Primitive People (21 page)

Shelly didn’t feel obliged to make self-justifying excuses for betraying Rosemary and Kenny and in the process subjecting two children to considerable strain—though to be fair, this last was something she probably didn’t suspect. How brave and confident Shelly seemed in comparison to Kenny, making Simone swear secrecy about how much sugar he put in his coffee. Obviously, Shelly believed no explanation was required. What you did with men, what you did to
get
men, was just not a moral issue.

Shelly said, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a chance to do something with Rosemary’s place? Don’t you think that the Miss Havisham thing is getting a little old?”

Simone glanced across the room. Both children were watching and listening. She wanted to rush over and put her hands over their ears and promise to protect their home from Shelly’s redecorating plans.

“Great Expectations,”
Shelly said. “Do they read that in Haiti? Suffice it to say that this batty old woman has been stood up at the altar and has preserved the wedding party, dress, cake, and all. I mean, has Rosemary showed you that
attic
… ?”

Just then Geoffrey announced his return by stamping the snow off his boots. Simone fought an absurd desire to fling herself on his mercy and make him swear that he would never let Shelly have Rosemary’s house. She looked at the children again and wondered if they were thinking this, too.

“Maybe we should call Mom,” said George—a simple suggestion that was, for George, spectacularly brave and assertive. “We should tell her we’re all right.”

“All right?”
said Shelly. “Hah!”

“That’s a fine idea,” Geoffrey said. “Very big boy, grown-up and considerate. Why don’t you go into the kitchen and call your mother right now?”

When George ducked around a pillar into the kitchen area, Geoffrey stage-whispered to Simone and Shelly, “Would anyone like to bet on whether the mother duck is even aware that her ducklings are gone?”

The phone must have rung for a very long time. Then George said, “Hello, Mom?”

The rest of them fell silent and listened to George’s soft voice. “Simone got there okay. We’re at Dad’s.” George fell silent and listened, nodding from time to time. At last he said, “Okay. Good. Me, too. Okay. See you. Bye.”

Only after he got off the phone did he notice that everyone was focused on him. He shrugged and forced a smile. “Mom says that Simone—not Dad—should drive us home.”

“What are you smiling about, George?” Maisie said.

“I can drive, goddamn it,” said Geoffrey.

Shelly said, “Simone, if it wasn’t for you, these children would have perished like baby birds in the snow.”

Perhaps Shelly imagined a life with Geoffrey that would also involve Simone—and was saving herself the trouble of finding a new
au pair.
Shelly would not be as careful as Rosemary was to always say “caregiver”—that classless, neutral, genderless word, so unaristocratic, suggesting that employer and employee were all working people together. Shelly was seeking Simone’s complicity in her plans for Geoffrey and his children, and meanwhile subtly assuring Simone: her job security was intact. But Simone knew better than to think that her life would improve under Shelly’s regime, and what was meant to reassure made her extremely anxious. Shelly would not tell her to find her own personal bottom line about housework. Shelly would have definite plans involving white paint and track lighting. Sooner or later she would ask about Simone’s immigration status, and Shelly would not be satisfied till she’d found out the truth. Then far too much of Simone’s future would depend on her pleasing Shelly.

The phone call had exhausted the last of George’s energy. “I’m tired,” he announced, and his eyelids drooped to prove it.

“That’s babyish,” said Maisie. “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

“I imagine they
would
be tired,” Shelly said. “Getting stuck on the road is exhausting.”

“Okay, pardners,” said Geoffrey. “Maybe it’s time for you guys to crawl up to the sleeping loft and catch a couple of z’s.”

Shelly said, “Geoffrey, I adore how your language changes to match your house.”

Recognizing that their father’s suggestion was a non-negotiable demand, Maisie scampered up the corkscrew staircase and George followed, clutching the center pole. Simone found herself in the same paralyzed state she’d slipped into whenever Joseph got angry and flung bottles around his studio, slamming them against the walls but never too near his paintings. It was unthinkable to be left down here alone with Geoffrey and Shelly. George and Maisie had protected them, and now they were leaving, and it was beyond her to make any move at all.

Then, blessedly, Simone’s duties showed her the right direction. She was the children’s caregiver. She said, “I will go with the children.” Geoffrey and Shelly smiled their agreement that this was a sensible plan, and Simone knew that if she worked for Shelly, she would often feel vaguely insulted.

At the top of the stairs Simone tried to stand and cracked her skull on the ceiling. Tears blurred her eyes, and she had to wait before she could see where she was.

One side of the wainscoted sleeping loft was open to the room below and provided a hidden perch from which to spy on the grownup world. But the children weren’t spying. They were already curled up on an elaborate antique bed. The gray headboard was made from branches, twisted and bound into curves; on the bed was a patchwork quilt in cheerless shades of brown and charcoal.

Simone lay down between the children. They rested their heads on her shoulders. First their heads grew heavy and then Simone heard their light syncopated wheezing.

Downstairs Shelly and Geoffrey were doing a great deal of walking. Simone heard the thud of Geoffrey’s boots, the tap of Shelly’s high heels.

In the hills above Simone’s grandmother’s village there had been a little church in which, if you whispered at the rear wall, you could hear it up at the altar. So from the loft Simone could hear the coffeepot bubbling downstairs. She could almost hear Shelly and Geoffrey breathe; she wondered if they knew it. What else had the children eavesdropped on during the nights they’d spent here? Or had they learned to fall asleep fast so as not to have to listen?

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.”

A
FTER 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.