The Barbarian Nurseries (15 page)

I
nside the game room, beneath the flat-screen and the game console, Scott Torres awoke on the floor at 5:35 a.m. after a night of surprisingly uninterrupted sleep, six hours in which the memory of what had happened in the living room disappeared in the inky cube of a lightless room and he lived in blissful nothingness. Within three seconds of opening his eyes, the series of events of the night before replayed themselves in his memory with the stark simplicity of those PowerPoint presentations the executives concocted on the fourth floor at Elysian Systems. He remembered the staccato dialogue of exchanged insults, each slightly more crude than the next, and then his attempt to get away while Maureen followed him around the room, yelling at the back of his shoulders.
That’s what happens when you call a woman that word you should never use: they either sulk away or come at you with newfound ferocity.
She had counterattacked with a spiteful commentary about Scott’s being unable to see a horizon beyond “the stupid
stucco coffin” in which his mother, separated from his father, had lived her final days alone; it was a remark so stunningly cold that it had caused the argument to stop while Scott took in the realization that he had married a woman who could insult the dead. His thoughts had turned to the many ways he might impose his will with his hands at precisely the moment Maureen took a step toward him to renew the argument: he pushed her away with the full, furious strength a man in his early forties could muster, a half-defensive shove that had sent her sprawling backward into the coffee table.

For an instant before she lost her balance he felt a strange and childlike gratification.
At last!
When she hit the table—such a fragile construction, that piece of Mexican craftwork—and Araceli entered the room, it all disappeared. Now a hollow numbness occupied the space between his eyes. Maureen had violated a trust by spending that money, she had damaged their family, but of course he had lost the moral high ground when he pushed her. Would she ever forgive him for her fall, see the full picture of events, and apologize for what she had done and said?
There is a less than fifty percent probability.
Or would she believe that her fall and the broken table had absolved her of any need to acknowledge how vicious she had been?
The much more likely outcome.
If she’d managed to get a full night’s sleep she might feel something other than the outraged sense of victimhood of the night before, when he feared, for a moment, that she would call the police. By the feminist calculus that followed these events, he was an abuser, a male inflictor of bodily harm, and therefore would be permanently expelled from the garden of family love, into the purgatory inhabited by the alcoholics, the goons, and the serial adulterers. Perhaps, after the erasures a few hours of sleep could bring, Maureen would see the crash and fall for what they really were: an accident, an act of mutual stupidity and clumsiness, like a pratfall in a comedy skit.
This is what happens,
he would tell her,
when two middle-aged people push their sleep-deprived bodies to raise small children, a task we should leave for twentysomething decath-letes, ballerinas, and other spry and limber people.

Scott would tell her these things in due time, but after just a few minutes awake, he had decided that for the moment a full retreat was in order, an escape from his wife’s sense of entitlement, from her new fascination with rare desert fauna, which appeared to have replaced
earlier fascinations with rustic Italian furniture and abstract California art. Let her figure it out on her own: or rather, with Araceli, who did the bulk of the work, who kept the house livable and the children fed and gave Maureen time to dream up schemes that would empty their bank accounts—now, as many times before, he thought of Araceli as a kind of subtraction from his wife. In Maine’s “Down East,” where his mother was from, and in the unknown Mexican places his father had lived, they understood about respect and responsibility. He was still the son of scrappers and survivors.

I have to get the hell out of here.
It was what he told himself those last days at MindWare, when he longed to work with adults again. Living with Maureen was looking like the final act at his roller-coaster start-up, when the Big Man spent an extravagance on five-star hotels, dinners at restaurants on the Strip, and a thousand dollars in golf lessons in a quixotic campaign to seduce the venture capitalists, raise cash, and fend off the board. At some point you had to say,
Stop, it’s over.
Suddenly, those old sayings of his Mexican father didn’t sound so silly and quaint:
Live cheap and smell sweet. Never hang your hat where you can’t reach it.
After grabbing a few clothes, he was out the door and in his car, gliding down toward the ocean with only the red eye of Scorpio watching him.

