In a Perfect World Read online

  “No,” Jiselle said, and even to herself, it sounded like pleading. “He would have hated the shampoo.”

  She did not, and never would, tell Mark about the secretary, and what she’d said. If he were my son, I’d shave his head. She knew what Mark would say about that—about superstition, about hysteria, about the flu.

  He said, sounding weary, “I guess, Jiselle, we’ll have to discuss this when I get home.”

  Now, still holding his black leather bag, Mark walked over to Sam, took his son’s chin in his palm, moved his head around, inspecting, and then he looked over at Jiselle, and said, “There are ways to get rid of head lice without shaving the kid’s head, Jiselle. Jesus Christ.” He shook his own head. “Surely,” he said, “you must have thought…” He trailed off.

  “Thought what?” Jiselle asked, but no sooner had the words come out of her mouth than she realized, suddenly, clearly, what.

  Joy.

  Her curls.

  Those cascades of strawberry-blond ringlets ribboned with satin on her wedding day. What that hair must have looked like beside Mark, stretching from her pillow to his in the mornings. The smell of it after she’d washed it. Rain. There was a rain barrel in the backyard, and Camilla had pointed it out one day and said, “Our mother used to wash her hair with rainwater.”

  Maybe she used to let the girls brush it. Like handmaidens. In the evenings. Sitting at the little vanity table. The sparks flying off the brush into the air. Maybe Mark used to gather it in his hands and kiss it. Maybe Sam, still a baby, would have taken it in his cereal-sticky fists and shoved it into his mouth.

  Oh my God, Jiselle thought, full of understanding:

  Sam’s hair had belonged to Joy.

  She could feel her lips quivering. She couldn’t speak.

  Mark exhaled.

  “Look,” he said, seeing the expression on her face. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Jiselle. You just…didn’t think. What’s done is done. It’s just hair. It’ll grow back.” He shrugged, but then he turned away. It was the first time he’d ever come home without taking her in his arms.

  “Daddy!” Camilla called then from her bedroom, dancing out from under the cloth in the doorway. She threw her arms around her father. He lifted her up off her feet, swung her around. “How’s my princess?” he asked.

  Jiselle watched them from the couch. The light from the sliding glass doors shone on Camilla’s golden hair, and a kind of pure white light flashed from it. Her cheeks were flushed. The little pearl studs in her ears looked damp, iridescent, freshly plucked from the sea.

  “It was my idea!” Sam shouted then, loudly.

  Jiselle looked down at him, startled, and Sam pressed his eyebrows together, elbowed her sharply.

  Mark turned to look at him, and then at Jiselle. How was it that the tears sprang up so instantly, so unbidden, into her eyes, as if they’d been there all along, waiting?

  “Sweetheart,” Mark said to Jiselle. “I’m sorry. I know you only did what you thought was best.”

  Camilla stepped away, disappeared back into her room, as Mark came over to Jiselle on the couch and kissed the top of her head, as if she were one of the children. Still one of his children, if not his favorite.

  “But,” he said softly, “it was a bit thoughtless.”

  Over his shoulder, Jiselle saw Sara, who’d been absent for the whole homecoming scene between Camilla and Mark, standing in the shadows of the hallway, looking back at Jiselle, a half-smile on her face.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jiselle suggested to Mark that, before the holiday season started, maybe they should all go down to Florida so that she could meet his mother.

  “Jesus,” he’d said. He was lying on the couch reading a magazine called Aviation Today. He put the magazine down, open on his chest, and said, “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Because she’s your mother?” Jiselle offered.

  Sara in her bedroom had overheard them and shouted out, “She’s my grandmother, and I’ve never met her.”

  Jiselle, blinking, looked down at Mark on the couch. He shrugged and said, “She’s a drunk, Jiselle. Completely out of her mind. She lives in a trailer with ten cats and a pet alligator. I would never subject you or my children to her.”

  He was wearing a black T-shirt. His uniform was laid out on the bed. He was leaving for the West Coast in five hours.

