by Héctor Tobar
It was a short walk across the living room to a second picture window, this one looking out to the backyard tropical garden, which was suffering a subtle degradation that was, in its own way, more advanced than the overgrowth of the front lawn had been. They had planted this garden not long after moving in five years earlier, to fill up the empty quarter acre at the rear of their property, and until now it glistened and shimmered like a single dark and moist organism, cooling the air that rushed through it. With the flip of a switch, a foot-wide creek ran through the garden, its waters collecting in a small pond behind the banana tree. Now the leaves of that banana tree were cracking and the nearby ferns were turning golden. Not long after Scott dropped the little bomb about Pepe, Maureen had made a halfhearted attempt at weeding “la petite rain forest,” as she and Scott called it, making an initial foray into the section of the garage where she had seen Pepe store some chemicals. She had no green thumb but guessed that keeping a tropical garden alive in this dry climate took some sort of petrochemical intervention: pest and weed control, fertilizers. Unfortunately, she had been frightened off by the bottles and their warning labels: Maureen had stopped breast-feeding only a few weeks earlier and was not yet ready to surrender the purity of body and mind that breast-feeding engendered. If she hadn’t yet given in to the temptation of a shot of tequila—though she suspected she soon would—why was she going to open a bottle marked with a skull and crossbones and the even more ominous corporate logo of a major oil company?
A downpour of dust and dirt was killing their patch of rain forest; she would have to step in and care for it or it would wither up in the dry air, and as she thought this she felt a pang of anxiousness, a very brief shortness of breath. It isn’t just the garden and the lawn, is it? Maureen Thompson had spent her teens and her twenties shedding herself of certain memories forged in a very ordinary Missouri street lined with shady sugar maple trees, where the leaves turned in October and it snowed a few days every winter, and the weather aged the things people left on their porches and no one seemed to care. Those days seemed distant now: they fit into two boxes at the bottom of one of her closets, outnumbered by many other boxes filled with the mementos of her arrival in California and life with Scott. Here on their hillside, on this street called Paseo Linda Bonita, one day followed the next with a comfortable and predictable rhythm: meals were cooked, children were dressed in the morning and put to bed at night, and in between the flaming sun set over the Pacific in a daily and almost ridiculously overwrought display of nature’s grandeur. All was well in her universe and then suddenly, and often without any discernible reason, she felt this vague but penetrating sense of impending darkness and loss. Most often it happened when her two boys were away at school, when she stood in their bedroom and sensed an absence that could, from one moment to the next, grow permanent; or when she stood naked in the bathroom, her wet hair in a towel, and she caught a glimpse of her body in the mirror, and sensed its vulnerability, her mortality, and wondered if she had asked too much of it by bringing three children into the world.
But no, now it passed. She returned to the living room and the picture window, where the drama on the front lawn had reached a kind of conclusion and the King of the Twenty-first Century was sweeping up the grass on the walkway.
When Scott Torres was a kid living in South Whittier he cut the lawn himself, and as he pushed the machine over the slope of his bloated home in the Laguna Rancho Estates, he tried to draw on those lessons his father had passed down two decades earlier, on a cul-de-sac called Safari Drive, where all the lawns were about a quarter the size of the one he was cutting right now. Try to get the thing moving smoothly, check the height of the wheels, watch out for any foreign object on the grass because the blades will catch it, send it flying like a bullet. His father paid him five dollars a week, the first money Scott ever earned. Like the other two adults in this home, Scott had been put in a reflective mood by the unusual events of the past few days, by the departure of two members of their team of hired help, and by the June shift in domestic seasons. Summer vacation was upon them and yesterday had been filled with the summing-up celebration of their two boys’ return from the final day of third and fifth grade with large folders filled with a semester’s worth of completed homework and oversized art projects that their mother oohed and aahed over. Now he brought the mower over the last patch of uncut grass and gave it a haircut too.
