she says. She’s talking about the few times she’s made him read aloud from the Bible while she worked. He has a good voice—pleasing ups and downs, so that sometimes the words become music. Ecclesiastes. Her favorite book in the Bible. But, because work is a kind of cleansing of the mind—the strokes and daubs requiring an even distribution of pressure and a continual maintenance of strength in the wrist and the fingers that is like kinesthetic concentration—and also because she knows the words of Ecclesiastes so well, she does not feel too guilty letting them become abstract, like music, like the beating of her pulse echoed by a mouth that belongs to someone else, a mouth issuing not conversation that needs to be attended to but edicts, or, even better, prayers: paint, draw, fill, transform.
When they call me Mexican, I tell them I’m Native, he says to the painter. A rez boy. I give them some story if they ask. I knew a rez boy. He was always at the laundromat. Sneaking in a six-pack. He washed the same rug over and over again until he finished the six-pack. He never got drunk. He liked to tell me things. I just use whatever he said when the cops ask.
Good, she says. That’s very smart. But we’ll get you an I.D. For if you get pulled over. I worry about that letter, that it won’t do the job.
Afew days later, they drive an hour to a town called Renewal. The man they meet is her printer. There are framed posters of her paintings lining one wall. The printer apologizes for the sun’s having got to some of them, fading them into ghostly colorlessness, as if they’d been worked on by an eraser. Let it all fade, she tells him placidly.
It seems that she and the printer have already discussed the business at hand. He takes a photo of Javier and then she and Javier go outside and sit on the stoop in the sun, waiting. They turn their faces up toward the light and close their eyes. That’s how the printer finds them, half an hour later, and they get up and follow him to the second floor, where the printer hands her a white envelope. She takes out the fake I.D., glances at it for a moment, and then gives it to Javier. No fuss, as if she weren’t handing him a new lease on life.
Good luck, the printer says to Javier, who feels heavy in the face and can’t talk.
On the way back, she explains to him that someone once had the name and address on his card—a young man who has passed—and now he is that young man.
She’s been standing at the doorstep for ten minutes, claiming to have heard the vehicle from miles away. He stays in his garage room until he gets the signal from her that it’s safe to come out.
As soon as he got his fake I.D., there was an incident with the cops. They pulled up just as he was parking the truck outside the grocery in town. Maybe one of the checkout women had told on him, one of the younger ones, with whom he shares a mutual dislike. He’d been waiting for this moment but his heartbeat was still something. He handed over her letter and took out his I.D. Surprisingly, the cops didn’t recognize him from their past encounters. It’s true that he’s older now, and darker, after so much time in the sun, cutting her grass, watching the horses that are brought over by a neighbor to graze on her unused land, or simply wandering the adjoining desert to give her more space and quiet when she’s in one of her moods. The police told him to hang tight while they called the painter—at least they weren’t bundling him into their car. When they finally got her on the phone, they kept asking her the same question, phrased a little differently each time: Is this the name of your employee? Are you sure he works for you? And he has permission to be driving your vehicle? Do you mind if we tail him for a bit and see that he’s doing what you say he’s supposed to be doing? He could hear her giving them an earful after this last question but the policeman on the receiving end was smiling.
Now a dusty Toyota pulls onto the gravel path. From his window, he sees a middle-aged woman get out of the car. He sees her smiling. She and the painter are talking, and Javier does not hear any change in the painter’s usual laconic rhythms. That’s her way of signalling friendliness and interest.
Javier comes out. He walks right up to the edge of the path. The woman and the painter watch him approach and, when he finally stops, the painter introduces him: Javi’s my helper. This is Diane.
Hello, Diane says.
We thought you were someone else, Javier says. He turns to the painter. You said she wasn’t coming until tomorrow?
I’m hopeless with time, the painter says.
It would be easier if she used the computer, Javier says.
Oh, I thought you didn’t have a computer, Diane says.
