The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,104

wearing the same clothes she had put on the night before, but even in this wrinkled and weary state, she presented a picture of hip and fashionable mexicana femininity. She wore a vintage pin-tucked blouse of caramel silk, its shimmering skin playing an odd lightgame with the copper tone of her skin and the half dozen friendship bracelets on her wrist. That blouse looked one hundred years old to Araceli and brand-new at the same time. Lucía was two weeks back from Princeton and still suffering from the cruel cultural whiplash caused by her return to Huntington Park: she had lived nine months among assorted geniuses and trust-fund children from across the United States, none of whom understood the contradictions of being a young expatriate from her own, wire-crossed corner of mexicano California. A week before finals she had split up with a young man who hailed from a moneyed Long Island suburb, in part because he had talked about coming to Huntington Park this summer, and the thought of him entering her home in his Tommy Hilfiger summer-wear was too much to bear. She imagined him reciting to her friends those Lorca poems he had memorized—¡verde que te quiero verde!—and thought, No, that won’t go over well in HP. She was still trying to figure out where she stood after a nine-month waking dream of calcified eastern tradition and unadorned American ambition. I am not the same Lucía. She was trying to figure out too how to tell her father that she had already dropped the premed classes in favor of Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, and James Baldwin. Lucía the Ivy Leaguer did not smile or laugh as easily as before, and sometimes she laughed harder and louder and with a kind of cynical meanness her friends did not recognize. Both Lucía’s father and her friends had been giving her strange looks as if to say, Is it possible you think you are better than us now? It was, therefore, a pleasure for Lucía to fall into conversation with an educated Latina from outside her Huntington Park and Princeton orbits. After just a few minutes of casual conversation, she had learned a lot about Araceli, the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, and what it was like to clean houses in Orange County.

Araceli said she wasn’t sure if she’d ever go back to school, but that she wasn’t going to be doing “esto” much longer, gesturing rather coldly in the direction of Brandon and Keenan on the trampoline. She had a little money saved up, and the “aventura” with the boys would be her last.

Lucía understood everything Araceli said, although her own castellano came out slowly and with the simple vocabulary of a much younger person—she had studied French in high school and never been formally educated in Spanish—and she often fell back to English.

“Go with what your heart tells you,” Lucía said, and then repeated the phrase in Spanish, “Haz lo que te diga tu corazón.” She gave a sidelong glance to her friends, who had drifted into semi-sleep again, their heads resting on the table. “I’m studying history and American literature. I don’t know why. Just because I like stories, I guess. My dad’s got a good story. Maybe I’ll write it someday.”

Scott had stayed up late into the night on the beach, watching the march of the constellations along the ecliptic, his dark-adjusted eyes making out the oval smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy. He had watched the flight of low-flying birds along the purple-blue twilight waters, the black featureless forms of two hel icopt ers headed southward to Mexico, and the silent, slow drift of lighted ships, and then he had fallen asleep sometime deep into the night, his head resting near the top of the sloping sand that rose from the water. He had been awakened after dawn by the simultaneous assault of the first rays of morning sun on his face and the first wave splashing the balls of his feet. He stretched out, then took a long, slow walk along the beach, listening to screaming seagulls. When he reached a tide pool he’d once visited with the boys, he held back tears at the not entirely rational thought that he might never enjoy such a life-affirming paternal moment again, until finally his rumbling stomach cured him of such melodrama and he decided to begin the long climb back to his house. He would launch a search for his wife and children, who had likely