Free Primitive People by Francine Prose Page A

all have coronaries at fifty. Don’t the Finns go cross-country skiing? I guess not enough to counteract all that reindeer butter.”
    From then on Rosemary could often be found skipping on the conveyor belt—even this she chose to do in her mouton coat. She said, “I must look like a grocery item trying to escape. What I feel like is a guinea pig in an abusive lab experiment.” She put the treadmill near the telephone so she could work out while chatting with Shelly. Rosemary told Simone it was easier to talk to Geoffrey now that she knew she was secretly fitting him into her exercise routine.
    Every so often Rosemary tried to get George to try the treadmill. She said the exercise would do him good, but George shook his head firmly no.
    “Can you imagine!” Rosemary said. “I would have loved it when I was his age!”
    Maisie stood at a distance watching with what Simone alone recognized as the superiority of a child who can climb straight up the walls.
    Rosemary changed her diet: no more burned-burger-and-pretzel dinners. Now she lived on moderate portions of Simone’s rice and beans and plantains. Everything came up for review, what was healthy and what wasn’t. Some things were psychologically good and physically bad, and the relative merits had to be carefully weighed. Luckily, the spiritual benefits of Rosemary’s sculpture canceled the risk of liver damage from the fiberglass and resins.
    Part of Rosemary’s program for mental health was to get out of the house more. Simone heard her ask Shelly on the phone, “Who’s doing the Halloween party?” Rosemary was silent a moment, then said, “Oh, I see. No, I don’t think I know them.”
    After that Rosemary paid new attention to the telephone and the mail, and once Simone heard her say, to a pile of junk flyers, “Come on, someone must celebrate Halloween. I’d settle for a charity bash, the Cerebral Palsy Harvest Moon Ball.”
    Simone coughed to make her presence known and to stop Rosemary from humbling herself before the mail. Without missing a beat Rosemary said, “Despite what one hears about charities, they’re grotesquely efficient. The day Geoffrey moved out, all the envelopes with envelopes inside got redirected elsewhere.”
    A few days before Halloween, Rosemary appeared in the kitchen. Maisie swallowed her corn flakes and pointed as if at an apparition. George said, “I can’t believe it. Mom’s got up for breakfast!”
    “Shut up, George.” Rosemary smiled. “I don’t appreciate the implications. Listen, I’ve got a brilliant idea. Halloween at the mall! I heard about it on the radio—it’s supposed to be terrific. Costumes! Prizes! Trick or treat! Free candy for the kiddies! Bob-bob-bobbing for apples!”
    George and Maisie and Simone looked at each other, and George rolled his eyes. Several times the children had asked if they could go to the mall for Halloween, but Rosemary had brushed the question off into some indefinite future.
    After the children left for school Rosemary considered costumes. “Let’s be creative,” she urged Simone. “This is a chance to expand their nonexistent art education, or at least work around the rigidity of those minimum-security prisons known as public schools. What do you think George should be? Perhaps something therapeutic, a lion or a tiger. It might do him good to go around roaring like the king of the jungle.”
    Simone had a dismaying vision of George in a humiliating kitty-cat suit, and when it seemed that Rosemary might have fixed on this idea, Simone cast about frantically for an alternative that would spare him.
    She said, “Maybe George could be an Eskimo,” and regretted it at once. The Eskimos were George’s secret—and she had given it away. Would he understand how anxious she’d been to save him from Halloween as a kitty?
    “An Eskimo?” Rosemary said. “An Eskimo? There may be such a thing as too creative. George, let me point out, is a white person. But wait. This could