The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  The guests found Maureen standing near the center of the lawn, with the baby Samantha on her hip, looking as elegant as ever in a powder-blue camisole and a taupe chiffon skirt printed with orchids. She gave each adult guest a peck on the cheek, taking a bit of pleasure in the gentility of this gesture, which was foreign to people in the river town of her Missouri youth. “Maureen, you look great!” the guests called out. “How did you lose all the weight so quickly?” “Look at Sam: she’s so big now!” “Look at all this stuff for the party! How do you do it? Where do you find the time?” She gave an aw-shucks shrug and guided the guests’ children toward the table with the faux-Roman outfits. “We’ve got helmets and swords for you guys to try out. But no hitting, please!”

  By 2:00 p.m. there were two dozen adult guests in the backyard, squinting before the sun-drenched grass as if the onset of summer had caught them by surprise, even though some were holding bathing suits for their children, none of whom had yet shown any interest in the pool. They were in their thirties and forties and had programming degrees and MBAs; they were young enough to have started new careers, and old enough to begin to grow nostalgic for the adventure they had shared with one another first on the single floor of an Orange County business park, and then in MindWare’s own, commissioned headquarters, an architectural gem in downtown Santa Ana that now belonged to the county’s largest real estate brokerage. They had been plucked from staid jobs in accounting and marketing departments, from the IT bowels of corporate towers, for an undertaking the Big Man had likened, repeatedly, to leading a wagon train across the Oregon Trail. The final months of MindWare’s meteoric rise and fall had been filled with a series of competitive enmities and clashes over business strategy, and in the company’s last days of independent existence, before the responsible investors had arrived to purge all but two of the original employees, several of the people today present in the Torres-Thompson backyard were not speaking to one another. But time had a way of making those bad feelings a mere seasoning floating atop the sweeter narrative of possibility that had once bound them all together.

  “Hey, it’s the head of research!”

  Tyler Smith had arrived, with his three children and his wife, an immigrant from Taiwan who was telling her charges, in Mandarin, to behave themselves and not jump in the pool without their mother.

  “Are they reading yet in Sierra Leone?” the Big Man called out, in an oft-repeated ribbing of the head of research, who had once traveled to West Africa to test MindWare software that was supposed to wipe out illiteracy.

  “You’re not taking those dialysis treatments anymore, are you, Tyler?” Maureen asked, because the project had left the head of research with a life-threatening kidney infection.

  “Stopped two years ago.”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  MindWare had been held together by Maureen’s concern for their daily well-being, and by Scott’s technical creativity and grounded common sense. Everyone liked Scott and Maureen, and the MindWare alumni who had moved away from California timed their annual summer vacations so they could be present at Keenan’s parties. Now Carla Wallace-Zuberi drew the group’s attention to Scott, who was standing by the humming pump that kept the castle filled with air, wearing khaki shorts, sandals, and an oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  “Scott, the house looks great. The kids are so big.”

  “Yes, they don’t seem to stop growing, no matter what we do.” Each birthday finds us a little heavier, Scott observed, a bit saggier, our eyes less bright. The Big Man was the one member of their crew who looked exactly the same: Sasha Avakian, a onetime fund-raiser for Armenian independence, who in his reincarnation as California entrepreneur had sweet-talked a trio of venture capitalists into funding MindWare and its many offshoots, including Virtual Classroom Solutions and Anytime Anywhere Gaming, some of which were still in business, though no longer under the control or guidance of the people gathering this afternoon in the Torres-Thompson backyard.

  “So, it’s a Roman theme, huh, Scott?” Avakian said. “A kid army of centurions—and their parents, the Huns!”

  “There’s always a theme. The party cannot be themeless.”

  “You had the wizard thing going on the last time I was here. And the astronaut thing a while back. My favorite was the safari theme, the explorer bit. That was a couple of years ago, right?”

  “Right,” Maureen interjected. She said this without looking at her guest—she was holding the baby Samantha over her shoulder, trying to get her to take her afternoon nap, and was at the same time keeping an eye on the still-empty swimming pool and the inflated castle, where two small centurions were trying to hit each other with their swords in between trampoline jumps.

