by Héctor Tobar
Back in the living room, Araceli tried to regain her breath and her sense of composure. She stood at the empty section of tiled floor where the coffee table had once stood and tried to sort out what exactly was happening in this household.
After the last of the lunch dishes had been put away, at about the time Araceli had removed the ground turkey from the freezer to begin to defrost for dinner, she began contemplating calling Maureen on her cell phone. This presented a small problem of etiquette. For all her feistiness and independence of spirit, Araceli was still a slave to certain customs and habits, and her undeniably inferior social standing prevented Araceli from immediately picking up the phone and demanding of her jefa: Where are you and when are you coming back? That wasn’t Araceli’s place; she had to come up with a pretext for calling, something related to her professional duties, such as they were. The better part of an hour passed, with Araceli distractedly wiping off counters and tabletops and sweeping floors that were already as spotless and shimmering as they were ever going to be, before she thought of something plausible to say: she would simply ask Maureen if the children would eat Spanish rice for dinner. This would be an exceedingly thin and probably somewhat transparent reason for calling, although la señora had mentioned before the onset of summer something about forcing the boys to broaden their palates and working a few vegetables into their diet of processed meats and cheeses. Araceli would now suggest that Latin American staple, asking if she should throw in some peas and carrots. She moved to the refrigerator and the list of “emergency phone numbers” located there, a typed list Maureen had prepared on Scott’s computer more than a year earlier, in one of her last acts of domesticity before she went into labor with Samantha. The list had been made for Araceli and for Guadalupe, neither of whom found the need to consult it, and it had not been updated since.
Maureen, cell was at the top of the list and Araceli quickly punched the numbers into the kitchen phone, anticipating her boss’s voice on the other end and the calming effect it would have not just on Araceli, but also on the children once Araceli could provide information about their mother’s whereabouts and expected hour of return. It was 2:29 p.m., according to the oven clock, and the boys were now ensconced in front of the television set, aware that they had done so without permission for the simple reason that their mother wasn’t around to be asked. Araceli listened with her ear on the receiver and began to worry after the fourth ring, surprised and a bit angry at the sixth and seventh rings. The ringing stopped and the voice mail message began. “Hi, you’ve reached Maureen Thompson …”
Araceli found herself answering, “Señora,” until she realized it was a recorded voice. She tried again with the same result. Something strange is going on, Araceli decided, looking at the clock again. 2:34 p.m. For the first time, Araceli wondered if Maureen would be home by the time el señor Scott arrived home from work at 5:45, and Araceli pessimistically concluded that the answer was no. She leaves me with her two boys all day without telling me. ¡Qué barbaridad! Up to now, her boss had been the epitome of responsibility and what Mexicans call empeño, the putting of effort and thought into one’s actions. Maureen was precisely the kind of person hundreds of thousands of Mexicans came to the United States hoping to work for, a smart and civilized employer who never needed to be reminded it was payday, and who with her daily conduct taught you some of the small secrets of North American success, such as the monthly calendar of events posted on the refrigerator and in the boys’ bedroom. June 2: School is out. June 22: Keenan’s day! August 17: Ob-gyn. August 24: Brandon’s day! September 5: School begins! © Planning, organization, compartmentalization. Respect and awareness for the advance of the clock, the ritual and efficient squeezing of events and chores into each day and hour. These were the hallmarks of daily life with Maureen Thompson.
These thoughts occupied Araceli as she stood in the living room before the picture window, absentmindedly staring at the lawn, which was returning, again, to a state of unevenness and unkemptness, when she heard a faint electronic tone. After much circular wandering through the house, she traced the sound to the backyard and the ocotillo: at the very top of the tallest arm of the desert plant, a mockingbird was imitating the tone emitted by Maureen’s cell phone, a series of four marimba notes. A few seconds later Araceli heard the sound repeated, this time clearly coming from the master bedroom, and she rushed back inside. In the half darkness of the late afternoon a light glowed near one of the lamps on the nightstand. Araceli moved to pick up the device, something she never would have imagined herself doing just that morning, because there were certain personal objects in the home she never touched—wallets, jewelry, and loose bills left lying about.
On this day, however, the unexplained absence of her boss caused such objects to begin to lose their radioactivity, and Araceli picked up the phone with the tips of her fingers, like the detectives in those American television dramas, and read the message on the display: 7 MISSED CALLS.
Araceli had left Mexico City just as the cell phone craze had taken off, and had never owned such a device. She did not know that pressing two or three buttons would reveal the identity of the callers, in this case herself (HOME) and SCOTT, who had just phoned five times in the past hour from his office in an attempt to talk to his wife directly.
