The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

7




Every 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.


Not 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.


All 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.

“They need to learn to take care of their own problems,” Araceli said, the phrase having become a refrain in their conversations.

“Exactly. I’m going to keep that extra fifty dollars to buy another hat like this one I’m going to wear tonight. I got it at that new place on Main Street. Let me show you.”

Marisela went to the closet and emerged with a cowboy hat made of black jute straw, its brim bent up saucily on two sides, like a bird about to thrust its wings downward. “Qué bonito,” Araceli said through half-gritted teeth, because they had an unspoken agreement not to speak ill of each other’s party clothes, what with Marisela’s having adopted the rural, denim-centered tastes of the Zacatecas people who dominated this neighborhood, while Araceli stuck stubbornly to the pop-inspired trends of Mexico City.

“And it hardly cost me anything at all.”

Several hours later, after watching a bit of television in the living room, and then getting themselves dressed and primped in Marisela’s bedroom and bathroom, they were out on the street and walking down Maple Street, headed to a quinceañera party. Marisela wore her new hat and a pair of jeans with arabesque-patterned rhinestones swaying on the back pockets. Araceli had let her hair down so that it reached halfway to her waist, brushing it out for a good long while. The effect of this liberated mane on her appearance was striking to anyone who knew Araceli the maid: all the tension of her workday face disappeared, and with her temples freed of the pulling strain of the buns in which she imprisoned her hair, her face took on the relaxed expression of a young woman without children to take care of or meals to prepare. She was wearing her “Saturday night chilanga uniform”: short black leggings with flamingo-colored trim that reached halfway down her calves, a black miniskirt with a few sequins, and a T-shirt with the word love across the front, a peace symbol filling the o. Three strands of necklaces made of raspberry-colored plastic rocks, and a few matching bracelets, were her chief accessories. It was a bold statement of where she came from. Similar versions of her uniforme de chilanga had previously earned Araceli a derisive comment or two from Marisela. “You know that people here think you look ridiculous. This isn’t the Condesa district.”

“That, my dear, is precisely the point.”

But today Marisela also kept to their pact and said nothing as they walked to the party, her teeth gleaming in their ruby lipstick frame, the most expressive part of her face, given the large, wraparound sunglasses she was wearing, another example of norteño chic, with encrusted “diamonds” on each side, eyewear that possessed an aeronautical quality, as if Marisela were preparing to be the first Zacatecas astronaut blasted into space.

“I don’t really know the people at this party that well,” Marisela was saying. “The girl who is having the quinceañera, her name is Nicolasa. She’s very tall, very pretty. I know her aunt, Lourdes is her name, because I used to work with her at that clothes factory.”

“I remember you telling me about Lourdes.”

“Actually, I do know some chisme about these people.” It was more tragedy than gossip, a story with dark, nausea-inducing contours, complete with psychopathic border smugglers and a father who disappeared once the family was safely ensconced in California. Abandoned with two children, Nicolasa’s mother had soldiered on until illness struck. “She got too sick to work, and too sick to even take care of the kids. So some people from the government came by and took the kids. They put them in something called Foster Care.”

“Foster” was one of those words than never quite found a home in Araceli’s mental arrangement of the English language. She’d heard it before and sometimes confused it with “faster”—much in the same way some English speakers themselves confused words like “gorilla” and “guerrilla,” or “pretext” and “pretense”—and she’d wondered if the American fix to broken families known as Foster Care somehow involved finding the quickest solution possible: instant guardians for the parentless, quick meals for the unfed.

“In Foster Care they separate siblings,” Marisela continued. “So this girl and her brother lived in different places for, like, three or four years.”

“What about the mother?”

“She died.”

“Dios mío.”

“I wish I could remember what she had.” “AIDS?”

“No, it was something more like cancer. But anyways, my friend Lourdes tried for a long time to get them out of Foster Care. They tried looking for the father too. Finally Lourdes’s sister and brother-i n-l aw tried to adopt them, but of course it took forever, because they were stuck in Foster Care and once they’re in that I guess it’s really hard to get them out.”

The story stayed with Araceli as she walked with Marisela past old bungalows whose windows and doors were open to catch a breeze in the final hours of a dying summer afternoon. Araceli saw kitchen walls shimmering in stark incandescent light, and heard a radio tuned to a Spanish-language broadcast of a baseball game, and a murmur of voices followed by a chorus of laughter, and she wondered about the voices she could not hear, and the tales of betrayal and loss they might tell. Araceli knew she could knock on any door, ask a question or two, and find herself inside a melodrama about a family forced to endure separation and travel great distances, and to struggle with the authorities and with their own self-destructive foibles.

