Primitive People (22 page)

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.

Early 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 twenty 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.”

Rosemary reached into her own bag and pulled out two boxes of crayons, two jars of rubber cement, and two packs of colored construction paper. “I got the children art supplies,” she said, “We really must do something to supplement their art education. It has just struck me that my children are six and ten and I personally have never once seen either of them pick up a pencil to draw. Does this mean that yet another natural impulse has been stomped out of them already? First generosity, then their
joie de vivre,
and now the urge to create?

“And speaking of generosity …” Rosemary rewrapped the presents and stuffed them in the wrong bags. “Simone, I have to tell you: I
forbid
you to get me a gift. But I also want to confess that I’ve got something for you. Straightforwardness is the only way to prevent an etiquette disaster. What we do or don’t do matters less than being clear about it. Eyes front and center as we march toward the nightmare of Christmas morning!”

The next afternoon Simone went out to buy a Christmas present for Rosemary. Incapable of facing the mall again, she thought of Glenda’s store.

Good Witch of the East smelled of bayberry, a fire roared in the wood stove; the marble tombstone cherub wore a rakishly tilted Santa hat. Glenda greeted Simone with a thimble-sized glass of eggnog. She said, “Non-alcoholic holiday cheer. Everyone’s got to drive. Shopping for the kiddies?”

“No.” Simone was embarrassed that she’d bought their presents elsewhere. Perhaps it was discomfort that made her say, “For Mrs. Porter,” though she hadn’t called Rosemary that since her first days in the house.

“Rosemary,” Glenda corrected her. “What a wonderful person. Of all the people to work for … you are truly lucky. She’s a deeply good human, and the sad thing is: so is Geoffrey.”

Simone made a stiff, unsuccessful attempt to smile concurringly. Glenda said, “Kenny says the meanest things about Rosemary, but I always defend her.” On the face of it, Glenda was taking credit for her loyalty to Rosemary, but actually she was boasting about being someone with whom Kenny gossiped meanly. Knowing Kenny, Simone imagined that many could claim this same intimate connection.

Glenda said, “Let’s work on this. Let’s give it some thought. Rosemary deserves something beautiful at this point in her life.”

Glenda sashayed through her store, pausing and picking up objects, as if seeing each one with a fresh shock of discovery and pleasure. “Rosemary is so dramatic. Almost theatrical. Also, she’s an artist. That requires something special.”

Disappointed that Simone didn’t know Rosemary’s astrological sign, Glenda finally settled on a long, colorful chiffon scarf and flung it around her neck with a brittle, stagy gesture so reminiscent of Rosemary that Simone had to buy it.

“Ikat,” said Glenda. “From Bali. The most romantic place on the planet.”

Counting out the money, Simone discovered that she had only one more dollar than the scarf cost, with tax. What would she have done if it was more and she couldn’t afford it? At least then she would still have had money left—instead of only a dollar. Simone felt light-headed, as one might after a haircut, except that this sudden weightlessness spread all the way to her feet.

While she gift-boxed the scarf, Glenda asked Simone how they celebrated Christmas in Haiti. Simone couldn’t remember telling Glenda that she was from Haiti. Kenny must have told her. She wondered what else he’d said. Could it be that Kenny said mean things about her, too?

“I was wondering,” Glenda said, “if you had any friends back in Haiti who could maybe send us some paintings or those incredible sequined voodoo flags. We could work something out. I used to carry these darling decal-covered metal briefcases, but when things got rough down there, the supply completely dried up.”