The Barbarian Nurseries (16 page)

These thoughts occupied Araceli as she stood in the living room before the picture window, absentmindedly staring at the lawn, which was returning, again, to a state of unevenness and unkemptness, when she heard a faint electronic tone. After much circular wandering through the house, she traced the sound to the backyard and the ocotillo: at the very top of the tallest arm of the desert plant, a mockingbird was imitating the tone emitted by Maureen’s cell phone, a series of four marimba notes. A few seconds later Araceli heard the sound repeated, this time clearly coming from the master bedroom, and she rushed back inside. In the half darkness of the late afternoon a light glowed near one of the lamps on the nightstand. Araceli moved to pick up the device, something she never would have imagined herself doing just that morning, because there were certain personal objects in the home she never touched—wallets, jewelry, and loose bills left lying about.

On this day, however, the unexplained absence of her boss caused such objects to begin to lose their radioactivity, and Araceli picked up the phone with the tips of her fingers, like the detectives in those American television dramas, and read the message on the display: 7
MISSED CALLS.

Araceli had left Mexico City just as the cell phone craze had taken off, and had never owned such a device. She did not know that pressing two or three buttons would reveal the identity of the callers, in this case herself
(HOME)
and
SCOTT
, who had just phoned five times in the past hour from his office in an attempt to talk to his wife directly.

Scott usually arrived, punctually, at 5:45 p.m., an hour that Araceli knew well because it marked the beginning of the winding-down phase of her workday:
el señor
Scott would come in through the door that led to the garage, and his sons would bother him about playing in the backyard or starting a game of chess, and Samantha might teeter-run to him with her arms raised. This was the signal for Araceli to leave dinner in a handful of covered Pyrex dishes ready to be served, ask Maureen if she needed anything more, and then retire to her room with her own dinner, to return later for the final cleanup. Such were the work routines carved into Araceli’s day during four years of service. Rarely were these rhythms broken: the light and weather in the outside world shifted, with dinner served in darkness in the winter, with white sunshine outside in the summer, and once with a rain of ash visible through the windows. Awaiting the arrival of this hour now became Araceli’s quiet obsession. She watched the clock on the oven advance past five, and then walked into the living room to check on the Scandinavian timepiece on the dresser to see if it had the same time. The boys were taking care of themselves. After a motherless lunch, they could feel their mother’s authority in the home waning further, and they had switched on their handheld video games.

Her putative hour of emancipation came and went without Scott coming through the door. The pasta and
albóndigas
were ready. She’d finished her work for the day.
Where is this man?
At 6:45 p.m. Araceli impulsively walked out the front door, down the path that led through the lawn, to the sidewalk of Paseo Linda Bonita and its silent and peopleless cul-de-sac. She stood with her arms folded and looked down the street, hoping to see
el señor
Scott’s car coming around the corner, but
the vista never changed from the blank-page sweep of wide roadway.
He’s not coming home either.
No lo puedo creer.
They’ve abandoned me.
The sun was just beginning its rush toward the daily ocean splashdown and Brandon and Keenan were in the house without a parent in sight. She could hear the air-conditioning turn off suddenly in the home next door, and then in another, leaving a disconcerting silence that soon took on an idiotic, satirical quality, as if she were standing not in a real neighborhood, but rather on a stage set crafted to represent vacant American suburbia.
Why is it that you almost never see anyone out here? What goes on in these luxurious boxes that keeps people inside?
There was no human witness on Paseo Linda Bonita to see Araceli in her moment of distress, no nosy neighbor to take note of the anomaly of a servant in her
filipina
waiting impatiently for her bosses to arrive, gritting her teeth at the darkening street. Araceli began to contemplate various scenarios that might explain this new and strangest turn of events. Perhaps the violent encounter in the living room had been followed by others, with Maureen finally deciding to leave her husband for good. Or maybe she was in the hospital, while Scott had taken flight lest he be arrested. Or he might have killed her and buried her in the backyard. One saw these news reports about American couples bringing the narrative of their relationships to a demented end with kitchen knives and shovels: Araceli had expanded her knowledge of U.S. geography from the maps in Univision stories that showed the places where North American men murdered their pregnant wives and fiancées, places with names like Nebraska, Utah, and New Hampshire.

