In a Perfect World (7 page)

But in this portrait he was only a prop. He was an afterthought. Jiselle stepped closer to look more carefully, although her heart was already beating hard. The center of this large photograph was the bride, of course, wearing a wedding gown, holding a blindingly white piece of cake up to the photographer. She was offering that piece of cake to the future, it seemed, on a wide silver knife. Her strawberry-blond hair cascaded over her shoulders in ringlets. She did not wear a veil but, instead, a ribbon of ivory velvet in her hair, wound through a strand or two, tied in a loose knot. Jiselle put her hand to her mouth.

“Oh, dear,” Mark said, coming up behind her.

He’d startled her, but she didn’t turn around. She couldn’t, transfixed as she was by that first bride’s gaze.

“Oh, Jiselle,” Mark said. “I just keep that up so the children will feel, you know, as if their mother’s here. Of course, now I’ll take it down.”

He took Jiselle’s shoulders in his hands and turned her around to look at him.

He pulled her to him and kissed her then with so much gentle longing that her knees would have buckled beneath her if he hadn’t been holding her so steadily in his arms.

T
he spring passed in a blur of anticipation. When Jiselle wasn’t flying, she was busy with preparations—the catering, the flowers, the invitations.

She still hadn’t met the children, but she’d sent the girls opal necklaces to wear with their bridesmaid dresses, and Sam (not for the wedding) a pirate’s three-cornered hat with a red feather. Mark would be bringing her to the house for a week prior to their marriage, and he said, “You can see for yourself then that they’re great kids, and they’ll adore you. But you’ll still have time to back out!”

Until after their honeymoon in Puerto Rico, he would continue to employ the nanny. Afterward, they would “see what the next step should be.”

“If you
want
to quit, to be home with the children, of course that’s fine. If
not
—”

If not, Jiselle knew, they would need to find another nanny.

She had not met the present nanny, but when she’d called Mark’s house once, a bright-sounding young woman had answered and called out to Mark in singsong, “The phone’s for you!”

“Where does she sleep?” Jiselle asked.

“When I’m here,” he said, “she sleeps at her apartment in town. When I’m gone, I don’t know. The couch? Why would I care? I hope you’re not jealous. I’m not one of those widowers who’s so desperate he sleeps with his children’s nanny.”

“Of course not!” Jiselle had said.

Who knew better than she that Captain Mark Dorn could have any woman he wanted?

Still, twice in two weeks, Jiselle had tried to make an appointment with her therapist to discuss the issue of quitting her job to take care of Mark’s children. She knew she could afford no
fuzzy logic
here, with her wedding only weeks away, but when she called Dr. Smitty Smith’s office, she got only his answering machine, on which he’d left a recording saying that his patients should leave a message, which he would return when he was over his illness.

T
he chapel in which Jiselle had been baptized, the one they’d reserved for the wedding, was damaged by the flooding that started the first week of July, after the long week of relentless rain at the end of June, so Jiselle quickly reserved the small garden behind the restaurant, where the reception was to be held as well.

Both events had to take place outdoors due to the new Health Department regulations requiring at least three months’ notice for an indoor gathering of more than thirty people. But the weather was terrible. After the rains, a thick humidity cloaked everything in more gray and stench. Some afternoons, the air was so thick and motionless that it felt like trying to breathe inside an aquarium. Mark and Jiselle decided to be married at twilight.

The afternoon before the wedding, around four o’clock, Jiselle and her mother arrived at the garden behind the restaurant to check on the flowers and the tables and chairs, to make sure everything was in order and had arrived, along with the cooler of champagne.

Jiselle had tried to call Mark earlier from her cell phone, but she couldn’t get a signal. She’d wanted to know how the children were. The night before, they’d gone out to dinner after the rehearsal, and Sam had thrown up at Jiselle’s mother’s feet. He’d been drinking 7-Up. Gallons of it. Every time he finished a large glass of it, the waitress had brought him another. Only Jiselle’s mother had been watching this, and later she said, “What do you expect, letting a child drink all that soda? Of course he’s going to throw up.”

