The Barbarian Nurseries (26 page)

“We’re having
carnitas,
the way they do it in the ranchos,” Salomón told the boys. “There’s a pig buried in there.”

“Underground?” Brandon asked.

“Yeah, we got hot rocks down there. And the pig, wrapped in foil, cooking. We let it cook for some hours. When it finish, you have very juicy meat.
Sabrosísima.”

Brandon gave the mound a look of innocent puzzlement, causing Mr. Luján and the two sweaty, stubbly-faced men with the shovels to grin: he was, in fact, deeply troubled by the idea that combustion was taking place in the unseen hollows beneath his feet. “I thought fire needed oxygen to burn,” he said, but Mr. Luján had turned his attention
elsewhere and did not answer, and his two cousins with the shovels didn’t speak English well enough to explain the simple physics of their
carnitas
barbecue. After thinking about it for a few seconds, Brandon came to the disturbing conclusion that he was standing over a pit of buried flames, as in the underworlds often depicted in the books he read: souls trapped in subterranean passages, evildoers building infernal machines in caves. He considered, for a moment, running away, until Mr. Luján returned and put his arm on his shoulder.

“Let me introduce you to the people here,” he said to the boys. And then he turned to Araceli and said in collegial Spanish,
“Y tú también.”

For the moment, the only guests were the four young adults sitting half asleep at the table, seemingly hypnotized by the piano resonating from two transistor-radio-sized speakers. A single piano note repeated inside the swirl of a flute, and then a tenor began to sing, pushing into falsetto, and Araceli found it odd that these people with their obvious Mesoamerican features were listening to a rather effete voice singing words in English.

“¡Buenos días!”
Councilman Luján said, causing his daughter, Lucía, to startle and sit up straight, and her three friends to emit wake-up groans and coughs.

“This is Araceli,” he said to Lucía. “She’s a friend of your cousin Marisela. And she’s visiting us for Fourth of July with the two boys she takes care of.
¿Cómo se llaman?”

“Brandon.”

“Keenan.”

“Look, they just finished with the trampoline,” Councilman Luján said.
“Vayan a jugar.
Go play.”

The boys ran off, while Araceli joined the four young adults. Lucía Luján was nineteen, and Araceli recognized her immediately as the girl in the cap and gown in the living room, even though the thick
braids into which she had woven her hair for summer had the curious effect of making her look younger than in the photograph. Her friends wore jewels and studs in the crooks of their noses, and loops inside their earlobes, and presented Araceli with the realization that she was losing touch with urban fashions. Probably they were already wearing these things in Mexico City, or would soon be, Araceli thought.
“Hola, ¿qué tal?”
Lucía said, after rubbing the sleepiness out of her eyes. “I think my cousin told me about you once.”

Lucía was wearing the same clothes she had put on the night before, but even in this wrinkled and weary state, she presented a picture of hip and fashionable
mexicana
femininity. She wore a vintage pin-tucked blouse of caramel silk, its shimmering skin playing an odd lightgame with the copper tone of her skin and the half dozen friendship bracelets on her wrist. That blouse looked one hundred years old to Araceli and brand-new at the same time. Lucía was two weeks back from Princeton and still suffering from the cruel cultural whiplash caused by her return to Huntington Park: she had lived nine months among assorted geniuses and trust-fund children from across the United States, none of whom understood the contradictions of being a young expatriate from her own, wire-crossed corner of
mexicano
California. A week before finals she had split up with a young man who hailed from a moneyed Long Island suburb, in part because he had talked about coming to Huntington Park this summer, and the thought of him entering her home in his Tommy Hilfiger summer-wear was too much to bear. She imagined him reciting to her friends those Lorca poems he had memorized—
¡verde que te quiero verde!
—and thought,
No, that won’t go over well in HP.
She was still trying to figure out where she stood after a nine-month waking dream of calcified eastern tradition and unadorned American ambition.
I am not the same Lucía.
She was trying to figure out too how to tell her father that she had already dropped the premed classes in favor of Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, and James Baldwin. Lucía the Ivy Leaguer did not smile or laugh as easily as before, and sometimes she laughed harder and louder and with a kind of cynical meanness her friends did not recognize. Both Lucía’s father and her friends had been giving her strange looks as if to say,
Is it possible you think you are better than us now?
It was, therefore, a pleasure for Lucía to fall into conversation with an educated Latina from outside her
Huntington Park and Princeton orbits. After just a few minutes of casual conversation, she had learned a lot about Araceli, the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, and what it was like to clean houses in Orange County.

