Primitive People (12 page)

Kenny seemed genuinely happy to see them, which in itself moved Simone. She always felt so indebted when a man registered her presence.

A little boy sat in Kenny’s chair—a tiny, dark-haired prince.
“Modified
spike,” his mother was saying. “Modified is the operative word.”

Kenny abandoned his victim when Simone and the children walked in, a reprieve for which the little boy dazzled them with a smile.

“You know that kid?” George asked Maisie.

“No,” whispered Maisie. “Do you?”

“Ola!”
said Kenny.
“Bonjour!
Yo!”

George said, “Yo!”

Maisie said, “Kenny!
Bonjour!”
The children seemed more cheerful already.

Kenny came closer and said to Simone, “Jesus Christ. I’m sorry about the other night. Shelly’s dinner party—Nightmare Alley, right? I don’t know what comes over me whenever I’m with Shelly. I cannot believe the evil shit I hear come out of my mouth. My whole vocabulary changes. Fucking this, fucking that. This is shit, that is shit, it’s all a fucking motherfucker.”

Kenny became aware of the children and the boy’s mother, staring. To the children he said, “You guys have heard shit like this before. Christ, I mean bad language.

“Women secretly love it,” he said. “The more outrageous the better. They never tell their husbands.” Was Kenny still talking about language? Was that what women loved? Did he mean the little boy’s mother? She shot a hostile glance at Simone.

“Isn’t Shelly a killer?” Kenny asked. “And I use that word advisedly. Whenever she comes to the salon—which, thank God, isn’t often—I’m always super aware of where the scissors are.” Simone noticed on the counter large apothecary jars full of pointy scissors, like torture implements, stewing in blue disinfectant. How unreassuring they must be to the timid child!

Kenny said, “It’s not that there aren’t women around. Some really beautiful women. But I’m terrified of Shelly. She would definitely rip your balls off and serve them—hush puppies, am I right?—to a close family member. I’d love to spend some time with you, Simone. We could drive to Connecticut. I would have to cross state lines before I felt safe from Shelly.”

Simone said, “My boyfriend gets jealous, too.” Why was she lying like this? Joseph never once asked what she did when she wasn’t with him. He thought she died when he wasn’t around and came back to life when he was. Sexual jealousy was not in the range of things you would logically feel for a zombie, nor was it a problem if you believed you were the only man in the world. But it seemed important to establish the fact that there was a boyfriend who would ride along like a ghost chaperon if she took a trip with Kenny.

Kenny said, “If he’s in Haiti, he’s got no business being jealous. If
Shelly
was in Haiti, I’d be cutting a fairly wide swath through the local female population. But speaking of doing damage—you guys look like a total wipeout. You look like somebody dragged you here from Rosemary’s house on your faces. You want a Valium, Simone? How about you, kids? A baby Tylenol? A Pepsi?”

“A baby Tylenol and Pepsi,” replied Maisie.

“Someone shot at us?” said George. “We were walking in the woods near our house and someone shot at us. I think it was a .357 magnum? You should have seen what it did to our tree.”

“A .357? I doubt it,” said Kenny. He looked at Simone for corroboration.

“Someone shot at us,” said Simone.

Kenny laughed. “The Count, I’ll bet. Your neighbor to the south.”

“Really?” said George. Kenny’s salutary effect on the children evaporated in a flash.

“Joke,” said Kenny. “The Count is a criminal and a freak but not a murderer. Or anyway, not of humans. Listen to Uncle Kenny. This is hunting season. You are considered a nine-point buck until you are proven human. Only the desperate or deeply impaired venture off the blacktop. After two six-packs you guys look like Bambi’s mom and two Bambis. Simone, didn’t Rosemary warn you? Some years she can’t talk about anything else.”

Simone was trying to remember the story Rosemary told about seeing a earful of hunters and fleeing to the city. Where were George and Maisie then? That had not been clear. It was often hard to tell from Rosemary’s stories when they happened or whom they happened to, or what exactly they meant.

Abruptly the little boy’s mother said, “I saw the most adorable item. Two doors down they’re selling these darling Red Ridinghood capes, cute and warm and made for kids who have to go anywhere near the forest during the annual bloodbath the locals call deer season. The capes made me wish all over again that I’d had a girl. But I’m not having another child, not even to get a daughter. She
did
have these terrific red baseball caps. I got one for Max.”

“Two doors down from
here?”
said Kenny.

