The Barbarian Nurseries (3 page)

“You’re doing pretty well,” he told his son. “But I really think you should get off now.”

“Okay,” Keenan said, and kept on playing.

Scott looked up and surveyed the books and the toys in the real space around them, the oversized volumes stacked unevenly in pine bookcases purchased in New Mexico, the plastic buckets filled with blocks and miniature cars. Here too he felt the mania of overspending, although in this room much of the excess was of his own doing. How many times had he entered a toy emporium or bookstore with modest intentions, only to leave with a German-designed junior electronics set, or a children’s encyclopedia, or an “innovative” and overpriced block game for Samantha meant to kindle her future recognition of letters and numbers? But for the gradual diminishing of their cash on hand, and the upwardly floating interest rates of credit cards and mortgages, he might now be conspiring to take them to their local high-end toy store, the Wizard’s Closet, where he had purchased toys that satisfied unfulfilled childhood desires, such as the set of miniature and historically accurate Civil War soldiers that at this moment were besieging two dinosaurs in the space underneath the bunk beds. The bookshelves were stacked with multiplication flash cards, a geography quiz set, a
do-it-yourself rock polisher, and a box of classical architecture blocks. Scott’s parents had sacrificed to make his life better than theirs; they had saved and done without luxuries: but Scott spent lavishly to ensure the same result for his own children. He remembered the childhood lesson of his father’s hands, with their curling scars three decades old, earned in farm and factory work, hands the father urged the son to inspect more than once, to consider and commune with the suffering that was buried in Scott’s prehistory, unspoken and forgotten before the clean and sweat-free promise of the present and future.

“Dad, Keenan hasn’t quit his game yet,” said Brandon, who had gone back up to his bunk to pick up the book he was reading the night before.

“Keenan, turn off the game, please,” Scott said, in a faraway voice his boys might have found disturbing if they were a few years older and more attuned to adult emotions like reflection and remorse. He had felt this way, also, the night Samantha entered the world, during those three hours he spent overwhelmed by the fear that he and his wife might be tempting fate by having their third child when they were pushing forty. His God, part penny-pinching Protestant and part vengeful Catholic, would wreak a holy retribution against him and his wife for wanting too much and trying for the girl that would give their family a “perfect” balance. But Samantha had entered the world easier than her brothers, after a frantic but short labor, and was a healthy and alert child. No, the reckoning came from the most likely and obvious place: the private spreadsheet disaster of his bad investments.
I thought I was being prudent. Everyone told me, “Don’t let your money get left behind, don’t let it sit—that’s stupid. Get in the game.”
The absurdity that a six-figure investment in a financial instrument called a “security” could shrink so quickly and definitively into pocket change still did not compute. He worried about the two geniuses in this room, if he was about to set them on a tumultuous journey that would begin with the sale of this home and a move to less spacious quarters. Scott considered the precocious reader sitting on the top bunk, and his younger brother, who appeared to have a preternatural gift for logical challenges, judging by his swift advancement through the levels of this game, and wondered if he might soon be forced to subtract something essential from their lives.

T
he first guests arrived and rang the doorbell ten minutes early, a terribly rude North American habit, in Araceli’s opinion. Rolling her eyes in exasperation, she left a stack of
sopes
waiting to be garnished with Oaxaca cheese in the kitchen and walked toward the finger that had set off the electric chimes, but stopped when two midget centurions with papier-mâché swords ran past her. Brandon and Keenan raced to the door, holding their helmets atop their heads as they ran, and Araceli listened, unamused, as they stumbled over the lines Maureen had told them to recite: “Friends, Romans, countries …” Keenan began, and then faltered, until Brandon finished with, “Give us your ears!”

“How cute,” the early guests called out. “Little Romans!”

When the second and third guests arrived at precisely the appointed hour, the boys were off playing with the children of the first guests, while Maureen and Scott were busy in the back, which left Araceli to open the door for the
invitados.

“We’re here for Keenan’s party?” An American woman with vaguely Asian features and a child and husband in tow tried to look past Araceli into the interior of the house, her expression suggesting she expected to see wondrous and magical things there.

“Sí, adelante.”
What Araceli really wanted to say was,
Why do you people insist on treating an informal social gathering as if it were the launching of a rocket ship? Why do you arrive with a clock ticking in your head? How am I supposed to finish these
sopes la señora
Maureen wants if you keep ringing the doorbell?
In Mexico it was understood that when you invited people to a party at one o’clock, that meant the host would be
almost
ready at one, and therefore the guests should arrive at their leisure at least an hour later.
Here they do things differently.
The punctual guests walked past her, oohing and aahing at the decorations in the living room, at the Roman-lettered cardboard signs declaring
happy birthday keenan
and
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on either side of the Chesterfield sofa, and the Doric Styrofoam columns topped with plastic replica helmets. Araceli recognized this couple, and the other guests that followed, from parties past. They were people she saw frequently back in the days when she first started with the Torres-Thompsons, when
el señor
Scott had his own company. They arrived dressed in the assertively casual attire Southern Californians wore at their weekend parties: in cotton shorts and leather sandals, in jeans faded to the whitish blue of the Orange County sky in summer, and in T-shirts that had gone through the washer a few times too often. Her
jefa
wanted everything “just right,” and now these early arrivers in their unironed natural fabrics were preventing Araceli from finishing her appointed task. The way some of these people dressed was the flip side of their punctuality: they were like children who cling to a favorite blanket or shirt, they valued comfort over presentation, they were unaware or unconcerned about the spectacle they inflicted upon the eyes of the overworked
mexicana
who must greet them. How disappointing to work so hard preparing a home for an elegant event, only to have such unkempt guests.

