by Héctor Tobar
She went to her worktable and reached inside and pulled out a piece of construction paper on which she was assembling a collage. The half-started project before her was taking form, in this early phase, with pictures cut out from the magazines Maureen discarded every month: International Artist, Real Simple, American Home, Smithsonian, Elle. Reaching under the table, she picked up a handful of magazines and then opened the table’s small drawer and took out an envelope. A collection of hands fell out. Araceli couldn’t draw hands very well, and she had begun gathering them as a kind of study, a communion with the anatomy of fingers, cuticles, and lifelines. There were hands from a Rembrandt, hands from an ad for skin lotion, hands wearing gardening gloves, a hand reaching out to shake another hand. There were just two hands glued to her construction-paper canvas so far, and she had placed them at the center of the composition-to-be. Painted in oil and open in a pleading expression, they were from Caravaggio’s painting Supper at Emmaus, a favorite of one of her art history instructors at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes; for some reason they had popped up in an insurance advertisement.
After an hour of trying out various hand arrangements, searching for more hands in the magazines, and attaching a few to her collage,
Araceli stopped, rubbed her eyes, and tossed herself onto her bed for a nap. She looked at the framed picture of her four-year-old nephew, the only family picture in a gallery dominated by shots of old friends from Bellas Artes. All had been scattered to the winds of employment and migration, to jobs in restaurants in the Polanco district of Mexico City, and to American cities and towns with exotic names she had collected on a handful of envelopes and postcards: Durham, nc; Indianapolis, in; Gettysburg, pa. At moments like this, when she was alone to encounter the lonely contradictions of her American adventure, the natural thing to do was to turn on the television and forget. Instead, she threw her arm over her face and closed her eyes, embracing the exhausted darkness and the acoustic panoply it contained: a singing bird whose call was three short notes and a fourth long one that sounded like a question mark. The very distant bass of an engine, and then the much sharper and high-pitched vibrations of a car pulling into the cul-de-sac of Paseo Linda Bonita, the motor puttering to a stop, the driver setting the brake. Now the voice of a woman talking in the next home, less than five feet from her second window, which opened to the narrow space between the two properties. She heard a girl responding to the woman, and though the words were indiscernible, it was clearly a mother-and-child dialogue, a series of questions and observations perhaps, moving forward at an unrushed rhythm. Each time Araceli heard these feminine voices she remembered the room in Mexico City she’d shared with her older sister, and their whispered conversations in the post-bedtime darkness. In the dry winters they awoke to the sound of their mother sweeping away the daily film of grainy soot that settled down from the atmosphere and built up in the courtyard her family shared with five others. The broom was made of thin tree branches tied together and made a scratchy, percussive sound as it struck any surface, leading Araceli the girl to think of it as a musical instrument that produced a rhythmic song many hours in length: clean-clean, clean-clean, clean-clean. During the day, her mother, aunt, and cousins gathered on the courtyard’s concrete to sort beans, hang clothes, and tend to a bathtub-sized planter filled with herbs and roses. Araceli had run away from that home, but sometimes in a restful moment she returned to the cold skin of its cement walls, to the steel front door that popped like the top of a can when opened, and to the rough, pebble-covered floor of the courtyard outside. Araceli missed Mexico City’s unevenness, its asymmetry and its improvised spaces. She missed those women and those voices, and her mother’s observations about tomatoes and men, and the aroma of sliced onions and marinated beef in industrial pots floating about the courtyard when they gathered outside on a good-weather Sunday, a table and conversation squeezed in between parked cars.
When she woke up, some twenty minutes later, Araceli expected for an instant to see her mother, and for an instant longer she felt the faint sensation that there was a household chore for her mother she had left undone.
