The Barbarian Nurseries (9 page)

“Increíble,”
Araceli said flatly.

“By the time I finally heard from the daughter, my
viejita
was just a box of ashes. After I got the box,
then
they all show up at the house. The daughter, the son-in-law, the other daughter, the long-lost brother, who I had never met before.
Todos.
And they start asking me questions as if it were all my fault. One of them wanted to search my things when I moved out, but when I started crying they let me go.”

“I’ve never taken care of an old lady,” Araceli said distractedly. “And I’ve never taken care of children until now.”

Araceli stood up, gave a perfunctory
“Con permiso”
to María Isabel, then walked over to the play structure, where Keenan was now running across the bridge with the girl María Isabel had brought. At the other end of the play structure, Brandon was sitting on a step, reading a book.
Where did he get a book? Is he always carrying one, the way other boys hold toy trucks or security blankets?

“What are you reading?” Araceli asked him. In four years of living with the Torres-Thompsons, it was the first time she had ever asked this boy that question: it felt like a correct, motherly thing to do.

“El revolución,”
Brandon answered, holding up the book to show her the title,
American Revolution.

“La
revolución,”
Araceli corrected.

She sat next to him, another thing she had not done before, and looked at the pages as he read them. The book contained short snippets of text and pictures of long muskets, reproductions of old paintings of battles, studio shots of museum artifacts like rusting buttons and uniforms. There was something sad about a young boy sitting in a park reading about men in white wigs who were dead. She wanted to tell him that he should put down his book and play, but of course that wasn’t her business, to talk to him like his mother.

“What happened to Guadalupe?” Brandon asked suddenly.

“Yeah,” Keenan chimed in from the play structure. “Where’s Lupita?”

Araceli was momentarily taken aback. Guadalupe had taken care of these boys for five years, she was like a big sister to them, and no one had explained her absence.

“¿Tu mamá no te dijo nada?”

“No. Nothing.”

“I don’t know why, but she is gone,” Araceli said, hoping to forestall any further questions.

“She’s gone? You mean she’s not coming back?”

“Is she working somewhere else?” Brandon asked in a distracted voice that suggested he already had an inkling that Guadalupe had quit. “Is she mad at Mommy? Is she getting married?” Brandon was continuously peppering the adults around him, including Araceli, with questions,
and these queries about Guadalupe seemed more like the casually curious questions he posed to Araceli from time to time: “Why can’t we have turkey dogs two days in a row? … Why do you say
‘buenos días’
in Spanish but not
‘buenos tardes?
…” In the Torres-Thompson family, doing your best to answer Brandon’s questions was a house rule.
La señora
Maureen was proud of her inquisitive oldest boy and liked to brag about the very first “brilliant” question he had asked when he was four years old: “Why do moths always fly around the lightbulbs?” Neither of his parents knew the answer and they scrambled to reference books and the Internet before giving their incipient genius the information his young brain demanded: moths use the moon to navigate at night, and the lights confuse them, so that “they think they’re circling the moon.”

When a boy got answers as satisfying as that one, they only fed his desire to ask more questions. “An atomic bomb? Why? How does that work? How do bald eagles see fish in the water from way up in the sky? Who is Malcolm X, and why is his last name X?” The boy was destined to be either a brilliant scientist or an irritating attorney.

“Did Lupita go back to Mexico?” Brandon asked his temporary caregiver. “What part of Mexico is she from? Is it the same time there as it is here? Can we call her?”

“No sé,”
Araceli said, giving an annoyed looked to make it clear that this answer applied to all of Brandon’s questions.
“No sé nada.”

Araceli felt a sudden warmness on her face: looking up, she saw a shimmering white disk of phosphorus eating through the clouds.
The sun will come out,
Araceli hoped, and then she said it out loud and Brandon looked up and nodded and returned to his book, lingering over a picture of two armies gathered at opposite sides of a bridge, engaged in a standoff of martial posturing. As he read the accompanying text, running his fingers over it, Araceli gave out a loud sigh.