They arrived at a bungalow decorated with a string of lights gathering in luminance in the twilight, its unseen backyard pulsating with accordions, trumpets, and clarinets. Marisela and Araceli had missed the actual quinceañera ceremony, because it had started on schedule, in violation of the Mexican social conventions Marisela and Araceli still followed, although they had arrived in plenty of time for the party that followed. After pushing in a splintery wooden gate, the two women stepped onto a concrete patio thick with more spectacled recruits to the Zacatecas space program who were shuffling about in cowboy boots and swaying inside jeans, while streamers dangled over their heads, brushing against the tops of their ten-gallon hats.

Following Marisela, Araceli cut through the dancers and found her way to a corner, against a wooden fence, where the nondancers held plastic cups and studied the patterns of the shifting feet on the dance floor with serious eyes, as if trying to decipher the meaning of the interlocking circles. Three pairs of women were dancing together, which was not unusual at these parties, the men of northern Mexico being a shy bunch, and when the music stopped and another song started, Marisela turned to Araceli to ask, “¿Bailamos?“ In an instant they were dancing on the patio, Araceli laughing loudly as she led her friend in a merry-go-round waltz, their legs intertwined and arms around each other’s waists. “Just watch,” Marisela shouted into Araceli’s ear above the music. “We dance like this once, and all these guys will be all over us.” Soon enough, several paisanos holding beers were trying very hard to look unimpressed by the sight of a tall woman with thick polyester legs protruding from her miniskirt, spinning deftly in her checkerboard flats and dancing cheek-to-cheek with her short friend in the persimmon-colored blouse.

When Araceli and Marisela stopped dancing, a young man in a baseball cap stepped out of the crowd and grinned and squinted into Marisela’s sunglasses, as if studying himself in the reflection there. He spoke words Araceli did not hear, and when the music started again he pulled Marisela into the center of the patio, and soon they were swallowed up in the mass of moving bodies like rocks plopping into a lake.

Araceli walked to the fence on the edge of the patio and prepared herself for the possibility that none of the brass-buckled astronauts would step forward and lead her back out onto the concrete floor to spin around. When Marisela finishes with that little guy she doesn’t seem to like so much, maybe we can dance again. At that instant, Araceli felt a tap on the shoulder and turned to see a lofty mass of flesh and denim standing before her. He was a man of about her own age, but significantly taller, with a head that was sprouting a full fountain of sexy, moist black curls. “¿Quieres bailar?“ he asked. Where did you come from? she wanted to say, and soon found one of her hands rising for the nameless man to guide her onto the patio. Her partner was husky but moved well, clasping her hands with confidence and with the slightly callused, blackish bronze hands of a man who earns his living outdoors. As they spun to the repetitive swirl of the trumpet and clarinets, Araceli took in the motion of his slacks, the churn of his shirt. Little miracles like this happened to people like Marisela all the time, but only very rarely to Araceli: to meet a stranger and, in an instant, to find herself moving in synchronicity with him.

Halfway through that first song, he leaned over as they danced, pressed his cheek against hers, and said, loud enough to be heard against the blaring music, “Hey, you dance well!”

“I know,” she shouted back.

The music stopped. People around them wiped perspiration from their foreheads and headed for the edge of the patio dance floor. Before Araceli could prepare herself for the inevitable Thank you and goodbye, the music had started again and the curly-headed man was asking, “¿Otra?“ “¡Sí!“

During the second song he said his name was Felipe and after the third he asked her name. When the music stopped after the fourth song she asked him where he was from, just so he wouldn’t go away. “Sonora,” he said. “A little town called Imuris. It’s near Cananea. ¿Y tú?”

“El De Efe.”

When it became clear he did not want to run away, she asked Felipe if he knew anyone else at the party. A few people, he said.

“I don’t know anyone.”

“Look, over there,” he said. “It’s the girl who is having the quince-añera.”

Araceli turned to see a tall young woman with mahogany skin who wore a tight white dress covered in constellations of beads. Nicolasa had the confident look of a young woman enjoying her day of neighborhood celebrity, and was listening to an older man and studying him with smart, dark eyes that occasionally darted away from him to the landscape of the backyard party: the crowd, and the strings of lights, and a large white sign attached to the fence that read feliz 15 nica. Her black hair was parted in the middle and long braids ran down over her shoulders: a girl’s hairstyle and a woman’s face and body. Next to her was a boy with the same complexion but a foot shorter: her brother, apparently. He looked small and vulnerable, and possessed all the tragic aura that his sister lacked: without the black suit he was wearing, he might be one of those boys you see weaving between the cars in Mexico City, raising their palms to catch coins and raindrops from the sky. Now the big, beefy man talking to them raised a bicep to show them a tattoo, a portrait of a cigarette-smoking soldier in a steel helmet, with sgt. ray, r.i.p. written inside a scroll underneath.

“They’ve been through a lot,” Felipe said.

