In a Perfect World

“We’re not catching this,” Tara Temple continued. “We’re developing this. The subtle changes in the environment are signaling changes in our bodies, our nutritional needs, and it’s happening too fast to adapt.”

This was something Jiselle had heard Dr. Springwell say, back when he was still broadcasting his show.

“Do you meditate?” Tara asked, leaning toward Jiselle, looking directly at her.

“No,” Jiselle said, sipping from her cup, avoiding those eyes. So blue. So full of certainty.

“You should,” Tara said. “Clarity in a time like this is extremely important.” She paused and looked at Jiselle as if she were inspecting her for disease. “What are you eating at least?” she asked.

“Well,” Jiselle said. “I’m just trying, you know, to keep us all fed.”

Tara Temple shook her head. “You need to be very conscious of what you’re eating,” she said.

“Yes,” Jiselle said. She nodded as if she understood, as if she would try to be more conscious of what she was eating. But how? It was so much harder than Jiselle had ever guessed it would be, keeping her small family fed. All those years, dashing from kiosk to kiosk, drive-thru to convenience store, she’d never once imagined how much time it would take to make a meal, to serve it. Without a stove. With a refrigerator that couldn’t be counted on. No gas in the car, and the grocery store closed half the time, ten miles from home.

The good decisions she’d made had nothing to do with her consciousness, as it turned out. They’d been lucky guesses. She’d somehow known that flour would be important and so, before the shortages, had bought twelve pounds of it. And sugar. Baking powder. A can of Crisco, a thing she’d never even seen up close before she bought it. Now, late mornings, when the power was on and she could use the oven, Jiselle would make enough muffins to last a week. She’d gotten the recipe out of an old Good Housekeeping magazine she’d found in the garage.

She’d learned, too, how to take care of fresh food. Potatoes and onions lasted an amazingly long time in the cool dark. Bouillon cubes. Cabbage. Apples. She’d torn out an article from the same Good Housekeeping magazine on how to soak beans so long that they needed to be boiled for only an hour to make soup. After all those years of relying on frozen dinners and packaged bread, it amazed Jiselle that she could prepare a meal out of beans and water and a single carrot that was so delicious even Sara would ask for seconds.

She’d stocked the cupboards and filled boxes in the cellar with canned food and dried fruit after hearing a woman on the radio say one day, “I’m stocking up on food. I know we’ve been warned not to ‘hoard,’ but protecting your family is not the same as ‘hoarding.’”

The woman’s voice sounded like a sober and practical Martha Stewart’s, but it couldn’t have been. Martha Stewart had died of the Phoenix flu two weeks before. In any case, Jiselle had taken the woman’s advice. She and Camilla had driven into town to the Safeco three times, loading the car each time with all the canned and dried goods they could buy. Ramen noodles. Crackers. Pop-Tarts. Broths. Powdered milk. The flour and sugar.

“Well, I have to go, but tell Bobby I stopped by and that I said I’d call in a couple of days, and I’ll be home next week. By the way,” Tara Temple said, stopping, turning to look at Jiselle, “how is Mark?”

“Well,” Jiselle said. “Still in the quarantine, of course. He’ll be in Germany still, for a little while, I’m afraid.”

Tara Temple smiled, wistfully it seemed. She said, “Ah, Mark.”

Jiselle said nothing. She waited for Tara Temple to go on.

“We’ve known him, you know, for a long time. Since long before the—” Here she paused and looked toward the road. “Since long before Joy, and all the years since. We were happy, I suppose, to hear he’d gotten married again. But not surprised. He was always such a—” She moved her hand through the air, as if trying to snatch the right phrase out of it. There was a look of unmistakable pleasure on her face as she said, “Mark was always such a fool for love.” She shook her head. “Such a hopeless romantic. In and out of love, always rescuing some damsel in distress or being rescued by one.” She let the hand dash back and forth in front of her for a few seconds before she went on, “And everyone put up with it because, as you must know better than anyone, he was so… attractive. It was a relief, and such a surprise, to imagine him settling down. There were not a few of us in this little town who were…” She looked, then, up to the sky and said, “Oh, never mind! I’m sure this isn’t something you want to hear about, my dear!”

Tara Temple turned back around, and Jiselle watched her descend the steps.

Had she been trying to tell Jiselle what Jiselle thought she might? Had she and Mark…?

Tara Temple was already opening her car door when Jiselle noticed that she was still holding on to the can of evaporated milk. (Absentmindedly? Or had she come to think of it as hers? Had she thought it was wasted on Jiselle, who would never take her advice about vitamin D or meditation, and so just die of the Phoenix flu anyway?) In any case, Tara Temple carried the can with her out the front door, and she still had it in her hand when she got behind the wheel of her car and called out her open window, “Goodbye!”

Jiselle said nothing about the milk. She had another can in the cupboard.

In the morning, Sara wandered into the family room where Jiselle and Camilla were reading together. She held up a pair of scissors in her hands. Jiselle instinctively sat up straighter, inhaling. The combination of Sara and a sharp instrument seemed full of dangerous potential.

But that morning Sara was wearing a white nightgown with yellow smiley faces on it—something Jiselle had never seen before and had not known that Sara owned. She said, handing the scissors to Jiselle, “Will you cut my hair? So it’s all one color?”

“Of course,” Jiselle said, taking the scissors from her, hoping she didn’t sound as breathless to Sara as she did to herself, and stood to follow her into the bathroom.

Since school had been closed, Sara’s hair had started to grow out of its ebony dye-job, and what had emerged were several inches of a sandy and reddish blond that reminded Jiselle of the color of fawns. The black fringe around her shoulders, contrasted with her natural color, made her look even more fearsome than when her hair was all one color, but Jiselle had assumed she liked it that way.

“This is so ugly,” Sara said, flipping the ends of her hair with her fingers. “Get rid of it. Please.”

“Sure,” Jiselle said.

She got a towel out of the linen closet and spread it over the sink, and then put her hand between Sara’s shoulder blades, pushed her forward gently. She rarely touched Sara on purpose—just accidentally when they reached for the salt shaker at the same time or when she found Sara’s elbow pressed against her own as they tried to walk through a door at the same time—and Jiselle was surprised how thin, almost fragile, Sara’s back felt, and her neck. She could feel the knobs of her vertebrae, and when Sara tilted her face to the side, Jiselle could see the pulse beat in a fluttering vein at her temple.

“Okay,” Jiselle said, taking a bit of the hair between her fingers. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” Sara said.

So Jiselle snipped at Sara’s hair until the black fringe had fallen either onto the towel in the sink or around their feet on the bathroom floor. It took a long time. Jiselle wanted to do a perfect job. “Okay,” she finally said, and Sara straightened up.

Jiselle stared at Sara’s reflection staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, and it was as if she were seeing this girl for the first time.

Sara, without the unnaturally black hair, seemed to have skin the color of peaches. She wasn’t, Jiselle realized, wearing her lip ring or her black makeup. Without these things she looked like an awkward adolescent—a young girl with a round face, wide eyes, soft hair, which Jiselle could not stop herself from touching.

It felt like rabbit fur, she thought, running her hand over the top of her stepdaughter’s head.

It felt like infant hair.

The next night they heard, in the distance, what sounded like either fireworks or gunfire.

The sun had just set, and Sam, who was playing with his action figures in the candlelight, looked up. He said, “Shouldn’t we be celebrating?”

“Celebrating what?” Camilla asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Independence?”