Primitive People (2 page)

For a long time Simone had felt that she and Miss McCaffrey were descending a staircase while a continuous procession of men streamed up the other side—good old boys in shirtsleeves and psychotics in stay-pressed suits. She could tell Emile these men were CIA; probably it was true.

She could also tell Emile that on the plane from Haiti she’d opened the lavatory door and walked in on an American man urinating into the toilet. He wore a gray suit and had gray hair and eyes that snapped on her like a crocodile before she shut the door and retreated. On his way out he’d smiled at her—a little strangely, she thought. Inside, she found the toilet seat shiny and wet with urine, and she knew what his smile had meant: he had known what she would find.

But what words, what actual words could she have used to tell this to Emile? It all seemed too complex and intimate to tell this stranger, her husband. Probably Emile had a wife and a dozen children already. Simone and Emile’s marriage was purely a business transaction; that had been made very clear by the travel agency from which she’d bought the illegal papers and whose name she’d heard through embassy gossip.

Simone weighed the importance of informing Emile that the travel bureau was an embassy joke—a joke that someday, possibly, the wrong person might not find funny. But all she’d heard was gossip, not news of an official investigation, and it was so rare at the embassy that one thing led to the next. If Emile was really a citizen, they wouldn’t send him back—but there might be a fine or jail, for which he should be prepared.

She said, “When the U.S. invaded Panama, it was either going to be Panama or they were going into Haiti.”

She expected him to ask how she knew, and she could tell him impressively how rumors traveled the embassy grapevine. Then she might mention the rumors about the travel agency. But Emile put his finger to his lips. He said, “Quiet! Are you crazy?”

He said, “Panama or Haiti, nobody here knows the difference. To these whites, all blacks are the same, no matter where we come from. But blacks and Haitian people and Spanish know, we know who to hate and fear. In the Bronx evil priests from Brazil and Puerto Rico are telling their followers that they can be healed with the severed hand of a Haitian, and Haitian boys are turning up dead with their arms hacked off at the wrists.”

After this it was awkward to steer the conversation back to the travel bureau. Besides, Simone reasoned, why risk needlessly alarming Emile and further complicating a tricky ride they were trying so hard to keep simple?

Cutting across three lanes of traffic toward the parkway exit, Emile handed Simone a matchbook on which was printed the address of an employment agency where his cousin worked. Emile dropped Simone off in Grand Army Plaza—where, disorientingly, she spotted the Arc de Triomphe. In school the nuns had taught them to recognize the great tourist landmarks of the United States and Europe, but later, in a brochure at the American Center, Simone had seen London Bridge stuck in the Arizona sand.

Emile left her in the center of the plaza amid honking cars she had to dodge in order to reach the sidewalk. But how green and leafy and quiet it seemed, compared to Port-au-Prince!

Miraculously, there was an agency and Emile’s
cousine
worked there; miraculously, there was a caregiver job for which, Emile’s cousin said, Simone seemed perfectly qualified.

Overqualified, Simone would have said, to care for some rich woman’s children. Tears of insult had welled up in her eyes when she realized that “caregiver” meant
au pair.
She said, “In Haiti I was chief assistant to the U.S. Cultural Attaché.” But it sounded less important than it had in the airport and failed to work the same magic it had worked on the INS man. Emile’s cousin’s eyes narrowed—with hatred, it seemed to Simone—and she brushed the air with the back of her hand, sweeping away Simone’s past, her education, her embassy job, anything that might have set her apart from any Haitian girl who would be lucky to get a job taking care of some rich woman’s children.

Emile’s cousin put Simone in a cab to Grand Central Station and repeatedly reminded her to buy a ticket to Hudson Landing. At the last moment she opened the taxi door and kissed Simone goodbye on both cheeks. She said, “You are lucky to have a job and a place. Many Haitian people are freezing to death in camps on the Canadian border.”

In the vast granite hive of Grand Central Station everyone was swarming, and Simone lifted her suitcase and ran, though she had plenty of time. She found the right track and the right train and a seat in an empty car, but doubted herself and grew faint with fright when the train pulled out, still empty.

