Hi Friends,
It’s been an exciting week around here. Copies of Harmony House are starting to land on people’s doorsteps. Also, we’ve got an launch party happening on Saturday, August 1st at 11:00 AM Eastern time. I’d love for you to be there. There’s a fun way for you to register for the event. Just go to Houze.Live and “audition” just like the characters in the book do. What you’ll experience is kind of a neat little magic trick. You’ll also get an invite to the exclusive online event AND be entered in a chance to win an signed copy of the book!
Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.
Previously…
Kelly, restored by Lefty's visit, threw herself into a new and darker series over a grueling seven-month stretch at the studio, while Lefty wrestled with whether the uncommercial direction would serve or threaten their ascent. The chapter closed on Marabelle finally asking her mother, point blank, why she'd had her and why her art mattered more, drawing out an honest answer that revealed Kelly feared losing herself as much as she feared losing Marabelle.
Lefty was up before sunrise every morning, and when he wasn’t away for work, there was always a hot breakfast. Many days it was oatmeal but some days he would make French toast, pancakes, or eggs and bacon.
As I underwent the metamorphosis in my tweens that would transform me into what he fondly called the Moody Monster, he began having to drag me out of bed to go to school. Kelly was unpredictable, of course. Some mornings she was his sous chef, the two of them listening to music as they worked at the kitchen island, but if she had worked all night, I wouldn’t see her until I came home from school.
For the next four years, we would feel more like a family than we ever had before or ever would after. We got a dog and raised chickens. We had movie nights and epic Parcheesi games. It was the kind of thing most teenagers would groan about, but I was there for it, soaking up the normalcy.
What I remember most vividly from this period was the revival of K.A. Mudd’s folk art project. It became a weird kind of unifying force, not just for our family, but for the little community of people around us in Santa Fe. I’m not sure the masquerade was necessary anymore given that the intense public scrutiny of Daedalia had all but disappeared. The world was concerned with bigger things in light of the financial crisis and so many people losing homes they never should have been able to afford in the first place. You didn’t have to look far to see people struggling. My nanny, Maria, had not been affected, but both her brothers had lost their family homes and her little house was overrun with nieces and nephews sleeping on palettes in the living room.
“I don’t want to be a problem Mr. Lefty,” I overheard her saying one afternoon when she was talking with my father on the patio.
“It’s no problem at all, Maria. You’re family. What do you need?”
After that conversation, Maria began sleeping in the guest quarters and her brothers took on a variety of unnecessary construction projects around our property, working in the evenings and on weekends to build a pergola, a meditation hut, and a walled garden with a koi pond. It felt good to have so many people around. They played their music on an old boom box covered in paint splatter and sheetrock dust. The Latin pop music was so romantic, sugary, and earnest, it tickled me that these macho brothers chose it as the backdrop for their quiet teasing conversations and occasional bursts of laughter while they dug footers and poured concrete. Their presence brought a warmth and ease to our home that I never understood had been missing. Two or three evenings a week, Maria and her sisters-in-law would make a big family dinner and we would all eat out in the courtyard at a long table her brothers had improvised from a couple of saw horses and sheets of plywood.
At the end of one of these dinners, during a lull in the conversation, Kelly addressed the whole table. I think she had a couple of glasses of wine by then because this move was completely out of character. She was sitting at the midline of the table that divided the adults from the kids and she was talking to us.
“I’d like you all to help me with an art project. I think it would be fun. What do you think?”
No one really knew how to respond, certainly not these kids. With the exception of Maria, no one else at the table had really interacted much with the reclusive, eccentric woman who spent so much time in the shed with the doors closed. Maria’s brothers and their wives exchanged looks, unsure if maybe they missed something in translation though they understood her perfectly well. Enrique, the more confident brother with the enormous mustache raised his beer and spoke up.
“Yes, of course! Art. Why not? Ninos, you want to help Ms. Kelly with some art?”
I remember the look on my father’s face and being unable to read it. When it came to my mother, his feelings were always conflicted, and that conflict dug trenches in his face that would make him look much older than he already was.
