In a Perfect World

  “Oh,” Jiselle said. “I know. It’s just—you know. My birthday! I’m excited.”

  Sam beamed. “Tell him to make it chocolate,” he said.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Far more people are not going to die of the Phoenix flu than die of it!” one television doctor said on a special news report. “We’d better keep attending school, paying our bills, and floating the economy. Otherwise, when the hysteria dies down, we’ll have something to be hysterical about.”

  Healthy people, it was said, could withstand this rather minor infection. Drug users could not, of course. Nor the children of drug users. It was true that medical professionals and the depressed were at special risk. People who did not have the right attitude often succumbed, and that was why the Wholeness books and tapes, which could easily be bought off the Internet, were so helpful. Even if you weren’t sick, ordering and listening to the tapes, reading the books about how to strengthen your character, alleviate stress, clean yourself of unhealthy thought patterns could ward off the disease.

  Jiselle was given one such book by the mother of Camilla’s boyfriend, Bobby Temple.

  “Honestly,” Tara Temple said, “it changed my life.”

  Jiselle had almost never spoken to the woman before that evening, although she had met Bobby’s father, Paul Temple, once or twice when he came by to pick Bobby up for some sort of lesson or sporting event.

  Paul Temple was a tall man with the same sand-colored hair as his son. He taught history at the local high school, and Jiselle thought he looked knowledgeable and sheepish about being knowledgeable. When the subject of current events came up on the front steps as he waited for his son, Paul Temple referred to the thirteenth century as if it had been last week—but then looked embarrassed to have slipped it into the conversation, like the smart boys Jiselle had known in high school, who would rather have walked straight into walls than worn glasses.

  His wife, Tara, seemed his opposite. Whatever she had, she had on display. That day, her hair was dyed a metallic blond, and she was wearing large silver-and-turquoise earrings and a sheer blue blouse. She said she was just stopping by to drop off Bobby’s track shoes, and Jiselle was surprised that she would think to give her anything at all—and especially surprised by the bright, lightweight book Tara Temple handed over.

  Its cover was slick, shiny. A whiteness at the center of more whiteness. CURE YOUR SELF! was written in gold letters across it. It was no longer than fifty or sixty pages, and holding it in her hands, Jiselle had the feeling that if she didn’t hold on to it tightly, it might float away.

  “Thank you,” she said, “but are you sure? I could get my own copy.”

  “I want you to have it,” Tara Temple said.

  Only later, turning the book over at the kitchen table, did Jiselle understand. On the back was written, Buy a copy of this book for everyone you know! Give this book away! It will increase your good fortune, and CURE YOUR SELF! This book—it was a kind of chain letter, spread from one person to another to another, mystically, like a virus.

  “What we need are better vaccines and antibiotics, not good fortune,” Mark said, picking up the book and tossing it back down on his way out the door.

  “It’s not my book,” Jiselle said to his back.

  “Well, that’s reassuring,” he said.

  “It’s Tara Temple’s.”

  “Oh God,” he said. “That woman.”

  “Mark,” Jiselle asked, “Do you think this is going to be a big thing?”

  “The Phoenix flu?” he asked, and then shrugged. “That depends on what you mean by ‘big thing,’ I guess. But aren’t you glad you’re not flying?”

  The media connected the fears of the flu, the war, global warming, and the end of the world to the number of women who were dropping out of the workforce.

  What was the point of two incomes if your money couldn’t buy you the luxuries you worked for? If you couldn’t even afford to put gas in two cars, let alone install a hot tub, why not have someone at home watching the children, folding the laundry, making nice dinners during the day?

  A stay-at-home mother was even one of Dr. Springwell’s secrets—number five or six on the famous list of “Immune Boosters” promoted by the portly physician whose popular show was devoted entirely to advice on avoiding an illness, which he never called the Phoenix flu but which was, of course, the Phoenix flu.

