by Héctor Tobar
There’s nothing I can do but wait. It occurred to Araceli, momentarily, that she had been spoiled by life with these people, that she had been conditioned to a crisis-free life, above all by Maureen’s relentless attention to daily routines, and the comfort of schedules assiduously kept. Over the last four years the two women had built many wordless understandings between them, so that, among other things, towels and dirty clothes circulated through the house as efficiently as the traffic on the empty streets of the Laguna Rancho Estates, from wet bodies to hampers to washing machines to shelves, touching the hands of both women in their circuit. Disposable diapers moved from plastic packages on store shelves to babies’ bottoms to special trash cans with deodorizers, and finally to the master trash cans in the back of the house, only briefly tainting the aroma of a country retreat that emanated from the pine and oak furniture, and from a handful of strategically placed bowls of potpourri and lavender.
Maureen was the center of gravity of this home, and with each hour her unexplained absence became harder to fathom. Why would she leave, where is she? If there were an explanation it might be easier to cope, and Araceli decided that she would call Scott and demand one: What did you do to la señora? Did you hurt her?
It was 8:30 a.m. and the boys were still asleep when Araceli marched to the refrigerator and called the second number on the list: Scott, cell. In four years of working for the Torres-Thompson family, Araceli had not once called Scott. This morning she would call him and simply demand to know why she had been left alone with two boys when since the beginning it had been made clear she was not to be a babysitter. After a night of being forced to be a mother and father to two boys, after sleeping on the floor in her clothes, Araceli was beyond politeness or deference. ¿Dónde estás? she would ask, in the familiar “tú” instead of the formal “usted,” in violation of ingrained Mexican class conventions, as if she were the boss and he were the employee, though of course the monolingual Scott would never pick up on her sassiness.
The phone rang once and moved to voice mail. She called again, with the same response.
Scott’s phone was in Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s apartment, which was on the second floor and inside one of those signal shadows that bedevil cell-phone engineers. He was sleeping, after staying up late into the night telling Charlotte about his fight with Maureen, and then falling asleep on her couch. By the time he awoke, just before noon, his phone would be dead because in the harried flight from his home he had neglected to pack the charger.
Araceli called a half dozen times in succession, the final attempt coming as Keenan came into the kitchen and demanded, “I’m hungry! I want something to eat!”
The sight of his thin eyebrows squeezed in irritation and the corners of his mouth drooping plaintively set Araceli off. A missing mother, a missing father, children expecting to be fed: it was all too much. The pots and pans, the salads and the sauces—that is my work. I am the woman who cleans. I am not the mother.
“I am not your mother!” Araceli shouted, and realized instantly her mistake, because Keenan turned and ran away, screaming, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” His shouts filled the living room and became fainter as he ran deeper into the house. Araceli chased after him, cursing herself and the situation and calling out “Keenan, Keenan” until she found him sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees on the floor of the bathroom, the one he shared with Brandon, with shower curtains depicting a coral reef teeming with tropical fish, and decorative rubber jellyfish affixed to the mirror, a tile-lined annex to the Room of a Thousand Wonders. Tears and mucus cascaded over his cheeks and lips and into his mouth. A very faint, motherly impulse to reach down and wipe his tears and clean his nose gathered in Araceli’s chest, but she resisted it. Instead, she picked up a bar of amber-colored soap and said, “Keenan, mira.”
She held the soap delicately between thumb and forefinger and drew lines on the mirror, making quick, sweeping movements to capture and hold his attention, like those clowns in Chapultepec Park who squeezed and stretched balloons into dogs and swords. In less than a minute she had produced a creature on the glass. It floated in the multidimensional space between Keenan and his reflection, ghostly and amber, and he stopped crying the moment he realized what it was.
“A dragon,” he said.
“Yes. A dragon,” Araceli said, her mouth bursting open into a rare display of happy teeth. “For you, Keenan.”
The boy wiped the tears from his face and considered the fanciful animal, which had been rendered in half flight, seemingly ready to pounce.
