The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

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In the Torres-Thompson family, every child’s birthday was an elaborately staged celebration built around a unique theme, with la señora Maureen purchasing specially ordered napkins and paper plates, and sometimes hiring actors for various fanciful roles. She made HAPPY BIRTHDAY banners with her own art supplies; she scoured the five-and-dime stores for old scarves and suits to make into costumes, and ordered special wigs and props over the Internet. Maureen hung streamers over the doorways, and drafted Guadalupe to create big balloon flowers, while Araceli labored in the kitchen to make cookies in the shapes of witches and dinosaurs. Keenan, the younger boy and middle child, would be turning eight in two weeks, and at the moment the preparations required that Araceli mix the paste for a papier-mâché project. Araceli did not mind doing this, because she appreciated the idea of a birthday as a family event organized by women in kitchens, and celebrated by large groups of people in places open to the sun and air, as they were in the parks of her hometown on the weekends. This birthday, like all the others, would be celebrated in the Torres-Thompson family backyard, in a setting filled with la señora‘s uncomplicated and appropriately childlike decorations, most in the primary colors also favored in Mexican folk art. Araceli believed that if you had transplanted this woman to Oaxaca she would have made very fine pottery, or papel picado, or been an excellent stage manager for a theater group wandering through the suburbs of El Distrito Federal.

Araceli took the bowl of completed paste to la señora Maureen in the playroom. She found her jefa kneeling on the floor over a piece of yellow construction paper with a red pencil grasped between her fingers, wearing an artist’s smock over her brown yoga pants.

“Señora, aquí está su paste,” Araceli said.

“Thanks.” After a few seconds passed without Araceli walking away, Maureen looked up and found Araceli examining her work with that neutral expression of hers, a half stare with passive-aggressive overtones. Maureen had seen Araceli’s wide, flat face assume this inscrutable look too often to be unsettled by it, and instead she gave her maid a half shrug and quick eye-roll of ironic semi-exasperation, as if to say, Yes, here I am again, on my knees, scratching away at an art project like some preschooler. Araceli broke her trance by raising one eyebrow and nodding that she understood: it was the sort of exchange that took place several times each day between these two women, a wordless acknowledgment of shared responsibilities as exacting women in a home dominated by the disorderly exertions of two boys, a baby girl, and one man. Maureen was writing happy birthday keenan in the classic, serif-heavy font of Roman buildings and monuments. Below these letters, la señora was trying to draw what looked like a Roman helmet, a birthday theme inspired by Keenan’s recent fixation with a certain Eur opean comic strip. Maureen drew one more line with Araceli watching, and then they were both startled by the cry of a baby, seemingly just behind la señora‘s shoulder. Turning around quickly, Araceli saw a burst of red lights on the baby monitor as Maureen calmly rose to her feet and headed for the nursery.

A few moments later Maureen appeared in the hallway with Samantha, a baby girl of fifteen months with hazel eyes still moist from crying to escape from her crib. She had her mother’s milky complexion and fine hair, though the baby’s locks were a deeper chestnut. La señora held her daughter, bounced and made kissing noises until she stopped her crying, and then did something she had never done before: she handed Samantha to Araceli. In the Torres-Thompson household, this baby girl carried the aura of a sacred and delicate object, like a Japanese vase on two teetering legs. In the last few weeks, she had started to walk, entering a world of possibility and danger, stumbling across the room to her mother’s embrace with a precarious Frankenstein step. Guadalupe carried the baby for hours every day, but now that Guadalupe was gone it appeared that some of this responsibility would fall to Araceli, who wasn’t sure if she was ready or willing to help take care of a baby. In fifteen months, Araceli had disposed of several hundred soiled diapers, but she had changed Samantha herself not more than three times, and always at the behest of Guadalupe. The truth was Araceli had never been close to children; they were a mystery she had no desire to solve, especially the Torres-Thompson boys, with their screams of battle and the electric sound effects they produced with their lips and cheeks.

But a little girl was different. This one led the life any Mexican mother would want for her baby, with an astonishing variety of pinks and purples in her wardrobe of onesies, bibs, T-shirts, nightshirts, her closet in the nursery overflowing with Tinker Bell Halloween costumes and miniature sundresses, and outfits like this casual track suit of velvety ruby-colored cotton she was wearing today. In El Distrito Federal, these clothes would cost a fortune; if you could find them at all it would be in the marble-floored malls in the affluent satellite fringes where there was valet parking at the front doors and perfume piped into the air ducts. Araceli gently touched one of the lavender barrettes in Samantha’s thin strands of hair, and the baby wrapped her small hand around one of Araceli’s fingers. In an instant, Araceli found herself cooing, making infantile noises. “¡Qué linda! ¡Qué bonita la niña!” Samantha smiled at her, which was so unexpected that it made Araceli lean over and kiss the baby on the cheek. Maybe that is not something I should do.

