In a Perfect World

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.