The Barbarian Nurseries (43 page)

Araceli’s presence was an antidote, somehow, to all those sad stories of workplace raids and deportations; she stood for the sophisticated place he and his mostly American-born readers imagined deeper, urban Mexico to be. She was an event of history that had been dropped into Giovanni Lozano’s provincial corner of the planet, a force with the potential to separate the Spanish-surnamed masses from their complacency and denial. People like his immigrant mother, who tended to her roses in their home in Garden Grove, telling Giovanni that she felt the Holy Spirit in the faint breeze that blew between the flowers. His mother pretended not to care when he told her how she and her people were being belittled on the radio and on television, in the courts and in the supermarkets, by the racists who attached that slur “illegal” to anyone and everyone with Mesoamerican blood in their veins.
Don’t you see, Mother?
he wanted to say.
They want to destroy us! Deport us all! It’s a war against our culture!

No, my people don’t understand shouting. They understand victims and heroes,
he thought. So he would give them an icon. He would take one of those photographs of Araceli from the newspaper website, and he would make a work of art, a portrait-poster. He would take Araceli’s face and multiply it, so that many Aracelis floated above the marching crowd at the next rally, in a Warholian statement about the power of her ordinariness and her celebrity. He would paste her to the walls,
and put some text underneath her. Perhaps Araceli’s own statement from the newspaper.
“¡No les tengo miedo!”
And why not in English too? A Mexican woman with her mouth open to the words: “I am not afraid!”

“I
don’t know what I know anymore,” Maureen said fifteen minutes into the interview with Deputy District Attorney Arnold Chang. Maureen and Scott were confused and evasive about time and their own actions during the disappearance of the children, and they were unwilling or unable to say anything about the defendant that would bolster a felony child endangerment conviction. They were freshly showered and scented, appropriately polite, but also distant to the man who was there to be their champion in court against the woman charged with endangering their children.

“She never did anything you found strange?” Chang asked.

“Strange? Oh, yes, lots of things,” Maureen said. “We called her Madame Weirdness.”

“You’d say hello and she wouldn’t answer,” Scott said.

“I got kind of used to that after a while. Who needs to hear ‘hello’ all the time in their own house?” Maureen said. “But she did seem unhappy a lot of the time.”

“Almost all the time,” Scott said. “But that’s not a crime, I guess. Unhappiness is not against the law.”

“What was she unhappy about?”

Maureen and Scott thought about this question for a few moments, reviewing their memories of the four years they had lived with Araceli for some insight into their employee’s inner life. They looked at each other blankly, then separately gave the prosecutor a startled and embarrassed shrug.

“We have no idea,” Scott said.

“I’m guessing that she was lonely,” Maureen said. “That she expected more from life—because, you know, she’s obviously very smart. But she worked hard. We have to give her that.”

“She did everything,” Scott said. “Everything. And never complained.”

“She grumbled,” Maureen corrected. “She was rude. But did we ever hear a real complaint? No.”

The “victims” wanted the case to go away, the deputy district attorney concluded, and that was a common enough reaction. They wanted to return to their normal, untroubled lives. But then the husband took it a step further.

“I’m not sure Araceli needs to be prosecuted,” Scott said suddenly, bluntly. “I really don’t think she did anything wrong.”

Maureen lowered her eyes, feeling suddenly exposed and naked, but not entirely surprised. She allowed Scott’s statement to fill the space above their dining room table unchallenged, knowing that her silence was a loud proclamation of assent.
If Araceli didn’t do anything wrong, then what about me?
She had contributed to Araceli’s jailing with that small lie to the 911 operator, and then she had all but denounced her former maid in a television interview, with insinuations that caused the Mexican woman to be jailed again. A simple statement by her husband had forced her to confront these truths. And it was all happening here in the living room, before yet another stranger.

“But she took them, or placed them, rather, in a situation of peril,” the deputy district attorney said.

“Because of us,” Scott said. “It was our fault.”

“Stop,” the deputy district attorney snapped, raising his palm like a traffic policeman, and both Maureen and Scott understood why.