T
he nursery manager paid a quick visit to Paseo Linda Bonita and left Maureen three pieces of paper. First there was a schematic drawing on a sheet from her sketchpad in which small symbols represented the various succulents the consult ant proposed planting in the Torres-Thompson backyard. Second, there was a form in which the price of creating this desert garden was laid out, with separate quotes
for “labor,” “flora,” and “base material,” and the alarmingly high figure of the sum total. The third and final piece of paper was a drawing that depicted the succulent garden as it would look from the perspective of the sliding glass doors of her home. The cylinders of a miniature organ pipe cactus would rise to the right, creating an anchor to the composition that would draw the eye leftward, toward the cluster of barrel cacti, mesquite shrubs, and large yuccas with arms blooming like human-sized flowers. When Maureen looked at the numbers on the smallest piece of paper she winced, and felt the dream of the drawing slipping away, becoming so many grains of pencil graphite dissolving into the white blankness of the paper. Then she remembered the argument that she would present to her husband, the logic that would make the garden real, the words the nursery manager had said in a matter-of-fact tone, because the truth of it was so self-evident: “I know it looks a little high. But in the final analysis you’re gonna save a good chunk of money each year off your water bill, and even more off your gardening bill. Because this is the sort of garden you just put in and forget about. Maybe two or three times a year you go in and weed the thing, but otherwise you just stand there and watch it look pretty.”

The drawing of the garden looked like a desert diorama, and Maureen imagined the dreamlike effect you got at an old-fashioned natural history museum, the sense of standing in a darkened room before a window that looks into another, brightly lit world. The succulent garden would create the illusion that their house was a portal into the unspoiled landscape of old California. Only Scott and his calculator stood between Maureen and the diorama coming to life. Against this obstacle, there was the accelerating decay of the current garden: in time, it would resemble a dried-out mulch heap, or one of those corners of Brazil ravaged by cattle ranchers. She could make this argument to her husband, or she could simply take control of the situation—as she did with every other problem in this home—and present him with a rather costly fait accompli. He’d be angry, but he’d pay the bill, because he always had before.

E
very other weekend the Torres-Thompson family engaged in a ritual of austerity, a temporary purging of the primary luxury that smoothed over their lives. It had been Maureen’s idea, years back when hired help in the home was still a novelty. They would reconnect with their self-r eliant past and spend forty-eight hours cooking their own meals, doing their own dishes, making their own beds. This act of self-abnegation required getting their full-time live-in off the property. Maureen had dreamed up the maid-free weekends after realizing that Araceli didn’t expect to have days off, that she was content to spend her weekends in the guesthouse in the back, entering the main home to cook meals and wash dishes on Saturday and Sunday with only slightly less energy than on the weekdays. “If you want to, it might be good if you took a couple of days off every couple of weeks,” Maureen told Araceli. “Leave the house, you know. But only if you want to.” In Mexico bosses did not give their employees choices, and ambiguous statements like Maureen’s were a common way around the unpleasantness of a direct command: so Araceli took the suggestion as an order.

Araceli’s biweekly excursions took her to the home of a friend in Santa Ana, an hour away by foot and bus. After a while, Araceli had
grown to appreciate the routine that got her out of the Torres-Thompson universe and into the Mexican-flavored neighborhoods of Santa Ana’s barrio, squeezed in between the railroad tracks and the bargain shopping of the city’s Main Street. On this particul ar Saturday, she swung by the dining room to say goodbye to Maureen and discovered her
patrona
on her hands and knees, with several sheets of newspaper spread over the tile floor of the dining room, trying to interest her two sons in a Saturday morning art project using three fist-sized blocks of sculptor’s clay. Keenan was kneading a lump, and the baby Samantha had ocher-colored fingers after sticking them in a bowl of clayish water, while Brandon was on the couch reading a book. Maureen looked up at Araceli with a smile of parental pride—
We are doing something educational, my children and I
—and if Araceli had a slightly more cynical bent she might have concluded the scene had been arranged for her benefit.
Yes, Mexican woman, you are leaving us to fend for ourselves, but as you can see we Americans can manage okay.

“Adiós,
I am leaving now,” Araceli said, tapping at the small travel bag hanging over her shoulder.

Maureen looked up from the table and said, “Okay. See you Monday,” and then added a gentle reminder. “Morning. See you Monday morning.”

“Sí, señora.”

With that Araceli was through the door and free from work, relishing those first few, very light and liberating steps down to the sidewalk, a happy reencounter with the person she once was, the woman who lived in a true city, with crowds, art, subways, and beggars. The twenty-minute walk to the bus stop took her downhill along the curving streets of the Laguna Rancho Estates, past one block where, for reasons Araceli never understood, all the houses were exactly alike, each a copy of a tile-roofed home from a white Andalusian village, each with the aesthetically misguided and culturally inappropriate addition of garages with tiny arched windows in their tin skins. The garages were as Spanish-phony as the made-up names on the street signs, which still brought a smile to Araceli’s lips. Mostly variations on the words
“vía”
and
“paseo,”
the street names had lots of pretty vowels that, when put together, meant absolutely nothing. Paseo Vista Anda. Via Lindo Vita. Her
jefes
lived on Paseo Linda Bonita, which was not only grammatically incorrect, Araceli noted, but also a redundancy.

