The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,142

the strange and accidental tale forward to the argument that ended with the broken living room coffee table, and her journey with Samantha into the desert, and her return to the spotless and empty rooms of this home.

“And that’s how we got into this mess,” Maureen said, and as she looked up through her swollen eyes at her old friend the phone rang once more. Peter Goldman picked it up after the second ring in the dining room, where he was drinking wine with Scott.

“The reporters,” Maureen said. “We’re living this media plague. They’ve made us into a story.”

“It was big on the morning shows,” said Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast, who had black hair cut man-short for the summer. She was a lean woman of forty with the no-nonsense air and taste for embroidered blouses of her Wyoming forebears.

“They called here last night, before we took the phone off the hook so we could sleep. The Today show. Scott talked to them and told them to leave us alone.”

“And then there’s the stuff in the papers. And in the blogs.”

“The blogs? I can only imagine.”

Stephanie removed three printed pages of blog posts from her purse, and held them so that Maureen could see them, a sampling of the 316 postings on the L.A. Times website as of late morning. She did this simply so Maureen would know, because that was the job of friends, to be both loyal and alert, and to bring knowledge that might be uncomfortable and unwanted but also necessary. Almost exactly half the postings expressed sympathy with Scott and Maureen: of those, half cited the clip of Maureen shouting back at the reporter in expressing their own outrage at the “liberal” and “immigrant-loving” media for refusing to believe that Brandon and Keenan had been kidnapped. These posters and their paranoid rhetoric held Maureen’s attention only momentarily. The other half, however, made various snide observations about the Torres-Thompsons and the Laguna Rancho Estates, about Maureen’s “rant” and how “spoiled” she and her husband were, and the obvious “heroism” of the Mexican woman who’d been briefly jailed for “the crime” of trying to save two children who’d been abandoned by their parents.

“Don’t take that stuff too seriously,” Stephanie said. “I just thought you should know. Maybe I shouldn’t have shown you.”

“No. I need to see this.”

“There was this one guy on the radio. KABC. Some guy from an immigrant association, talking about how Mexican women are the ‘salt of the earth,’ how they raise our children and do heroic things every day, and how Araceli is, what’s the word, ‘emblematic’ of this big ‘font of mothering’ these Latina nannies provide. I tried calling in to defend you, to say something, but—”

“A font of mothering? Araceli?”

“Yeah. It was some really overwrought expression like that.”

“Unbelievable.” Maureen scanned a few of the English postings, then stopped and returned them to her friend. “Araceli is the real mother, I guess,” she said with sarcastic resignation. “I’m just the rich parasite.”

“Ignore them. You know who you are. You’re a great mom. To three kids. And now with Guadalupe gone? All by yourself you’re raising them. None of those people know how hard you work. And who cares, frankly?”

Above all, Maureen was offended simply by the idea that distant strangers would offer their glib and automatic opinions about her home and family. They peered into her household and made a wicked sport of her, Scott, and their children, extrapolating conclusions based on a few photographs released to the public, their own prejudices about people “like her,” and the recorded moment when she chose to defend herself before the intrusive white light of the television cameras gathered on her front lawn. These faceless strangers could type insults and collectively craft the big falsehood of Araceli’s lionization, without knowing that the Mexican woman disliked Maureen’s children and frowned at them as she served them dinner, and that she had once had the gall to tell Maureen, “These boys have too many toys to keep in order. They are not organized in their brains to have this many toys.” Araceli questioned my sons’ intelligence, she sat for hours in her room playing artist with our trash, she recoiled at the sight of my baby girl’s spit-up. But now she is a Mexican Joan of Arc.

“It’s true that I left, that we left her alone in the house,” she told Stephanie finally. “But that doesn’t give her the right to take our children on some bizarre journey to the city,