“Hello, I brought some cookies for the party,” the next early arriver said. “Can I leave them with you?”

The woman with the chocolate chip cookies was Carla Wallace-Zuberi, chief publicist of the defunct MindWare Digital Solutions. She was a roundish white woman of Eastern European stock with box-shaped sunglasses and a matriarchal air, and she lingered near the doorway as her husband advanced into the Torres-Thompson home with their daughter, Carla’s gaze settling on Araceli as the Mexican woman took a few impertinent moments to assess the cookies. Carla Wallace-Zuberi prided
herself on having an eye for strong personalities and here was one that clearly could fill a room, and not just because she was a tad larger than most other Mexican servants. Araceli wore her hair pulled tightly and gathered in two fist-sized nubs just over her ears, an absurd style that suggested a disoriented German peasant.
The only thing this Mexican woman accomplishes by pulling her hair back is to establish a look of severity: maybe that’s the point.
A small spray of hair, just a few bangs, jutted forth from Araceli’s forehead like the curled plume of a quail, a halfhearted concession to femininity. On this as on all other workdays, Araceli wore the boxy, nurselike uniform called a
filipina
that was standard for domestics in Mexico City. Araceli had five such uniforms and today she wore the pale yellow one because it was the newest. She took the cookies from the publicist with a frown that said: since you insist on giving these to me … The publicist suppressed a surprised chuckle.
This is one tough woman, a no-nonsense mom. Look at those hips: this woman has given birth. Of course she is irritated, because she is separated from her child, or children.
Carla Wallace-Zuberi was a self-described “progressive,” and a few days before this party she had spent twenty minutes in her neighborhood bookstore perusing the back cover, jacket flap material, and opening paragraphs of a book called
María’s Choice,
which related the journey of a Guatemalan woman forced to leave her children behind for years while she worked in California:
How terrible,
Carla Wallace-Zuberi thought,
how disconcerting to know that there are people like this living among us.
This bit of knowledge was disturbing enough to keep her from buying the book, and for the rest of the party, whenever Carla Wallace-Zuberi caught a glance of Araceli, guilt and pity caused her to turn her head and look the other way.

When Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian appeared at the door five minutes later, his eyes caught Araceli’s directly in a way that was at once irritating to her and familiar. He was a tall, bulky man with curly chestnut-blond hair, and much darker eyebrows that were shaped like railroad boxcars. Now he raised both boxcars spryly as he made eye contact with the Mexican maid. The Big Man was the partner of
el señor
Scott in that business of theirs, and there was a time when he made frequent visits to this home, assaulting Araceli with this same impish look. A self-described “professional bullshitter,” the Big Man saw in Araceli an authenticity lacking in ninety-nine percent of the people who crossed
his path. He had no line, no clever riposte with which he could amuse and beguile this woman, the way he could with people who came from his own, English-speaking, California software entrepreneur circle. He had seen Araceli out of uniform and with her hair much longer and not tied back like it was today, and had once managed to make her laugh with a bilingual pun. The memory of her laughter, of her round face brightening and the ivory sparkle of her teeth, had stayed with him. She worked with another girl, Guadalupe, who was too petite and too fake-cheerful to hold his attention, and today he barely noticed her absence. The Big Man also knew, because he had made a point of finding out over the years, that Araceli had no children, no boyfriend that Scott or Maureen knew about (on this side of the border, at least), and that Scott considered her something of a sphinx. Scott and his wife had coined nicknames for her such as “Madame Weirdness,” “Sergeant Araceli,” and the ironic “Little Miss Sunshine,” but she was also extremely dependable, trustworthy, and a dazzling cook. The Big Man’s stomach rumbled as he contemplated the Mexican hors d’oeuvres that would be on offer at this party, as at all the others the Torres-Thompsons hosted. He entered the home ahead of his long-suffering wife, and son, without saying any other word to Araceli than a mumbled
“Hola.”

