In a Perfect World

well.

Both events had to take place outdoors due to the new Health Department regulations requiring at least three months’ notice for an indoor gathering of more than thirty people. But the weather was terrible. After the rains, a thick humidity cloaked everything in more gray and stench. Some afternoons, the air was so thick and motionless that it felt like trying to breathe inside an aquarium. Mark and Jiselle decided to be married at twilight.

The afternoon before the wedding, around four o’clock, Jiselle and her mother arrived at the garden behind the restaurant to check on the flowers and the tables and chairs, to make sure everything was in order and had arrived, along with the cooler of champagne.

Jiselle had tried to call Mark earlier from her cell phone, but she couldn’t get a signal. She’d wanted to know how the children were. The night before, they’d gone out to dinner after the rehearsal, and Sam had thrown up at Jiselle’s mother’s feet. He’d been drinking 7-Up. Gallons of it. Every time he finished a large glass of it, the waitress had brought him another. Only Jiselle’s mother had been watching this, and later she said, “What do you expect, letting a child drink all that soda? Of course he’s going to throw up.”

But when Jiselle spoke to Mark that morning, Sam seemed fine. Camilla, however, was lying down, complaining of menstrual cramps, and Sara had not yet broken the Vow of Silence, as Mark had begun to refer to it. She’d begun it the week Jiselle came to stay, and Jiselle knew, from sneaking a look at her diary, that she planned to continue:

If he marries this stupid bitch, I’m going to make their lives a living hell.

For one thing, I’m never going to say another word out loud to either of them as long as they live.

After they’d supervised the raising of the canopy over the garden by Perfect Party Rentals, Jiselle and her mother went back to the house together to get dressed. Jiselle’s wedding dress, freshly laundered at BC-YU Cleaners, hung on the back of the door of her childhood bedroom, now her mother’s sewing room. It was draped in a clear plastic sheet emblazoned with a black cartoon caricature of a ninja soldier with the face of B.C. Yu, the laundry’s owner and operator, a sword held high over his head.

Jiselle had known B.C. for years. She’d driven into town with her mother to drop off their clothes at his establishment a thousand times. He’d dry-cleaned Jiselle’s prom dresses, steam-ironed her graduation gown, laundered the black dress she’d worn to her father’s and Ellen’s funerals. He’d cleaned those and wrapped them in the same clear sheet with his face and the sword. It was a perfect caricature, and Jiselle could never decide whether it was, for B.C., a joke (playing off stereotypes—the mild-mannered Korean dry cleaner turned ninja?) or a fantasy.

She was exhausted and closed the sewing room door. The film of humidity and drizzle that had coated her during the wedding preparations had mixed with the smell of her own sweat. She was too tired to take a shower just yet. She had to rest for a minute or two first.

Because there was no longer a bed in her old room, Jiselle lay down on the floor beside the sewing table and closed her eyes. She heard the shower begin in the bathroom, and the sound of the shower doors sliding open and closed, and then she fell asleep to the music of water pelting the naked flesh of her mother, and then she was dreaming—dreaming that she was under the Perfect Party Rentals tent, waiting for a wedding to begin. It was a dream within a dream, and the feeling was so peaceful that it didn’t matter to Jiselle whether or not anything ever happened to her again. There was water running somewhere, and the sounds of doors opening and closing politely, and then, “Oh my God, Jiselle!”

Her eyes snapped open. She sat up, finding herself in the sewing room again, with her mother standing over her wearing the salmon-pink linen dress she’d bought for the wedding—her ice-blond hair carefully clipped behind her head; her white summer shoes, her matching purse over her arm—and an expression of horror on her face.

“What the hell are you doing?” she shouted. “You’re getting married in thirty minutes.”

“How long have I been asleep?” Jiselle asked. She looked at the gold watch Mark had given her for her birthday and saw that an hour had passed. The hour she’d allotted for dressing, and makeup, and arranging her hair.

“For God’s sake,” her mother said, “get your dress on!”

And then, still stinking, stripped down to her underwear, having only enough time to drag a brush through her hair, Jiselle was ripping the ninja off her wedding dress, pulling it up over her hips, hearing the fabric rip with a terrible, permanent sound, and realized that she was stepping on the hem of the dress at the same time that she was yanking it on, and then she was in the passenger seat of her mother’s car.

“Oh Mom,” Jiselle said. She was trying not to cry.

“Don’t talk,” her mother said.

But Jiselle couldn’t help it.

“I just can’t believe—”

“I said, don’t talk, Jiselle. It’s just going to make it worse if you start crying now. This whole thing is a fiasco anyway.”

Jiselle bit her lip, which tasted like salt, and willed herself not to cry, not to speak, but then, it seemed, her mother’s floodgates burst:

“Why exactly, Jiselle, do you think I kicked your father out when you were fifteen?”

“Because…” Jiselle said, but then realized she had nothing to say. Somehow, in her mind, she’d connected the dog, Bingo, with her parents’ divorce. Her father had come home with the dog, and the next day he was gone. But, surely, the dog could not have been the last straw. Her parents had been married for twenty years by then.

“Because he was sleeping with that little slut already. I caught them in our bed in the middle of the afternoon while you were at school. Your little friend was playing hookie.”

“No,” Jiselle said. “Mom, they didn’t start—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Jiselle, be quiet.”

Be quiet.

Jiselle’s mouth was still open, but she couldn’t speak. It was as if her mother had cast a spell over her. Jiselle saw that her mother’s hands were holding the steering wheel so tightly that the knuckles had gone from white to red, and she was shaking her head in little snaps. Her lips were pursed, but she was also grinding her teeth.

“I have been keeping my mouth shut about this for the last eighteen years, but didn’t it ever cross your mind? Do you ever remember your father taking an interest in anything about your life except for your friend Ellen?”

Jiselle put her hand on the door handle, as if she might be able to simply step out of the car.

“Well? Why do you think he was always so eager to give darling little Ellen a ride home or pick her up for you?”

Jiselle didn’t move or swallow. She couldn’t.

“And now my daughter’s about to make the same mistake I made, marrying a man because he’s charming and handsome, without knowing another damn thing about him.”

Jiselle had to unroll her window despite the air-conditioning in her mother’s car, and still she could hardly breathe. She had to close her eyes. She let the air rushing past her pummel her face like ghosts in boxing gloves. Finally, her mother pulled over, brakes squealing, wheels thumping up against the curb. “Get out,” she said to Jiselle as she jumped out herself, in her salmon-pink suit, and disappeared around the corner of the restaurant.

When Jiselle finally managed to get out of her mother’s car—carefully, she did not want to risk ripping the hem of her dress even more—and closed the car door, someone behind her called out, “Lady?”

She turned to look. It was the man from Perfect Party Rentals. “Lady,” he said again, “there’s a problem with your tent.”

“What?” Jiselle asked, but he’d already stepped past her to the garden. She followed him, holding her dress