Primitive People Read Online Free Page B

nothing you know about that this guy doesn’t know better. I always think 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?
    Even worse, Rosemary paid by check; she was sure Simone would want to start an account at the bank in Hudson Landing. She said, “This is America. A bank account proves you exist.” It would also have proved that Simone wasn’t living with her husband in Brooklyn and would make it easy to find her if Immigration started looking. Emile had specifically cautioned her never to sign her name or tell anyone—anyone!—one true fact about her past. He said, “You can never tell here what will lead to what.” She could be deported or sent to camps up north. He’d told her there was a giant computer that knew everything about you, and once you were in its memory, you would never be free.
    Simone took the checks Rosemary proffered on occasional Fridays and filed them in her dresser drawer. Rosemary would never notice that the sums hadn’t been drawn. She often described how she’d tried to balance her account two months in a row, then flung her checkbook against the wall and given up forever. Simone supposed she would cash the checks at some time in the future, though right now this future seemed, at best, gelatinous and cloudy. Try as she might, she couldn’t see beyond her present existence at Rosemary’s, which felt at times like house arrest: half prison, half cocoon. But she had come to agree with Emile’s cousin—she was lucky to be here.
    By now Simone felt very gloomy, but she couldn’t show it because she and Kenny had drifted back to the main salon and the children were watching. Kenny said, “The rich are not only richer. They are sleazier than you and me. Again, present company excepted.” He stuck his thumb up at George and Maisie. “Okay, George Raft. Let’s do