The Barbarian Nurseries (14 page)

Araceli raised her eyebrows and prepared to turn away, but then something happened that had never happened before: they resumed their argument, without caring that Araceli was still in the room. Scott raised his finger and declared, “Don’t you dare, don’t you dare say another fucking thing.”
I didn’t think he could do that. He screams while I watch.
Maureen rose to her feet and began to walk toward Scott, causing Araceli to immediately turn around and close the door with the same speed and sense of repulsion that one uses to change the
television channel upon encountering a gory, tasteless scene from a horror movie.

Inside the kitchen Araceli removed her apron: she would leave the dinner ready, in covered bowls on the marble counter, and then leave the kitchen and seek shelter in her room for the time being. When men raised their voices in imitation of carnivorous mammals, smart women made for the exits; that’s how it was in her home, in many other homes, in too many homes to count in the stacked cubes of the Nezahualcóyotl neighborhood where women conspired during the day to undo the tangles men made with their words at night.
Sometimes you just have to run away. You have to close the window, close the door, and seal off your ears from the sounds people make when the dogs inside them decide to come out and snarl.
Araceli made a conscious effort not to listen to the back-and-forth coming from behind the pine door, not to hear what words were being said as she finished putting clear plastic wrap over the bowls filled with pasta and fish sticks.

Araceli was reaching for the back door when she heard a half-grunted “Be quiet!” followed by an unmistakably female scream and a high-pitched crash that sounded like fifty porcelain plates striking the floor and shattering all at once. Instinctively she ran back across the kitchen, pushed open the swinging door, and found Maureen on the floor, half sitting and half prone upon the ruins of the coffee table, raising her arms in an attempt to steady herself without getting cut on the pool of shattered glass around her. She looked to Araceli like a woman who had been dropped from an airplane, or who had fallen from a cloud, landing on a spot of the earth she did not recognize, and who was surprised to see she had survived. Scott stood above her, raising his hands to his temples as he looked down at his wife.

“Oh, my God, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it,” he said, and he reached out to help her.

“Get away from me!” Maureen shouted, and he instantly stepped back. “Araceli, help me. Please.”

The Mexican woman froze.
What have they done to each other, these people?
Araceli felt the need to restore order and understood that the violence in this room might spin into something unspeakable were it not for her presence.
Today I am the civilized one and they are the savages. They have taken the living room I have worked so hard to give the
sparkle of a museum and they have transformed it into a wrestling ring.
Lucha libre.
If I hadn’t come in they would be grabbing the chairs from the dining room and throwing them at each other.
Stepping gingerly around the ruins of the table she had cleaned that morning, and too many other mornings to count, with blue ammonia spray, Araceli reached out and took the hand of her
jefa
and helped her to her feet.

“You know, Bigger, I’ve long wanted to go into these houses … and just
see
how your people live.”

—Richard Wright,
Native Son

W
aaaaaaaaaa!

The alarm startled Araceli awake at the lazy hour of 7:30 a.m., the summer sun already blasting through the curtains. On most mornings she would have been long awake, but the memory of the powerful matriarch of the mansion momentarily helpless on the floor had kept her from sleeping well. During the summer the Torres-Thompson household got a later start to the day and Araceli could often spend some time in the morning with the hosts of the Univision morning show as she got dressed, half listening to their interviews with diet experts, the celebrity gossip, the reports on the latest drug murders in Guerrero and Nuevo Laredo, the videos of the dead being pulled from overturned buses, and the like. Now she had witnessed a kind of news event in this home, too close and too raw to be entertainment. The crash and scream had invaded her dreams, causing her to sleep right up to the deadline announced by her digital clock. By now,
el señor
Scott would have made himself some toast and be out the door—on this morning, perhaps more than any other, he would have wanted to avoid contact with his servant. Araceli took her time getting dressed and put on her white
filipina,
dreading the stony mood that awaited as soon as she entered the
main home; a day of silences from Maureen, followed by the tense sharing of the domestic space in the evening when Scott returned from work. When a man tosses his wife to the ground, there can be no easy forgiveness.

With some trepidation Araceli opened the door to the kitchen, and then the door from the kitchen to the living room. No one, nothing, all quiet, as orderly as she had left it the night before, when she swept up the glass and steel ruins of the coffee table and collected them in two boxes she placed next to the plastic trash barrels outside. Only the conspicuously empty space in the living room hinted at what had happened the night before. Perhaps she should examine the floor for any traces of glass, lest the baby Samantha pick one up and place it in her mouth. Leaning down, Araceli examined the ocher surface of the Saltillo tile floors and found two slivers, each smaller than a child’s fingernail. She held them in her palm to examine them, meditating not so much on the shards as on the unexpected violence that had produced them.
This house will not return to normal so quickly.
Suddenly Araceli the artist, the Araceli who didn’t care, longed for the ordinary. She was the strange one, the
mexicana
they couldn’t comprehend, but it would fall to her to bring the Torres-Thompson household back to a calm center by restoring the broken routines: the comfort of served breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, the tonic of a sparkling kitchen and smartly made beds at the end of the day. She tossed the shards into the trash and started breakfast, following the rotation
la señora
had established on a refrigerator calendar. Friday: Cream of Wheat.