“That’s really tight,” he said.
“I’m going to make you pancakes,” Araceli said. “Pancakes with bananas. You like that, no? Nice?”
He nodded. After she had coaxed the boy back to the kitchen and served him chocolate milk, after she had prepared the banana pancakes and served them with generous portions of Grade AA authentic Canadian maple syrup, and after the boys had left the kitchen for the entertainments of Saturday morning television, Araceli was once again alone with the telephone list on the refrigerator.
Below Scott’s cell phone on the list of emergency numbers there was Scott, office, which she called even though it was Saturday. “We are currently closed. Our office hours are …” Next was Mother, meaning Maureen’s mother, a woman with cascading ash-colored hair who had visited this home three times since Araceli began working here, most recently in the days after Samantha was born. She was a reserved woman whose main form of communication was the lingering, considered stare, and she had rarely spoken more than a few curt words at a time to Araceli. There had been one unguarded moment, though, during the older woman’s first visit to this house, when she had encountered Araceli in the kitchen and said, “You’re lucky to have this job. You know that, right?” The house on Paseo Linda Bonita was a freshly minted masterpiece then, the virgin furniture was free of child-inflicted scratches, the walls were freshly painted, and la petite rain forest still resembled a small, transplanted corner of Brazil. “Working with my daughter and grandchildren, in this amazing house. I hope you appreciate it.” The words contained an odd patina of regret and envy: as absurd as it sounded, Maureen’s mother resented Araceli for working in this home in daily proximity to her daughter, for the perceived intimacy of their relationship. I could cook and clean too, the old woman was saying without saying it, as good as, if not better than, you, Mexican woman. I could live in the small house in the back and see my grandchildren every day, but of course my daughter won’t have me.
For Araceli to call this gringa acomplejada and ask to be rescued was a measure of the desperation of the moment.
Araceli punched in the number. “The area code for this number has changed,” said a recorded voice. ¿Cómo? She tried the number again and heard the same message, then tried it again with the new area code but this time heard three loud tones, ascending in frequency, followed by the message “The number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in use …”
¡Caramba!
Next on this list was Goldman-Arbegasts, the family that was the Torres-Thompsons’ best friends, although they had missed, for some reason, the most recent birthday party. Yes, these Goldman-Arbegasts were responsible people, the mother was a somewhat taller and more even-tempered version of Maureen, another matriarch of schedules and smartly dressed children.
“Hi, you’ve reached the Goldman-Arbegast residence,” said a woman’s voice. “We’re not here right now because we’re in Italy.”
“No, we’re in Greece!” said a boy’s voice.
“No, we’re in Paris!” interrupted the voice of a man.
“No, we’re in London!” said a second boy’s voice.
And then in chorus all four voices said, “We’re in Europe! On our dream vacation!”
Araceli put the phone back in its wall cradle and looked at the remaining two numbers on the list: they were both for the doctors who had treated Maureen during her pregnancy and delivery, and thus useles
s for the crisis Araceli now faced.
