The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

11




I’m scared. Araceli, can you sleep with us?”

Keenan asked this with the comforter pulled up to his chin, in bed after forty-five minutes of crying and confusion Araceli would not soon forget. It seemed to Araceli that getting the boys into their room with their teeth brushed and under the covers, in her best approximation of what their mother would have done, was a Herculean task in itself, and that asking her to throw herself on the floor next to them was asking one thing too many. She needed a moment alone, to step back and think what to do next. The boys had begun to panic an hour or so after dusk, when the windows turned into black planes broadcasting images of parentless rooms. “Where’s Mommy?” “Where’s Dad?” They had peppered her with these questions and had grown increasingly insistent on receiving some answer other than “I don’t know,” “Soon,” or the Spanish “Ya mero.” Araceli told them they had to go to bed, and this had set off a round of silent tears from Brandon, and a strange, high-pitched grunt-growl from Keenan. They were going to bed with neither their mother nor their father in the home, with only the surly Mexican maid in the house, and suddenly they felt as lost as two boys separated from their parents on a busy city street. Brushing their teeth and changing into pajamas had calmed them to the point that they could wipe the tears from their faces; the nightly routines their mother had inculcated in them became, for a moment, a soothing substitute for her presence.

“Will you sleep with us, please?” Keenan repeated.

Araceli desperately wanted to return to her room, but of course that wasn’t possible: if she retired to her casita in the back she would be leaving the children alone in the house.

You shouldn’t just give in to children. You shouldn’t just give them anything they ask for.

In Araceli’s family home in Nezahualcóyotl children were obedient, quiet, and nondemanding: girls, especially, were expected to occupy quiet, scrubbed spaces that adults were free to ignore. Her own childhood equivalent to the bedtime routine in the Room of a Thousand Wonders took place in the spare room of tile floors she shared with her sister, floors both sisters had been required to mop from the age of ten onward. At bedtime the only good night was a quick look-in from their mother, a check of their obedience. They feared their mother’s disapproval and the idea that they might delay her from that final reward of her workday: the climb to the roof, where pennants of denim and polyester caught the breeze and, in their cool evening stiffness, announced, En esta casa, yo mando: In this house, I am love, a river of order and sustenance that flows steady in all seasons.

“I won’t sleep here next to you, no,” Araceli said. “But I will sleep close. Over here, in the hallway. Okay?”

“In the hallway?”

“Yes. Aquí.”

She opened the door to their room and in a few moments she had taken two comforters from one of Maureen’s closets and tossed them on the floor, along with a pillow.

“Aquí voy a dormir. Aquí voy a estar.”

“Okay.”

Araceli, for the first time in her life, bedded down in her filipina.


Araceli awoke before dawn with the children asleep, the chorus of morning birds yet to begin outside the windows, and walked through the empty house as if in a trance. There seemed to Araceli a slight chance that either Scott or Maureen had returned during the night, but each flick of a light switch revealed only a stark tableau of dust-free furniture: the comforter was still taut on the bed in the master bedroom, there were no blankets on the floor to indicate anyone had slept in Scott’s game and television room, and the kitchen showed no signs of anyone having been there since Araceli gave the last wipe to the counters as the boys prepared for bed the night before. She circled back to the master bathroom, the space Araceli most strongly associated with Maureen’s physical presence, and surveyed the objects as if one of them might tell her when la señora would return. ¿Dónde estás, mi jefa? A paddle brush resting in a wicker basket on the marble slab of the sink drew Araceli’s eye. This inelegant piece of black plastic did the daily hard work of Maureen’s morning and bedtime grooming, and a thick weave of Maureen’s russet hair had built up between the nylon bristles, and for an instant Araceli imagined the strands rising from the brush and taking form, and then Maureen herself emerging magically underneath, calming her children with her motherly exhortations.

