Primitive People

by Francine Prose

  “One thing about Kenny,” Rosemary said. “He knows what children want.”

  Kenny said, “Hey man, it should be obvious. I’m really an eleven-year-old.”

  Simone opened the small white box on which a little silver oval bore the logo of Glenda’s shop. Inside, she found two button-shaped earrings. On each button an iridescent tropical sunset matched the necklace from Geoffrey. Coincidence was impossible, as was collaboration, as was any chance that these objects had spontaneously moved these men to think of Simone.

  Perhaps Shelly bought both presents: her little private joke. Or maybe Kenny and Geoffrey went separately to Glenda’s shop and Glenda arranged the match. Glenda would have imagined she was doing Simone a favor. Once again Simone felt pathetic and foolish for ever having imagined that Geoffrey had bought the necklace because it reminded him of her. At least she would know better than to think that about Kenny.

  “Try them on!” said Rosemary.

  It would have taken too much effort for Simone to refuse, though screwing on the earrings demanded heroic coordination. “Pull your hair back,” Rosemary said.

  “Gorgeous!” pronounced Kenny, and kissed Simone on the cheek so naturally that no one watching would ever suspect how recently they had enacted a scene of sexual humiliation.

  “Rosemary gets two presents,” Kenny said. “A hostess present and a Christmas.”

  The presents were wrapped together, and when Rosemary untied them, a plastic toy fell to the floor: a wind-up jaw with white teeth and shiny bright pink gums. Rosemary bent to pick it up and, with the resigned air of someone submitting to an inescapable punishment, wound the key and skittered the chattering toy across the table.

  Rosemary said, “Why do I perceive this as personal criticism?”

  Kenny said, “I thought you would go for it, man. I thought it would relax you. Anyway, come on now. Check out your real present.”

  “Oh, a tape!” Rosemary said. “I love music! I play it when I work. Neon by Starlight. Fabulous name. It looks somehow … homemade …”

  “Homegrown,” Kenny said. He retrieved the tape from Rosemary and tucked it into the stereo, hit the power button, and white noise blared from the speakers.

  Abruptly the static resolved itself into Kenny singing, “Embraceable You.” In the background a tinkly cocktail piano and a quavering sax kept falling behind the melody and rushing to catch up. Kenny’s voice slid smoothly over the quicker runs but wobbled and cracked on the longer notes so that, listening, you came to dread them.

  “Pay attention,” Kenny said. “The sound of my new life.”

  “Kenny!” Rosemary said. “That’s fantastic!”

  Simone caught the bored, disappointed looks on the children’s faces. They’d tired of Kenny’s presents. The ice skater’s spin seemed more frantic, grabbing dizzily for attention. The digital watch sat on the table next to the pocketknife. How small, thought Simone, that she should be pleased by yet another competitive thought, by the children’s not valuing Kenny’s gifts any more than hers.

  Kenny and Rosemary were discussing the fact that Kenny’s band would be playing New Year’s Eve at the Villa Anita Motel.

  “This year when the clock strikes twelve,” Kenny said, “I’ll be kissing the microphone.”

  Rosemary waved irritably at the stereo, as if enjoining it to be quiet. When it refused to obey she went over and silenced it herself. She said, “Kenny, we got you a collective present—from Simone, the children, and me.”

  Kenny unwrapped the box and, piece by piece, lifted out an inlaid mother-of-pearl comb, a matching shaving brush and mirror.

  Simone thought, It’s a perfect gift, then realized why she’d thought so. Kenny already had one almost identically like it. His combing his hair while she’d sat on his bed was forever engraved on her mind. That he already had such a comb and brush was another unwelcome secret that bound them, though it was hard to be certain if Kenny would know she knew; he had been so much more focused on grooming himself than on Simone’s presence. Still, he had made a special point about his gangster hairbrush.

  “Hey, thanks,” Kenny said. “Very Al Capone. It’s me.” Kenny looked into the mirror and twisted his face into a mask of shock. “Jesus Lord in heaven, help me! A fat mirror! Adds twenty pounds to your face. A mirror from an era when fat was cool and hip. Check it out, Simone. You’ll look like Ethel Waters.”