  “So—”

  Jiselle sank into the plaid chair across from him, about to say it—So, the children did not have a grandmother who could have taken care of them?—when Mark stood. He said, “As soon as we have a chance, I’ll take you somewhere wonderful, sweetheart,” and knelt down and held her face like a precious object in his hands.

  For the three days he was gone, Jiselle rehearsed in her mind what she would say when he returned:

  So, there never was a grandmother?

  So, you always knew you wanted me to take care of the children?

  So, would you have married me if there had been no children?

  But Mark was delayed for twenty-four hours, his plane grounded at the gate at LAX. One of the ticket-holding passengers, it seemed, was exhibiting symptoms of the Phoenix flu, according to an airline employee at the kiosk where he’d checked in—coughing, broken blood vessels on his cheeks, a watery-bloody discharge from the eyes.

  But the passenger was a lawyer, traveling with his wife, who was also a lawyer. He said he had pinkeye, a severe case, and that without evidence to the contrary it was illegal, discriminatory, to refuse to let him on the plane.

  Mark called Jiselle off and on from the airline lounge during the first six hours of the stand-off, but then his cell phone died. The whole thing went on for hours before the security guards ushered the passenger out of the airport and into a waiting police van and drove him away. By then, the flight crew had been dismissed, and Mark called her from the hotel. “I miss you, sweetheart,” he said. “All I want is to hold you in my arms tonight. To have to wait until tomorrow seems like torture.”

  By the time he finally got home again and stepped through the door in the dark, a shadow of beard on his jaw, a bouquet of roses in one hand and his leather satchel in the other, Jiselle had forgotten what she’d planned to say about his mother, or why, and in the morning he had to leave again.

  “Well, things will get better,” Annette said over the phone when Jiselle told her about the haircut and also about Sara’s diary.

  She is going to go the way of all the other bitches he’s brought home—RUNNING OUT OF HERE SOBBING INTO HER LITTLE FUCKING HANKIE.

  “Don’t read the diary if you don’t want to know what she thinks of you,” Annette went on. “Or, I guess you could say, would you really not know what she thinks of you if you quit reading the diary?”

  “She leaves it out,” Jiselle said, “like I’m supposed to read it. She leaves it open.”

  In fact, the day after their bedroom door was installed, Sara had left the diary on Mark’s and Jiselle’s bed.

  She thinks she can ruin everything. She thinks she can erase my mother. She can’t!!!!

  “Mark? Can we install a door?” Jiselle had asked him in a whisper one night after they made love in such total silence and darkness that Jiselle had felt briefly bodiless, and disoriented, under him.

  “Well.” Mark hesitated at first, and then said, “Sure. I guess.”

  Jiselle had suspected that the girls might not like it, but she’d had no idea how angry it would make them until they came home and stood in front of it—Camilla with a hand covering her mouth, and Sara with her fists balled at her waist. “Is this so you guys can make noises while you fuck?” she’d shouted at the door.

  “Well,” Mark had said later to Jiselle. “It’ll take them a while to get used to it. They liked the curtains. Their mother put those up.”

  Why? Jiselle had wondered. Admittedly, she, too, had liked the curtains when she’d first seen them. Those flimsy pieces of silk draped in the doorways had seemed like a sweet
, strange, new kind of privacy—a privacy made out of fabric woven in Asia, some land where the air hung too heavy, was too precious to restrain with anything as cumbersome as a door.

  But she soon realized that you could not be an American newlywed in a small house full of children without a bedroom door.

  But neither could you be an adolescent girl making the kind of final, smashing accusation that the slamming of a door accomplished until you actually had one. Even if it was not the door to your own bedroom.

  “Nothing’s perfect,” Annette said, and then laughed.

  The holiday season began with a blizzard the day before Thanksgiving—but Mark, stranded in Minneapolis, rented a car and was home before Jiselle had put the turkey on the table.

  Her first turkey. Ever. She’d spent the whole morning peeking in at it. Covered in its crinkled tinfoil, it made sizzling sounds, but it was deathly pale, and every time she saw it again through the glass in the oven door, she felt her heart sink—literally felt it sink, as if her torso were filled with water and her heart were a sodden sponge. Sinking. What was in that oven did not look like the turkey of her fantasies, which would have been browning, plumping with juices, somehow generating its own golden gravy in the roaster.

