In a Perfect World Read online

  “Why wait?” Annette said when Jiselle expressed surprise that Annette was already pregnant only a month after marrying her pediatrician, Dr. Williams, thirty years her senior, the very doctor who’d administered Annette’s first vaccinations, treated her strep throat and sprained ankle.

  Why wait? had, in fact, become a kind of mantra. Advertising campaigns repeated it over and over, as did religious leaders. Waiting to buy a thing or to repent of your sins could be equally foolish. The recent increase in the number of marriages was swiftly followed by a skyrocketing number of pregnancies. At the top of the bestseller list was What to Expect When You’re Expecting, followed by The Prophecies of Nostradamus.

  It was said that college students across the country had formed groups devoted to the study of Nostradamus. Why wait to see what the future will hold if we can find out from the past?

  The media connected the war, the fears of the flu, the beautiful and alarming weather, to the behavior of teenagers and adults alike. Bars were crowded in the middle of the day. Workplace affairs were ubiquitous. Unplanned pregnancies and planned ones. There was a pregnant woman on every street corner, it seemed, and a baby being pushed in a stroller on every street. The boys who didn’t go into the military after high school dropped out to become poets. It was said that in Las Vegas it had become so common for gamblers to sit at their slot machines until they collapsed that ambulances were kept idling behind casinos. The twenty-four-hour wedding chapels were busy twenty-four hours a day. So much champagne was being demanded that liquor stores across the country had instituted a one-bottle-per-customer rule to avoid the violent outbursts of customers who came in and found the shelves empty.

  Jiselle, however, wasn’t thinking about the news when she told Mark that, yes, she would marry him.

  She was thinking that she’d waited a long time for this.

  She was thinking that she’d waited long enough.

  In Montreal, Jiselle found the perfect dress. Off-white linen and lace. Just above the ankle. A low neckline sewn with seed pearls.

  “Four hundred dollars Canadian,” the salesgirl said, “and we can tailor it for you.”

  But it didn’t need to be tailored. It fit Jiselle perfectly, as if it had been made for her. And in her hair she would wear a band of lace from her grandmother’s wedding dress—which had arrived in America in tatters in a moth-filled trunk on a Danish ship. Her mother had kept the scraps of that in her attic all these years.

  “Let me see,” Mark said at the Budget Roadway Inn.

  “No,” Jiselle said. “You’re not supposed to see the bride in her dress until the wedding day. It’s bad luck.”

  “To hell with that,” Mark said. “Life is short. Let me see.”

  “Mark.”

  “What if I die before I see it?” he said. “I’m in a dangerous profession! You’d have to live another sixty years knowing you’d denied me the greatest pleasure of my life.”

  Jiselle laughed, and then went into the bathroom and took the dress out of the tissue in which it was wrapped. A few minutes later she stepped out wearing it.

  “Here,” she said, offering herself in the dress.

  Mark stood up from the edge of the bed. His mouth was open, but he didn’t say a word. As he stepped toward her, Jiselle was astonished to see that there were tears in his eyes.

  Outside their window, a truck roared by, rattling the windowpane with its speed. They were staying in a dirty, noisy motel near the airport. As Mark had warned her she might, the owner of L’Amourette Inn, the lovely B-and-B Jiselle had found for them on the Internet, had refused to check Jiselle into their reserved suite when she was unable to convince the woman that, despite the plates on her rental car, she was Canadian

  The border patrol guard between New Hampshire and Quebec had warned her, too.

  “Nobody’s renting rooms to Americans, Madame.”

  “I’m staying with relatives,” she’d lied.

  He returned her passport and nodded disapprovingly.

  Jiselle had followed her MapQuest directions up a long winding road to L’Amourette Inn, glimpsing it through the pines from a mile or two away—a Victorian mansion with a wraparound porch. Rocking chairs on the porch. Shutters on the windows. A cupola. A red weathervane and a wishing well. She parked her rental car in a litter of aspen leaves in front of the inn and walked up the stairs to the porch, carrying her cell phone, her purse, her overnight bag.

