Primitive People

by Francine Prose

  IN SEVERAL OF HER magazines Simone had read warnings: Women driving alone should always check the front and back seats before entering a vehicle. But where could an intruder have found room to hide in Rosemary’s Volvo? Simone’s anxiety filled the whole car—and ambushed her when she got in.

  Leaving Geoffrey’s office, she missed the children intensely and felt barely capable of making her way home alone. She reminded herself of how long and how well she had functioned before she knew them, traveled from Port-au-Prince to New York without George and Maisie’s support. But rage and pain were great navigators, and besides, she hadn’t been driving.

  Simone’s heart began to thrum like a moth in ajar. Luckily she had to stay on the road and couldn’t afford to panic, and after a moment the fluttering stopped, leaving her giddy and weak. She squinted against the flickering sun that jumped out from behind the black trees in the huge locker full of dead sheep pretending to be a forest.

  Simone told herself, This is peaceful. In Haiti there was war, bursts of automatic fire and bodies in the street. On the night of the last election she’d lain in bed, waiting for Joseph. Everyone expected violence, she’d heard shots from every direction, but she wasn’t worried that Joseph might be hurt—she was afraid he was with someone else. Probably he was with Inez; probably she knew that. What a small, selfish person she’d been in that vast sea of trouble and pain. So it followed that her motives for leaving Haiti seemed, from this distance, small and pathetic. She would have felt better about her life if she had left for political reasons; the victims of history were heroic in ways that the victims of heartbreak were not. But perhaps it had all worked out for the best; for the moment she was safe, and after the turmoil she’d left behind, a moment of safety was fine.

  Here people got in line and took turns. Cars crawled through drive-in banks. No one stumbled by the road beneath impossible burdens, the bent real-life versions of the happy laundresses Joseph painted. No wonder Americans loved the sight of people with laundry on their heads! They all had washing machines and a car to carry their clothes. This was life like clockwork. This was peace, not war. And yet it didn’t seem peaceful, though Simone could not have said why.

  Simone got back to Rosemary’s with no idea how she’d got there. She stood in the foyer, listening for music or for the squeal of Rosemary’s air compressor. The house was eerily quiet. Was Rosemary asleep upstairs? Simone had the Volvo. Rosemary never walked. Had Shelly taken her somewhere? How much time would Simone have to pass until she could go get the children?

  Then Simone heard a rustling like the dry scratch of a mouse and tracked the noise to the living room, where she found Rosemary on the couch, extending one limp hand to Simone from her shroud of a navy blanket.

  “Oh, Simone, you’re here,” she gasped. “Oh thank God. Thank God you’ve come.” Rosemary pushed the covers down a few inches. Her forehead glistened with sweat.

  “I can’t breathe,” she whispered. “I’m having some kind of attack.” Simone could tell it was not a habitual thing Rosemary knew how to handle. In Port-au-Prince she had seen a woman have a seizure on the street. The woman was alone when she fell and no one came to help; people watched, keeping their distance, until the woman stopped twitching.

  “We’ll have to try the Instacare Clinic,” Rosemary managed to pant. “Shapiro will be out running some dismal marathon and his answering service is so deaf you just call and scream and hang up.”

  A look of concentration—of listening—came over Rosemary’s face. “Shit,” she said, “here it comes again,” and her chest swelled and collapsed with a harsh rhythmic croak. An unwilled thought came to Simone—the frogs on George’s computer—and its giddy inappropriateness made her realize how scared she was. What if Rosemary died and Simone was left here alone, an illegal alien with a dead employer? What did it mean that, on the drive here, her own heart had acted up, too? Was it weather, air pressure, some contagious disease? Wasn’t it human to take on the feelings of those with whom you lived closely? Simone had come to share Miss McCaffrey’s pleasure when a dance performance went well, and Joseph’s political angers and Inez’s twitchy boredom.

  On the way to the clinic Rosemary said, “Turn right. No, I meant left.” Emergency seemed to have oiled the wheels so Simone could make tricky U-turns.

  At last they found the red brick building. “Fast-food medical care,” Rosemary said. “The last wrinkle they have yet to iron out is the drive-in appendectomy.”

  A woman behind a window took Rosemary’s credit card. Simone was relieved that Rosemary seemed able to manage without her help. Rosemary said, “This is going to sound hypochondriacal, but I’m in acute respiratory failure.”

