In a Perfect World

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 gesture. 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.