Primitive People (13 page)

“Of course they have to allow it—there’s only Rick DeWitt left. His second wife, the bride’s stepmother, is a Manhattan gynecologist! How did Rick meet a gynecologist is what
I
want to know. The consulting gynecologist at the dry-out clinic! I
know
your grandfather was a gynecologist, Shelly. This is different; that was Memphis. In any case, Rick DeWitt’s the reason one has to go. And of course the house and the setting. The food will be vile, as always …”

After a silence Rosemary said, “Squid? You must be joking! How did you find out? Okay. Answer it. Talk to you later.”

“Call waiting.” Rosemary made a face at Simone as she hung up the phone. “They’re serving squid at a Thanksgiving wedding! Extraordinary, no? I swear this country is getting more Third World every minute! Apparently Shelly has done some decorating for the groom. I wish she’d stop talking about room furnishing as if it were high art.”

Rosemary refused to consider the possibility that Simone was not invited. “You are going,” she said. “For the purposes of the invitation you are my holiday-weekend houseguest. To leave a guest home to fend for herself on Thanksgiving would go against our culture. I don’t know what the etiquette is for bringing one’s caregiver; there might be some barbaric seating mistake, like putting you with the children. So let’s just say you are our guest, everything will be much smoother.”

Meanwhile, there was the crisis of what Simone and Rosemary would wear. Simone had the one good linen dress she’d worn to embassy parties, white but not so white that a diplomat might hand her his empty glass and half-eaten hors d’oeuvre wadded up in a napkin. Rosemary squinted at Simone and finally offered her opinion that a good jacket might almost—almost!—pull things out of the fire. She left open the question of where this jacket would come from.

Rosemary emptied her closet, a heroic achievement. The closet was so large she could stand inside it and fight her way into various outfits, some of which, the most promising, she wore as far as the closet door and said, “Hideous, right?” No response was expected from Simone, who sat on Rosemary’s bed. In between consultations Rosemary chatted to keep Simone entertained.

“Don’t imagine I’m unaware,” Rosemary called from the closet, “that twenty years of outgrown clothes are occupying a space large enough to house a small family. But what am I supposed to do? Invite a homeless family to come and live in my closet?”

Rosemary struggled with some tangled hangers, then shoved the whole mess back in. “The trouble with so-called stability is that nothing gets thrown out. You can see the purpose of an occasional war or plague from a housecleaning point of view. As the memory goes, we cling to the artifact. Hence this house: the Porters’ memories have been gone for about three centuries. I’ve come to think that memory loss is a contagious condition transmitted through sexual contact.”

Working from the front of her closet back, Rosemary tried on outfits in reverse chronological order, or, as she told Simone, back through her previous incarnations. The black clothes of the eighties gave way to seventies bell-bottoms and the fitted shirts that gave everyone round shoulders and knobby wrists. Rosemary held up a vintage cowboy shirt, stained an improbable fuchsia at the armpits and neck. She said, “This garment has had a toxic reaction to human bodily fluids.”

Watching Rosemary try on clothes was like watching a movie backward; with every reel the actors get younger and the dead reappear. Rosemary in a daisy-printed blouse or a housedress with cabbage roses offered brief sad glimpses of the Rosemary of the past, very much at the start of things, trusting and still hopeful enough to walk around in flowers. Every outfit Rosemary experimented with intensified her “look”—the look of a cartoon creature with its paw in an electric socket.

“Maternity stuff!” Rosemary cried, and was silent awhile.

“It’s hopeless,” she said at last. “I’ll just have to wait for inspiration to strike and then throw something together. The pittance we get from Geoffrey prohibits buying anything good. Perhaps I should go as Ike Turner again. Relax, I’m joking, Simone. Let’s make sure the children look fabulous. Then you and I can slip by unnoticed. Let’s work on getting George to consider some other look besides Child Revivalist Preacher.”

The children were excited by the prospect of a wedding with its vague titillating connection to adult sexual secrets. And like their mother, they welcomed an invitation—the first since Simone had been here—to participate in a social event at somewhere homier than the mall.

Didn’t George and Maisie have friends and didn’t their friends have birthdays? Their accounts of school life were eerily unpeopled, a moonscape of empty classrooms in which only teachers had names, but not, apparently, the ability to see the invisible George and Maisie, who floated through their days from which they returned every afternoon with bags stuffed full of half-completed mimeoed pages of math problems or spelling words. These they hid from their mother, not just because they did badly, but to avoid Rosemary’s rants on the theme of public education and how many trees were sacrificed daily to bore her children to death.