  “Don’t worry, dear.” The receptionist smiled. “Leave the diagnosis to Doctor.”

  “Come this way,” she said, and Rosemary shot a wild look at Simone. Both of them followed the woman into a curtained-off cubicle.

  “Hop on the table,” said the woman. “You’ll want to take off that fur coat. Doctor won’t hear a heartbeat, and then where will we be?”

  On her way out the woman drew the curtain. They could hear her and the doctor yelling back and forth.

  “How was I supposed to know he’s her nephew?” the doctor said. “The worst kind of teenage shithead, the absolute scum of the earth. I don’t ask, I don’t want to ask how he broke the arm. Okay, I’m not as gentle as I might be, seeing if I can set it. He keeps screaming, ‘Aunt Suzie! Aunt Suzie!’ How am I supposed to know Aunt Suzie is Susan, my goddamn nurse?”

  A white-haired man yanked open the curtain and told Rosemary and Simone, “What we have around here is what they call organized chaos. Know anyone who wants a job?”

  Simone looked at Rosemary. Were they expected to answer?

  “I’m Dr. Worms,” he told them. “Believe me, I’ve heard every possible joke about my name. What’s the problem, young lady?”

  Rosemary burst into tears and in a strangled voice managed to convey the fact that she couldn’t breathe.

  “There, there.” The doctor patted her shoulder. “I know how it is. You’re the one who can’t get sick. The hubby can get sick and the kids can get sick but you can’t let up for a minute.”

  He felt the glands under Rosemary’s neck and put a stethoscope to her heart. He said, “You know, there is one thing women do better …” and waited till Rosemary asked, “What?”

  “Everything!” The doctor grinned. “I think you’ll be fine. Short of hooking you up to a million bucks’ worth of electronics better suited to an auto shop than a human, I have to go with my hunch, which is that physically you’re shipshape. Something’s just getting to you. How many kids do you have?”

  “Two,” said Rosemary.

  “Three,” the doctor corrected her.

  “Three?” Rosemary looked bewildered. Was there one she’d forgotten?

  “Three counting your husband,” he said.

  Rosemary said, “I guess you know my husband.” The doctor said, “I’m just like him.”

  A few days later Rosemary saw her regular doctor for a checkup. This was after much discussion with Simone and then on the phone with Shelly, asking Shelly the same questions she had just asked Simone: Was something really wrong with her? Should she bother with the doctor? Wasn’t it normal that Rosemary should feel a tiny bit fried the first weekend her children spent with their psycho father?

  But it hadn’t just been in her head. She had had physical symptoms. Who knew what fatal condition Dr. Worms—Dr. Worms!—might have overlooked. What kind of physician hears you can’t breathe and makes dumb jokes about your husband? What had he done in another state to wind up working at that clinic?

  Simone’s father had died suddenly of an aneurysm of the brain and her mother, some years later, succumbed in a matter of days to meningitis. That both of them had been fully alive and then, dizzyingly, dead made Simone feel unqualified to give medical advice.

  Rosemary came home from Dr. Shapiro’s offi
ce with an armload of pamphlets that she dumped on the kitchen table and read, a paragraph from each one. “I’ve been kidding myself,” she said. “Talking bananas and potassium and eating potato chips and toxic fumes. You can only fool the body so long. Our whole lives will have to change.”

  The first change was a treadmill Rosemary bought at a sports shop. “Nordic skiers are indestructible,” she said. “Excepting, I guess, the Finns, who all have coronaries at fifty. Don’t the Finns go cross-country skiing? I guess not enough to counteract all that reindeer butter.”

  From then on Rosemary could often be found skipping on the conveyor belt—even this she chose to do in her mouton coat. She said, “I must look like a grocery item trying to escape. What I feel like is a guinea pig in an abusive lab experiment.” She put the treadmill near the telephone so she could work out while chatting with Shelly. Rosemary told Simone it was easier to talk to Geoffrey now that she knew she was secretly fitting him into her exercise routine.

  Every so often Rosemary tried to get George to try the treadmill. She said the exercise would do him good, but George shook his head firmly no.

  “Can you imagine!” Rosemary said. “I would have loved it when I was his age!”

  Maisie stood at a distance watching with what Simone alone recognized as the superiority of a child who can climb straight up the walls.