“So you know that story?”

“You mean about their mother dying and being adopted and all that? Yeah. Everybody does. Everybody in the neighborhood, at least.”

“I’m not from the neighborhood.”

“Yeah, I know. I think I would have remembered you,” he said, naturally and simply, without any secondary meanings.

“You see that guy next to them? He got back a few months ago from the war. His name is José. He’s a cousin of the lady who owns this house.”

“What about you? What’s your story?”

“I paint houses. And some construction. But mostly I paint houses.”

“That pays well, qué no?”

“It’s okay. But I like to paint other things besides walls. ¿Entiendes? The other day I was painting at this family’s house and I heard la señora asking my boss if he knew anyone who could paint a design on a table for her. I stepped in and said I could do it, because I like to draw. She wanted a dragon for her son’s room, so I made her one. A big red dragon. She liked it and the boy did too. That was fun.”

“You’re an artist!”

“No, I wouldn’t call myself that. But I like to draw. The dragon turned out okay.”

“I studied art,” Araceli offered, making a conscious effort not to speak breathlessly: a dancing artist had fallen into her lap, and she wanted to tell him everything, all at once. “I was at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in El De Efe, but only for a year. Then I had to quit.” Araceli thought she should explain why, but stopped herself: among mexicanos of their status, in this place called California, no explanations were necessary when describing dreams that died.

“I could tell by looking at you that you’re really smart. You look like one of those girls from the show Rebelde. A student. I could tell. That’s why I asked you to dance.”

At the end of the evening, the two of them having danced for two hours, Felipe said he had to leave because he had to be up early the next morning. Tomorrow is a Sunday, why would you have to be up early? Araceli wanted to ask, but she resisted the temptation. He asked for her phone number, which she wrote on a slip of paper he tucked into the front pocket of his shirt.

“I work in a house,” she told him. Trabajo en una casa. It meant, Yes, you can call me, but a gringo will answer, and be polite, please, and don’t call me in the middle of the night because my jefes won’t appreciate that. He appeared to understand and smiled as he turned away, and Araceli got one last good look at the backside of his slacks as he left: he was husky when you looked at him from the front, but from the back he was much better proportioned, the width of his shoulders stood out, suggesting a certain musculature. He was a sensitive mexicano trapped, like her, in a too-big body.


On Sunday afternoon, some thirty-six hours after the departure of her only domestic help, Maureen found herself sitting on the floor of her walk-in closet, listening to the steady static that came from the baby monitor, and to the distant sounds of heads being smashed, flesh being pierced, and stone walls crashing to the ground. Allowing the boys the pleasures of movie-made warfare was the only way she was going to get a little time to herself, to sort through her box of family pictures and to arrange the photographs of Samantha’s first birthday in the album she had purchased months ago. Maureen did this to calm herself, and as an affirmation of the nurturing progress of her family. She took a picture of Scott holding Samantha at the party and placed it next to another that showed the baby sitting before her cake, with Brandon and Keenan on either side, helping her blow out a wick that burned atop a wax number one. The blending of features in the faces of their children was plain to see: there was Ireland in the specks of emerald in Keenan’s eyes, Maine in her daughter’s prominent jaw, and Mexico in the way Brandon’s long nose stretched. Her children blended the features of many branches of the human tree. In their faces she saw the hands of an eccentric creator, an artist who surprises his audience with the unexpected.

On the other end of the Paseo Linda Bonita home, Scott was gripping a console control with two hands, playing a football simulation of cutting-edge visual complexity. He had purchased the newest release two days earlier, thinking that he could justify the cost as a professional, tax-deductible expense, because he had designed a game or two in his day and might again. But the unadorned truth was that a bestselling game like this was beyond his talents, which had been honed in the days of “real programming.” You had to manage and inspire large groups of people to bring a game like this to market: artists, teams of technicians conducting motion studies, and brain trusts of football mavens to work out the strategy book. This game was a big Hollywood production: the credits were buried deep in the disk for true geeks like Scott to find, and ran on for several pages, as if for a David Lean epic.

A man needed to play, to feel the exhilaration and escape of sports, even if he was sitting down while doing it, so Scott returned to the task at hand: leading his team of animated San Francisco players to victory over a Pittsburgh team. The glossy realism of the animation more than made up for the lack of exertion, and as he completed a third-and-long backed up against his own goal line, Scott thought that a virtual triumph was the most ephemeral source of adrenaline out there, but it did make it easier to do the dishes afterward. Maureen expected Scott to leave the kitchen spotless, to attack the stacks of bowls and oily pans in the sink, wipe the counters, and sweep the floor. It was an absurd rule of Maureen’s that the house had to look “presentable” when Araceli walked in the door on Monday morning. Unfortunately, the disarray built rather quickly in Araceli’s absence, with dishes filling the sink and loose laundry invading the hallways and bedrooms, while children’s shoes walked midstride on the living room floor and plastic warriors massed for battle on the dining room table, surrounded by a toast-crumb snowfall.