S
uch was the domestic discipline in the home on Paseo Linda Bonita that several hours passed before either Araceli or the two boys noticed that Maureen and Scott were gone. Having been conditioned by a half summer’s worth of their mother’s anti-television, anti-computer exhortations, Brandon and Keenan began their day with appropriately mind-nurturing and solitary activities. It was a quiet, sisterless morning, and through the open summer windows and the screens the house filled with the squeaky
chee-deep chee-deep
of the tree swallows that were acquainting themselves with the ocotillo in the backyard. Saman-tha’s usual prespeech utterances and screams were not there to ring in the ears of her brothers, though the boys were not yet conscious of her absence. The boys did not know that their sister was already halfway to the Sonoran Desert with their mother just as they were finishing their Cream of Wheat with Araceli. Keenan drifted over to the Room of a
Thousand Wonders and began assembling a three-level spacecraft with Danish plastic mini-bricks, while Brandon climbed onto the couch in the living room and lost himself in the fourth volume of a detective-fantasy thriller for “middle readers” that involved teams of elves capable of time-bending magic. So gripping was the escape of the boy-detective protagonist from yet another band of machine-gun-toting criminals, that Brandon failed to notice that the coffee table was missing.

After the usual and easy post-breakfast cleanup in the kitchen, Araceli wandered about the house picking up dirty laundry, starting with the pajamas in the boys’ room, and then moving to the nursery. She was preoccupied, once again, with Felipe, because after putting away the saucepan she had used to prepare the Cream of Wheat, she had a sudden premonition that he would call her today—perhaps it was some sort of psychic displacement produced by having witnessed the fight between Scott and Maureen the night before. In the presence of violent disagreement, a germ of happiness might take root.
Hoy el gordito me va a llamar.
Araceli was daydream-dancing with her “little fat man” when she entered the nursery and noticed the comforter on the floor and quickly surmised that Maureen had slept there. A few minutes later the conclusion was confirmed when Araceli entered the master bedroom and found the bed exactly as she had left it yesterday afternoon. Clearly,
el señor
Scott had not slept here either; he had probably bedded down with the big television set, and indeed, on her final stop on the laundry search Araceli found a sleeping bag and pillow tossed on the floor there. Well, of course they didn’t make up before going to bed, that was no surprise. Araceli made her way to the laundry room, got the first load of Maureen’s clothes into the washer after checking for and failing to see any blood:
It appears they did not kill themselves.
Finally, she circled back to the kitchen, unsurprised that in her wanderings through the house her path did not cross with that of
la señora
Maureen. It was a big house and on many days Maureen wandered in and out, unannounced, quite often.

At 12:15 p.m. the boys came back to the kitchen table for lunch, and it was only after they had devoured the last of the chicken tenders Araceli had prepared that Keenan, who was always slightly more attuned to any change in his surroundings than his older brother, finally asked Araceli casually, “Where’s my mom?”

Araceli turned from the sink, where she had a saucepan soaking in lightly soaped water, and faced Keenan.

“¿No está en la casa?”

“No, she’s not here.”

“That is strange,” Araceli said. It occurred to Araceli, for a second, that she should utter something to
disimular,
one of those verbal misdirections that Mexicans are especially good at, a fiction such as,
Oh, now I remember, she went to the market,
that would lift the look of mild concern that had suddenly affixed itself to Keenan’s hazel eyes. Instead she said nothing and thought how on any other day Maureen exiting the house unannounced without the two boys for an hour or two or three wouldn’t cause her any concern, but after the events of the night before …? Given the swirling cloud of disorder and emotional collapse gathering around this household, anything was possible. One day a crew of men hacking the garden with machetes, the next her
patrones
wrestling in the living room. What next?
Maybe my crazy
jefa
left the baby with me too and didn’t tell me.
In the time it took to scrub the saucepan the idea morphed from preposterous to credible.
The baby is wandering somewhere alone in the house! I have to find the baby!
Araceli bolted from the kitchen, her hands dripping with dishwater, leaving Keenan’s unanswered “What’s wrong?” in her wake as she moved in big, loping strides to the living room, and to the nursery and through the hallways, into the walk-in closet, calling out, “Samanta! Samanta!” eating the “th” in much the same way the baby herself would in six months’ time when she tried, for the first time, to pronounce her own name. Finally, Araceli sprinted out of the house and into the backyard, across the lawn, and toward the cool, still blue plane of the swimming pool.
No, please, no, not here,
aquí
no, in the name of
Nuestra Señora Purísima,
no.
The baby was not in the pool, nor in the desert garden, nor anywhere else within the confines of 107 Paseo Linda Bonita, because Maureen had taken the baby with her, of course. Araceli could see that the baby was with
la señora
Maureen. There was no need to panic.