  Rosemary changed her diet: no more burned-burger-and-pretzel dinners. Now she lived on moderate portions of Simone’s rice and beans and plantains. Everything came up for review, what was healthy and what wasn’t. Some things were psychologically good and physically bad, and the relative merits had to be carefully weighed. Luckily, the spiritual benefits of Rosemary’s sculpture canceled the risk of liver damage from the fiberglass and resins.

  Part of Rosemary’s program for mental health was to get out of the house more. Simone heard her ask Shelly on the phone, “Who’s doing the Halloween party?” Rosemary was silent a moment, then said, “Oh, I see. No, I don’t think I know them.”

  After that Rosemary paid new attention to the telephone and the mail, and once Simone heard her say, to a pile of junk flyers, “Come on, someone must celebrate Halloween. I’d settle for a charity bash, the Cerebral Palsy Harvest Moon Ball.”

  Simone coughed to make her presence known and to stop Rosemary from humbling herself before the mail. Without missing a beat Rosemary said, “Despite what one hears about charities, they’re grotesquely efficient. The day Geoffrey moved out, all the envelopes with envelopes inside got redirected elsewhere.”

  A few days before Halloween, Rosemary appeared in the kitchen. Maisie swallowed her corn flakes and pointed as if at an apparition. George said, “I can’t believe it. Mom’s got up for breakfast!”

  “Shut up, George.” Rosemary smiled. “I don’t appreciate the implications. Listen, I’ve got a brilliant idea. Halloween at the mall! I heard about it on the radio—it’s supposed to be terrific. Costumes! Prizes! Trick or treat! Free candy for the kiddies! Bob-bob-bobbing for apples!”

  George and Maisie and Simone looked at each other, and George rolled his eyes. Several times the children had asked if they could go to the mall for Halloween, but Rosemary had brushed the question off into some indefinite future.

  After the children left for school Rosemary considered costumes. “Let’s be creative,” she urged Simone. “This is a chance to expand their nonexistent art education, or at least work around the rigidity of those minimum-security prisons known as public schools. What do you think George should be? Perhaps something therapeutic, a lion or a tiger. It might do him good to go around roaring like the king of the jungle.”

  Simone had a dismaying vision of George in a humiliating kitty-cat suit, and when it seemed that Rosemary might have fixed on this idea, Simone cast about frantically for an alternative that would spare him.

  She said, “Maybe George could be an Eskimo,” and regretted it at once. The Eskimos were George’s secret—and she had given it away. Would he understand how anxious she’d been to save him from Halloween as a kitty?

  “An Eskimo?” Rosemary said. “An Eskimo? There may be such a thing as too creative. George, let me point out, is a white person. But wait. This could be genius. Recycle some old furs from the attic, creepy shaman stuff. I’m sure he’d like some kind of harpoon, very weaponesque and phallic, always appropriate for the shaky pre-adolescent ego. And Maisie? We could do Maisie as the Death of Little Nell. Come on, I’m joking, Little Nell is precisely what we want to avoid. We want something healthy, organic, American. What about Pocahontas? The only Native American Hudson Landing is going to see.”

  Rosemary and Simone foraged in the attic and found a smelly fur parka for George and a feathered Indian bonnet for Maisie.

  “Perfect!” Rosemary said. “Let’s surprise them. No peeking till Halloween!”

  On Halloween the children came home from school and took one look at their costumes, and their faces crumpled.

  “What’s the matter?” Rosemary asked through clenched teeth. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  George gave Simone an accusing look. Clearly he thought she’d told his mother about the Eskimo videotape. There was no way to invoke the kitty-cat she’d rescued him from being.

  “These feathers are from a bird,” Maisie said.

  “A dead bird,” Rosemary pointed out. “By that point plumage was the least of its problems. But I like this evidence in you, Maisie, of correct ecological thinking. The feather bonnet was unconscious of me, a mistake I won’t repeat. Meanwhile, put it on for now and let me paint your face. You will be sadder being the only kid without a costume than worrying about some chicken that died ages before you were born. Besides, it’s nature red in tooth and claw. Do you think Pocahontas worried about dead birds?”

  The night was dark and sheeted with rain. Rosemary’s nose inched toward the windshield.

  “Every car in the opposite lane,” she said, “is full of guys dressed as Diana Ross and the Supremes.”

  The children had grumpily donned their costumes and now were taking it out on each other. “Quit it!” Maisie shrieked. “George is poking me with his harpoon!”

