Primitive People Read Free Page A

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