In a Perfect World (15 page)

When the power was on and there was cold beer, Jiselle would offer him one. Often, sitting across from her on the deck in his T-shirt and jeans—looking rugged, Jiselle thought, like an outdoorsman, not a historian—he’d seem as if he were about to tell Jiselle something or ask her for advice, but he never did.

There was no denying now that people were dying in large numbers, all over the country—and that even if it was not being called a plague, it was a plague. The suppression of information until recently had not been a conspiracy, the public was assured, but rather a
complexity
that had kept those numbers from being interpreted and disseminated in an accurate manner. And although no one had called it the Phoenix flu or hemorrhagic zoonosis, there had been deaths in St. Sophia as well—a child who’d gone to Sam’s school, a woman who’d worked at the library, an elderly couple and their disabled son. When Jiselle and Sam went into town for the goose food, she had seen graves being dug in the St. Sophia Cemetery, and then the fresh dirt mounded over them. Despite the ban, a white balloon had managed somehow to snag itself in one of the tallest trees in the center of town. It blew around there erratically in a high breeze for a couple of days before the Fire Department came with a truck and ladder and took it down. Apparently, it had been upsetting residents of St. Sophia.

“It’s hype,” Mark said over the phone. “The whole thing. The pharmaceutical companies and the European Union have a lot of money to make over this hype.” He no longer sounded anxious on the phone. “The airline is paying my salary, right? As long as the checks don’t bounce, everything’ll be okay.”

The checks were not bouncing. They continued to be deposited directly into Mark’s and Jiselle’s shared account every week. So, Mark pointed out, there had been no hardship, really, had there? The Gesundheitsschutzhaus was clean, comfortable, he said. The food was good. They were allowed to go outside into a small fenced garden. There was a gym for exercise. No one had gotten sick. They would soon be allowed to leave. He might even miss it. Germany was an amazingly efficient and beautiful place.

“I miss you,” Jiselle said. “I can’t tell you how much—”

“Keep yourself busy,” Mark said. “That’s what I’m doing. This’ll be over before we know it.”

Sam taught Jiselle how to play chess.

It took her days to learn and memorize the fundamentals, only to find that she was the kind of player who might make a fine move that set in motion a long series of self-defeats, unable as she was to think more than one move ahead. But Sam was patient, and Jiselle was learning from her mistakes. When she made a good move, he was delighted: “Yeah!” he’d shout when she took his pawn.

For her part, Jiselle could not believe that after a lifetime of looking down at the mystery of a chessboard (all of her previous lovers, and her father, had played, and none had ever suggested teaching her), she understood now what was being enacted on it. For the first time, she understood what
checkmate
meant and what it meant to be a
pawn.

They played some nights at the kitchen table by candlelight when the power went out, and, those nights, Jiselle sometimes had the feeling that she was a woman from another era, another life. That she had gone back to some step she’d skipped in a process she hadn’t recognized as a process:

Candle flickering. The child’s face, deep in concentration over a wooden board and its simple wooden pieces. Through the open windows, the crickets’ excited confessions to the dark. Next door, she might hear Diane Schmidt singing folk songs to herself in a high, girlish voice.

One day, Sara put down her leather-bound black diary, in which she sometimes spent hours writing in tiny letters (“I’m trying to save space”) and took up one of Jiselle’s half-finished afghans and finished it. After that, she began and finished another. Then, a flowing winter scarf, and then she started to crochet a shawl with the exotic yarn Jiselle had bought in Rome but never used—gossamer, fawn-colored. Sara sat for hours on the couch in the family room, intent on the task of pulling the fine, pale stuff through the silver eye of her crochet hook, spinning it out on the other side as an intricate orderliness spilling softly around her.

Jiselle picked up the edge of the shawl and smoothed her hand over the downy floss and lace of it. The stitches were perfect.

“Sara,” Jiselle said, “you’re so good at this.”

Sara looked up. She said, “I heard you reading that story to Sam, the one about the girl who had to make a shawl so thin it could be pulled through a wedding ring before the prince would marry her.”

Jiselle said, “Are you looking for a prince?”

Sara snorted, rolled her eyes, went back to work. She alternated between the careful crochet work and the tiny printing in her journal. When she wasn’t doing one, she was working on the other.

Camilla took up jogging.

