The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

18




In thirty minutes, Maureen told Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast the entire story, beginning with the fiasco of the birthday party and the drunken ramblings of Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian and the planting of the desert garden. They were sitting in the kitchen, with Samantha’s somewhat plump, pre-toddler body squeezed into a now-stationary hand-crank rocker. Samantha was about three months and fifteen pounds past the appropriate age and size for this contraption, Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast observed, and it disturbed her, mildly, to see her old friend subject her baby to this uncharacteristic and extended moment of inattention. Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast was used to seeing Maureen in elegant control of just about any situation that presented itself, moving slowly and deliberately and in good cheer in the face of poolside scrapes and wine-glass mishaps. Stephanie admired and in many ways sought to emulate her old playgroup friend, even though, in a few, select encounters over the past few months, she’d noticed how the old, even-tempered Maureen was being slowly ground down by the demands of two growing boys and a baby girl. But never had Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast seen Maureen in the sleep-deprived and disoriented state in which she found her today, circling aimlessly about the kitchen as she spoke, and finally wiping the tears from her face as she brought the strange and accidental tale forward to the argument that ended with the broken living room coffee table, and her journey with Samantha into the desert, and her return to the spotless and empty rooms of this home.

“And that’s how we got into this mess,” Maureen said, and as she looked up through her swollen eyes at her old friend the phone rang once more. Peter Goldman picked it up after the second ring in the dining room, where he was drinking wine with Scott.

“The reporters,” Maureen said. “We’re living this media plague. They’ve made us into a story.”

“It was big on the morning shows,” said Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast, who had black hair cut man-short for the summer. She was a lean woman of forty with the no-nonsense air and taste for embroidered blouses of her Wyoming forebears.

“They called here last night, before we took the phone off the hook so we could sleep. The Today show. Scott talked to them and told them to leave us alone.”

“And then there’s the stuff in the papers. And in the blogs.”

“The blogs? I can only imagine.”

Stephanie removed three printed pages of blog posts from her purse, and held them so that Maureen could see them, a sampling of the 316 postings on the L.A. Times website as of late morning. She did this simply so Maureen would know, because that was the job of friends, to be both loyal and alert, and to bring knowledge that might be uncomfortable and unwanted but also necessary. Almost exactly half the postings expressed sympathy with Scott and Maureen: of those, half cited the clip of Maureen shouting back at the reporter in expressing their own outrage at the “liberal” and “immigrant-loving” media for refusing to believe that Brandon and Keenan had been kidnapped. These posters and their paranoid rhetoric held Maureen’s attention only momentarily. The other half, however, made various snide observations about the Torres-Thompsons and the Laguna Rancho Estates, about Maureen’s “rant” and how “spoiled” she and her husband were, and the obvious “heroism” of the Mexican woman who’d been briefly jailed for “the crime” of trying to save two children who’d been abandoned by their parents.

“Don’t take that stuff too seriously,” Stephanie said. “I just thought you should know. Maybe I shouldn’t have shown you.”

“No. I need to see this.”

“There was this one guy on the radio. KABC. Some guy from an immigrant association, talking about how Mexican women are the ‘salt of the earth,’ how they raise our children and do heroic things every day, and how Araceli is, what’s the word, ‘emblematic’ of this big ‘font of mothering’ these Latina nannies provide. I tried calling in to defend you, to say something, but—”

“A font of mothering? Araceli?”

“Yeah. It was some really overwrought expression like that.”

“Unbelievable.” Maureen scanned a few of the English postings, then stopped and returned them to her friend. “Araceli is the real mother, I guess,” she said with sarcastic resignation. “I’m just the rich parasite.”

“Ignore them. You know who you are. You’re a great mom. To three kids. And now with Guadalupe gone? All by yourself you’re raising them. None of those people know how hard you work. And who cares, frankly?”

Above all, Maureen was offended simply by the idea that distant strangers would offer their glib and automatic opinions about her home and family. They peered into her household and made a wicked sport of her, Scott, and their children, extrapolating conclusions based on a few photographs released to the public, their own prejudices about people “like her,” and the recorded moment when she chose to defend herself before the intrusive white light of the television cameras gathered on her front lawn. These faceless strangers could type insults and collectively craft the big falsehood of Araceli’s lionization, without knowing that the Mexican woman disliked Maureen’s children and frowned at them as she served them dinner, and that she had once had the gall to tell Maureen, “These boys have too many toys to keep in order. They are not organized in their brains to have this many toys.” Araceli questioned my sons’ intelligence, she sat for hours in her room playing artist with our trash, she recoiled at the sight of my baby girl’s spit-up. But now she is a Mexican Joan of Arc.