  “They’re really very much improved,” Rosemary told Simone. “A few months ago even sibling conflict was beyond their energy level. I really have to say, Simone, that your friendship has made a difference.”

  This was almost enough to reconcile Simone to the humiliations of her own costume: high heels and a little black shirt and a gold lamé mini-skirt. Simone and Rosemary were dressed, respectively, as Tina and Ike Turner.

  Finding the gold skirt for Simone had inspired Rosemary, who seemed relieved, even overjoyed, that Simone knew who Tina Turner was. In fact, her music video had been the most popular request on the American Center TV. That had pleased Miss McCaffrey, who liked Tina Turner as much as ballet, the difference being they couldn’t afford to bring Tina Turner to Haiti. Rosemary had teased Simone’s hair till it looked like an agitated turkey, then darkened her own face with makeup, spray-dyed her own hair black, and now looked rather natty in a boy’s white tuxedo. For the first time in months Rosemary had shed her mouton coat.

  “It’s our Carnival,” she said. “Or our excuse for Carnival or Mardi Gras or whatever. The one night out of the whole year we get to dress up and act out.”

  Simone felt as if objecting to her costume would be a sin against the culture. That had been Miss McCaffrey’s phrase, “sinning against the culture”; several times she’d told Simone that the greatest statesmen were the ones who would sit on the floor of the tent and eat the eye of the sheep. Still, the reference to Mardi Gras filled Simone with misgivings; she had always had a terrible time at Carnival in Port-au-Prince. Last year Joseph contrived to get lost in the crowd and disappeared for days, which at least excused Simone from having to fake the Carnival spirit. Even—especially—as a child the ecstatic mobs alarmed her. Though she longed to be the sort of person who enjoyed that sort of surrender and could briefl
y forget herself and lean on the arms of the crowd, she hated it when crowds picked up and moved without anyone seeming to will it.

  Rosemary had definitely caught the spirit. Tonight as they’d left the house, she’d taken a long swig from a vodka bottle in the freezer. She’d said, “All I need is the silver coke spoon to make my costume complete. Georgie, where’s that cheap electric guitar we bought and you never played?”

  Now from the back seat George said, “There was this drunk driver on TV? He wiped out this mom and kids, they were on bikes? And they took away his license and he went to jail for life?”

  “Relax, George,” said Rosemary. “One swig of vodka does not a DWI make. What gives me the willies,” she told Simone, “is that in six years they’ll be driving.”

  “Six years for me,” said George. “Ten years for her.”

  Rosemary was looping wide circles around the mall parking lot. She said, “Geoffrey had that male fetish about parking right by the entrance. I myself never had any desire to compete in that arena.” They parked a mile from any other cars and hiked out into the rain.

  Simone tottered behind the others on her ice-pick heels. George waited for her to catch up and then said, “Did you tell my mom about the Eskimo tape?”

  “No,” replied Simone. “I did not. But I had to do something. Your mother was planning to dress you as a lion or a tiger.” Once more telling the truth had involved going too far. It was wrong to make these children feel any more misunderstood by their parents—wrong of Simone to incriminate Rosemary in order to clear herself. But the force of the truth seemed to work on George, who believed and appeared to forgive her. The brisk walk through the cold drizzly lot made their talk heartfelt and intense.

  George said, “Simone, if you tell anyone I’ll never speak to you again.”

  Simone knew that George meant it. She said, “Don’t worry. I won’t.” There was no point asking him why he needed this secret kept. The tape was not about hunting or blood but about George’s secret religion. The igloo was a refuge to him, a haven where things were simple, uncomplicated by sarcasm or ambiguous adult nuance. Well, why shouldn’t people have ceremonies that gave them some courage or hope, just so long as it didn’t involve killing something for the occasion? Sometimes Simone envied believers their spirits and loas, whose tricks and whims and grudges so neatly explained the world. If your lover left you it might be consoling to think that someone had prayed to Erzulie and turned the goddess of love against you. Joseph said that voodoo was an instrument of ignorance and repression which should be rooted out of the people even if nothing took root in its place. Yet he was surprisingly tolerant of Inez’s flirtation with voodoo and amused by her stories about the jewelry and perfumes her rich friends put on Erzulie’s altar to secure her help with an affair, a seduction, or a revenge. It had taken Simone this long to hear how it must have sounded to Joseph—Inez prattling on about women who would do anything for love.