Primitive People (3 page)

Mrs. Porter—Rosemary!—told Simone that George had a problem with grief. He often burst into tears at school, and the other children teased him. Nothing sad had ever happened to him; it was nothing like that. His parents’ separation was stressful—but that didn’t fully explain it. More likely it was genetic, a character flaw from the start.

Rosemary said, “Poor poor Georgie was born like that: dour, burdened with cares. Even as a baby, he made you think of a depressive CPA reborn in piglet form. I realize that’s an awful way to talk about one’s child. But we’d all go mad here if we lost our sense of humor. My real worry is that I’m neglecting the children’s problems because they’re so darn convenient. George and Maisie are too out-to-lunch to fight like normal siblings.”

Six-year-old Maisie was a morbid child, too, dreamy and elegiac. She took Simone on her own house tour, a tour of the old and discarded. She said, “This is our piano. It doesn’t work. This is our broken swing set. These are George’s electric trains that he never plays with.” She showed Simone a plot in the yard where their former pets were buried, marked with wooden twig-crosses and rain-streaked Polaroids of the deceased. It seemed an almost suspicious number of newly dead cats and dogs until Maisie explained that the pets had been old, they’d belonged to her parents, some from before they were married. She knew how old each pet was at the hour of its death; she had an actuarial gift for converting dog to human years.

One day Maisie told Simone to watch, and ran to the dining-room doorway. She licked her palms and wet the soles of her feet, then braced her arms and legs against the door frame and climbed up the inside of the doorway and hung beneath the ceiling like one of those suction-animals people here stuck inside car windows. She scrambled down and looked innocent when she heard Rosemary approach. Maisie was black-haired, with skim-milk skin and pink-rimmed rabbity eyes; she wore flowery dresses and frilly panties that showed when she hung upside down.

It startled Simone how quickly she came to love the children. Something about their undemanding melancholy made her want to make them happy, to transform them from two pale will-o’-the-wisps into a flesh-and-blood boy and girl. Soon she found her own moods rising and plummeting dangerously with tiny improvements and declines in the children’s spirits.

She had no desire to teach them French, which they had no desire to learn—they spent too much of the day in school to want lessons when they came home. And after that first interview, Rosemary forgot she’d asked.

In the mornings Simone walked George and Maisie down the long, tree-lined driveway and waited with them for the bus to come—and picked them up in the afternoon. She always felt happy, or happier, when at the end of the day she felt the ground tremble and heard the wheezing brakes that signaled the bus’s approach. Almost involuntarily, a welcoming smile appeared on her face, and the children saw it and nearly smiled back.

It was safer for the children not to know Simone’s secrets: her illegal marriage and the money she’d stolen from Joseph and Inez. But there was one worrisome secret that she couldn’t hide, though for a while it almost seemed it might not become an issue.

Rosemary assumed that Simone could drive. The agency must have said so. And when Rosemary tossed her the car keys, Simone caught them in one hand—a reflex that in this context was as good as a lie. Had the agency also lied about Simone’s immigration status? Rosemary never asked. Maybe she couldn’t imagine a whole category of problems she didn’t have. Or perhaps she supposed that Simone, like herself, was simply entitled to be here.

One Saturday Rosemary asked Simone to take the children for haircuts. “The place is called Short Eyes. It’s on Route 9. The children know where it is.” She gave Simone three twenty-dollar bills and said, “The price is insane, I know it.”

Just finding and opening the door of Rosemary’s Volvo seemed like an accomplishment and flooded Simone with a warm sense of competence and control. She ordered the children to sit in back and got behind the wheel, and some time later glanced in the mirror and saw them, wide-eyed and pallid.

George said, “Don’t you know how to drive?”

“You better tell Mom,” said Maisie.

“I can’t,” Simone answered, and this seemed reasonable to the children.

George rolled into the passenger seat, his face faintly flushed and sweaty. He showed Simone the parts of the car and what to hold down when. She braked and hit the gas and braked. The children tumbled forward.

All day they practiced on back roads, bucking and weaving down the deserted narrow lanes and carefully working their way up to larger, more crowded highways.

“We’re like water drops,” said Maisie. “Trickling into the river and drowning.”

