first session, when she’d made an appointment through the University Health Services—right after she’d dropped out of college but before they’d canceled her student benefits. Her father and Ellen had been dead for a few months, and Jiselle was flunking out, when she’d gotten a paper returned to her from her Western Civilization course.
On the bottom of it, scrawled in red pen, was “F—Fuzzy Logic.”
Nothing else.
As if no further explanation could be given or would be needed.
Jiselle no longer had any actual memory of the paper itself. Of writing it, of stapling its pages together, of her thesis and argument and support, of handing it in, but the words had stayed with her over the years. They were the words that had brought her to Smitty Smith, in whose office she had wept on that last winter day of her college career, and in which she was smiling helplessly now after announcing her engagement to Captain Mark Dorn.
Dr. Smith said nothing more until a few minutes had passed in silence, and then he said, “Well, we’ll have to finish talking about this next time,” and then, wearily, like a man with a low-grade fever, “Congratulations, Jiselle.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded and said, “But just, you know, think hard about this. Think clearly.”
But there were others—plenty of them—who urged Jiselle not to think too hard, to act quickly.
“Find me a man like that, Jiselle,” another flight attendant said, “and I’d stay home with his brats, I’d iron his shirts, I’d wax his floors.”
A chorus of flight attendants gathered around her at the gate and agreed.
When Jiselle herself uttered reservations (“You know, I haven’t even met his children yet…”), this chorus sang out in unison, “Who cares? They’ll be awful! All children are awful, whether they’re yours or someone else’s! But you’ll be married to Captain Dorn!”
In Jiselle’s fantasy, the children were not awful. When she imagined herself with Mark’s children, they were always sitting in a circle around her in a forest. In this fantasy, a soft bed of fallen pine needles was spread out beneath them, and Jiselle had her gilt-edged collection of Hans Christian Andersen tales open on her lap—the book from which her father used to read to her—and she was about to start a story.
It didn’t matter, for this particular fantasy, that Mark’s daughters were certainly too old to be read to, or that once, when Jiselle visited his house while the children were in Madison with their nanny, she’d picked up the diary of one of the girls and read the most recent entry:
If he marries that fucking bitch, I’m going to make her life a living hell.
The diary was black and leather-bound and had been left on the kitchen counter, where, surely, the new girlfriend of her father visiting the house that weekend was supposed to find it.
Jiselle had put it down and stepped away from it slowly. Her heart had been thrumming like a bird trapped in a box.
But, in Jiselle’s fantasy, Sara would come to realize how much she had in common with her new stepmother, and how much she had missed not having a mother all these years. She would confide in Jiselle and grow to love her.
In her fantasy, Jiselle and the three children in the forest were all wearing white, and although they were sitting on the ground, their clothes did not get dirty.
The afternoon he asked Jiselle to marry him they were in Kyoto, in bed in a hotel room full of cherry blossoms, and they’d left the curtains open while they made love.
Afterward, they went to the window and looked down.
The roads were thronged. It was the day of the Lantern Parade, which was one of the city’s most important festivals, or so Jiselle had been told by her taxi driver, in perfect English.
Conceived during a plague in the ninth century as a ritual to purify the land and to appease the rampaging deity Gozu, the first parade had ended the plague, and so had been held every year since by the citizens of Kyoto, who even managed, the driver told her, to keep the Americans from dropping an atomic bomb on their city with their religious devotion and their beautiful parade.
Ten stories below them, a float made entirely of pink blossoms moved along slowly, trailing long silk flags through the streets. From a throne at the center of it, a little boy in Shintu robes was swinging a pale yellow lantern. When the boy looked up, Jiselle yanked the curtain around her naked body as quickly as she could, although he couldn’t have seen her so far above him—a woman in one of a hundred tiny windows in a tower, looking down.
“I’m not a perfect man, Jiselle,” Mark said. “I’ve got some baggage. But I’m in love with you. And I need you.” He turned from the window to her. “They need you, too,” he added. “We’ll be a family.”
An automatic family.
Was it such a crazy thing to want?
At the checkout lines at every airport gift shop were women’s magazines and tabloids announcing HOW TO KEEP YOUR FAMILY SAFE IN TROUBLED TIMES, beneath the stunning, smiling, face of Angelina Jolie, as full of inner peace as any medieval Madonna, her brood of twelve children gathered around her.
“Why wait?” Annette said when Jiselle expressed surprise that Annette was already pregnant only a month after marrying her pediatrician, Dr. Williams, thirty years her senior, the very doctor who’d administered Annette’s first vaccinations, treated her strep throat and sprained ankle.
It was said that college students across the country had formed groups devoted to the study of Nostradamus. Why wait to see what the future will hold if we can find out from the past?
The media connected the war, the fears of the flu, the beautiful and alarming weather, to the behavior of teenagers and adults alike. Bars were crowded in the middle of the day. Workplace affairs were ubiquitous. Unplanned pregnancies and planned ones. There was a pregnant woman on every street corner, it seemed, and a baby being pushed in a stroller on every street. The boys who didn’t go into the military after high school dropped out to become poets. It was said that in Las Vegas it had become so common for gamblers to sit at their slot machines until they collapsed that ambulances were kept idling behind casinos. The twenty-four-hour wedding chapels were busy twenty-four hours a day. So much champagne was being demanded that liquor stores across the country had instituted a one-bottle-per-customer rule to avoid the violent outbursts of customers who came in and found the shelves empty.
Jiselle, however, wasn’t thinking about the news when she told Mark that, yes, she would marry him.
She was thinking that she’d waited a long time for this.
She was thinking that she’d waited long enough.
In Montreal, Jiselle found the perfect dress. Off-white linen and lace. Just above the ankle. A low neckline sewn with seed pearls.
“Four hundred dollars Canadian,” the salesgirl said, “and we can tailor it for you.”
But it didn’t need to be tailored. It fit Jiselle perfectly, as if it had been made for her. And in her hair she would wear a band of lace from her grandmother’s wedding dress—which had arrived in America in tatters in a moth-filled trunk on a Danish ship. Her mother had kept the scraps of that in her attic all these years.
“Let me see,” Mark said at the Budget Roadway Inn.
“No,” Jiselle said. “You’re not supposed to see the bride in her dress until the wedding day. It’s bad luck.”
