The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  “We’re okay,” Scott said finally. “Just trying to get back to normal.”

  There was just one topic to cover, the most recent entry in the file, and Olivia Garza jumped straight to it. It was an allegation of domestic violence related to an open case, and she had to ask.

  “So, tell me a little about what happened that night with the table. With the argument you had. The argument that set all this off.”

  “How did you know about that?” Scott asked quickly.

  “The woman who used to work here mentioned it last night on Spanish-language television.” Maureen’s forehead and cheeks suddenly matched the color of her daughter’s blouse. “No one told you? It was on Channel 34, but I’m pretty sure it was mentioned later on cable in English.”

  “We’ve been screening calls,” Maureen said.

  “I imagine it’s the table that used to occupy that spot right there,” Olivia Garza said, pointing to an empty rectangle of tiles framed by two couches.

  “I fell backwards,” Maureen said.

  “Because I pushed her.” Scott sensed he could not lie to this woman who carried a clipboard but wrote nothing down, and who seemed to study everything with a neutral expression. If he lied, she would know, and this would send them into new and ever more tortuous predicaments.

  “We were arguing,” Maureen said. “It got out of hand.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s never happened before,” Maureen continued. “We never had a fight like that before. He’s not a violent person. It’s not the way he handles things.”

  “I’m a programmer.”

  “He’s a gentle person. I said things. We were just stressed out over money.”

  “It’s not a good situation, the money.”

  In the course of fifteen minutes all the truth fell into the room. Scott began by laying out the details of their finances: how much they had purchased their home for, the cost of their two sons’ private school, how they had spent more because of certain complications in Maureen’s pregnancy, and the loss of expected income from investments that “didn’t pan out.” Maureen was struck by the blunt math of it all; Scott had told her these things in parts, but she had never understood it altogether, how complex and rooted their financial follies were. Together, she saw now, they suffered from a disease of outlook in a chronic and advanced stage, a bloated and myopic way of life.

  Scott arrived, finally, at the argument over the garden and the moment he laid hands on his wife. “I just lost it. It was an instant. She was on the floor. The next morning we both left. Separately. I guess Araceli cleaned everything up.”

  “I went to the desert,” Maureen said. “Alone. With my daughter.” The sound of her own contrition surprised her. No, I am conceding too much. “But Araceli shouldn’t have taken them into the city. If she had just waited a day longer.”

  The social worker nodded, and for the first time scribbled something on her notepad: a sentence, a phrase, a conclusion, an “assessment.”

  “You mind if I go talk to your boys, alone, for just a minute or two?”

  Scott led Olivia Garza to the space Araceli had called the Room of a Thousand Wonders, where Keenan was on his bed reading a graphic novel modeled after a fictitious boy’s diary, while Brandon read a little paperback, his stomach on the floor, though he sat up straight at the sight of the social worker.

  “I’ll leave you, then,” Scott said.

  “Thank you.”

  Olivia Garza greeted the boys and pointed at their bookcase. “So many books. You guys read all these?”

  “Most of ‘em,” Brandon said.

  “We had more, but Mom threw them away,” Keenan said.

  “No,” Brandon said, giving his brother a hard look. “She gave them to the poor kids’ library.”

  “We read a lot,” Keenan said.

  “Me too,” Olivia Garza said. “When I went to college, I took some classes in reading, though they don’t call it that there. They call it literature.” The social worker mentioned some of her favorite books, including a thirteen-volume series about the fantastic misadventures of three siblings who retain their innocent spirits and optimistic outlook even as they are orphaned and wander through a cruel adult world.

  “I read all those twice,” Brandon said. “They’re really funny.”

  Talking to children was the hardest thing in the world to do, and the aim in these “interviews,” Olivia Garza had learned long ago, was not the soliciting of information, but rather a sounding of the waters of the subjects’ moods and fears, a passive probing of their dispositions. To her practiced eye these boys communicated both intellectual curiosity and a touch of the loneliness that was entirely common in well-off families. And perhaps a little preadolescent ennui from the older one. If they had been traumatized by the flight of their parents, and their journey into Los Angeles, it was not immediately apparent.

  “What are you reading now?” she asked Brandon. He showed her the cover of the paperback and then handed it to her in the same way a teenager surrenders a pack of cigarettes to a school principal. “Wow, a classic. This is an advanced book for your age.”

  “I’m a pretty good reader.”

  “But do you understand everything that’s in it?”

  “About eighty percent. No, ninety. When I get to a part I don’t get, I just pretend the words don’t exist.”

  “Interesting.”

  “That way I keep going.”

  “I should learn to do that.”

  “It’s like the best book I’ve ever read. It’s really real. Next to that, everything else I’ve read sounds kind of phony.”

  Olivia was holding the book and leafing through it when Maureen appeared at the doorway, holding Samantha and trying too hard to project an air of motherly nonchalance.

  “Is everything okay?” she said with a smile.

  “Yes, yes. We were just talking about the book Brandon was reading. What page did you say you were on, Brandon?”

  “Ninety-three.”

  “Do you mind if I borrow this for a second? I’ll give it right back, I promise.”

