The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

24




Araceli had told herself she wouldn’t look at the crowds, and as she ascended the courthouse stairs with Ruthy Bacalan, she kept her gaze fixed downward, using a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. When she raised her head for an instant, a flash of black-and-white caught her eye, a poster of an enlarged X-ray of a skull with a rod running through the middle. There was a caption that meant to explain the image, but did not: KILLED BY ILLEGALS. She looked at the protesters grouped behind and around the X-ray and saw a tired-looking woman in a nurse’s uniform holding it up, and alongside her stood a group of men and women clutching at various pieces of red-white-and-blue fabric, shouting at Araceli and shaking their fists, raising the volume because she had deigned to look at them. They carried other signs that were just words: MEXICO = DISEASE + DEATH + DESTRUCTION. They screamed “Go home!” to Araceli and also to the group of counterprotesters standing to her left, and now Araceli followed their shouts to study this other group too. Araceli recognized a few people from the gathering at the church where she had failed to give a speech, and they were all holding posters composed of a ridiculous photograph taken when she was about to be arrested for the second time. There were ten two-dimensional Aracelis bouncing on the staircase, and she thought that she should turn and raise her finger and open her mouth in silent imitation of her pose in that impromptu portrait—that would be a good joke—but she stopped herself when she remembered she was standing on the steps of a courthouse and should respect its solemn function even though the competing bands of protesters were not. A policeman took a step toward the flag people, walking down and across the wide staircase, his arms outstretched, saying, “Keep back!” She had a moment to think how unusual that was, to have a policeman protecting her, and looked to her left when she heard someone yelling her name: a young woman was swinging a Mexican flag back and forth, and Araceli caught the eagle in the coat of arms and thought her bandera seemed awfully medieval next to the Stars and Stripes on the other side. As for the United States flag, she didn’t understand why so many stripes and stars were crowded into such a small space. That flag is written in English. Both sides seemed to be held back by some invisible boundary, allowing Araceli and her attorney to advance in the wide path between them, and Araceli wondered if there was a line drawn on the steps to keep them back, like the Chinese chalk she scratched on the floor underneath the cabinets and inside the closets to keep away the ants on Paseo Linda Bonita. There were a few more students in the group of people who had come to support her, people in their twenties it seemed, their lithe frames inside bright and seductive cottons. Their expressions were wounded and aggrieved, like children who’ve been betrayed by alcoholic parents. Araceli thought they looked handsome and dignified next to the older and less lithe red-white-and-blue crowd, who all seemed to share the outrage and embittered superiority of good people who’ve been victimized by slum-born criminals.

Suddenly, the woman in the light green nurse’s uniform crossed the invisible line and rushed toward her, causing Ruthy Bacalan to scream, “Hey!”

“Tell the truth!” Janet Bryson screamed a few inches from Araceli’s face, and then she uttered the first complete sentence she had ever spoken in Spanish, a four-word phrase she had manufactured herself with the aid of an Internet translation program: “¡Diga la verdad, usted! ¡Diga la verdad, usted!”

Standing on the other side of the steps, Giovanni Lozano watched in outrage as the woman in green verbally assaulted his martyr-hero, and now he too crossed the invisible line and rushed toward Araceli, reaching out to push Janet Bryson away. A man of about forty in a bus driver’s uniform shirt rushed forward to grab Giovanni, and in seconds the two groups had merged into a single mass of vocal cords and flexing muscles on the staircase behind Araceli and her lawyer. Ruthy Bacalan grabbed Araceli by the elbow and said, “Almost there,” as they reached the top of the stairs and stepped between a grunting squad of sheriff’s deputies heading down into the crowd with batons drawn, and a moment later Araceli and Ruthy entered the still quiet of the new Laguna Niguel satellite courthouse and its concrete plaza.