“Good Witch of the East,” said the woman. “Where did you think I meant?”

“Oh, Glenda’s place,” said Kenny. “Glenda’s my buddy. Far out. Another total fuzzball with a blue-chip business sense.”

He finished cutting the little boy’s hair. The boy and his mother left.

“Button up,” Kenny told George and Maisie. “Let’s hit it. We’re out of here. Uncle Kenny is going to treat you guys to one red cape and one red hat.”

Shooing Simone and the children out, Kenny said, “Hey, dig it. Over there’s the jingling cash register, and I’m leaving the joint unlocked.”

He led them several doors down to a store with a crowded, dusty window and a sign that said, in swirling letters,
GOOD WITCH OF THE EAST
. Zither music played on a stereo, crystalline and frantic. The air smelled of potpourri, like the soap shop under Geoffrey’s office, but with a faint insecticide edge.

Guarding the door, large sinister wooden frogs affected debonair poses. On a table were drinks trays made from butterfly wings. A large stone cherub pouted, unappreciative for having been rescued from somebody’s tombstone and set down among the painted hatboxes full of rolls of watered-silk ribbons, soft-sculpture bedroom slippers representing Nancy and Ronald Reagan in bed, brightly colored, overdesigned toys that failed to catch the children’s attention except for one tiny expensive set of doll’s woodworking tools. Simone wondered what principle of selection had gathered these items together.

“Good taste and magic.” A trilling voice rang out as if in answer to Simone’s unspoken question. A stout, sweet-looking woman swayed in from the back of the shop in a two-piece outfit ingeniously knotted from many flowered silk scarves. “I’m Glenda,” she said. “Simple introductions are not Kenny’s strong suit.”

“Eat shit,” said Kenny genially. “Simone, Maisie, and Big George. Glenda, what it
is,
babe?”

“Same old,” said Glenda, and a lovely smile glorified her doughy face. It was always instructive to see what women turned into around Kenny. “The usual shnorrers and kleptos. Did I tell you about that old Native American guy the Sweat Lodge Church flew in from Utah and dumped. He came in trying to sell me some kind of animal pelt. He put it down on the counter and it was crawling with maggots! Little white blind grubby things wriggling down the display case. I started screaming, I made him take it away. Then I went next door and bought a six-pack of Black Flag. Very unorganic. Can you smell it?”

“Yuck,” Maisie agreed.

Glenda turned to Maisie. “Whooo are yooou?”

“The caterpillar!” said Maisie. “In
Alice in Wonderland.”

“Exactly,” Glenda told her. “I love your look. I could
sell
you in here.”

“Yeah,” said George. “Give her away!” This aspect of George troubled Simone even more than his sadness: how quickly he allied himself with whoever was on the offensive, especially when it was at the expense of his sister or his mother. When Geoffrey made fun of Rosemary, it was George who chimed in, though at home he showed her a puppylike, unrequited devotion.

“How’s Shelly?” Glenda said.

Kenny turned over a cobalt-blue vase, as if examining it for listening devices. “Russia will be a democracy,” he said. “But we’ll still have Shelly.”

Glenda said, “What about
you,
Simone?”

Simone replied, “I take care of the children.”

“Simone takes care of the children,” said Kenny, “while she reconnoiters and marshals her forces to take New York City by storm. She could be a model or an actress like Cicely Tyson’s niece. Look at her, Glenda? Don’t you think Simone could be a movie star?”

“Absolutely,” Glenda answered.

The children were appraising Simone with new interest and concern. They had never considered that they might be a way station on her road to success. That this disturbed them pleased Simone, though she knew it was wrong of her to want the children to worry more or feel less secure than they already did.

Maisie prompted Kenny: “Are we getting the cape?”

“How old are you, dear?” said Glenda. Simone, without thinking, put her arm around George.

“Six,” Maisie replied.

“Six going on thirty-six,” Glenda said. “The perfect Victorian mini-adult. Kenny, did I tell you this ugly story? A woman came into the shop this week, you know that survivalist couple, Vietnam vet, they live in that camouflage station wagon? He waits for her out in the car—”

“Check,” said Kenny. “The one with the bowie knife in her belt. Half a dozen ratty children.”

“Exactly. And one of the children glommed onto an egg”—Glenda pointed to a straw basket full of marbleized stone eggs—“and simply would not let go. The mother’s prying its fingers loose, and by now the baby’s howling and the poor woman asks if I take food stamps.”

