In a Perfect World Page 4

  Jiselle had turned hurriedly to put the figurine back on the mantel, stammering something about just blowing off the dust, but her mother rushed at her, grabbed it out of her hands. “I’ll take care of that. You keep your hands off of it,” she said as she straightened the mermaid on the mantel, and then turned back to Jiselle with a look that was both threatening and beseeching. “Please.”

  It was the first time Jiselle had considered the possibility that her mother might have loved her own father as much as Jiselle loved hers. It was the first time she’d ever even imagined her mother as a little girl—a girl sitting in a father’s lap, being patted on the head by his rough hand, maybe while he sang the Danish folksong Jiselle’s own father had sung to her:

  Min Tankes Tanke ene Du er vorden, Du er mit Hjertes første Kjarlighed…

  “You alone have become the thought of my thoughts. You are my heart’s first love…”

  Her own father used to call Jiselle “my Danish princess,” and had told her, in fact, that her name in Danish meant “little princess.” Throughout her childhood, Jiselle had taken his word for it, until, in college, she looked it up.

  By then it was already old news—old news of the most sordid nature—that her father was involved with Ellen, who had been Jiselle’s best friend since second grade. She’d thought by then, when it came to things having to do with her father, that nothing would surprise her. How many girlfriends had he had since her mother had thrown him out of the house, and how many of those girlfriends had been young enough to be his daughter, even if they weren’t his daughter’s age?

  And still somehow it had surprised Jiselle to find, in that reference book, that the meaning of the name Jiselle was not “princess.”

  It was “hostage.”

  When she told her father this during one of their strained weekly phone calls, he snorted and said, “I wouldn’t know about that. Your mother was the one with the European pretensions. She certainly never asked me what I thought of the name.” But when, at Thanksgiving that year, Jiselle asked her mother how she’d come to give her the name Jiselle, her mother rolled her eyes and said, “Your father picked that one out.” And then, “How is your dear father?” she asked. “And your darling stepmother?”

  “He’s not marrying Ellen,” Jiselle had said, trying not to sound defensive—but even to her it sounded protective and aggressive at the same time.

  “God, Jiselle,” her mother had said, “I can’t imagine what kind of denial you’re in, to stand up for him.”

  And, in truth, how many such denials had Jiselle managed to flimsily construct over the last few years?

  He’s not dating Ellen.

  He’s not in love with Ellen.

  He’s not sleeping with Ellen.

  All the time, apparently, he was.

  But even before he’d been thrown out, and long before he’d started up with Ellen, it had seemed to offend and amaze her mother that Jiselle loved her father so much. When he came home from work and Jiselle ran screaming through the house to greet him, her mother would say, “Lord, Jiselle, he was just at the pharmacy, not the Crusades.”

  So, the day she took down the Little Mermaid figurine, it was a revelation that her mother might have once loved her own father. He’d died many years before Jiselle was born, and her mother had always spoken disparagingly of the farm on which she’d grown up, her father’s endless labor. The manure, the pigs. The uncles in a perpetual war against the weather. Their hands under the hood of some machine all day. Her own mother’s exhausted death from heart failure at the age of fifty-three.

  Standing with her back to the mantel and the Little Mermaid, her arms crossed, her mother had said to her, “It’s the only thing I have.”

  In Copenhagen, Mark and Jiselle had taken a limousine together to the airport, although they had different flights back to the States. Mark was piloting a jet from Paris to Atlanta. Jiselle was headed to London, to LaGuardia, and from there to Detroit.

  Their limousine driver was a young blond man, no older than twenty, who only nodded to the two of them after putting their luggage in the trunk. Between the front and back seats was a Plexiglas partition, and behind it, Mark kept Jiselle wrapped in his arms as the limousine moved smoothly through the flowers and towers and spires of Copenhagen on a Sunday morning. Church bells rang and echoed, rang and echoed, both monotonously and wildly, as if they had never really started and would never stop. Mark’s uniform smelled pleasantly stiff, like dry-cleaning chemicals, and like Mark. When the limousine stopped at an intersection, hundreds of bicyclists sped past, bikes flashing in the sunlight, sounding like the stingerless bees hovering over the yellow tulips in the Tivoli Gardens.