Scott stopped the engine and breathed in the scent of freshly cut grass and lawn mower exhaust, the pungent bouquet a powerful memory-trigger of his days of teenage chores. He remembered the olive tree in front of the Torres family home in South Whittier, and many other things that had nothing to do with lawns or lawn mowers, like working on his Volkswagen—his first car—in the driveway, and the feathered chestnut hair and the Ditto jeans of the somewhat chunky girl who lived across the street. What was her name? Nadine. The olive tree dropped black fruit onto the sidewalk and one of Scott’s jobs back then was to take a hose and wash away the stains. The neighborhood of his youth was a collection of flimsy boxes held together by wallpaper and epoxy, plopped down on a cow pasture. The Laguna Rancho Estates were something altogether different. When Scott had first come to this house the lawn had not yet been planted, there was a patch of raw dirt with stakes and string pounded into it, and he had watched the Mexican work crews arrive with trays of St. Augustine grass to plant. In five years, the roots created a dense living weave in the soil, and he had struggled to make his haircut of it look even; in fact, he failed. After he raked up the grass he noticed the blades that stuck to his sweaty arms, and as he wiped them off he thought that each was like a penny when you added up how much you saved by cutting the lawn yourself.
Two weeks earlier, he had quickly calculated what he paid the gardener over the course of a year and had come to a surprisingly large four-figure number. The problem with these Mexican gardeners was that you had to pay them in cash; you had to slap actual greenbacks into their callused hands at the end of the day. The only way around it was to go out there in the sun and do it yourself, because bringing these hardworking Mexicans into your home was expensive, and in the end all those hours the Mexicans worked without complaint added up. That was also the problem with Guadalupe: too many hours.
Scott’s parents were frugal people, much like Pepe the gardener: Scott could see this in his methodical, cautious count of the bills Scott gave him. Pepe scratched out the amount with a stubby golf course pencil he kept in his wallet along with a piece of invariably soiled paper. Scott’s father was Mexican, which in the California of Scott’s youth was synonymous with poverty, and his mother was a square-jawed rebel from Maine, a place where good discipline in the use of funds was standard Protestant practice. Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.
Scott 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 would have made very fine pottery, or papel picado, or been an excellent stage manager for a theater group wandering through the suburbs of El Distrito Federal.
Araceli took the bowl of completed paste to la señora Maureen in the playroom. She found her jefa kneeling on the floor over a piece of yellow construction paper with a red pencil grasped between her fingers, wearing an artist’s smock over her brown yoga pants.
“Señora, aquí está su paste,” Araceli said.
“Thanks.” After a few seconds passed without Araceli walking away, Maureen looked up and found Araceli examining her work with that neutral expression of hers, a half stare with passive-aggressive overtones. Maureen had seen Araceli’s wide, flat face assume this inscrutable look too often to be unsettled by it, and instead she gave her maid a half shrug and quick eye-roll of ironic semi-exasperation, as if to say, Yes, here I am again, on my knees, scratching away at an art project like some preschooler. Araceli broke her trance by raising one eyebrow and nodding that she understood: it was the sort of exchange that took place several times each day between these two women, a wordless acknowledgment of shared responsibilities as exacting women in a home dominated by the disorderly exertions of two boys, a baby girl, and one man. Maureen was writing happy birthday keenan in the classic, serif-heavy font of Roman buildings and monuments. Below these letters, la señora was trying to draw what looked like a Roman helmet, a birthday theme inspired by Keenan’s recent fixation with a certain Eur opean comic strip. Maureen drew one more line with Araceli watching, and then they were both startled by the cry of a baby, seemingly just behind la señora‘s shoulder. Turning around quickly, Araceli saw a burst of red lights on the baby monitor as Maureen calmly rose to her feet and headed for the nursery.