Scott usually arrived, punctually, at 5:45 p.m., an hour that Araceli knew well because it marked the beginning of the winding-down phase of her workday: el señor Scott would come in through the door that led to the garage, and his sons would bother him about playing in the backyard or starting a game of chess, and Samantha might teeter-run to him with her arms raised. This was the signal for Araceli to leave dinner in a handful of covered Pyrex dishes ready to be served, ask Maureen if she needed anything more, and then retire to her room with her own dinner, to return later for the final cleanup. Such were the work routines carved into Araceli’s day during four years of service. Rarely were these rhythms broken: the light and weather in the outside world shifted, with dinner served in darkness in the winter, with white sunshine outside in the summer, and once with a rain of ash visible through the windows. Awaiting the arrival of this hour now became Araceli’s quiet obsession. She watched the clock on the oven advance past five, and then walked into the living room to check on the Scandinavian timepiece on the dresser to see if it had the same time. The boys were taking care of themselves. After a motherless lunch, they could feel their mother’s authority in the home waning further, and they had switched on their handheld video games.
Her putative hour of emancipation came and went without Scott coming through the door. The pasta and albóndigas were ready. She’d finished her work for the day. Where is this man? At 6:45 p.m. Araceli impulsively walked out the front door, down the path that led through the lawn, to the sidewalk of Paseo Linda Bonita and its silent and peopleless cul-de-sac. She stood with her arms folded and looked down the street, hoping to see el señor Scott’s car coming around the corner, but the vista never changed from the blank-page sweep of wide roadway. He’s not coming home either. No lo puedo creer. They’ve abandoned me. The sun was just beginning its rush toward the daily ocean splashdown and Brandon and Keenan were in the house without a parent in sight. She could hear the air-conditioning turn off suddenly in the home next door, and then in another, leaving a disconcerting silence that soon took on an idiotic, satirical quality, as if she were standing not in a real neighborhood, but rather on a stage set crafted to represent vacant American suburbia. Why is it that you almost never see anyone out here? What goes on in these luxurious boxes that keeps people inside? There was no human witness on Paseo Linda Bonita to see Araceli in her moment of distress, no nosy neighbor to take note of the anomaly of a servant in her filipina waiting impatiently for her bosses to arrive, gritting her teeth at the darkening street. Araceli began to contemplate various scenarios that might explain this new and strangest turn of events. Perhaps the violent encounter in the living room had been followed by others, wit
h Maureen finally deciding to leave her husband for good. Or maybe she was in the hospital, while Scott had taken flight lest he be arrested. Or he might have killed her and buried her in the backyard. One saw these news reports about American couples bringing the narrative of their relationships to a demented end with kitchen knives and shovels: Araceli had expanded her knowledge of U.S. geography from the maps in Univision stories that showed the places where North American men murdered their pregnant wives and fiancées, places with names like Nebraska, Utah, and New Hampshire.
Araceli would like to leave too, but she could not, thanks to the chain that ran back to the house and those two boys anchoring her to this piece of California real estate. She could not run away, or stray too far, because there were children in the home and to leave them alone would be an abdication of responsibility, even if they had been left in Araceli’s care against her will. ¿Qué diría mi querida madre? Subconsciously, Araceli began to pace the sidewalk, reaching the boundaries of the next property and turning back, because anything might happen to those boys, unsupervised: they might even start a fire. She could not therefore simply continue walking down the hill, and this realization caused her to stamp her foot into the concrete like a child forced back inside for supper.
Araceli was still outside, about twenty-five yards beyond the closed front door, when the phone rang inside the Torres-Thompson home. She did not hear it. Anticipating that the person calling was his mother, Keenan interrupted his game play at the second ring and ran from the living room to the kitchen, stood on his tiptoes, and grabbed the dangling cord of the receiver from its perch five feet off the ground on the kitchen wall on the fourth ring.
“Hello? Mommy?”
“Hi, sweetie.”
“Mommy, where are you?”
“I’m just taking a little break.”
“A break?”
“Yes, honey. A little vacation.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m angry with your father.” “Oh.”
The pause that followed lasted long enough for even young Keenan to feel the need to fill it, though he couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Mommy loves you,” Maureen said finally. She was in a hotel room with musty old Navajo rugs and sage burning on an incense tray, watching her baby girl devour a banana. The squeaky tones of her younger son’s voice evoked images of domestic routine: Araceli must have the situation in hand, Maureen thought; she is helping Scott, and Maureen felt her concerns about the boys and home she had left behind lift quickly. “Mommy’s just a little angry with your father.”
“When are you coming back?”
“Soon, honey. Soon.”
These words comforted Keenan sufficiently that he started thinking about getting back to his game. It had been ages since he’d played it as long as he had today.
“What have you been doing today?”
“We’re playing on our Game Boys,” he said. “I got to the top of Cookie Mountain. Brandon showed me how to do it. It was really cool.”
Maureen winced. Scott gets home and the first thing he does is let them play those mindless games.
“Did you eat?”
Keenan looked across the kitchen and noticed the dishes Araceli had left on the counter. “We’re having spaghetti and meatballs,” he said. Maureen heard the “we” and assumed it included Scott. Satisfied that her boys were being taken care of by Araceli, and that Scott was hovering nearby, she said goodbye to her son and hung up the phone quickly, the better to avoid any awkward conversations with her husband.
Years of being married and raising children had brought Scott’s and Maureen’s parental clocks into sync. Thus, a minute or so after Keenan had replaced the phone in its cradle, the phone rang again. Keenan had returned to the living room and turned his Game Boy back on, and now he circled back to the kitchen, picking up the phone on the eighth ring.