Who could she call now? No one immediately came to mind. She did not know the neighbors, not their names or anything about their relative trustworthiness, and it would be dangerous, she sensed, to share the secret of their isolation with strangers. She had no phone numbers for any uncles or aunts that might exist in the Torres-Thompson universe: Scott was an only child and Maureen had a sister that Araceli had never met. As the hours passed and Scott and Maureen did not return, the strangeness of her predicament only grew. Araceli sensed, for the first time, a larger malaise, the consequences of one or more hidden family traumas at work, as in the convoluted narratives of a telenovela. The woman whose hair filled the brush, whose voice kept the boys bright-eyed, eager, and well behaved, could not and should not have abandoned them. Araceli expected to hear the long-gaited slapping of Maureen’s sandals on the Saltillo tiles at any moment, but until then there was no place she could walk to where Brandon and Keenan might be welcomed as relatives or friends. Nor was the phone ringing with calls from the outside world, with compadres and acquaintances calling in to chat: in fact, the phone didn’t ring very often at all. It seemed impossible to Araceli that a family and a home could become something akin to an island surrounded by vast stretches of salt water, and that its young inhabitants and their innocent housekeeper might become castaways. The peninsulas that linked this island to a continent of annoying relatives and nosy neighbors had been quickly and definitively washed away. Araceli realized now that the daily solitude she felt in this home, the oppression of the droning appliances and the peopleless views from the picture window, was not hers alone. This American family whose home she inhabited had come to this hill above the ocean to live apart from the world. They are runaways, like me. It was an obvious truth, but one Araceli had never fully pondered before. Among Mexicans the peculiar coldness of the norteamericanos was legendary because it came to infect the many paisanos who lived among them. One heard how individualism and the cult of work swallowed up the hours of the American day, their sunsets and their springtimes, causing their family gatherings, their friendships, and their old people to disappear. But it was quite another thing to be thrust directly into an American family’s lonely drama, to find your mexicana self a player in their game of secrets and silences, their separation from one another by long stretches of freeway, by time zones and airline hubs and long-distance phone rates. And what about the absent family patriarchs? Not once had she heard Maureen speak of her father, there were no pictures of the man anywhere. Was he dead too, like Scott’s mother? And if so, why was he not mourned with photographs? Or was he simply banished from the home like the boys’ Mexican grandfather? It seemed to Araceli that el viejo Torres should have his number on the refrigerator. Why wasn’t it there?
Maureen’s room at the High Desert Radiance Spa was a two-room suite in which both rooms opened to a strand of Joshua trees, their twisted limbs arranged on a gently sloping hillside in the poses of a modern dance troupe. Just after sunrise, she stepped outside and sat in a plastic chair on the small cement patio, while Samantha slept inside the room, curled up under her favorite blanket in a fold-up crib that housekeeping put away every afternoon. The evening chill would be baked away soon, but for the moment wisps of freezer air whispered to the Joshua trees and nudged the tumbleweeds forward. Yesterday morning she and Samantha had walked the spa’s hiking trail (“difficulty: low”), following it to the opening of a scrub canyon, where Samantha climbed up a small sandstone rock shaped like the belly of a very pregnant woman. Oh, to have brought a camera to capture my little mountaineer! The hours here passed with few thoughts of shouting men or broken tables. A mother and daughter on their own had a mellow symmetry, and since arriving at this oasis Samantha had not had a single tantrum: obviously this girl needed more time alone with her mother; she relished not having to compete for attention with two older boys. Maureen herself felt replenished. There was an essence of herself that she had neglected, a part of her soul that was attached to this dry, austere, and harsh place. A California equivalent to the Missouri grasslands, to the places where her homesteader ancestors stood on the blank slate of the land. I am a woman of open spaces. The only male presence in her getaway was the kneading hands of a man named Philip, who applied oils scented with sage and chamomile to her skin, and who left only the few, forbidden centers of her body untouched. Now I know all the things I haven’t allowed myself to feel for years.
The plan had been to return home Monday morning, to face Scott again and perhaps to forgive him. Perhaps. But then the good people at the front desk had mentioned their Monday discount. She would have just enough of the emergency cash left to stay one more night and take one more session on that table.
On Saturday night, Araceli put the boys to bed with none of the drama and screaming of the night before. They had spent the afternoon in various illicit pursuits, chief among them an hour-l ong gun battle with plastic pistols that fired foam bullets, the boys laughing as the projectiles bounced harmlessly off the furniture and their bodies. Araceli had forced the boys to clean up the house, and they had simply acquiesced when she declared, “Ya es tarde, time for sleep.” Once they were in bed, she pulled back the blankets to cover them, in imitation of the mothers she had seen in movies, because she couldn’t remember her own mother doing such a thing. These boys seemed to appreciate and need the gesture, and Araceli even touched Brandon on the forehead when she noticed the tears welling in his eyes.
“Do you think Mom and Dad will ever come back, Araceli?” he asked.