“Can’t you just let this go?” Scott said, with frustrated insistence. “Because the longer it goes on, the deeper you’re digging us into a big mess. I mean, the media, everything. It’s going to swallow up our family.”

“There’s something you need to understand,” Deputy District Attorney Chang said after a few moments. “It’s not your decision to make. This case doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the People now.”

“W
ell, that went smoothly,” Scott said once the deputy district attorney had left.

“We spent the last twenty minutes talking about the desert garden and about his kids,” Maureen observed, and with that she turned away from Scott and walked over to the portable playpen in the middle of the living room and took out Samantha.

“She’s spending a lot of time in there,” Scott observed, but his wife
ignored him and gave him the baby, and in a few moments she had disappeared into the kitchen and then emerged again with an apron.

“There’s some things we need to talk about,” Scott said. Before the arrival of the representative of the district attorney’s office, Scott had spent the morning on the phone, speaking to a representative of Child Protective Services. He had to sit down with his wife and sort through how they were going to work their way out of this mess, but now she walked away from him again, tying the apron around her back and disappearing into the kitchen.
How is it that women are so good with their fingers behind their backs and we men are not?
The image of motherly dexterity and purpose stuck with him as he took the baby and headed for the backyard. He took Samantha outside and rolled a ball around the grass with her, and enjoyed the crazy, baby-tooth giggle she gave when it slipped away from her. “Ball,” his daughter said, her voice mostly a big, squeaky vowel. When they had finished playing he looked for his wife, thinking that he might grab and hold her attention with the momentous news that their daughter had just uttered her first word. He found her in the boys’ room, on her knees, examining the contents of the boys’ bookcase.

“Hey, Samantha is talking now.”

“I know. She said ‘milk’ a few days ago. Didn’t I tell you?”

“No.” He studied his wife, who was taking books and dropping them into a box with harried relish. “What are you doing?”

“I had an epiphany,” Maureen said, giving a scan of the room Araceli called El Cuarto de las Mil Maravillas. “We have too much stuff.”

“What?”

“The kids have toys they haven’t played with in two or three years. And books like these that they’ll never read again.” She held up two slim volumes from a series of detective mysteries written for young readers, one for each letter of the alphabet. Their precocious younger son had finished whipping through all twenty-six more than a year earlier. “Why have we kept these? It’s all this stuff gathering dust that’s just making it that much harder to keep this place clean.”

“Okay,” Scott said in the tone with which one addressed children and madmen.

“Of course, the real solution is to move to a smaller house,”
Maureen continued. “That’s what we should have done a while ago.” It pained her to think she’d soon have to leave this home built with so much time and care. But there was no other way out. Not any she could see. “We can’t have your dad staying with us forever. And if we’re not going to have any live-in help, then we can’t be in a place that’s this big. If we can get rid of about half the stuff we own, we can fit into a smaller place. Maybe a place with a public school district that’s halfway decent.”

Scott could see his wife would now approach the task of divesting herself and her home of these superfluous objects with the same vigor she had applied to their accumulation. The household was her domain, and he and all the children would live according to whatever principles she embraced: baroque beauty and excess, or simplicity and moderation.
What do they call it when women run everything? Matriarchy? Feminoc-racy?
He imagined a leaner household, smaller credit-card bills, and a less imposing flat-screen television. Or perhaps no television at all. Hadn’t it been that way once, in some other time, in the prehistory of his American family, a time his Mainer great-grandfather would remember? He allowed himself to imagine living in that emptier household with children, perhaps with a vegetable garden in the back instead of cacti or semitropical plants—and then he remembered the nagging matters of the present.

“We need to talk about some things.”