Simone watched the play of light on the wide, flat river, mentally pleading with it not to leave the side of the train. As long as they followed the Hudson, they weren’t hurtling out into space. She had seen pictures in magazines of American trees turned orange, but they were brighter and stronger than the whiskery saplings sprouting above the tracks. Some of the hills were barren rubble, like the mountains in Haiti. Every pretty town they passed seemed to be turning its back—on the train, Simone cautioned herself, it had nothing to do with her.

It was a hot September afternoon. Mrs. Porter met Simone at the Hudson Landing station wearing a paint-spattered mouton fur coat, visibly chewed and balding, as if it were made from the pelts of creatures who died gnawing themselves out of traps. The coat was one reason Simone could have believed that Mrs. Porter might practice some strange religion. She was glad when their talk about the paintings in the attic clarified all that.

“Believe it or not,” Mrs. Porter said, “I requested someone from Haiti. The children’s wretched public school can hardly manage English. And the dollar being what it is, you can forget the French mademoiselle. Right now, top priority is that I get some work done. When you become a sculptor at forty you’ve got to hustle to catch up.”

Mrs. Porter pursed her lips and blew a thin stream of air up at her frizzy yellow bangs. “Of course when I started sculpting it drove Geoffrey straight up a wall. Three-dimensional
things
that were
me
—he could not endure it. I’ll spare you the details of the vicious ways he communicated that fact. It’s a trial separation, so called. But between us, the verdict’s in.

“How tall are you?” Mrs. Porter looked up at Simone. “Wait. Don’t bother. Centimeters are useless. In any case, I couldn’t have hired
you.
Not with Don Juan in residence. Needless to say, it made it dicey for me to have any female friends. Why do I think I’ve seen you before? Your face is so familiar … Wait. I’m having quite the high-powered
déjà vu.”
She flapped one hand in front of her face. “It’s
suffocating
up here!”

Mrs. Porter led Simone down the attic stairs and through the second-floor hall, then took the sweeping main staircase and stopped halfway down on a landing.

“The scenic lookout!” she said. Together they surveyed the entrance hall and the huge living room beyond it, with its peeling gilded wallpaper and flaking dandruffy plaster. A patch of blue-green mildew crept toward some crispy hanging plants. Purple crayon was scribbled down the white keys of the piano. Everything that could be sat on was thatched with animal hair, although there didn’t seem to be any cats or dogs in residence.

“Did I say light housekeeping?” Mrs. Porter asked. “I must have been out of my mind. Look at this place! You’d go insane. When it comes to cleaning you’ll just have to find your personal bottom line. You might as well forget the cooking, too. George and Maisie like canned baked beans. They’re full of protein and roughage. The beans, that is, not the children. Or else we can actually hire a cook. I was always afraid to, with Geoffrey.

“All you have to do is make sure the kids don’t kill each other or you or themselves—and cheer them up! I don’t care how. Lift their little spirits somehow! And if you teach them
un petit peu de français?
Well, that would be
fantastique.”

“Yes, Mrs. Porter,” Simone said. “When should I begin?”

“This minute—and that’s
Rosemary!
Call me anything else and you’re fired!”

S
OMETIMES ROSEMARY WORKED ON
her sculpture through dinner, and Simone ate with the children at the huge yellow-pine kitchen table where, Rosemary explained, twenty indentured child servants once dined on reject potatoes and beer. She said, “Stinginess is a genetic trait, Geoffrey’s family has a marker for it. Let us pray that it skips a generation and bypasses Maisie and George.”

At first Simone put out regular dinners, place settings and glasses of water, but within days they’d reverted to something more primeval. Huddled at one end of the table, Simone and the children wolfed down their food as if each were standing alone in the kitchen gorging on something forbidden. At first Simone cooked normal meals, but they preferred eating separate dinners. Maisie lived on raw cut-up vegetables, George on breaded fried frozen shrimp. What a great relief it was, the children’s desire for repetition, freeing Simone from any guilty allegiance to the adult desire for change.

Simone, too, ate the same meal every night, plates of the rice and red beans she made in a large pot on weekends and reheated in portions with fried plantains that the children liked, too. Rosemary noted approvingly the household’s increased plantain consumption. “God’s perfect nutritional packages. Potassium city,” she said.