Is that what I said? the painter says. I meant I don’t use one. Or very rarely. My gallery person insisted that I get the thing. He insists on Wi-Fi. He insists and he makes things happen—but what I don’t like, it’s a safe bet I won’t use.
Do you have a couple of hours today?
I’ll make time, the painter says.
She leads them both into the kitchen. They have to pass the boxes in the living room, which she kicks around to make whatever path she needs at any given moment. They contain books, mostly duplicates of her various exhibition catalogues, and also dishes, bedding, a lot of maps, because she went through an old-map phase, photographs, index cards of things she thought important enough to write down, although as her gallerist said, looking through them, they read like obscure fortune-cookie wisdom.
She makes tea. She doesn’t offer lunch. She is not nervous but Javier knows she’d like to get this first meeting out of the way, to get her talking done, to see whether what she says out loud alone in the house or while she works is the self-indulgent babble of a solitary creature or an articulate equivalent to her brushstrokes.
Diane thanks her for the tea. Asks why she decided to delay going into the retirement home.
Javi came and it made a big difference. I would rather stay. I guess, she says, I underestimated the amount of time it would take me to say goodbye.
But you wouldn’t be saying goodbye, as I understood it. You’d be coming back to paint.
But a certain part of my life would be over. My life in this home.
Did living with someone else take getting used to? Diane says.
But I don’t live with someone else. I live here, and Javi’s in his space. We spend some time together. I suppose you should be asking him—he is not allowed to talk to me, until he is. He lives inside the rules that I set. I make no apologies. I’m eighty-two. If you can’t be autocratic at my age, when can you? So I’m living only with myself, and Javi is myself, but with more energy, with a better spirit.
Are you saying you’re cranky? Diane moves the iPhone on the table closer to the painter, who doesn’t flinch.
I have no temperament to speak of. I am equable.
Diane turns to Javier, who is puttering at the edges of the large kitchen, as if doing a kind of improvised dance, shifting forward and then retreating, wanting to be part of the talk and knowing better than to make an attempt. Is she cranky, Javi? Diane says.
Javier shakes his head no.
The painter doesn’t even turn to look at what he might answer.
The painter and Diane talk late into the night. A cot is opened for Diane in the living room. She forgoes her reservation at the inn the next night as well. The painter breaks her routine. The days are spent not painting but talking. Javier has never heard her talk so much. This goes beyond the little sayings chirped out while she paints. Or the lines of dialogue addressed to some figment in the next room. Maybe it’s more than one figment. Javier has never considered any of this behavior strange. He has never asked whom she’s speaking to, or even what she’s saying, because mostly he understands what she says to be a private code between her and her unseen ghost or ghosts. Or perhaps it was a way of practicing for this visit with Diane, which she has known about for months.
Diane works for a wealthy man in Los Angeles who has bought twenty of the painter’s canvases from the past fifteen years. He plans to give these acquisitions their very own suite of rooms in a museum he’s building in L.A. The museum will open, in two years’ time, with these twenty works, as well as the man’s famed trove of Impressionist and classical paintings, amassed over the course of decades.
Diane has been sent to interview the painter at length. They have planned to talk for five days, with a follow-up visit sometime in the near future. A portion of Diane’s interview will appear in the exhibition catalogue, while the whole interview is to be archived for future students of the painter’s work. This kind of project has not been attempted before—owing, as Diane put it, to the painter’s “late-blooming fame.” And also to the painter’s churlish relationship to said fame.
The day after Diane leaves, the painter is back at work. She is following some internal prompt that comes out as stacked lines, equidistant from one another, all the way from the top to the bottom of the canvas. You’d think, given the narrow range of her material and motifs, that the paintings would look like the same thing over and over, but it’s striking how much variation can be wrung out of a subtle shift in color, or a different spacing between the parallel lines, or even the thickness of the lines. Sometimes, drawing these lines, she becomes so mesmerized that her tongue hangs out like a dog’s, and her eyes glaze over, as if some inner spirit had become dominant.