  Jiselle had watched the show only once, in a hotel room in Minneapolis. “We are like fish in a small bowl,” Dr. Springwell was saying. He had two goldfish in a glass bowl on a table in front of him. Behind him was a painted sky, heavenly blue, in which a few cottony clouds sat motionless and serene. The doctor wore a white shirt unbuttoned at the neck. His bald head gleamed. “The slightest shift changes everything.”

  Dr. Springwell tipped the bowl a little to the left then, and the camera closed in on the two bright fish, who had been floating in it peacefully, seemingly asleep, but who were now trying frantically to swim, with their tiny, fluttering fins, against the current. Those fins looked as if they were made of the thinnest tissue. Useless.

  “See?” Dr. Springwell said. “This is the barely perceptible change in our climate, but it alters everything. The fish have to learn to swim all over again in this new world. Like us! What we experience in our fishbowl is the gradual shift in our resources, our economy, our way of life, and, most important, our immune systems.”

  Here, the words Dr. Springwell’s Secret and the cover of his bestselling book began to flash against the blue sky behind him. Dr. Springwell righted the bowl, and the fish, disoriented, began to swim in what appeared to be hopeless, exhausted circles.

  “Do it,” Annette had said. “Quit. Stay home. Just think, no more puke. No more pretzels. I love being home.”

  Annette was four months pregnant by then, and there were complications, but luckily she was married to a doctor. She watched television all day. She made phone calls. She kept a bucket beside the bed and threw up in it every half hour. She jokingly called her husband Dr. Williams and said that Dr. Williams said not to be concerned. Many women had morning sickness all three trimesters, and she must just be one of the lucky ones.

  “I don’t know,” Jiselle said. “Sara, the younger daughter—I think she hates me.”

  “So what? Does she hate you more than those old ladies who can’t get their bags stuffed into the overhead compartment hate you? Does she hate you more than terrorists hate you?”

  “But,” Jiselle asked Annette on the phone, “won’t I feel like I’m trying to—?”

  “Take their mother’s place? Forget about her!” Annette said. “She’s dead! I mean, it’s not like you were never with any other men.”

  True.

  But Jiselle had never been married. She’d never had a child with a man. She’d never been widowed.

  His first wife’s name had been Joy, and it was amazing how many times a day one heard that name or saw it in the form of the word. On a card, followed by an exclamation point. On the lips of the president nodding over a lectern on television: It is with great joy that I am announcing today that seven thousand troops will be returning to the United States next month. On the lips of the president’s opponents when it didn’t happen: What happened to all that “joy”?

  The Joy of Cooking.

  The Joy of Sex.

  Joy to the world…

  No Joy in Mudville.

  Cultivating a sense of inner joy in troubled times…

  Mark had told Jiselle the basics of their meeting (college), and their courtship (two years), and their decision to marry, to move to Wisconsin, to have three children, and then he ended with “and then she was hit by a school bus. In front of our house. In front of our children. What else can I say?”

  “That’s horrible,” Jiselle said to him, holding her head with one hand and covering her mouth with the other. “Just horrible.”

  Mark shook his head. It was a tired and resigned gestu
re. His wife, he seemed to be saying, how could she have done it to them?

  “You know,” Jiselle’s mother said. “I Googled that. It sounded fishy to me, and I started wondering if you might be getting involved with a serial killer. But there it was in the St. Sophia News: PILOT’S WIFE STRUCK BY BUS IN FRONT OF HOUSE.

  “This is just the beginning,” their neighbor, Brad Schmidt, told Jiselle one afternoon when they met at the end of their driveways after having dragged out their trash cans for the garbage truck. “It’s the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

  By then Jiselle had already spoken to Brad Schmidt several times—always over the hedge or with the garbage cans at the end of the driveway—and he always said something about the Phoenix flu.

  “It’s hairs,” he said that afternoon. “They import hair for wigs and extensions, you know. From Pakistan. Korea. And those people they cut the hair off of died of the Phoenix flu.”

  Jiselle tried to smile politely. She said, lifting one shoulder, “Who knows?”—although she briefly considered pointing out that the flu had started in the United States, that other countries were outlawing imports of all kinds from America—blankets, food, clothes, books. Outside the United States, everything American was suspect.