Surrounded by palms and a crowd of briefcases and the men and women who carried them, the building’s faux-Mission architecture and terra-cotta tile roof suggested a resort where lawyers came to unwind. Araceli and Ruthy joined the line of barristers and passed through the center of three tall arches and headed toward a glass door, where a group of men and women with cameras formed a phalanx. They’ve come to photograph me again, Araceli thought, and she raised her head and gave them a good look at her mestiza face. But only one of the photographers stepped forward to snap her picture, with all the others looking behind her, causing her to turn to see what had caught their attention, but there was only the empty concrete plaza she had just walked through. She was vaguely disappointed and felt a brief and absurd sense of rejection. What? There’s another celebrity mexicana bigger than me? Who is she? A serial killer? She must have done something very, very bad.

Araceli swung open the last set of glass doors, and she and Ruthy Bacalan stepped into the courthouse and its icy air.


When Olivia Garza was twelve, a Kern County social worker visited her home. Young Olivia was impressed by the ability of a woman armed with mere plastic credentials to put the fear of God and the law in her father, who never again got quite as drunk or angry. In the years that followed, her mother was never again forced to visit an emergency room on a Saturday night with her children in tow, leading Olivia the young woman to conclude that she wanted to become that person—a stranger who could wield the power of reason and the law over a family in their own living room. After she went to college and joined Orange County Child Protective Services, she came to realize that there were certain mothers who had seen her in their dreams long before they had met her, because they too had been girls who watched a stranger with a clipboard step into their living room. As Olivia Garza entered Paseo Linda Bonita alone for the first time, she sensed that Maureen was one of these people—it was the peculiar air of recognition and fear about her, the sense that she was being forced to repeat a very old and demeaning family ritual.

“Is it just you?” Maureen asked as she guided Olivia toward a large, long dining room table with a platter in the center. “We made you some cupcakes. The kids decorated them.”

Maureen had been preparing for the scheduled arrival of the representative of Child Protective Services for two days, drafting everyone in the family but Samantha into the cleaning of the home, and then including Samantha in the final spreading of cupcake frosting and sprinkles, which allowed Maureen to announce to the social worker that “even our little girl helped with these.” El abuelo Torres had cut the front lawn—again—Brandon swept the path, Keenan helped clean his sister’s room, Scott finished the bathrooms, and Maureen had wandered into the succulent garden to pick the tiny explosions of milkweed and sow thistles. It was like the preparation for another birthday party, except that Araceli wasn’t around to help this time, which left Maureen more frazzled than she would have been otherwise, and the boys sulking, because they didn’t like the idea of “working,” since that was something grown-ups did. “Are we slaves now?” Brandon asked his mother, who did not hear him. If the social worker knew my mom had me sweeping, Brandon wondered, and that my hands will soon have blisters from holding that broom and that rake, would it get us all in trouble?

When Olivia Garza arrived, Brandon and Keenan greeted her in the living room with freshly combed and moist hair, and their hands in their pockets, in a loose approximation of soldiers standing at attention, until their mother told them they could go to their room to read while the adults talked in the dining room. Maureen brought coffee and sat at the table next to her husband, and Olivia felt compelled to reach over and take a cupcake. “Thank you,” she said. Looking at the couple and at the baby who was sitting on her mother’s lap with frosting on her worm-sized fingers, Olivia Garza asked, “So, how have you been doing?”

Maureen kneaded her lips and looked down at the oak table and the Guatemalan embroidered place mats that covered the freshly polished surface, and said nothing because she was trying very hard to convey her mastery over the situation, and saying just one word about how she was “feeling” would unleash her emotions and set them off to entertain this stranger. As she blinked against the tears welling in her eyes, she did not know, or intuit, that Olivia Garza had arrived at the conclusion that this family’s essential normality posed no threat to its children, and that she would soon make the final entry in the case file before formally closing it. It was a decision she’d arrived at moments earlier, in a burst of insight triggered by seeing this living room without police detectives or district attorneys for the first time. She could now feel this home and see it properly. And what she saw was a mother whose only crime was trying too hard.

“We’re okay,” Scott said finally. “Just trying to get back to normal.”