Mornings, she’d head out the front door in her running shoes and silky shorts, come back an hour later soaked with sweat, scarlet-cheeked, panting. Her legs began to look stronger, the calves chiseled, defined by the muscles in them. Bobby might be waiting for her in the family room. Sometimes Jiselle would find him moving Sam’s action figures across the arm of the couch even when Sam wasn’t around. He’d laugh when she caught him at it, and say, “The boredom’s making me regress.” His father was spending more and more time on the lawn than it required, mowing it into a perfect chessboard pattern of crisscrosses and squares while Bobby, displaced, sat on the couch with the action figures or on the deck drinking lemonade.

“I could make a nice brick path for you,” Paul suggested to Jiselle one afternoon. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat, and Jiselle could see how physically fit he was. His muscles were different from Mark’s, which were hotel-gym muscles, and more defined. Paul’s body was solid, sinewy. His hair was damp around his forehead. “From the deck down to the ravine. I’ve got the bricks left over from a project. It would give me something to do, and it wouldn’t hurt Bobby to keep a bit busier, if you know what I mean.” He nodded up to Bobby, who had fallen asleep in a lawn chair while Camilla was out running. “Keep our kids out of trouble.”

He showed Jiselle where he would lay the bricks. He said he thought that at the end of the path he could even make a few steps down the bank and into the ravine. “What do you think?” he asked.

“Well, a path would lovely,” Jiselle said. “I’ll need to ask Mark, but I think—”

“Oh, of course,” Paul said. “Ask Mark. See what Mark has to say.”

They walked back across the lawn together. That day, the backyard was a riot of midsummer flowers and leaves, and overhead in the sky the contrail of a jet had dissolved across the clear blue. Planes were still flying sporadically, despite the restrictions and the drastic diminishment in flight offerings, the lack of fuel. Passengers were required to produce a statement of purpose to be approved thirty days in advance of travel, and even some of the most desperate were being denied. A woman in Oregon was trying to get to her son in New Jersey. The boy was twelve years old and had gone to visit his father and stepmother, both of whom had fallen ill and died within a week of his arrival. The boy was in the hospital in Newark now, also ill, and although she was willing to pay up to ten thousand dollars for a one-way flight, the mother could not get a seat on any airline. The last report Jiselle heard on the news was that Tom Cruise had arranged a private plane to take the woman to her son. There was footage of the woman on a tarmac climbing the stairs to a small jet, her hair whipping behind her in the wind.

Now a jet was flying over the house, and the stream behind it looked like a white ribbon that had frayed and then been pulled to pieces.

It was impossible, she thought, but Jiselle considered briefly that the jet held that mother. She was alone up there, looking down, hands clasped in her lap. Behind her, a plume of desperation and relief. Soon that disintegrating path behind her would be invisible overhead.

When Jiselle spoke to Mark about the brick path, he said, “Tell him I said that was fine.”

“You’re sure?” Jiselle asked.

She could hear what sounded like a party taking place behind Mark’s voice. Ice dropped into glasses. A violin. Mark said that they’d been bringing in entertainment, catering nice meals paid for by the airline, subsidized by the European Union, which was insisting on their continued quarantine. Sometimes Jiselle thought he sounded drunk. He slurred the occasional word.
Zhizelle.

“Why not? Brick path,” he said. “Sounds great.”

So, the next week, one morning, Paul and Bobby arrived with a load of bricks and stacked them neatly at the side of the yard while Jiselle watched from the deck—Sam running between Paul and Bobby, a blue jay shrieking down from a tree branch, the sweat on Bobby’s and his father’s T-shirts soaking through the cotton. A cross of sweat on Bobby’s back. The dark silhouette of a Victorian widow on Paul’s.

For three days in a row, the midafternoon heat had topped ninety-nine degrees. The power had come back again, and Jiselle turned on the air-conditioning when it grew so uncomfortable that she felt she couldn’t stand it. The sweat pooled on her eyelids and onto her eyelashes.

But the heat didn’t dampen Bobby’s and Paul’s and Sam’s enthusiasm for working on the brick path.

“They’re bored,” Camilla said. “They’re going nuts. They’re not like us.”

She’d come back into the house from her run. Jiselle had implored her not to run in the heat. (“You’ll pass out. Heatstroke. You’ll get dehydrated.”) But Camilla just shook her head, smiling. “It’s nice of you to worry, but I’ll be fine.”

And she did seem fine. Flushed, glowing. After her shower, Camilla lay on the couch in the family room in the air-conditioning with her hair wrapped in a towel, watching CNN. Jiselle sat down beside her.