There’s nothing I can do but wait. It occurred to Araceli, momentarily, that she had been spoiled by life with these people, that she had been conditioned to a crisis-free life, above all by Maureen’s relentless attention to daily routines, and the comfort of schedules assiduously kept. Over the last four years the two women had built many wordless understandings between them, so that, among other things, towels and dirty clothes circulated through the house as efficiently as the traffic on the empty streets of the Laguna Rancho Estates, from wet bodies to hampers to washing machines to shelves, touching the hands of both women in their circuit. Disposable diapers moved from plastic packages on store shelves to babies’ bottoms to special trash cans with deodorizers, and finally to the master trash cans in the back of the house, only briefly tainting the aroma of a country retreat that emanated from the pine and oak furniture, and from a handful of strategically placed bowls of potpourri and lavender.

Maureen was the center of gravity of this home, and with each hour her unexplained absence became harder to fathom. Why would she leave, where is she? If there were an explanation it might be easier to cope, and Araceli decided that she would call Scott and demand one: What did you do to la señora? Did you hurt her?

It was 8:30 a.m. and the boys were still asleep when Araceli marched to the refrigerator and called the second number on the list: Scott, cell. In four years of working for the Torres-Thompson family, Araceli had not once called Scott. This morning she would call him and simply demand to know why she had been left alone with two boys when since the beginning it had been made clear she was not to be a babysitter. After a night of being forced to be a mother and father to two boys, after sleeping on the floor in her clothes, Araceli was beyond politeness or deference. ¿Dónde estás? she would ask, in the familiar “tú” instead of the formal “usted,” in violation of ingrained Mexican class conventions, as if she were the boss and he were the employee, though of course the monolingual Scott would never pick up on her sassiness.

The phone rang once and moved to voice mail. She called again, with the same response.

Scott’s phone was in Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s apartment, which was on the second floor and inside one of those signal shadows that bedevil cell-phone engineers. He was sleeping, after staying up late into the night telling Charlotte about his fight with Maureen, and then falling asleep on her couch. By the time he awoke, just before noon, his phone would be dead because in the harried flight from his home he had neglected to pack the charger.

Araceli called a half dozen times in succession, the final attempt coming as Keenan came into the kitchen and demanded, “I’m hungry! I want something to eat!”

The sight of his thin eyebrows squeezed in irritation and the corners of his mouth drooping plaintively set Araceli off. A missing mother, a missing father, children expecting to be fed: it was all too much. The pots and pans, the salads and the sauces—that is my work. I am the woman who cleans. I am not the mother.

“I am not your mother!” Araceli shouted, and realized instantly her mistake, because Keenan turned and ran away, screaming, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” His shouts filled the living room and became fainter as he ran deeper into the house. Araceli chased after him, cursing herself and the situation and calling out “Keenan, Keenan” until she found him sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees on the floor of the bathroom, the one he shared with Brandon, with shower curtains depicting a coral reef teeming with tropical fish, and decorative rubber jellyfish affixed to the mirror, a tile-lined annex to the Room of a Thousand Wonders. Tears and mucus cascaded over his cheeks and lips and into his mouth. A very faint, motherly impulse to reach down and wipe his tears and clean his nose gathered in Araceli’s chest, but she resisted it. Instead, she picked up a bar of amber-colored soap and said, “Keenan, mira.”

She held the soap delicately between thumb and forefinger and drew lines on the mirror, making quick, sweeping movements to capture and hold his attention, like those clowns in Chapultepec Park who squeezed and stretched balloons into dogs and swords. In less than a minute she had produced a creature on the glass. It floated in the multidimensional space between Keenan and his reflection, ghostly and amber, and he stopped crying the moment he realized what it was.

“A dragon,” he said.

“Yes. A dragon,” Araceli said, her mouth bursting open into a rare display of happy teeth. “For you, Keenan.”

The boy wiped the tears from his face and considered the fanciful animal, which had been rendered in half flight, seemingly ready to pounce.

“That’s really tight,” he said.

“I’m going to make you pancakes,” Araceli said. “Pancakes with bananas. You like that, no? Nice?”

He nodded. After she had coaxed the boy back to the kitchen and served him chocolate milk, after she had prepared the banana pancakes and served them with generous portions of Grade AA authentic Canadian maple syrup, and after the boys had left the kitchen for the entertainments of Saturday morning television, Araceli was once again alone with the telephone list on the refrigerator.


