The Barbarian Nurseries (8 page)

No one in Elysian Systems bothered to hide the fact that they were using their computers throughout the workday to watch their stocks and mutual funds and 401(k) accounts, not even the executives up on the fourth floor.
Before, we played Nerf football in the hallways, and practiced tango dancing in the cafeteria. Now we watch our retirement shrink in multicolored graphs. Football and tango were better for the soul.
This morning, as on most mornings in recent months, Scott squinted at his screen in frustration at the dynamic displays, updated at five-minute intervals, that confirmed his poor financial judgment, his bad bets. For several years the market had risen dependably, and people started to think of it as a machine that made money, but that wasn’t its true nature.
The market did not behave according to any pattern Scott had been able to discern. Turning the market into the graphs and charts of the type filling Scott’s flat-panel display created the illusion that it was a mathematical equation, that it obeyed rules like those hidden inside the core of computer games, where players spent hours exploring and prodding to uncover the underlying logic, the key that opened the jewelry box. The equations that ran the market were, in fact, too vast for any computer to decipher: they were the sum of the desires and fears of millions of people, divided and multiplied by the ostensibly rational but really quite subjective calculations of “analysts.” The math was twisted further by the fiscal legerdemain of accountants who could be as creatively fuzzy as impressionist painters. The numbers their spreadsheets spit out, Scott now knew, were inflated by narrative inventions like those Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian used to confabulate at meetings with venture capitalists. Scott had learned these lessons while watching the Big Man run their company, but unfortunately he had no way to apply them to his own investment decisions, and he had spent several frustrating years moving the “go-away” money from MindWare around the market and into various “instruments.” Five years ago the charts and graphs pointed, unmistakably, toward exotic new fields being tested in Research Triangle laboratories, and if they had continued to follow that logic Scott would not be working at Elysian Systems today, he would not have a mortgage to worry about, and Pepe the gardener would still be cutting the lawn and tending to the backyard garden and Scott would be liberated of his wife’s complaining to him about it.

A
s was their custom, the regulars at Laguna Municipal Park South began arriving around noon. They brought packed lunches, strollers stuffed with extra diapers and moist towelets, and carried pay-as-you-go cell phones to talk to the barrio relatives who were watching over their own children as they earned dollars caring for their
patrones’
boys and girls. The weekday routine of the park was broken this morning by the appearance of a new woman, a fellow
latinoamericana
who occupied the bench by the play structure, and who instantly reminded the regulars of locales deep to the south, and not because of her broad face and caramel skin, or the way she slumped on the bench and
sneered at the play structures. No, it was the uniform that reminded them of their home countries, the excessive professional formality of matching pink pants and the wide, pocketed blouse that was known back home as a
filipina.
It was the uniform of the high-society domestic back home, though hardly anyone wore one in California, where most employers preferred their domestics in the sporty and practical attire of jeans and tennis shoes, complemented with the odd gift garment from the boss: a quality hoodie from Old Navy, or a sturdy cotton blouse from Target. The new woman in the park was sitting with her arms folded defiantly across her chest, as if she were a prisoner taking some fresh air in the recreation yard, watching over two boys who themselves were very familiar because they used to come here with Guadalupe, a favorite of the group.

“¡Buenas tardes!”
announced a perky older woman in sweatpants and a loose-fitting blouse as she took a seat next to Araceli. “Those are Guadalupe’s kids.”

“Así es,”
Araceli said.

The woman introduced herself as María Isabel and pointed out that she had brought a girl to the park who was about Keenan’s age. Araceli watched as the girl and Keenan stood on opposite sides of the elaborate play structure, as if contemplating the gender divide and the walkways of plastic and compressed rubber that stood between them, until Keenan made another mouth explosion and returned to the game with his older brother.

“I heard that Guadalupe might quit,” María Isabel announced. “So, you took her place?”

Before Araceli could answer, María Isabel rose to her feet to push the girl, who had run over to the swing, and then turned toward Araceli in anticipation of an answer.

“No, we used to work together.”

“That Guadalupe was a funny girl. Always telling jokes. Did she ever tell you the story about the little boy getting lost in the women’s section in the mall?”