  Olivia Garza said goodbye to the boys and left the Room of a Thousand Wonders with Maureen.

  “Is everything okay?” Maureen repeated when they reached the living room, because she sensed they were not.

  The social worker held open the book to page ninety-three and gave it to her. “I’m not sure he’s quite old enough for this. And especially passages like this one.”

  Maureen took the copy of The Catcher in the Rye, a book she had never read, though she knew the name of its protagonist. The social worker’s thick index finger had been resting on a page where Holden Caulfield was using the cool slang of the middle of the last century, smoking cigarettes and preparing to talk to a prostitute: “She was sort of a blonde, but you could tell she dyed her hair. She wasn’t any old bag, though.” Just a few pages later the protagonist was talking to her pimp, arguing with the man, the narrator’s voice suggesting the casualness and loose morality of an ancient American era.

  “Oh, my God. Why is he even reading this? Where did he get this?”

  Maureen held the book and looked at the representative of Child Protective Services, and felt the weight of a judgment that was at once holy and official. Her shame deepened when she realized that the social worker had discovered this transgression after just fifteen minutes of conversation with her son. COUNTY OF ORANGE, said the official seal on the social worker’s plastic badge: three pieces of the eponymous fruit rested in a green field that itself was nestled inside the center of a sun ablaze with a corona of dancing yellow arms, and for an instant that seal was as disturbing as those dusty old icons of Saint Patrick in her Missouri home, the ones with the snakes at his feet and flames around his head. Her eleven-year-old was consorting with pimps and prostitutes, having been transported to a seamy corner of Manhattan via the art of fiction, and he was doing so in Maureen’s very house, in her very presence. Because I am not
really looking at him. I am not here in the room with him. Now the saints that looked after the Irish and the County of Orange both knew this secret.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” Maureen said, directing her words not just to the social worker but to everyone she knew. “I thought I was in control of everything. I thought I had it all under control.”

  Underneath all the order and beauty around me, things are not as they should be. I’ve glossed it all over so it doesn’t look like Pike County, but underneath everything is just as frayed as that old couch in our living room, as those unpolished and splintering floors. She felt foolish for expending so much effort uselessly, and when she thought of herself puttering around this living room amid its leather, oak, and wool, she felt an empty sorrow, as if she were standing at the beginning of a dirt path that led back to the places she had run away from. “I’m so sorry.” She plopped herself down on the sofa, still carrying Samantha on her hip. She wanted to cry, but could not. Instead she sat there, defeated, and thought about how Brandon had betrayed her, and that she shouldn’t be surprised, because he was a man, after all: and then she stopped herself from thinking that, because he was eleven years old and that was absurd. This is why women go crazy. We live with men who act like boys and boys who want to be men, and we’re trapped between what we know is right and what little we can do, between what we can see and what’s invisible to us. It’s all impossible. She shook her head and mumbled the word out loud. “Impossible.”

  “It’s not really that big of a deal,” Olivia Garza said, reaching into her purse and handing Maureen a tissue from the large supply she carried.

  Maureen realized now that there were tears in her eyes. She wiped her face and began to speak, in a voice that was eerily steady. “We are going to change.”

  “Excuse me?” Olivia Garza said.

  “We’re moving. To a smaller house.”

  “Maureen,” Scott said. He wanted to stop his wife before she went too far, because she always took things too far.

  “We’re going to put our kids in public school. In another city.” It was a necessary sacrifice, Maureen thought. A surrender. A defeat. They would leave their Eden, and that would be a fair punishment. “If they go to public school, if we live in a smaller house, how much will we save? Twenty, thirty thousand a year? No, more. Right?”

  “Yes,” Scott said. He felt defeated seeing his wife like this—fighting off tears one moment, and then telling a stranger about a new beginning the next. I am responsible for this. In a few weeks or months, when they were living at another house, she would come to the same conclusion, regret all the things she had said, and find a way to blame him for it.

  “Well, that sounds all very positive to me,” Olivia Garza said. “But don’t worry. We don’t take away kids because their parents let them read Salinger.” She allowed herself a hearty, big woman’s laugh. “I really just thought you should know what he’s reading. I think it’s just the tone—that’s what he likes about it. He told me he just skips over the parts he doesn’t understand. The rebellious tone. Get ready. Puberty hits earlier these days.”

  Scott led her to the door, and after what he hoped was a final handshake, the social worker pulled him close and spoke in a low, furtive voice.

  “You have nothing to worry about,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’m not supposed to say this, but I will: my office won’t bother you anymore. And no one else can or will. Not the sheriff or the DA. No one.”

  “Really?”

  She took a moment to size up Scott with her large eyes, wondering if he could be trusted with the information. “Go about your lives. But I never said it. You didn’t hear it from me.”

  “We’re free and clear? Why are you are telling me?”

  “You’re a smart guy, Torres,” she said, rolling the r in his surname suggestively. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

  It was another mystery, like how to cut a lawn cleanly, or the rules of the stock market, and Scott wondered if he’d ever understand. For the moment, he decided he’d keep it a secret, even from Maureen.

