The Barbarian Nurseries (13 page)

“And what was that?” said Scott, who was the only other person at the table with children.

“Well, I guess he’s been listening to me and his dad talk a lot, because he asked me, ‘Mommy, which is worse: a fool, or an idiot?’ “

“Good question!”

“I’ve often wondered that myself!”

“So what did you tell him?”

“ ‘Well, Patrick,’ I said, ‘a fool is someone who is aware that they’re stupid, sort of, and doesn’t care. You know, like a court jester. At least that’s how I understand the word “fool.” And an idiot is someone with, how should I say, a medical condition. They just can’t help being stupid. Which one is worse is, I guess, in the eye of the beholder.’ “

“Good answer!”

“We aren’t allowed to use the word ‘stupid’ in my household,” Scott said, rolling his eyes.

“So what did your little boy say?”

“He said he thought it was worse to be an idiot. And then he went back to playing his Game Boy.”

Moments later, the check arrived, setting off a round of programmer stretches, sighs, and yawns. By the time the waitress returned with Scott’s credit card in a leather holder, Mary Dickerson was already on her feet and ready to leave.

“I’m sorry, but the system is rejecting this card,” the waitress said with a no-nonsense directness that contrasted markedly with her cheer-iness when she first took their order more than two hours earlier. She was a tall black woman in her forties, her safari uniform covered midway through her shift with salsa and coffee stains: her suddenly stern demeanor caused the procession of programmers toward the front door to stop.

“What’s going on, Scott?” Mary Dickerson said, more as a rebuke than a question.

“Are you sure?” Scott asked the waitress.

“Yes, honey. I am. Shall we try another one?”

Scott opened his wallet, quickly surveyed the various plastic representations of creditworthiness and family photographs contained therein, and concluded that rather than taking a chance on a second card, the best course of action would be to make a run to the nearest automated teller machine. He looked at his now-standing employees, who were all staring at him as one does a second-rate substitute teacher in junior high school, and remembered that there was a dispenser of cash about three or four hundred yards away, at the other end of the asphalt lake upon which this restaurant, an armada of automobiles, and a dozen commercial establishments floated. Scott would hop into his car and drive to the machine and the round trip would take less than two minutes. “I’ll be right back,” he said to the waitress.

“What?”

“Just gotta get some cash.” He could feel the discomfort of his employees’ forced gathering propelling them toward the door. “Sit down. Don’t leave. Please.” Mary Dickerson glared at him with her mouth agape as he rushed out the door.

When he returned, six minutes and forty-five seconds later according to the timer function on his watch, a Mexican busboy was wiping off the empty table, whistling the melody of a reggaeton song, and all of Scott’s employees were gone except for Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki, who greeted him by the cash register with a sympathetic grin.

“We all just paid it, split it eight ways,” she said. “Everyone really wanted to go. So I paid your share.”

Which am I now? Scott wondered. A fool or an idiot?

B
ack at the office, it took sixty seconds at his computer terminal for Scott to uncover his wife’s latest credit-card betrayal. At the top of his online statement there was a charge from a company called Desert Landscaping for an astonishing four-figure amount, as much as he would have paid Pepe the gardener for two years of work, if not more. The cactus garden, he could now see, was another obnoxious vanity foisted upon him by his wife, equivalent to three months of their inflated, adjustable-rate mortgage payments, which were the chief obstacle to Scott getting their finances back into the black again, along with the several thousand dollars he spent on private school for his two sons every month. In fact, thanks to his spendthrift wife, they were going to have to struggle to round up the cash to pay for the boys’ “facilities and activities” fee at the start of the next semester. He squeezed his face in a half wince as he scrolled through the page in search of the interest rate he would pay on said credit card.
Twenty-six-point-four percent, compounded!
There were formulas taught in finance classes that calculated how quickly the “force of interest” could destroy a family with the slow but powerful engine of exponential calculus. Now he scrambled to grab a memo pad, and scratched out a worst-case scenario.