Araceli said she wasn’t sure if she’d ever go back to school, but that she wasn’t going to be doing
“esto”
much longer, gesturing rather coldly in the direction of Brandon and Keenan on the trampoline. She had a little money saved up, and the
“aventura”
with the boys would be her last.

Lucía understood everything Araceli said, although her own
castellano
came out slowly and with the simple vocabulary of a much younger person—she had studied French in high school and never been formally educated in Spanish—and she often fell back to English.

“Go with what your heart tells you,” Lucía said, and then repeated the phrase in Spanish,
“Haz lo que te diga tu corazón.”
She gave a sidelong glance to her friends, who had drifted into semi-sleep again, their heads resting on the table. “I’m studying history and American literature. I don’t know why. Just because I like stories, I guess. My dad’s got a good story. Maybe I’ll write it someday.”

S
cott had stayed up late into the night on the beach, watching the march of the constellations along the ecliptic, his dark-adjusted eyes making out the oval smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy. He had watched the flight of low-flying birds along the purple-blue twilight waters, the black featureless forms of two hel icopt ers headed southward to Mexico, and the silent, slow drift of lighted ships, and then he had fallen asleep sometime deep into the night, his head resting near the top of the sloping sand that rose from the water. He had been awakened after dawn by the simultaneous assault of the first rays of morning sun on his face and the first wave splashing the balls of his feet. He stretched out, then took a long, slow walk along the beach, listening to screaming seagulls. When he reached a tide pool he’d once visited with the boys, he held back tears at the not entirely rational thought that he might never enjoy such a life-affirming paternal moment again, until finally his rumbling stomach cured him of such melodrama and he decided to begin the long climb back to his house. He would launch
a search for his wife and children, who had likely left for Missouri to spend a week, or perhaps a month or two in recreation and exile from their abusive paterfamilias, and perhaps he would go there to plead his case.

He was surprised to spot, halfway through his quarter-mile trek through the meadow, the familiar high silhouette of his wife’s car. For a moment he felt a sense of relief and reprieve—they had not left him after all—and then once again a sense of foreboding when he realized he would have to add an explanation for this night out on the beach to his apology for the fiasco in the living room and his absence over the past four days.
She’ll think I’ve gone totally nuts.
He got closer to the car and imagined his unhappy sons inside, and the daughter who would wrap her arms around him no matter what. When he reached the car, smiling despite himself, the electric-driven window lowered theatrically, revealing Maureen’s sunglasses, which she quickly lowered to study him and his surroundings with unshaded eyes.

“Where are the boys?” she asked quickly.

“What?”

Maureen had seen Scott appear on the horizon, and she too felt her apprehensions lifting, a motherly reunion just moments away. She too imagined an embrace, or several, dropping to her knees as one did when children were smaller. But no, Scott was alone.

“Where are the boys?” she insisted.

“You don’t have them?”

“I have Samantha! I left with Samantha and left you with Brandon and Keenan.”

“No, you didn’t. I wasn’t home.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t have any of the kids. I left. I thought they were all with you.”

“I left on Friday with Samantha.”

“You didn’t take the boys?”

“Obviously not!”

“Where are they?”

B
y dusk the Lujáns’ ample backyard was filled with a hundred people chewing pork whose succulent juices pooled at the bottoms of
paper plates, and triggered memories of summer barbecues in provincial Mexican cities with gazebos and stone churches. Araceli noted that they were significantly better dressed than the summer partygoers at the Torres-Thompson residence. They were all immigrants linked to Mr. Luján by blood, marriage, and business ties, and several were compadres of Mr. Luján and his wife. Not having lost the sense of formality attached to family gatherings in their native country, the men were dressed in freshly ironed shirts tucked into jeans and polished snake-skin boots, and the women wore big jewelry and ran wet combs through their sons’ hair, and teased and pulled their daughters’ hair into buns, braids, ponytails, and little black fountains held in place with barrettes that bore butterflies and flowers. The men showed off new brass belt buckles with Mexican flags and the names of towns in Jalisco and Durango, and the women moved about in newly purchased jeans or stiff dresses whose wide linen cones resembled the style worn in U.S. movies during the Eisenhower era.