Back in the living room, Araceli tried to regain her breath and her sense of composure. She stood at the empty section of tiled floor where the coffee table had once stood and tried to sort out what exactly was happening in this household.

A
fter the last of the lunch dishes had been put away, at about the time Araceli had removed the ground turkey from the freezer to begin to defrost for dinner, she began contemplating calling Maureen on her cell phone. This presented a small problem of etiquette. For all her feistiness and independence of spirit, Araceli was still a slave to certain customs and habits, and her undeniably inferior social standing prevented Araceli from immediately picking up the phone and demanding of her
jefa: Where are you and when are you coming back?
That wasn’t Araceli’s place; she had to come up with a pretext for calling, something related to her professional duties, such as they were. The better part of an hour passed, with Araceli distractedly wiping off counters and tabletops and sweeping floors that were already as spotless and shimmering as they were ever going to be, before she thought of something plausible to say: she would simply ask Maureen if the children would eat Spanish rice for dinner. This would be an exceedingly thin and probably somewhat transparent reason for calling, although
la señora
had mentioned before the onset of summer something about forcing the boys to broaden their palates and working a few vegetables into their diet of processed meats and cheeses. Araceli would now suggest that Latin American staple, asking if she should throw in some peas and carrots. She moved to the refrigerator and the list of “emergency phone numbers” located there, a typed list Maureen had prepared on Scott’s computer more than a year earlier, in one of her last acts of domesticity before she went into labor with Samantha. The list had been made for Araceli and for Guadalupe, neither of whom found the need to consult it, and it had not been updated since.

Maureen, cell
was at the top of the list and Araceli quickly punched the numbers into the kitchen phone, anticipating her boss’s voice on the other end and the calming effect it would have not just on Araceli, but also on the children once Araceli could provide information about their mother’s whereabouts and expected hour of return. It was 2:29 p.m., according to the oven clock, and the boys were now ensconced in front of the television set, aware that they had done so without permission for the simple reason that their mother wasn’t around to be asked. Araceli listened with her ear on the receiver and began to worry after the fourth
ring, surprised and a bit angry at the sixth and seventh rings. The ringing stopped and the voice mail message began. “Hi, you’ve reached Maureen Thompson …”

Araceli found herself answering,
“Señora,”
until she realized it was a recorded voice. She tried again with the same result.
Something strange is going on,
Araceli decided, looking at the clock again. 2:34 p.m. For the first time, Araceli wondered if Maureen would be home by the time
el señor
Scott arrived home from work at 5:45, and Araceli pessimistically concluded that the answer was no.
She leaves me with her two boys all day without telling me. ¡Qué barbaridad!
Up to now, her boss had been the epitome of responsibility and what Mexicans call
empeño,
the putting of effort and thought into one’s actions. Maureen was precisely the kind of person hundreds of thousands of Mexicans came to the United States hoping to work for, a smart and civilized employer who never needed to be reminded it was payday, and who with her daily conduct taught you some of the small secrets of North American success, such as the monthly calendar of events posted on the refrigerator and in the boys’ bedroom. June 2:
School is out.
June 22:
Keenan’s day!
August 17:
Ob-gyn.
August 24:
Brandon’s day!
September 5:
School begins! ©
Planning, organization, compartmentalization. Respect and awareness for the advance of the clock, the ritual and efficient squeezing of events and chores into each day and hour. These were the hallmarks of daily life with Maureen Thompson.