  “Hello?” she called, raising a hand to her forehead to peer through the screen.

  A large woman in a white apron whirled around then, at the foot of a long oak staircase, and sputtered in her lovely French accent, “Oh my, you scared me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Come in. Come in,” and bustled to the door, opened it—but before Jiselle could step in, the woman’s smile faded. She said, “You’re not Canadian.”

  “Yes,” Jiselle said. “I am. I—”

  The woman shook her head. “No. No U.S. citizens. I can’t risk it.”

  Jiselle told the woman that she was from Toronto and hadn’t been to the States except to drive through New Hampshire after visiting relatives in Boston. She would have happily produced her passport, she said, but she’d left it behind with her fiancé. He’d be arriving soon. He’d bring it with him.

  “I don’t believe you,” the woman said. “You can’t cross the border without your passport. There will be no one from the States staying at my inn. You’re all going to catch this and kill the rest of us. It’s just a matter of time.”

  She shut the door so hard that the little diamond-shaped panes of glass rattled in their frames, and Jiselle, whose heart seemed to echo the rattling glass in her chest, went back to the car and called Mark’s voice mail, letting him know she’d call back when she found them another place—which she was unable to do until the Budget Roadway, which had a Vacancy sign posted beside a small, hand-drawn picture of the U.S. flag.

  In that hotel room, Mark came to her, standing before him in her dress. He knelt down, took her hands in his, brought them to his face, kissed them slowly. After a long time, he stood up and said, “Now take it off.”

  She did. As he watched, Jiselle stepped out of her wedding dress, and then he took it from her and placed it carefully over the back of a chair, and picked her up in his arms, and placed her on the bed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was lovely summer weather in the country, and the golden corn, the green oats, and the haystacks piled up in the meadows looked beautiful. The stork walking about on his long red legs chattered in the Egyptian language, which he had learnt from his mother. The cornfields and the meadows were—

  Goddamnit!”

  The cornfields and meadows were surrounded by a large forest, in the midst of which—

  “Where are you? Where the hell is my black dress?”

  In the midst of which were deep pools. Indeed, it was delightful to walk—

  “Didn’t you hear me? What the hell happened to my black dress? It was on the fucking hook on the back of my closet door.”

  Jiselle kept the book open on her knees but looked up from its pages.

  Sam shifted nervously beside her.

  Sara was wearing only a black bra and panties, standing at the threshold of the bedroom. Jiselle recognized the panties as a pair of her own. Jiselle had bought herself those panties—mesh and lace—for almost fifty euros in Paris. She’d stood at the edge of a large four-poster bed covered with blue pillows at a hotel in Edinburgh as Mark slid those panties slowly down her thighs, to her ankles, where she’d kicked them away with the toe of her Spanish shoes. Sara had been taking things out of her dresser again.

  Well, she had been stealing Sara’s things, too.

  Jiselle looked back down at the book and said, “I didn’t do anything with your dress.”

  “The hell you didn’t,” Sara said as she stomped back out. “My collar’s gone, too. Stay out of my closet!” She slammed the new bedroom door behind her as hard as she could. The air pre
ssure in the room changed with the force of it. The lace curtains fluttered in the windows, and Mark’s uniforms shifted in his closet.

  Jiselle looked over at Sam. His eyes were wide but also amused. He said, “Keep reading?”

  Jiselle inhaled. She swallowed. Deep in the back of her closet, her stepdaughter’s black dress—the one that covered, maybe, three inches of her thighs at most, the one with the rip in the spandex lace just over her right breast—lay on the floor like a call girl’s shadow—along with the spiked black leather dog collar Sara liked to wear with the dress. Her fishnet stockings were there, as well, and those black combat boots that, it seemed, Sara had not yet noticed were also missing. Jiselle turned the page.