5
Over the years, Maureen had developed the habit of keeping her eyes lowered and focused on the driveway when she pulled her sport-utility vehicle out of the garage, so as to avoid eye contact that might draw her into chitchat with her cul-de-sac neighbors. Exchanging pleasantries would force her to remember certain unpleasant encounters. The family next door was a very even-tempered aeronautical engineer and his wife, slightly younger than Scott and Maureen, with a lone daughter who was about Keenan’s age. A single “playdate” in which Keenan accidentally ripped off the arm of one of little Anika’s treasured imitation-antique dolls and left her weeping uncontrollably had embarrassed Maureen so thoroughly, she had not knocked on their door since. The boy-girl divide was too wide, you had to keep them in separate worlds, which would be a problem when Samantha got older. Opposite the Torres-Thompsons was the Smith-Marshall family, whose two boys were about the same ages as Brandon and Keenan, but who were so thoroughly medicated for aggressive behavior and general weirdness that Maureen shuddered when she remembered stepping into their home. “Something not good is going on in that family,” she had told her husband. “The mom is in a place you get to by taking pills that come in pretty pastel colors.” In general, Maureen was put off by the undeniable superficiality of the Laguna Rancho Estates, by the plastic surgery fad that had swept through the place in the same way Astroturf porches had once swept through the small-town Missouri neighborhood where she had grown up. Her encounters with the remade women of the Laguna Rancho Estates made Maureen self-conscious enough about her middle-aged looks that, after having three children by natural methods (excepting the epidurals, of course), she had briefly contemplated a tummy tuck of her own. But in the end the idea of submitting the imperfections of her midriff to a surgeon’s blade put her off: she wouldn’t become one of those silicone Californians the people back home would sneer at. High-priced real estate in a new subdivision attracted the kind of people who could throw money at their insecurities, a description that Maureen would apply to herself in the occasionally candid moment. The difference was that she didn’t mind, too much, looking at the mirror and seeing a slightly older version of herself than the one in her memory, the odd silver strand in the rusty sweep of her hair, and the crow’s-feet advancing from the very slight folds in the corners of her eyes, an odd Gaelic mutation that suggested squinting in the face of a powerful Atlantic breeze. She preferred the look of distinction and experience to the scrubbed and washed-out look of one eye and cheek job too many, or the unreal orange hue produced by electric suns. I’m not any less superficial than they are. I just have a different aesthetic. I’ll take a weather-beaten chair or table with character over a brand-new but flavorless piece of furniture. Maureen wanted to age as gracefully as humanly possible in a climate where each day was a battle to defend her complexion against the dry air; she wanted to raise her children without the aid of prescriptions for psychotropic compounds, and without a game console like the one their father played with. What Maureen wanted, the only thing she could say with certainty she wanted, was to bring goodness and beauty to the life of her family.
For that reason she was headed to her local nursery to research some clever, cheap, and elegant solution to the problem of the dying rain forest in her backyard.
Through the smoky glass of the sport-utility vehicle, Araceli watched freeway destination signs pass overhead. SAN DIEGO. LOS ANGELES. NEWPORT BEACH. Being the car-trip escort to la señora Maureen used to be one of Guadalupe’s responsibilities. Other people go to work in factories. I have to squeeze into this automobile, with this woman and her children. All for that moment at the end of the week when they give me an envelope with two pictures of Benjamin Franklin and one of a man called Grant.
No one talked, but Araceli could hear Brandon and Keenan tapping away at their electronic toys in the backseat. Brando
n’s hair was auburn, darker than his mother’s, though he had the same smart, wide-apart eyes that to Araceli suggested ancestors in some rough-hewn European village, like those peasants of Daumier and Millet in Araceli’s art history textbook, the largest of the handful of books in her personal library: gleaners, sowers, potato eaters. Brandon’s fingers moved over the buttons of his little machine with artistic precision and for a moment it occurred to Araceli that he might do well with piano or guitar lessons, but la señora Maureen never pushed him. Sometimes you had to push children to do things that were good for them: if she ever found a partner to share her dreams, they would raise their offspring with that piece of Mexican wisdom. Maureen had the air conditioner on high and the cold made Araceli’s nose run, and she gave a theatrically loud sniffle and feigned a cough, but her jefa didn’t seem to notice.
