In a Perfect World Read online

  The regular codes of conduct were being pleasantly broken or ignored that night. People walked in the middle of the street, unwrapping candy and discarding the trash on sidewalks. Despite the public service announcements about not eating candy the origins of which you were uncertain, children and their parents were gobbling it down even as they collected it. Teenagers were handed cans of beer by homeowners. A few macabre revelers wore zombie masks and nurse uniforms in reference to the Phoenix flu. One tall, frightening boy sauntered alone, without bothering to collect candy, from door to door in a black cloak and a long-beaked bird mask. People smiled at him, and he nodded somberly back.

  The pharmacist joked about the lice—“How big are these bugs? Can you fry ’em up for supper?”—but when Jiselle was apparently too flabbergasted to respond, he explained to her soberly what she needed to buy and what she needed to do, and she left the store with a small comb and a bottle of something called Nix, with a horrifying cartoon of a beast with eight legs on the label.

  “You okay?” she asked Sam when she got back into the Cherokee with her paper bag.

  He was staring straight ahead. “Look,” he said when she was behind the wheel, and he pointed to something in the parking lot.

  She put on her sunglasses to see what it was through the glare on the windshield. She leaned forward, squinting.

  There, in the middle of the nearly empty drugstore parking lot, was a small group of dark furred things. Moving but not scurrying. Milling.

  Animals, clearly. But what kind?

  She rubbed her eyes and leaned forward to see them better. There were eight or nine of them. Tails. And paws. Black.

  “Listen,” Sam said.

  Jiselle held her breath and listened, and even through the rolled-up windows she could hear them making a quiet high-pitched sound, like childish chuckling, or singing. She turned to Sam and asked, whispering the question to him, “What are those?”

  “Rats,” he said.

  “Oh my God,” Jiselle said, putting a hand to her mouth and seeing them, then, clearly. Their naked tails. Their sharp pink ears. Her heart sped up. She started up the engine of the SUV, and the rats, seeming to have heard it, turned their horrible faces in its direction but didn’t run off. They simply stared at Jiselle and Sam in the SUV. As she drove out of the parking lot, she was careful to make a wide loop around the rats, which did not leave their tight circle but seemed, instead, to stand their ground even more stubbornly, watching them drive away.

  Back at home, Jiselle read the directions on the bottle of Nix, while Sam ate the grilled cheese sandwich she’d made for him. It was the one thing she’d mastered in the kitchen since moving into Mark’s house. The only thing. She’d gone so long in life without learning how to cook, it seemed that she had lost the capacity to learn. She’d burned omelets and served up pink-centered chicken breasts a few times before the girls took to cooking for themselves, Lean Cuisines and pot pies.

  (“None of the other nannies could cook, either,” Sam said to her once, and then stammered an apology when he saw the look on her face.)

  The few dinners she’d made that had actually succeeded—lasagna, seafood manicotti, chicken and dumplings, an enchilada casserole—had displeased the girls as much as the ruined ones. Too spicy. Or not spicy enough. Sara would say she was a vegetarian some days. Camilla would claim to have allergies she’d failed to mention until a certain meal was served. And although Sam was always willing to eat anything she made, all he really wanted was grilled cheese, and that, at least, Jiselle had finally figured out how to make exactly as he liked it.

  Browned but only slightly. The cheese soft and warm but not gooey in the center.

  She’d put the sandwich in front of him on his favorite plate—pale blue with a faded picture of Scooby-Doo in the center—and poured him a glass of milk. She unscrewed the top of the bottle of Nix and sniffed it, and realized she must have made a face when Sam said, “Is it super bad?”

  “Well,” Jiselle said softly, “it’s not great.”

  In truth, it smelled like tar and also formaldehyde.

  “We’ll do this a little later, okay?” she offered.

  “Okay,” Sam said, tearing parts of his sandwich off before eating them. Jiselle put the bottle of Nix on the table and folded her hands. Sam was going to hate this. This boy who squirmed away from his father when he simply tried to wipe some ketchup off his face—who, once, when Jiselle had suggested cleaning out his ears with a Q-tip, had looked at her with wide, horrified eyes and said, “Are you kidding?”