Araceli would like to leave too, but she could not, thanks to the chain that ran back to the house and those two boys anchoring her to this piece of California real estate. She could not run away, or stray too far, because there were children in the home and to leave them alone would be an abdication of responsibility, even if they had been left in Araceli’s care against her will. ¿
Qué diría mi querida madre?
Subconsciously, Araceli began to pace the sidewalk, reaching the boundaries of the next property and turning back, because anything might happen to those boys, unsupervised: they might even start a fire. She could not therefore simply continue walking down the hill, and this realization caused her to stamp her foot into the concrete like a child forced back inside for supper.

Araceli was still outside, about twenty-five yards beyond the closed front door, when the phone rang inside the Torres-Thompson home. She did not hear it. Anticipating that the person calling was his mother, Keenan interrupted his game play at the second ring and ran from the living room to the kitchen, stood on his tiptoes, and grabbed the dangling cord of the receiver from its perch five feet off the ground on the kitchen wall on the fourth ring.

“Hello? Mommy?”

“Hi, sweetie.”

“Mommy, where are you?”

“I’m just taking a little break.”

“A break?”

“Yes, honey. A little vacation.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m angry with your father.” “Oh.”

The pause that followed lasted long enough for even young Keenan to feel the need to fill it, though he couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Mommy loves you,” Maureen said finally. She was in a hotel room with musty old Navajo rugs and sage burning on an incense tray, watching her baby girl devour a banana. The squeaky tones of her younger son’s voice evoked images of domestic routine:
Araceli must have the situation in hand,
Maureen thought;
she is helping Scott,
and Maureen felt her concerns about the boys and home she had left behind lift quickly. “Mommy’s just a little angry with your father.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Soon, honey. Soon.”

These words comforted Keenan sufficiently that he started thinking about getting back to his game. It had been ages since he’d played it as long as he had today.

“What have you been doing today?”

“We’re playing on our Game Boys,” he said. “I got to the top of Cookie Mountain. Brandon showed me how to do it. It was really cool.”

Maureen winced. Scott gets home and the first thing he does is let them play those mindless games.

“Did you eat?”

Keenan looked across the kitchen and noticed the dishes Araceli
had left on the counter. “We’re having spaghetti and meatballs,” he said. Maureen heard the “we” and assumed it included Scott. Satisfied that her boys were being taken care of by Araceli, and that Scott was hovering nearby, she said goodbye to her son and hung up the phone quickly, the better to avoid any awkward conversations with her husband.

Years of being married and raising children had brought Scott’s and Maureen’s parental clocks into sync. Thus, a minute or so after Keenan had replaced the phone in its cradle, the phone rang again. Keenan had returned to the living room and turned his Game Boy back on, and now he circled back to the kitchen, picking up the phone on the eighth ring.

“Hello?”

“Hi! Keenan?”

“Dad?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Where are you?” Keenan said. Scott was sufficiently distracted by his surroundings and the circumstances under which he was making the call—he was standing in the patch of grass by the street outside Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s apartment building—that he failed to notice the subtle verbal clue that perhaps not everything was right in his home.

“I’m taking a little break from being home.”

“A vacation?” Keenan asked.

“Yeah, like a vacation.”

Keenan was less interested in this conversation than the one he had just had with his mother. Hearing their two voices within minutes of each other had returned to him a sense of normality, and he wanted to get back to his game, and also start eating the spaghetti and meatballs on the counter.

“How’s Mommy doing?”

“She says she’s really angry at you.”

His wife had spent the day filling his sons’ ears with soliloquies about what a horrible man he was, the completely predictable sequel to the pratfalls and crashes of the night before.

“I know she’s angry at me,” Scott said, the words coming out with a sad sense of finality. In an instant, his mood changed.
How dare she try to turn the children against me.
“I’m angry at her too,” he said. He imagined his wife hovering nearby, and that she might take the phone away
from Keenan and start to harass him about where he was, so he said his goodbyes quickly, telling his son to listen to what his mother told him to do.

“Okay, Dad,” Keenan said, even though his mother wasn’t there, because like his father, he was in a hurry to get off the phone too.

I
’m scared. Araceli, can you sleep with us?”