“Do you?” said Kenny. “I get asked all the time.”

“The hell you do,” said Glenda. “The question was: Did I want to give the child a malachite egg from Oaxaca? The answer was: No, I did not. So I make all sorts of lame little jokes. No, I’m sorry, I can’t. But when the mother finally drags the kid out, I am totaled by guilt, thinking about how this woman can’t buy anything pretty for her kids, and next week some rich witch will MasterCard a two-hundred-dollar doll-carpentry set for a grandchild whose name she can’t remember. I could have given the kid that egg. It cost me four bucks wholesale.”

Kenny said, “You thought this after she left the store or you thought this after her car left the parking lot?”

“All right,” Glenda said. “Anyway, I decided I wanted to do something for kids in general. And I remembered that poor little girl last year who was blown away by hunters on her back-yard swing set. It was inspiration—Little Red Ridinghood! I
saw
these little capes in which kids would be visible and safe. Then I came up with red baseball caps, not to gender-discriminate.”

“Fuckin-A not to,” said Kenny.

Simone stared at Glenda. She wished there was some way of asking about the little girl shot in her yard without alarming George and Maisie.

“How much?” Kenny asked.

“Seventeen ninety-five for the capes,” said Glenda. “Eight ninety-five for the caps. Reasonable, no?”

“Outrageous,” Kenny said. “I’ll take one of each. Actually they
are
reasonable when what we’re buying is protection.”

“Protective magic,” said Glenda. She handed Kenny a cape and a hat, and he passed them along to the children, saying, “Wear them in good health, kids. Don’t get killed.” Glenda led the children to look at themselves in a mirror in back of the shop.

“I left my wallet at the salon!” Kenny yelled to Glenda.

Glenda called back, “I trust you.”

“She shouldn’t,” Kenny told Simone. “Others have made that mistake.”

Maisie wore her cape home and George kept on his baseball cap. Rosemary said, “What is this? I thought we
did
Halloween. Or have the children joined some kind of cult or team?”

“It’s a present from Kenny,” Maisie said. “So hunters won’t think we’re deer and shoot us.”

“I’m amazed Kenny knows what month it is,” Rosemary said. “Let alone that a slip of paper allows our neighbors to use helpless children for target practice when they run out of mailboxes.”

Simone and George and Maisie eyed each other and said nothing. Rosemary was in an excellent humor they didn’t want to spoil with the news that someone might have tried to kill them in the forest. Her good mood dated from several days ago when an invitation had come, asking them to a wedding to be held Thanksgiving Day.

“The nerve!” Rosemary told Shelly, whom she had called right away. “Don’t they think people have families? Do they think the world has nothing to do on a national family holiday, that they’re so important we’ll drop everything, stiff the relatives, cancel our own Thanksgivings, and answer the DeWitts’ summons to join them in celebrating the marriage of their daughter Batsy?”

Realizing that the children were listening, Rosemary covered the receiver. “I mean your cousin Betsy. Don’t you
ever
call her Batsy.”

“Are we going to have Thanksgiving?” George asked.

Rosemary put a finger to her lips and got quiet, listening to Shelly, and looked briefly distraught before she managed to sound suitably delighted. “Oh, you’re invited, too? Great! We’ll see each other there!”

Now Rosemary could join Shelly in slandering their future hosts with the brio and clear consciences available only to the invited. Discussions of the wedding were so frequent and all-involving that Rosemary gave up the ski track while talking on the phone, and her entire exercise and diet program soon fell by the wayside. It was as if she had been in training for something that was finally about to happen, or had done active penance to
make
it happen, like a pilgrim crawling on her knees to pray at a holy shrine. Shelly kept warning Rosemary not to expect too much from this wedding: the catapult that would rocket her back into social life. And indeed Rosemary did seem to be steeling herself for disappointment, taking care to let it be known that she didn’t even want to go.

“The DeWitts are cousins,” she told Shelly on the phone. “In other words, I have no choice. All right,
Geoffrey’s
cousins. But like it or not, they are related to my children by the thin tea that in the Porter family passes for blood. Which means Geoffrey will be at the wedding. I really
shouldn’t
go. It’s criminal to hand him the power that my seeing him there will give him. But I so want to
observe
it. I wouldn’t miss this fabulous scene, the double-barreled phenomenon of Old Money
and
New Age vulgar self-display. The groom’s a Sufi homeopath veterinarian. The family is just dying.