The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,197
restraint. Sunlight and breezes raced through its spaces, which seemed familiar and somehow midwestern. This house embodied the new person she wanted to become, and she felt it was a good sign that at this property, unlike all the others, the Realtor had not done a double-take when he saw the notorious Orange County family from the television news walk up to the door.
“It’s from 1919,” Scott said, reading the brochure as he climbed the stairs behind them. “The plumbing is probably not great.”
“Who cares about the plumbing?” Maureen said. We’re looking for a new beginning, she thought, and some old pipes aren’t going to stop us.
She returned to the porch and admired the street, with its wide oaks and denuded jacarandas, each standing in a pool of purple flowers. It was a version of an America that was, a Main Street USA, a Music Man. She thought, Only the streetcars are missing. This is the kind of street where the boys can ride their bikes. There were no walls separating this neighborhood from the rest of the city, and yet there were no bars on the windows either, no suggestion that the residents lived in fear. This is as it should be. Yes, the air was still and dirty here; she would miss the sea breezes living inland. She was losing the California home of her dreams—she had been chased away from it, really, but perhaps it was for the best. I paid for my ocean view with that horrendous isolation, up on that hill, in that gated and insular place.
“It’s just nineteen hundred square feet,” Scott said. “Can we squeeze in?”
“That’s the point,” Maureen said. “To make do with less.”
Scott examined the asking price, a nose more than seven figures, and more than he had paid for the house on Paseo Linda Bonita five years earlier. Now I might be paying more for less house and no ocean view. It made sense only for the supposedly excellent local public schools, and for having a home small enough to take care of without a Mexican living with them.
“What if we offer a little less than that?” Scott said to the Realtor, a man with slippery hair and ruddy skin who was just reaching the top of the stairs.
“They may take it. You’re lucky; it’s a good time to buy. The prices have sort of stabilized the last month or so.”
“Do you think the prices will start to drop?”
“No. Not a chance.”
Up on the second floor Brandon was still on his stomach, still looking out the window, a bit disappointed by the failure of this new landscape to trigger any vision or hint of adventure. And then a girl of twelve or thirteen appeared below. From his perch he watched her pass before the house, hands folded over her chest holding a book, a long black braid bouncing on the back of her neck, advancing with a slow, feminine glide over the sidewalk squares. The sight of her brought forth an unfamiliar sensation deep in his stomach. That’s a pretty girl. He quickly forgot about forest creatures and everything else on the street until the girl disappeared from his field of vision, and for the next hour he didn’t think about any of the books he was reading, about Holden Caulfield or the dragon in Eragon, and instead he secretly wished they would move to this house so that he might see that girl again and maybe even talk to her.
Maureen walked out the back door and climbed down the stairs with Samantha, and allowed her little girl to roam the fescue lawn in the backyard. There was neither a pool nor room for one. Good. Better that way. The yard was separated from the neighbors not by the high walls of the Laguna Rancho Estates, but by a picket fence not much taller than Samantha herself. Standing at the door that led from the kitchen to the backyard, Maureen could look directly into the property of another Craftsman next door. She saw a woman there in a large straw hat leaning over a row of plants with a hoe. A garden occupied much of the woman’s yard, and it was filled with emerald globes and sunflowers reaching skyward, and corn plants that would soon be man-high, each looking as stiff and sturdy as a tree.