  “A fat mirror!” Rosemary flapped at the mirror and turned away with a shriek.

  Simone looked in Kenny’s mirror. She didn’t resemble herself, not even the haggard version of herself she’d seen in Kenny’s bathroom. And it wasn’t that she looked fat. She looked somehow transparent, as if she could see through her skin to the tangled nerves inside. Something had come disconnected. A wire had jiggled loose. She recalled the airplane lavatory in which she’d surprised the CIA man. She’d glimpsed her face in the mirror and seen there the face of a woman whom a stranger had meant to find his urine.

  Rosemary said, “Everybody play with your toys! I’ve got serious cooking to do!”

  Simone followed Rosemary into the kitchen, where a large, attractive turkey sat in a pool of its own juices. There were bowls of yams and mashed potatoes, broccoli and a green salad.

  Rosemary said, “You were sleeping, Simone. I know it’s hard to believe. It’s a miracle what one can accomplish in the throes of salmonella!”

  Through the kitchen door Simone saw the dining-room table set with a dark green cloth, red napkins, heavy silverware, and white plates. Rosemary said, “I want it to go on record that I am capable of approximating the housewifely Christmas virtues if I think it might add significantly to my children’s happiness.”

  It was astonishing, really, what Rosemary was capable of. Watching her whip up a glossy, smooth flour gravy, Simone couldn’t have been more shocked had she levitated off the ground.

  “You look mind-blown,” Rosemary said. “You must have thought that the way I’ve been these last months is how I’ve always been. Please, Simone, even Dracula had his day among the living! Within the past twenty-four hours I have begun to feel as if I, too, am rising from the tomb.” And indeed Rosemary did look a shade less pale; she was flushed and slightly mottled from the heat of the oven.

  “Maybe it was the solstice passing,” she said. “The darkest day is behind us. But I honestly sense a thin ray of light breaking through the gloom. I feel that I am ready to make a change for the better. How strange that you can sleep for years and one morning just wake up. Isn’t this Rip Van Winkle land? It must be a geographical thing. Gracious, this turkey is perfection! But who in the world’s going to carve it? Are you up to it, Simone? Don’t answer. I feel the same. That is: maybe I could, maybe I couldn’t, but please, please don’t ask me. Kenny carving our Christmas turkey—how sexist and degraded. Isn’t that the very definition of reduced circumstances?”

  The turkey fell away from the bone under Kenny’s knife. He said, “Cutting is what I do. Still, I can’t believe these chicks, trusting me with a carving knife, alone with women and children.”

  “Kenny the serial killer.” Rosemary swigged from the bottle of port she had just splashed on the yams. “Isn’t he adorable?”

  At last the table was covered with food, and the children were summoned. George sat down before the feast and said quietly, “I’m not hungry.”

  “I’m not either,” said Maisie.

  “That’s ridiculous.” Rosemary poured wine for Kenny and Simone and herself, and drank hers and poured more. Kenny drained his glass almost as fast, and Rosemary refilled it.

  Rosemary said, “I refuse to consider what your father probably fed you. Marshmallows with candy-bar sauce and a Pepsi chaser. Anything to feed your sugar jones and turn you into total junkies clawing your way back to his house.”

  Maisie munched a celery stalk. “We had Christmas Eve dinner,” she said.

  “I’m sure you did,” said Rosemary, “in some diner somewhere where your father happens
to know the waitress.”

  “No,” George said. “At Dad’s house …”

  Rosemary said, “Well then, I can imagine. Your father sees food, like everything else, as an occasion for manipulation, a way to keep you coming back for more. For children it’s white sugar with Red Dye #2 and everything deep-fried in tropical oils and doused in ketchup or honey mustard.”

  She finished off another glass of wine. “Really, the hardest thing for children to comprehend is that simple actions can have symbolic and metaphoric significance not directly affecting themselves. This dinner, for example, is not just food. It would mean something not to eat it. I was just telling Simone that this meal has meant something to me. I was saying that it dawned on me while I was pulling this together that if I could do this, I was capable of getting my life back on track.