“It’s true that I left, that we left her alone in the house,” she told Stephanie finally. “But that doesn’t give her the right to take our children on some bizarre journey to the city, for God knows what purpose.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Maureen thought of the daily vigilance necessary to keep domestic order and to stay true to her values and raise children who would be good citizens and thinkers. It was all a private, selfless act, and now she was being mocked as precisely the opposite. Araceli was responsible for this chorus of snarky and misspelled voices against her.

“How could she not believe we were coming back? That doesn’t make sense to me. She doesn’t even leave a note. That woman was always off. And why take them into Los Angeles, of all places?”

“She was wrong to do that.”

“She placed them in danger.”

Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast kept silent and gave her friend a weak nod of solidarity. She sensed that Maureen would eventually add her voice to those seeking to punish Araceli, and she did not approve. I will not hold this against my friend. Here before her was a good woman in an impossible situation. She lived for her children. Her children were her art. And now the city belittled her as a bad mother. Would I act any different? If my jaw tightens in anger when my New York in-laws criticize my parenting, how would I act if an entire city were sitting in judgment? Stephanie watched as her friend bit her lip and turned to look at her sleeping baby girl.

“This rocker is too small for Samantha, isn’t it?” Maureen said finally, as if she had stepped out of a fog and found her daughter, unexpectedly. “I can’t put her in this thing anymore. She’s all squeezed into it. What was I thinking?”


In the space Araceli knew as the Room of a Thousand Wonders, Brandon and Keenan huddled with their friends, Max and Riley Goldman-Arbegast. For once they had not drifted immediately to the pleasures of interlocking plastic blocks arranged as imaginary parapets, forts, and bunkers, or the distractions of handheld electronic games. Instead, they talked about their recent adventures: the Goldman-Arbegasts’ trip to Europe, and the train journey that Brandon and Keenan had taken out of their home and into another world in the center of Los Angeles.

“We saw the Parthenon in Athens,” Max said.

“Is that where Zeus lived?” Keenan asked.

“No, that’s Mount Olympus,” Brandon corrected. Both he and Max, the older of the Goldman-Arbegast brothers, were great fans of Greek mythology.

“And then later we went to London and saw the marbles the English took from the Greeks.”

“The Greeks played with marbles?” Keenan asked.

“No. They’re these big flat pictures carved out of marble,” Max said. “And we saw the Rosetta Stone.”

“When we went to L.A., everybody spoke in Spanish, mostly,” Keenan said. “We saw el cuatro de julio.”

“I learned how to say ‘thanks’ in Italian,” Riley countered. “It’s ‘grazie.’ “

“And we saw you and Keenan on television,” Max said.

“Yeah,” Brandon said flatly. “We were on lots of TV stations.”

“Lots and lots. Like every one, I think,” Riley said.

“Were you scared when that lady kidnapped you?” Max asked, rushing in the question, as if he had been waiting to ask.

“Nah, I don’t think she kidnapped us,” Brandon said. “We were looking for our grandfather. But we got all mixed up. We saw some cool things, though.”

“We saw the Colosseum,” Riley said.

“Were there gladiators?” Keenan asked.

“Nah,” Max said. “It’s all ruins now.”

“Parts of L.A. are ruins too,” Brandon said. He began to share a few more details of his journey to Los Angeles, and his encounters with war refugees and lynch mobs, though this time with less gusto than before. He had already tried telling the story to his parents, only to be interrupted by so many of his mother’s questions that the story didn’t sound like his anymore. Why is it, he wondered later, that stories begin to turn old the first time you tell them? Why won’t a story allow itself to be told over and over?

“I think L.A. sounds cooler than Europe,” Max pronounced once Brandon had finished.

“I guess,” Brandon said. “I really wanna go to Greece, though. And Rome too.”

The four slumping boys remained sitting in a circle; the older boys felt their bodies slip into an unease, a too-bigness that hinted at their coming adolescence. Finally, Brandon noticed a book sticking out of Max’s back pocket.

“Whatcha reading?”

“It’s an old book I found on my grandpa’s bookshelf when we stopped to visit him in New York,” Max said. “He said I probably should be older to read it. Because there’s stuff in it I shouldn’t read ‘cause I’m only twelve. But then he gave it to me anyway when my mom wasn’t looking. It’s got some bad parts. Some parts that are really bad, actually.”

“What? Like murders and stuff?”

“Nah. I can’t describe it. There’s no dragons or warriors or elves like in all the other books I read before. But it’s really, really cool. And bad. There’s kids smoking in it.”