The result was a five-figure catastrophe: he would be a servant to that borrowed money for the foreseeable future. Its preposterous largeness made him feel bullied and violated, as if his wife had grabbed him
by the shirt collar and tossed him into a locked room whose walls were plastered with receipts, bills of sale, service contracts, and warranties, each a mocking reminder of her relentless and happy assault on their disposable income. His three kids were trapped in that room with him too, prisoners to the debt as much as he was. Scott stood up from his chair and grabbed at the air around his temples, and began pacing in his claustrophobic work space, fighting the desire to kick at his chair, or pick up everything on his desk and hurl it against the glass. Finally he flung a pencil at his computer screen with the violent windup of a rioter throwing a rock at a liquor store; the pencil snapped in two but failed to do any damage to the screen itself. “Fuck!” He looked out through the glass and noticed that Jeremy Zaragoza, Mary Dickerson, Charlotte, and all his other employees were staring at him with expressions that combined various degrees of glee, concern, and puzzlement.
Yes, here I am in my cage, the boss who lives at the mercy of his wife’s weaknesses and wants.
Soon he would be wandering away from his post as corporate laughingstock, to spend a day searching for neighborhoods with affordable homes and half-decent public schools.

W
hen Araceli cooked and cleaned, she daydreamed, and when she daydreamed, her train of thought often ended at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, just off the Periférico Highway in the western part of Mexico City. She had opened her eyes in the morning remembering Felipe, and how he painted dragons, and thought that at the National School of Fine Arts painting dragons would have invited contempt and ridicule. Only a narrow strip of park, with jacaranda trees and walkways where dogs sniffed and pulled at leashes, separated Araceli’s temple of artistic knowledge from the boorish city that surrounded it, buses and microbuses congregating nearby and nudging against one another like cattle in a slaughterhouse pen. At the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes all the first-year students were too somber of disposition to paint or draw anything but abstract representations of their inner demons, or starkly detailed studies of the overcrowded, exhausted city.
That was my problem: I was too serious.
If she had contented herself with painting dragons and fairies for her nieces and nephews, Araceli concluded, she wouldn’t be the miserable migrant she was now. Those first,
few light days of art school she would walk into the main lobby and study the board announcing various exhibitions and gallery openings, watch the students march back and forth in their creative torment across the patios, holding brushes and portfolios, and feel she was standing at the center of the artistic universe—or considerably closer, at least, than she had been at her home in Nezahualcóyotl.

Araceli felt especially attuned to the visual world then, and as she crossed the sooty metropolis her eye was constantly searching for compositions. On the Metro she studied the tangle of wires between the tracks, the contorted faces of passengers squeezing through doors, and the rivers of scampering feet that flowed up and down the wide stairways linking one Metro line to another, and the improvised geometry of the underground passageways that intersected at odd angles. One of her instructors had looked at these first-year sketches and pronounced, “You will make a first-rate cartoonist,” and even Araceli knew that was a slight. Then her classmate Rafaela Bolaño told her she too had been declared a “cartoonist,” and it became their running joke. “We are starting a new movement, Rafaela, you and I. We are the Visceral Cartoonists!”