A few days later, she gathers eight of her recent canvases, props them up side by side against both of the studio’s long walls. She spends an almost silent ten minutes moving from one to another. Then she goes to the kitchen but won’t talk to Javier. A few moments later, she returns to the studio, and then, after another ten minutes have passed, she goes through the kitchen, to the living room, and then out the door, where Javier sees her, from the large window by the kitchen sink, pacing back and forth, clearly agitated, though by good or bad energy he can’t tell.
He makes some tea and brings this out to her in a tin mug, her favorite.
She takes it from him and finally slows down her to-ing and fro-ing. She sits on the uncut grass and sips the tea. When she’s finished, she hands him the mug and he returns with it to the kitchen, where he keeps half an eye on her, while going about his lunch-making tasks.
Lunch is taken in silence. Something is preoccupying her, it’s clear, but she’s not likely to share it until she has it worked out. She leaves him to clean up. He could choose to join her in the studio, walking through the long hallway she had built to connect the studio to the house, so that she wouldn’t have to go outside to enter her workspace, so that between her life-life and her art-life there would be no formal delineation. But, instead, he decides to go for a drive into town, without telling her. Maybe treat himself to a movie, and bring back some groceries as a thin justification for his desertion.
By the time he comes back, it’s dark. She has a choice of refrigerated meals she could heat up in his absence, but he finds she has done no such thing. She doesn’t ask him where he’s been. She figures he has his reasons, just as she has hers. He cuts some beef into thin strips, and then stir-fries them with onions and bell peppers sliced lengthwise. She sits in front of her plate hollowed out, her head and torso low. She still has an appetite, though, and sucks up the food at speed. She stays at the table while he does the dishes, content to just sit there with her glass of water. He joins her when he’s done, asks her if she wants something sweet, as she usually does, to cap off the evening meal. She tells him to feel free to get something for himself. There’s pecan pie and rhubarb compote and some coffee cake that might need to be finished soon. He takes a fruit pop from the freezer. She gets up and asks him to follow her into the studio after he’s finished. Watching her walk away, he can see that she’s not pleased, but with what he can’t tell.
He walks into the studio to find her seated in an armchair that she’s hauled in from the living room. The chair is facing a leaning row of paintings, effectively turning the space into a gallery. Come, she says, getting up from the armchair. Sit. He follows orders. Look at these paintings. And, when you’re done, turn your chair around and look at those behind you. He stares at the lined canvases. In all of them, the lines have become feathery, an effect achieved by letting some of the background color bleed ever so slightly onto the black horizontal marks. After a while, he ventures a question: What am I looking for?
What do you think? she says.
Do I like them? he says. Yes. I do. I think.
What do you like about them?
They are like your others, but different. They are like in a dream.
This seems to give her pause. She puts a finger on her chin and strokes the area for a bit.
She does not return to the studio the next day. They take a drive into the town where the retirement home is. She unlocks the compound gate for him and locks it behind them. Her space is situated at the back of the property, accessible through a gap between one portion of the main house and an add-on built years later. Hers is the only completed bungalow on the premises. Next to it stand three shells in various stages of construction.
She takes the key from her jeans pocket and opens the door. You can go out and wander around, if you’d like, she tells him.
He decides to turn on the TV instead. This is one of the two television sets she moved over, a chunky thing with an antenna he needs to maneuver to get a satisfactory picture. He lies down on her bed without taking off the cover and falls asleep after an hour or so, the TV still on. He wakes to find her in the exact same place she was in when he fell asleep—in a cane armchair facing the open front door, looking out onto the scrub of the back yard. Are you hungry? she asks him. He says yes. They drive to the town where he does the grocery shopping, arriving in that odd time a couple of hours after lunch and several more before dinner, so they are the only ones at the diner. The old waitress is working this shift and she asks after the painter, who gives one-word answers. This is not taken as unfriendliness and the waitress keeps talking—about the fluctuating tourist trade, the weather, which seems to keep getting warmer when it should be cooling, and her burgeoning online business selling dream catchers.