“No te preocupes. Your mommy will be back soon. And Araceli is taking care of you now.” Araceli spoke these words more soothingly than any she had ever addressed to these boys, or to any other children, and she felt a sudden and unexpected welling of altruism coursing through her veins, a drug that straightened your back and made you feel taller. What else can you tell two lost boys but that you will take care of them? “Araceli will take care of you,” she repeated. “I will sleep here, on the floor, again. ¿Está bien? A little later. After I wash the dishes.”
Araceli pulled herself from the hallway floor just outside the door of the Room of a Thousand Wonders the next morning with the boys still sleeping. They were sweating inside their brightly colored pajamas, shirts and pants with superheroes imprinted on them, men of rippling muscles in various flying poses whose courage offered protection against such evil threats as temporary parental abandonment. Their wet hair was matted against their foreheads, strands clinging to beads of perspiration. Keenan was curled up in a fetal position, clutching a pillow and a stuffed lion between his arms. If I am still taking care of them tonight, I will tell them to go to bed in shorts.
She wandered through the house again, quickly peeking into the garage to see if Maureen’s or Scott’s car was there, and then to the living room and the gallery of faces inside teak and cherrywood on the bookshelves. These pictures, Araceli realized, were the only clues that could untangle this family mess. The portraits of the grandfather, el viejo Torres, called out to her most loudly, smiling wryly from the final decades of black-and-white photography, a teenager standing before a Los Angeles bungalow, his swarthy skin rendered in tones of gray and darker gray, hands on his hips and an irresistible twinkle in his eye. This relic had been here since Araceli had started working for the Torres-Thompsons, when the old man was still coming to the house regularly, before he uttered the words that caused his banishment. What did you say, viejo? And where might I find you? Araceli remembered the looks of exasperation on the faces of Maureen and Scott when they discussed el viejo Torres in the kitchen one Saturday afternoon, and snippets of conversation: “What a jerk.” “What a dinosaur.”
Probably Maureen had not yet gotten around to removing el dinosaurio from this family gallery because he was on the bottom shelf, in a lesser spot in relation to the recent school pictures of the boys with eager smiles and moussed hair, and of Maureen herself holding the newborn and slippery Samant
ha while sitting up with exhausted ecstasy on a hospital bed. Maureen in the delivery room was on the shelf next to a recent shot of Samantha with a red bow in her thin hair and to the bronze-toned image of a woman with pinned-up hair and a giant curtain of a dress staring back from the Victorian era, the folds in the corners of her eyes suggesting she was Maureen’s grandmother or great-grandmother. Next there was a recent shot of Maureen’s mother, taken in a pine forest, a gray-haired woman in khaki shorts and hiking books, with a faint and uncharacteristic smile. This is the woman’s shelf: there are four generations of girls from Maureen’s family here. Araceli considered too, on the second shelf from the top, the wedding pictures of Scott and Maureen, including a shot of the couple laughing and bending their bodies in an expression of the kind of uncontainable hilarity that hadn’t been seen in the Torres-Thompson household for quite some time.
Of all these people, Araceli concluded, old man Torres was the only adult still alive and likely to live in a place reachable from Paseo Linda Bonita. They hadn’t yet purged the old man from the family, not completely—he was a resilient mexicano, apparently. If their parents don’t come back, I’ll take them to this old man’s house. Araceli would have to prepare herself for the worst contingency. She had been used to thinking this way once, her naturally pessimistic outlook had served her well in her single-woman bus journey to the border, and then through the sprint, hike, and crawl into California, and in the first few harrowing and lonely weeks in the United States. Those were days of important lessons, though the subsequent four years in this household on Paseo Linda Bonita had led her to the false belief that the world might still have sanctuaries where prosperity and predictability reigned. Standing here now in front of pictures of the absent and departed members of the Torres and Thompson clans, she realized she might soon have to start thinking like an immigrant, like a desperate woman on the highway uncertain where the asphalt and the invisible trails of carbon monoxide might take her.