Below Scott’s cell phone on the list of emergency numbers there was Scott, office, which she called even though it was Saturday. “We are currently closed. Our office hours are …” Next was Mother, meaning Maureen’s mother, a woman with cascading ash-colored hair who had visited this home three times since Araceli began working here, most recently in the days after Samantha was born. She was a reserved woman whose main form of communication was the lingering, considered stare, and she had rarely spoken more than a few curt words at a time to Araceli. There had been one unguarded moment, though, during the older woman’s first visit to this house, when she had encountered Araceli in the kitchen and said, “You’re lucky to have this job. You know that, right?” The house on Paseo Linda Bonita was a freshly minted masterpiece then, the virgin furniture was free of child-inflicted scratches, the walls were freshly painted, and la petite rain forest still resembled a small, transplanted corner of Brazil. “Working with my daughter and grandchildren, in this amazing house. I hope you appreciate it.” The words contained an odd patina of regret and envy: as absurd as it sounded, Maureen’s mother resented Araceli for working in this home in daily proximity to her daughter, for the perceived intimacy of their relationship. I could cook and clean too, the old woman was saying without saying it, as good as, if not better than, you, Mexican woman. I could live in the small house in the back and see my grandchildren every day, but of course my daughter won’t have me.

For Araceli to call this gringa acomplejada and ask to be rescued was a measure of the desperation of the moment.

Araceli punched in the number. “The area code for this number has changed,” said a recorded voice. ¿Cómo? She tried the number again and heard the same message, then tried it again with the new area code but this time heard three loud tones, ascending in frequency, followed by the message “The number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in use …”

¡Caramba!

Next on this list was Goldman-Arbegasts, the family that was the Torres-Thompsons’ best friends, although they had missed, for some reason, the most recent birthday party. Yes, these Goldman-Arbegasts were responsible people, the mother was a somewhat taller and more even-tempered version of Maureen, another matriarch of schedules and smartly dressed children.

“Hi, you’ve reached the Goldman-Arbegast residence,” said a woman’s voice. “We’re not here right now because we’re in Italy.”

“No, we’re in Greece!” said a boy’s voice.

“No, we’re in Paris!” interrupted the voice of a man.

“No, we’re in London!” said a second boy’s voice.

And then in chorus all four voices said, “We’re in Europe! On our dream vacation!”

Araceli put the phone back in its wall cradle and looked at the remaining two numbers on the list: they were both for the doctors who had treated Maureen during her pregnancy and delivery, and thus useless for the crisis Araceli now faced.

Who could she call now? No one immediately came to mind. She did not know the neighbors, not their names or anything about their relative trustworthiness, and it would be dangerous, she sensed, to share the secret of their isolation with strangers. She had no phone numbers for any uncles or aunts that might exist in the Torres-Thompson universe: Scott was an only child and Maureen had a sister that Araceli had never met. As the hours passed and Scott and Maureen did not return, the strangeness of her predicament only grew. Araceli sensed, for the first time, a larger malaise, the consequences of one or more hidden family traumas at work, as in the convoluted narratives of a telenovela. The woman whose hair filled the brush, whose voice kept the boys bright-eyed, eager, and well behaved, could not and should not have abandoned them. Araceli expected to hear the long-gaited slapping of Maureen’s sandals on the Saltillo tiles at any moment, but until then there was no place she could walk to where Brandon and Keenan might be welcomed as relatives or friends. Nor was the phone ringing with calls from the outside world, with compadres and acquaintances calling in to chat: in fact, the phone didn’t ring very often at all. It seemed impossible to Araceli that a family and a home could become something akin to an island surrounded by vast stretches of salt water, and that its young inhabitants and their innocent housekeeper might become castaways. The peninsulas that linked this island to a continent of annoying relatives and nosy neighbors had been quickly and definitively washed away. Araceli realized now that the daily solitude she felt in this home, the oppression of the droning appliances and the peopleless views from the picture window, was not hers alone. This American family whose home she inhabited had come to this hill above the ocean to live apart from the world. They are runaways, like me. It was an obvious truth, but one Araceli had never fully pondered before. Among Mexicans the peculiar coldness of the norteamericanos was legendary because it came to infect the many paisanos who lived among them. One heard how individualism and the cult of work swallowed up the hours of the American day, their sunsets and their springtimes, causing their family gatherings, their friendships, and their old people to disappear. But it was quite another thing to be thrust directly into an American family’s lonely drama, to find your mexicana self a player in their game of secrets and silences, their separation from one another by long stretches of freeway, by time zones and airline hubs and long-distance phone rates. And what about the absent family patriarchs? Not once had she heard Maureen speak of her father, there were no pictures of the man anywhere. Was he dead too, like Scott’s mother? And if so, why was he not mourned with photographs? Or was he simply banished from the home like the boys’ Mexican grandfather? It seemed to Araceli that el viejo Torres should have his number on the refrigerator. Why wasn’t it there?