  Some of the bicyclists were wearing the now-familiar American flag with a heavy black X through it.

  Jiselle had glimpsed these all over the world.

  Everyone hated the United States now, it seemed. For decades they’d been ruining the environment with their big cars and their big wars, and now they wanted to spread their disease to the rest of the world, too.

  Yankee go home.

  U.S. not welcome.

  But, even as it got harder to travel—more bureaucracy, more hostility—during the glorious early months of their courtship, Jiselle and Mark met in exotic cities all over the world, spent their time in hotel beds, DO NOT DISTURB dangling in several languages from doorknobs.

  They ate chocolates, drank champagne.

  They took baths together, Mark’s knees up around Jiselle’s shoulders, Jiselle’s soapy feet sliding around his crotch, gingerly.

  They ordered room service, ice cubes between her breasts, between his teeth, traced down her torso.

  Afterward, they’d laugh about the sheets, which were damp, tangled.

  As soon as they got into a room, they’d pull the curtains.

  They ignored the fire alarm. Let’s just burn.

  Together.

  Oh. God.

  In Brussels, Mark bought Jiselle something pink and battery-operated with long waving fronds. He had only to touch her with it to bring her to panting, helpless orgasms. When she opened her eyes afterward, he was looking down at her, smiling.

  On the Italian Riviera, they went to a topless beach, where Mark rubbed suntan oil on Jiselle’s breasts in full view of the teenage boys smoking cigarettes under an umbrella beside them. When she looked over, one of the boys was rubbing his erection happily, unabashedly, through his cutoffs, looking at her.

  When Jiselle rang the bell on the door of Duke’s Palace Inn, a man in a white apron unlocked it to let them in. Most of the more expensive restaurants in Chicago and on the outskirts had a locked-door policy now, and required reservations—ostensibly because, with the economy the way it was and the fears of the flu having changed the dining-out habits of the whole nation, chefs and restaurant owners had no way of estimating, any longer, the amount of food that would be needed on any given day or night.

  But there had also been talk that this was just an excuse, really, to impart a false sense of safety to customers, who, it was presumed, would feel better about going to a restaurant to eat if they didn’t need to worry about unexpected people wandering in off the street—sick people, homeless people, strangers, the whole potentially infected population of those who would not think ahead far enough to make reservations at a nice restaurant.

  The doorman locked the door behind them after they stepped inside.

  At the hostess lectern, Jiselle stood blinking in the candlelight, scanning the dining room until she saw, at a round table in the center, her mother, who did not look up from her menu until Jiselle was standing beside her, touching her shoulder, looking down onto the top of her head with its ice-blond hair. She looked up then, and her gaze fell on Jiselle, Sam, Camilla, and Sara in turn. “Hello.”

  Camilla smiled wanly and nodded at Jiselle’s mother. Sara stared at a vague place in the corner of the restaurant. Sam, bobbing on his toes, said, “Hi!” so loudly that a couple dining in a
far corner of the restaurant looked over.

  Jiselle sat down, trying not to look at her mother looking at Sara. Earlier, she’d given Sara her own black dress to wear when Sara couldn’t find hers, and had lent her, too, the beautiful black shoes she’d bought in Madrid.

  It was a conservative, funeral parlor outfit, nothing like the one Sara had wanted to wear, and still, somehow, Sara managed to make it look provocative, managed to look like a girl whose job it was to deliver pornographic birthday greetings to corporate businessmen. Jiselle might have managed to hide the dress, but she hadn’t been able to keep Sara from wearing black fingernail polish, black lipstick, all that black eyeliner, the ring piercing her lower lip. She was pretty sure the black eyeliner was her own—the Chanel ebony pencil missing from her dresser drawer for a week—but God knew she was never going to say anything. She’d already resigned herself to the petty thefts. On the couple of occasions when it was something she couldn’t live without or couldn’t replace—the onyx ring Mark had bought for her from a street vendor on Isla Mujeres—Jiselle went into Sara’s room while she was out and searched around until she found it.

