Primitive People Read Online Free
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,
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,
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