  She watched him eat. She tried not to stare at his hair—all those beautiful curls, and what might be crawling among them—but she leaned a little to the left, considering the shape of his skull. He had beautiful cheekbones. A pleasing jaw and brow. She said, “Have you ever considered having your head shaved?”

  Sam looked up brightly from his Scooby-Doo plate. “Wow,” he said. “You mean, like a total skinhead?” Sam knew about skinheads. They’d been the latest bad news. Burning down Chinese-owned businesses. Burning crosses on the lawns of Jews, African Americans, Muslims—anyone they chose to blame at the moment for the Phoenix flu.

  “Well, yeah,” Jiselle said. “I guess. Like a skinhead—but nice.”

  “That would be so cool,” Sam said, holding a piece of his grilled cheese aloft. His eyes were wide. In them, Jiselle could read the clock on the microwave behind them blinking 11:11, 11:11, 11:11.

  Jiselle told herself she was not shaving Sam’s head because of the advice of the hysterical secretary at his school, but what could it hurt?

  It was just hair. It would grow back.

  So, after lunch, she stood behind him at the kitchen sink. First, she used scissors to cut the strawberry-blond curls off his head—soft, beautiful handfuls—and then she shook the satiny strands off her fingers into the trash can. They clung to her arms, her shirt, her jeans, and the static electricity actually crackled when she brushed them off in little jumping sparks. She wet what was left of his hair by leaning him forward over the sink, filling her hands with lukewarm water, splashing it over his hair, and then she patted shaving cream onto his head. Finally, she used Mark’s razor to carefully smooth the last of it from his scalp, and afterward they both went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror so Sam could see.

  The skin on Sam’s scalp was pale, but it looked healthy—and without hair, it was possible to really see how handsome his features were. The nose was Mark’s, but the eyes were deep set and olive-brown. At his temples were subtle and delicate blue veins just under the surface. The head was a beautiful shape, and the back of his skull felt solid and satisfying in her palm. Touching it—the weird, beautiful, wonderful nakedness of it—Jiselle could imagine what it had been like for Mark, and for Joy, to bring him into the world for the first time, the way the skin of a newborn might really feel like the organ that skin is: breathing, alert, warm and cool at the same time. She had the impulse to kiss his head, but she had never actually kissed Sam before, except for the kind of air-blown kiss to the cheek her mother had always given her, and she had no idea how he’d react, so she settled for smoothing her fingertips along the beautiful ridge behind his ear, tickling him a little. He laughed. He moved his head around so he could inspect himself from both sides in the mirror, and asked, “How do I look?”

  “You look perfect,” Jiselle said.

  Because of head lice and the public school’s policy on them, Sam and Jiselle had the whole day free, and it wasn’t even noon.

  A hike? Monopoly? A trip to town to the hobby shop?

  Since the children had started school in September, Jiselle had mostly spent her afternoons alone in the house, moving through its rooms, feeling baffled as to how to begin to clean them up.

  The dust she’d dispersed a few days before would have either settled again or redistributed itself with maddening genius. Sam’s plastic action figures would be everywhere. The girls’ shoes, jewelry, magazines were scattered
across every flat surface, and Jiselle knew that if she picked those up and moved them there would be shrieking later—Where the hell’s my bandana? What did you do with my magazine?

  And the floors.

  The floors seemed magnetized—eternally capturing or creating long clouds of lint and hair held together with dust, which were spirited into corners when Jiselle turned her back. She would have just finished with the broom, turned around, and there those clouds would have gathered again.

  On the phone from upstate New York, Annette said, “Get a fucking housekeeper. For God’s sake. You’re not his maid, Jiselle.”

  But how, Jiselle thought, could she justify her days to herself or to anyone else if she had a housekeeper, if someone else were coming in to do the few things she had to do?

  And what would she do while the housekeeper did these things? And what would she do with the time left over?