Keenan asked this with the comforter pulled up to his chin, in bed after forty-five minutes of crying and confusion Araceli would not soon forget. It seemed to Araceli that getting the boys into their room with their teeth brushed and under the covers, in her best approximation of what their mother would have done, was a Herculean task in itself, and that asking her to throw herself on the floor next to them was asking one thing too many. She needed a moment alone, to step back and think what to do next. The boys had begun to panic an hour or so after dusk, when the windows turned into black planes broadcasting images of parentless rooms. “Where’s Mommy?” “Where’s Dad?” They had peppered her with these questions and had grown increasingly insistent on receiving some answer other than “I don’t know,” “Soon,” or the Spanish
“Ya mero.”
Araceli told them they had to go to bed, and this had set off a round of silent tears from Brandon, and a strange, high-pitched grunt-growl from Keenan. They were going to bed with neither their mother nor their father in the home, with only the surly Mexican maid in the house, and suddenly they felt as lost as two boys separated from their parents on a busy city street. Brushing their teeth and changing into
pajamas had calmed them to the point that they could wipe the tears from their faces; the nightly routines their mother had inculcated in them became, for a moment, a soothing substitute for her presence.

“Will you sleep with us, please?” Keenan repeated.

Araceli desperately wanted to return to her room, but of course that wasn’t possible: if she retired to her
casita
in the back she would be leaving the children alone in the house.

You shouldn’t just give in to children. You shouldn’t just give them anything they ask for.

In Araceli’s family home in Nezahualcóyotl children were obedient, quiet, and nondemanding: girls, especially, were expected to occupy quiet, scrubbed spaces that adults were free to ignore. Her own childhood equivalent to the bedtime routine in the Room of a Thousand Wonders took place in the spare room of tile floors she shared with her sister, floors both sisters had been required to mop from the age of ten onward. At bedtime the only good night was a quick look-in from their mother, a check of their obedience. They feared their mother’s disapproval and the idea that they might delay her from that final reward of her workday: the climb to the roof, where pennants of denim and polyester caught the breeze and, in their cool evening stiffness, announced,
En esta casa, yo mando:
In this house, I am love, a river of order and sustenance that flows steady in all seasons.

“I won’t sleep here next to you, no,” Araceli said. “But I will sleep close. Over here, in the hallway. Okay?”

“In the hallway?”

“Yes. Aquí.”

She opened the door to their room and in a few moments she had taken two comforters from one of Maureen’s closets and tossed them on the floor, along with a pillow.

“Aquí voy a dormir. Aquí voy a estar.”

“Okay.”

Araceli, for the first time in her life, bedded down in her
filipina.

A
raceli awoke before dawn with the children asleep, the chorus of morning birds yet to begin outside the windows, and walked through the empty house as if in a trance. There seemed to Araceli a
slight chance that either Scott or Maureen had returned during the night, but each flick of a light switch revealed only a stark tableau of dust-free furniture: the comforter was still taut on the bed in the master bedroom, there were no blankets on the floor to indicate anyone had slept in Scott’s game and television room, and the kitchen showed no signs of anyone having been there since Araceli gave the last wipe to the counters as the boys prepared for bed the night before. She circled back to the master bathroom, the space Araceli most strongly associated with Maureen’s physical presence, and surveyed the objects as if one of them might tell her when
la señora
would return.
¿Dónde estás, mi jefa?
A paddle brush resting in a wicker basket on the marble slab of the sink drew Araceli’s eye. This inelegant piece of black plastic did the daily hard work of Maureen’s morning and bedtime grooming, and a thick weave of Maureen’s russet hair had built up between the nylon bristles, and for an instant Araceli imagined the strands rising from the brush and taking form, and then Maureen herself emerging magically underneath, calming her children with her motherly exhortations.

There’s nothing I can do but wait.
It occurred to Araceli, momentarily, that she had been spoiled by life with these people, that she had been conditioned to a crisis-free life, above all by Maureen’s relentless attention to daily routines, and the comfort of schedules assiduously kept. Over the last four years the two women had built many wordless understandings between them, so that, among other things, towels and dirty clothes circulated through the house as efficiently as the traffic on the empty streets of the Laguna Rancho Estates, from wet bodies to hampers to washing machines to shelves, touching the hands of both women in their circuit. Disposable diapers moved from plastic packages on store shelves to babies’ bottoms to special trash cans with deodorizers, and finally to the master trash cans in the back of the house, only briefly tainting the aroma of a country retreat that emanated from the pine and oak furniture, and from a handful of strategically placed bowls of potpourri and lavender.

