In a Perfect World

by Laura Kasischke

  They took the back roads and highways home instead of the freeway, which was congested with all the post-Easter brunchers (the lights at Duke’s Palace Inn had flickered twice during brunch, and Jiselle presumed this had happened all over the city, and people were worried, heading for home), and Sam and the girls laughed at the enormous inflated bunnies in front yards as they passed through each small town. There were neon-bright plastic eggs strung from trees. Plastic rabbits hanging from clotheslines. Pink and yellow streamers waving from telephone poles. Newscasters had linked the serious outbreaks of the flu in California and the rumors of war on a second front to the extra significance given this year to the Lenten season. Believers weren’t just giving up candy; they were giving up sex. They were giving up cell phones. They were giving up pleasures and conveniences of all kinds. The police had been called in to end a parade of flagellants in San Francisco on Ash Wednesday. In New Mexico, three men had been roped to crosses outside a church and left there overnight. The nation was looking forward to Easter and to the end of this nonsense.

  They passed through one town at the Illinois-Wisconsin border where there had apparently been a parade earlier in the day. It had left shredded pink and purple paper all over the road. A few Easter baskets rolled, lost, along the sidewalk. A kind of throne had been built outside the courthouse for, it seemed, the Easter Bunny—a trellis decorated with tissue roses and green crêpe paper and a chair draped in pink and purple velour. It was empty now, but there was still a trail of crushed candies and pale blue candy wrappers where the children must have stood in line waiting for a chance to sit on the Easter Bunny’s lap.

  Driving through that little town with the pastel trash and the spring flowers in bloom—the daffodils and tulips and all the flowering trees in their whites and pinks—reminded Jiselle of the sugar Easter eggs her mother used to buy for her when she was a child. You would look inside the bright sugar cave to find a perfect little village with emerald green grass and cozy bungalows for rabbits and ducklings made of more sugar.

  Usually, Jiselle had kept those on a shelf until her mother, around the Fourth of July, would point out that they were attracting ants. But, one year, she’d decided to taste the egg.

  Although the first broken-off bit of the bric-a-brac on the eggshell had tasted stale, Jiselle couldn’t resist another nibble, and another, until eventually she’d managed to nibble away the whole exquisite egg and the peaceful scene inside it, too.

  As the length of his detainment dragged on, Jiselle began to call Mark several times a day. If he didn’t answer, she left long messages on his voice mail:

  “I’m sitting on the deck. The kids are inside. Sam’s been building a tower in his room out of Legos. Sara and Camilla have been downloading songs, now that the power’s back on. I baked a loaf of bread and washed the sheets. Every night I hold your pillow in my arms and pretend it’s you.”

  “Sweetheart,” Mark said. “It’s important not to ramble on the voice mail. It costs just as much as talking to me in person, and I think we should be as conservative as we can. Who knows how long this will go on.”

  “But…what about the lawyers? I thought you were sure—”

  “What’s sure in this life, Jiselle? I love you, and I know this is hard for you, but it’s harder for me.”

  “Of course,” she said. “I know that, Mark. It’s—”

  “Shhh,” he said. “I love you. You are the love of my life. I have to go.”

  Summer came in early, mild and sweet. The air smelled of cake, yeasty and moist. There was the usual seasonal sense of something new beginning again, except that with the weather growing warm and humid so early, it was as if a step in the process of the seasons had been skipped. By the middle of May, teenage girls and their mothers had taken equally to wearing what looked like lingerie in the middle of the day—to the grocery store, to the bank. Black camisoles. Satin halter tops. Short shorts.

  Seeing them in St. Sophia, with its tulips lined up in straight rows outside the public buildings and its flags flapping overhead, those girls and women looked to Jiselle as if they’d stumbled on to the wrong set—parading their call girl costumes through the filming of a 1950s TV show.

  The power outages, it seemed, and the shortages, and the fears of the flu had inspired a portion of the population to toss off its old morality and to live for the moment. Drug use and promiscuity were said to be at an all-time high among teenagers. Small communes were forming, in the Western states especially—enclaves devoted to free love, spiritual growth, and the pleasures of the flesh. It was said that Dr. Springwell was not, after all, in the Canary Islands but on a ranch in Wyoming, where he led a cult of young people who were devoted to sexual experimentation.

  But other groups formed, too.

  After it was noted in the press how few Phoenix flu deaths had been reported among the Amish, the New Amish groups sprang up. They blamed cell phones for the power outages and the flu: the radiation emitted by the towers was blanketing the country in poisonous, invisible vibrations that disrupted the environment, driving the birds into a frenzy. This was also the reason for the visibility in recent months of so many rodents. They had been driven out of the ground. They had lost all sense of direction because of the effect of the vibrations on their inner ears.

  The radiation was causing the human immune system to go haywire, the New Amish said. They lived in sod houses and made their own clothes and utensils from found materials.

  But most of the people Jiselle saw around town simply seemed bored. There had never been so many people in St. Sophia. Stuck in St. Sophia. Spending their days in St. Sophia. Without school, without sports, without work, without the malls in the city and suburbs open, they were wired with energy and exhausted at the same time. They actually sat on the park benches, which had seemed to be merely decorations to Jiselle until then. Mothers pushed children on the swings in the park. They walked on the sidewalks.