Maureen’s room at the High Desert Radiance Spa was a two-room suite in which both rooms opened to a strand of Joshua trees, their twisted limbs arranged on a gently sloping hillside in the poses of a modern dance troupe. Just after sunrise, she stepped outside and sat in a plastic chair on the small cement patio, while Samantha slept inside the room, curled up under her favorite blanket in a fold-up crib that housekeeping put away every afternoon. The evening chill would be baked away soon, but for the moment wisps of freezer air whispered to the Joshua trees and nudged the tumbleweeds forward. Yesterday morning she and Samantha had walked the spa’s hiking trail (“difficulty: low”), following it to the opening of a scrub canyon, where Samantha climbed up a small sandstone rock shaped like the belly of a very pregnant woman. Oh, to have brought a camera to capture my little mountaineer! The hours here passed with few thoughts of shouting men or broken tables. A mother and daughter on their own had a mellow symmetry, and since arriving at this oasis Samantha had not had a single tantrum: obviously this girl needed more time alone with her mother; she relished not having to compete for attention with two older boys. Maureen herself felt replenished. There was an essence of herself that she had neglected, a part of her soul that was attached to this dry, austere, and harsh place. A California equivalent to the Missouri grasslands, to the places where her homesteader ancestors stood on the blank slate of the land. I am a woman of open spaces. The only male presence in her getaway was the kneading hands of a man named Philip, who applied oils scented with sage and chamomile to her skin, and who left only the few, forbidden centers of her body untouched. Now I know all the things I haven’t allowed myself to feel for years.

The plan had been to return home Monday morning, to face Scott again and perhaps to forgive him. Perhaps. But then the good people at the front desk had mentioned their Monday discount. She would have just enough of the emergency cash left to stay one more night and take one more session on that table.


On Saturday night, Araceli put the boys to bed with none of the drama and screaming of the night before. They had spent the afternoon in various illicit pursuits, chief among them an hour-l ong gun battle with plastic pistols that fired foam bullets, the boys laughing as the projectiles bounced harmlessly off the furniture and their bodies. Araceli had forced the boys to clean up the house, and they had simply acquiesced when she declared, “Ya es tarde, time for sleep.” Once they were in bed, she pulled back the blankets to cover them, in imitation of the mothers she had seen in movies, because she couldn’t remember her own mother doing such a thing. These boys seemed to appreciate and need the gesture, and Araceli even touched Brandon on the forehead when she noticed the tears welling in his eyes.

“Do you think Mom and Dad will ever come back, Araceli?” he asked.

“No te preocupes. Your mommy will be back soon. And Araceli is taking care of you now.” Araceli spoke these words more soothingly than any she had ever addressed to these boys, or to any other children, and she felt a sudden and unexpected welling of altruism coursing through her veins, a drug that straightened your back and made you feel taller. What else can you tell two lost boys but that you will take care of them? “Araceli will take care of you,” she repeated. “I will sleep here, on the floor, again. ¿Está bien? A little later. After I wash the dishes.”


