Finally Geoffrey said, “It’s quiet up there.”
Shelly said, “That must mean they’re unconscious. You really do have weird children. You know that, don’t you, Geoffrey?”
“Meaning what?” Geoffrey didn’t want to hear. Simone heard in his voice the same edge of fear that Kenny had, talking to Shelly. Why hadn’t anyone taught Simone that meanness gave you power? How stupid of her to think that men liked you to be nice! Perhaps it would help Maisie to grow up observing this.
Shelly went on. “George never picks up his feet and Maisie’s feet don’t touch the ground. They’re both such morbid little freaks. Living with Rosemary can’t be fostering tiptop mental health. Geoffrey, I mean, for example: there we were in your car stuck in the snow—and what were we talking about? Children all over the country are talking Batman and Robin. Your children were talking about horse hearts and hearts in fried-chicken buckets.”
“Batman was three summers ago,” Geoffrey said coolly. “If you’re going to spend time with them you’re going to have to keep current. Anyway, you were the one with the wholesome story about the hearts in the bathroom sink.”
Shelly said, “Heart. Singular. The funny thing is, I got halfway through the story and realized that I couldn’t finish it. There was an adult detail I had to quickly blue-pencil out. The R-rated part is that afterward my sister took me aside and told me: the whole time my dad was showing us that heart, she could see a humongous erection underneath his pants.”
“Wow,” Geoffrey said. “Was it true?”
“How should I know?” Shelly said. “I wouldn’t have known what one looked like.”
“You’ve since learned,” said Geoffrey.
“So they tell me,” Shelly said.
An unwelcome image arose before Simone: the corpse on the street in Haiti. The dead man was not just sliced open—he had been castrated, too. The crows briefly attended the hole in his groin before they moved up to his eyes. Simone shouted and waved her arms at the crows. They rose a few inches up in the air, then fluttered and landed again.
Downstairs it was quiet. Then Geoffrey thudded across the room. Simone heard him take down two cups and fill them with coffee. The legs of his chair scraped the floor as he sat. A spoon clinked against a cup.
“Ugh, sugar,” said Shelly. “White death.”
AFTER THAT, SIMONE WAS always uneasy when she was apart from the children. It was not unlike the way she’d felt when she’d first begun to drive. Now, too, she felt safer in George and Maisie’s presence, perversely reassured by the fact that they all knew the same troubling thing. Not once did they mention the afternoon with Shelly and their father, a silence that permitted Simone the faint unreasonable hope that it had all been a hallucination induced by the white and the cold. Once more the children reminded her of Haitian children as they took on the bombed-out look of civilian noncombatants in a war that has dragged on so long that nothing more can shock them. Now that Simone knew their secrets, she wondered why she had wanted to—so they could all suffer together in this uncertain state?
Irrationally Simone let herself think that they could keep Rosemary safe, as if their knowing the truth would somehow give them control and they could protect her from having to learn it. Simone could hardly remember how Rosemary had looked to her that first day, the doyenne of the manor conducting her on a tour of the filthy attic, the dotty rich woman in the fur coat, the owner of eyeless paintings. More and more, Rosemary reminded Simone of a frazzled cartoon creature, blithely crossing a chasm on the ghost of the bridge that its nemesis has just exploded. Rosemary talked about Geoffrey evicting them—but not for a moment did she believe that it would actually happen.
Shelly wanted Geoffrey and the house. Their peaceful life here was in danger. Each morning Simone woke up thinking catastrophe might occur before nightfall. But it didn’t, Rosemary didn’t find out, night came, and then the next morning.
The elements protected them. Snow fell every day. The pantry was stocked with plantains, rice and beans, frozen shrimp, carrots and celery, so there was no need to leave the house or ever go outside. In the mornings the school bus came on one-hour and two-hour delays, and the radio station that warned them of this became their link to the outside world.
