The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,30

we’ll see Fanny, though I hope not. Fanny is a mess.”

Araceli said nothing and for a moment they watched Brandon chase Keenan over a bridge of plastic slats, until Brandon lost his footing and fell over the edge, headfirst onto the black mat below. Keenan laughed as his brother climbed up and rubbed his head, unhurt.

“Niños traviesos,” María Isabel said with a tone of mild exasperation that she intended as a gesture of sympathy with Araceli. “But I’d rather take care of children. If you’ve got a girl, it isn’t any work at all. A boy is a little more work, but I’ll take even three boys over an old lady. That was my last job, taking care of a viejita on her deathbed.”

“Really?” Araceli said, unable to mask her complete lack of interest.

María Isabel lauched into a story about la señora Bloom “wrestling with death” and “trying to keep him from taking my old lady away.” Araceli was going to speak up and say, I really don’t want to hear this story, but at that instant María Isabel shifted her gaze to an object or person behind Araceli and began to wave.

“Juana! ¡Aquí estoy! Over here.”

Within a few minutes Araceli was sitting in a circle of Spanish chatter, with three more women greeting Araceli with smiles and holas and polite kisses on the cheek.

“You’re taking care of Guadalupe’s kids,” said Carmelita, a stubby-legged woman from Peru. “Those are good boys. She loved them.”

“This is one of the nicer parks around here,” said Juana, who had oily, uneven bangs, and the coffee-colored skin of her ancestors in the mountains of Veracruz. “They clean it every night. And the police patrol past here, so you hardly ever see any vagrants.”

As the women gathered in the play area, Araceli had a fleeting sense of nostalgia for the company of colleagues, the banter of coworkers, the space that Guadalupe and Pepe had filled in her life. The women told her about their families and the American homes they worked and lived in, while simultaneously keeping an eye on their charges, who were swarming over the play structure and filling the air around it with the squeals their parents called “outside voices.” Carmelita sat on the mat a few feet from Araceli and allowed the boy in her care to stand in his leather shoes and overalls, walk toward her, and then fall into her embrace. Modesta, a freckled and green-eyed mexicana, raised a finger at a girl climbing the roof of the structure’s plastic cube, and the girl immediately clambered down to safety. They were all parents themselves (and María Isabel a grandparent), and their motherly self-assurance fell over and calmed the children around them like a rain of warm milk. Once they’d finished greeting Araceli, their conversation drifted, as it often did, to the practical problems of child-rearing.

“This is a good place to practice walking. If he falls, he can’t hurt himself.”

“If you don’t let them fall, they don’t learn to walk.”

“I remember when Kylie was that age. Es una edad de peligros: they fall as much as they talk. She still has that scar on her forehead, underneath her hair.”

“I finally got Jackson to eat the squash, after I tried that recipe with the food machine. Un milagro. But it didn’t work with his sister.”

“Each one is different. God makes them that way.”

Araceli watched and listened, saw the children on the play structure casting glances at their paid caregivers, and the caregivers looking back as if to say, You are okay, I am here. They knew that each child was his or her own shifting landscape because the estrogen that ran through their veins, and their own histories as mothers, allowed them to see these things: Araceli sensed that North American employers and Latin American relatives alike revered them for this power. They all seem to possess it—and to know that I do not.

After a while their attention returned to Araceli, the quiet, awkward woman in their midst, and the small mystery and break in the park routine she represented. What, they now asked directly, had happened to Guadalupe?

“I guess they didn’t have enough money to pay her what she wanted,” Araceli told them. “Or to keep her.”

“Or she didn’t want to stay,” María Isabel said knowingly.

“No sé.”

“Yes, I remember her saying something about the money,” María Isabel said. “First they asked her to work for less. Then her patrón said they were going to need just one person to cook