Araceli carried the baby and walked in circles as Maureen built a small collection of papier-mâché helmets, using a bowl as a frame, until she had enough to outfit a platoon of child Romans. Her jefa left the helmets to dry and gave a stealthy peek through the playroom’s window at the backyard. Pepe was gone and the plants in the tropical garden were mourning his absence even more than Araceli. The translucent stems of the begonia ‘Ricinifolia’ were performing a deep bow in Pepe’s honor, reaching down to kiss the drying soil at their feet, while their asterisk bursts of flowers, each pale pink petal the size of Samantha’s thumbnail, were drying and withering and being plucked off by the breeze. Like flakes of ash, the paper-thin petals caught hot drafts and floated magically upward and away from the garden and the window, where two women and a baby girl stood watching.


Later that afternoon Maureen changed out of her smock and yoga pants into jeans and a loose-fitting Stanford T-shirt of Scott’s. She put on a wide-brimmed straw hat and walked purposefully back into the garage, deciding to ignore the bottles of chemicals for the moment as she retrieved a stiff pair of garden gloves and some rusty tools. Then she marched up to la petite rain forest and got a good look at the crabgrass weeds that were filling up the dry soil at the base of the calla lilies and the banana tree. These could be removed rather simply, with a hoe, and Maureen began to do so, with a rhythmic and therapeutic hacking. Hurry, hurry, before the baby starts to cry. Maureen felt a pang of guilt when she remembered Guadalupe’s departure, and she regretted not having told her sons that their babysitter would never be coming back. Samantha would forget about Guadalupe quickly, but the boys would not, because after five years she had truly become “part of the family,” a phrase that for all its triteness still meant something. Her boys deserved some sort of explanation, but the thought of giving them one squeezed Maureen’s throat into silence: how much longer could she keep up the fiction about Guadalupe’s “vacation”?

Moving more quickly, Maureen retrieved a hose from the side of the house and sent streams of water over the ribbed banana leaves: a tree like this was worth having just for the wide sweep and silhouette of the leaves. That had been the impulse of planting la petite rain forest in the first place: to hide the adobe-colored wall behind it and create the illusion that these banana trees and tropical flowers were the beginning of a jungle plain where savage tribes lived and vines swallowed the metal shells of downed airplanes. With a quick spray the stand of Mexican weeping bamboo looked healthier, though Maureen didn’t have time to rake up the dead leaves clustering at their base. With regular watering and maybe a bag of organic mulch—tropical gardens needed mulch, didn’t they?—she might get la petite rain forest looking fit and trim again in time for Keenan’s birthday.

With Araceli’s help they would make it to the day of the party without any major embarrassments. It was to be both a birthday party and the annual, informal reunion of the old crew from MindWare, the company her husband-to-be had cofounded a decade earlier in the living room of Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian, a garrulous charmer and pitchman from Glendale. Maureen had joined them eighteen months later as their first-ever “director of human resources,” which in those undisciplined and freethinking early days made her a kind of company den mother. MindWare had since been sold to people who did not wear canvas tennis shoes to work, and the twenty or so pioneers who were its core had been dispersed to the winds of entrepreneurial folly and corporate servitude. Scott came out of his shell when “the Duo of Destiny and Their Devoted Disciples” were reunited and drank too much sangria, which was another reason why Maureen went to the trouble of making each party a small exercise in perfection.

Maureen stepped back inside and found Samantha resting her cheek against Araceli’s shoulder in the living room, looking out the big picture window in a somnolent daze while beads of sweat dripped from Araceli’s forehead. She’s been holding the baby this entire time. “Thank you, Araceli,” Maureen said as she relieved her maid of Samantha’s weight.

Maureen was carrying Samantha to the playroom when a flash of green on the floor caught her eye: her husband had left a trail of cut grass on the Saltillo tiles in the living room. She followed the blades to the hallway that led to the bedrooms and his “gaming” room, and touched them with the tips of her toe-loop leather sandals. Before she could call out to Araceli, the Mexican woman had arrived with broom and dustpan, quickly corralling the stray blades into a palm-sized pile. When it came to the upkeep of the house, Maureen’s and Araceli’s minds were one. Keeping Araceli and letting Guadalupe go was the better outcome of the we’re-going-broke saga Scott had foisted upon them, though she was not entirely convinced they were indeed flirting with bankruptcy. Guadalupe and Pepe were ill-timed and too-sudden losses. But as she watched Araceli sweep up the grass from the floor, Maureen felt less alone before the enormous responsibility of home and family, and somehow stronger. You pay to have someone in your home, and if it works out, they become an extension of your eyes and your muscles, and sometimes your brain. This protected feeling stayed with her as she watched Samantha try to take a step in the playroom and listened to the distant and soothing growl of the vacuum cleaner: Araceli was busy erasing the last traces of Scott’s footsteps from the carpeted hallways.