Paseo Linda Bonita and all the other
paseos
and
vías
in the Laguna Rancho Estates bent and twisted in arbitrary ways, as if the designers had intended to frustrate impatient motorists, unpunctual deliverymen, novice mail carriers. When Araceli first came to work here she too had been disoriented by the anti-linear geography of the place, more than once finding herself turning into an unfamiliar dead end, having to retrace her steps back out of the maze. Now she reached the front gate, a stone portal with a guard shack and two big black iron gates with the letters
l, r,
and E superimposed in polished steel. A man of chocolate skin and cornrow braids was posted there, and he gave a distracted half wave back as she walked past, headed to the bus stop marked by a fiberglass sign,
orange county transportation authority.
Only the maids and construction workers used this bus stop, so there was no sidewalk, just the dust and pebbles of the shoulder and a post driven into the undeveloped meadow that ran down to the beach. Araceli turned her back to the road and gate and faced the rolling expanse of yellow grass that mamboed in the breeze, the remnant of the
“rancho”
the Laguna Rancho Estates were named for, the millennial silence interrupted only infrequently by the sound of a vehicle moving behind her with a low purr. Looking past the meadows at the blue ocean beyond, she saw a large vessel many miles offshore, a black box drifting northward across the horizon, like a flat cutout in an arcade game. It was routine to spot ships as she waited at the bus stop, and seeing another evoked a fleeting sense of hopelessness: their slow, industrial drift seemed free of any romantic purpose, and their presence somehow tamed the Pacific and robbed it of openness and adventure.

Araceli waited. She had spent her formative years in Mexico City lines standing before elevator doors and cash registers, in buses stranded before stoplights, and in constipated thoroughfares, but it seemed illogical to find herself waiting in this open, empty stretch of California. Making a Mexican woman stand under this bus sign for thirty minutes was a final subtraction from all that was supposed to be relaxing, leisurely, and languorous about these neighborhoods by the sea. When her time became her own again, when she was a woman with a party outfit stuffed into a travel bag, Araceli reverted to the city dweller she was by birth; she was in more of a hurry, restless.
Ya, vámonos, ándale,
let’s get moving.
¡Ya!
In Nezahualcóyotl, you didn’t have to walk twenty minutes to get to the bus stop, all you had to do was walk half a block, and there
would be two or three buses waiting for you, double-parked, the drivers honking at one another and all the taxis and shuttle vans around them. No one complained: that was life in Mexico City, you waited as the multitudes shuffled around you, jabbing elbows into your chest, pushing grocery bags into your stomach. Araceli never would have imagined herself also waiting in the United States, so pathetically alone on a winding road.

N
ot long after Araceli walked out the door, Maureen noticed that Samantha had worked bits of clay into the zipper of her yellow pajama jumpsuit, a discovery that caused Maureen to feel the sudden weight of motherly sleeplessness behind her pupils. Looking up at the clock, she noticed her morning sense of being fully awake and alert had not lasted past nine-thirty. As soon as a baby entered the world, you were sentenced to two years of interrupted sleep, unless genetic probability favored you with the rare “easy baby,” the ones fated to become grown-ups with the gentle dispositions of Buddhist priests. In three tries Maureen had never been so blessed; each child had sapped a bit of her youth with nights similar to the last one, which had been interrupted by Samantha’s cries at 12:04 a.m., 2:35 a.m., and 4:36 a.m. The years of infant and toddler helplessness took a toll on a mother’s body too; they were an unexpected extension of those nine months of gestation that a mother endured not in her womb and hips, but rather in the muscles around her eyes, and in her arms and spine. This Saturday would begin with the cleaning of this clay-covered baby and move later to the harried cooking of lunch and dinner, all the while keeping an eye on the boys so that they didn’t spend too much time on their electronic toys, and on Samantha to make sure she didn’t injure herself, and would end with the washing of the dishes in the evening after she had put her children to bed.

On most days Maureen didn’t mind the responsibility; she felt the purpose and nobility of motherhood flowing through her body like warm blood, and saw those exalted notions alive in the healthy, glowing skin of her children and in the nurturing home she had built around them. Today would not be one of those days. Today she would see only the frayed ends of a family project that was subtly coming apart, with
two boys of growing muscle mass and bad attitude, and little time for the arranging, sorting, and creating that made up Maureen’s notion of what family life should look like. In the back of the closet a year of the boys’ schoolwork and art projects were gathering dust because Maureen didn’t have the time to catalogue them as was her wont, nor had she filed away the pictures from Samantha’s first birthday. If Samantha napped and Scott did the dishes she might get to those things today. He was probably hiding in that carpeted nook of his, with a game, and thinking of this she felt the sense of petty injustice that overcomes a slave upon learning she is carrying the heaviest rocks of all.

