The Barbarian Nurseries (40 page)

As he contemplated the quarter-inch-thin newborn baby of paperwork called
The People of the State of California v. Araceli N. Ramirez,
Ian Goller could already see its final fate on that day when, as an inch-thick folder, it would be rolled away into that mausoleum called Archives.

F
or the first few days without Araceli, the disorder at the home on Paseo Linda Bonita began to gather momentum at first light with the unmade beds, whose comforters and sheets endured in the shape of lumpy cotton corpses until late in the afternoon. Only Maureen tackled that essential household task, until she finally scolded Scott into action: “If you could make
our
bed, at least, before you leave in the morning.” He grumbled and complied, but left it all uneven. Was it that he didn’t care that the comforter was drooping on her side of the bed, or was it some kind of eye condition that prevented him from seeing it? She was going to have to teach the boys to make their own beds, and give them some incentive to do so, perhaps an allowance.
They’re old enough to do chores now. I swept floors and folded clothes when I was a girl.
Then
there was the kitchen, whose crowded sink soon evoked the dishwashing station of a cheap diner, with sticky pots and pans beginning to climb upward and over the edge of the sink by 10:00 a.m., their leftover contents becoming encrusted as noon approached. All three bedrooms, the hallways, and the living room were littered with the sweaty fabric of shirts, socks, and underwear of every size but her own. She found Samantha’s soiled socks hiding under the couch, and pajama tops in the backyard, and children’s picture books on the floor underneath the dining room table. And then there was Samantha herself. Though the smallest member of the family, she tossed more objects into the splatter of disarray than everyone else put together. No one could tell her to pick up her hand puppets, her dolls, her stuffed lions, her rubber blocks, her Tinker Bell wand. Apparently, Araceli had spent a good amount of her day picking up after Samantha, who required a pair of eyes on her at all times and thus subtracted from Maureen’s ability to be in all the corners of the home where she needed to be.
Samantha, you came to this world to make your mother’s life more beautiful, and feminine, but you’ve also made it infinitely more complicated.

The only solution was to spur gadget-man into action.

“Scott. The dishes. Could you, please?”

He studied the spread of steel bowls and plastic plates across the kitchen’s marble counters, three complete sets associated with the preparation and serving of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “Why didn’t you use the dishwasher?”

Maureen didn’t answer this question, and allowed the aggression in her silence to linger until she heard the water start to run in the sink.

When the school year began and Maureen started volunteering three days a week at the boys’ school it was going to be very difficult. She was going to have to find day care for Samantha because they could never again hire a stranger to work in their home.

The consequences of their years of comfort, their pampering by Mexican hands, were there to live with. Voices of judgment continued to occupy the space beyond the pine, glass, and tile cocoon of Paseo Linda Bonita, and she sensed they were growing in volume and meanness. The need to escape that noise gave a greater focus and purpose to her cooking, scrubbing, folding, and other domestic pursuits, as if each muscle exercised in domesticity were building walls that sealed her off
from those profane outsiders. But how long could you transform your home into a monastery, with all the televisions and radios permanently off, and the phone off the hook, before you went crazy? She tried calling Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast, but the awkward silence and transparent excuses that followed her invitation for Max and Riley to come and play in the backyard and swim in the pool dissuaded her from calling again.
What have I done for my friend to treat my family with the frigid distance the uninfected have for the diseased?
For the rest of that day, Maureen understood that she had lost a part of herself when she stepped out the door with Samantha that fateful morning.
Goodbye, happy innocence.
She suppressed the recurring thought that she should call her mother.
No, that would be much worse.
Instead, she turned on NPR because she knew she would find dispassionate, adult voices, and for forty-five minutes she allowed the reasoned cadences of its afternoon news report to fill the living room and kitchen. She listened to a Prague coffee machine, the musical speaking-voice of a Louisiana shrimp fisherman. It was all very eclectic and relaxing, until she heard the sudden teaser: “Next, from California, a story that many people say defines the social divide in that sunny place. It’s a case involving two children, their parents, and a Mexican woman …” Maureen took three leaping strides across the room and hit the
OFF
button.
Social divide? My home is a social divide?