Usually now, when she watched it, the news was good. No one expected severe power outages since the government had intervened. China was backing down. The war in the Mideast was all but over. The oil embargo would not last, but new developments in alternative fuel sources were being made every day. Researchers were on the verge of finding the cause of hemorrhagic zoonosis, and although this wasn’t a cure or a vaccine, it was the first step in that direction. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt had been married on a boat in the middle of the ocean so that the wedding could be attended by guests from every corner of the globe—the many foreign dignitaries who loved them but who could not have flown in to the country for it because of the travel restrictions. According to CNN, thousands of large and small boats had crowded around the
Angelina
for the occasion. There were fireworks. There were photographs of the couple wearing white, waving to helicopters circling them on a calm ocean in a perfectly blue sky.

One afternoon Jiselle was both shocked and strangely gratified to hear a CNN reporter mention, almost offhandedly, that there’d been some speculation that the Phoenix flu was being caused by the importation of hair from developing countries, and Jiselle looked forward to telling Brad Schmidt the next time she went over to their house to see if they needed anything. She would congratulate him on his prescience. He would be pleased, especially if he’d made a believer out of her—and, in truth, suddenly this theory seemed no more farfetched than some of the other things being blamed: Herbal supplements. Global warming. Contaminated grapes. Germ warfare. Bad Karma. Infected cats. Infected dogs. Teenage sex.

On CNN, it was Britney again, dancing on a hilltop in the sunlight wearing a spangled bikini top, blond hair flowing behind her. Sara walked into the room. “Jesus,” she said. “Like, how many people have died since
her,
and they’re still going on about this?”

Camilla turned the television off, pointing the remote at it like a handgun. The screen went black.
“Really,”
she said. “It’s pathetic.”

H
e had been quarantined in Germany for twenty-two weeks, and Jiselle was having trouble picturing Mark’s face.

Every night, she’d stare at his photograph on top of their dresser—the photo in which he, in his pilot’s uniform, had his arm around her, in her flight attendant’s uniform, and the Pacific Ocean was an infinity of gray containing only one small sailboat behind them.

But as soon as she closed her eyes and tried to call up the features of her husband’s face without the help of the photograph, they would melt in her imagination, as if he were a runner, blurring by. Or on that speeding train up the side of the mountain in Germany.

“Well, Jiselle, you barely knew him before you married him, and he’s been gone most of your marriage anyway,” Annette said.

It felt like a slap across the face—some thin, feminine hand made of air and disapproval smacking her cheek. Annette made a sound on her end of the line, something like air being snorted out of her nose. She’d had a difficult delivery—hours of labor followed by a C-section—but the baby was healthy, a little girl named Paulette, who was three months old. Annette was still so weak from her pregnancy problems that they’d had to hire a nanny to look after the baby, but Annette had been able to get out of the house a few times in the last couple of months.

“Don’t worry,” she said when Jiselle’s silence went on long enough that it was clear she wasn’t going to say anything else, “it’ll all work out when Mark gets back.”

“I need you,” Jiselle said to Mark one evening when the phone connection was unusually crisp over the ocean between them, and when he responded, she could hear every consonant, perfectly pronounced. She could even hear what sounded like swallowing, and the sound of his tongue passing over his teeth when he paused.

“I don’t want to hear that right now, Jiselle,” he said. “I’m helpless over here. I have to believe you’re okay there, and that you’re up to the job of taking care of the kids and yourself. I can’t deal with any soft-minded stuff.”

“What?” Jiselle instinctively put a hand to her throat, pressed the phone closer to her ear.

“You know what I’m talking about, Jiselle. Try to rise to the occasion, okay? This isn’t Disneyland for any of us anymore. Now, I have to go. It’s the middle of the night here. Goodnight, my darling.”

Jiselle mouthed the word
goodnight,
but Mark hung up before she could say it aloud.

She stood looking at the phone in her hand for a long time.

After it became clear that there would not be time left in the school year for schools to reopen before September, the children had begun to stay up until well into the early hours of morning—1:00
AM,
2:00—and to sleep until noon, even during the week, which had, without the routine of school, become indistinguishable from the weekends. Often, Bobby Temple did not leave for his own house until the sun came up. Those nights, Jiselle fell asleep to the low murmur of his and Camilla’s voices on the other side of the wall.

She thought that, perhaps, as the stepmother, as the adult in the house, she was supposed to ask Bobby to leave, but he was so polite, so helpful—emptying the garbage and then hauling the can to the end of the driveway on Fridays, playing with action figures on the floor with Sam, emptying the rodent cages with him. It was a comfort and a relief having a nearly grown man in the house. When the county stopped garbage pickup, Bobby helped Jiselle burn what couldn’t be composted. (He’d started the compost himself, behind the garage.) When the electricity went out, he would go through the house gathering up the flashlights they’d left lying around since the last power outage, and then he’d start up the generator.