A few moments later Maureen appeared in the hallway with Samantha, a baby girl of fifteen months with hazel eyes still moist from crying to escape from her crib. She had her mother’s milky complexion and fine hair, though the baby’s locks were a deeper chestnut. La señora held her daughter, bounced and made kissing noises until she stopped her crying, and then did something she had never done before: she handed Samantha to Araceli. In the Torres-Thompson household, this baby girl carried the aura of a sacred and delicate object, like a Japanese vase on two teetering legs. In the last few weeks, she had started to walk, entering a world of possibility and danger, stumbling across the room to her mother’s embrace with a precarious Frankenstein step. Guadalupe carried the baby for hours every day, but now that Guadalupe was gone it appeared that some of this responsibility would fall to Araceli, who wasn’t sure if she was ready or willing to help take care of a baby. In fifteen months, Araceli had disposed of several hundred soiled diapers, but she had changed Samantha herself not more than three times, and always at the behest of Guadalupe. The truth was Araceli had never been close to children; they were a mystery she had no desire to solve, especially the Torres-Thompson boys, with their screams of battle and the electric sound effects they produced with their lips and cheeks.
But a little girl was different. This one led the life any Mexican mother would want for her baby, with an astonishing variety of pinks and purples in her wardrobe of onesies, bibs, T-shirts, nightshirts, her closet in the nursery overflowing with Tinker Bell Halloween costumes and miniature sundresses, and outfits like this casual track suit of velvety ruby-colored cotton she was wearing today. In El Distrito Federal, these clothes would cost a fortune; if you could find them at all it would be in the marble-floored malls in the affluent satellite fringes where there was valet parking at the front doors and perfume piped into the air ducts. Araceli gently touched one of the lavender barrettes in Samantha’s thin strands of hair, and the baby wrapped her small hand around one of Araceli’s fingers. In an instant, Araceli found herself cooing, making infantile noises. “¡Qué linda! ¡Qué bonita la niña!” Samantha smiled at her, which was so unexpected that it made Araceli lean over and kiss the baby on the cheek. Maybe that is not something I should do.
Araceli carried the baby and walked in circles as Maureen built a small collection of papier-mâché helmets, using a bowl as a frame, until she had enough to outfit a platoon of child Romans. Her jefa left the helmets to dry and gave a stealthy peek through the playroom’s window at the backyard. Pepe was gone and the plants in the tropical garden were mourning his absence even more than Araceli. The translucent stems of the begonia ‘Ricinifolia’ were performing a deep bow in Pepe’s honor, reaching down to kiss the drying soil at their feet, while their asterisk bursts of flowers, each pale pink petal the size of Samantha’s thumbnail, were drying and withering and being plucked off by the breeze. Like flakes of ash, the paper-thin petals caught hot drafts and floated magically upward and away from the garden and the window, where two women and a baby girl stood watching.
Later that afternoon Maureen changed out of her smock and yoga pants into jeans and a loose-fitting Stanford T-shirt of Scott’s. She put on a wide-brimmed straw hat and walked purposefully back into the garage, deciding to ignore the bottles of chemicals for the moment as she retrieved a stiff pair of garden gloves and some rusty tools. Then she marched up to la petite rain forest and got a good look at the crabgr
ass weeds that were filling up the dry soil at the base of the calla lilies and the banana tree. These could be removed rather simply, with a hoe, and Maureen began to do so, with a rhythmic and therapeutic hacking. Hurry, hurry, before the baby starts to cry. Maureen felt a pang of guilt when she remembered Guadalupe’s departure, and she regretted not having told her sons that their babysitter would never be coming back. Samantha would forget about Guadalupe quickly, but the boys would not, because after five years she had truly become “part of the family,” a phrase that for all its triteness still meant something. Her boys deserved some sort of explanation, but the thought of giving them one squeezed Maureen’s throat into silence: how much longer could she keep up the fiction about Guadalupe’s “vacation”?
Moving more quickly, Maureen retrieved a hose from the side of the house and sent streams of water over the ribbed banana leaves: a tree like this was worth having just for the wide sweep and silhouette of the leaves. That had been the impulse of planting la petite rain forest in the first place: to hide the adobe-colored wall behind it and create the illusion that these banana trees and tropical flowers were the beginning of a jungle plain where savage tribes lived and vines swallowed the metal shells of downed airplanes. With a quick spray the stand of Mexican weeping bamboo looked healthier, though Maureen didn’t have time to rake up the dead leaves clustering at their base. With regular watering and maybe a bag of organic mulch—tropical gardens needed mulch, didn’t they?—she might get la petite rain forest looking fit and trim again in time for Keenan’s birthday.