A
ll the disciplined orderliness and empty lawns of the Laguna Rancho Estates disappeared in the barrio where Araceli’s friend Marisela lived. The Santa Ana neighborhood was cluttered and improvised, and the homes stucco and clapboard, ash-gray and flaky fuchsia. There were palm trees and olive trees and avocado trees and jacarandas, some overgrown and older than any of the homes, with tree roots buckling the sidewalks into waves. Some lawns were green squares of watered perfection, and others were eaten up with patches of dust upon which lawn chairs and frayed couches rested, and clusters of people sat talking with wide sweeping gestures, while women and children stood on the porches behind them and examined the landscape like mariners on the prow of a ship.

The bus stopped on Maple Street and Araceli stepped off and walked a few blocks to the white wood-frame house where Marisela lived with a family from Zacatecas. She climbed onto the porch, which was covered with a worn carpet of plastic grass, opened the screen door, and entered the uniquely Mexican set of cultural contradictions that was the home of Octavio Covarrubias, a longtime friend of Marisela’s family and the owner of this house. She found him in a torso-swallowing blue lounge chair: he was reading, in a rather conspicuous display of his lefty bona fides, the Sunday edition of the Mexico City daily newspaper
La Jornada,
which he received by mail every week, devouring its star-studded lineup of radical Mexican literary and political commentators. Covarrubias was a semiretired carpenter and one of the thousands of proletarian, Spanish-speaking autodidact intellectuals scattered across
the Southern California metropolis, and he had two large moles above his left eye that he called Io and Europa, after the moons of Jupiter. His wife and adolescent progeny, meanwhile, were sitting semierect on a couch as they absorbed the pings, sizzles, and cheers of a television broadcasting a Mexico City–based variety show hosted by a garrulous man whose vulgar shtick annoyed thoughtful people on both sides of the border. The living room décor further echoed the contrasts between high and low culture, with the velvet painting of tongue-wagging dogs on one wall looking across the space at the bowed, dignified heads of the mother and child in a Siqueiros woodcut on the other. Even on the bookshelf, the gravitas of Elena Poniatowska and José Emilio Pacheco were pushing up against the pulp crime of
Los secretos del cartel del Golfo
and
The True Story of Los Zetas,
announcing to Araceli her arrival at the home of a workingman grappling for ideas, arguments, and facts to understand his world.

Octavio lowered his newspaper to say
“Hola, Araceli, ¿qué tal?”

Araceli returned the greeting and asked if Marisela was in.

“She’s waiting for you.”

Araceli zigzagged around the children in the living room and made her way to the last bedroom in the back, where she found Marisela lying on her back on a bed, pushing buttons on her cell phone.

“No one ever calls me,” Marisela said without looking at Araceli. She was a short and roundish young woman who always wore jeans that were a size too small. Araceli liked Marisela because she was blunt and often unaware of the fact that she was offending people, and because she was a
chilanga,
a Mexico City native. They had met in a Santa Ana thrift store, two Latinas sorting through the same rack of men’s vests, and weeks later it was Marisela who introduced Araceli to the friend who knew a gringa in Laguna Rancho who in turn knew another gringa, named Maureen Thompson, who was looking for a new maid.

“The only call I got today was from
el viejo,”
Marisela said, turning on her side to look at her friend now. “He didn’t even ask how I was doing before telling me he needed money.”

“Is your brother still sick?”

“No, he got better. Now they need one hundred dollars because there’s a hole in the roof.”

Once it had been taboo to complain about their families and the
demands they made. A Mexican daughter in exile was supposed to place individual ambitions aside and make ample cash transfers in the name of younger siblings and nephews. So their money flowed southward, every month without fail, even as the months and years passed and the voices on the other end of the telephone became older and more distant. Their U.S. wages fertilized a tree of family narratives that had grown many new and gnarly branches that no longer involved them directly. Now Araceli and Marisela complained openly and without guilt, because it had become painfully clear that their families didn’t understand the complications of life in the supposedly affluent United States of America, and because their relatives were using their telephones as probes to discover how deep the well of dollars went, as if they sensed, correctly, that the faraway daughters in exile were squirreling away money for their own selfish use.

“I’m going to send them fifty instead of one hundred,” Marisela said.