The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,6

remembered his late mother standing in the doorway of that South Whittier home under the canopy of the olive tree, watching him earn his five dollars with her frugal eyes, and felt like a man waking up from a long drinking binge as he looked back at the white house with the ocher-tile roof that rose before him. His home had become a sun-drenched vault filled with an astonishing variety of purchased objects: the coffee table handmade by a Pasadena artist from distressed Mexican pine and several thick, bubbling panes of hand-blown glass; the wrought-iron wall grilles shipped in from Provence and the Chesterfield sofa of moss-green leather; a handcrafted crib from the Czech Republic.

We have behaved and spent very badly. Scott held on to this idea as he rolled the creaking, cooling mower into the garage, feeling a meek, half-defeated self-satisfaction. I cut the goddamn grass myself. It wasn’t rocket science. He reentered the house and his Mexican maid gave him an odd smile with some sort of secondary meaning he could not discern. This woman was more likely to ignore you when you said hello in the morning, or to turn down her lips in disapproval if you made a suggestion. Still, they were lucky to have her as their last domestic employee. Araceli was the only person in this house besides Scott who understood frugality: she never failed to save the leftovers in Tupperware; she reused the plastic bags from the supermarket and spent the day turning off lights Maureen and the children left on. Scott had never been to the deeper reaches of Mexico where Araceli hailed from, and he had only once been to his maternal homeland in the upper reaches of Maine, but he sensed they were both places that produced sober people with tiny abacuses in their heads.

A few moments later Scott had slipped out of the kitchen and looked through the sliding glass doors that led out to the backyard and felt like an idiot. He had forgotten about the garden, the so-called, misnamed “tropical” garden, which was actually a “subtropical” garden, according to the good people at the nursery who had planted the thing. For the first time Scott contemplated its verdant hollows and shadows with the eye of a workingman, a blister or two having formed on his palms thanks to his efforts on the front lawn. He remembered Pepe wading into this semi-jungle with a machete, and the crude noise of his blade striking fleshy plants, emerging with old palm fronds or withering flowers. Scott wasn’t ready to enter into that jungle today, although he would soon have to. It seemed to him it would take a village of Mexicans to keep that thing alive, a platoon of men in straw hats, wading with bare feet into the faux stream that ran through the middle of it. Pepe did it all on his own. He was a village unto himself, apparently. Scott wasn’t a village and he decided to forget about the tropical garden for the time being because it was in the backyard, after all, and who was going to notice?

2

In the Torres-Thompson family, every child’s birthday was an elaborately staged celebration built around a unique theme, with la señora Maureen purchasing specially ordered napkins and paper plates, and sometimes hiring actors for various fanciful roles. She made HAPPY BIRTHDAY banners with her own art supplies; she scoured the five-and-dime stores for old scarves and suits to make into costumes, and ordered special wigs and props over the Internet. Maureen hung streamers over the doorways, and drafted Guadalupe to create big balloon flowers, while Araceli labored in the kitchen to make cookies in the shapes of witches and dinosaurs. Keenan, the younger boy and middle child, would be turning eight in two weeks, and at the moment the preparations required that Araceli mix the paste for a papier-mâché project. Araceli did not mind doing this, because she appreciated the idea of a birthday as a family event organized by women in kitchens, and celebrated by large groups of people in places open to the sun and air, as they were in the parks of her hometown on the weekends. This birthday, like all the others, would be celebrated in the Torres-Thompson family backyard, in a setting filled with la señora‘s uncomplicated and appropriately childlike decorations, most in the primary colors also favored in Mexican folk art. Araceli believed that if you had transplanted this woman to Oaxaca she