  “How do you find the time to do these things, Maureen?” the wife of the Big Man said. “With three kids?”

  “Araceli,” Maureen said, turning to look back at her guests. “She’s a godsend.”

  Maureen watched Araceli walk toward her guests with a tray of drinks, and not for the first time felt comfort in her employee’s dependability. True, Guadalupe would be laughing and chatting up the guests in bad English if she were here, not scowling at them. But Maureen never needed to tell Araceli what to do more than once.

  Araceli’s tray contained a collection of blue glass tumblers filled with a sangria concoction that Maureen made for summer parties. Each drink was chilled with ice cubes Araceli had pried from a dozen trays, because Maureen wanted moon-crescent ice in her tumblers. Araceli watched each guest take a glass with the soon-t o-melt crescents and went back to the kitchen with the empty drink tray to retrieve more hors d’oeuvres. When she returned to serve the guests she refused to acknowledge those few who were courteous enough to say thank you, and gave a sidelong glare to Mrs. Tyler Smith when she dared to say “Gracias.” I speak English, Araceli wanted to say. Not much, but “Thank you” has been in my vocabulary since the fourth grade. On one of these trips she crossed paths with la señora Maureen, who was walking back into the yard with a baby monitor in hand. Araceli began to lose track of the number of trips she had made with drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Finally came the culinary climax, her sopes, which were a California variation on a recipe of her aunt’s. The sopes had begun their existence as balls of corn masa in Araceli’s palms last night. Each was fried and garnished with Haas avocados, shredded cilantro, vine-ripened tomatoes, and white Oaxaca cheese, so that as she walked into the crowd of partiers she was presenting the colors of the Mexican flag. I could eat five of these all by myself, Araceli thought. Maybe if I go through here quickly enough I can keep them from getting all the sopes.

  The Big Man began to gather an audience around him, regaling the group with tales from his new “mercenary” work as a consultant/lobbyist. He came to Scott and Maureen’s parties because he respected them for their work ethic and loyalty, qualities he did not possess in large quantities himself, and once he was in their home his “gift” to them was to keep their guests amused and entertained. “So there I am, all of a sudden, shuffled into the mayor’s office. The mayor of Los Angeles. He’s saying goodbye to some people in Spanish. That guy, let me tell you, he’s got a thankless job. Because there’s a whole city filled with Mexicans who elected him to office—they think their day has come. And that’s going to be a problem: because he can’t keep them all happy. There’s too many Mexicans. It’s mathematically impossible.”

  The Big Man lived in Los Angeles, on its Westside, but to the rest of the partygoers that city and its overpopulated unpleasantness were far away, and the reference to the ethnic divisions in Los Angeles led to a moment of awkward silence filled by the laughs and squeals of children inside the inflated castle. In the circle of Maureen and Scott’s friends, discussing any topic related to ethnicity was on the fringe of what was considered polite. Many now had interracial children, and all believed themselves to be cultural sophisticates, and had given their progeny names like Anazazi, Coltrane, and Miró that reflected their worldly
curiosity. They avoided discussing race, as if the mere mention of the subject might cause their fragile alliances to come apart. “Mexican” was a word that sounded harsh, somehow, and it caused a few of them to look at Araceli.

  Maureen’s maid was a woman with the light copper skin of a newly minted penny, and cheeks that were populated with a handful of summer freckles. Araceli’s Mexican forebears included dark Zapotecs and redheaded Prussians, and in her family she was on the paler side of the spectrum. But in California, and at this party, she stood out unmistakably as an ambassador of the Latino race. Still, she appeared oblivious to the Big Man’s comments as she walked past. Others glanced briefly at Scott: he didn’t have any of the qualities associated with “Mexicans” by those in the metropolis who were not Mexican, but his surname was Torres, after all. Scott was sipping his sangria and had just closed his eyes and wasn’t listening either. He was, instead, trying to discern all the different fruits in this beverage: grapes from the wine, of course, and also orange and apple. And is that pomegranate? Pomegranate? That takes me back.

