Primitive People Read Free Page B

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.
    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