The lingering resentment in the chocolate swirl of Araceli’s eyes confronted all the other guests too as they passed through the front door and followed the sounds of screaming children and chattering adults to the backyard. None of the mothers invited to the party had a full-time, live-in maid, and to them Araceli’s subservient Latin American presence provoked feelings of envy and inadequacy. They knew of Araceli’s cooking and her reputation as a tireless worker, and they wondered, briefly, what it would be like to have a stranger living with them, taking away all the unpleasantness from the porcelain surfaces of their homes.
Does she do anything and everything?
Some associated Maureen and her summer fitness and frail beauty with this Mexican woman and the other one, Guadalupe, who for reasons unknown was not present today.
Give me two extra sets of hands to do the housework and carry the baby and I’d look good too.
For most of the husbands, however, Araceli blended into the domestic scenery as if she were a frumpy, bad-humored usher guarding the entrance to a glittering theater. The memory of her faded quickly before the birthday decorations in the living room and
the eye-catching colors and textures of the furniture and ornamental touches to be found there—the mud-colored Bolivian tapestry thrown over the sofa, or the shimmering stone skin of the floor, which Araceli had mopped and polished the night before, and the bookcases and armoires of artificially aged pine where two dozen pictures framed in pewter and cherrywood documented a century of the Torres and Thompson family histories. The guests passed through the impeccable prologue of the living room, thence through an open sliding glass door to the backyard, a semicircle of grass the size of a basketball court framed by the restrained jungle of
la petite
rain forest, which was starting to look dry and wilted because the automatic sprinkler system had stopped working a week earlier. A humming engine accompanied a large inflated castle on the lawn, the swimming pool shimmered with ultramarine highlights in the sun, and a small tent covered a table stacked with toy swords and shields and papier-mâché helmets. Another
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made from cardboard and painted marble-white dangled from the roof of the tent.

The guests found Maureen standing near the center of the lawn, with the baby Samantha on her hip, looking as elegant as ever in a powder-blue camisole and a taupe chiffon skirt printed with orchids. She gave each adult guest a peck on the cheek, taking a bit of pleasure in the gentility of this gesture, which was foreign to people in the river town of her Missouri youth. “Maureen, you look great!” the guests called out. “How did you lose all the weight so quickly?” “Look at Sam: she’s so big now!” “Look at all this stuff for the party! How do you do it? Where do you find the time?” She gave an aw-shucks shrug and guided the guests’ children toward the table with the faux-Roman outfits. “We’ve got helmets and swords for you guys to try out. But no hitting, please!”

By 2:00 p.m. there were two dozen adult guests in the backyard, squinting before the sun-drenched grass as if the onset of summer had caught them by surprise, even though some were holding bathing suits for their children, none of whom had yet shown any interest in the pool. They were in their thirties and forties and had programming degrees and MBAs; they were young enough to have started new careers, and old enough to begin to grow nostalgic for the adventure they had shared with one another first on the single floor of an Orange County business park, and then in MindWare’s own, commissioned headquarters, an architectural gem in downtown Santa Ana that now belonged to
the county’s largest real estate brokerage. They had been plucked from staid jobs in accounting and marketing departments, from the IT bowels of corporate towers, for an undertaking the Big Man had likened, repeatedly, to leading a wagon train across the Oregon Trail. The final months of MindWare’s meteoric rise and fall had been filled with a series of competitive enmities and clashes over business strategy, and in the company’s last days of independent existence, before the responsible investors had arrived to purge all but two of the original employees, several of the people today present in the Torres-Thompson backyard were not speaking to one another. But time had a way of making those bad feelings a mere seasoning floating atop the sweeter narrative of possibility that had once bound them all together.

“Hey, it’s the head of research!”

Tyler Smith had arrived, with his three children and his wife, an immigrant from Taiwan who was telling her charges, in Mandarin, to behave themselves and not jump in the pool without their mother.

“Are they reading yet in Sierra Leone?” the Big Man called out, in an oft-repeated ribbing of the head of research, who had once traveled to West Africa to test MindWare software that was supposed to wipe out illiteracy.

“You’re not taking those dialysis treatments anymore, are you, Tyler?” Maureen asked, because the project had left the head of research with a life-threatening kidney infection.

“Stopped two years ago.”

“Oh, thank God.”

MindWare had been held together by Maureen’s concern for their daily well-being, and by Scott’s technical creativity and grounded common sense. Everyone liked Scott and Maureen, and the MindWare alumni who had moved away from California timed their annual summer vacations so they could be present at Keenan’s parties. Now Carla Wallace-Zuberi drew the group’s attention to Scott, who was standing by the humming pump that kept the castle filled with air, wearing khaki shorts, sandals, and an oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

“Scott, the house looks great. The kids are so big.”

“Yes, they don’t seem to stop growing, no matter what we do.”
Each birthday finds us a little heavier,
Scott observed,
a bit saggier, our eyes less bright.
The Big Man was the one member of their crew who looked
exactly the same: Sasha Avakian, a onetime fund-raiser for Armenian independence, who in his reincarnation as California entrepreneur had sweet-talked a trio of venture capitalists into funding MindWare and its many offshoots, including Virtual Classroom Solutions and Anytime Anywhere Gaming, some of which were still in business, though no longer under the control or guidance of the people gathering this afternoon in the Torres-Thompson backyard.

“So, it’s a Roman theme, huh, Scott?” Avakian said. “A kid army of centurions—and their parents, the Huns!”