  This turkey looked, instead, like a very large, very dead, bird. It had cost eighty-seven dollars because of the turkey shortage. So many had been killed (senselessly, it was said, because they were not carriers of Yersinia pestis, but killed nonetheless), and no one had anticipated that Americans would stick so stubbornly to their traditions, that millions more turkeys would be demanded than would be available, and that the price of a turkey, when one could be found, would be whatever a person was willing to pay.

  Jiselle’s mother had gone to visit a sister in Albuquerque for the holiday. She’d done it, Jiselle knew, to avoid the new arrangements. It was the first Thanksgiving since her parents’ divorce that she and her mother had not gone to Duke’s Palace Inn together, except for one time when Jiselle had been flying. But when Jiselle invited her to the house for Thanksgiving dinner, her mother was utterly silent for several long seconds on the other end of the phone before she said, “No. Thank you. I’m going to New Mexico.”

  Right beside her relief, Jiselle had felt a surge of panic. She had, she realized, no idea how to make a Thanksgiving dinner, and although her mother hadn’t made one herself in decades, surely she knew more about it than Jiselle.

  She did her best. She read an article in a magazine suggesting she put sage and walnuts in the dressing. So she did. She boiled cranberries for cranberry sauce according to the directions on the plastic package of cranberries, and marveled at the way the skins of the berries split and spilled their deep burgundy syrup into the saucepan. Who, she wondered, had first thought to do that? They were such tough little berries, and so sour. Who would have guessed that sugar and boiling would change them so completely? Jiselle tried to picture the inventor of cranberry sauce—some woman not unlike Jiselle but wearing a pilgrim’s black dress and white apron, hair pulled back in a bun, peering into a pot with grim determination.

  Jiselle was just pulling the turkey out of the oven when Mark stepped in the front door. His hair and the shoulders of his black leather pilot’s jacket were dusted with snowflakes, and he was holding a bouquet of orange tiger lilies.

  “Happy Thanksgiving!” he said.

  He didn’t even take the jacket off before standing at the head of the table and carving the turkey, which was somehow miraculously browned on the outside, steamily moist as he sliced into it. Outside, the snow continued to fall, and except that Sara was wearing black lipstick and a ripped T-shirt, and Camilla had said she wasn’t hungry and so was lying on the couch in the other room watching MTV, they were, Jiselle thought, a kind of Norman Rockwell painting—a healthy American family gathered around the Thanksgiving table.

  The Christmas season came fast on the heels of Thanksgiving, faster than Jiselle ever remembered it coming. For weeks the newscasters had been announcing that there had never been such a lavish holiday season. Money was being thrown to the wind, credit cards maxed out. Shelves were being emptied. Some said the cause was a renewed confidence in the economy. Others said it was fear of a coming depression, or a fatalism brought on by the flu, or the anticipation of the end of the war or the start of a new one. One historian Jiselle heard interviewed on NPR said, in a voice so low it sounded like the source of gravity itself, that a return to traditions often preceded the complete collapse of a culture.

  Jiselle had driven into St. Sophia one Saturday afternoon. It was a week until Christmas, and she needed to mail something to her mother, because her mother again had made other plans. This time she was going to visit an old high school friend in Maine. Jiselle decided to buy her a bracelet at the local jewelry store and FedEx it to her.

  She parked Mark’s Cherokee outside the store, and was surprised to see how many shoppers were strolling through St. Sophia’s tiny downtown. They wore expensive parkas and sunglasses and carried shopping bags. A fluffy snow, looking like feathers, was falling from a few marble-gray clouds in a blue sky. The air was so still that the flakes seemed to hang, weightless with patience, before drifting down in long pendulum arcs through the air, resting on the branches of the trees and the ground, sometimes surging upward again before settling. She looked up at the sky, where she thought she could see, up near the clouds, a few white balloons traveling overhead. But they were too far away to be sure. She saw them so often now that she might have been imagining them.