There was just one topic to cover, the most recent entry in the file, and Olivia Garza jumped straight to it. It was an allegation of domestic violence related to an open case, and she had to ask.

“So, tell me a little about what happened that night with the table. With the argument you had. The argument that set all this off.”

“How did you know about that?” Scott asked quickly.

“The woman who used to work here mentioned it last night on Spanish-language television.” Maureen’s forehead and cheeks suddenly matched the color of her daughter’s blouse. “No one told you? It was on Channel 34, but I’m pretty sure it was mentioned later on cable in English.”

“We’ve been screening calls,” Maureen said.

“I imagine it’s the table that used to occupy that spot right there,” Olivia Garza said, pointing to an empty rectangle of tiles framed by two couches.

“I fell backwards,” Maureen said.

“Because I pushed her.” Scott sensed he could not lie to this woman who carried a clipboard but wrote nothing down, and who seemed to study everything with a neutral expression. If he lied, she would know, and this would send them into new and ever more tortuous predicaments.

“We were arguing,” Maureen said. “It got out of hand.”

“Yes.”

“It’s never happened before,” Maureen continued. “We never had a fight like that before. He’s not a violent person. It’s not the way he handles things.”

“I’m a programmer.”

“He’s a gentle person. I said things. We were just stressed out over money.”

“It’s not a good situation, the money.”

In the course of fifteen minutes all the truth fell into the room. Scott began by laying out the details of their finances: how much they had purchased their home for, the cost of their two sons’ private school, how they had spent more because of certain complications in Maureen’s pregnancy, and the loss of expected income from investments that “didn’t pan out.” Maureen was struck by the blunt math of it all; Scott had told her these things in parts, but she had never understood it altogether, how complex and rooted their financial follies were. Together, she saw now, they suffered from a disease of outlook in a chronic and advanced stage, a bloated and myopic way of life.

Scott arrived, finally, at the argument over the garden and the moment he laid hands on his wife. “I just lost it. It was an instant. She was on the floor. The next morning we both left. Separately. I guess Araceli cleaned everything up.”

“I went to the desert,” Maureen said. “Alone. With my daughter.” The sound of her own contrition surprised her. No, I am conceding too much. “But Araceli shouldn’t have taken them into the city. If she had just waited a day longer.”

The social worker nodded, and for the first time scribbled something on her notepad: a sentence, a phrase, a conclusion, an “assessment.”

“You mind if I go talk to your boys, alone, for just a minute or two?”

Scott led Olivia Garza to the space Araceli had called the Room of a Thousand Wonders, where Keenan was on his bed reading a graphic novel modeled after a fictitious boy’s diary, while Brandon read a little paperback, his stomach on the floor, though he sat up straight at the sight of the social worker.

“I’ll leave you, then,” Scott said.

“Thank you.”

Olivia Garza greeted the boys and pointed at their bookcase. “So many books. You guys read all these?”

“Most of ‘em,” Brandon said.

“We had more, but Mom threw them away,” Keenan said.

“No,” Brandon said, giving his brother a hard look. “She gave them to the poor kids’ library.”

“We read a lot,” Keenan said.

“Me too,” Olivia Garza said. “When I went to college, I took some classes in reading, though they don’t call it that there. They call it literature.” The social worker mentioned some of her favorite books, including a thirteen-volume series about the fantastic misadventures of three siblings who retain their innocent spirits and optimistic outlook even as they are orphaned and wander through a cruel adult world.

“I read all those twice,” Brandon said. “They’re really funny.”

Talking to children was the hardest thing in the world to do, and the aim in these “interviews,” Olivia Garza had learned long ago, was not the soliciting of information, but rather a sounding of the waters of the subjects’ moods and fears, a passive probing of their dispositions. To her practiced eye these boys communicated both intellectual curiosity and a touch of the loneliness that was entirely common in well-off families. And perhaps a little preadolescent ennui from the older one. If they had been traumatized by the flight of their parents, and their journey into Los Angeles, it was not immediately apparent.