“Smoking?”

“Yeah. Cigarettes. It’s, like, the best book I’ve ever read.”

Max gave a conspiratorial scan, and then took the old paperback from his pocket and handed it to Brandon, who examined its timeworn cover, and a title whose meaning he could not immediately decipher.

“You can keep it,” Max said. “I finished it in the car.”

Brandon opened the first page and began to read. When the narrator promised to describe “what my lousy childhood was like,” Brandon was hooked.


“You know, eventually, they’re going to prosecute that poor woman because of me.” It was one of the few comments Scott had allowed himself to make about the situation, and Peter Goldman decided he would try and ignore it. “It’s either her or me. Or us, I mean. I guess we deserve to be punished more.” They were near the bottom of the bottle and had been talking baseball and football, for the most part. Having bared his guilt for a moment, Scott caught himself, took another gulp of wine, and looked up at his old friend, who seemed more amused than outraged by Scott’s situation. Here’s one person, Scott thought, who won’t sit in judgment. Scott was trying to think of something witty to say to chase away the unwanted pathos of the moment, when the phone on the dining room table before them rang again and Peter Goldman picked it up.

“No, he’s not interested,” Peter Goldman said. “That’s right. Thank you. Bye-bye, now … bye.”

“Thanks for doing that, buddy,” Scott said. “I really owe you.”

“Every good quarterback needs a good offensive line. Especially when the pass rush is as murderous as the one surrounding this household, let me tell you.” They had a camaraderie forged during five years of school meetings, birthdays, and excursions to amusement parks, a brotherhood born of their marriages to women who dragged them all over the city and erased many hours of potential sports viewing, all in the name of family obligation.

There was a knock on the door. Three evenly spaced and polite taps, followed by a pause, and three more evenly spaced but louder taps. Peter Goldman rose to his feet and said, “I’m on it.” A moment later Scott felt a shaft of warm light enter his home through the half-open door and heard the mumble of a voice from outside. After a quick back-and-forth, Peter came walking back to the table.

“It’s a guy from the district attorney’s office.”

“Not again. F*ck.”

“Should I tell him to go?”

“No. I have to talk to him.”

Scott stood up and walked to the front door and swung it open.

“Mr. Torres, we haven’t been able to get through on the phone,” said Ian Goller. He wore a light-swallowing charcoal suit and a thin red tie over a starched white shirt, and to Peter Goldman, who had never met him before, he radiated the unrealness of an actor who’d wandered off the soundstage of a Technicolor spy flick. Goller had been shot back to Pasco Linda Bonita, quickly, by the dizzying spin of the news cycle, and the clamor of a vociferous segment of the voting public inside Orange County, and an influential segment of watchers and commentators beyond the county’s borders. These voices were demanding, via various forms of digital and analog media, that Ian Goller and his colleagues in the district attorney’s office apply the “rule of law” in the case of Araceli Ramirez, alleged childnapper.

Goller had arrived at the district attorney’s office, off the beach and with his hair still wet (figuratively speaking and maybe literally too), with certain idealistic notions firmly rooted in his brain—specifically, the belief that criminal law was a scientific pursuit in which American and European traditions of jurisprudence were applied to the dispassionate weighing of facts and the protection of the public. During his ascent to the upper layers of the agency, and with his eventual admission to the walnut-paneled sanctuary of the district attorney himself, this idealism had aged and matured into a more realistic understanding of the job and its responsibilities. Above all, he had come to learn it simply wasn’t possible for a public servant to ignore public opinion—completely—when defining right and wrong. The perceptions of the people counted, their collective fears and wants, what outraged them and what did not. In this case, the law-abiding sensibilities of many an Orange County resident had been offended by the suspect’s unauthorized arrival in the United States of America. It made them skeptical and suspicious of her actions with the boys, and eager for punishment. In nonlegal terms: they would not cut her any slack. So he couldn’t either. Goller found himself more or less obliged, therefore, to dive into the unpredictable waters of a politically necessary but potentially tricky prosecution.

Once he took such a plunge, however, Goller needed to make sure he could reach the other side. In other words, he needed to make sure he didn’t lose. And for that, he needed to clean up the image and stiffen the resolve of the victims.

“Have you read the newspaper this morning?” Goller asked Scott.

“This has been a really trying time for my family,” Scott said slowly, pinching the space between his eyes, while resisting the temptation to reach across the table and serve himself another glass of wine.