Her “social divide” was, at any rate, erased now because Araceli was gone and in jail again. This knowledge caused Maureen to feel a pang of guilt every time she did something in the house that Araceli would have done. When she picked up a sponge at the kitchen sink, or emptied out the dishwasher, or took out the trash, she felt she was standing in Araceli’s footsteps.
Is there a special place of torment, down there in the circles of hell, for those women who betray their sisters? I can speak the words that will set her free: but if I do, will I lose my children?
The anger that she felt toward Araceli in the first days of her sons’ disappearance had dissipated.
It’s a natural, motherly thing, to seethe at the person who took your sons.
Now her guilt was assuaged only by the information provided by the assistant district attorney at her front door this morning—he had come to “warn” her that the “alleged abductor” of her children would likely go free in a plea bargain. He seemed to think this would make her bitter, that she would spew motherly recrimination, and she
pursed her lips in a kind of simulated grimace, but in fact she was relieved.
We worked on this house together, Araceli and I, it was our joint project. The orbit of men, of news and jurisprudence, has driven a wedge between us.
Then the prosecutor had added that Araceli would be likely deported, and this had caused Maureen to ask her only question: “Deported? For a misdemeanor?” Araceli probably would have been deported anyway; it was inevitable once the police descended on her home.
I am responsible for the exile of the woman who worked in my home. Or rather, Scott is. And me. We are.
She thought these things as she prepared and poured her daughter’s milk, and in her distraction the white liquid spilled over the top of the bottle and onto the table where Samantha was sitting.

“Milk!” the baby screamed.

“Oh, my God, Sam, you talked! Your first word!”

“Milk!” her baby girl repeated.

Maureen gave her daughter a kiss on the forehead and reached for a rag to clean the spill. When she knelt down to wipe the white drops on the floor, a small moving object at the foot of the table caught her eye. It was an ant, and she watched it join the flow of one of two serpentine threads that converged on the tile underneath her daughter’s high chair. The ants were bumping, circling, and shifting around a spot of spilled and dried Cream of Wheat. Maureen followed their highway across the dining room to the kitchen, and found it led out into the backyard, passing underneath the door that Araceli once opened every morning to begin work.

W
hile Maureen studied the ants and remembered Araceli, the story of the seemingly soon-to-be-deported
doméstica
caused the mayor of Los Angeles to daydream while ostensibly perusing the menu at his favorite downtown eatery. “The filet mignon here is so tender,” the mayor’s political consultant said, “you can cut it with a spoon.” The mayor of Los Angeles glanced across the white cloth of the table and the sweating goblets of water and gave the consultant a listless and distracted shake of the head.

“I’m thinking the Asian tuna salad,” the mayor mumbled. “Lost my appetite.”

The mayor had slipped into a brooding funk, a rare twenty minutes
of reflective silence, causing his consultant and even the regular customers at the Pacific Dining Car to take notice. He was a man who spent most of his waking day in conversation and monologue—on the phone, in his City Hall office, in parking lots and passageways, in elementary school auditoriums, at doughnut shops, in Westside receptions, in his official Lincoln Town Car. The mayor was a self-described pathological talker who liked to brag that he’d been talking nonstop since the age of four; he knew his consultant had two small children and that he could call and find him awake at dawn. Six hours earlier, he had done just that, after catching the appearance of an up-and-coming state senator from Fremont, California, on Univision’s
¡Despierta América!
talk show. “Hey, I just saw Escalante talking about that Mexican nanny again,” the mayor had said, without preamble. “He’s going to town on this. He was on Telemundo yesterday. And someone told me they heard him on the radio a couple of times.”

“Really,” the consullant had said wearily into his kitchen phone, while watching his eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter eat Cream of Wheat and simultaneously twirl their chestnut ringlets. The consultant was a New Jersey transplant of Italian heritage with a wild shock of gray Beethoven curls, a lefty pamphleteer who had risen from 1980s rent-control battles to become the master tactician of the progressive wing of the state Democratic Party, helping a variety of principled and competent leaders win election to office. “I think it’s obvious why Escalante’s doing this,” the consultant began. “He’s not on anyone’s radar, because he’s never done anything. A Latino politician who has to wave his arms like crazy to get the attention of
Latino
voters isn’t going anywhere. He’s got no shot at winning any statewide primary. None.”