Araceli pulled herself from the hallway floor just outside the door of the Room of a Thousand Wonders the next morning with the boys still sleeping. They were sweating inside their brightly colored pajamas, shirts and pants with superheroes imprinted on them, men of rippling muscles in various flying poses whose courage offered protection against such evil threats as temporary parental abandonment. Their wet hair was matted against their foreheads, strands clinging to beads of perspiration. Keenan was curled up in a fetal position, clutching a pillow and a stuffed lion between his arms. If I am still taking care of them tonight, I will tell them to go to bed in shorts.

She wandered through the house again, quickly peeking into the garage to see if Maureen’s or Scott’s car was there, and then to the living room and the gallery of faces inside teak and cherrywood on the bookshelves. These pictures, Araceli realized, were the only clues that could untangle this family mess. The portraits of the grandfather, el viejo Torres, called out to her most loudly, smiling wryly from the final decades of black-and-white photography, a teenager standing before a Los Angeles bungalow, his swarthy skin rendered in tones of gray and darker gray, hands on his hips and an irresistible twinkle in his eye. This relic had been here since Araceli had started working for the Torres-Thompsons, when the old man was still coming to the house regularly, before he uttered the words that caused his banishment. What did you say, viejo? And where might I find you? Araceli remembered the looks of exasperation on the faces of Maureen and Scott when they discussed el viejo Torres in the kitchen one Saturday afternoon, and snippets of conversation: “What a jerk.” “What a dinosaur.”

Probably Maureen had not yet gotten around to removing el dinosaurio from this family gallery because he was on the bottom shelf, in a lesser spot in relation to the recent school pictures of the boys with eager smiles and moussed hair, and of Maureen herself holding the newborn and slippery Samantha while sitting up with exhausted ecstasy on a hospital bed. Maureen in the delivery room was on the shelf next to a recent shot of Samantha with a red bow in her thin hair and to the bronze-toned image of a woman with pinned-up hair and a giant curtain of a dress staring back from the Victorian era, the folds in the corners of her eyes suggesting she was Maureen’s grandmother or great-grandmother. Next there was a recent shot of Maureen’s mother, taken in a pine forest, a gray-haired woman in khaki shorts and hiking books, with a faint and uncharacteristic smile. This is the woman’s shelf: there are four generations of girls from Maureen’s family here. Araceli considered too, on the second shelf from the top, the wedding pictures of Scott and Maureen, including a shot of the couple laughing and bending their bodies in an expression of the kind of uncontainable hilarity that hadn’t been seen in the Torres-Thompson household for quite some time.

Of all these people, Araceli concluded, old man Torres was the only adult still alive and likely to live in a place reachable from Paseo Linda Bonita. They hadn’t yet purged the old man from the family, not completely—he was a resilient mexicano, apparently. If their parents don’t come back, I’ll take them to this old man’s house. Araceli would have to prepare herself for the worst contingency. She had been used to thinking this way once, her naturally pessimistic outlook had served her well in her single-woman bus journey to the border, and then through the sprint, hike, and crawl into California, and in the first few harrowing and lonely weeks in the United States. Those were days of important lessons, though the subsequent four years in this household on Paseo Linda Bonita had led her to the false belief that the world might still have sanctuaries where prosperity and predictability reigned. Standing here now in front of pictures of the absent and departed members of the Torres and Thompson clans, she realized she might soon have to start thinking like an immigrant, like a desperate woman on the highway uncertain where the asphalt and the invisible trails of carbon monoxide might take her.


Scott awoke on Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s couch, following a forty-eight-hour bacchanalia of popcorn, nachos, pizza, diet soft drinks, and power beverages consumed in front of Charlotte’s flat-screen TV and game console, fighting Persian armies and completing post routes to sinewy wide receivers. Charlotte listened to his complaints about his wife, she fed him munchies he consumed compulsively and without joy, and she nestled into a spot on her vinyl couch next to him, her leg and sometimes her shoulder touching his. She tried rubbing his neck: “You have to watch out for the carpal tunnel with these game controllers.” But she wasn’t able to stir those passions that begin below a man’s waist and reach, through circuits of nerve and muscle and irrationality, to moist lips and tongue. Instead, she had set free an inner boy.