“I understand. But you should see this.” Goller placed the local news section of the Orange County Register on the dining room table. The headline in question ran on the lower half of the page, incongruously below a photograph of children at a public swimming pool in Santa Ana.





CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES

TO INVESTIGATE PARENTS

IN MISSING BOYS SAGA





Goller allowed this piece of unpleasant information to settle in as Scott slumped back in his chair, pushing it away from the table as he did so, adopting a pose of aggressive nonchalance in which the sky-blue fade of his jeans stretched out into view. Peter Goldman thought that Scott looked just like his son Brandon when he did this.

“What happened to you and your sons is being twisted by certain people,” Goller said, with an expression of fatherly concern. Maybe it was the wine, or maybe just the pressure: whatever it was, Scott was having trouble paying attention.

“Scott. Can I call you Scott?”

“Sure.”

“I take it you’re a native Californian, Scott. Right?” Goller said, though he already knew the answer.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“South Whittier. St. Paul High.”

“Ah, I went to Mater Dei, in Santa Ana. And I think we’re about the same age.”

“Probably. But what does that have—”

“I want you to understand what’s happening around you,” Goller interrupted. “Let’s be blunt: there’s a lot of people taking a certain perverse pleasure in what’s happening to you.”

Scott had no answer to this statement, no observation. He wanted to say he didn’t care what people thought, he didn’t care about Araceli or the newspapers or the television. But he did.

“So why is it happening?” Scott asked with a teenager’s skeptical insolence.

“It’s because California’s changed. Because it’s not the same place it was when we were growing up.”

“It’s not?”

“No. Think of the way people respected certain things. In the past, no one would have questioned the good intentions of two good American parents like you and your wife.”

“Probably not.”

“Now they do. And why? Because you’re being accused by a woman with thousands of defenders. Fine: it’s their right to stand up for her, to say she’s being victimized by the system. But these people, they see me, and you, as their enemy. It’s totally whacked that they think that way, but that’s how it is. And now they see in this case a chance to make all of us look silly.”

“I really don’t mind looking silly,” Scott said, without completely meaning it. He was confused by the direction Goller had taken their conversation.

“Well, it’s more than looking silly, isn’t it?” Goller continued. “Really, these people want to humiliate you, so that they can make the Mexican woman the hero. And why? For an idea.” Goller was going to go abstract, and back in time, because he had learned that Scott was a programmer, and sensed the man needed to see a robust architecture of ideas before he took any action. An outline for this talk had come to Goller as he drove to the Laguna Rancho Estates, through undeveloped marshes and hill country, past towering eucalyptus trees and the bare breasts of yellow hills. In general, being a DA in his hometown was a daily assault on Goller’s childhood memories, but this place by the sea, with its open vistas and untainted, orderly neighborhoods, transported him back in time, to his Orange County youth of puka shells and Op summer shirts. Certain things were clearer to him when he came here, and now he would explain these essential truths to Scott, show him the larger picture.

“Think of this moment we’re living in, this craziness, from the perspective of history. California history,” Goller began. “We grew up in the same kind of places, really. Me in Fullerton, and you in Whittier.” Their homes had been parked on the same plain of scattered orchards and cow patches southeast of Los Angeles, and they had gone to schools that were big rivals back when there were “still enough big German and American kids around to make up a good football team.” California was a paradise of open land and sea breezes, the sliver of Eden between the desert and the sea. This was the California of Scott’s and Ian Goller’s birth, a place of quiet, neat settlements separated by the geometry of melons and cabbages growing in fields, by the repetition of citrus groves, the scent of orange trees blooming. “That beautiful place was our playground. It was a place where anything was possible, where the open spaces matched how we felt about ourselves. How we saw the future.” This paradise was gone, Goller said; the orchards had been plowed over to make room for new neighborhoods, rows of houses that became more ramshackle, more faded from one decade to the next. In the years since he’d been a DA, Ian Goller had been forced to see the decay of his hometown up close. There were too many people here now, a crush of bodies on the sidewalks and too many cars on the highways, people crowded into houses and apartment buildings in Santa Ana, in Anaheim, cities that used to be good places to live. The landmarks of Scott’s youth, the burger stands and the diners, were now covered with the grimy stains of time and something else, an alien presence. There was more trash on the streets than ever. Who threw trash on the streets when Scott and Ian were boys? No one. Everything had been corrupted and despoiled. But most people simply didn’t care. They allowed these multitudes to fill the state. Outsiders, most of them uneducated, people without prospects in their own country. And when those multitudes produced, with a kind of mathematical inevitability, the inmates that filled the jails and prisons, too many Californians averted their eyes and pretended it wasn’t happening. Worse, the defenders of these people twisted everything, and demonized American families like Scott’s for having the good sense to live behind the gates that protected them from the criminal anarchy outside. These people were now cheering the idea that his family would be investigated.