  It was, indeed, delightful to walk about in the country. In a sunny spot stood a pleasant old farmhouse close by a deep river. And from the house down to the waterside grew great burdock leaves, so high that under the tallest of them a little girl could stand upright.

  Jiselle had begun reading the book to Sam a few weeks earlier, when one night before dinner, she found him under his bed.

  “What are you doing under there?”

  There was no answer.

  What could she do? Mark had been gone four out of every five days since the beginning of the month. If she didn’t get Sam out from under the bed herself, he might stay under there until Mark came home again. A child’s skeleton in jeans and a T-shirt. Strawberry-blond curls and dust. “Sam?”

  He didn’t answer, so she sat down on the bed.

  “Sam?”

  Jiselle heard him sniffle under there and felt her own implication of tears then, just behind the bridge of her nose, somewhere around her sinuses. She bit her lip to stop the tears. It would do Sam no good if she started crying, too—although, she supposed, the girls would love it. (“Are you blubbering again?” Sara would ask. “Gee,” Camilla would say, as if simply stating an interesting fact, “our mother never cried. Our mother always said, ‘Be strong, girls. Nobody likes a crybaby.’”) Jiselle pinched the place between her eyebrows and lay on her back on Sam’s bed, her feet still on the floor. She swallowed, and then counted to ten before saying it again.

  “Sam?”

  A muffled sob.

  “Please?” she said to the ceiling. “Come out?” And then, trying to control the little quiver in her own voice, the anxiety that she imagined would sound to him like impatience, she said, “Sam? I can’t let you just stay under the bed. Can I?”

  Even to her, it sounded weak, the question childlike, as if she really were expecting an answer to that question from the ten-year-old under the bed.

  Sam went completely silent again. Not even a sniffle. Jiselle knelt down beside the bed and tried to look under it, but all she could see was darkness and the white rubber sole of one shoe.

  “Okay, Sam,” she said. “Tell me what’s wrong. Can you please tell me?” She waited.

  This time she counted to fifty.

  Finally, she reached under the bed, fishing around until she’d gotten a grip on what she was fairly sure was a tennis shoe, and then a second one, and pulled Sam out by his feet as gently as she could.

  He didn’t struggle. He emerged with a long strand of dust attached to his head, and his face a mess of tears and snot, wrinkled and blotched from crying.

  “What’s wrong?” Jiselle asked, leading him to the edge of the bed by his wrist and sitting him down beside her.

  “I miss my dad,” Sam sobbed.

  “Oh, Sam,” she said, and she couldn’t help it then. A few tears ran from the corners of her eyes into the little valley between her lips and her nose. She wiped them away and said, “I’m so sorry. I miss him, too.”

  So, they decided together that they needed to keep themselves busier. They wouldn’t miss Mark so much if they had 37 more to do. Especially in the evenings, after dinner, and just before bed. Jiselle would, they decided, read aloud to Sam in the evenings. He agreed that the Hans Christian Andersen looked good. She’d taken the book down from the shelf and held it out for him to see. “My father,” she told him, “read this whole book to me one summer.”

  She placed it on his lap.

  The heft of it was satisfying. The gilt-edged pages glowed. Opened, it smelled of pine trees and the past.

  It was a hundred and two degrees that evening in the center of the city. For heat that summer, every record that could be broken had been. From the sewer grates rose a smell so sweet and terrible that people held tissues and pieces of clothing to their mouths and noses. A few wore surgical masks. The latest thing was surgical masks with noses and mouths printed on them.

  Bozo noses.

  Smiles with front teeth missing.

  An elderly woman had tied a little scrap of pink chiffon scarf loosely around the muzzle of her poodle, which trotted beside her, looking about shyly, as if it were embarrassed about the scarf.

  Some said it was the heat that was causing the Phoenix flu—which health experts were no longer referring to as the Phoenix flu but as hemorrhagic zoonosis, because it was not an influenza, they said, but an antibiotic/vaccine-resistant strain of Yersinia pestis.