Brandon wandered into the kitchen first, at 8:36, followed by his brother a few minutes later. They sat at the kitchen table, eating silently, their spoons hitting the bottom of their bowls with a comforting clank-clank, Brandon reading a thick book with a dragon on the cover as he ate. Araceli wondered how much they knew about their parents’ altercation the night before. Probably they heard everything, she thought, and this was almost true: they had retreated to the television room and the comfort of cartoon warfare just as the shouting had reached a peak, but before their father had shoved their mother backward into the coffee table. Brandon had guided his softly weeping younger brother away with a “Hey, Keenan, let’s go watch a movie,” and the crash and their mother’s short scream had been lost behind a closed door of sound-swallowing
Mexican pine, and in the swirling orchestral theme music that accompanied a boy on his animated martial-arts adventures through a world inhabited by dueling tribes of warriors. When Maureen had shown up sometime later to tell them to get ready for bed, they had assumed everything was normal because they were too young to pick up the muted exhaustion in her voice, too unknowing of the cruelties that adults could inflict upon one another to recognize the meaning in the puffy droop in their mother’s eyes.

M
aureen awoke atop a cushion of comforters on the floor of the nursery, next to her daughter’s crib. With its lavender walls, Samantha’s incipient doll collection, and the stuffed purple pony in the corner, the nursery was a safe room, its femininity a shield against the masculine harshness outside. He didn’t follow her there; he didn’t hit her or yell at her with her baby girl by her side. Having failed to injure Maureen with his words, Scott had infected the household with fear and unpredictability and the silencing power of his muscle. He unleashed a monster, to ravage her body and violate unspoken codes, to inflict the injuries his words could not. At first the argument about Maureen’s spending on the desert garden had played out as the mirror image of the argument about Scott’s neglect of
la petite
rain forest. In this case it was Scott who was the aggrieved party, having been humiliated before his employees, but somehow Maureen had wrested the upper hand, shifting the discussion to Scott’s failings as husband and parent, and their roots in his emotional distance. She had taken the argument back to South Whittier, to that sad little two-story home of thin drywall and crabgrass lawns, with the box rooms that had mirrors along the walls to create the illusion of space. It had been her misfortune to visit this property as their courtship reached its climax, to see the Torres family home in all its faded, lower-middle-class glory, and last night she had allowed herself to blurt out certain truths he refused to see, long-held but never-spoken observations that focused on that brittle woman whose admonitions were the font of her husband’s ambition and also much of his self-doubt. It occurred to Maureen now, in the morning, that bringing her late mother-in-law to the conversation was not a good idea: the rage she provoked by doing so was entirely predictable, but not what
happened next. He had taken two purposeful and irrational steps toward her, and attacked her with the muscles of his forearms and hands, sending her sprawling backward across the room and into the table. There was the moment of stunned helplessness as she lost her balance and the table collapsed and shattered underneath her, followed, seconds later, by a moment of clarity, the sudden understanding of a long-suppressed fear.

I always expected him to do this.

Maybe from the first time they dated she sensed that the nervous, faded-cotton exterior of Scott Torres concealed a roiling core. That was the attraction to him in the first place, wasn’t it? Before she had seen the home in South Whittier, before she had lived with the man, she saw the anguished exertions of an artist searching for perfection, though he possessed only some of the language and social gifts that oozed from painters, actors, and writers. He suffered to bring his creations into the world, and when they did not come he could turn sullen and angry in a disturbingly adolescent kind of way. His daydreams and his projects were his best friends and companions, and often they caused his face to brighten with a mischievous sparkle. There was something charming, she decided, about a man whose brilliance lay in solving problems that could not be easily explained in words.
I will make you
my
project, Scott Torres.
She had taken this shy man and, like a wizardess, had given him at least some charm, and a surplus of family riches. And now he had rewarded her with the same common violence that sent women to shelters. Hours later she could still feel his assault just below her collarbone, and see the two bruises that seemed to float on the surface of her skin like jellyfish.

Fatherhood did this to men. They weren’t prepared for it. After the boys were born there were days when Scott glared at the clutter of baby paraphernalia in their home, the spit-up stains scattered on the rugs and their clothing, with the resentful eyes of a prison convict.
What? Did you expect it to be easy? This sagging you feel around your eyes, the ache in your arms, that is called parenthood, and it is no longer the exclusive province of women.
Then came the scattered moments of aggression when his toddlers committed minor sins, when Brandon was a two-year-old just learning the power of felt-tip pens to deface freshly painted walls, or when Keenan tossed a wine glass on the floor, and
Scott blared a too-loud “No!” When she was halfway into carrying Samantha, he punched the wall, leaving a crater for a week before fixing it, never bothering to explain what had set him off.
It’s true what my mother said. You can think you know someone as intimately as they can be known, you can commune happily with their odors and their idiosyncrasies for years, but then they show you something distasteful, something frightening precisely at the moment when you’re too far in to get out.
Maureen’s father was old Missouri Irish and the hurtful memory of his living room explosions had led her to adopt her mother’s maiden name when she was eight een. Now the neighbors had likely heard Scott too, they knew that his wife and children were inside cowering. They all knew.

