The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,23
Astroturf porches had once swept through the small-town Missouri neighborhood where she had grown up. Her encounters with the remade women of the Laguna Rancho Estates made Maureen self-conscious enough about her middle-aged looks that, after having three children by natural methods (excepting the epidurals, of course), she had briefly contemplated a tummy tuck of her own. But in the end the idea of submitting the imperfections of her midriff to a surgeon’s blade put her off: she wouldn’t become one of those silicone Californians the people back home would sneer at. High-priced real estate in a new subdivision attracted the kind of people who could throw money at their insecurities, a description that Maureen would apply to herself in the occasionally candid moment. The difference was that she didn’t mind, too much, looking at the mirror and seeing a slightly older version of herself than the one in her memory, the odd silver strand in the rusty sweep of her hair, and the crow’s-feet advancing from the very slight folds in the corners of her eyes, an odd Gaelic mutation that suggested squinting in the face of a powerful Atlantic breeze. She preferred the look of distinction and experience to the scrubbed and washed-out look of one eye and cheek job too many, or the unreal orange hue produced by electric suns. I’m not any less superficial than they are. I just have a different aesthetic. I’ll take a weather-beaten chair or table with character over a brand-new but flavorless piece of furniture. Maureen wanted to age as gracefully as humanly possible in a climate where each day was a battle to defend her complexion against the dry air; she wanted to raise her children without the aid of prescriptions for psychotropic compounds, and without a game console like the one their father played with. What Maureen wanted, the only thing she could say with certainty she wanted, was to bring goodness and beauty to the life of her family.
For that reason she was headed to her local nursery to research some clever, cheap, and elegant solution to the problem of the dying rain forest in her backyard.
Through the smoky glass of the sport-utility vehicle, Araceli watched freeway destination signs pass overhead. SAN DIEGO. LOS ANGELES. NEWPORT BEACH. Being the car-trip escort to la señora Maureen used to be one of Guadalupe’s responsibilities. Other people go to work in factories. I have to squeeze into this automobile, with this woman and her children. All for that moment at the end of the week when they give me an envelope with two pictures of Benjamin Franklin and one of a man called Grant.
No one talked, but Araceli could hear Brandon and Keenan tapping away at their electronic toys in the backseat. Brandon’s hair was auburn, darker than his mother’s, though he had the same smart, wide-apart eyes that to Araceli suggested ancestors in some rough-hewn European village, like those peasants of Daumier and Millet in Araceli’s art history textbook, the largest of the handful of books in her personal library: gleaners, sowers, potato eaters. Brandon’s fingers moved over the buttons of his little machine with artistic precision and for a moment it occurred to Araceli that he might do well with piano or guitar lessons, but la señora Maureen never pushed him. Sometimes you had to push children to do things that were good for them: if she ever found a partner to share her dreams, they would raise their offspring with that piece of Mexican wisdom. Maureen had the air conditioner on high and the cold made Araceli’s nose run, and she gave a theatrically loud sniffle and feigned a cough, but her jefa didn’t seem to notice.
The idea had come to Maureen after her perusal, at a local bookstore, of various gardening guides. She had begun with a handbook or two on tropical gardens, but was quickly intimidated by their instructions for elaborate irrigation systems and complex recipes for organic fertilizers, and tips for keeping alive fragile species. The authors lectured her on keeping the air and soil humidity above seventy percent, and insisted she install various electric sensors, then teased her with shots of couples standing next to their Balinese jungle gardens, and stone paths lined with breadfruit trees and palm fronds dripping water. A tropical garden, she decided, was like a “special needs” child: you could make him bloom if you made him the center of your universe, but she had three children already, thank you