The next day, they again drive to the painter’s retirement apartment, where, again, nobody bothers them and they are left to pass the hours as two immobile sculptures, until it’s time to be fed, and today they drive into the part of town where the multiplex is, sneaking hamburgers and fries into a movie about time travel that he’s already seen and tells her he doesn’t mind seeing again.
For the next weeks, they are at the house only for breakfast and sleep. Always going on one expedition or another. He gets paid his usual fee, and she surrenders him to his mother every weekend, as per their understanding. They become habitués at the diner, the multiplex, the mall, the various churches, the outdoor bazaars, the folk museums, the roadside zoos, the bookstores, the auditorium of the local college, even at the laundromats, where they sit, sometimes for hours, observing the tide of Native users washing in and out, although Javier’s rez boy is not among them. Sometimes they are joined by her printer, especially at the multiplex, where he is given free rein to choose their day’s selection. More often, it’s just the two of them. One day, Javier asks her, What about your painting?
What about it? she says, as if it were understood that that was what all the excursions were about.
Don’t you want to paint anymore? he says.
I don’t feel anything, she says.
He tries to figure out if she’s lying, at the same time wondering why she would need to, with him. Her face is no different from the one that greets him in the morning and at night—matter-of-fact, ground down.
On a few nights, they return to the studio, where they study the paintings, wordlessly letting the lines take over their fields of vision until the room seems to be made of feathery bars with the density of the thinnest necklace.
Diane’s calls are not returned. Her e-mails are not read. I have given her more than enough, the painter says.
After a month of no work, the painter announces that she’s ready to move on. But first they must make one last study of the paintings that have been gathering dust against her studio walls, silent, their power attenuated by her neglect. They spend nearly the whole day in front of the eight works, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner while engaged in close observation—some of the works have been painted over and over, so that the finished image rests on layers of minute adjustments that she made to get at the vision in her inner eye.
The next thing that happens has a casual air—an air of experiment. They drag one of the canvases, picked because it’s closest to the barn door that forms a barrier between the studio and the outside world, into what she calls the back yard—scrubland, tiny pebbles, and dust as far as the eye can see, where the dog used to run, sometimes for miles, in search of rodents to bring back and drop at her feet. Stand back, she tells him, before going into the studio, and then the house. She reappears with a can of fluid with which she douses the painting, and then she sets the work alight with a match from a box. She needs to light another match to set fire to a particularly intransigent section and get the whole thing going. Even so, it takes a while for everything to be consumed.
He watches the ceremony with a dispassionate air, as does she.
The other canvases meet the same fate—the process played out over a series of days and nights. The mound of black ash in the back yard gets to hip height, and Javier has to sweep it into eight black garbage bags, per the painter’s instructions. These are tied at the neck and placed in the studio, where the paintings were, a kind of transfiguration or exchange. And then the studio-barn door is closed, and the connecting door between the studio and the house is closed, too, as if to facilitate the end of this strange episode, which can rightly be traced back to Diane. Her visit and her questions set it all in motion. And yet the painter gave no sign—answered Diane’s questions in good faith, sometimes with long pauses where her mind would wander until an answer that it liked better than the rest passed in front of it. What was it that she’d said to Javier one morning, with Diane fast asleep on her cot in the living room, while the two of them were greeting the early-morning sun in the kitchen, sipping coffee? Something about fame—the benefits of fame. Diane’s first observation had been about the painter’s fame coming late in life. The painter had said that, if you looked at that statement straight on, there was nothing wrong with it, it was true as far as that went: she had, in fact, been struggling for a long time while most of her peers were being celebrated; it had taken her decades to catch up. But, if you looked longer, reflected on what Diane had said, she seemed to be suggesting that the fame was the sole reason for her visit. That the fame was the saving grace of the painter’s story. That up until the moment that she became famous, the painter and her life’s work had deserved to be lost, left unrecorded. That Diane was heeding the call of this fame, asking her questions and taking notes because this was what follows after fame has made its decree, conferred upon its subject the gift of an afterlife: years after the painter was in the grave, her answers would ring down the long hallway of time to whoever poked a finger into her digital cubbyhole to make inquiries, entreaties, to seek the corroboration of the painter-in-fame in her actual utterances. So she had to burn the paintings, which will now exist only in her mind and in Javier’s.