  The following morning Child Protective Services issued a two-sentence press release concerning “the events surrounding two children at a home on Paseo Linda Bonita in the Laguna Rancho Estates.” “CPS has investigated this matter,” the release said, “and has closed the case without further action.” The memo was transmitted to news agencies via the press office at the Board of Supervisors, falling into the reporters’ mail slots along with releases from other agencies announcing the unemployment figures, the number of county residents receiving public assistance, and the upcoming celebration of Orange County Weights and Measures Day. By then only a few dedicated scribes noticed or cared, and just one penned a news brief that appeared alongside the summaries of traffic accidents and robberies in the Orange County daily newspaper. The minds and eyes of the reporters on the county beat had been spirited away by another drama, playing out on four channels of the county press room’s cable television hookup. This new story involved a single missing child and had begun to unfold the previous afternoon in Stanton at about the same time Olivia Garza was leaving the Torres-Thompson home and Araceli Noemi Ramírez Hinojosa was sitting before a judge inside the Laguna Niguel satellite courthouse. The protagonists were a missing eight-year-old girl in a Hello Kitty blouse and her stepmother, an elementary school teacher, and the supporting cast included crews of divers searching the bottom of a lake. It was a case whose cruelty and gruesomeness would invite no ambiguity, uniting a city in a sense of tragedy and revulsion once the child’s body was found.

  The dead girl had four siblings whose custody would soon become Olivia Garza’s concern, along with the fate of the level one caseworker who had visited the trailer park where the girl lived twice the year before to investigate several anonymous complaints. Olivia Garza fired the caseworker herself, and visited the siblings in their Foster Care homes several times. Many weeks later, after her role in that horrific case had ended, Olivia Garza remembered her pleasant visit with the Torres-Thompson boys on Paseo Linda Bonita and how she had reencountered The Catcher in the Rye again, after twenty years. She read the book on her first Saturday afternoon off and decided, belatedly, that it was probably okay for a bright eleven-year-old to read.

  25

  The ants marched in from their hidden nests in the soil outside and every day they conquered new territories of tile, particleboard, and porcelain. They gathered in pulsating masses around pieces of chicken underneath the dining room table, over the toilet paper in the bathroom trash cans, and inside the kitchen sink, carrying away whatever it was that settled at the bottom of the garbage disposal. As the number of days without Araceli in their home grew, Maureen came upon more fresh swarms each morning, when Scott was still snoring in the last few minutes of post-dawn coolness, with Samantha awake and in her mother’s arms, drinking her first bottle of the day. At first Maureen assaulted the insects with water and soap, simply smothering them with wet sponges and paper towels, reclaiming the kitchen and other spaces a square foot at a time, washing both their corpses and their still-slithering bodies down the drain. Within a day the effectiveness of this fight back diminished and the swarms returned in their original ferocity. The ants appeared next in the bedrooms and garage, and in the kitchen there were always two or three ant scouts on the counter where she prepared meals, probing in every direction in an odd shuffle, until she killed them with a squeeze of her fingers. How did Araceli keep the ants away?

  The ants triggered memories of the time before Araceli worked for them, in that first year in the Paseo Linda Bonita home, when the trails the insects forged into the kitchen during a summer-long siege led Maureen to briefly consider moving out. It was her helplessness before the ants that had finally convinced Maureen she should hire a housekeeper, and she had gone through various women who struggled with the insects as much as Maureen did, until she found Araceli. Now Maureen suspected that Ar
aceli had secretly applied some potent and probably illegal Third World insecticide to defeat the ants, deciding on her own to disobey Maureen’s admonition not to use chemical poisons. For a day or two Maureen searched cabinets and shelves in the kitchen, laundry room, and garage for the bottle or can that contained this magic potion, but she could not find it. Araceli had defeated the ants, Maureen finally concluded, merely by being extremely vigilant, by never flagging in the disciplined daily upkeep of all the ant-prone surfaces of the home, by never allowing garbage to accumulate, or spills to linger. Maureen did not have the energy to imitate this behavior, nor did her new domestic helper, her father-in-law. The old man cooked, he looked after the children—sort of—and made the beds, but he would not clean the floors, no matter how many hints Maureen dropped. Probably he thinks mopping a floor is women’s work.

  Maureen finally mopped the kitchen, bathroom, and living room floors herself one night, with Samantha asleep and Scott reading stories to the boys in their bedroom, and for a moment she felt renewed by the fake-lemon scent of disinfectant and the wet gleam of clean tile. As she leaned into the mop Maureen noted the presence of fading chalk lines along the base of several walls and wondered if Araceli had placed them there for some reason, and what those lines could mean. They were like crop circles, an apparition with mysterious and alien meanings, and another example of Araceli’s many minor imprints on the household landscape, like her decision to save instant-coffee powder in the refrigerator, or to leave basil leaves in a bowl of water by the kitchen window. Basil? Is that some sort of cure? But for what? Maureen wiped out the chalk lines with the same desperate insistence that a student uses in erasing an incorrect math equation on a chalkboard.