The radio announcer called this a record-breaking early December snow. He remarked how bizarre the weather was—had anybody noticed?—in dire tones, as if in a code whose dark meaning his listeners would know. Simone had no trouble believing that nature was struggling and dying; there was hardly a tree left on the whole island of Haiti. But she had only his word for it that this was unusual weather here. For all she knew, it was a lie cooked up for foreigners to believe, and the truth was that their Decembers had always been like this. She had not seen a year here, she had not even been through a season. It was so often a mistake to think she knew what this place was like.
The radio announcer became a presence in the house, with his own personality and quirks, one of which was the inability to say something bad without immediately saying something good. So the fact of six inches of snow was the promise of a white Christmas. He was constantly reminding them of how many days were left till Christmas, announcing the number aggressively, as if he meant to scare them. And indeed the children’s gloom deepened as the number decreased.
One evening the phone rang, and when Simone answered, Geoffrey said, “Is Rosemary home?”
Simone said, “She’s in her studio.”
Geoffrey said, “Could you get her?”
Rosemary had been in a sculpting frenzy ever since the day she’d got drunk and told Simone the story of her and Geoffrey’s last fight. Simone found her covered with plaster dust, her lips powdery and caked. When she took off her goggles, two raccoony circles remained. Her spattered fur coat seemed to have been rescued in mid-cremation. Rosemary was sanding a statue made of some kind of pumice that looked at once like a female nude and a cankerous growth on a tree.
Simone walked with Rosemary from the studio back to the phone. On the way Rosemary said, “I know this is awkward for you, Simone, it would have been very hard for you to refuse to disturb me. But if, when I am working, you could find some way to spare me these distracting interruptions …”
Rosemary picked up the phone and, without saying hello, said, “I know what this is about. This is going to be about Christmas.”
It was the first indication that, unprompted, she knew what season it was. She took the phone in the pantry and closed the door behind her. Simone and the children could hear her rage like a madwoman in a cell. At last they heard the unmistakable crack of a phone slammed down on the hook, and Rosemary appeared at the pantry door, red-faced and streaked with tears.
“Well, it’s settled!” she trilled. “George and Maisie will spend Christmas Eve at their father’s. At precisely eleven on Christmas morning Geoffrey will bring them back as far as the end of the driveway. I will not have Simone driving all over creation on Christmas Day just because my children’s father is being possessive and selfish. And George and Maisie will have two Christmases—the divorced children’s compensation!”
George cranked his forearm in the air. Maisie clapped her hands. They were so relieved to be having any Christmas at all.
Rosemary said, “We’ll have a real old-fashioned Christmas dinner. George and Maisie and me and Simone. And we’ll invite Kenny and Shelly.”
Rosemary’s new resoluteness had sparked a flicker of hope in the children that, at the mention of Shelly’s name, instantly sputtered out. Simone and the children stared at the floor, to which they were suddenly rooted. People believed there were voodoo spells that could paralyze you like this: you were walking across your house and suddenly froze in position, and you stood there as your systems shut down and your heartbeat quit.
Rosemary, on the contrary, seemed galvanized into action. Perhaps her talk with Geoffrey had reminded her of reality, or at least infected her with the spirit of healthy competition.
Earl
y one afternoon she called Simone to her studio to plan the children’s Christmas. She said, “I feel like some Pentagon spokesman with bad news about the military budget. I’ve squirreled away two hundred dollars from Geoffrey’s stingy allowance. So what we are looking at, basically, is poverty-level Christmas. Meanwhile, the woodchuck parents of my children’s school friends are spending major bucks on remote-control high-tech junk that will break on Christmas morning.”
What school friends? Simone wondered. This wasn’t the time to ask. It was surprising, even impressive, to see Rosemary so focused, so in touch with the fact that she had children, and that a holiday was coming that they might want to observe. Had Rosemary done this every Christmas? Delayed till the last minute and then pulled everything together? However would Simone know? This was her first Christmas here. She couldn’t even tell if this was a record-breaking snow.