Maureen heard him but chose not to respond, because if she did she would lose the momentum that was carrying her through the domestic juggling act of her day. If she stopped she would curl up like a ball on the bed with a bowl of ice cream and the television turned on to faux courtrooms and talk-show hosts who filled the day with common sense and scolding rants delivered to knucklehead moms. Better to sort through this bookcase, separating out the old Dr. Seuss and other very early reader books Samantha might still enjoy. If she could leave the boys’ room looking less cluttered, the sense of minor accomplishment would stay with her and lift her through the preparation of lunch. Afterward, she would strap up Samantha for a walk through the neighborhood to see if she might fall asleep, because the baby was starting to skip her naps, which transformed her into a moody afternoon screamer. The visit of the representative of the district attorney’s office had
thrown Maureen off, set her back, but now the sight of these books had her back on track again. Each book had a little of their past and their hope attached to it, and it would be hard to part with the brightly colored pages of trucks, trains, and spaceships, many with dates of purchase and a name written inside:
Brandon’s favorite, Age 3.
There was a poetic order, she could now see, in the seemingly haphazard collection of topics and images in these books.
Here a slice of ancient Egypt brought to life with meticulous drawings, there a child’s primer on human evolution. Australopithecus, Homo habilis.
They had purchased these books to transform their children into little cosmopolitan princes. But all this was too much. She considered a collection of art-history primers, which her sons never cracked open. Michelangelo and his Sistine Chapel were gathering dust, because her sons were unmoved by the hand of God touching Man.

“The child services people called this morning,” Scott said behind her.

“Uh-huh.”

Scott lowered Samantha to the floor and allowed her to begin walking through the room, thinking perhaps that would get his wife’s attention away from the books she was sorting. There was something remarkable, and also very predictable, Scott thought, about this moment: he and his wife had been thrust into a public crisis, suffered embarrassment on television, in the newspapers, and on the Internet, and yet the essential dynamic in their marriage remained unchanged.
I’m trying to help us avoid disaster and she is still not listening.

“Maureen, we need to focus,” he insisted. “Child Protective Services got set off by the stuff about the spa. About you being at the spa alone. Apparently there’s another, quote, unquote, ‘wave of anger’ building against us. The media found out about MindWare, and me being a software millionaire, supposedly, and how much our house is worth. Peter Goldman said they’re calling us ‘symbols of excess.’ “

“Peter told you that?” Maureen asked, finally turning to face him. “You talked to him?”

“Yes. This morning. I called him after I talked to the child services people and that nut Ian Goller. Goller called just before his guy came out here. He said we should go to the courthouse when Araceli’s hearing starts. And this time we should take the boys.”

“But he said last week we didn’t have to.”

“Not to the trial. To a rally outside. On the same day.”

“A rally? A rally against the immigrants? What for?”

“Because of the kids. Goller says it’ll keep pressure on child services to leave us alone. That’s why I told that guy I wanted to drop the case. Because this whole thing is getting too crazy and weird. But now I don’t know. What happens if I tell the child services people the same thing I told the DA guy? That it was our fault. What do we say?”

Instead of responding, Maureen took a deep breath to gather herself, then walked over to the room’s large closet and opened it. She allowed the quiet to linger, and then focused her eyes and attention on the next challenge before her: a half dozen plastic containers filled with toys. The only solution here was to order the boys to go through everything and decide what they wanted to keep and send the rest to Goodwill.
Responsibility: they are just the right age to learn a lesson about managing their living space.

“Maureen,” Scott insisted. “Please! We have to talk about this.”

She turned to face him and spoke in a calm but determined voice. “Don’t you understand? I’m trying to take control of our lives too.” She stretched out her arms and held her palms upward and gestured around the room filled with the artifacts of their frenetic overcollecting, the stuffed shelves of make-believe objects, and the overflowing plastic, paper, and fabric inside the closet. “What we need to focus on to keep our family in one piece is in here. In these rooms. Not out there.”

“I
saw this woman and those two boys crossing the street on Broadway. And it was two days before they show up on the TV ‘kidnapped.’ I’m certain of it,” Judge Adalian told the cable host from the network’s Burbank studios. “I told this to the district attorney’s office in very clear terms. First on the phone, and then in writing. So what do they do? They ignore me. There is no follow-up. So I insist. I’m a judge and I’m used to getting my way, I guess. They still haven’t called back. I find this a bit irritating. So I called up the public defender’s office and told the very nice young deputy they have working on this case. And she was very happy to hear that a municipal judge is making a statement that corroborates the defendant’s version of events.”