The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,22

Bellas Artes. All had been scattered to the winds of employment and migration, to jobs in restaurants in the Polanco district of Mexico City, and to American cities and towns with exotic names she had collected on a handful of envelopes and postcards: Durham, nc; Indianapolis, in; Gettysburg, pa. At moments like this, when she was alone to encounter the lonely contradictions of her American adventure, the natural thing to do was to turn on the television and forget. Instead, she threw her arm over her face and closed her eyes, embracing the exhausted darkness and the acoustic panoply it contained: a singing bird whose call was three short notes and a fourth long one that sounded like a question mark. The very distant bass of an engine, and then the much sharper and high-pitched vibrations of a car pulling into the cul-de-sac of Paseo Linda Bonita, the motor puttering to a stop, the driver setting the brake. Now the voice of a woman talking in the next home, less than five feet from her second window, which opened to the narrow space between the two properties. She heard a girl responding to the woman, and though the words were indiscernible, it was clearly a mother-and-child dialogue, a series of questions and observations perhaps, moving forward at an unrushed rhythm. Each time Araceli heard these feminine voices she remembered the room in Mexico City she’d shared with her older sister, and their whispered conversations in the post-bedtime darkness. In the dry winters they awoke to the sound of their mother sweeping away the daily film of grainy soot that settled down from the atmosphere and built up in the courtyard her family shared with five others. The broom was made of thin tree branches tied together and made a scratchy, percussive sound as it struck any surface, leading Araceli the girl to think of it as a musical instrument that produced a rhythmic song many hours in length: clean-clean, clean-clean, clean-clean. During the day, her mother, aunt, and cousins gathered on the courtyard’s concrete to sort beans, hang clothes, and tend to a bathtub-sized planter filled with herbs and roses. Araceli had run away from that home, but sometimes in a restful moment she returned to the cold skin of its cement walls, to the steel front door that popped like the top of a can when opened, and to the rough, pebble-covered floor of the courtyard outside. Araceli missed Mexico City’s unevenness, its asymmetry and its improvised spaces. She missed those women and those voices, and her mother’s observations about tomatoes and men, and the aroma of sliced onions and marinated beef in industrial pots floating about the courtyard when they gathered outside on a good-weather Sunday, a table and conversation squeezed in between parked cars.

When she woke up, some twenty minutes later, Araceli expected for an instant to see her mother, and for an instant longer she felt the faint sensation that there was a household chore for her mother she had left undone.

5

Over the years, Maureen had developed the habit of keeping her eyes lowered and focused on the driveway when she pulled her sport-utility vehicle out of the garage, so as to avoid eye contact that might draw her into chitchat with her cul-de-sac neighbors. Exchanging pleasantries would force her to remember certain unpleasant encounters. The family next door was a very even-tempered aeronautical engineer and his wife, slightly younger than Scott and Maureen, with a lone daughter who was about Keenan’s age. A single “playdate” in which Keenan accidentally ripped off the arm of one of little Anika’s treasured imitation-antique dolls and left her weeping uncontrollably had embarrassed Maureen so thoroughly, she had not knocked on their door since. The boy-girl divide was too wide, you had to keep them in separate worlds, which would be a problem when Samantha got older. Opposite the Torres-Thompsons was the Smith-Marshall family, whose two boys were about the same ages as Brandon and Keenan, but who were so thoroughly medicated for aggressive behavior and general weirdness that Maureen shuddered when she remembered stepping into their home. “Something not good is going on in that family,” she had told her husband. “The mom is in a place you get to by taking pills that come in pretty pastel colors.” In general, Maureen was put off by the undeniable superficiality of the Laguna Rancho Estates, by the plastic surgery fad that had swept through the place in the same way