“Yes.”

María Isabel gave the girl another push, the wide fan of her charge’s blond hair catching the air and billowing in the moist morning air, her pendulum movement and the creaking of the apparatus keeping a kind
of harried time. “Push me higher, María,” the girl yelled, and María Isabel obeyed and gave another heave. María Isabel was a woman of oak-bark hue with freshly dyed and aerosol-sprayed short hair, and she was wearing smart matching accessories of gold earrings and a thin gold chain on her wrist that were mismatched with the bleach-burned T-shirt draped over her short frame.
This woman arrives at work dressed as if she were a secretary, and then strips down into janitor clothes.
“You tell a few good stories and the time just flashes by,” María Isabel continued. “A lot of us come here every day. Later on we’ll probably see Juana. And Modesta and Carmelita. Carmelita is from Peru and the nicest woman you’ll ever meet. Maybe we’ll see Fanny, though I hope not. Fanny is a mess.”

Araceli said nothing and for a moment they watched Brandon chase Keenan over a bridge of plastic slats, until Brandon lost his footing and fell over the edge, headfirst onto the black mat below. Keenan laughed as his brother climbed up and rubbed his head, unhurt.

“Niños traviesos,”
María Isabel said with a tone of mild exasperation that she intended as a gesture of sympathy with Araceli. “But I’d rather take care of children. If you’ve got a girl, it isn’t any work at all. A boy is a little more work, but I’ll take even three boys over an old lady. That was my last job, taking care of a
viejita
on her deathbed.”

“Really?” Araceli said, unable to mask her complete lack of interest.

María Isabel lauched into a story about
la señora
Bloom “wrestling with death” and “trying to keep him from taking my old lady away.” Araceli was going to speak up and say,
I really don’t want to hear this story,
but at that instant María Isabel shifted her gaze to an object or person behind Araceli and began to wave.

“Juana!
¡Aquí estoy!
Over here.”

Within a few minutes Araceli was sitting in a circle of Spanish chatter, with three more women greeting Araceli with smiles and
holas
and polite kisses on the cheek.

“You’re taking care of Guadalupe’s kids,” said Carmelita, a stubby-legged woman from Peru. “Those are good boys. She loved them.”

“This is one of the nicer parks around here,” said Juana, who had oily, uneven bangs, and the coffee-colored skin of her ancestors in the mountains of Veracruz. “They clean it every night. And the police patrol past here, so you hardly ever see any vagrants.”

As the women gathered in the play area, Araceli had a fleeting sense of nostalgia for the company of colleagues, the banter of coworkers,
the space that Guadalupe and Pepe had filled in her life. The women told her about their families and the American homes they worked and lived in, while simultaneously keeping an eye on their charges, who were swarming over the play structure and filling the air around it with the squeals their parents called “outside voices.” Carmelita sat on the mat a few feet from Araceli and allowed the boy in her care to stand in his leather shoes and overalls, walk toward her, and then fall into her embrace. Modesta, a freckled and green-eyed
mexicana,
raised a finger at a girl climbing the roof of the structure’s plastic cube, and the girl immediately clambered down to safety. They were all parents themselves (and María Isabel a grandparent), and their motherly self-assurance fell over and calmed the children around them like a rain of warm milk. Once they’d finished greeting Araceli, their conversation drifted, as it often did, to the practical problems of child-rearing.

“This is a good place to practice walking. If he falls, he can’t hurt himself.”

“If you don’t let them fall, they don’t learn to walk.”

“I remember when Kylie was that age.
Es una edad de peligros:
they fall as much as they talk. She still has that scar on her forehead, underneath her hair.”

“I finally got Jackson to eat the squash, after I tried that recipe with the food machine.
Un milagro.
But it didn’t work with his sister.”

“Each one is different. God makes them that way.”

Araceli watched and listened, saw the children on the play structure casting glances at their paid caregivers, and the caregivers looking back as if to say,
You are okay, I am here.
They knew that each child was his or her own shifting landscape because the estrogen that ran through their veins, and their own histories as mothers, allowed them to see these things: Araceli sensed that North American employers and Latin American relatives alike revered them for this power.
They all seem to possess it—and to know that I do not.