The next day, after school, five children between the ages of four and twelve gathered in the courtyard outside Kelly’s shed. They fidgeted nervously and poked each other, whispering in Spanish. Unbeknownst to me, Kelly had been busy for a week preparing for this project. I had assumed she was doing her Daedalia work in the shed but when she rolled back the doors and brought out a large tray full of potato halves I was confused. Equally curious, the children huddled around her. She encouraged them to pick up the potatoes. On the cut side of each, she had carved an elaborate stamp, each one depicting a different creature or plant and all of them rendered in a primitive style somewhere between Aztec art and characters from a comic strip.
“Pick two that you like,” she said, setting the tray down on the ground. “There’s all kinds. Find the ones that speak to you— makes you feel good.”
After each of the children had picked their favorites, they followed her into the studio where she had mounted three large canvases on the far wall and spread drop cloths beneath them. On the floor, she had placed trays of paint, one with red, one with yellow, and one with blue. What followed was an art lesson delivered in the only way my mother could, which was to demonstrate. She encouraged the youngest child to step forward with her two potato stamps and asked her to pick the color she liked the most. I felt a tension in my shoulders, knowing how meticulous Kelly was, and how exacting her standards were. But she was patient and forgiving and had obviously prepared. She guided the child over to a long strip of butcher’s paper she had stretched across the floor a safe distance away from the canvases. She guided the little girl’s tiny hands to stamp her potato cut-outs onto the paper. “Hold it… press for 1, 2, 3. Now lift up carefully so you don’t drip… that’s it.” The light in the little girl’s face when she lifted up her stamps to reveal a bright red chicken and a blue raccoon was contagious.
As the other children took their turns, Kelly would demonstrate something new like how the stamps could be placed close together, some connecting like puzzle pieces to make completely new, larger animals, cactuses, or trees. She showed them how to rinse off their stamps so they could use a different color. She showed them how to carefully stamp over a previous impression with a new color to create secondary colors. She never once told the children or me what we were making, what her larger vision was for the canvases. After a half an hour of experimenting on the paper, she stood up from her crouch. She wiped her hands on a towel, walked over to the canvases, and said, “Okay, you’re ready. Who’s going to be my brave soul to go first?”
No one raised their hand or stepped forward. The children fidgeted and studied their hands. “Marabelle, how about you? Will you be the first?”
I wasn’t expecting this. I hadn’t participated at all up to that point. I remember being jealous of those kids, getting a version of my mother I rarely if ever saw. I got up from the saggy couch where I had been pretending to pay no attention. I picked up a couple of potatoes from the tray without even looking at the designs. I was equally indiscriminate about choosing colors to dip them in. She motioned for me to come to the canvas in the middle.
“Take us on an adventure now,” she said. “Make your mark. The first one is always the hardest.”
I do not possess my mother’s natural talent, and even as a child I had a little interest in making art. What I knew that the other children didn’t, was how exacting my mother could be so when I pressed the stamps into the canvas, I tried to center them perfectly and press them neatly to avoid any splatter or drips. I stepped back to assess my work. On the left center of the canvas there was a bright red crow mid flight. The larger potato I had dipped in the green paint produced a crooked, barren tree on the right center of the canvas. Together, they looked like a pair of deranged eyes.
“How did that feel Marabelle?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“What would make it better? There’s no wrong answer, sweetheart. Do anything that feels good to you.”
A sharp anger arose in me. I was used to this type of tutelage from Coach Lefty, but it was another thing entirely coming from my mother. I turned to the paint trays and without dipping my potatoes in water to wash off the paint I purposely dipped them into different colors, leaving behind bloody tendrils in the egg-yolk yellow tray and strings of seaweed in the ocean blue one. I turned, stepped quickly to the canvas, and smacked the two potatoes against it with a satisfying wet thud. I then proceeded to smear muddy blue and yellow trails in a crude spiral pattern radiating from the eyes. Maybe it’s just my dramatic remembering of the moment, but I believe the children gasped.