Scott had been looking at the oak surface of the table, and at times directly into the eyes of Ian Goller as he spoke, and had failed to notice that at some point in Goller’s talk Maureen had entered the room with Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast, who was holding a sleeping Samantha. They had been drawn in by the sound of the stranger’s voice, with Maureen at first amused by the incongruity of Goller’s black suit on a hot July day, and by the way he slipped into a geeky trance as he spoke. His motives soon became perfectly clear to Maureen, and in another set of circumstances she would have asked him to leave. I don’t like to hear that meanness, that intolerance, she might have said. But these were not normal times, and she found herself a bit taken in by the emotional pull of his argument. I don’t really understand anything anymore. I am surrounded by mysteries and apparitions: like the presence of this man in black. This man is telling me what to feel as much as he’s telling me what to think. It was not the immigrants she thought of as alien, as much as the L.A. reporters who had parked themselves on her lawn, and who now staked out the front gate to the Estates. They were a disorderly and insistent clan of microphone men and women, of camera-holders and question-shouters, and they reminded her of the City of Los Angeles proper, and her first days in the metropolis. She had come to California expecting something altogether different than what she had first encountered, as a single woman in her twenties in an L.A. neighborhood called Mid-City, an ugly place of wide thoroughfares and gray liquor stores and bunkered apartment buildings with underground garages that were rape traps. She carried Mace in her purse back then, and put a steel lock over the steering wheel of her parked, single-girl Honda Civic with its Show-Me State license plates. Quickly she had found a way to escape southward. That’s why I’m living here, on this hillside overlooking the ocean, instead of in some condo off La Cienega, or in Brentwood. Here I have found a purer version of California.

“There are people who believe that this change in our hometown is a natural and inevitable thing,” Goller continued. He watched as Maureen stepped forward and picked up the newspaper on the table, and saw the indignation that filled her eyes when she saw the headline. “It’s in their interest to treat this Mexican woman as the victim, and you as her victimizers. And that’s the way everyone will see it, unless you tell them differently.”

Maureen looked at him with equal measures of skepticism and curiosity. He was a strange, elegant little man; it was not every day you met someone who could make a harsh and angry line of argument sound gentle and reasonable. “I don’t quite get what you’re telling us,” Maureen said. “We’re supposed to start talking about immigration and the undocumented, or the illegals, or whatever, and that’s going to get the media off our backs? Isn’t that just going to get us deeper in a mess?”

“No. You don’t talk about those things. Definitely not. Your part is very simple. You just tell your story to someone with a sympathetic ear. You tell them your story, and you erase the idea that you’re just this crazy family.” He had them now, Scott especially: he was daydream-listening, processing truths. “There’s a reporter I know. He’s actually the local guy for one of the cable news networks. He’ll guide you through an interview, I believe, without compromising you on anything.”

Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast watched Maureen take a piece of paper with two phone numbers from Goller and give the faintest nod of assent. No, Maureen, don’t. In a short while, Stephanie would politely round up her husband and children and they would leave, and not return. Maureen was going to link her fate to the kidnapping story circulating among the nativists and rightists on talk radio, when instead she should be telling the story of the broken coffee table. That’s how Stephanie saw things. People would understand a woman’s desire to escape an angry husband. But Maureen had too much pride to do such a thing. Maureen wanted, with the stoic resolve of a British monarch, to protect the family image: she did not want the world to think of her sprawled helpless on her back.

For a moment, Stephanie felt more connected to the Mexican woman who had worked in this house, the hardworking oddball and perfectionist who had been Maureen’s shadow since Stephanie had first come for a playdate. The sad thing is that Araceli and Maureen are really so much alike.

Goller shook everyone’s hand and left. Stephanie followed her husband to the window, where he studied Goller walking down the path and to his car.

“He’s got a surfboard on top of his car,” Peter Goldman said, laughing at the incongruity as Stephanie looked at his parked BMW and saw it was true. “Look, he’s starting to take off his jacket. He’s like Batman or something.”

About a mile down the coast, there was a surf break called Cotton’s that was one of the best-kept secrets on the coast this summer. A little slice of Orange County goodness, known only to the locals, a place where, after a terrain-shifting winter storm, long walls of water now moved left over sand and rocks, large and steady at middle tide. Ian Goller thought that he might, with a little luck, have it to himself late on a quiet weekday afternoon like this one.