Diane shows up months later. Of course they don’t know it’s her who’s driving up so early in the morning. By this time, the women have come to live on the premises—Javier’s mother and two of the friends who used to gather in her kitchen to make tamales, all thrown out of the loop of their lives by new immigration policies. In essence, they have sought refuge on the painter’s property, and she, by providing it, is actively flouting the new rules. So when Diane’s car is heard outside, the painter’s and Javier’s first thought is to shepherd the women from the kitchen, where they all sit having breakfast, to the garage, which has been transformed into their new home, their hiding place, for how long God knows.
The women exit through the studio and then access the back door of the garage, out of sight of anyone arriving at the front of the house.
By the time Javier reënters the kitchen, it’s clear that the visitor is Diane and equally clear that the painter, standing guard at the door, will not let her in. Diane is baffled by the unfriendliness, and Javier comes up behind the painter, hoping to take over the duties of explication. She has said all she wants to say, Javier says.
Did I do something wrong? Diane says. I don’t understand.
Talking too much—it’s been bad for her, for her work. She doesn’t want to talk anymore.
You have enough, the painter repeats.
We had an agreement, Diane says. And I have a few questions. Just an hour? Could you give me that? I’ve come so far.
No, the painter says.
You have to respect what she says, Javier says.
But this is her legacy, Diane says. You understand what legacy means, right? She is talking to Javier now. You can convince her.
She has destroyed work because of you, because of what you said, Javier says. And then the painter turns her angry face to Javier, and he looks down.
Destroyed? Diane says. What could I have said? Please. You must have misunderstood. I came here with the utmost respect. You have to know that.
Go, the painter says, and turns her back on Diane, who is left behind with Javier for only a brief moment before he closes the door on her. A few minutes later, he and the painter hear her car backing away.
That afternoon, opening the painter’s e-mail, Javier finds a new note from Diane, with the subject line “My Apologies.”
Don’t open it, just— The painter doesn’t know the term.
Trash it?
Trash it, the painter says, and Javier does, regretfully.
More e-mails come from Diane in the next few days, and they all meet the same fate.
Javier and his mother have a fight. She claims that the kitchen should be the women’s domain. How else are they supposed to contribute? Javier says that the painter isn’t looking for them to contribute—just stay out of the way, or talk to the painter whenever she needs to hear another voice. But the two other women are too shy. They can’t look the painter in the eye. Also, Javier’s mother, beyond expressing her gratitude, can’t think of anything to say and, when asked questions, can barely stammer out her one-word replies. But the painter has been patient with them all, especially with Javier’s mother. It’s Javier who can’t stand the stop-and-start quality of the talk around the dining table and has to act out his displeasure, huffily getting up and making a performance of his dishwashing at the sink.
Let’s ask her if she would like to try our cooking, Javier’s mother says.
You are not going to bother her, Javier says.
You’re ashamed of me, his mother says.
No, I’m not, Javier says. And then he says, What if I am?
Don’t worry, his mother says. I won’t be around too much longer for you to be ashamed of.
One day, Javier is asked to drive them all to Renewal, back to the printer’s. Javier knows what this means but he can’t get the painter alone to talk her out of her lousy plan: what good would even the best fake I.D. be if it can’t be corroborated by the holder’s behavior—by the way she stands, unable to look anyone in the eye, and, most of all, by her English, her lousy English? Even Javier’s mother knows that it’s a wasteful gesture, but again she can’t bring herself to speak. She goes through the procedure—the picture-taking, the waiting, and then, upon being handed the finished documents, the show of gratitude, to the point of tears—all without saying a word.