“Hello?”
“Hi! Keenan?”
“Dad?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Where are you?” Keenan said. Scott was sufficiently distracted by his surroundings and the circumstances under which he was making the call—he was standing in the patch of grass by the street outside Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s apartment building—that he failed to notice the subtle verbal clue that perhaps not everything was right in his home.
“I’m taking a little break from being home.”
“A vacation?” Keenan asked.
“Yeah, like a vacation.”
Keenan was less interested in this conversation than the one he had just had with his mother. Hearing their two voices within minutes of each other had returned to him a sense of normality, and he wanted to get back to his game, and also start eating the spaghetti and meatballs on the counter.
“How’s Mommy doing?”
“She says she’s really angry at you.”
His wife had spent the day filling his sons’ ears with soliloquies about what a horrible man he was, the completely predictable sequel to the pratfalls and crashes of the night before.
“I know she’s angry at me,” Scott said, the words coming out with a sad sense of finality. In an instant, his mood changed. How dare she try to turn the children against me. “I’m angry at her too,” he said. He imagined his wife hovering nearby, and that she might take the phone away from Keenan and start to harass him about where he was, so he said his goodbyes quickly, telling his son to listen to what his mother told him to do.
“Okay, Dad,” Keenan said, even though his mother wasn’t there, because like his father, he was in a hurry to get off the phone too.
11
I’m scared. Araceli, can you sleep with us?”
Keenan asked this with the comforter pulled up to his chin, in bed after forty-five minutes of crying and confusion Araceli would not soon forget. It seemed to Araceli that getting the boys into their room with their teeth brushed and under the covers, in her best approximation of what their mother would have done, was a Herculean task in itself, and that asking her to throw herself on the floor next to them was asking one thing too many. She needed a moment alone, to step back and think what to do next. The boys had begun to panic an hour or so after dusk, when the windows turned into black planes broadcasting images of parentless rooms. “Where’s Mommy?” “Where’s Dad?” They had peppered her with these questions and had grown increasingly insistent on receiving some answer other than “I don’t know,” “Soon,” or the Spanish “Ya mero.” Araceli told them they had to go to bed, and this had set off a round of silent tears from Brandon, and a strange, high-pitched grunt-growl from Keenan. They were going to bed with neither their mother nor their father in the home, with only the surly Mexican maid in the house, and suddenly they felt as lost as two boys separated from their parents on a busy city street. Brushing their teeth and changing into pajamas had calmed them to the point that they could wipe the tears from their faces; the nightly routines their mother had inculcated in them became, for a moment, a soothing substitute for her presence.
“Will you sleep with us, please?” Keenan repeated.
Araceli desperately wanted to return to her room, but of course that wasn’t possible: if she retired to her casita in the back she would be leaving the children alone in the house.
You shouldn’t just give in to children. You shouldn’t just give them anything they ask for.
In Araceli’s family home in Nezahualcóyotl children were obedient, quiet, and nondemanding: girls, especially, were expected to occupy quiet, scrubbed spaces that adults were free to ignore. Her own childhood equivalent to the bedtime routine in the Room of a Thousand Wonders took place in the spare room of tile floors she shared with her sister, floors both sisters had been required to mop from the age of ten onward. At bedtime the only good night was a quick look-in from their mother, a check of their obedience. They feared their mother’s disapproval and the idea that they might delay her from that final reward of her workday: the climb to the roof, where pennan
ts of denim and polyester caught the breeze and, in their cool evening stiffness, announced, En esta casa, yo mando: In this house, I am love, a river of order and sustenance that flows steady in all seasons.
“I won’t sleep here next to you, no,” Araceli said. “But I will sleep close. Over here, in the hallway. Okay?”
“In the hallway?”
“Yes. Aquí.”
She opened the door to their room and in a few moments she had taken two comforters from one of Maureen’s closets and tossed them on the floor, along with a pillow.
“Aquí voy a dormir. Aquí voy a estar.”
“Okay.”
Araceli, for the first time in her life, bedded down in her filipina.
Araceli awoke before dawn with the children asleep, the chorus of morning birds yet to begin outside the windows, and walked through the empty house as if in a trance. There seemed to Araceli a slight chance that either Scott or Maureen had returned during the night, but each flick of a light switch revealed only a stark tableau of dust-free furniture: the comforter was still taut on the bed in the master bedroom, there were no blankets on the floor to indicate anyone had slept in Scott’s game and television room, and the kitchen showed no signs of anyone having been there since Araceli gave the last wipe to the counters as the boys prepared for bed the night before. She circled back to the master bathroom, the space Araceli most strongly associated with Maureen’s physical presence, and surveyed the objects as if one of them might tell her when la señora would return. ¿Dónde estás, mi jefa? A paddle brush resting in a wicker basket on the marble slab of the sink drew Araceli’s eye. This inelegant piece of black plastic did the daily hard work of Maureen’s morning and bedtime grooming, and a thick weave of Maureen’s russet hair had built up between the nylon bristles, and for an instant Araceli imagined the strands rising from the brush and taking form, and then Maureen herself emerging magically underneath, calming her children with her motherly exhortations.