Araceli Ramirez was a cause célèbre and a deepening obsession among the mayor’s core Latino supporters, but the consultant’s position on what the mayor’s position should be in her case had not changed. It was the same at 6:45 a.m. in the kitchen of his Northeast L.A. bungalow as it had been in two previous conversations on the subject: keep closed lips and fight the temptation to opine. “You’re the mayor of Los Angeles—this is in Orange County. Leave it alone. Because if you don’t, this crazy family and their nanny could blow up in your face.”

At 6:45 in the morning, the mayor had accepted this counsel as wise and obviously true. He had forgotten about Escalante and the
proto-martyr languishing in a Santa Ana jail cell. Then, in the waning moments of his third and final public appearance of the morning, at the Bonaventure Hotel, he had been given another rude reminder of Araceli’s existence. The mayor was paying a courtesy call to a group of striking hotel workers, and had just finished up with a few words in his thick-accented but steadily improving Spanish, when one of the striking maids reached over and squeezed his wrist. She was a short woman with the angular face and short hair of a female prizefighter, and she had pulled the mayor close to her.
“No tengas miedo,”
she said, in a tone that recalled the mayor’s late mother.
“Ponte los pantalones. Di algo para apoyar a Araceli. Me enoja que no hayas dicho nada sobre esa pobre mujer.”
The mayor gave a grimace-smile and pulled away, startled a bit by the strength of the woman’s grip.

“She told me to put my pants on,” the mayor said suddenly to his consultant as his salad arrived. “That last woman in the hotel. The short one. Did you see her? I actually recognized her once I was forced to take a look. Die-hard shop steward. Walked precincts in each of my campaigns. She told me she was angry I hadn’t said anything about the Mexican maid. ‘Put your pants on,’ she said. ‘And say something to support Araceli.’ “

“What is that, some sort of Mexican thing? Not having pants?”

“Yeah. Precisely.”

“Well, that’s emasculating. Is that why you ordered a salad?”

“Very funny,” the mayor said, and with that he gave his famous, world-conquering grin—it was the flash of erect porcelain that had gotten him elected mayor, and that got him into trouble, sometimes, when he directed it in private at petite, single young women in their thirties. He dug into his salad, took a few bites, and began to talk. “But she has a point.”

“She does?”

“The way she sees it, she didn’t vote for me just to run the City of L.A.”

“Right. The whole icon thing. The long-oppressed people thing.”

Legions of people expected the mayor of Los Angeles to opine on the case of a wronged Orange County nanny simply because they shared an ethnic heritage. They saw in his election the fulfillment of his people’s long-held aspirations for power and respect. Never mind that most of
the voters who had elected the mayor to office were white: he was expected to speak out in favor of immigration reform and amnesty and other subjects far beyond the influence of his actual, quite meager powers, as outlined in the city charter. When he spoke out for immigrant legalization, like these people expected him to, it caused another kind of voter to focus on the seeming threat of his Mexicanness, and a few to harden their belief that he was the leader of a Chicano conspiracy to enslave white people. His Mexican heritage was, at once, his greatest political asset and his heaviest albatross.

“Not saying anything at all makes me look weak,” the mayor said. He did not use that word often in referring to himself, it was a sort of taboo in the mayor’s circle, and hearing the mayor say it caused the consultant to sit forward in his seat. “People are starting to think I’m running away from it.” The mayor’s career, from a rough-and-tumble Eastside childhood, to UC Berkeley and a quixotic minor crusade or two as a civil-rights lawyer, to the state legislature, and finally to election as the mayor of the second largest city in the United States, was a dance between affability and toughness, charm and ruthlessness. He understood that “weak” was poison in politics, just like it was on the streets of his youth. The early chapters of his biography were set in a preppy Chicano Catholic school, where the mayor-to-be wore cardigan sweaters and played Black Panther dress-up games, and finally got into the fistfights that led to his expulsion. When the mayor heard the word “weak” and its many synonyms he felt a twinge of the old aggression, and his silence for the past twenty minutes had come from having suppressed a powerful desire to tell that hotel maid to go fuck herself.