Happily, the children did know the route to the haircut salon. “It’s called Short Eyes?” George told Simone. “That’s what they call child molesters in jail in New York City?” When George was anxious, which was most of the time, every sentence was framed as a question.

It took Simone a few seconds to figure out what George meant. Then she said, “How do you know that?”

“Kenny told my mom,” George explained. “He tells everyone.”

Short Eyes—Kuts for Kids was in a mini-mall designed to suggest a frontier town in a cowboy movie. Inside, the salon had a jungle motif, all zebra skin and rattan. Dozens of long-armed, brown, fake-fur gibbons were suction-cupped to the ceiling. Maisie eyed them competitively, chewing on a knuckle.

A young man in a tight white T-shirt and jeans hovered over a traumatized boy, making predatory mosquito-like swoops around the child’s head. Finally he whipped a jungle-print apron off the boy’s chest. The child rotated rigidly and grimaced at his mother. He looked as if he’d just had his ears surgically enlarged.

“Fabulous!” His mother pressed some bills in the child’s hand. “Give this to Kenny and say thank you very much.”

“Thank you very much,” repeated the child, and followed his mother out.

“Little geeks,” Kenny told Simone. “They’re lucky their mommies don’t drown them in sacks like kittens. Not these guys.” He saluted George and Maisie. “These guys are my buddies. That’s because they’ve seen this …”

He reached into a drawer and took out a large, anatomically correct, flesh-colored rubber ear. “They know that this is what happened to the last kid who moved when I was cutting his hair.”

The children had seen it and could share with Kenny a conspiratorial smirk, though George kept sneaking looks at the ear till Kenny put it away. Kenny muscled George into the chair, then hooked his arm around Simone’s neck and scooted her into a back room.

“So you’re working for El Ditzo,” he whispered. “Hey, babe, I mean good luck.” He pushed Simone away to look at her, then drew her back to his side; it was strangely pleasant, being flopped around like a doll. He said, “Tall women. I love it! You’ve got a great look, like that actress—what’s her name—the one who played that gay junkie hooker Bob Hoskins fell in love with. Jamaican? Trinidadian?”

“Why good luck?” Simone asked.

“Don’t tell me,” said Kenny. “Haitian! I used to hang out in Brooklyn. Well, for one thing, when you get paid, if you get paid, try to get it in cash. That scumbag could freeze her assets any second now. Have you met the old man? Geoffrey Porter the Fourteenth?”

“No,” said Simone. “I mean, not yet.” Sometimes the children spent the night with their father; he picked them up at school in the afternoon and took them back there in the morning. He had not come to the house since Simone started work.

“Count yourself lucky,” said Kenny. “The guy could freeze anyone’s assets. Weirdly straight, very Jack the Ripper, very much in control. It’s fabulous to watch the dude, like talking to a schizophrenic, one half of his face looks entitled by birth to tell you what’s real and what’s not, the other half has to keep checking to make sure the old magic still works. There is nothing you know about that this guy doesn’t know better. I always think he’s two beats away from telling me how to cut hair. Honestly, you can’t blame the babe if her frontal lobe scabs over. The man’s screwed everything female and human—well, female, there’s that Arabian farm—between here and Albany. Not that there’s a whole lot happening in terms of women, present company excepted. It’s Rip Van Winkle time up here, seriously asleep. ‘Short eyes’ is what they call child molesters in the joint, and nobody in this valley knows it. It’s my own private joke on the suburban middle, upper-middle, and upper class.”

“Why good luck?” Simone repeated. It took Kenny a moment to work back and find the point at which her attention had quit progressing along with his conversation.

“Well, for one thing, Rosemary jokes about inbreeding, but it’s hardly a joke. They naturally select for elegant heads and tiny little brains, the lowest possible cranial capacity without actually being a pinhead. I can tell you, I cut those heads—I need a microscope to fucking find them. The whole family’s like a pack of extremely high-functioning Afghan hounds. Well, really, the whole neighborhood—it’s a longitudinal thing. They’re like a bunch of babies, instant erase, no guilt. They wake up in the morning and yesterday’s not on the disk. It means they can do anything and not have to worry or pay. Don’t trust them is all I’m saying, you can’t level with these people. And no matter how weird and sick it gets, don’t say Kenny didn’t warn you.”