  “Of course I have no idea yet what precisely this means for me and the children. But having the will and desire to act is certainly the first step. Actually I guess the first step is admitting you have a problem; having the will to change is the second. In which case I have taken two at once and we should toast the occasion.” Rosemary lifted her glass and clinked it with Simone’s and Kenny’s. “Of course you’re hungry, goddamn it, kids. Not to eat this meal would be a cruel mistake. This is not food but evidence of your mother’s spiritual regeneration.”

  “Which means we’re eating the evidence,” said Kenny. “Like in that Alfred Hitchcock show where the woman killed her husband with a leg of lamb and cooked and served it to the cops, and they could never find the murder weapon.”

  Rosemary’s sniffy silence made it eloquently clear that Kenny’s reply was inadequate to her expression of faith in the future. Tension piqued everyone’s appetite. The children even tried the yams. They each took a bite and proceeded instantly to the mashed potatoes, with which they contrived to be busy when the broccoli came around.

  “You’d like the broccoli, Maisie,” said Rosemary. “I left it nearly raw. Think of it as green carrots with a flower on top.”

  Kenny said, “That is total bullshit.”

  “Excuse me?” Rosemary said.

  Kenny said, “I never trust those flashes that tell you your life’s going to be okay. Those are the very moments when we are being most grievously bullshitted by the cosmos. Your life is never going to be okay and whatever’s coming is worse than whatever was. All those things we took for granted and lost, they’re never coming back. Being a kid, running around on the street after dinner. The first chick you imagined you loved and actually let you fuck her. All that’s finished. History. Gone. You won’t see that in this life again. You’re losing the whole thing, day by day: your parents, your kids, your own body. Every minute is taking you closer to death and you’re never going back, and the dead aren’t returning to start out again as babies. Every second, your cells are getting slacker and weaker and your muscle is losing its tone and things are growing on your skin. If you’re even halfway awake there’s not a minute you can’t feel it. What’s the purpose of doing anything is what I want to know. I cut hair and the hair grows back. It fucking grows after you’re dead.

  “I’m sorry to have to give you kids the bad news on Christmas Day. But the earlier you’re prepared for it, the less of a shock it’ll be. Not that you’re ever prepared for it. When you’re young you don’t believe it. The ability to blow it off is one of the first things you lose. This is just the dark side, guys. It’s something that’s always there. Lots of times I could kill myself just to escape from knowing about it.”

  George said, “Can I have a biscuit?”

  “I thought you weren’t hungry,” said Maisie, and puffed out her cheeks.

  “Are you saying your brother’s fat?” said Rosemary. “Is that what you’re doing with your cheeks? Saying your brother’s fat?”

  “Not listening,” said Kenny. “You kids aren’t listening. Species survival technique.”

  Simone, too, was doing her best not to dwell on what Kenny had just said. She was just not in the mood to feel sorry for Kenny right now. Why was it that everyone here wound up winning your sympathy—first George and Maisie, then Rosemary, and now, it seemed, even Kenny. At the same time she had to admit that Kenny’s speech cheered her a little in that it offered a reason not to take his rejection personally. She had read a magazine article about how worries and problems can sap male sexual interest. Was this true of all men or only American men? Trouble hadn’t sapped Joseph’s interest, but rather deflected it elsewhere.

  Everyone reached for their drinks. Rosemary said, “Except for the suicidal overlay, Kenny, that sounds like something Geoffrey would say. I know you mean it, I do. But I am sick of men sharing the secrets from the wrenching depths of their soul, the screaming cries of pain that have just at that moment bubbled up from their hearts—and later I discover they’ve been saying it to every woman they meet. Geoffrey had the most fabulous speech about a death’s-head traffic cop and feeling his life depended on breaking through this roadblock. It was just so moving, you fell in love with him the minute that you heard it, until you realized he’d been telling every underage twit in the Hudson Valley.”

  Simone felt as if something cold had been dragged lightly over her shoulders. Really, she should have suspected that. Oh, poor Geoffrey, she thought.

