“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!”
SOMETIMES 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 the
y 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 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 th
ink 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?
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