Haitian food made Simone feel less homesick, though in Haiti she often ate frozen dinners from the embassy commissary. One night she told George and Maisie, “This is the diet of Haiti. Haitian peasants are lucky when they can get red beans and rice.” The children looked sheepish and lectured to, and Simone felt ashamed, because mostly all she had wanted was an excuse to talk about Haiti, just as, after she met Joseph, she took every occasion to mention his name.

Simone was surprised to find plantains for sale at the Hudson Landing supermarket, to which she walked, a mile each way, past the Hudson River estates, along the picturesque low stone walls attractively covered with poison ivy. No blacks or island people ever shopped at the market, but no one seemed to think Simone’s being there was unusual or special. In fact, being stared at might have been better than being made to feel transparent, as if everyone could look through her to the more interesting cereal boxes. Simone felt lonelier in the market than she did anywhere else, and it helped only slightly that everyone else seemed lonely, too. No one was selling anything, the shoppers had no one to talk to; recorded music sprinkled down on them like the cold freezer air. How muffled it sounded after the buzz of the markets at home, the cries of the fish and vegetable women, the curses of the porters. Simone longed to hear those sounds, though she knew that she was forgetting how the buzz of the market changed when army or government men came through, and how abruptly it stopped at dusk, replaced by ominous silence and occasional heart-stopping shouts.

Probably the plantains were for vacationers newly returned to Hudson Landing, nostalgic to re-create the food of some happy tropical island. Sometimes Simone lingered—pathetically, she felt—in the vegetable section, as if waiting for a shopper to come along and pick up a bunch of plantains and they could begin a friendship on the basis of starchy fruit. She would have liked to hear herself say out loud what her job was, whom she worked for—naturally to someone who could be trusted not to tell Immigration that she wasn’t living in Brooklyn with Emile.

The other place she haunted was the magazine stand—a hundred times more magazines than she’d seen at the embassy, where initially her job had involved skimming
Time
and
Newsweek
for the names of young dancers and musicians who’d be flattered to travel to Haiti for the U.S. government per diem. Occasionally a ballet troupe came through, and for days the office was busy with handsome young Oklahomans who might unexpectedly stretch or do neck rotations in the middle of a sentence. But after the violence intensified, Simone’s duties were mostly confined to opening Jiffy bags containing videotaped ballets and children’s cartoons for Miss McCaffrey to show on the American library VCR.

When Miss McCaffrey hired Simone, after meeting her at the gallery, she tactfully asked which language Simone preferred to use in the office and seemed at once disappointed and relieved when Simone chose English. She herself spoke a stilted Creole she’d learned in USIA language school and read so much about Haiti that she often knew gossip about pop music and radio stars that was news to Simone.

So now, like Miss McCaffrey, Simone read fan magazines—as well as magazines about golf, computers, sailing, gourmet cooking, and martial arts. But she felt she learned deeper things about people’s secret lives from magazines that counseled American women about their personal fears: worries about their husbands and children, about overweight and cancer, about combining a placid family life with a profitable career. One alarming article on “Finding the Perfect Caregiver” suggested that working mothers—not Rosemary, apparently—investigate their prospective caregiver’s employment record and immigration status.

Many of these magazines advised women not to be too hard on themselves, to forget the perfect workday
and
the perfect family dinner, and perhaps this had something to do with the menus Rosemary occasionally fixed for them all: underheated canned baked beans, burned hamburgers, pretzels and popcorn they ate directly from the bag. In this, as in everything, Rosemary gave the impression of a woman who had just with great effort liberated herself from a prison of obligation and duty, though it was unclear, exactly, what these duties had been. The quirky, unnutritious diets, the un-brushed hair, the nights they slept in their clothes—all four of them might have been children accidentally left alone. The scale of the house reduced them, its high ceilings and doorways, the sideboards and massive tables hewn for a vanished race of giants.

In a short time Simone and the children discovered each other’s secrets; they sensed that they could trust each other not to tell Rosemary. George, who was ten, had a videotape he watched over and over, a
National Geographic
film about life on the Arctic Circle. It showed Eskimos bent over holes in the ice, motionless for hours, then yanking a seal up through a hole that suddenly bubbled with blood. Blood was everywhere, steaming in bowls, smeared on people’s mouths, staining patches of scarlet ice where sled dogs fought over the meat. At first George turned off the tape when Simone came into his room, but later he let her watch with him, provided they didn’t speak.