But when Jiselle spoke to Mark that morning, Sam seemed fine. Camilla, however, was lying down, complaining of menstrual cramps, and Sara had not yet broken the Vow of Silence, as Mark had begun to refer to it. She’d begun it the week Jiselle came to stay, and Jiselle knew, from sneaking a look at her diary, that she planned to continue:

After they’d supervised the raising of the canopy over the garden by Perfect Party Rentals, Jiselle and her mother went back to the house together to get dressed. Jiselle’s wedding dress, freshly laundered at BC-YU Cleaners, hung on the back of the door of her childhood bedroom, now her mother’s sewing room. It was draped in a clear plastic sheet emblazoned with a black cartoon caricature of a ninja soldier with the face of B.C. Yu, the laundry’s owner and operator, a sword held high over his head.

Jiselle had known B.C. for years. She’d driven into town with her mother to drop off their clothes at his establishment a thousand times. He’d dry-cleaned Jiselle’s prom dresses, steam-ironed her graduation gown, laundered the black dress she’d worn to her father’s and Ellen’s funerals. He’d cleaned those and wrapped them in the same clear sheet with his face and the sword. It was a perfect caricature, and Jiselle could never decide whether it was, for B.C., a joke (playing off stereotypes—the mild-mannered Korean dry cleaner turned ninja?) or a fantasy.

She was exhausted and closed the sewing room door. The film of humidity and drizzle that had coated her during the wedding preparations had mixed with the smell of her own sweat. She was too tired to take a shower just yet. She had to rest for a minute or two first.

Because there was no longer a bed in her old room, Jiselle lay down on the floor beside the sewing table and closed her eyes. She heard the shower begin in the bathroom, and the sound of the shower doors sliding open and closed, and then she fell asleep to the music of water pelting the naked flesh of her mother, and then she was dreaming—dreaming that she was under the Perfect Party Rentals tent, waiting for a wedding to begin. It was a dream within a dream, and the feeling was so peaceful that it didn’t matter to Jiselle whether or not anything ever happened to her again. There was water running somewhere, and the sounds of doors opening and closing politely, and then, “Oh my God,
Jiselle!”

Her eyes snapped open. She sat up, finding herself in the sewing room again, with her mother standing over her wearing the salmon-pink linen dress she’d bought for the wedding—her ice-blond hair carefully clipped behind her head; her white summer shoes, her matching purse over her arm—and an expression of horror on her face.

“What the
hell
are you doing?” she shouted. “You’re getting married in
thirty minutes.”

“How long have I been asleep?” Jiselle asked. She looked at the gold watch Mark had given her for her birthday and saw that an hour had passed. The hour she’d allotted for dressing, and makeup, and arranging her hair.

“For God’s sake,” her mother said, “get your dress on!”

And then, still stinking, stripped down to her underwear, having only enough time to drag a brush through her hair, Jiselle was ripping the ninja off her wedding dress, pulling it up over her hips, hearing the fabric rip with a terrible, permanent sound, and realized that she was stepping on the hem of the dress at the same time that she was yanking it on, and then she was in the passenger seat of her mother’s car.

“Oh Mom,” Jiselle said. She was trying not to cry.

“Don’t
talk,”
her mother said.

But Jiselle couldn’t help it.

“I just can’t believe—”

“I said,
don’t talk,
Jiselle. It’s just going to make it worse if you start crying now. This whole thing is a fiasco anyway.”

Jiselle bit her lip, which tasted like salt, and willed herself not to cry, not to speak, but then, it seemed, her mother’s floodgates burst:

“Why exactly, Jiselle, do you think I kicked your father out when you were fifteen?”

“Because…” Jiselle said, but then realized she had nothing to say. Somehow, in her mind, she’d connected the dog, Bingo, with her parents’ divorce. Her father had come home with the dog, and the next day he was gone. But, surely, the dog could not have been the last straw. Her parents had been married for twenty years by then.

“Because he was sleeping with that little slut already. I caught them in
our
bed in the middle of the afternoon while you were at school. Your little friend was playing hookie.”

“No,” Jiselle said. “Mom, they didn’t start—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Jiselle, be quiet.”

Be quiet.

Jiselle’s mouth was still open, but she couldn’t speak. It was as if her mother had cast a spell over her. Jiselle saw that her mother’s hands were holding the steering wheel so tightly that the knuckles had gone from white to red, and she was shaking her head in little snaps. Her lips were pursed, but she was also grinding her teeth.

“I have been keeping my mouth shut about this for the last eighteen years, but didn’t it
ever cross your mind?
Do you ever remember your father taking an interest in
anything
about your life except for your friend Ellen?”