Maisie asked what the bride was going to wear. George asked about the food, less from anticipation than from fear he might not like it. Simone referred them to Rosemary who told them the wedding was at the home of a rich branch of their father’s family whose blond, bovine daughter was marrying some gold-digging New Age witch doctor and would most likely dress appropriately. The food was squid, not exactly the children’s favorite, and anyway, there wouldn’t be enough, so probably they should eat first.

“What’s a witch doctor?” asked Maisie.

“A witch doctor,” explained Rosemary, “is what ignorant people call shamans in tribal cultures. Shamans practice magic, can cure the sick or make the healthy fall ill, and in their spare time stir up natural phenomena, volcanoes, earthquakes, and such. They are especially good on hysterical paralysis and demon possession. Ask Simone about it. Haiti’s the witch-doctor Mayo Clinic.”

Maisie said, “I can move clouds by looking at them.”

George asked, “How could they make you sick? What kind of sickness would it be?”

“Hold it!” ordered Rosemary. “Your cousin Betsy’s fiancé is not a bona fide witch doctor. That was a figure of speech. I should have said: a bogus medical practitioner who gives people sugar pills for their pets and charges them—though not, I gather, very much. Apparently he accepts barter, which on principle we like, though we’re also grateful to capitalism for providing us with this house. Grateful, I mean, for
Geoffrey’s
house and however long he allows us to stay here. Shelly decorated the groom’s living room and the groom doctored Shelly’s cat.”

“What happened to the cat?” asked George.

“It died, actually,” Rosemary said.

T
HANKSGIVING CAME, UNSEASONABLY WARM
, a bright November morning. On their own the children took baths and emerged wrapped in towels, their smooth skins rosy and fragrant and ever so lightly steaming. Simone watched George comb his wet hair in the hall mirror, in such a deep meditative state that he didn’t see her. Maisie appeared, looking gift-wrapped in red velvet, black ribbon, white lace. George put on a sweatshirt and sweatpants, a sober businesslike gray.

Only Rosemary’s outfit came as something of a shock. A ruglike rectangular poncho hung almost to her ankles, a rough tan-and-brown-striped wool blanket that smelled as if it had just been yanked off some llama. Underneath she wore a black mini-dress, black heels, black fishnet stockings.

She must have caught the expressions on Simone’s and the children’s faces. She said, “One advantage of having money and talent is that one can get away with looking as if one slept in one’s clothes. What you three fashion plates don’t realize is that it’s going to be freezing. The ceremony will probably be on a knoll in the middle of a windswept tundra. Why do upper-middle and upper-class youth always want to get married at Stonehenge?”

Under one arm Rosemary carried what looked like a groundhog but turned out to be a mink jacket for Simone. She said, “A genuine fifties bolero.
Très très chic.
This is not Port-au-Prince, girl. You’ll freeze in that little
shmatte.”

The jacket was dry and prickly and several sizes too small, a hair shirt that chafed Simone’s underarms, rucking up her dress. Discomfort intensified Simone’s annoyance at herself for acceding once again to Rosemary’s fashion advice.

“You look sensational!” Rosemary said. “Like a high-class Haitian hooker.”

Rosemary drove cautiously, not wanting to miss the gate. Maisie said, “People tie balloons outside when they’re having a party.”

“How would you know?” asked George. “You’ve never been to a party.”

“I have,” Maisie said.

Rosemary said, “There will not be balloons in this case. Balloons are not these people’s style.”

They turned into a driveway flanked by cobblestone gateposts. On each post bobbled a cluster of pink and silver balloons.

“I told you there’d be balloons!” Maisie cried.

“With Arabic writing!” Rosemary crowed. “The DeWitts must be expiring!”

The driveway seemed several times longer than the road from home. Finally they reached the house: a white segmented Palladian dinosaur creeping down toward the Hudson. Small groups chatted on the rolling lawn, while braver guests advanced warily to admire the view of river, as if the river were a sleeping child or dog they were afraid of waking. Most of the men wore dark suits, a few had on raincoats and Irish tweed caps. The older women wore expensive, slightly baggy wool coats. The younger ones had on elegant suits in shades of olive and putty. Their eyes followed Rosemary, Simone, and the children, but their heads stayed neatly in place.