In the end Araceli was done in not by the snobby teachers, but by the long journey across the city from home to school and back again, east to west to east, and by the lists of required materials submitted at the beginning of each term. At the art supply store the clerk gave a satirical grin as he laid the required oils on the counter before her, each an import from England: quinacridone red, raw umber, terra rosa, titanium white, 150 pesos a tube. And then the brushes whose supple bristles suggested the hides of large mammals migrating across the Mongolian steppes; the collection of flesh-toned pastels from Germany, the entire human spectrum in a pine box; and finally the textbook tomes with prices as flashy and exorbitant as their glossy pages of illustrations. “They come from Spain, so it’s all in euros, which is really bad for us Indians here in Mexico,” the clerk said. Beyond the cost of these accoutrements, there was the simple question of having enough money to buy a
torta
for lunch, and the exhaustion that overcame her after the final, hour-long journey home on the Metro and on the bus as it inched forward the last three miles along the main drag of Nezahualcóyotl with its littered sidewalks, the multitudes of factory workers fighting
the gridlock on Ignacio Zaragoza Boulevard, pushing against the domestics and the peddlers of pirated CDs. She would rise up before dawn to finish assignments she’d been too tired to complete the night before. “Araceli, why are you killing yourself like this?” her mother said one morning, her words heavy with a sense of futility and absurdity.
“¿Para qué?
“ The decision to go to art school was, for her mother, a superfluous act of filial betrayal, because daughters, unlike shiftless boys, were expected to place family first. A wayward daughter counted as much as six wayward sons on the scale of neighborhood shame. When Araceli gave up art school after a year and started working, handing over half of her earnings to pay for her baby brother’s future college education, her parents stopped assaulting her with their prolonged silences.

Probably Felipe had an artist’s soul and had also been forced to surrender his ambitions. “You look smart, that’s why I asked you to dance,” he’d said. Felipe, she sensed, had long ago made the accommodation Araceli still struggled to live with; he could make art without feeling the sense of injustice that ate away at Araceli whenever she thought about her mother and the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes.

In the late afternoon, when Araceli was finishing cooking dinner and was getting ready to set the table, she noticed that she had absentmindedly arranged Maureen’s silver forks, knives, and spoons into patterns on the kitchen counter while polishing them earlier in the day: an asterisk, a series of overlapping triangles, an arrow. Araceli imagined, for a moment, a sculpture that would make an ironic statement about the fine curlicue designs on their handles: she imagined taking a blowtorch and welding forks, knives, and spoons into tangled sculptures of machetes and plows.
That would be fun, but expensive.
She was rubbing a spot on the last spoon that had somehow escaped her cleaning when she heard the front door slam, hard enough to provoke a faint rattle of the dishes in the cupboard.
What was that? One of the boys again?

After a minute or so Araceli began to hear raised voices,
el señor
and
la señora
yelling at each other. The usual back-and-forth barking and pleading, their voices pushing through the closed door as an irritating and genderless vibration. She considered the basil remedy again, but then thought better of it: their fighting was part of a natural rhythm, a kind of release; they would fight and a day or two later Araceli would
see Scott rubbing his wife’s back, or Maureen clasping his hand as they watched their children play in the backyard. After observing the Torres-Thompsons for several years she could begin to see their arguments as a kind of marriage fertilizer: they were ugly, one recoiled before their nasty smell, but they appeared to be necessary. She listened as the shouting continued, rising in volume so that she could begin to make out clear phrases: “Because you have to be more responsible!” “Don’t humiliate me,” and finally a laughing shout of “Pepe? Pepe?” Well, Araceli’s curiosity was piqued now, she had to see what was going on, so she opened the door to the living room but pushed it too hard, bringing forth a moment of unintended theatricality in which the yelling instantly stopped and both Scott and Maureen turned to face her, their foreheads and cheeks burning with an identical angry hue. No, Araceli hadn’t intended to do that; she wanted to hear more clearly what they were saying, not to stop the fight altogether. One glance at her
jefe
and
jefa
told her that this argument was significantly more serious than any that had come before, that the words passed between them were dangerously close to finding a physical expression in the exercise of limbs and muscles. Scott was standing in the center of the living room with his arms tensed at his sides, and as he turned to look at Araceli she saw a man with an expression she barely recognized: here was a man who felt his power slipping from him, who strained to open his eyes wide to take in the room and the woman before him, as if he had never really seen her before this moment. A few feet away, Maureen sat on the couch, before the coffee table and its plane of blown glass, legs crossed and arms folded, in that tenuous state of mind that exists between being amused and being afraid. Araceli sensed she was trying very hard to convince herself that her husband’s yelling was nothing more dangerous than the grumbling of an eight-year-old.