  Jiselle had to wind her way carefully down the sidewalk crowded with shoppers. Surely they were tourists from Chicago (visitors who wanted to be part of an old-fashioned small-town Christmas scene for a few hours on a Saturday) because there were more people downtown today than there were houses in St. Sophia.

  And the town did look like the quaintest of villages in the snow that afternoon. Garlands hung from the brick façades of the stores. Tinsel and lights were strung in the trees, swaying between the street signs. When Jiselle reached the jewelry store, she was surprised to find a real reindeer tied by a red velvet ribbon to a lamppost outside. Beside the reindeer stood an old-fashioned Santa—thin, wearing a maroon robe and hood—with an antique sleigh. Children had crowded around, petting the reindeer, which raised and lowered its head with such dignity it seemed as if it might address the crowd: I’m honored to be here with you today…. A garland of silver beads and cranberries was strung over its antlers and draped down its shaggy flanks, and a red velvet blanket covered its back.

  Jiselle stopped, too, and gazed at the strange sight. The reindeer’s antlers looked so heavy she wondered how he held his head aloft. She imagined what it might be like to feel the first stirring of those bones growing out of your skull—the ache, the itching, the excitement. And this St. Nicholas, Jiselle could tell, had a real beard—long, gray, and authentic. His eyes were startlingly blue. He looked Old World and serious, nothing like the mall Santa Clauses of Jiselle’s childhood, who’d been the kind of Santas you might glimpse later in their red felt costumes smoking cigarettes in the parking lot.

  No, it seemed impossible to her that they’d ever been fooled by those, but they had. Somehow they’d managed to believe that each one of those costumed men was Santa despite the impossibility—the identical red felt and plastic and the tin buckles of their belts. As children, they’d whispered their secrets to him. They were sure he’d grant their wishes, even when he didn’t.

  The jewelry store was crowded. Customers in their parkas elbowed one another politely out of the way. A teenage girl went from glass case to glass case with a bottle of Windex and a paper towel wiping off fingerprints. Under the glass counters, row upon row of diamond rings flickered with their tiny, cold fires. Strand after strand of gold was laid out on a black velvet tray. Loose gems were scattered around in the display case—rubies and emeralds and sapphires. Some perfect pearls glowed in a half-shell.

  Jiselle picked out a slim, brig
ht silver bracelet for her mother. She held it against the underside of her own wrist to look at it. It was like a silver vein traced against the skin there. A man and his wife looked at it, too, waiting, it seemed, for Jiselle to put it down.

  “Are you buying that?” the woman asked impatiently. “If you’re not buying that, I’d like it.”

  Jiselle ignored them, signaled the woman at the cash register, and said, “I’ll take this one,” holding it up. The couple huffed and walked over to another display case.

  The saleswoman wrapped the bracelet for Jiselle in pale purple tissue paper, tying it with a scarlet ribbon. By the time Jiselle was back on Main Street, outside Starbucks, St. Nicholas and his gathering of children were gone. A dwarf in a green velvet elf costume, bells jingling on his cap, was sweeping the reindeer’s droppings into a paper bag.

  Christmas morning, Sam was up first. At daybreak, he came to Mark’s and Jiselle’s door and knocked until they got out of bed. “Presents!” he shouted. “Now!” When he was certain that Jiselle and Mark were up, he went into his sisters’ rooms, pulling them by their arms, groaning, yawning, into the living room.

  While Jiselle went to the kitchen and made coffee, Mark started a fire in the fireplace, and the smell of the Christmas tree mixed with the coffee and the sulfur smells of the fire, which roared up quickly—a few black ashy stars from the newspaper drifting among the dancing flames.

  Sam was wearing his thermal underwear. Camilla, a long white gown with lace at the sleeves. Mark had his black velvet robe pulled around him, socks on with his plaid slippers.

  Sara wore a black slip. Dime-store satin. She perched herself on the arm of the couch, and from where Jiselle sat on the floor, she could see that Sara was again wearing that pair of panties trimmed in black lace that Jiselle had bought for herself in Paris.