  One morning, as she stood in line at the St. Sophia Credit Union (Mark had told her to go, to make sure the airline was still depositing his checks and to get some cash “in case”), she saw ahead of her in the line, which snaked out the door and around the corner of the bank’s brick façade, Bobby’s mother, Tara Temple. She was wearing patent leather high heels. Black, they glinted in the sun bouncing off the sidewalk and sent thin beams of light straight up the insides of her long, tanned legs. She was wearing shorts so short that Jiselle could see the fold between her thigh and her buttocks, and, on the inside of one sleek thigh, a little rose, which looked like either a temporary tattoo or a brand-new one.

  Tara Temple had met Jiselle only those two or three times (the last time was when she’d brought over the Wholeness book) and didn’t appear to recognize her. Between them, a man in a necktie and Bermuda shorts stood very close to Tara, and Jiselle watched as, saying nothing, he reached behind Tara and smoothed three fingers down the small of her back to the place where her tailbone clefted into her tight shorts.

  Jiselle looked quickly away. Bobby’s mother had to have been at least ten years older than she, but standing behind her in that line, wearing flat black sandals and one of Mark’s baggy T-shirts over a pair of worn-out khaki shorts, Jiselle felt old, and maternal, and disapproving. She liked Paul Temple, Bobby’s father, who had stopped by several times recently to help Bobby with the yard work, which Bobby had agreed to take on for forty dollars a week. (He’d wanted to do it for free—because “I eat like five meals a day here!”—but Jiselle had insisted on paying him.) Because Paul Temple taught history at St. Sophia High, he’d had nothing to do since the schools closed down. A week earlier, he and Bobby had spent the whole day cutting down dead brush between the lawn and the ravine for her, and then they’d burned it in a barrel in the backyard. It had been an especially great day for Sam, who adored Mr. Temple, who liked to punch Sam in the shoulder and call him Bud.

  A bank teller came out then and announced that the computers had frozen, and the wait could be “d
ays.” She strongly suggested their leaving and coming back another time.

  Jiselle watched as Tara Temple turned to look at the man behind her.

  They smiled sleepily at each other and left the line together.

  GOODBYE TO THE NECKTIE was a news bulletin for days. Men were being encouraged to go without them. The “New Businessman” had an open collar and short sleeves. He wore cargo pants or shorts, carried a satchel instead of a briefcase. There was some joyful speculation that the days of eight-to-five were over forever, replaced by siestas, long vacations—an entirely different way of life having been glimpsed in this brief, strange period. It was a side benefit to the collapse of the economy, the devastation wrought by the Phoenix flu. The rules for behavior of all kinds had changed overnight—or changed while Jiselle had been making grilled cheese sandwiches for Sam and reading novels at home.

  Camilla had hauled out all the books she’d been assigned in her Advanced Placement English course that year, lining them up in the order she thought would be most educational and appealing. Jiselle had just finished Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which had left her weeping in the bathtub the night she’d finished it. Now, she was halfway through Mrs. Dalloway, which kept her in a kind of dreamy reverie long after she put it down.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t read this stuff in high school,” Camilla said, and Jiselle felt the familiar prickle of her skin at one of Camilla’s seemingly harmless observations. “Or at least in college.”

  Jiselle looked up at her. Camilla was looking at her curiously from the couch. For the first time, perhaps, Jiselle noticed that the girl had a very fine, blond down on her shoulders and arms. She was wearing a sundress with thin straps, and no makeup, and Jiselle felt as if she were looking at a stranger.

  “I never finished college,” Jiselle said. She opened her mouth again and realized that she was about to tell Camilla about her father, about Ellen, about the accident, as if that explained why she’d left college, but then she closed her mouth again and gave a little apologetic smile.

  “That’s no biggie,” Camilla said. “Some of the dumbest people I know finished college.”

  The second week of May, there were the first officially confirmed reports of massive outbreaks of hemorrhagic zoonosis in Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho. Some newscasters used the word hundreds. Others said thousands. All nonessential government services nationwide were closed down by executive order, although there was grumbling about this in the Midwest and on the East Coast. Wasn’t this clearly, mostly, a Western disease? Wouldn’t the most prudent thing be to limit travel over and across the Mississippi until the cause of the illness, the source of the contagion, could be determined? Why shouldn’t people in Ohio be allowed to keep their post offices and libraries open if they wanted to? They weren’t infected with hemorrhagic zoonosis.

  People in the Western states thought the same things about the East.

  “During the Black Plague the English called it the French disease, the French called it the Italian disease, and so on and so on. People blaming other people for the plague is nothing new,” Paul Temple said. He’d started coming by most days around five o’clock, if he wasn’t already there working on the yard, walking the two miles from his own house. He’d knock politely on the door and wait for Jiselle or one of the children to open it for him, although Jiselle had told him it was fine just to come in. When she opened the door, he’d smile apologetically and say he was “just looking for something to do. With the schools closed, not a big demand for history teachers in St. Sophia.”

  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 th
in 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.”