Primitive People (8 page)

“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 office 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 briefly 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.

The white atomic light of the mall made Simone’s eyeballs ache. It took all her bravery and resolve to put one foot in front of the other, and she couldn’t have done it had she let herself think how they looked—an Indian, an Eskimo, and two black rock-and-rollers. Her mini-skirt rode up on her thighs as she swayed on the needle heels.

Rosemary said, “I love it! Look at us! I love going as the Third World contingent!
Isn’t
it like Carnival in Haiti?”

But except for the fact that people wore costumes, it was the opposite of Carnival. Glaring and white instead of dark and hot, indoors instead of out, everyone in discreet little groups instead of jammed tight in one mass, and instead of a throbbing drone of music, drums, and voices, a watery stillness broken by bursts of mothers and children yelling. Though the mall was overheated its white glare suggested a freezer, with gangs of costumed little mites swarming over the shelves.

Many women were dressed like cats, young mothers in black tights and pointy ears with curled tails and drawn-on whiskers, often with several toddlers dressed like a litter of kittens. These women seemed not to know each other or to be surprised by each other’s presence, or even to find it interesting that they’d all had the same idea. Each time they passed one of these cats Simone looked at George as if to say: Behold what you might have been, a fate far crueler than Eskimo furs in the steamy mall. George understood what Simone’s look signified, and their wordless communication made Simone feel connected with him and chosen.

“Mom?” George ventured, without hope. “Carry my harpoon?”

“I will not,” said Rosemary. “I’ve already got the guitar. Besides, it’s part of your costume. You could have left it home.”

“It’s the only part of my costume I liked,” said George.