The Barbarian Nurseries (10 page)

“They need to learn to take care of their own problems,” Araceli said, the phrase having become a refrain in their conversations.

“Exactly. I’m going to keep that extra fifty dollars to buy another hat like this one I’m going to wear tonight. I got it at that new place on Main Street. Let me show you.”

Marisela went to the closet and emerged with a cowboy hat made of black jute straw, its brim bent up saucily on two sides, like a bird about to thrust its wings downward.
“Qué bonito,”
Araceli said through half-gritted teeth, because they had an unspoken agreement not to speak ill of each other’s party clothes, what with Marisela’s having adopted the rural, denim-centered tastes of the Zacatecas people who dominated this neighborhood, while Araceli stuck stubbornly to the pop-inspired trends of Mexico City.

“And it hardly cost me anything at all.”

Several hours later, after watching a bit of television in the living room, and then getting themselves dressed and primped in Marisela’s bedroom and bathroom, they were out on the street and walking down Maple Street, headed to a
quinceañera
party. Marisela wore her new hat and a pair of jeans with arabesque-patterned rhinestones swaying on the back pockets. Araceli had let her hair down so that it reached halfway to her waist, brushing it out for a good long while. The effect of this
liberated mane on her appearance was striking to anyone who knew Araceli the maid: all the tension of her workday face disappeared, and with her temples freed of the pulling strain of the buns in which she imprisoned her hair, her face took on the relaxed expression of a young woman without children to take care of or meals to prepare. She was wearing her “Saturday night
chilanga
uniform”: short black leggings with flamingo-colored trim that reached halfway down her calves, a black miniskirt with a few sequins, and a T-shirt with the word
love
across the front, a peace symbol filling the o. Three strands of necklaces made of raspberry-colored plastic rocks, and a few matching bracelets, were her chief accessories. It was a bold statement of where she came from. Similar versions of her
uniforme de chilanga
had previously earned Araceli a derisive comment or two from Marisela. “You know that people here think you look ridiculous. This isn’t the Condesa district.”

“That, my dear, is precisely the point.”

But today Marisela also kept to their pact and said nothing as they walked to the party, her teeth gleaming in their ruby lipstick frame, the most expressive part of her face, given the large, wraparound sunglasses she was wearing, another example of
norteño
chic, with encrusted “diamonds” on each side, eyewear that possessed an aeronautical quality, as if Marisela were preparing to be the first Zacatecas astronaut blasted into space.

“I don’t really know the people at this party that well,” Marisela was saying. “The girl who is having the
quinceañera,
her name is Nicolasa. She’s very tall, very pretty. I know her aunt, Lourdes is her name, because I used to work with her at that clothes factory.”

“I remember you telling me about Lourdes.”

“Actually, I do know some
chisme
about these people.” It was more tragedy than gossip, a story with dark, nausea-inducing contours, complete with psychopathic border smugglers and a father who disappeared once the family was safely ensconced in California. Abandoned with two children, Nicolasa’s mother had soldiered on until illness struck. “She got too sick to work, and too sick to even take care of the kids. So some people from the government came by and took the kids. They put them in something called Foster Care.”

“Foster” was one of those words than never quite found a home in Araceli’s mental arrangement of the English language. She’d heard it
before and sometimes confused it with “faster”—much in the same way some English speakers themselves confused words like “gorilla” and “guerrilla,” or “pretext” and “pretense”—and she’d wondered if the American fix to broken families known as Foster Care somehow involved finding the quickest solution possible: instant guardians for the parentless, quick meals for the unfed.

“In Foster Care they separate siblings,” Marisela continued. “So this girl and her brother lived in different places for, like, three or four years.”

“What about the mother?”

“She died.”

“Dios mío.”

“I wish I could remember what she had.” “AIDS?”

“No, it was something more like cancer. But anyways, my friend Lourdes tried for a long time to get them out of Foster Care. They tried looking for the father too. Finally Lourdes’s sister and brother-i n-l aw tried to adopt them, but of course it took forever, because they were stuck in Foster Care and once they’re in that I guess it’s really hard to get them out.”

