In a Perfect World

At the hostess lectern, Jiselle stood blinking in the candlelight, scanning the dining room until she saw, at a round table in the center, her mother, who did not look up from her menu until Jiselle was standing beside her, touching her shoulder, looking down onto the top of her head with its ice-blond hair. She looked up then, and her gaze fell on Jiselle, Sam, Camilla, and Sara in turn. “Hello.”

Camilla smiled wanly and nodded at Jiselle’s mother. Sara stared at a vague place in the corner of the restaurant. Sam, bobbing on his toes, said, “Hi!” so loudly that a couple dining in a far corner of the restaurant looked over.

Jiselle sat down, trying not to look at her mother looking at Sara. Earlier, she’d given Sara her own black dress to wear when Sara couldn’t find hers, and had lent her, too, the beautiful black shoes she’d bought in Madrid.

It was a conservative, funeral parlor outfit, nothing like the one Sara had wanted to wear, and still, somehow, Sara managed to make it look provocative, managed to look like a girl whose job it was to deliver pornographic birthday greetings to corporate businessmen. Jiselle might have managed to hide the dress, but she hadn’t been able to keep Sara from wearing black fingernail polish, black lipstick, all that black eyeliner, the ring piercing her lower lip. She was pretty sure the black eyeliner was her own—the Chanel ebony pencil missing from her dresser drawer for a week—but God knew she was never going to say anything. She’d already resigned herself to the petty thefts. On the couple of occasions when it was something she couldn’t live without or couldn’t replace—the onyx ring Mark had bought for her from a street vendor on Isla Mujeres—Jiselle went into Sara’s room while she was out and searched around until she found it.

Then Sara waited until Jiselle was out, and went into Jiselle’s drawers and stole it back.

After that, Jiselle had no choice but to snatch it again and then to wear it day and night.

Her mother inhaled, looking from Sara to Jiselle. “Nice to see you,” she said. “Happy birthday, Jiselle.”

“Thank you,” Jiselle said. She sat between her mother and Sara, and across from Sam, who tucked his linen napkin into the collar of his shirt and kept it there until Jiselle managed to catch his eye, shake her head. Then he spread it theatrically onto his lap, smiling.

They ordered drinks when the waiter came over—sodas for the kids (“Just one tonight, Sam, okay?”) and champagne for Jiselle and her mother, along with an appetizer. Snails. Jiselle’s favorite dish at Duke’s. Bread was passed around in a basket so light it was hard to hold on to, as if they had been served emptiness in a basket made of air.

After the sodas and champagne arrived, Jiselle’s mother raised her glass and said, dispassionately, “Many happy returns.”

Jiselle and the children raised their glasses, too.

Jiselle was surprised, when she did, to see that her own hand, holding up the sparkling glass, was shaking.

“Let’s try to have a nice meal, shall we?” her mother said, looking around at the children.

“Yes,” Jiselle said, as if her mother had been talking to her.

They’d taken only a few, silent sips of their drinks before the snails were brought out on a little silver plate and set in the middle of the table. Sam leaned toward the plate, curious, but the girls recoiled. Sara put her napkin to her mouth as if to stifle a scream, as the smell of garlic rose from the small, curled, dark gray flesh. Camilla looked away, grimacing. Jiselle pierced one on the end of her small silver fork, brought it to her mouth, placed it on her tongue, and ate it slowly.

It was delicious—the soft, luxurious density of something delivered divinely from the sea, liberated from its shell by nymphs, relaxed into death by butter. That snail seemed nothing at all like the kind of creature Jiselle used to find clinging to rocks in her grandmother’s garden—its whole body a small, hopeless, damp tongue, bearing all that weight from one place to the next, seeming to think its shell might save it.

As she chewed, Jiselle kept her eyes on her plate, except to look up one time when her mother said to Camilla, “Aren’t you going to eat?”

Camilla didn’t answer. She was staring at the candle in the center of the table. It flickered, surged, contracted in a blue-and-orange dance, trying, Jiselle knew, to eat up all the oxygen in the room.

“Camilla?” Jiselle said. Camilla looked up then. Her eyes were so red and swollen they were painful to look at, and Jiselle looked away.

For hours after the news, Camilla lay on her bed with her face in her pillow, weeping, while Sara stomped around the house with her cell phone, spreading the bad news, sharing the grief. Jiselle hadn’t known they even liked Britney Spears. Wasn’t Camilla, at least, too old to be a Britney Spears fan? Wasn’t Sara too punk for a Barbie doll like Britney? Wasn’t Britney Spears, by then, old news anyway?

Apparently not.

Apparently Camilla and Sara had thought of Britney Spears as a kind of immortal sister. They were inconsolable. No, they did not want breakfast. Or lunch. Or to talk. Finally, after the second hour of weeping, Jiselle went to Camilla’s room, stood in the threshold, and said, “I’m sad, too, Camilla, but we can’t let it—”

“Let it what?” Camilla asked. Her tone, hysterical and angry at the same time, sounded vaguely threatening, and it was at that moment that Jiselle realized she’d had no earthly idea what she was about to say, anyway. In truth, was she even so sure she fully believed that it was inappropriate to grieve so deeply for Britney Spears? And if it was, why was it? They’d prefaced the special news bulletin with a few bars from “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” and the tears had pricked Jiselle’s eyes before she’d even had a chance to blink.

Britney Spears, back then, with all that flaxen hair, still a child, half-naked, the wind blowing some wheat around behind her a long decade or more ago. The kind of girl who might own a winged horse—dead? Of the flu? Of hemorrhagic zoonosis? All that self-destructive energy, that combustion, just to die of the same infection that might kill the odd, unlucky nurse’s aide or mallard duck?

Anyway, she knew that even if she had managed to say something coherent to Camilla about how, maybe, it was inappropriate to grieve for a pop star the way you would grieve for a member of your own family, Camilla would have nodded politely through her tears, wiped her nose with a piece of tissue, and agreed—to Jiselle’s face. To her face, Jiselle was always right. Only later would Jiselle overhear Camilla muttering to her sister, “That bitch is so cold.”

Sara would simply have stomped out, saying something like, “Spare us your philosophy, Mommy.”

(In the previous week, Sara had taken to calling Jiselle—ironically, in italics— Mommy, while Camilla had still never called Jiselle by any name at all. Jiselle had no idea what, if Camilla were forced to get her attention in a crowd, she might have been able to bring herself to call out: Jiselle, or Stepmother, or Second wife of my father?)

What had Jiselle, standing at the threshold of Camilla’s room, thought she might say?

That was the problem with being a stepmother, Jiselle was beginning to realize, or with being a mother, for all she knew: you went around trying to convince children of things you weren’t that sure of yourself. That it was inappropriate to cry yourself sick over the death of a pop star. That it was better to read with the television off. That eating cookies before dinner was inherently wrong.

Sam was only ten, and he’d already figured out that a room looked just as clean if you kicked the laundry under the bed as it did if you spent the hours it would take to sort and fold and put the clothes in closets and drawers.

Wasn’t that what Jiselle herself had done for years?

Hypocrisy had somehow not been one of the “cons” she’d considered when thinking about resignation from her job to stay home with Mark’s children. When he’d first proposed the possibility, there had been so many things to think about that hypocrisy could never have fit on the “con” list.

Loss of seniority, pension, and job security; financial dependence after so many years of being on her own—these things had occurred to her.

When Jiselle’s mother asked her again if she planned to eat anything, Camilla finally said, in a quavering voice, “I’m not very hungry.”