“What are you reading now?” she asked Brandon. He showed her the cover of the paperback and then handed it to her in the same way a teenager surrenders a pack of cigarettes to a school principal. “Wow, a classic. This is an advanced book for your age.”

“I’m a pretty good reader.”

“But do you understand everything that’s in it?”

“About eighty percent. No, ninety. When I get to a part I don’t get, I just pretend the words don’t exist.”

“Interesting.”

“That way I keep going.”

“I should learn to do that.”

“It’s like the best book I’ve ever read. It’s really real. Next to that, everything else I’ve read sounds kind of phony.”

Olivia was holding the book and leafing through it when Maureen appeared at the doorway, holding Samantha and trying too hard to project an air of motherly nonchalance.

“Is everything okay?” she said with a smile.

“Yes, yes. We were just talking about the book Brandon was reading. What page did you say you were on, Brandon?”

“Ninety-three.”

“Do you mind if I borrow this for a second? I’ll give it right back, I promise.”

Olivia Garza said goodbye to the boys and left the Room of a Thousand Wonders with Maureen.

“Is everything okay?” Maureen repeated when they reached the living room, because she sensed they were not.

The social worker held open the book to page ninety-three and gave it to her. “I’m not sure he’s quite old enough for this. And especially passages like this one.”

Maureen took the copy of The Catcher in the Rye, a book she had never read, though she knew the name of its protagonist. The social worker’s thick index finger had been resting on a page where Holden Caulfield was using the cool slang of the middle of the last century, smoking cigarettes and preparing to talk to a prostitute: “She was sort of a blonde, but you could tell she dyed her hair. She wasn’t any old bag, though.” Just a few pages later the protagonist was talking to her pimp, arguing with the man, the narrator’s voice suggesting the casualness and loose morality of an ancient American era.

“Oh, my God. Why is he even reading this? Where did he get this?”

Maureen held the book and looked at the representative of Child Protective Services, and felt the weight of a judgment that was at once holy and official. Her shame deepened when she realized that the social worker had discovered this transgression after just fifteen minutes of conversation with her son. COUNTY OF ORANGE, said the official seal on the social worker’s plastic badge: three pieces of the eponymous fruit rested in a green field that itself was nestled inside the center of a sun ablaze with a corona of dancing yellow arms, and for an instant that seal was as disturbing as those dusty old icons of Saint Patrick in her Missouri home, the ones with the snakes at his feet and flames around his head. Her eleven-year-old was consorting with pimps and prostitutes, having been transported to a seamy corner of Manhattan via the art of fiction, and he was doing so in Maureen’s very house, in her very presence. Because I am not really looking at him. I am not here in the room with him. Now the saints that looked after the Irish and the County of Orange both knew this secret.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” Maureen said, directing her words not just to the social worker but to everyone she knew. “I thought I was in control of everything. I thought I had it all under control.”

Underneath all the order and beauty around me, things are not as they should be. I’ve glossed it all over so it doesn’t look like Pike County, but underneath everything is just as frayed as that old couch in our living room, as those unpolished and splintering floors. She felt foolish for expending so much effort uselessly, and when she thought of herself puttering around this living room amid its leather, oak, and wool, she felt an empty sorrow, as if she were standing at the beginning of a dirt path that led back to the places she had run away from. “I’m so sorry.” She plopped herself down on the sofa, still carrying Samantha on her hip. She wanted to cry, but could not. Instead she sat there, defeated, and thought about how Brandon had betrayed her, and that she shouldn’t be surprised, because he was a man, after all: and then she stopped herself from thinking that, because he was eleven years old and that was absurd. This is why women go crazy. We live with men who act like boys and boys who want to be men, and we’re trapped between what we know is right and what little we can do, between what we can see and what’s invisible to us. It’s all impossible. She shook her head and mumbled the word out loud. “Impossible.”

“It’s not really that big of a deal,” Olivia Garza said, reaching into her purse and handing Maureen a tissue from the large supply she carried.