  Another silence fell, longer even than the last, so thick the children cut their turkey just to have something to do. Finally Kenny said, “Speaking of old TV … last week I saw this killer old show. Some creep horror thing, pre-Twilight Zone, black-and-white, Golden Age of Television. Very experimental. It was based on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Telltale Heart.’ This guy was lying awake in bed freaking out with guilt. On the sound track a heartbeat got louder and louder and louder, until by the final commercial it was bouncing off your skull.”

  “What’s ‘The Telltale Heart’?” asked George.

  Kenny said, “It’s a story about a guy who kills someone and buries him under the floor and he goes nuts thinking he can hear the guy’s heart still beating. I read that story as a kid, I had to read it for school. I remember I stayed up all night—it was the most terrifying thing ever. But I can’t recall why he killed the guy, if it was love or money or plain psychotic hate. Hey, listen to me. Christmas dinner and I’m talking about a heart beating under the floor. I’m starting to sound like Shelly. Worse. I sound like Shelly in drag. Shelly’s always telling this perverted story about her father bringing home a human heart and getting a giant hard-on dissecting it in the bathroom sink.”

  Simone and the children looked down at their plates.

  Before they heard or saw it, they all knew George was crying; they sensed it, like a sudden drop in barometric pressure. An abyss had opened up at the table, and at the bottom was George. Helpless tears ran down George’s face. His eyes kept filling and overflowing.

  Rosemary walked around the table and put her arm around him. “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “I hate Shelly,” George said.

  “Get in line, Georgie boy,” said Kenny. “Join the club.”

  “Shelly?” said Rosemary. “Why Shelly? What did poor Shelly do?”

  George began to blubber. Words stuck gummily in his mouth and broke loose in ragged pieces. Two clear words kept emerging. One was Shelly. The other was Dad.

  At last even Rosemary understood. She let go of George and stood up very straight. She said, “Was Shelly at your father’s today? I mean last night. Christmas Eve.”

  Maisie had been staring at George, but now she quickly recovered and looked slightly fevered and glassy-eyed with energy and excitement, with the thrill of finally saying what was most crucial and most forbidden. She took a deep theatrical breath and self-consciously held it till the air leaked out of her in a high, breathy whistle. Using her rib cage for emphasis was something Rosemary would do, and as always, it startled Simone to see Rosemary in her children. Maisie filled her lungs again and this time said, “Shelly was at Dad’s last night and this mo
rning. Shelly said that next Christmas we would all be having Christmas here at this house.”

  It was how George talked about grisly murders and bloody auto wrecks, how Geoffrey talked about temptation and getting old and regret, how Kenny talked about losing your life and nothing coming back. So Maisie, too, waited for Rosemary to promise it wouldn’t happen.

  “Not all of us,” George said. “Not Mom.”

  But Maisie already knew that. She was looking at Rosemary, more or less as she’d looked at Simone when they’d been shot at in the forest. In danger the children took their cue from the nearest adult.

  Rosemary said, “And what did your father say?” But she didn’t wait for an answer. She turned and walked out of the room.

  George called after her, “We said we wanted to live with you, Mom!”

  They all heard the bathroom door close. No one moved or said a word. The whole kitchen seemed to hum softly, some hum from the depths of the house, to which the refrigerator added a ratlike squeal Simone couldn’t remember hearing.

  Kenny said, “Fuck Shelly, that lying motherfucking bitch.” He stood up and grabbed his jacket and stormed out of the house.

  Simone and the children remained at the table. Maisie twisted a coil of hair and ran her finger along the dry ends. George poked at his chewed-over turkey with such concentration you would have thought the solution to their dilemma lay beneath that gristle and skin. Simone fought the urge to tell him not to play with his food. It was Rosemary’s voice she imagined, coming from her mouth, and this seemed the clearest sign yet of how mixed up everything was.

  Maisie said, “Kenny forgot his present. We’ll have to save it and give it to him.”

  Out of some reflex, Simone said, “That’s very nice of you, Maisie.” George looked stricken, as he had since Rosemary left the table. Simone thought: He will feel better if he washes his face. But selfishly, she didn’t want him getting up from the table. Neither Simone nor Maisie nor George wanted the others to leave. This was what they had learned in the forest: Keep together. Keep quiet. Don’t move.