The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,141

control.

Janet Bryson worked, sacrificed, and kept an eye on the Mexicans for her only son, an ungrateful sixteen-year-old who was beginning to talk English like a Mexican: she could hear it in the way he stretched out the vowels into a long whine in words like “really” and “guy,” and the gangster intonations with which he pronounced phrases like “so what.” “Why are you talking that way?” she would demand, but he would just shoot back that annoyed sneer that had taken over his face since he turned thirteen. Before he met Mexicans, Carter was a boy who understood they were a mother and son against the world. She had recently given him the keys to his first car and he had rewarded her by working on it in the driveway with one of the Mexicans, and then disappearing every afternoon and most evenings in that old Toyota Celica, leaving her alone in the house to think about her Mexican neighbors and to watch television, where the news was filled with Mexicans. If you looked closely, you saw them everywhere: on the edges of fires, at basketball games, in mug shots. And now in the face of that running woman, the stealer of children who, for mysterious reasons, was now walking free.

On the day that Araceli Ramírez became a national celebrity, Janet Bryson stood on the front porch of her home and called out to her son, “Carter! Where are you going?” He waved but didn’t answer. She had been planted in front of her television set for most of the day, and her obsession with the story had caused her to consume, all on her own, a family-size bag of cheese curls. It’s not good to eat that way. But what else could she do? Those boys looked like her boy, in the old grade school picture with the brown fixer stains in the hallway, Carter before hormones swelled his arms and thickened his neck. Two American boys spirited away southward into Mexico. Unprotected. She found herself actually weeping when word of their rescue had flashed on Headline News. “Thank God!” She slipped into the kitchen and made herself a late lunch, and allowed the television to fill the house with noise as she waited for whatever epilogue the news might bring. And then she had heard the announcement of the Mexican woman’s release, and the scurrilous insinuations against the American parents.

When Maureen shouted, “That’s a lie,” Janet Bryson shared her sense of motherly indignation, and felt herself instantly freed from the state of vibrating meaninglessness that seemed to settle over her mind and home during those long hours when her son was away. We should all shout like that. Janet Bryson wanted to shout at the next-door neighbor with the string of Christmas lights circling a backyard shrine, whose nighttime glow filled her bedroom 365 days a year, to shout at the unseen young Mexicans who had taught her son to whine at the end of his words. She had to do something; she had to join her shout to the shout of that American mother who had been wronged. She had to rally the troops. She returned to her computer and started writing.

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