The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,105
left for Missouri to spend a week, or perhaps a month or two in recreation and exile from their abusive paterfamilias, and perhaps he would go there to plead his case.
He was surprised to spot, halfway through his quarter-mile trek through the meadow, the familiar high silhouette of his wife’s car. For a moment he felt a sense of relief and reprieve—they had not left him after all—and then once again a sense of foreboding when he realized he would have to add an explanation for this night out on the beach to his apology for the fiasco in the living room and his absence over the past four days. She’ll think I’ve gone totally nuts. He got closer to the car and imagined his unhappy sons inside, and the daughter who would wrap her arms around him no matter what. When he reached the car, smiling despite himself, the electric-driven window lowered theatrically, revealing Maureen’s sunglasses, which she quickly lowered to study him and his surroundings with unshaded eyes.
“Where are the boys?” she asked quickly.
“What?”
Maureen had seen Scott appear on the horizon, and she too felt her apprehensions lifting, a motherly reunion just moments away. She too imagined an embrace, or several, dropping to her knees as one did when children were smaller. But no, Scott was alone.
“Where are the boys?” she insisted.
“You don’t have them?”
“I have Samantha! I left with Samantha and left you with Brandon and Keenan.”
“No, you didn’t. I wasn’t home.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t have any of the kids. I left. I thought they were all with you.”
“I left on Friday with Samantha.”
“You didn’t take the boys?”
“Obviously not!”
“Where are they?”
By dusk the Lujáns’ ample backyard was filled with a hundred people chewing pork whose succulent juices pooled at the bottoms of paper plates, and triggered memories of summer barbecues in provincial Mexican cities with gazebos and stone churches. Araceli noted that they were significantly better dressed than the summer partygoers at the Torres-Thompson residence. They were all immigrants linked to Mr. Luján by blood, marriage, and business ties, and several were compadres of Mr. Luján and his wife. Not having lost the sense of formality attached to family gatherings in their native country, the men were dressed in freshly ironed shirts tucked into jeans and polished snake-skin boots, and the women wore big jewelry and ran wet combs through their sons’ hair, and teased and pulled their daughters’ hair into buns, braids, ponytails, and little black fountains held in place with barrettes that bore butterflies and flowers. The men showed off new brass belt buckles with Mexican flags and the names of towns in Jalisco and Durango, and the women moved about in newly purchased jeans or stiff dresses whose wide linen cones resembled the style worn in U.S. movies during the Eisenhower era.
Alongside this older, largely Mexican-born and Spanish-speaking group, there was a younger circle of partygoers, speakers of English and Spanglish, teenagers and sedate twentysomethings who equated good taste with understated flair and the ironic embrace of fashions past. They wore porkpie hats and baseball caps, jeans with narrow legs, canvas tennis shoes and mauve T-shirts of high-quality cotton, and campy links of faux-gold chains. A couple were dressed in baseball jerseys as wide as capes, and the shorts and knee-high white socks that a goofy midwestern suburban dad might wear, their cottoned feet stuffed into guarache sandals, a style Lucía liked to call “retro summer gangster casual.” They were all people of understated ambitions too, most having graduated to new jobs at hardware stores and composition-writing classes at community colleges, or to long drives across the metropolis to the waiting lists and crowded parking lots of underfunded state universities.
Both groups of guests, young and old, looked at Mr. Luján and his daughter, Lucía, with varying degrees of respect and envy, because in their own way father and daughter were the most successful people they knew. The compadres entered Mr. Luján’s home and found its knight-errant furnishings tasteful and elegant, and they saw in Lucía and the famous university attached to her name a shiny specialness that made them sick to their stomachs with worry about their own progeny and how studious and dedicated those children might or might not be. Among her friends too, Lucía was the subject of awe, esteem, and suspicion, because she had gone farther away from Huntington Park than anyone else they knew, and because she had come back from this distant and wealthy place to stand