A week later, she asks for Javier’s help in talking with the painter, although she won’t tell him in advance what she wishes to discuss, except to say that she won’t be taking the kitchen and the cooking away from him.
Javier translates for her: On the Internet, she discovered a church that offers sanctuary to people like her and her two friends, but it’s in Los Angeles. In fact, three of the women who were part of her circle are already there. Enjoying protection from the government goons and from snitches, which, even here in the middle of nowhere, she feels the threat of. Each time the neighbor brings over his horses to graze and each time the doorbell rings to announce the food drop-off, she feels her heart tighten and, even though they don’t talk about it, she’s sure her two friends feel the same way. Besides, they’ve already asked so much of the painter. Just one last thing to ask: could they take the pickup? And could they take Javier—since they aren’t comfortable behind the wheel of a vehicle? He would, of course, make his way back to New Mexico after he drops them off at the church. Is this something that she can give permission for? The painter turns to Javi, asks him what he thinks. He’s quiet but he knows there is no way out of this. Besides, it would solve his problem: his life alone with the painter could resume.
There is much activity the day before the trip. Two cannisters of gas and several blankets await in the back of the pickup. A new phone has been purchased for Javi, with an app to talk him through the journey and so that the painter can keep abreast of his progress.
Earlier in the day, Javi ran errands for his mother and now a plastic tub of wet masa sits at the center of a ring of kitchen chairs. Beside it, on a low stool, a sheaf of corn husks. Next to one of the chairs is a pot of pulled-beef roast, cooked for eight hours the night before in a stew of different varieties of tomatoes and some peppers from the painter’s dried garland. The painter has been sitting in. She has observed the routine for the first few go-rounds and now, with Javi’s mother’s guidance, she spoons the proper proportion of masa, then beef, then masa again to seal the beef in, and then, with Javi’s mother’s fingers over hers, she folds the corn husk so that no strings are needed to secure the tamales while steaming. A bunch of the painter’s pails have been filled with water, with a ceramic bowl sitting inside each one, awaiting the folded tamales to start cooking on the stovetop.
Freed by work, the women converse openly, in Spanish and some hesitant English. After two tamales, the painter’s fingers have had enough. She is happy to sit there, asking a few questions of the women, letting them dictate the talk, even if that means that most of her questions go unanswered. But over the course of a couple of hours the back and forth opens a window into the women’s lives, especially the youngest woman, whose new identity card calls her Cathy.
Brought here as a child by parents fleeing a nothing existence in Juárez, she has lived in Texas, Nevada, and California, Northern and Southern. Twelve years ago, she followed a rumor of employment to New Mexico, and has done nearly everything, from fast-food work to childcare. She has sold bottles of water and cans of soda on the side of the road. She has sold single red roses in their own plastic wrapper on the side of the road. She has begged on the side of the road with a sign written for her by a helpful college student. She lost a child when the child was two. She wasn’t married to the father—that at least was a blessing. Her years in New Mexico have passed like lightning—she was in her twenties when she arrived, and is nearly out of her thirties now. She lived in Los Angeles before and can help the other women get the lay of the land. She’s glad to be going back. Life in the city has always been more to her liking, despite the smog and the traffic, and especially living closer to the sky than to the ground. She asks to be excused from the circle. She asks with her head hanging low, so that the painter and the other women can’t see her face, their only clue the quiver in her voice, so slight they may even be imagining it.
After five minutes, the painter asks if they shouldn’t go see how she’s doing. Javi’s mother says forget it—she’s the most dramatic of the group. Javi’s mother and the other woman exchange smiles. The other woman is the oldest—the painter guesses somewhere in her late fifties, with Javi’s mother a close second.
Javi’s mother motions for the painter to take the abandoned seat beside her. Tells the painter she doesn’t have to do anything other than hold her hand out and she will do the rest—spoon the ingredients and fold and seal the husk.