  “Still, I guess they really do deserve a share of the pie,” the Big Man said, renewing his monologue with a conciliatory tone, as if there might be a closeted Mexican in his audience. “But this mayor guy, he’s a real piece of work,” the Big Man continued, and he began to pronounce on the swirl of rumors surrounding the personal life of the city leader. Suddenly his son ran through the cluster of his audience: he was a boy of eight with the same curly hair and round belly as his father, and was wearing one of the papier-mâché helmets, along with plastic breast armor and a skirt of cardboard scraps painted to resemble leather. “Hey, it’s the Little Big Man!” someone called out, and the ensuing laughter finally brought the Big Man’s monologue to an end.

  The adults scanned the backyard for their children and saw how their swords and other homemade Roman paraphernalia were starting to fall apart, littering the lawn with scraps of cardboard and paper. They bit into their taquitos and tasted bits of shredded chicken in a red sauce that was boldly spiced with organic chile de árbol. Now Araceli was weaving between them with two sopes on her tray: they were the last two, she had just realized, and she was going to try to make it back to the kitchen and impertinently devour them. But just as she broke free of the main cluster of guests, she walked into a patch of open grass to discover the Big Man standing alone and suddenly staring straight at her, and then at her tray and the sopes. The Big Man raised his boxcar eyebrows jauntily and extended his hands, using one to take the last two sopes, and the other to place his empty drink on Araceli’s tray. “Thanks, kid.”

  “¡Cabrón!” Araceli muttered under her breath, but the Big Man did not hear her because he was circling back to the conversation, which had taken the lamenting, retrospective tone that eventually came to dominate the reunions of the MindWare alumni, once the alcohol started to set in.

  “We should have set up in India,” Tyler Smith was saying. “Everyone is doing that now. Bombay.”

  “Mumbai,” Carla Wallace-Zuberi corrected.

  “Yeah. Or Bangalore. Everyone was telling us to do that.”

  “The stockholders,” Tyler Smith said, repeating a word whose connotations only further darkened their shared mood. “The guy from that hedge fund. What an asshole!”

  “Shahe!” the Big Man’s wife shouted toward the inflated castle. “Shahe Avakian! Take your foot off that boy’s neck now!”

  “Those bouncy houses always bring out the aggressive behavior,” Carla Wallace-Zuberi said.

  “The stockholders! The sacred stockholders!” interjected the Big Man, as his molars crushed what was left of Araceli’s last sope. “The first thing we should have done is killed all the stockholders.”

  “Uh, that would have included all of us too.”

  “And the board members too. Where did we find those people?” said the Big Man, who knew perfectly well.

  “They actually expected us to make money,” Scott said.

  “Remember that letter from that stockholder in Tennessee?” the head of research said. “The guy who said he was sticking with us even though he’d lost half of his investment.”

  “And all those stupid suggestions he made,” Scott said. “That we should move our headquarters to Nashville.”

  “Toyota moved there,” Carla Wallace-Zuberi said dryly. “At least the guy was loyal.”

  “I’m sure he sold what he had pretty soon after.”

  “I’m still living under the dictatorship of the stockholders,” Scott said. He was a midlevel executive at a new company, supervising programmers. “The stockholders measure and quantify everything you do. Most of them you never see, but they seem to know everything you do. Like God, I guess. They’ll turn their backs on you if your numbers aren’t right, and then go off running in the direction of another guy who does have the right numbers. Like a herd.”

  This observation caused a pause of agreement and knowing nods. “If you think about it,” Carla Wallace-Zuberi offered, “the whole system is like mob rule.”

  “Woe to the land that’s ruled by a child!” the Big Man shouted suddenly, and for no discernible reason. They turned to find his flush face staring at the grass, at nothing, and at that point they all shared the same thought: He’s getting drunk again.