  Then Sara waited until Jiselle was out, and went into Jiselle’s drawers and stole it back.

  After that, Jiselle had no choice but to snatch it again and then to wear it day and night.

  Her mother inhaled, looking from Sara to Jiselle. “Nice to see you,” she said. “Happy birthday, Jiselle.”

  “Thank you,” Jiselle said. She sat between her mother and Sara, and across from Sam, who tucked his linen napkin into the collar of his shirt and kept it there until Jiselle managed to catch his eye, shake her head. Then he spread it theatrically onto his lap, smiling.

  They ordered drinks when the waiter came over—sodas for the kids (“Just one tonight, Sam, okay?”) and champagne for Jiselle and her mother, along with an appetizer. Snails. Jiselle’s favorite dish at Duke’s. Bread was passed around in a basket so light it was hard to hold on to, as if they had been served emptiness in a basket made of air.

  After the sodas and champagne arrived, Jiselle’s mother raised her glass and said, dispassionately, “Many happy returns.”

  Jiselle and the children raised their glasses, too.

  Jiselle was surprised, when she did, to see that her own hand, holding up the sparkling glass, was shaking.

  “Let’s try to have a nice meal, shall we?” her mother said, looking around at the children.

  “Yes,” Jiselle said, as if her mother had been talking to her.

  They’d taken only a few, silent sips of their drinks before the snails were brought out on a little silver plate and set in the middle of the table. Sam leaned toward the plate, curious, but the girls recoiled. Sara put her napkin to her mouth as if to stifle a scream, as the smell of garlic rose from the small, curled, dark gray flesh. Camilla looked away, grimacing. Jiselle pierced one on the end of her small silver fork, brought it to her mouth, placed it on her tongue, and ate it slowly.

  It was delicious—the soft, luxurious density of something delivered divinely from the sea, liberated from its shell by nymphs, relaxed into death by butter. That snail seemed nothing at all like the kind of creature Jiselle used to find clinging to rocks in her grandmother’s garden—its whole body a small, hopeless, damp tongue, bearing all that weight from one place to the next, seeming to think its shell might save it.

  As she chewed, Jiselle kept her eyes on her plate, except to look up one time when her mother said to Camilla, “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  Camilla didn’t answer. She was staring at the candle in the center of the table. It flickered, surged, contracted in a blue-and-orange dance, trying, Jiselle knew, to eat up all the oxygen in the room.

  “Camilla?” Jiselle said. Camilla looked up then. Her eyes were so red and swollen they were painful to look at, and Jiselle looked away.

  For hours after the news, Camilla lay on her bed with her face in her pillow, weeping, while Sara stomped around the house with her cell phone, spreading the bad news, sharing the grief. Jiselle hadn’t known they even liked Britney Spears. Wasn’t Camilla, at least, too old to be a Britney Spears fan? Wasn’t Sara too punk for a Barbie doll like Britney? Wasn’t Britney Spears, by then, old news anyway?

  Apparently not.

  Apparently Camilla and Sara had thought of Britney Spears as a kind of immortal sister. They were inconsolable. No, they did not want breakfast. Or lunch. Or to talk. Finally, after the second hour of weeping, Jiselle went to Camilla’s room, stood in the threshold, and said, “I’m sad, too, Camilla, but we can’t let it—”

  “Let it what?” Camilla asked. Her tone, hysterical and angry at the same time, sounded vaguely threatening, and it was at that moment that Jiselle realized she’d had no earthly idea what she was about to say, anyway. In truth, was she even so sure she fully believed that it was inappropriate to grieve so deeply for Britney Spears? And if it was, why was it? They’d prefaced the special news bulletin with a few bars from “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” and the tears had pricked Jiselle’s eyes before she’d even had a chance to blink.