The idea had come to Maureen after her perusal, at a local bookstore, of various gardening guides. She had begun with a handbook or two on tropical gardens, but was quickly intimidated by their instructions for elaborate irrigation systems and complex recipes for organic fertilizers, and tips for keeping alive fragile species. The authors lectured her on keeping the air and soil humidity above seventy percent, and insisted she install various electric sensors, then teased her with shots of couples standing next to their Balinese jungle gardens, and stone paths lined with breadfruit trees and palm fronds dripping water. A tropical garden, she decided, was like a “special needs” child: you could make him bloom if you made him the center of your universe, but she had three children already, thank you very much.
Wandering deeper into the stacks, she came upon a book titled The Wonders of the Desert Garden. Its cacti and assorted succulents caught her interest, as did a chapter called “Southern California: the Sonoran Possibilities” that carried several photographs of the agave, aloe, and the Golden Barrel cacti in the Huntington Gardens in San Marino. In another she found a map that showed the Sonoran Desert reaching to a mountain range in California: on a clear day, you could see these mountains, the Palomars, from the toll road that cut through the hills behind her home. We’re practically on the fringes of the Sonoran and the Mojave. It made so much more sense to try to re-create an ecosystem that was native to this part of California, rather than one native to Southeast Asia or the Amazon. Desert gardens, by definition, needed very little water. The moisture that came from the occasional ocean breeze or from the fog bank that climbed up from the sea into their hillside cul-de-sac was more than enough.
They arrived at a nursery, Maureen leading the way with Samantha in her arms, Araceli and the boys trailing after, walking through the narrow spaces between the tables with plants.
“Yeah, your tropicals are high-maintenance, no doubt about it,” the nursery manager concluded, after hearing Maureen describe her garden’s decline. “Probably your succulents are something you wanna look at.” The nursery manager was a sun-blanched woman of about thirty in jeans and a wide-brimmed straw hat, and she led Maureen and her retinue through aisles of potted vincas and roses underneath a canopy of translucent fabric, to a section at the back of the nursery where the sun blazed down on a crowd of mini yucca plants and other succulents filling several tables, alongside some potted cacti that were as tall as Samantha. “Over at our Desert Landscaping location in Riverside we’ve got a spectacular saguaro, five feet tall. A majestic plant, really, a centerpiece to an entire garden. With your succulents, drainage is key. Of course, it’s all low-maintenance once you get it in … For a small fee, we’ll do the landscape design for you.” When you first encountered them, Maureen thought, these plants possessed a menacing aura: the armor of their spines, the short hair of barbs. But their architecture was graceful and sturdy, especially the baby saguaros, with their interlocking arches. Pastel-green was the predominant color, but when you spent time looking at them you noticed subtle variations in hue. Maureen examined a plant that looked something like a desert sea urchin, and detected orange-red highlights in the tips of its spiky arms. They soaked up the noonday rays with the same gusto with which the banana trees soaked up water. “You’re gonna save a ton on your water bill, no doubt about that,” the nursery manager said, as if reading Maureen’s thoughts. “And you’ll save on labor too, because these things practically take care of themselves.”
“Brandon, cuidado,” Araceli said.
Maureen turned to see her oldest shaking his finger and mouthing the word Ouch, and then laughing. “Didn’t hurt,” he said. Yes, Maureen would have to build some small barrier to discourage the boys and Samantha from wandering into the desert garden—if she decided to go ahead and follow her instinct, which told her that replacing the water-starved tropicals with a succulent garden was the perfect solution to her problem. Their thick, sunproof skins would forever remove from her property the humiliation of the Big Man reciting lines about weeds and “gross nature.”
Walking up alongside Maureen, getting a glimpse of her from the side while trying not to stare, Araceli saw her employer’s eyes focusing. Clearly her patrona was planning some big, dramatic statement with these plants. The nursery manager was explaining things and studying Maureen, examining her reactions. The nursery manager could see la señora was a moneyed person: Araceli’s Mexican presence trailing behind the children was equivalent to that of a German luxury vehicle, or a piece of gaudy jewelry hanging from Maureen’s neck. Add to the picture Maureen’s regal bearing, the long languorous crescents of her recently styled hair, and her air of pampered distraction, and it came as no surprise to Araceli that the nursery manager was giving her that special treatment norteamericanos reserved for people with serious money to spend. She answered Maureen’s questions with “Sure,” “Of course,” and “We could probably do that.” For a moment the unctuous manager added to Araceli’s lingering, growing, and not entirely explicable sense of dread. She didn’t like walking between these armored plants, every one of which was designed to inflict injury, and she didn’t like the anxious and impatient look on the face of her patrona. Maureen was pulling at the crescents of her hair again, biting the ends.