In the middle of April, Bobby drove Jiselle to the airport in his father’s car to pick up Mark’s Mazda from airline employee parking, where it had been since Mark’s fateful flight to Germany. Jiselle drove the Mazda back, and Bobby followed in the Saab.

They parked the Cherokee in the garage and closed the garage door.

“Do what you have to do,” Mark had said disapprovingly over the phone when she told him that she was going to start driving the Mazda instead of the Cherokee now because of the SUV attacks. “Let the thugs run the world,” he said. “But be careful with my Mazda.”

Jiselle didn’t respond. His disapproval didn’t change her mind. She had responsibilities—his children. She had to take precautions. The attacks were becoming more and more common, moving inexorably from the city to its fringes. Drivers were being hauled out of their big vehicles and beaten. The SUVs were toppled, smashed with baseball bats, set on fire.

“We’ve got to blame
something
for the Phoenix flu,” Paul Temple said. “We’re like the flagellants during the Black Death. What we’re whipping is ourselves. We’re not a God-fearing society, so if it isn’t God who’s punishing us for our sins, it must be the environment punishing us for our gas-guzzling vehicles.”

That afternoon, Paul had walked over to get his Saab back, but Bobby and Camilla had already taken it out again to pick up some things for dinner, so Jiselle invited him in, offered him a beer. The electricity had been on solidly and without interruption for four days, so the beer was cold. He took the bottle gratefully and settled into a chair on the deck, gazing out at the ravine, which was still glistening and dripping from the rainstorm earlier. The air was warm and humid. Paul Temple was flushed. His forehead was beaded with sweat. He leaned on his elbows with the bottle of beer on the table between his arms and held his head in his hands.

“It’s a secular society,” he went on, “so it’s not God; it’s global warming. But it’s the same idea. The idea is that we brought this on ourselves. That cult in Idaho, the one where they all killed themselves to erase their carbon footprint—that could be straight out of the Middle Ages.”

Jiselle had seen photos of the cultists—more than a hundred dead men, women, and children in rows in their compound outside of Boise. They had all had white sheets pulled up to their chins, and their bare feet dangling from the ends of their cots. Such organized mania, she’d thought, looking at the photographs on CNN. How had they managed it?

Paul looked up at Jiselle and said, “These are strange times.”

Jiselle nodded. She saw bewilderment and despair in his expression, which she felt sure had to do with his wife, Tara. That day at the bank returned to her. She was afraid she might betray her own knowledge then, and looked away. Overhead, she heard a plane and looked up to see a pinwheeling bit of silver in the haze. Not a commercial airliner. Those had been grounded for good in the last two weeks. It was, instead, one of the small, fast military or corporate jets that had been crisscrossing the sky lately—quiet and suspiciously high, gone in a blink, although Jiselle continued to stare at the silver spinning place it had been until the sun in the haze over the treetops appeared to double itself.

That afternoon, Jiselle realized they were low on everything. The milk was gone. One of the children had used the last of it and put the empty carton back in the refrigerator. The peanut butter was mostly gone, and there was a green spot of mold on the last slices of bread in the Wonderbread bag.

Outside, Bobby and Paul were hauling bricks, placing them in careful rows beside one another, while Sam ran back and forth from the deck to the edge of the ravine, occasionally flapping his arms. Jiselle called to Sara and Camilla, “Anyone want to go to the store?”

They both did. It had already become a rare treat to go into St. Sophia. Gas was eleven dollars a gallon, and they were trying to conserve what was in the car for emergencies.

They drove in Mark’s Mazda—Camilla beside Jiselle, Sara in the backseat. Jiselle put the top down, for the hard breeze of it, and turned the radio on to the oldies station—happy, stupid songs about being a teenager in a perfect world. Even the car crashes in that world seemed safe, predictable. There were never any special announcements on the oldies station. The only chatter was about a contest in which the naming of a songwriter could win you a thousand dollars. Sara and Camilla nodded along to the songs, seeming content enough. “Take a Letter, Maria.” “Hey There, Lonely Girl.”

Although it had been dry, the rains had been relentless the month before, so the flowers were as vivid as Jiselle ever remembered them. Along the side of the road the wildflowers waved their caution-yellow faces at the sun. Red-winged blackbirds darted among the blooms and grasses, landing on long blades, not even bending them, appearing to be weightless. Butterflies and moths swarmed around the purple-blue of cornflowers. The Queen Anne’s lace made a webby froth in the ditches.