  Britney Spears, back then, with all that flaxen hair, still a child, half-naked, the wind blowing some wheat around behind her a long decade or more ago. The kind of girl who might own a winged horse—dead? Of the flu? Of hemorrhagic zoonosis? All that self-destructive energy, that combustion, just to die of the same infection that might kill the odd, unlucky nurse’s aide or mallard duck?

  Anyway, she knew that even if she had managed to say something coherent to Camilla about how, maybe, it was inappropriate to grieve for a pop star the way you would grieve for a member of your own family, Camilla would have nodded politely through her tears, wiped her nose with a piece of tissue, and agreed—to Jiselle’s face. To her face, Jiselle was always right. Only later would Jiselle overhear Camilla muttering to her sister, “That bitch is so cold.”

  Sara would simply have stomped out, saying something like, “Spare us your philosophy, Mommy.”

  (In the previous week, Sara had taken to calling Jiselle—ironically, in italics—Mommy, while Camilla had still never called Jiselle by any name at all. Jiselle had no idea what, if Camilla were forced to get her attention in a crowd, she might have been able to bring herself to call out: Jiselle, or Stepmother, or Second wife of my father?)

  What had Jiselle, standing at the threshold of Camilla’s room, thought she might say?

  That was the problem with being a stepmother, Jiselle was beginning to realize, or with being a mother, for all she knew: you went around trying to convince children of things you weren’t that sure of yourself. That it was inappropriate to cry yourself sick over the death of a pop star. That it was better to read with the television off. That eating cookies before dinner was inherently wrong.

  Sam was only ten, and he’d already figured out that a room looked just as clean if you kicked the laundry under the bed as it did if you spent the hours it would take to sort and fold and put the clothes in closets and drawers.

  Wasn’t that what Jiselle herself had done for years?

  Hypocrisy had somehow not been one of the “cons” she’d considered when thinking about resignation from her job to stay home with Mark’s children. When he’d first proposed the possibility, there had been so many things to think about that hypocrisy could never have fit on the “con” list.

  Loss of seniority, pension, and job security; financial dependence after so many years of being on her own—these things had occurred to her.

  When Jiselle’s mother asked her again if she planned to eat anything, Camilla finally said, in a quavering voice, “I’m not very hungry.”

  Sam chased a snail around his plate with his fork, caught it, put it in his mouth, chewed, and said, “I don’t get why it’s such a big deal.”

  Instantly, Jiselle recognized it as the worst possible thing he could have said, but by then it was too late. Sara whipped around to glare at her brother with her mouth open. Jiselle’s
mother looked over. Jiselle cleared her throat nervously. “Sam,” she said. “Let’s not talk about that, okay?”

  Obediently, Sam gave a world-weary shrug, and then he reached across the table for another slice of bread, dragging his elbow through the butter dish as he did. He wiped the butter off his elbow onto his pants leg, smiled pleasantly up at Jiselle’s mother, and continued to eat.

  “What are we talking about?” Jiselle’s mother asked, looking around the table.

  Jiselle cleared her throat, and then, under her breath, leaning toward her mother, answered, “Britney Spears. She died.”

  Her mother blinked noncommittally. Camilla drew a ragged breath. Sara choked out, “Excuse me,” and stood up, heading for the women’s room. When she did, her linen napkin slid off her lap and onto the floor. They all glanced down at it, but no one made a move to pick it up.

  “Britney Spears?” Jiselle’s mother asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “Yes,” Jiselle said, scrambling to think of a way to change the subject. “The singer.”

  “I know who Britney Spears is,” her mother said. “I just don’t know why we’d—”

  Jiselle raised a desperate hand in the air over her mother’s head and began waving at their waiter. Her mother turned to look at him, too, and in one second he was beside the table. “Yes, ma’am?” he said to Jiselle, who opened her mouth with no idea what she should ask him for. Thinking frantically, she was surprised to hear herself say, as if she’d intended all along to say it, “It’s my birthday. Do you think we might have a cake after dinner?”

  “Certainly.” The waiter smiled and bowed.

  When he was gone, Jiselle’s mother said, shaking her head, “We haven’t even gotten our main course yet.”