  Sometimes the vacuum cleaner sounded like the dual engines of a jet starting up. Or Jiselle would hear, overhead, an actual jet—a distant needle in the sky—and she’d imagine her past still taking place up there. The metal cart. The drawer of ice. The faces looking up at her. The way turbulence or exhaustion, or simply being thirty-five thousand feet in the air, could turn even the most self-satisfied businessmen and women into needy children.

  They were scared.

  They did not have wings. They did not know how to fly. They were incredibly grateful for the calm smile, the foil packet of pretzels.

  But of course there had been the other sort of passenger. Drunk on miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Punching their flight attendant buttons for more. There had been the woman who’d said to Jiselle once, when she’d had to rouse her from a drooling sleep to put her tray table back up for landing, “I hope you burn in hell.” She didn’t miss that.

  But, since quitting, the days could last so long. Sometimes Jiselle would sit down at the kitchen table and will the phone to ring. Call me, Mark. When it did ring, she’d jump, heart racing, but it usually wasn’t Mark. Once or twice, it was Brad Schmidt calling from next door, asking if Jiselle had heard this or that bad piece of news on the radio. Although their houses were separated by a long, tall hedge, Brad Schmidt seemed able to see through it, to know when Jiselle was sitting by the phone.

  No, she would not have heard the news. She didn’t listen to the news. Why would she? Whales washing up on beaches. Chickens being burned alive, and some man who called himself Henry Knighton killing prostitutes in Seattle to “cleanse the earth.”

  The news had to happen to her before she knew about it—and even then she wasn’t always sure what it was, like the afternoon when, while folding laundry in the bedroom, she heard a crash in the kitchen.

  No one was home. Mark was flying; the children were at school. Jiselle stepped cautiously out of the bedroom and went to the kitchen, where she found that the cupboards had all swung open. A broken dish lay on the ceramic tiles. A coffee cup had rolled off the counter and into the sink. She stood with her hand to her chest for what must have been several minutes, feeling her heart beat hard, trying to get used to this new order of things, this unfamiliarity, the idea that the kitchen cupboards could open on their own and spill their contents. Then she heard Brad Schmidt shout, “Hey!” from the other side of his hedge, and she hurried to the kitchen window and looked out to see him standing in the side yard, his arms parting the branches, looking through them. “You know what that was, Mrs. Dorn?”

  “No,” Jiselle called back, opening the window to hear his answer.

  “That was an earthquake!”

  Indeed, a rare Midwestern earthquake had shaken the whole region. Gently but surely, it had registered itself with a few framed photographs falling off walls, some cracks in a freeway overpass, that dish Jiselle had to pick up off the kitchen floor, and the cup out of the sink. Not terribly damaging, just surprising.

  “This is just the beginning,” Brad Schmidt said to her later at the end of their driveways. “Tip of the iceberg. Tornadoes. Tsunamis. Hold your hat on. Ever read about the Black Death? It was all there. Before the plague did its worst work—the floods, the winds, the earthquakes. You wait.” There was no mistaking the tone in his voice for anything but excitement.

  After considering his options for his free afternoon, Sam decided on a hike into the ravine behind the house.

  He loved a hike. Loved the ravine. He and Jiselle had already taken a few hikes together since she’d moved in. There was a good trail, and Sam knew every inch of the ravine and liked to dispense his knowledge. Jiselle was the ingénue. Everything surprised her. Rabbits surprised her. Ferns surprised her. The occasional deer crashing away through the trees. Raccoons.

  That afternoon, the pine trees pulsed with light under a blank white sky. Following the path into the ravine, Jiselle had the sense of entering a vast emptiness. Something abandoned. Many species of birds had migrated south. Animals were hibernating. The only sound was the watery, distant call of a pigeon. There was not a plane in the sky, as far as Jiselle could see. Not even a contrail fraying above them.