To steal a few minutes of play here and there was one thing, Scott thought: to fully indulge your inner gamer was another. These games were meant to be played by the hour, the better to appreciate their narrative mazes, the overwrought art of their virtual stages. Now, in his second morning here, Scott continued his playing tour of Charlotte’s impressive and diverse collection, chipping onto the green at Pebble Beach to the sound of the roaring surf nearby, negotiating with Don Corleone in his study, forging blades of steel in a medieval foundry, and carrying his new weapons into battle against hordes of bearded Vikings on a Scandinavian beach.


They’ll probably put them in the Foster Care. Until they can find their parents. What else are they going to do?” That was Marisela’s considered opinion, rendered by phone, and it matched Araceli’s own assessment of what would happen if she called the police. “And of course they’ll start asking you questions. The police have to ask you questions.”

“That’s not good.”

“No, not for you.”

“And the boys?” Araceli asked.

“They’ll probably put them in the police car, take them to the station, and then to Foster Care.”

“What else could they do?”

Children who spent their nights under blankets decorated with moons and stars in the Room of a Thousand Wonders should not have to spend a single night in the Foster Care. Araceli imagined communal sleeping arrangements, bullying twelve-year-old proto-psychopaths, and cold macaroni and cheese without salt. Children raised in the recirculated air and steady temperatures of the Paseo Linda Bonita would not last long in the drafty warehouses of Foster Care. She imagined the boys cuddling under unlaundered blankets, and suffering the cruel admonitions of caretakers who did not realize how special and smart they were, how they read books about history, how they had learned to identify Orion and Gemini, quartzite and silica, from the library in the Room of a Thousand Wonders. Children with the sensitive intelligence of these boys—qualities their mother did not sufficiently appreciate, because she saw only their boisterous and disorderly masculinity—should not and could not be exposed to the caprices of Foster Care.

Araceli did not want to be responsible for that loss of innocence. There was a finite amount of innocence in the world and it should be preserved: like Arctic wilderness and elephant tusks, it was a precious creation of nature. And what would the police say or do to her? Probably they would report her to the immigration agents in the blue Wind-breakers, the ICE people—it was difficult to imagine that a Mexican woman without a green card could call the police and present them with two unaccompanied and guardianless American children without herself being drawn into a web that would eventually lead to her deportation.

Perhaps she was getting ahead of herself. If by Monday morning neither Scott nor Maureen had returned, she would call Scott’s office and demand that her boss return home immediately.


Araceli was in a deep sleep on the floor in the Room of a Thousand Wonders, dreaming that she was walking through the corridors of her art school in Mexico City, which did not resemble her art school at all, but rather a factory in a desolate corner of an American city, when she was awakened by a series of screams.

“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”

She sat up, startled, and in the yellow glow of the night-l ight saw Keenan yelling at the wall next to his bed.

“Keenan, qué te pasa?”

“Mommy!”

“Keenan. ¡Despiértate! You’re having a night mirror!”

“Mommy!”

“It’s just a night mirror!” Araceli insisted, and with that Keenan stopped, turned, and searched for his Mexican caretaker. To his young eyes his room had become a small submarine in a deep ocean of darkness, a bubble of light and security in a frightening world without his mother and father. The captain of this craft was the Mexican woman with the wide face now looking up at him from the door to the hallway with startled and irritated eyes.

“What?” Keenan asked in a high, perplexed voice suddenly stripped of his fear.

“You said he’s having a what?” Brandon said from the perch of his bunk above Keenan.

“A night mirror.”

“What?”

“A night mirror,” Araceli repeated. “You know, when you see ugly things when you’re sleeping.”

After a pause to digest her faulty pronunciation, Brandon said in a scholarly voice, “No, in English we say nightmare.”

“Pues, una pesadilla entonces,” Araceli said angrily. “Nightmare,” like many other expressions with Old English origins, was a word she would never be able to wrap her tongue around, especially since it bore no resemblance to the Spanish equivalent.

