The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,25

of dread. She didn’t like walking between these armored plants, every one of which was designed to inflict injury, and she didn’t like the anxious and impatient look on the face of her patrona. Maureen was pulling at the crescents of her hair again, biting the ends.

“Well, we’ll be in touch, then,” Maureen said to the nursery manager. After looking absentmindedly at the collection of small succulents arranged haphazardly on the table before her, she turned to Araceli and announced, “Let’s go to the mall.”

6

The park consisted of a rubber mat and the requisite slides and swings, resting at the bottom of a slope of irrigated fescue overlooking the beach and the ocean. Midmorning dew covered the grass and the park was deserted, a fact that Araceli found disappointing somehow. She expected crowds, children running, the smoke of barbecues drifting skyward, but here the only movement was from the empty swings being tapped forward by the invisible hand of the ocean breeze, their plastic seats garnished with mist. In the distance, the roar of the surf, and sometimes the whine or purr of a car gliding down the street that curved around the park. The overcast was a whitish gray roof, as it was most summer mornings before the sun came to burn off everything to blue. The tableau was quiet, oceanic, meditation-inducing, but for the sound of Maureen berating her two sons inside their idling car.

Thirty minutes earlier, alerted by a series of screams and shouts, Maureen had discovered her two sons gripped in a pretzel headlock on the living room floor underneath the bookcases with their picture frames and two glass vases from Andalusia that rattled when, in their wrestling, Keenan had managed to push his brother backward into the furniture. “You’re going to break something!” Maureen had shouted, referring simultaneously to their bodies and the objects in her bookcase. They grunted and yelped and Maureen had struggled to separate them as Keenan tried to dig his teeth into his older brother’s wrist, while Brandon screamed “Get off me” and tried to free himself with a kick. I order them off the television an hour ago, and without the pacifying power of that screen, they are trying to draw blood. There was no play in this, they were like two drunks on the sawdust-covered floor of a bar. Once or twice a week this happened, a testosterone brawl born suddenly from a moment of peaceful brotherly play. Maureen believed a mother had to eradicate the disease of Y-chromosome violence during childhood, lest her family one day be consumed by the gunplay horrors broadcast on the television news. She had decided to whisk them out of the house, into the punishment of open space and an afternoon spent with Araceli as their caretaker.

Inside the car, with Keenan still in tears and Brandon glaring defiantly out the window, Maureen launched into a familiar monologue of threats that revolved around the loss of “privileges.” “Boys!” she said by way of conclusion. “Sometimes I wish I could just leave you with your father and take Samantha and just go. Go someplace far away.” Then, turning to face the boys directly, she said, “I wish I could just leave you with your father!” It was an unforgivably mean thing to say and Maureen would regret it later, after she had driven off with Samantha and seen the defiant expression of proto-adolescent withdrawal on Brandon’s face, a narrowing of the eyes that suggested a future rebellion with sweaty and disheveled male textures. But in her frustration Maureen told herself she didn’t care, because there was only so much boy craziness a woman could put up with.

“Listen to Araceli,” Maureen told her sons after opening the door and lining them up on the sidewalk next to their housekeeper. “She’s in charge. And if I hear from her that you didn’t behave, you’re going to lose your Game Boy privileges for the rest of the summer.” Turning to Araceli, she announced, “I’ll be back about one.” Araceli was standing with her arms folded across her chest, dressed from head to toe in a pink filipina, looking back at her jefa with bemused irritation. Maureen thought briefly that perhaps this was not such a good idea, suddenly leaving her boys at a park with this ill-tempered Mexican woman of un-proven child-rearing skills. Araceli was allergic to her boys; she would just as well limit her contact with them to making their meals and picking up their scattered