Maureen realized now that there were tears in her eyes. She wiped her face and began to speak, in a voice that was eerily steady. “We are going to change.”

“Excuse me?” Olivia Garza said.

“We’re moving. To a smaller house.”

“Maureen,” Scott said. He wanted to stop his wife before she went too far, because she always took things too far.

“We’re going to put our kids in public school. In another city.” It was a necessary sacrifice, Maureen thought. A surrender. A defeat. They would leave their Eden, and that would be a fair punishment. “If they go to public school, if we live in a smaller house, how much will we save? Twenty, thirty thousand a year? No, more. Right?”

“Yes,” Scott said. He felt defeated seeing his wife like this—fighting off tears one moment, and then telling a stranger about a new beginning the next. I am responsible for this. In a few weeks or months, when they were living at another house, she would come to the same conclusion, regret all the things she had said, and find a way to blame him for it.

“Well, that sounds all very positive to me,” Olivia Garza said. “But don’t worry. We don’t take away kids because their parents let them read Salinger.” She allowed herself a hearty, big woman’s laugh. “I really just thought you should know what he’s reading. I think it’s just the tone—that’s what he likes about it. He told me he just skips over the parts he doesn’t understand. The rebellious tone. Get ready. Puberty hits earlier these days.”

Scott led her to the door, and after what he hoped was a final handshake, the social worker pulled him close and spoke in a low, furtive voice.

“You have nothing to worry about,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m not supposed to say this, but I will: my office won’t bother you anymore. And no one else can or will. Not the sheriff or the DA. No one.”

“Really?”

She took a moment to size up Scott with her large eyes, wondering if he could be trusted with the information. “Go about your lives. But I never said it. You didn’t hear it from me.”

“We’re free and clear? Why are you are telling me?”

“You’re a smart guy, Torres,” she said, rolling the r in his surname suggestively. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

It was another mystery, like how to cut a lawn cleanly, or the rules of the stock market, and Scott wondered if he’d ever understand. For the moment, he decided he’d keep it a secret, even from Maureen.

The following morning Child Protective Services issued a two-sentence press release concerning “the events surrounding two children at a home on Paseo Linda Bonita in the Laguna Rancho Estates.” “CPS has investigated this matter,” the release said, “and has closed the case without further action.” The memo was transmitted to news agencies via the press office at the Board of Supervisors, falling into the reporters’ mail slots along with releases from other agencies announcing the unemployment figures, the number of county residents receiving public assistance, and the upcoming celebration of Orange County Weights and Measures Day. By then only a few dedicated scribes noticed or cared, and just one penned a news brief that appeared alongside the summaries of traffic accidents and robberies in the Orange County daily newspaper. The minds and eyes of the reporters on the county beat had been spirited away by another drama, playing out on four channels of the county press room’s cable television hookup. This new story involved a single missing child and had begun to unfold the previous afternoon in Stanton at about the same time Olivia Garza was leaving the Torres-Thompson home and Araceli Noemi Ramírez Hinojosa was sitting before a judge inside the Laguna Niguel satellite courthouse. The protagonists were a missing eight-year-old girl in a Hello Kitty blouse and her stepmother, an elementary school teacher, and the supporting cast included crews of divers searching the bottom of a lake. It was a case whose cruelty and gruesomeness would invite no ambiguity, uniting a city in a sense of tragedy and revulsion once the child’s body was found.

The dead girl had four siblings whose custody would soon become Olivia Garza’s concern, along with the fate of the level one caseworker who had visited the trailer park where the girl lived twice the year before to investigate several anonymous complaints. Olivia Garza fired the caseworker herself, and visited the siblings in their Foster Care homes several times. Many weeks later, after her role in that horrific case had ended, Olivia Garza remembered her pleasant visit with the Torres-Thompson boys on Paseo Linda Bonita and how she had reencountered The Catcher in the Rye again, after twenty years. She read the book on her first Saturday afternoon off and decided, belatedly, that it was probably okay for a bright eleven-year-old to read.