“Yeah, a pesadilla is what you say in Spanish,” Brandon said diplomatically. With that he and his brother put their heads back on their pillows, and both boys thought that “night mirror” was in many ways a more apt description than “nightmare”: Keenan looked at the wall and thought of it as a reflection of his motherless room and a window into a parallel world, and within a few minutes he was asleep again, as was his brother.

Araceli listened to their boy-sized puffs become rhythmic, the quiet song of children at rest. This is the third night I am spending alone with these boys. I should be the one crying out in my sleep. I should be the one screaming for my mother. ¡Mamá, ayúdame!

Unable to fall back asleep, she decided to get up and make herself tea. She took her steaming cup of manzanilla to the silent living room, lit one of the lavender-scented candles there, and sat on the couch. Maureen never brought a match to these candles—why buy something and never use it? Araceli sipped her tea and watched the yellow flame flicker and cast long shadows throughout the room, the soft, dancing light falling upon the pictures in the Torres-Thompson gallery, coloring the faces with nostalgia and loss. Here are people related by blood, but distant from one another. Pobrecitos. The photograph of the younger version of el abuelo Torres was the one most closely related to her own experience: the urban setting was familiar, along with the mestizo smile. Had he run across the desert to reach the United States as Araceli had? Araceli had a photograph like this of her mother in Mexico City, a snapshot taken by one of those men with the big Polaroids in the Zócalo, when her mother was a young woman recently arrived from provincial Hidalgo. My mother still felt like a tourist in Mexico City then, and so does the young man in this picture—he is a young man in the first days of his Los Angeles adventure. In this picture too there was a just-arrived feeling, the brow raised in something between astonishment and self-assurance. Now something behind the young man caught her eye. Three numbers could be seen floating above his slicked-back hair, attached to a wall behind him: 232. A street address. She remembered how her mother carefully wrote dates and other information on the back of family photographs. On a hunch, she picked up the frame, turned it around, and moved the tabs that held the photograph in place and pulled it out. She found words and numbers written on the back in the elegant, masculine script of another era, the florid penmanship of a teenager educated according to the standardized rules of Mexican public education, the looping letters teachers of the Secretaría de Educación Pública had tried to force upon Araceli too, until she rebelled.

West 39th Street, L.A., Julio 1954.


On Monday morning, Araceli approached the preparation of the oatmeal with a sense of finality. After breakfast was cooked and served she would be free, because el señor Scott was sure to be at his office, the desk altar where he never missed a weekday prayer. When they finished eating, the boys went directly to the game room and within a minute or so the sound effects of steel striking steel were wafting toward the kitchen, where Araceli stood before the refrigerator, a tremor of anticipation in her hands as she picked up the telephone and began to punch in the number.

“You’ve reached Scott Torres, vice president of programming at Elysian Systems. I’m currently on the phone or away from my desk. Please leave a message or press zero to talk to the operator.”

Startled to hear another recorded voice, she pressed zero. After a single ring, an actual human voice answered, a woman.

“Elysian Systems.”

“Con Scott Torres, please. Mr. Scott Torres.”

“I’m sorry, he called in sick today.” “¿Qué?”

“Excuse me?”

“He called sick?”

“Yes,” the operator said, speaking slower now, because the person on the other end of this call was obviously English-challenged. “He called in sick.”

“¿Cómo que sick?”

Now the operator was amused by the incongruity of a woman with a thick accent and poor telephone skills calling a cutting-edge, if somewhat small, software company, and asking for a midrange executive in the same tone of voice these people probably used to order their spicy food.

“Sick, yes. Ill. Unwell. Would you like me to transfer you to his voice mail so you can leave him a message?”

“A message? Yes. Please.”

Araceli thought quickly about what she should say while Scott’s message unfurled again over the phone, her pulse racing anew.

“Señor Scott. Estoy sola con los niños. I am alone with the boys.” She stopped and seconds passed as she thought how she should elaborate on that central fact. “¡Sola! Por tres días ya. Se nos está acabando la comida. The food is gone almost. No sé qué hacer. La señora Maureen se fue. I don’t know where she is …”

A loud tone sounded on the receiver and the call went dead.


