Free Primitive People by Francine Prose

took Rosemary’s credit card. Simone was relieved that Rosemary seemed able to manage without her help. Rosemary said, “This is going to sound hypochondriacal, but I’m in acute respiratory failure.”
    “Don’t worry, dear.” The receptionist smiled. “Leave the diagnosis to Doctor.”
    “Come this way,” she said, and Rosemary shot a wild look at Simone. Both of them followed the woman into a curtained-off cubicle.
    “Hop on the table,” said the woman. “You’ll want to take off that fur coat. Doctor won’t hear a heartbeat, and then where will we be?”
    On her way out the woman drew the curtain. They could hear her and the doctor yelling back and forth.
    “How was I supposed to know he’s her nephew?” the doctor said. “The worst kind of teenage shithead, the absolute scum of the earth. I don’t ask, I don’t want to ask how he broke the arm. Okay, I’m not as gentle as I might be, seeing if I can set it. He keeps screaming, ‘Aunt Suzie! Aunt Suzie!’ How am I supposed to know Aunt Suzie is Susan, my goddamn nurse?”
    A white-haired man yanked open the curtain and told Rosemary and Simone, “What we have around here is what they call organized chaos. Know anyone who wants a job?”
    Simone looked at Rosemary. Were they expected to answer?
    “I’m Dr. Worms,” he told them. “Believe me, I’ve heard every possible joke about my name. What’s the problem, young lady?”
    Rosemary burst into tears and in a strangled voice managed to convey the fact that she couldn’t breathe.
    “There, there.” The doctor patted her shoulder. “I know how it is. You’re the one who can’t get sick. The hubby can get sick and the kids can get sick but you can’t let up for a minute.”
    He felt the glands under Rosemary’s neck and put a stethoscope to her heart. He said, “You know, there is one thing women do better …” and waited till Rosemary asked, “What?”
    “Everything!” The doctor grinned. “I think you’ll be fine. Short of hooking you up to a million bucks’ worth of electronics better suited to an auto shop than a human, I have to go with my hunch, which is that physically you’re shipshape. Something’s just getting to you. How many kids do you have?”
    “Two,” said Rosemary.
    “Three,” the doctor corrected her.
    “Three?” Rosemary looked bewildered. Was there one she’d forgotten?
    “Three counting your husband,” he said.
    Rosemary said, “I guess you know my husband.” The doctor said, “I’m just like him.”
    A few days later Rosemary saw her regular doctor for a checkup. This was after much discussion with Simone and then on the phone with Shelly, asking Shelly the same questions she had just asked Simone: Was something really wrong with her? Should she bother with the doctor? Wasn’t it normal that Rosemary should feel a tiny bit fried the first weekend her children spent with their psycho father?
    But it hadn’t just been in her head. She had had physical symptoms. Who knew what fatal condition Dr. Worms—Dr. Worms!—might have overlooked. What kind of physician hears you can’t breathe and makes dumb jokes about your husband? What had he done in another state to wind up working at that clinic?
    Simone’s father had died suddenly of an aneurysm of the brain and her mother, some years later, succumbed in a matter of days to meningitis. That both of them had been fully alive and then, dizzyingly, dead made Simone feel unqualified to give medical advice.
    Rosemary came home from Dr. Shapiro’s office with an armload of pamphlets that she dumped on the kitchen table and read, a paragraph from each one. “I’ve been kidding myself,” she said. “Talking bananas and potassium and eating potato chips and toxic fumes. You can only fool the body so long. Our whole lives will have to change.”
    The first change was a treadmill Rosemary bought at a sports shop. “Nordic skiers are indestructible,” she said. “Excepting, I guess, the Finns, who