Maureen was the center of gravity of this home, and with each hour her unexplained absence became harder to fathom.
Why would she leave, where is she?
If there were an explanation it might be easier to cope, and Araceli decided that she would call Scott and demand one:
What did you do to
la señora?
Did you hurt her?

It was 8:30 a.m. and the boys were still asleep when Araceli marched to the refrigerator and called the second number on the list:
Scott, cell.
In four years of working for the Torres-Thompson family, Araceli had not once called Scott. This morning she would call him and simply demand to know why she had been left alone with two boys when since the beginning it had been made clear she was not to be a babysitter. After a night of being forced to be a mother and father to two boys, after sleeping on the floor in her clothes, Araceli was beyond politeness or deference.
¿Dónde estás?
she would ask, in the familiar
“tú”
instead of the formal
“usted,”
in violation of ingrained Mexican class conventions, as if she were the boss and he were the employee, though of course the monolingual Scott would never pick up on her sassiness.

The phone rang once and moved to voice mail. She called again, with the same response.

Scott’s phone was in Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s apartment, which was on the second floor and inside one of those signal shadows that bedevil cell-phone engineers. He was sleeping, after staying up late into the night telling Charlotte about his fight with Maureen, and then falling asleep on her couch. By the time he awoke, just before noon, his phone would be dead because in the harried flight from his home he had neglected to pack the charger.

Araceli called a half dozen times in succession, the final attempt coming as Keenan came into the kitchen and demanded, “I’m hungry! I want something to eat!”

The sight of his thin eyebrows squeezed in irritation and the corners of his mouth drooping plaintively set Araceli off. A missing mother, a missing father, children expecting to be fed: it was all too much.
The pots and pans, the salads and the sauces—that is my work. I am the woman who cleans. I am not the mother.

“I am not your mother!” Araceli shouted, and realized instantly her mistake, because Keenan turned and ran away, screaming, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” His shouts filled the living room and became fainter as he ran deeper into the house. Araceli chased after him, cursing herself and the situation and calling out “Keenan, Keenan” until she found him sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees on the floor of the bathroom, the one he shared with Brandon, with shower curtains depicting
a coral reef teeming with tropical fish, and decorative rubber jellyfish affixed to the mirror, a tile-lined annex to the Room of a Thousand Wonders. Tears and mucus cascaded over his cheeks and lips and into his mouth. A very faint, motherly impulse to reach down and wipe his tears and clean his nose gathered in Araceli’s chest, but she resisted it. Instead, she picked up a bar of amber-colored soap and said, “Keenan,
mira.”

She held the soap delicately between thumb and forefinger and drew lines on the mirror, making quick, sweeping movements to capture and hold his attention, like those clowns in Chapultepec Park who squeezed and stretched balloons into dogs and swords. In less than a minute she had produced a creature on the glass. It floated in the multidimensional space between Keenan and his reflection, ghostly and amber, and he stopped crying the moment he realized what it was.

“A dragon,” he said.

“Yes. A dragon,” Araceli said, her mouth bursting open into a rare display of happy teeth. “For you, Keenan.”

The boy wiped the tears from his face and considered the fanciful animal, which had been rendered in half flight, seemingly ready to pounce.

“That’s really tight,” he said.

“I’m going to make you pancakes,” Araceli said. “Pancakes with bananas. You like that, no? Nice?”

He nodded. After she had coaxed the boy back to the kitchen and served him chocolate milk, after she had prepared the banana pancakes and served them with generous portions of Grade AA authentic Canadian maple syrup, and after the boys had left the kitchen for the entertainments of Saturday morning television, Araceli was once again alone with the telephone list on the refrigerator.

B
elow Scott’s cell phone on the list of emergency numbers there was
Scott, office,
which she called even though it was Saturday. “We are currently closed. Our office hours are …” Next was
Mother,
meaning Maureen’s mother, a woman with cascading ash-colored hair who had visited this home three times since Araceli began working here, most recently in the days after Samantha was born. She was a reserved
woman whose main form of communication was the lingering, considered stare, and she had rarely spoken more than a few curt words at a time to Araceli. There had been one unguarded moment, though, during the older woman’s first visit to this house, when she had encountered Araceli in the kitchen and said, “You’re lucky to have this job. You know that, right?” The house on Paseo Linda Bonita was a freshly minted masterpiece then, the virgin furniture was free of child-inflicted scratches, the walls were freshly painted, and
la petite
rain forest still resembled a small, transplanted corner of Brazil. “Working with my daughter and grandchildren, in this amazing house. I hope you appreciate it.” The words contained an odd patina of regret and envy: as absurd as it sounded, Maureen’s mother resented Araceli for working in this home in daily proximity to her daughter, for the perceived intimacy of their relationship.
I could cook and clean too,
the old woman was saying without saying it,
as good as, if not better than, you, Mexican woman. I could live in the small house in the back and see my grandchildren every day, but of course my daughter won’t have me.