The story stayed with Araceli as she walked with Marisela past old bungalows whose windows and doors were open to catch a breeze in the final hours of a dying summer afternoon. Araceli saw kitchen walls shimmering in stark incandescent light, and heard a radio tuned to a Spanish-language broadcast of a baseball game, and a murmur of voices followed by a chorus of laughter, and she wondered about the voices she could not hear, and the tales of betrayal and loss they might tell. Araceli knew she could knock on any door, ask a question or two, and find herself inside a melodrama about a family forced to endure separation and travel great distances, and to struggle with the authorities and with their own self-destructive foibles.

They arrived at a bungalow decorated with a string of lights gathering in luminance in the twilight, its unseen backyard pulsating with accordions, trumpets, and clarinets. Marisela and Araceli had missed the actual
quinceañera
ceremony, because it had started on schedule, in violation of the Mexican social conventions Marisela and Araceli still followed, although they had arrived in plenty of time for the party that
followed. After pushing in a splintery wooden gate, the two women stepped onto a concrete patio thick with more spectacled recruits to the Zacatecas space program who were shuffling about in cowboy boots and swaying inside jeans, while streamers dangled over their heads, brushing against the tops of their ten-gallon hats.

Following Marisela, Araceli cut through the dancers and found her way to a corner, against a wooden fence, where the nondancers held plastic cups and studied the patterns of the shifting feet on the dance floor with serious eyes, as if trying to decipher the meaning of the interlocking circles. Three pairs of women were dancing together, which was not unusual at these parties, the men of northern Mexico being a shy bunch, and when the music stopped and another song started, Marisela turned to Araceli to ask,
“¿Bailamos?
“ In an instant they were dancing on the patio, Araceli laughing loudly as she led her friend in a merry-go-round waltz, their legs intertwined and arms around each other’s waists. “Just watch,” Marisela shouted into Araceli’s ear above the music. “We dance like this once, and all these guys will be all over us.” Soon enough, several
paisanos
holding beers were trying very hard to look unimpressed by the sight of a tall woman with thick polyester legs protruding from her miniskirt, spinning deftly in her checkerboard flats and dancing cheek-to-cheek with her short friend in the persimmon-colored blouse.

When Araceli and Marisela stopped dancing, a young man in a baseball cap stepped out of the crowd and grinned and squinted into Marisela’s sunglasses, as if studying himself in the reflection there. He spoke words Araceli did not hear, and when the music started again he pulled Marisela into the center of the patio, and soon they were swallowed up in the mass of moving bodies like rocks plopping into a lake.

Araceli walked to the fence on the edge of the patio and prepared herself for the possibility that none of the brass-buckled astronauts would step forward and lead her back out onto the concrete floor to spin around.
When Marisela finishes with that little guy she doesn’t seem to like so much, maybe we can dance again.
At that instant, Araceli felt a tap on the shoulder and turned to see a lofty mass of flesh and denim standing before her. He was a man of about her own age, but significantly taller, with a head that was sprouting a full fountain of sexy, moist black curls.
“¿Quieres bailar?
“ he asked.
Where did you come from?
she wanted to say, and soon found one of her hands rising for the nameless man to
guide her onto the patio. Her partner was husky but moved well, clasping her hands with confidence and with the slightly callused, blackish bronze hands of a man who earns his living outdoors. As they spun to the repetitive swirl of the trumpet and clarinets, Araceli took in the motion of his slacks, the churn of his shirt. Little miracles like this happened to people like Marisela all the time, but only very rarely to Araceli: to meet a stranger and, in an instant, to find herself moving in synchronicity with him.

Halfway through that first song, he leaned over as they danced, pressed his cheek against hers, and said, loud enough to be heard against the blaring music, “Hey, you dance well!”

“I know,” she shouted back.