  “He’s on a Shakespeare kick,” the Big Man’s wife explained laconically. “He’s saying that one a lot. Because with his new work, he’s getting to know a lot of politicians.”

  “That was from one of the Richards,” the Big Man said, holding back a burp, but otherwise recovering himself. “Richard the Second. The Third, maybe. No, the Second.” He was feeling the wine in the sangria, and what a pleasant sensation it was.

  “This is what we do for recreation now,” the Big Man’s wife said. “We look for Shakespeare festivals. Sasha says he likes the bard for his speeches. Says he’s studying how they’re put together—so we get to write off all the trips. We saw a Tempest in the redwoods in Santa Cruz. That was memorable. We’ll do Ashland this month and maybe Stratford next year, right, hon?” The Big Man gave an approximation of a nod and started to drift away. He wanted to find that Araceli kid and see if she had any more of that silver-dollar-sized tortilla dish—and maybe talk to her. His wife stood there for a moment, her question unanswered, and now she abruptly left the group too, to look for their son. The others in the group watched them leave in opposite directions, and for a moment the Big Man’s drunken shuffle and his wife’s distracted scanning of the backyard was like a snippet of conversation all by itself, a piece of gossip to mull over.

  A few moments later the first of the children jumped into the water with a splash and most of the adults drifted over to the fence that circled the pool. Tyler Smith’s wife took off her blouse and shorts to reveal a one-piece bathing suit underneath, folded her clothes and left them on the grass, and followed her sons into the water. Having exhausted the conversation topics of business, politics, and property values, the guests watched her silently as she took a few moments to touch the water with her palms before plunging gracefully below the surface. In a few minutes there were a dozen children in the pool, water glistening on their buff and khaki skins. With their mixed Asian, African, and European features, their epicanthic folds and proud Armenian noses, their Chinese cheekbones and Irish foreheads that were turning deep saffron in the sun, they resembled a group of children Marco Polo might have encountered on the steppes of the Silk Road, at a crossroads where spices and incense and brass pots were traded at the edge of a river.

  The Big Man stood alone by the garden and picked up one of the helmets that had been tossed on the lawn and tried it on: the papier-mâché shell wrapped itself around his curls but refused to reach his ears, so he pulled it off and let it fall to the grass. Next he took a few steps toward la petite rain forest and examined the azaleas, before turning back to study Araceli, who was standing in the middle of the lawn distributing the last plate of finger foods. That woman looks miserabl
e and lonely, like someone forced to sit in a stranger’s room and listen to the silence for days, weeks, years. He again remembered her laughter, all those years ago, and wondered what he could say to make her smile again. How do you make a Mexican woman chuckle? What causes her to let go of her worries and show the sparkle of her teeth like a burst of white fireworks?

  Araceli nearly dropped her tray when she caught the Big Man gawking at her again, his lips rising slowly into an idiotic grin of mischievousness and craving. This was a more direct and prolonged stare than he had ever given her and she quickly realized that he was drunk. Yes, drunk, as confirmed by the fact that he was now stumbling into the garden and trying to kiss one of the flowers.

  The Big Man found himself embraced by the banana tree, then escaped its grasp to stand over the azaleas and the calla lilies. Every time he came to the house he spent some time admiring the tropical garden, but today something wasn’t right. These birds-of-paradise need work. The calla lilies were shriveling and a few snakes of crabgrass were starting to climb up their stalks from below. What are these little things growing down here? Sow thistles, interlopers from the desert, pale green and drought-resistant, with paper-dry flowers. And look at these tiny holes in these otherwise pretty leaves of the banana tree. The garden was dying, and in its decay the Big Man felt a slow-moving but irresistible force at work; something as simple as the passing of time, perhaps, or some profound and unseen truth about the family that owned it. The Big Man remembered one of his favorite lines from Hamlet: “… ‘tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed, and things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.” What beautiful poetry, those lines. His voice rose as he repeated the phrase out loud several times, his poor approximation of a British accent growing more affected each time, especially when he said “merely.” He turned to face the other partygoers, and addressed them with full thespian voice.