“Well, we’ll be in touch, then,” Maureen said to the nursery manager. After looking absentmindedly at the collection of small succulents arranged haphazardly on the table before her, she turned to Araceli and announced, “Let’s go to the mall.”
6
The park consisted of a rubber mat and the requisite slides and swings, resting at the bottom of a slope of irrigated fescue overlooking the beach and the ocean. Midmorning dew covered the grass and the park was deserted, a fact that Araceli found disappointing somehow. She expected crowds, children running, the smoke of barbecues drifting skyward, but here the only movement was from the empty swings being tapped forward by the invisible hand of the ocean breeze, their plastic seats garnished with mist. In the distance, the roar of the surf, and sometimes the whine or purr of a car gliding down the street that curved around the park. The overcast was a whitish gray roof, as it was most summer mornings before the sun came to burn off everything to blue. The tableau was quiet, oceanic, meditation-inducing, but for the sound of Maureen berating her two sons inside their idling car.
Thirty minutes earlier, alerted by a series of screams and shouts, Maureen had discovered her two sons gripped in a pretzel headlock on the living room floor underneath the bookcases with their picture frames and two glass vases from Andalusia that rattled when, in their wrestling, Keenan had managed to push his brother backward into the furniture. “You’re going to break something!” Maureen had shouted, referring simultaneously to their bodies and the objects in her bookcase. They grunted and yelped and Maureen had struggled to separate them as Keenan tried to dig his teeth into his older brother’s wrist, while Brandon screamed “Get off me” and tried to free himself with a kick. I order them off the television an hour ago, and without the pacifying power of that screen, they are trying to draw blood. There was no play in this, they were like two drunks on the sawdust-covered floor of a bar. Once o
r twice a week this happened, a testosterone brawl born suddenly from a moment of peaceful brotherly play. Maureen believed a mother had to eradicate the disease of Y-chromosome violence during childhood, lest her family one day be consumed by the gunplay horrors broadcast on the television news. She had decided to whisk them out of the house, into the punishment of open space and an afternoon spent with Araceli as their caretaker.
Inside the car, with Keenan still in tears and Brandon glaring defiantly out the window, Maureen launched into a familiar monologue of threats that revolved around the loss of “privileges.” “Boys!” she said by way of conclusion. “Sometimes I wish I could just leave you with your father and take Samantha and just go. Go someplace far away.” Then, turning to face the boys directly, she said, “I wish I could just leave you with your father!” It was an unforgivably mean thing to say and Maureen would regret it later, after she had driven off with Samantha and seen the defiant expression of proto-adolescent withdrawal on Brandon’s face, a narrowing of the eyes that suggested a future rebellion with sweaty and disheveled male textures. But in her frustration Maureen told herself she didn’t care, because there was only so much boy craziness a woman could put up with.
“Listen to Araceli,” Maureen told her sons after opening the door and lining them up on the sidewalk next to their housekeeper. “She’s in charge. And if I hear from her that you didn’t behave, you’re going to lose your Game Boy privileges for the rest of the summer.” Turning to Araceli, she announced, “I’ll be back about one.” Araceli was standing with her arms folded across her chest, dressed from head to toe in a pink filipina, looking back at her jefa with bemused irritation. Maureen thought briefly that perhaps this was not such a good idea, suddenly leaving her boys at a park with this ill-tempered Mexican woman of un-proven child-rearing skills. Araceli was allergic to her boys; she would just as well limit her contact with them to making their meals and picking up their scattered toys, but in Araceli’s severe disposition there was an air of ample responsibility, the sense that she wouldn’t panic in an emergency. Maureen looked around the park and saw a pay phone: she gave her maid a handful of quarters. “You should really get a cell phone,” she said, provoking no response from Araceli. “I’ll be at home with Samantha. Call me if there’s a problem. I can be here in fifteen minutes.”