The whole conversation was upsetting Simone more than she could say. Emile’s cousin at the employment agency had promised that Simone would get room and board and one hundred and twenty dollars a week. But on that first day Rosemary explained that, since she’d listed the job, her own precarious financial status had gone straight down the dumper. Would Simone mind accepting fifty dollars a week until Rosemary stabilized things with her estranged husband? In theory Simone could have taken it up with Emile’s cousin in Brooklyn, but she couldn’t see going back there or even calling long distance, and if she said she
did
mind and Rosemary fired her—where would she go then?

Even worse, Rosemary paid by check; she was sure Simone would want to start an account at the bank in Hudson Landing. She said, “This is America. A bank account proves you exist.” It would also have proved that Simone wasn’t living with her husband in Brooklyn and would make it easy to find her if Immigration started looking. Emile had specifically cautioned her never to sign her name or tell anyone—anyone!—one true fact about her past. He said, “You can never tell here what will lead to what.” She could be deported or sent to camps up north. He’d told her there was a giant computer that knew everything about you, and once you were in its memory, you would never be free.

Simone took the checks Rosemary proffered on occasional Fridays and filed them in her dresser drawer. Rosemary would never notice that the sums hadn’t been drawn. She often described how she’d tried to balance her account two months in a row, then flung her checkbook against the wall and given up forever. Simone supposed she would cash the checks at some time in the future, though right now this future seemed, at best, gelatinous and cloudy. Try as she might, she couldn’t see beyond her present existence at Rosemary’s, which felt at times like house arrest: half prison, half cocoon. But she had come to agree with Emile’s cousin—she was lucky to be here.

By now Simone felt very gloomy, but she couldn’t show it because she and Kenny had drifted back to the main salon and the children were watching. Kenny said, “The rich are not only richer. They are sleazier than you and me. Again, present company excepted.” He stuck his thumb up at George and Maisie. “Okay, George Raft. Let’s do it.”

George stared into the mirror and sat so still his eyeballs jiggled. He tried not to wince as Kenny assaulted the front of his hair. Finally Kenny stepped back and admired his work and, as an afterthought, fired up his electric clippers and shaved a tiny Batman symbol on the back of George’s head. When he finished he held up a hand mirror, and though it took George some time to get the hang of two mirrors, Simone could tell the moment he saw, because his whole face lit up.

“Excellent,” George said.

Kenny made Maisie’s hair spike up on top and hang down in corkscrew curls—a kind of jellyfish effect. He kissed the children and Simone, and walked them out to the car.

“Speaking of the joint,” he said, leaning down into the car, “or should I say the nuthouse, come hang out if you get time off for good behavior. I could use the company. Anyhow, I’ll see you around. This is not the largest town when it comes to the young and the hip. It’s stronger on the dead and the undead. The overbred and the restless.”

Kenny paused and looked around, miming paranoia. In Haiti you learned to be aware of who might be standing nearby—or you learned, as Simone had, to be mindful of what you said. Clearly Emile was right: one must take the same precautions here.

The mini-mall was deserted; a light rain had begun to fall. “Speaking of the undead,” Kenny said, “have you met Rosemary’s so-called friend and my so-called girlfriend, Shelly?”

“I don’t think so,” Simone said.

“You don’t think so?” Kenny rolled his eyes. “If you don’t know, you haven’t met her. Shelly’s a force of nature. She’s the entry under ‘Ballbreaker’ in the
Guinness Book of World Records.
I just sit back and watch her work. I learn from her, I mean it. I have mothers come in and try to stiff me, bad checks, they left their wallets home, but if I were Shelly they would never
suggest
it. I would be making a profit instead of barely clearing enough to pay some high-school chick to dust those fucking monkeys on the ceiling. Which, let me add, were Shelly’s brilliant decorating suggestion.”

Mortifyingly, Simone realized that she, too, had forgotten to pay Kenny. She groped in her purse for Rosemary’s sixty dollars, but Kenny put his hand on hers and curled her fingers over the bills.

“Forget it,” he said. “I know that scene. Believe me. You’re going to need it. This is exactly what I mean. Look how I’m running my business. But I may be the last guy left in the valley with a nonbionic human heart. Anyway, I wouldn’t want you thinking that all Americans are like that—that we’re all like your sleazebag robber baron boss and his artsy batshit wife.”