Maureen felt the curtains of an ancient, unerasable shame being drawn across the windows of this bright home.
I have to flee. Again.
When she was eleven Maureen walked out and no one heard the slap of the screen door because her older sister and her mother were in full-throated battle with her father. On that day she ran out in her spring sundress and sandals, jumping down the steps, running to the corner, and then walking when she looked over her shoulder and saw no one was following, past other small houses like hers in that Missouri river town, underneath the impossible pinks of the flowering dogwoods, past the lonely Baptist church and the venerable, abandoned gas station and its gravel bays. Past the fields at the edge of town, with pebbles in her sandals, she walked slowly toward the unfettered horizon that loomed over the stubs of early corn, feeling comfort in the promise of other fields fallow and freshly plowed, and then to the hills where tractors cut plow lines that flowed around the undulating contours of the landscape, until she finally stood alone at the entrance to a solitary farm. Two silos stood guard there, each looking like a man with steel-pipe arms and a tin-roof hat, and she thought how much better it would be to have a father who was as tall and stately and silent. She thought these things until tires rolled on the dirt path behind her, and she turned and saw the police car that would take her home.

Now Maureen would leave and stay gone for a few days, and her absence would teach Scott a lesson. She would leave and decide later whether, and under what conditions, she would come back. But how would she cope on the road with three children, driving on the interstate?

How long could she even control her boys in a claustrophobic hotel room? She envisioned herself with her three children at a nearby hotel suite, the boys pushing each other backward into the fold-out couch, the minibar, in subconscious imitation of their father. Did she really want to be around that boy energy, their unpredictable physicality? A woman alone with two boys and a baby girl would not work. Her mother was in St. Louis, and if Scott was right about the credit cards Maureen wouldn’t be able to buy plane tickets to get there. Maureen went over her options during a mostly sleepless night and in the last hour before dawn she knew exactly what she would do: she would raid the emergency cash that the ever-cautious Scott kept in a washroom drawer next to the earthquake kit. And then she would leave with Samantha for a few days, allowing Scott to contemplate her absence and take care of the boys. Araceli would be there to keep the household from falling apart and the boys from going hungry. It was what she had always wanted to do anyway, to take off with Samantha for a few days, for a “girls’ vacation.”

As she carried a half-asleep Samantha through the house and to the car, she thought,
It’s going to be another hot day.
For the moment, however, there would be the chill of early morning, and she tossed a blanket over her daughter. She wanted to be out the door before Scott woke up, to avoid any further, unpleasant confrontations and present him with a fait accompli, but when she entered the garage at 7:45 a.m. she discovered his car was already gone; he was off to work about an hour earlier than usual. This did not surprise her, though it did cause her to pause in her escape plan: if she left now, her two boys would be alone in the house, because Araceli was still in the guesthouse, and not yet at work, separated from Brandon and Keenan by two walls and the five paces or so it took to walk to the kitchen’s back door.
Damn it!
To leave now would violate a taboo of motherhood: she would have to carry Samantha back into the house and start her escape all over again.
If I go back in, I might not leave at all, I might lose my nerve.
She opened the garage door to confirm his car was also absent from the driveway, then stepped outside into the morning air. Now the light came on in the kitchen, and from the driveway Maureen could see, through the window, the sleepy rebellion on the face of her Mexican employee as she began the breakfast routine. Araceli was in the house, and the sight
of her was enough to set Maureen on her journey again, to surrender to the momentum and sense of emancipatory purpose that had brought her to the driveway in the first place. She opened the car door and gave a faint sigh as she freed herself of her sleeping daughter’s weight and strapped her into the car seat. She had a vague idea of where she was headed: to that spa in the high desert mountains above Joshua Tree she had read about in the arts section of the newspaper, the one said to be relatively cool even in the heat of summer, the one with the babysitters who took care of your child while they pampered you in steam and lavender.

Maureen was outside the gates of the Estates, turning onto the road that skirted through the meadows, when she realized she had forgotten her cell phone. It was too late to go back home, if she did so she might cancel her expedition altogether, so she directed her car to the first gas station and a public phone and called directory assistance, and reached a half-awake clerk at the spa-hotel and made a reservation. Minutes later, mother and daughter were on the unencumbered, early morning highway, heading out of the city, sprinting eastward in the face of an incoming bumper-to-bumper, heading toward the dry foothills at the edge of the metropolis.