Sara let her elbow rest on the car door and opened and closed her fingers in the wind as the car flew through it, as if she were trying to hang on to the air. Camilla leaned her head back on the seat and closed her eyes, her face lit up by the sun. Jiselle watched the road in front of her spinning out like a black ribbon. There were almost no other cars on the road.

“If you don’t want to hear the bad news out there, folks, you’ve finally found the right station!” a man with a deep voice, which managed to sound girlish in its excitement, shouted over the radio. “We’re just playing music and telling really stupid jokes!”

When Jiselle finally reached the edge of St. Sophia and pulled up to the Safeco, the parking lot was nearly empty. There were just a few small cars parked at the edges—employees’ cars? A couple of motorbikes were on the sidewalk outside the store, and an empty wheelchair, looking abandoned, sat by itself next to the Dumpster. There was one truck parked out front, and a man in a blue shirt was tossing crates out of the back of it onto the pavement. He didn’t look at Jiselle and the girls when they passed by, but after they’d already started to pass through the automatic doors, Jiselle heard him mutter, “Hot babes,” as if it were an accusation. When they were on the other side of the doors, which had closed, Jiselle looked back.

The man had a wild black beard and bright blue eyes. He was staring at her with his chin lifted. She turned away again fast.

Inside the supermarket, Sara and Camilla parted, heading down different aisles, pushing their separate carts. Jiselle took a red plastic basket and said, “Let’s not forget to get Saltines and 7-Up for the Schmidts.”

Saltines and 7-Up seemed to be all Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt ate. It was the only item from the store they ever requested when Jiselle offered to pick something up for them.

What were they living on otherwise?

They never took their car out of the garage anymore, but they looked healthy enough. Like the water Mr. Schmidt said he had, did he also have a stockpile of food? Was he setting traps—eating possum, squirrel? There were apple trees in his backyard, but they had only just begun to grow small, hard fruit. Even if he’d managed somehow to plant a vast vegetable garden, not much could have come up there yet either.

Jiselle would buy them, she decided, some cans of tuna and sardines, if there were any, but she went to the cracker aisle first to get the Saltines, which were plentiful and light to carry in her basket. She took two boxes and moved on.

Freshly mopped, the floors of the grocery store were wet and streaked, but there seemed to be no one working there except for one girl behind one cash register. Many of the things Jiselle wanted—eggs, fresh vegetables, and fruit—lay behind the glass doors of the padlocked freezers or under the heavy yellow contamination cloths. Still, there seemed to be more things on the shelves that afternoon than there had been the week before, when they were still cordoning off the bakery aisle. Now, some of the bread was moldy, but Jiselle found the best loaf she could and put it in her basket. And she was glad to see that there was milk. Many gallons of it. And cheese. And even yogurt, which she’d been learning to live without but still loved. She was happy, passing the displays of canned soup and stuffing mix, to see the plenty. There was still more than enough in the grocery store to feed them for months—
years
—if need be, until the energy crisis ended and normal shipping routes were reopened.

She tracked down peanut butter for Sam, Frosted Flakes. She shook the box just to hear the flakes inside. Sam would be so happy about the Frosted Flakes. She took the last box of Raisin Bran off the shelf, too, but put it back when she saw that the bottom had been ripped and the waxy pouch inside was open. She picked up a box of Pop-Tarts instead.

At the checkout line, they stood and waited for the girl behind the cash register to finish a phone conversation before scanning their purchases.

“That’s none of her business,” the cashier hissed and whispered. “She can
kiss my ass.”

She had her back turned to them, as if they would not be able to hear her words if they couldn’t see her mouth, so they waited in the lane, surrounded by the usual magazines and tabloids, which were covered with the usual headlines:

PRESIDENT THREATENS WAR OVER EUROPEAN VACCINATION HOARDING

LOSE TEN POUNDS IN TWO WEEKS
.

MOTHER SCREAMS, “DON’T LET MY BABY DIE!”

Every one of those magazines was at least two months old. Sara picked up a
People
and put it back down, shaking her head.

Finally, the girl behind the cash register got off the phone and rang up their purchases wearily. Each time she scanned an item she seemed to also glance at her watch. She looked pregnant and was wearing a green apron over her protruding stomach and, under the apron, a dress with yellow tulips on it.

Was it possible that she smelled a bit like whiskey? Could that sweet, hot scent be her perfume, or did the smell drift over only when the girl opened her small, glossy red mouth?