Rosemary said, “This will be a test of our creativity. A real old-fashioned pre-MasterCard Christmas. Popcorn and cranberry wreaths for the tree—as if fresh cranberries weren’t expensive! It’s a lot like Halloween at the mall, another creativity tester: American women, including ourselves, using skills they don’t think they possess. I just wish there were a wider range, that we got to do something artistic besides making dinosaur costumes from packing foam and big Christmases on small budgets.”
But weren’t they in a studio crammed with Rosemary’s artistic life? It would have seemed mean-spirited for Simone to point this out while Rosemary was so generously making a wish on behalf of other women.
“Dress warmly,” Rosemary cautioned Simone. They went out on the lawn. The brittle crust on top of the snow cracked beneath their feet. Rosemary carried pruning shears, Simone a two-handled straw basket. Rosemary clipped a few pine boughs, and they gathered the rest from the ground. The heavy basket rocked into their shins as they lugged it back to the house.
In Haiti Simone had seen Macbeth performed by a troupe from Puerto Rico. Palm fronds camouflaged Macduff’s army, and the audience gasped when the jungle shuddered and glided across the stage. Now Simone wished that Rosemary could camouflage the mansion, cover it with pine boughs, and sneak it away past Shelly. But all Rosemary had in mind was some greenery over the doorways. Simone held the ladder while Rosemary tacked up the boughs and flecks of paint and wallboard showered down on their heads.
The next day Rosemary took Simone shopping to the grocery and the mall. She practiced the driving advice she’d preached—two miles an hour in bad weather. The errands took even longer because Rosemary had heard of a market in Fishkill giving away free Christmas turkeys with every thirty-dollar purchase.
En route they considered the question of why the turkeys were free. Were they the victims of some toxic spill or pernicious turkey disease? Rosemary said, “If this is what Geoffrey wants, I guess he’s going to get it. His beloved children eating turkeys from Chernobyl, the poisonous food of the poor. Or maybe they truck these turkeys in from voodoo temples in the Bronx. Do you think you could tell, Simone—identify secret ritual markings?”
The turkeys were crammed in a cooler just inside the supermarket door. Floating in pinkish fluid in amniotic plastic sacks, they resembled specimens preserved in cloudy jars, medical anomalies: adults dead in the womb. Rosemary deliberated as if they were puppies she was trying to pick from a litter, as if each one had a living soul that might beg her to take it home. Finally she chose one, apparently at random, and raced off after cranberries, popping corn, broccoli, and yams.
The turkey beeped as the cashier whisked it over the sensor. She said, “You should have seen the guys that brought these in on the truck.”
“Did they glow in the dark?” Rosemary asked.
“I’m not kidding you,” the woman said. “Dust masks and space suits and goggles.”
Rosemary and Simone loaded the car, and as they drove to the mall, Rosemary outlined her plans to divide and conquer. They would split up and shop for the children and meet in time to leave. Attacking the problem this way would let them cover more ground and not oblige them to be an audience for one another’s choices. It would spare them competitive jostling if they both found the same perfect gift.
Rosemary never considered that Simone might not have money. She must have assumed that Simone was cashing the checks she infrequently gave her—one more happy consequence of refusing to balance her checking account. In fact, Simone had thirty dollars skimmed from grocery money and another thirty still left over from the original sixty she’d got to pay Kenny. Even touching the uncashed checks in her drawer felt dangerous and risky, while not cashing them seemed like a sacrifice, a ritual offering: paying money to the drawer so her life here would not have to change.
In the mall, before they separated, Rosemary said, “Look around you. Everyone is either on the edge of tears or on the edge of murder. To not keep this constantly in mind is to ask for a chilling surprise.”
Simone found the toy store with its maze of burrows, more like tunnels than aisles between high walls of cardboard boxes. Many of the boxes showed gleeful, shiny-faced children enjoying the games inside, aiming missile-like plastic bees at vibrating electric hives and bouncing on the kind of sports equipment that George and Maisie would most despise. The tiny hassocklike trampoline would humiliate George and demean Maisie’s power to leave the ground on her own.