For Araceli to call this
gringa acomplejada
and ask to be rescued was a measure of the desperation of the moment.

Araceli punched in the number. “The area code for this number has changed,” said a recorded voice.
¿Cómo?
She tried the number again and heard the same message, then tried it again with the new area code but this time heard three loud tones, ascending in frequency, followed by the message “The number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in use …”

¡Caramba!

Next on this list was
Goldman-Arbegasts,
the family that was the Torres-Thompsons’ best friends, although they had missed, for some reason, the most recent birthday party. Yes, these Goldman-Arbegasts were responsible people, the mother was a somewhat taller and more even-tempered version of Maureen, another matriarch of schedules and smartly dressed children.

“Hi, you’ve reached the Goldman-Arbegast residence,” said a woman’s voice. “We’re not here right now because we’re in Italy.”

“No, we’re in Greece!” said a boy’s voice.

“No, we’re in Paris!” interrupted the voice of a man.

“No, we’re in London!” said a second boy’s voice.

And then in chorus all four voices said, “We’re in Europe! On our dream vacation!”

Araceli put the phone back in its wall cradle and looked at the remaining two numbers on the list: they were both for the doctors who had treated Maureen during her pregnancy and delivery, and thus useless for the crisis Araceli now faced.

Who could she call now? No one immediately came to mind. She did not know the neighbors, not their names or anything about their relative trustworthiness, and it would be dangerous, she sensed, to share the secret of their isolation with strangers. She had no phone numbers for any uncles or aunts that might exist in the Torres-Thompson universe: Scott was an only child and Maureen had a sister that Araceli had never met. As the hours passed and Scott and Maureen did not return, the strangeness of her predicament only grew. Araceli sensed, for the first time, a larger malaise, the consequences of one or more hidden family traumas at work, as in the convoluted narratives of a
telenovela.
The woman whose hair filled the brush, whose voice kept the boys bright-eyed, eager, and well behaved, could not and should not have abandoned them. Araceli expected to hear the long-gaited slapping of Maureen’s sandals on the Saltillo tiles at any moment, but until then there was no place she could walk to where Brandon and Keenan might be welcomed as relatives or friends. Nor was the phone ringing with calls from the outside world, with compadres and acquaintances calling in to chat: in fact, the phone didn’t ring very often at all. It seemed impossible to Araceli that a family and a home could become something akin to an island surrounded by vast stretches of salt water, and that its young inhabitants and their innocent housekeeper might become castaways. The peninsulas that linked this island to a continent of annoying relatives and nosy neighbors had been quickly and definitively washed away. Araceli realized now that the daily solitude she felt in this home, the oppression of the droning appliances and the peopleless views from the picture window, was not hers alone. This American family whose home she inhabited had come to this hill above the ocean to live apart from the world.
They are runaways, like me.
It was an obvious truth, but one Araceli had never fully pondered before. Among Mexicans the peculiar coldness of the
norteamericanos
was legendary because it came to infect the many
paisanos
who lived among them. One heard how
individualism and the cult of work swallowed up the hours of the American day, their sunsets and their springtimes, causing their family gatherings, their friendships, and their old people to disappear. But it was quite another thing to be thrust directly into an American family’s lonely drama, to find your
mexicana
self a player in their game of secrets and silences, their separation from one another by long stretches of freeway, by time zones and airline hubs and long-distance phone rates. And what about the absent family patriarchs? Not once had she heard Maureen speak of her father, there were no pictures of the man anywhere. Was he dead too, like Scott’s mother? And if so, why was he not mourned with photographs? Or was he simply banished from the home like the boys’ Mexican grandfather? It seemed to Araceli that
el viejo
Torres should have his number on the refrigerator. Why wasn’t it there?