Scott entered his sons’ bedroom and found his progeny with heads bowed and eyes fixed on tiny screens. Their fingers made muted clicks and summoned zaps and zips and tinny accordion music from the devices in their hands. He considered them for a moment, two boys transported by semiconductors into a series of challenges designed by programmers in a Kyoto high-rise. Keenan, his younger boy, with his black madman wig of uncombed and pillow-pressed hair, was opening his hazel eyes wide with manic intensity; Brandon, his older son, with the long russet rock-star hair, sat slumped with a bored half frown, as if he were waiting for someone to rescue him from his proto-addiction, which was precisely what Scott had come here to do. Maureen had told him to get them out of the house and “run them a bit,” because without Guadalupe to get them outdoors and away from their insidious, pixilated gadgets, the first week of summer had failed to add much color to their skin. “Why don’t you play football with them?” Maureen had said, and of course Scott resented being told this, because like every other good parent he lived for his children. When he grabbed a book from their library to read or when he watched them swimming in the backyard pool, the money spent on this hilltop palace felt less like money lost. That was the idea behind the home in the first place, to give their boys, and now Samantha too, a place to run and splash, with a big yard and rooms filled with books and toys of undeniably educational value, such as the seldom-used Young Explorers telescope, or the softball-sized planetarium that projected constellations onto the walls and the ceilings.

“Why is your game barking?” Scott asked his older son.

“I’m taking Max for a walk,” Brandon said.

After a few perplexed seconds, Scott remembered that his oldest son was raising virtual puppies. He walked, shampooed, and trained his dogs, and the animated animals grew on the screen during the course of an hour or two, soiling the rug and doing other dog things. We don’t own a real dog, because my wife can’t stand the mess.

“Okay, guys, that’s enough of that. Games off … please.”

Brandon quickly folded shut his game, but Keenan kept clicking. “Let me just save this one,” he said.

“Go ahead and save it, then.” Scott was a programmer and a bit of a gamer himself: he understood that his son was holding a toy that told a story, and that he could lose his place by the flipping of the off switch. Scott walked over to see precisely which gaming world his son had entered and saw the familiar figure of a plumber in overalls. “Ah, Mr. Miyamoto,” Scott said out loud. The alter ego of the game’s Japanese creator jumped from one floating platform to the next, fell to the ground, was electrocuted and then miraculously resurrected, and eventually entered passageways that led to virtual representations of forests and mountain lakes. In this palm-sized version, the game retained an old, arcade simplicity, and to Scott the programmer, the mathematics and algorithms that produced its two-dimensional graphics were palpable and nostalgia-enducing: the movement along the x- and y-axes, the logical sequences written in C++ code: insert, rotate, position.

“You’re doing pretty well,” he told his son. “But I really think you should get off now.”

“Okay,” Keenan said, and kept on playing.

Scott looked up and surveyed the books and the toys in the real space around them, the oversized volumes stacked unevenly in pine bookcases purchased in New Mexico, the plastic buckets filled with blocks and miniature cars. Here too he felt the mania of overspending, although in this room much of the excess was of his own doing. How many times had he entered a toy emporium or bookstore with modest intentions, only to leave with a German-designed junior electronics set, or a children’s encyclopedia, or an “innovative” and overpriced block game for Samantha meant to kindle her future recognition of letters and numbers? But for the gradual diminishing of their cash on hand, and the upwardly floating interest rates of credit cards and mortgages, he might now be conspiring to take them to their local high-end toy store, the Wizard’s Closet, where he had purchased toys that satisfied unfulfilled childhood desires, such as the set of miniature and historically accurate Civil War soldiers that at this moment were besieging two dinosaurs in the space underneath the bunk beds. The bookshelves were stacked with multiplication flash cards, a geography quiz set, a do-it-yourself rock polisher, and a box of classical architecture blocks. Scott’s parents had sacrificed to make his life better than theirs; they had saved and done without luxuries: but Scott spent lavishly to ensure the same result for his own children. He remembered the childhood lesson of his father’s hands, with their curling scars three decades old, earned in farm and factory work, hands the father urged the son to inspect more than once, to consider and commune with the suffering that was buried in Scott’s prehistory, unspoken and forgotten before the clean and sweat-free promise of the present and future.

“Dad, Keenan hasn’t quit his game yet,” said Brandon, who had gone back up to his bunk to pick up the book he was reading the night before.

“Keenan, turn off the game, please,” Scott said, in a faraway voice his boys might have found disturbing if they were a few years older and more attuned to adult emotions like reflection and remorse. He had felt this way, also, the night Samantha entered the world, during those three hours he spent overwhelmed by the fear that he and his wife might be tempting fate by having their third child when they were pushing forty. His God, part penny-pinching Protestant and part vengeful Catholic, would wreak a holy retribution against him and his wife for wanting too much and trying for the girl that would give their family a “perfect” balance. But Samantha had entered the world easier than her brothers, after a frantic but short labor, and was a healthy and alert child. No, the reckoning came from the most likely and obvious place: the private spreadsheet disaster of his bad investments. I thought I was being prudent. Everyone told me, “Don’t let your money get left behind, don’t let it sit—that’s stupid. Get in the game.” The absurdity that a six-figure investment in a financial instrument called a “security” could shrink so quickly and definitively into pocket change still did not compute. He worried about the two geniuses in this room, if he was about to set them on a tumultuous journey that would begin with the sale of this home and a move to less spacious quarters. Scott considered the precocious reader sitting on the top bunk, and his younger brother, who appeared to have a preternatural gift for logical challenges, judging by his swift advancement through the levels of this game, and wondered if he might soon be forced to subtract something essential from their lives.