Alongside this older, largely Mexican-born and Spanish-speaking group, there was a younger circle of partygoers, speakers of English and Spanglish, teenagers and sedate twentysomethings who equated good taste with understated flair and the ironic embrace of fashions past. They wore porkpie hats and baseball caps, jeans with narrow legs, canvas tennis shoes and mauve T-shirts of high-quality cotton, and campy links of faux-gold chains. A couple were dressed in baseball jerseys as wide as capes, and the shorts and knee-high white socks that a goofy midwestern suburban dad might wear, their cottoned feet stuffed into
guarache
sandals, a style Lucía liked to call “retro summer gangster casual.” They were all people of understated ambitions too, most having graduated to new jobs at hardware stores and composition-writing classes at community colleges, or to long drives across the metropolis to the waiting lists and crowded parking lots of underfunded state universities.

Both groups of guests, young and old, looked at Mr. Luján and his daughter, Lucía, with varying degrees of respect and envy, because in their own way father and daughter were the most successful people they knew. The compadres entered Mr. Luján’s home and found its knight-errant furnishings tasteful and elegant, and they saw in Lucía and the famous university attached to her name a shiny specialness that made them sick to their stomachs with worry about their own progeny and
how studious and dedicated those children might or might not be. Among her friends too, Lucía was the subject of awe, esteem, and suspicion, because she had gone farther away from Huntington Park than anyone else they knew, and because she had come back from this distant and wealthy place to stand underneath the power wires and sip beer as if she were an ordinary HP girl, even though she knew she would never be an ordinary HP girl again.

Among all these people, young and old, Mexican-born and California-born, the presence at the party of two Orange County boys went largely unnoticed, with Brandon and Keenan slipping easily into the mostly English-speaking orbit of the children, and only a few parents noticing their long bohemian locks, or the ease with which they glided across the backyard in their bare feet and untrimmed toenails. But after just a few minutes no one failed to notice the
paisana
with Germanic height and bronze freckles, dressed like some explorer in a canvas hat, presenting them all with the mystery of her person. She was too old and not casually stylish enough to be one of Lucía’s friends, but too young and not formal enough to be one of the compadres.

“¿A
quién llevas en la camisa?”
Araceli asked one of Lucía Luján’s friends, switching to English when he didn’t seem to understand her right away. “On your shirt.
Ese hombre.
He looks like Jesus, but he is smoking.
Y tengo entendido que Jesucristo Nuestro Señor no fumaba.
Jesus does not smoke.”

Griselda Pulido, Lucía Luján’s best-friend-forever, heard Araceli’s
chilanga
accent, and began to pepper her with questions about Mexico City. Griselda had long thought of Mexico’s capital as a kind of Paris, a destination she would visit one day in solemn pilgrimage, a place where a woman with Mexican roots might escape her fraught American existence and find her true self. She wanted to know where the
chilangos
went out at night, what rock bands they listened to, and at which nightclubs they danced. “What is the Palacio de Bellas Artes like?” Griselda Pulido asked. Switching to Spanglish, she asked,
“Tienen las pinturas de Frida allí,
or do you have to go to her house in Coyoacán?”

To Araceli, this woman Griselda seemed as intelligent and curious as Lucía, but with a tragic air that was only heightened by the velvet eye shadow she wore, and cross-combed hair that ran down her forehead and crashed upon the eyebrows. “I got into Brown, which is in Rhode Island,
and I thought I’d hang out over there on the East Coast with Lucía, but I couldn’t go,” Griselda said, and Araceli looked her straight in the eye to say,
I understand completely.
Going to school for as long as they wanted was one of those things
latinoamericana
girls couldn’t do, and hadn’t been able to do for centuries, the same inequity having kept at least one of Araceli’s grandmothers illiterate her entire life.
Our feminine emancipation is incomplete: maybe our daughters, if we ever have any, will be free.
Araceli tried to answer Griselda’s questions about Mexico’s capital city as best she could, even though she was a bit thrown by the way Griselda weaved English and Spanish together, so freely and without care.