Where’s my boy, Javi’s mother asks after a while.
I think he’s gone to see a movie, the painter says.
He’ll be back? Javi’s mother says.
I expect so, the painter says.
For the first few hours, Javi’s mother chatters incessantly. But, with the onset of night, the noise dies away. Her limp neck has taken away her chin, and her hands lie folded in her lap. She’s like a malevolent gesticulating and talking doll whose batteries have died. Outside the truck, cities appear as so many bright lights, and then dematerialize, leaving Javier and the women journeyers on a big conveyor belt of cosmic darkness. Behind him, in the back of the pickup, the other women have been lying underneath the wool blankets but now, looking in the rearview mirror, he can see one of them sitting up, part of her hairdo loosed by the seventy-mile-an-hour wind. It’s the older woman, Maria—God knows what her new name is. She met his mother when they were cleaners at a motel, a job that lasted only a few months before the private contractor hired Thai replacements who would work longer hours for much less pay.
A little while later, he stops by the side of the road to piss. Both women in the back are up now, having spent the daylight hours asleep. He asks them if they’re hungry. They say no. They’re eager to get to the church. To Los Angeles. But they tell him to rest for a few minutes if he needs it. They watch as he lights a cigarette, takes three puffs, and then throws it away, its orange tip arcing into the darkness beside them. He gets back in and resumes driving. In just under twelve hours, he makes it to Nevada, where they stop at a roadside restaurant.
At first the women don’t even want to get out to freshen themselves, or to fuel up. Like anyone with a guilty conscience, they are suffering from the unbearable condition of believing themselves to be transparent. He has to assure them that everything’s going to be fine, and, besides, he needs a break, as well as to run water in his armpits and on his face. At the restaurant, the women share a large order of pancakes, which they douse with syrup, using up all that’s in the bottle. Javi and his mother order the same thing: the Grand House Breakfast, which comes with two strips of bacon, two pork sausages, and a stack of pancakes even taller than the order shared by the two women across from them. When the syrup is gone, instead of asking the waitress for more, Javi supplements with strawberry jam, carved out of three disposable packets. It seems that, like the women, he believes in not attracting notice.
Javi and his mother don’t talk much. She doesn’t ask—hasn’t asked—about his life with the painter. Having lived in the painter’s home for a few months now, she has no need of questions. She doesn’t even bother to ask if Javi wants to return there after delivering the women to L.A.
The big meal puts Javi’s mother back to sleep as soon as they resume their drive.
When she wakes up, it’s because his cell phone is buzzing next to her thigh. He makes her hold it up to his ear, so that he can hear the painter ask about the drive. They’re less than a day away, and, yes, the phone has been very useful, although he hasn’t had to take directions since listening to it a couple of times before the start of the trip. Is there anything the painter wants him to bring back from L.A., or even from Nevada?
He doesn’t follow the women into the church. He doesn’t want to. Best to have a clean, a total, break. Instead, he makes a show of driving quickly away, not even answering his mother as she bids him goodbye. Not looking at her shrinking figure in the rearview mirror. He pulls into the first In-N-Out Burger that he sees on the way back. Sits in the parking lot wolfing a whole burger down, licking his greasy fingers. Chugging a jumbo iced soda. Only then—watching people pull in and out of the lot, kicking up the fine spray of dust that seems to be everywhere in this city, that coats the parked cars and even the human beings who call this place home—only then does he let the whole weight of it sink in: he will probably never see his mother again. She is lost to him. Very likely the church will be the first stop in a chain of underground places, his mom and her friends passed from sponsor to sponsor, until the day that a new Administration abolishes the old one’s rulings. Maybe then they’ll be reunited—but who knows how long that will be. Only then does he cry out. Nobody to witness. And, even if someone heard him, what could anyone make out through the windshield that has been marked and scored by the million particles of dust that caressed his journey west? The light that is everywhere in this city—shining so brightly that it blinds you to what sits right in front of you. ♦
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