Jiselle put her hand on the door handle, as if she might be able to simply step out of the car.

“Well?
Why do you think he was always so eager to give darling little Ellen a ride home or pick her up for you?”

Jiselle didn’t move or swallow. She couldn’t.

“And now my daughter’s about to make the same mistake I made, marrying a man because he’s charming and handsome, without knowing another damn thing about him.”

Jiselle had to unroll her window despite the air-conditioning in her mother’s car, and still she could hardly breathe. She had to close her eyes. She let the air rushing past her pummel her face like ghosts in boxing gloves. Finally, her mother pulled over, brakes squealing, wheels thumping up against the curb. “Get out,” she said to Jiselle as she jumped out herself, in her salmon-pink suit, and disappeared around the corner of the restaurant.

When Jiselle finally managed to get out of her mother’s car—carefully, she did not want to risk ripping the hem of her dress even more—and closed the car door, someone behind her called out, “Lady?”

She turned to look. It was the man from Perfect Party Rentals. “Lady,” he said again, “there’s a problem with your tent.”

“What?” Jiselle asked, but he’d already stepped past her to the garden. She followed him, holding her dress off the damp pavement with one hand, trying to hold the hastily tied ribbon in her hair with the other.

The guests were already gathered, murmuring in a blur of colorful clothes. Mark was there. He stepped toward her, and then she saw it—the tent, collapsed onto the buffet table and the folding chairs and the ground. It looked as if a parachute had fallen to the earth with alarming speed, from a great height, directly onto Jiselle’s wedding. Her mother’s arms were crossed, her jaw set. She was standing in the shadows beside Pastor Gillingham, who had changed so much since Jiselle last saw him that she recognized him only by the way his bushy eyebrows, white now, took up so much of the surface of his face. His left arm dangled limply at his side. He looked back at Jiselle and did not register any recognition at all.

“Jiselle?” Mark said quietly.

He took her arm, peering into her face. His dark hair glittered with silver in the dusk. He appraised her, taking in the ripped seam, the safety pins, her hair wild around her face, the ribbon slipping out of it. Looking from her to the sky, he said, “If we do this before it starts to thunderstorm, Jiselle, we don’t need a tent.”

She nodded weakly.

She looked around.

Her guests had circled the collapsed tent, and they were smiling apologetically at her. Sam, in his little blue suit, with his long strawberry-blond curls glistening in the hazy sun, had picked up an edge and was looking under it. Camilla, radiant in the yellow satin dress Jiselle had chosen for her, with her long elegant arms shining, brushed her blond hair out of her eyes and smiled. Sara, in a black lace dress, black tights, and black combat boots, stood with her arms crossed, staring at the ground, at her own shadow, it seemed.

“All is well, sweetheart,” Mark said, cradling her elbow in his palm. “Nothing to worry about.” He motioned with his arm, then, to his children, calling them over, and they gathered behind him—Sam bouncing over, Camilla gliding, Sara shuffling reluctantly behind them.

“Doesn’t Jiselle look lovely?” Mark asked them.

“Pretty!”
Camilla said. She was still smiling brightly, not a shred of sarcasm revealing itself on her face.

“Jesus,” Sara said, breaking her vow. “You stink.”

Somehow, the storm waited to explode overhead until after Pastor Gillingham had pronounced them man and wife. It was no longer dusk, but actual dark. Still, the sky, starless and clouded, reflected the lights of the town and glowed over them, and when Mark leaned down to “kiss the lovely bride,” as Pastor Gillingham instructed him, Jiselle opened her eyes wide, realizing that
she
was the lovely bride.

The kiss went on and on. The guests laughed and clapped and stayed long enough under the darkening sky to raise a toast. They gathered around Mark and Jiselle. Even her mother looked peaceful, pleased, by then. She took Jiselle’s hands in hers, leaned into her, and whispered, “I’m sorry, Jiselle. You’re a lovely bride, and he’s probably nothing like your father.”

“Thank you,” Jiselle said.

“And what I said about—”

“It’s okay,” Jiselle said.

The guests stepped gingerly around the collapsed tent and raised their glasses, just as the warm rain began to fall in fat drops on their heads and arms, and said in unison, as if it had been planned, “To the perfect couple!”