Laura Kasischke - In a Perfect World

It was the first time Jiselle had considered the possibility that her mother might have loved her own father as much as Jiselle loved hers. It was the first time she’d ever even imagined her mother as a little girl—a girl sitting in a father’s lap, being patted on the head by his rough hand, maybe while he sang the Danish folksong Jiselle’s own father had sung to her:

Min Tankes Tanke ene Du er vorden, Du er mit Hjertes første Kjarlighed …

“You alone have become the thought of my thoughts. You are my heart’s first love…”

Her own father used to call Jiselle “my Danish princess,” and had told her, in fact, that her name in Danish meant “little princess.” Throughout her childhood, Jiselle had taken his word for it, until, in college, she looked it up.

By then it was already old news—old news of the most sordid nature—that her father was involved with Ellen, who had been Jiselle’s best friend since second grade. She’d thought by then, when it came to things having to do with her father, that nothing would surprise her. How many girlfriends had he had since her mother had thrown him out of the house, and how many of those girlfriends had been young enough to be his daughter, even if they weren’t his daughter’s age?

And still somehow it had surprised Jiselle to find, in that reference book, that the meaning of the name Jiselle was not “princess.”

It was “hostage.”

When she told her father this during one of their strained weekly phone calls, he snorted and said, “I wouldn’t know about that. Your mother was the one with the European pretensions. She certainly never asked me what I thought of the name.” But when, at Thanksgiving that year, Jiselle asked her mother how she’d come to give her the name Jiselle, her mother rolled her eyes and said, “Your father picked that one out.” And then, “How is your dear father?” she asked. “And your darling stepmother?”

“He’s not marrying Ellen,” Jiselle had said, trying not to sound defensive—but even to her it sounded protective and aggressive at the same time.

“God, Jiselle,” her mother had said, “I can’t imagine what kind of denial you’re in, to stand up for him.”

And, in truth, how many such denials had Jiselle managed to flimsily construct over the last few years?

He’s not dating Ellen.

He’s not in love with Ellen.

He’s not sleeping with Ellen.

All the time, apparently, he was.

But even before he’d been thrown out, and long before he’d started up with Ellen, it had seemed to offend and amaze her mother that Jiselle loved her father so much. When he came home from work and Jiselle ran screaming through the house to greet him, her mother would say, “Lord, Jiselle, he was just at the pharmacy, not the Crusades.”

So, the day she took down the Little Mermaid figurine, it was a revelation that her mother might have once loved her own father. He’d died many years before Jiselle was born, and her mother had always spoken disparagingly of the farm on which she’d grown up, her father’s endless labor. The manure, the pigs. The uncles in a perpetual war against the weather. Their hands under the hood of some machine all day. Her own mother’s exhausted death from heart failure at the age of fifty-three.

Standing with her back to the mantel and the Little Mermaid, her arms crossed, her mother had said to her, “It’s the only thing I have.”

In Copenhagen, Mark and Jiselle had taken a limousine together to the airport, although they had different flights back to the States. Mark was piloting a jet from Paris to Atlanta. Jiselle was headed to London, to LaGuardia, and from there to Detroit.

Their limousine driver was a young blond man, no older than twenty, who only nodded to the two of them after putting their luggage in the trunk. Between the front and back seats was a Plexiglas partition, and behind it, Mark kept Jiselle wrapped in his arms as the limousine moved smoothly through the flowers and towers and spires of Copenhagen on a Sunday morning. Church bells rang and echoed, rang and echoed, both monotonously and wildly, as if they had never really started and would never stop. Mark’s uniform smelled pleasantly stiff, like dry-cleaning chemicals, and like Mark. When the limousine stopped at an intersection, hundreds of bicyclists sped past, bikes flashing in the sunlight, sounding like the stingerless bees hovering over the yellow tulips in the Tivoli Gardens.

Some of the bicyclists were wearing the now-familiar American flag with a heavy black X through it.

Jiselle had glimpsed these all over the world.

Everyone hated the United States now, it seemed. For decades they’d been ruining the environment with their big cars and their big wars, and now they wanted to spread their disease to the rest of the world, too.

Yankee go home.

U.S. not welcome.

But, even as it got harder to travel—more bureaucracy, more hostility—during the glorious early months of their courtship, Jiselle and Mark met in exotic cities all over the world, spent their time in hotel beds, DO NOT DISTURB dangling in several languages from doorknobs.

They ate chocolates, drank champagne.

They took baths together, Mark’s knees up around Jiselle’s shoulders, Jiselle’s soapy feet sliding around his crotch, gingerly.

They ordered room service, ice cubes between her breasts, between his teeth, traced down her torso.

Afterward, they’d laugh about the sheets, which were damp, tangled.

As soon as they got into a room, they’d pull the curtains.

They ignored the fire alarm. Let’s just burn.

Together.

Oh. God.

In Brussels, Mark bought Jiselle something pink and battery-operated with long waving fronds. He had only to touch her with it to bring her to panting, helpless orgasms. When she opened her eyes afterward, he was looking down at her, smiling.

On the Italian Riviera, they went to a topless beach, where Mark rubbed suntan oil on Jiselle’s breasts in full view of the teenage boys smoking cigarettes under an umbrella beside them. When she looked over, one of the boys was rubbing his erection happily, unabashedly, through his cutoffs, looking at her.

When Jiselle rang the bell on the door of Duke’s Palace Inn, a man in a white apron unlocked it to let them in. Most of the more expensive restaurants in Chicago and on the outskirts had a locked-door policy now, and required reservations—ostensibly because, with the economy the way it was and the fears of the flu having changed the dining-out habits of the whole nation, chefs and restaurant owners had no way of estimating, any longer, the amount of food that would be needed on any given day or night.

But there had also been talk that this was just an excuse, really, to impart a false sense of safety to customers, who, it was presumed, would feel better about going to a restaurant to eat if they didn’t need to worry about unexpected people wandering in off the street—sick people, homeless people, strangers, the whole potentially infected population of those who would not think ahead far enough to make reservations at a nice restaurant.

The doorman locked the door behind them after they stepped inside.

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.