The music stopped. People around them wiped perspiration from their foreheads and headed for the edge of the patio dance floor. Before Araceli could prepare herself for the inevitable
Thank you and goodbye,
the music had started again and the curly-headed man was asking,
“¿Otra?
“
“¡Sí!
“

During the second song he said his name was Felipe and after the third he asked her name. When the music stopped after the fourth song she asked him where he was from, just so he wouldn’t go away. “Sonora,” he said. “A little town called Imuris. It’s near Cananea.
¿Y tú?”

“El De Efe.”

When it became clear he did not want to run away, she asked Felipe if he knew anyone else at the party. A few people, he said.

“I don’t know anyone.”

“Look, over there,” he said. “It’s the girl who is having the
quince-añera.”

Araceli turned to see a tall young woman with mahogany skin who wore a tight white dress covered in constellations of beads. Nicolasa had the confident look of a young woman enjoying her day of neighborhood celebrity, and was listening to an older man and studying him with smart, dark eyes that occasionally darted away from him to the landscape of the backyard party: the crowd, and the strings of lights, and a large white sign attached to the fence that read
feliz 15 nica.
Her black hair was parted in the middle and long braids ran down over her shoulders: a girl’s hairstyle and a woman’s face and body. Next to
her was a boy with the same complexion but a foot shorter: her brother, apparently. He looked small and vulnerable, and possessed all the tragic aura that his sister lacked: without the black suit he was wearing, he might be one of those boys you see weaving between the cars in Mexico City, raising their palms to catch coins and raindrops from the sky. Now the big, beefy man talking to them raised a bicep to show them a tattoo, a portrait of a cigarette-smoking soldier in a steel helmet, with
sgt. ray, r.i.p
. written inside a scroll underneath.

“They’ve been through a lot,” Felipe said.

“So you know that story?”

“You mean about their mother dying and being adopted and all that? Yeah. Everybody does. Everybody in the neighborhood, at least.”

“I’m not from the neighborhood.”

“Yeah, I know. I think I would have remembered you,” he said, naturally and simply, without any secondary meanings.

“You see that guy next to them? He got back a few months ago from the war. His name is José. He’s a cousin of the lady who owns this house.”

“What about you? What’s your story?”

“I paint houses. And some construction. But mostly I paint houses.”

“That pays well,
qué no?”

“It’s okay. But I like to paint other things besides walls.
¿Entiendes?
The other day I was painting at this family’s house and I heard
la señora
asking my boss if he knew anyone who could paint a design on a table for her. I stepped in and said I could do it, because I like to draw. She wanted a dragon for her son’s room, so I made her one. A big red dragon. She liked it and the boy did too. That was fun.”

“You’re an artist!”

“No, I wouldn’t call myself that. But I like to draw. The dragon turned out okay.”

“I studied art,” Araceli offered, making a conscious effort not to speak breathlessly: a dancing artist had fallen into her lap, and she wanted to tell him everything, all at once. “I was at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in El De Efe, but only for a year. Then I had to quit.” Araceli thought she should explain why, but stopped herself: among
mexicanos
of their status, in this place called California, no explanations were necessary when describing dreams that died.

“I could tell by looking at you that you’re really smart. You look like one of those girls from the show
Rebelde.
A student. I could tell. That’s why I asked you to dance.”

At the end of the evening, the two of them having danced for two hours, Felipe said he had to leave because he had to be up early the next morning.
Tomorrow is a Sunday, why would you have to be up early?
Araceli wanted to ask, but she resisted the temptation. He asked for her phone number, which she wrote on a slip of paper he tucked into the front pocket of his shirt.

“I work in a house,” she told him.
Trabajo en una casa.
It meant,
Yes, you can call me, but a gringo will answer, and be polite, please, and don’t call me in the middle of the night because my
jefes
won’t appreciate that.
He appeared to understand and smiled as he turned away, and Araceli got one last good look at the backside of his slacks as he left: he was husky when you looked at him from the front, but from the back he was much better proportioned, the width of his shoulders stood out, suggesting a certain musculature. He was a sensitive
mexicano
trapped, like her, in a too-big body.