  But what would have been the point of arguing with him? Brad Schmidt was elderly. He was pleased with his theory. A week earlier, he’d had to bring his wife, who had Alzheimer’s, back from the group home in which she lived. Several of its employees had fallen ill, and they’d closed down. Since then, Jiselle had seen her only once, when Mrs. Schmidt had wandered across their lawns to the front door. Before she’d had time to knock on the door, Jiselle had opened it, and this seemed to startle the old woman, who asked, “How did you know about me?”

  “I saw you from the window,” Jiselle said.

  “You watch me?”

  “Well, no,” Jiselle said. “This is where I live, and I was looking out the window.”

  “Oh.”

  Mrs. Schmidt’s eyes remained wide, an expression of puzzled alarm on her face, and Jiselle was surprised how much like a ghost she was—thin, white-haired, nearly translucent, like someone who had been snatched back from the other world but who did not quite understand that she was back, or why. The old woman reached out and took Jiselle’s hands in her own, and asked, “So, do you know me, young lady?”

  “Now I do,” Jiselle answered as brightly as possible.

  “Then, who am I?”

  “You’re Mrs. Schmidt.”

  “Very nice,” Diane Schmidt said, nodding, as if Jiselle had passed a test. Just then, her husband came panting around the hedge—clearly he’d been searching for his wife—and took her home.

  That morning at the end of their driveways, Brad Schmidt snorted and said, “Britney Spears. All this bullshit about Britney Spears. Britney Spears isn’t even the first of millions.”

  Jiselle nodded. “Still,” she said, “it’s very sad.”

  “Sad, sure,” Brad Schmidt said. “Better get used to it.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mark chose an afternoon when the children were on a field trip to Chicago with the public schools to bring Jiselle to the house for the first time. He drove downstate and into Illinois to pick her up in his ice-blue sports car. (“A Mazda RX-8. The only midlife crisis car I could pile three kids into.”)

  Jiselle heard the engine in her driveway before she looked out the window. The car sounded like an enormous cat purring as it pulled in. The top was down.

  Mark had been to her house only once, and Jiselle knew he’d been unimpressed. (“Kind of boxy, isn’t it? And the neighbors, too many, too close. But I guess what’s the point of having a nice place if you never stay in it anyway?”) This time, he didn’t even bother to step inside. He took her overnight bag out of her hand at the door, walked back to his car, tossed it in his trunk, and then turned to watch as she locked the front door and descended the little cement stoop. After she’d crossed the front lawn to him, he took her in his arms, pulled her to him, and kissed her. For a second, Jiselle let her eyes flutter open. Over his shoulder and across the street, she saw a teenage girl in cutoffs and a T-shirt watching them dreamily, but intensely, from her own front yard.

  Of course.

  How many times had Jiselle herself fantasized this scene when she was a teenager—a handsome man, a fast car in the driveway, the passionate kiss, the way he would sweep her into the car, drive her away?

  In one of Jiselle’s earliest memories, she and Ellen had stuffed one of their Barbies into the passenger seat of a Barbie-Mobile, stretching out her long legs stiffly on the dashboard as Ken drove her wildly across the shag carpet in Ellen’s basement.

  Clearly, that had been Ellen’s fantasy, too—except that the driver had been Jiselle’s father, who’d driven her drunk in his Roadster straight into oncoming traffic, and the next day Jiselle was called to the wrecking service, shown the car. The blood-soaked upholstery. The collapsed roof. A single high-heel shoe on the floor of the passenger side.

  The wrecking yard workers had stood around her, telling her the car was still worth at least ten thousand dollars.

  “You can’t just junk it,” one of them had said. “It’s a classic.”

  But Jiselle had walked away from it with only a few coins she’d found scattered on the driver’s seat, believing that they had fallen from her father’s pocket and that she should keep them. But she had put them in her purse, where they were scattered among the other coins, and she finally spent them on a parking meter, maybe, or a package of gum.