“The bar is on the verandah,” Rosemary whispered to Simone, “and that is where we are heading. Slowly—this ridiculous grass is like a Cuisinart on these heels. God, these women all look like generals in the Milanese fashion army.”

Tending the bar was a friendly young man with an earring. “Don’t tell me. You’re an actor,” Rosemary said. “Bartenders are always actors.”

“No, ma’am,” said the bartender. “I’m a high-school senior.”

“Well, you should be an actor,” Rosemary said. “I know it’s one in the afternoon, but I’ll have a martini. And Coca-Cola for the kids. George and Maisie! Three glasses of Coke all wedding. That’s the limit! Understand?” Rosemary smiled at the bartender so he would mark and enforce this limit, and he grinned back from the infinite wisdom of the few years he had on George.

If this were a Haitian wedding, Simone might have asked for rum. But now to be inconspicuous she said, “I’ll have the same.”

“The same Coke or the same martini?” asked the bartender.

“Martini,” said Simone.

She and Rosemary stood at the top of the steps facing the lawn, cautiously sipping their oily, chemical-tasting drinks. Finally one of the big-shouldered suits turned out to have Shelly inside it, and Rosemary raced across the grass, trailed by Simone and the children. Rosemary’s heels sank into the lawn and obliged her to walk on her toes.

Rosemary pursed her lips in a kiss that, to Simone’s surprise, landed on the grizzled cheek of the man to whom Shelly was speaking: a rumpled, handsome, elderly fellow with a shock of pure white hair.

“Rick!” cried Rosemary. “Good to see you! Congratulations! George and Maisie, do you remember Daddy’s cousin Richard?”

“Yes,” said George. “I mean, I’m not sure.”

“Good to see you.” Rick DeWitt shook the children’s hands. To George he said, “I see you have already found the bar, young man.” George nodded, beaming with pleasure.

Rick, too, had already found the bar—several days ago, it seemed. Being anywhere near him made you gulp your drink to catch up. Simone took a swallow of gin and felt it slither down her spine. Before the others arrived, Rick had been giving Shelly his undivided attention, but now he seemed perfectly happy to share it with Rosemary and Simone.

“This is Simone, our houseguest.” Rosemary’s diction sounded inexplicably drawling and Shelly-like.

“Pleased to meet you. Welcome.” Rick grasped Simone’s hand in his warm bony palm.

“Permanent houseguest-in-residence,” said Shelly, and Simone got instantly tense. All this could lead so easily to someone asking the wrong questions, to curiosity, embarrassment, more curiosity, and worse. Luckily it looked as if Simone’s immigration problems would be the least of her host’s concerns; and luckily Shelly wasn’t really talking about Simone, but only using words as noise to reclaim Rick’s attention. Rick’s eyes swam toward Shelly, missed, and drifted out toward the wedding.

“Ah, yes.” He sighed dramatically. “Congratulations.”

“A Sufi homeopath veterinarian,” Shelly said. “Isn’t that unique? Well, it must be nice to have another doctor in the family.”

“Shelly!” Rosemary said.

Rick DeWitt said, “Want to know the worst part? I console myself with the thought that Ronald Reagan went through worse. His daughter married a yoga teacher, as I’m sure you remember. They missed the presidential inauguration—the yoga teacher had to work! But why should I think a yoga teacher is worse than a homeopath? We’ve got Sufi blessings on the balloons and the paper napkins. The neighbors think we’re hosting a PLO convention.”

“Where’s Betsy?” said Rosemary. “Where’s the blushing bride?”

“My daughter?” said Rick. “I’m about to go find her.”

A companionable silence fell on the group as they watched Rick weave across the lawn. “Totally hammered,” said Shelly.

“Wouldn’t
you
be?” said Rosemary. “I’m getting there myself. Have you seen Geoffrey? This will be the first time I’ve seen him in, I don’t know, months.”

“Rosemary, your outfit’s terrific,” said Shelly. “You look like a whore
and
her gaucho pimp put together in one fashion statement.”

Rosemary said, “What I like about this outfit is the ambivalence it projects.”

“That’s awfully private,” Shelly said. “Schizophrenia has never really caught on as a design principle, though there have been a few tasteless attempts at the bag-lady look.”