Free The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar

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
    O ver 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 takingpills 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