  Phoenix flu, they believed, was not only an inaccurate term; it was an incendiary one. People diagnosed with it were shunned, isolated in corners of emergency rooms, refused small-town hospital beds, driven out of apartment complexes, expelled from institutions of all kinds. It was hoped that calling it something scientific might lessen the public’s fear of it.

  The public continued to call it the Phoenix flu.

  It was not caused or spread by the heat, experts said, despite the ill effects the heat had on those who were already sick.

  And birds, too, had been ruled out as infection-carriers.

  If anything, it was said, humans were infecting birds.

  Still, biohazard teams were sent out in yellow suits whenever a dead bird was found on the sidewalk or in a backyard—to take it away, dispose of it. The days of birdbaths and birdhouses and birdfeeders seemed over.

  Then, after an outbreak at a daycare center, outraged citizens demanded a ban on imported toys—although no connection to the toys and the disease was ever confirmed. The Chinese government retaliated by banning flights from the United States to China if they held even the cremated remains of American dead, devastating Chinese Americans whose loved ones had requested to be returned to their homeland after their deaths.

  But the Chinese government compared the scattering of American ashes in China to the medieval practice of catapulting plague-dead corpses over fortress walls to infect enemies.

  There was nothing the U.S. government could do about the ban, except make threats.

  Quarantining oneself, experts agreed, was futile. The virus could be in the water, in the dirt, in the air. Who knew? It could take years to discover the source of the infection, and more years to find a cure. Most people quit trying to guess where it might be, and how to avoid it, and simply went on with their daily lives. A poll asking, “How concerned are you about the Phoenix flu?” reported that 61 percent of Americans were Not very concerned. Another 10 percent were Not concerned at all.

  As well as being the day of Britney Spears’s death, it was Jiselle’s birthday, and they were meeting her mother for dinner at Duke’s Palace Inn. It wasn’t the first time they’d eaten together since Jiselle’s wedding. There had already been a disastrous dinner at the house that had ended with Sara leaving the table without touching the food on her plate, and Sam running to the bathroom to throw up the liter of root beer he hadn’t mentioned having guzzled before sitting down to chicken and dumplings. (“For God’s sake, Jiselle, why do you let that boy drink soda?”) Fearing something even worse this time, and in public, Jiselle had almost canceled the birthday dinner, but she knew what her mother would think about that—about her new marriage, about her stepchildren, about her whole life, and all of her decisions—if she did. She would say, “How sad for you, alone on your birthday. Mark simply couldn’t take one day off to spend w
ith you?”

  They were still a block away from the restaurant when a bus rolled by, and the exhalation of diesel fumes came as a nearly pleasant relief in the stifling heat. A woman ran past with a baby tucked into her blouse. From under the damp white silk dangled little porcelain feet.

  When they reached Duke’s Palace Inn, the front window was dark, but Jiselle could see the ghostly flickering of candles on the other side.

  The year before, to celebrate her birthday, Mark and Jiselle had met in Copenhagen at the Tivoli Gardens, where they strolled among the flowers. The Danes said there had never been a summer like it—so much color, and the swarms of strange, stingerless bees hovering over everything in a shining, golden hum.

  Together, Mark and Jiselle watched the changing of the guard outside the palace, and then took a boat ride along the canals, got a glimpse in the distance of the Little Mermaid shining against a gleaming sea—a provocative naked fish-girl, head bowed, as if she were self-conscious or a little sad, or both.

  It was like seeing a character from a dream, in life. On the fireplace mantel in the house in which Jiselle grew up, her mother kept a figurine of the Little Mermaid—green, like the statue itself, but ceramic, and about the size of a lap dog.

  Once, and only once, despite her mother’s many warnings not to, Jiselle had taken it down. She was twelve or thirteen, and holding it in her hands that day for the first time, she realized that it was hollow—and also heavy, especially for something hollow. When her mother walked in and saw her holding the Little Mermaid, she shouted, “Put that back. Your grandfather gave that to me.”