The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,98
and south and back again.
“Which way do we go?” Keenan said.
“Tengo que preguntar,” Araceli said, but there was no one around to ask, and they began to walk down the sidewalk, past parking meters and empty diagonal parking spaces, underneath the fluted tower of a shuttered Deco movie palace, Keenan craning his head to admire the melting green skin of a nonfunctioning bronze clock affixed to the top. After half a block, they found one store with an open door and lights on behind the display windows.
“Not open,” said the Korean woman inside. She was kneeling on the floor with a clipboard, surrounded by boxes and racks of rayon blouses. “Cerrado.”
“I am not looking for clothes,” Araceli said. “I am looking for a street.” She showed the woman a slip of paper with the address Marisela had given her.
Myung Lee rose to her feet, took the address, and then sized up the child-accompanied woman who had given it to her. In the four months since opening her business, every day seemed to bring another oddity, another riddle, like this Mexican woman and her handsome children. Myung Lee was a native of Seoul, single, thirty-eight years old, and fluent in the language of local fashions: rayon with tropical flowers and leopard prints and bold décolletages, free-flowing polyesters to drape over bodies of any shape or size. “Maybe I know this street,” she said. Geography was easy: what she didn’t understand was the stealthy methodology of the shoplifters, or the pricing logic of the wholesalers in the garment-factory district, or why her uncle would lend her $40,000 to open a business, while expecting her to fail. This Fourth of July morning brought more lonely hours of inventory, and more obsessive daydreaming about her uncle and his haughty California millionaire confidence and his thin teenage daughter with her size-two dresses and their mansion in that Asian Beverly Hills called Bradbury. The longer Myung remembered her debt to her skeptical samchon, the more she hated rayon and tropical flowers and leopard patterns. Oddly, however, she still liked being in the presence of American women, or Mexican women, or whatever most of her clients were, and as she moved to the door to show Araceli which way to go, she felt the irritation on her face slipping into the pleasantness that was always good retail practice.
“This is over there,” Myung Lee said, pointing to the east. “Not far. Two blocks.” She placed a hand on Keenan’s shoulder and said, “Your boys are very nice,” leaving Araceli too stunned to offer any clarification. Their father must be very fair, Myung Lee thought, and she imagined this missing white partner as the strangers walked away down Pacific Boulevard. I am a single woman, yes, but I haven’t allowed a man to leave me with two boys to feed and clothe. No.
“She thought you were our mother,” Keenan said. “That was weird.”
“Estaba muy confundida,” Araceli said, and they headed away from empty Pacific Boulevard into a neighborhood of houses with sandpaper skins painted blue-violet and carnation-pink, with little patches of stiff crabgrass enclosed behind painted brick pillars and iron bars welded in feather and fan patterns. A canopy of intersecting utility wires drew Brandon’s eye upward again, while Keenan looked across the street and saw a man leaning against a fence with his hips thrust out in the style of Latin American campesinos, a pose that reminded Keenan of the handful of childhood photographs he’d seen of his grandfather. “Maybe this is where Grandpa John lives,” Keenan said.
“I guess,” Brandon said. “It’s not as poor as Los Angeles.”
They advanced two blocks more and the street name still did not materialize on any of the signs, and Araceli stopped again, and the rolling wheels of the suitcases ceased their noise, and for a moment she and her charges stood in an unexpectedly deep silence. The thoroughfares and the freeways that surrounded the neighborhood were empty in those first hours of a holiday morning, no trucks or forklifts were at work in the nearby industrial districts, and in the absence of the usual noise there was a natural stillness that seemed somehow unnatural. Every Huntington Park resident who was up and about that morning noticed the quiet too; it hit them first through the windows left open on a summer night, and later when they stepped outside. They heard the calls of the birds for the first time in months, the keek-keek of highflying, black-necked stilts heading for the nearby