  Sam walked ahead of her on the path. She’d made him wear one of his father’s fishing caps—a smashed khaki thing that was too big for him—because the exposed flesh on his freshly shaved head looked so pale. Now, trudging ahead of her in the cap, he looked comical, top-heavy, like some cartoon character, with his bony shoulders, his long gait, that hat.

  She was looking from Sam’s back to the treetops, thinking what a perfect day it was (warm but not hot, the whole afternoon ahead of them) when it ran across the path only a few inches in front of her.

  A warm-blooded darkness. A sneaky, wild, black furred thing, slipping between herself and Sam.

  If she hadn’t frozen instinctively, Jiselle would have tripped over it. But after freezing, she jumped backward, screamed, and Sam turned just in time to see the rat scurry off, and Jiselle’s boot (which was all wrong for hiking, she realized at that moment, the heel of it too smooth and high) and the path slide out from under her. And suddenly she was slipping backward into the muck, arms windmilling ridiculously around her as she tried to regain her balance, not regaining it, propelling her instead farther and farther off the path until she finally fell with a thud, and then was simply sitting in the muck, on her butt, the dampness seeping in. She looked up.

  The expression on Sam’s face was bright with shock. His eyes were wide, his mouth an exaggerated zero.

  “Ji-selle?”

  They stared at each other for a few seconds before they both started to laugh, laughing until they were gasping with it. Sam, holding his stomach, doubled over, finally managing to ask, “Are you okay?”

  “Well,” Jiselle said, wiping the tears from her eyes, “my pride is a little wounded.”

  She tried to push herself up, but her hands slid out from under her, and then, when she slid through the muck again, she just gave up and lay back laughing. What difference did it make now? She was covered by then with the stuff.

  Sam reached down to offer her a hand, and Jiselle said, taking it, “This sucks,” as Sam pulled her to her feet, and her body emerging from the muck made a genuine sucking sound, and they started to laugh so hard again that Sam lost his grip on her hand, and she was lying on her back in the muck again.

  “What were you thinking?”

  She looked up. She hadn’t heard Mark pull in the driveway, although she’d known he was on his way home. She and Sam were sitting beside each other on the couch, reading from the Hans Christian Andersen collection, “The Happy Family,” in which a family of naive snails foolishly envy their cousins, the escargots. Mark stood in the center of the family room holding his bag in his hand as if he might not bother to set it down.

  Jiselle tried to keep her voice from trembling as she said, “He had head lice, Mark.”

  She had already told Mark this news over the phone. Camilla had gotten home from school, seen Sam’s shaved head, and gasped, “Does Dad know about this?” She let her
mouth hang open, staring at her brother, and then looked at Jiselle.

  Jiselle had flushed. Hot. Sweaty. Except for the most casual criticism (“Our mother used to squeeze the orange juice herself”), Camilla had never said anything before to Jiselle’s face that wasn’t full of sugary approval—Great! Thank you! How cool!—and Jiselle felt now, seeing her look of deep disapproval, that something shameful was being exposed. Dirty underwear, smelly feet. That shameful thing was, she realized, her own willful naiveté. Jiselle had known (how could she not?) that the girl hated her, had overheard what she had to say to her sister from behind the curtains of their rooms, but she had let herself pretend it was something it wasn’t, anyway, and that determined ignorance had made her even more detestable, she realized now as Camilla walked swiftly out of the room.

  Sara had simply come in, looked at Sam, and turned around. Her shoulders, Jiselle thought, seemed to be shaking. With laughter?

  A few minutes later Jiselle heard Camilla whispering from her bedroom on her cell phone, “She just totally shaved Sam’s head, Dad. She’s gone crazy.”

  A few minutes after that, Mark called Jiselle on the house telephone, pretending he didn’t know. He started by telling Jiselle that he was in an airport lounge in Newfoundland. That there was so much wind that a corporate jet had been tipped over on the runway. He asked her how she was, how the kids were, how the weather was, and finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and just blurted out, “I shaved Sam’s head because he had head lice.”

  There was a sigh, and then a clearing of the throat, and then, “You’re kidding, right? Jiselle? Tell me you’re kidding?”