Maureen had decided to aggressively ignore this growing disorder, and was still in the closet, retreating deeper into family nostalgia, remembering the gentle, funny, and neglected but handsome man her husband was. Back then, she had thought of his surname, Torres, as a signpost announcing her arrival at a remote, exotic village.

After all these years what had seemed like silent strength had been revealed to be a deeply rooted stoicism, a disconnectedness from people. The promise of a Latin journey seemed closer to fruition after their marriage, when her new mother-i n-l aw had graciously presented her with an album of Torres family pictures, including some bleak photographs of her father-in-law as a boy, and others of him as a cocky young man. She had framed a couple of these sturdy old images and placed them in the living room for guests to see, but they were artifacts in a historical vacuum, since in her few conversations with the old man he refused to talk much about his life in the black-and-white, Spanish-speaking past. “We had a raw deal when we were kids, but we never complained about it. And I sure as hell ain’t going to complain about it now.” The old man had dedicated his life to the erasure of the language and rituals he associated with short hoes and lettuce fields, with the transience of old Ford trucks and night arrivals at labor camps and menacing urban ghettos. The old man confused amnesia with reinvention, and thus the only trace of Mexican in her husband was that very faint brownish red she saw when he allowed himself to stand under the sun for an hour, and perhaps his Julius Caesar nose, which may or may not be Indian. Everything else about Scott was as pale and severe as the Maine winters her late mother-in-law used to talk about, though Maureen never would have dared to say such a thing out loud, to anyone, because as an American “white” woman it wasn’t her place to make such judgments.

Her journey through the albums having failed to transport her away from the messy and complicated present, Maureen put her family memories back in their shoe boxes and decided to start cleaning the house. As she picked up dirty pajamas and towels, she marveled, not for the first time, at how much work Araceli did. This home, even when you thought of it in the most abstract sense, as a place of security, order, and happiness, depended on the Mexican woman as much as it did on Maureen. Allowing Araceli to leave for two days was, Maureen realized, a way of claiming it as her own.

She was in the kitchen, holding Samantha and heating up a bottle of milk, when her oldest son entered the kitchen to ask for something to eat.

“How about a sandwich? Turkey and cheese?”

“Okay.”

“Is the movie over? Did you turn off the TV?”

“Yes,” Brandon said. “And yes.”

She looked at the dishes in the sink, remembered to scan the backyard for toys, and thought about what she would make for dinner and what she could get the boys to do this afternoon: perhaps a game of Scrabble Junior. It takes concentration to do all these things at once. Already today she had played Risk with her boys and had set them to work with aprons and paintbrushes and butcher paper. Later she would wade into her boxes of colored scrap paper and fabric strips and assemble another art project. There was an element of performance to being a good mom, but no one gave you executive bonuses for getting through the day, for keeping three kids fed, entertained, and stimulated without doing the easy thing and leaving them in front of the television. It took stamina and a certain optimistic and demanding outlook.


Maureen had the baby on her hip and was walking to the bedroom to retrieve her children and call them to an early dinner when she caught a glimpse of her husband, sitting on that boomerang-shaped chair before the mirage of a high-definition television monitor, a series of color images quick-flashing in response to the movement of his fingers. Again? What is the fascination? I am carrying the baby and he is playing. She took in his frantic fingers, and the intense look of excited concentration she could see in profile, and decided the moment presented an opportunity.

“Honey, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, giving a quarter turn in her direction without taking his eyes off the screen. “Sorry, I’m in my two-minute offense here.”

“Okaaaay. Well, I came up with a plan for the garden. Something that will save us some money in the long run. But it’s gonna require a big expense to get started.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m going to have them put in some desert plants.”

“Cool.”

“I’ll go ahead and do that, then.”

“What?”

“The desert garden.”

“But how much is it going to cost?” he said, giving a half turn in her direction while the screen behind him replayed the last running play.

“Not too much. Honest.”

“Really,” he said, and then the pull of the game caused him to turn fully to the screen.

“Honest, I promise,” she said to the back of his head.

“Cool,” he said, and Maureen thought that at any other moment she would have been angered by his failure to pay full attention to her.

“So I’ll just charge it, then,” she said.

He did not answer, but instead leaned his body forward in his chair. On the screen the animated representation of a football quarterback threw a very long pass, and through a mesmerizing miracle of technology the game’s eye followed the ball through the air and into the hands of an animated receiver, though Maureen had already turned away and was in the hallway when that very masculine corner of her home filled with a semiconductor-produced simulation of a multitude, a sizzle of voices and cheers celebrating a touchdown.