  After she settled into the passenger seat beside Mark, she put a clip in her hair, and as they drove off, Jiselle waved to the teenage girl, who looked away, pretending she hadn’t been watching.

  They drove for miles without talking. Without needing to talk. Mark kept one hand on Jiselle’s knee, the other on the steering wheel. His house was seventy miles north of Jiselle’s town, on the diagonal. Like Jiselle, he was required by the airlines to live less than an hour away from O’Hare. His town, St. Sophia, had been one of those on the suggestion list Jiselle had been given when she’d taken her job, but she’d decided against it because she’d thought it was too small. There would be no single men to date.

  How many flight attendants, she now wondered, had made the same mistake? Who among them might have been beside this pilot in his sports car today if it had been otherwise?

  Mark drove the sports car the way he flew a plane, with total confidence, in deep concentration. Ahead of them, the highway wound blackly through green hills. For a while, they followed the river, which was smooth and dotted with stone-white ducks and seemed to have stopped moving altogether. After a while they came up behind a pickup truck carrying several large birdcages, each cage full of silky white doves. Hundreds of doves. The driver was an elderly woman, who glared at Mark and Jiselle as they passed her in the no-passing lane.

  Mark and Jiselle smiled at each other.

  They passed a few more cars. An empty school bus. An ice-cream truck. Another pickup—this one hauling a horse trailer out of which a horse’s amber tail swished the air.

  They crossed rickety covered bridges spanning rocky little streams that bubbled and frothed below them, and then they were crossing the boundary to his town, St. Sophia, where a red-white-and-blue sign stated simply: ST. SOPHIA—AMERICA’S HOMETOWN.

  They slowed down.

  “We’re here,” he said. He took his hand off her knee and placed it on the steering wheel. Jiselle nodded and smiled over at him, but he was looking straight ahead, so she looked around.

  Gingerbread Victorians lined the shady Main Street. There were brick and clapboard storefronts. The library had Greek columns. The fire station had one shining red truck parked out front and a Dalmatian lounging under an oak tree beside it.

  “We moved here to have the kids,” Mark said, gesturing around him at his town. “It seemed so old-fashioned. So out of the way. Of course, it’s changed a lot since the
n.”

  A flag flew from the yard of the school, which was a red brick two-story building with a few gothic flourishes around the doors. The post office had a cupola on the roof, a blue mailbox outside. There was a tidy park with a swing set and a merry-go-round and a wishing well. There was another flag flapping from a pole beside the courthouse.

  Jiselle couldn’t imagine how St. Sophia had changed.

  There was about it a sense of time having stopped at some idealized moment—the sun at the highest point in the sky, the season stalled perfectly between spring and summer, the population poised between too few and too many. The happiest hours chiming from a clock tower. The sweetest period of American history reflected in the most romantic of American architecture. Peace, following a war. The kindest politics. A time of prosperity, but not materialism. An era during which people believed in things but were not fanatical.

  A little boy riding a red bicycle too large for him waved excitedly as Mark and Jiselle drove by. Jiselle waved back, and Mark saluted. “A school chum of Sam’s,” he said.

  They took Main Street from one brief end of town to the other, and then kept on going, until the Victorians slipped away and the trees grew up around them. The road to Mark’s house turned to gravel, and then to dirt, and then to clay.

  Jiselle had known it was in the woods, at the edge of a ravine, but she was surprised by how deep into the woods it was, how alive the woods seemed to be—fluttering with leaves, and wings, and the fragile airy progress of butterflies.

  They pulled into his driveway, and there it was—a small log house, the house Mark had described to her so well that the one in her imagination matched this one perfectly: The covered wraparound porch. The brick chimney. All of it pushed up to the edge of a ravine full of pines and white birches. There were lace curtains in the windows. A chipmunk sat on the front porch, cheeks stuffed with something, munching. It looked up as they pulled in, as if it had been expecting them, and when they stepped out of the car, it didn’t run away but waited until they’d reached the mossy cobblestone walk to the front door before slipping into the rock garden.