My mother did something she rarely did. She laughed. It started as a low, bubbling tremor and then swelled into a full belly-laugh. It was foreign and offputting. I hadn’t heard her laugh much in my life so I felt sure she was laughing at me, her ugly, untalented daughter. Something in me broke and I started to cry. Because I wasn’t facing her, she thought my tears were laughter, and it was only when I put my hands to my face that she realized. She rushed over to me and pulled me to her. My body was rigid, unyielding, but she wouldn’t let go and then I really started sobbing.
“It’s perfect Maribel. You’re perfect whatever you feel is perfect.”
She turned around to look at the canvas, not letting go of me. I was humiliated and wanted to run but she held me.
“You see, it’s perfect,” she whispered into my hair. “Please show me what else you feel.” Then louder, for the benefit of our audience, she said, “Here, use my hands. I will be your painting machine. I’m awaiting your instruction.”
She said this last part in a playful robot voice that put the children at ease. She took the potato cuts from my hands and then offered her hands to me as tools. I’m sure I protested and said it was dumb, but she persisted until I took her by the wrists and pulled her back to the paint trays. Once the potatoes were loaded with more paint, I pulled her back to the canvas, and for the first time, really stared at it. I’m not sure what she saw, but I saw only the primitive smearing of a child. When I raised her hands to the canvas, I was expecting a kind of reverse ventriloquism, like the dummy would actually be doing the performance, but her hands were relaxed, inert, and waiting to be guided. I positioned her right hand above and centered between the eyes I had initially made and pressed the back of her hand into the canvas. I moved her left hand into position, centered below the two eyes and pressed.
We made many trips between the paint trays and the canvas for what could have been a couple of minutes or a couple of hours. I remember being into it, having the ability to control her, to move her as I wanted. Then we stopped and stepped back to survey the result. If you are imagining I somehow channeled my mother’s mystical powers and we created a transcendent piece of art, I hate to disappoint you but there was no magic trick. It was no better than a toddler’s random finger painting. But as we stood there, both of our hands sticky with paint, I felt connected to her, and that was kind of a magic trick.
She encouraged the other children to approach our canvas and make their mark anyway they wanted to. They were tentative at first, but it didn’t take long for the whole crew to embody the spirit of Jackson Pollock. They carried on until there was no whitespace left and only then did they lose interest.
“Was that fun?”
The children nodded without much enthusiasm.
“That was great! Now that you guys are pros, you wanna help me make some real art?” my mother asked. There was a little less enthusiasm. I’m sure it was beginning to feel like school to them– a white woman giving instruction on a subject that had no practical application in their lives. “Mare, will you go and help Maria bring some snacks out for everyone?”
When I returned with Maria fifteen minutes later, the mood was different. The kids were all gathered around my mother who was standing in front of the right canvas where she had begun to work. There was a pattern of blue shapes on the canvas she made from one of the potato stamps that had bold, primitive lines to represent water or waves. She was demonstrating, but also teaching as she went. Each child got a turn to contribute to the emerging piece of art. Unlike the chaotic mess we had made on the first canvas, this piece had focus and direction and the kids could feel it being shaped beneath their hands. The overlapping blue-green potato stamps became scales on an enormous fish that was breaking the surface of what would become a starry sky.
I watched the rest of the afternoon as my mother slipped between her interior world of maniacal focus and the world of these children. She was exploring, reaching, but why? It was like watching someone trying to walk five puppies, all running in different directions. Later that night after I had been tucked in and the lights were off, I could hear my parents talking in the other room. I strained to hear what they were saying but it was impossible. Like most kids who grow up in the orbit of parents with a complicated relationship, I had developed an ability to read tone, timbre, and cadence when six inches of plaster made words indecipherable.
He was upset, concerned. I gathered it was from the way she had spent the afternoon. Maybe he was annoyed that she was distracted from the real work she should have been doing. Maybe he feared she was giving Daedalia too much exercise in the yard. Whatever it was, that night Kelly didn’t take the bait. She didn’t yell or cry or throw anything at the wall. After a few minutes, I heard the television.
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This was hard to read! My hands were itching to play with those stamps. Your descriptions of the scene, the physicality of sipping and stamping, and the shapes and patterns on the canvas revealing a mystical scene were all riveting.