After a while their attention returned to Araceli, the quiet, awkward woman in their midst, and the small mystery and break in the park routine she represented. What, they now asked directly, had happened to Guadalupe?

“I guess they didn’t have enough money to pay her what she wanted,” Araceli told them. “Or to keep her.”

“Or she didn’t want to stay,” María Isabel said knowingly.

“No sé.”

“Yes, I remember her saying something about the money,” María Isabel said. “First they asked her to work for less. Then her
patrón
said they were going to need just one person to cook and clean and take care of the kids too. To do everything. Guadalupe said she thought it was too much work for one person. And that she wouldn’t do it, even if they asked her … So I guess they hired you.”

Araceli said nothing.

“Do you know where she went?” Carmelita asked.

“No.”

Suddenly the newcomer looked perplexed and agitated. Araceli could see now that all the scenery at Paseo Linda Bonita had been shifting around her, even before Guadalupe left: calculations were being made, consultations undertaken. Araceli worked harder than Guadalupe, she was infinitely more reliable, but she didn’t chat with her bosses, or make friendly with them, and so they had revealed their crisis to Guadalupe, the flighty and talkative one. But they hadn’t even bothered asking Araceli what she thought, and had instead simply foisted more work upon her. Araceli saw her standing in the world with a new and startling clarity. She lived with English-speaking strangers, high on a hill alone with the huge windows and the smell of solvents, and lacked the will to escape what she had become. She quietly accepted the Torres-Thompsons’ money and the room they gave her, and they felt free to make her do anything they asked, expecting her to adapt to their habits and idiosyncrasies, holding babies, supervising boys at the park, and probably more things that she could not yet imagine.

“Sometimes, you just have to pack your things and go to the next job,” María Isabel said. “That’s how it was when
la señora
Bloom died …”

“Again with
la viejita,”
Carmelita said. Juana and Modesta rolled their eyes.

“I was telling the story to Araceli when you all got here. And I never finished.”

“The Day of the Dead isn’t until November,” Carmelita said with a wry smile. Already Juana and Modesta were starting to drift away, walking closer toward their charges. “Why don’t you wait until nighttime to start telling your scary stories?”

“There’s nothing scary about it. It’s a story about a human being. About two human beings. Me and
la señora
Bloom.”

“Araceli doesn’t want to hear that story,” Carmelita said.

“No, no, it’s not a problem,” Araceli said. Already, this woman’s rambling had revealed one unexpected truth, and if she allowed her to go on, she might reveal another.

“Like I was saying,
la señora
Bloom lived by herself, with only me to keep her company. None of her kids even lived nearby. The one daughter who called to check in every week, she lived in New York. So one day, finally,
la señora
Bloom gave up and let go. I was talking to her, just like I’m talking to you right now, about my ungrateful children in Nicaragua. Then I looked at the bed and I saw her with her eyes open. I waited for them to close, but they never did. So I crossed myself about twenty times, and called the ambulance. Two very nice young men came, and they said, ‘She’s dead.’ And I said, ‘I know that.’ And then they said, ‘There’s nothing we can do.’ They said I had to wait for the coroner. And they left her with me. So here I am all alone with a body in the house! I call the daughter in New York and there’s no answer. Just the machine. I keep trying, all day long, and I’m thinking, I can’t say that into the machine,
Your mother is dead.
So finally I tell the machine, ‘Please call your mother’s house.’ But she never did. I was all alone with that body for fifteen hours, until the brown van came and they took my
viejita
away.”

María Isabel stopped and saw Araceli looking off at the ocean, but plowed on. “The house smelled like death to me: so I cleaned all night long, until all the disinfectant was gone. Finally the coroner called: they wanted to know what to do with the body. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t reach the family.’ So they tell me, ‘If we don’t hear from someone in forty-eight hours, we’re going to cremate her.’
Así de frío.
So I started yelling at them, saying, ‘Don’t you have a mother? Would you burn your own mother?’ “