Parents staggered through the store weighed down by bulky objects; their faces were contorted gargoyles of frustration and rage. Many searched frantically for some unfindable special offer. A young woman told Simone, “My girl friend warned me they’d be sold out by October. You would not believe how many people do their Christmas shopping on Labor Day weekend. Each year I swear I’ll be like that. But we can never get it together till the last minute. Am I right?”
Simone bristled at being included in this fellowship of the slow, and hurried off past the models of fighter planes designed to make George seem unhandy, the sewing sets created to make Maisie feel clumsy, exiled from female life. She floated out into the mall, where in the bright light every face suggested an arrested scream, except for the mothers of small children who were actually screaming. Two teenage girls in jeans walked by with a little boy on a leash.
Simone was suddenly conscious that no one here looked like her—for the moment, anyway, there were no other black faces around, and people either stared at her like naturalists at a weird bird or saw her coming and averted their eyes, as from a wreck by the side of the road. She couldn’t remember feeling this way since she’d come to Hudson Landing, not at the supermarket or on the street or here at the mall on Halloween; but then she had been with a white family and everyone had been in costume.
The only ones who paid no attention to her were the children standing in line, waiting to see Santa. Simone’s first year at the embassy, they’d had a Christmas party at which the embassy children lined up to see Santa with the same poleaxed looks of horror as the children here. By the next year, the escalating violence had sent the children back to the States, and the Christmas party had no Santa Claus, only very drunk adults.
Now, as she drifted past the children, past a store specializing in neon-framed photos of movie stars, Simone, like Rosemary among the turkeys, was listening for some private communication—in this case from some shop or toy that was right for George or Maisie. At last she caught a faint signal from a stall of odd lamps that resembled ghost aquariums from which all the fish had decamped, leaving fantastic plant forms waving sinuously in a lit-up neon sea. The water in the smallest lamp was a maraschino red. Simone’s instinct, that Maisie would love it, was confirmed by its costing ten dollars.
The wrapped-up lamp felt like ballast, anchoring her to the world and making her somewhat more confident as she entered a store devoted to gadgets made of steel and chrome. Huge blown-up photos showed men fishing in streams and rafting through foaming rivers. A compass that told the time and gave the positions of the stars was much too expensive, but the Junior Jacknife cost twent
y dollars and seemed perfect for George.
The ponytailed salesman agreed. “It’s never too early,” he said. “If I had a kid I would get him a knife as soon as he could hold it. The shit kids have to deal with in their neighborhoods these days—I’d get my kid an assault rifle to bring along to first grade.”
Simone wondered if he would have said that if she weren’t black. The photos around them suggested that knives were for freeing trout from hooks rather than for self-defense in outbreaks of bloody street violence. Probably she should reconsider what she was doing—buying a knife for an unhappy, morbid ten-year-old boy. Now, of course, she remembered how terrifying it was when George borrowed Rosemary’s X-Acto knife to work on his science projects. And yet Simone felt sure that George wouldn’t hurt himself and would greatly value the knife as a talisman and a vote of faith in him as a miniature man.
But the minute both gifts were in her possession all her happy conviction vanished, and she realized that they were wrong, misguided, pointless wastes of money. She didn’t know these children, really, didn’t know what would make them happy, and had got them demoralizing, insulting objects they would hate.
How primitive it all was, she thought, like some voodoo sacrifice in which everything depended on finding the right offering for the right god. But in this ritual the spirits were those of your family and friends, and you knew in advance that no gift would suffice and everything would be rejected.
Simone spotted Rosemary on a bench by the chocolate-chip-cookie wagon. She dreaded the prospect of Rosemary asking what she’d bought. She sat down beside her, by the artificial trees that dappled the shafts of colorless sun filtering down through the skylight.
“Let’s see.” Rosemary rummaged among Simone’s parcels. Unlit, Maisie’s lamp looked putrified and stagnant.
“Nice,” Rosemary said.
She reacted more positively to George’s pocketknife. After a minute of speechless horror she said, “No, I get it. I get it! This is a genius present for George. It will make him feel more like a male—what a revolting prospect.”
Primitive People Page 17