Scott Torres was not at his desk because he was recovering Monday morning in a hotel room, alone, having fled Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s apartment after two nights, his marital fidelity more or less unblemished. Thanks to the hotel minibar, he was hung over and had awakened at 8:45 in a bright, sun-drenched room with open curtains, stumbling over to the phone to report in sick to the office switchboard some ten minutes later, having forgotten, in his unsettled state, that he’d given the entire programming department, including himself, the day off for a four-day weekend. He showered, dressed, and paid the hotel bill in cash. It was time to go home and face Maureen.


After hanging up the phone, Araceli lingered by it for several minutes, because it seemed within the realm of possibility that Scott could receive her message immediately and call her back. She had already decided that she would not spend another night sleeping on the floor of El Cuarto de las Mil Maravillas. Before the day was out either she would have reached one of her patrones with the message of her plight, or she would head out for the Los Angeles address of the Torres family patriarch, the clapboard building depicted in the glossy photograph. During her first few weeks in California, Araceli had lived at a similar address, a 107 East Twenty-third Street, and she believed that if the address corresponded to the logical system one expected from an American city, a 232 West Thirty-ninth Street must not be far away. It was not within Araceli’s experience, or that of most people who had been born and raised into adulthood in Mexico, that families picked up and moved themselves and abandoned their old properties every few years, in the same way one might discard a dress that had been worn once or twice too often. Property in Mexico stood as a constant. Once in possession of a deed, and sometimes without a deed at all, a family would plant itself on a patch of topsoil and allow themselves to become as rooted as noble old oak trees, their branches of children and grandchildren a canopy blossoming over the land. Either old man Torres himself or someone related to him would certainly be living at this West Thirty-ninth Street address, just as one could find twenty to thirty people connected by blood, marriage, and poor judgment to Araceli at Monte Líbano 210 in Nezahualcóyotl and the adjoining houses.

This escape plan liberated Araceli’s mind of the mocking ticks of the clock, of her dependence on absent bosses. She had taken control of the situation.

At 10:45 a.m. she entered the gaming room and found the two boys sitting on the couch amid the ambient noise of a cheering crowd. There was a football game taking place on the flat screen in front of them, only the players were frozen in their positions, several stopped in midstride, an image that seemed unnatural precisely because the players looked so lifelike. The virtual football teams were waiting for one or both of the boys to set them in motion with controllers that had been tossed on the rug and forgotten. Having grown bored, finally, with the pleasures of computer-generated fantasy, the boys were both reading, Brandon immersed in a Bible-sized tome, Keenan with a book of brightly colored cartoons depicting the adventures of a journalist mouse, the text rendered in a crazy pasticcio of changing fonts.

“When are Mom and Dad coming home?” Brandon asked.

“Get ready,” Araceli announced, ignoring the question. “After lunch, we go to your grandfather’s house.”

“To Grandpa John’s?” Brandon asked.

“Yes.”

“Excellent!” Keenan said. They had not seen their paternal grandfather in two years, a time at the very limit of young Keenan’s pool of memories, though the old man had left a lasting impression on both of them because he was a bit of a libertine, a dispenser of large quantities of hard candy who didn’t care if a movie was rated PG-13, and who often handed over meaningful sums of cash that raised the eyebrows of their parents. The boys associated him, most strongly, with visits to a soda fountain in his neighborhood, a place where a certain dish of chocolate in excess was served. They remembered their grandfather sitting in a booth across from them, wringing his hands in delight as they devoured their dessert and turning down their offers of, “Wanna try some, Grandpa?” Brandon and Keenan packed their rolling suitcases and backpacks with extra speed, anticipating another visit to that temple of sugar, and the condominium with the expansive recreation facilities where the elder Torres lived alone in a long-dashed hope that his grandchildren might visit him and use the kidney-shaped swimming pool. They packed their bathing suits and Game Boys too, until Araceli told them to leave all toys behind and to bring more underwear instead.