Jiselle had the whole day free, and it wasn’t even noon.
A hike? Monopoly? A trip to town to the hobby shop?
Since the children had started school in September, Jiselle had mostly spent her afternoons alone in the house, moving through its rooms, feeling baffled as to how to begin to clean them up.
The dust she’d dispersed a few days before would have either settled again or redistributed itself with maddening genius. Sam’s plastic action figures would be everywhere. The girls’ shoes, jewelry, magazines were scattered across every flat surface, and Jiselle knew that if she picked those up and moved them there would be shrieking later— Where the hell’s my bandana? What did you do with my magazine?
And the floors.
The floors seemed magnetized—eternally capturing or creating long clouds of lint and hair held together with dust, which were spirited into corners when Jiselle turned her back. She would have just finished with the broom, turned around, and there those clouds would have gathered again.
On the phone from upstate New York, Annette said, “Get a fucking housekeeper. For God’s sake. You’re not his maid, Jiselle.”
But how, Jiselle thought, could she justify her days to herself or to anyone else if she had a housekeeper, if someone else were coming in to do the few things she had to do?
And what would she do while the housekeeper did these things? And what would she do with the time left over?
Sometimes the vacuum cleaner sounded like the dual engines of a jet starting up. Or Jiselle would hear, overhead, an actual jet—a distant needle in the sky—and she’d imagine her past still taking place up there. The metal cart. The drawer of ice. The faces looking up at her. The way turbulence or exhaustion, or simply being thirty-five thousand feet in the air, could turn even the most self-satisfied businessmen and women into needy children.
They were scared.
They did not have wings. They did not know how to fly. They were incredibly grateful for the calm smile, the foil packet of pretzels.
But of course there had been the other sort of passenger. Drunk on miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Punching their flight attendant buttons for more. There had been the woman who’d said to Jiselle once, when she’d had to rouse her from a drooling sleep to put her tray table back up for landing, “I hope you burn in hell.” She didn’t miss that.
But, since quitting, the days could last so long. Sometimes Jiselle would sit down at the kitchen table and will the phone to ring. Call me, Mark. When it did ring, she’d jump, heart racing, but it usually wasn’t Mark. Once or twice, it was Brad Schmidt calling from next door, asking if Jiselle had heard this or that bad piece of news on the radio. Although their houses were separated by a long, tall hedge, Brad Schmidt seemed able to see through it, to know when Jiselle was sitting by the phone.
No, she would not have heard the news. She didn’t listen to the news. Why would she? Whales washing up on beaches. Chickens being burned alive, and some man who called himself Henry Knighton killing prostitutes in Seattle to “cleanse the earth.”
The news had to happen to her before she knew about it—and even then she wasn’t always sure what it was, like the afternoon when, while folding laundry in the bedroom, she heard a crash in the kitchen.
No one was home. Mark was flying; the children were at school. Jiselle stepped cautiously out of the bedroom and went to the kitchen, where she found that the cupboards had all swung open. A broken dish lay on the ceramic tiles. A coffee cup had rolled off the counter and into the sink. She stood with her hand to her chest for what must have been several minutes, feeling her heart beat hard, trying to get used to this new order of things, this unfamiliarity, the idea that the kitchen cupboards could open on their own and spill their contents. Then she heard Brad Schmidt shout, “Hey!” from the other side
A hike? Monopoly? A trip to town to the hobby shop?
Since the children had started school in September, Jiselle had mostly spent her afternoons alone in the house, moving through its rooms, feeling baffled as to how to begin to clean them up.
The dust she’d dispersed a few days before would have either settled again or redistributed itself with maddening genius. Sam’s plastic action figures would be everywhere. The girls’ shoes, jewelry, magazines were scattered across every flat surface, and Jiselle knew that if she picked those up and moved them there would be shrieking later— Where the hell’s my bandana? What did you do with my magazine?
And the floors.
The floors seemed magnetized—eternally capturing or creating long clouds of lint and hair held together with dust, which were spirited into corners when Jiselle turned her back. She would have just finished with the broom, turned around, and there those clouds would have gathered again.
On the phone from upstate New York, Annette said, “Get a fucking housekeeper. For God’s sake. You’re not his maid, Jiselle.”
But how, Jiselle thought, could she justify her days to herself or to anyone else if she had a housekeeper, if someone else were coming in to do the few things she had to do?
And what would she do while the housekeeper did these things? And what would she do with the time left over?
Sometimes the vacuum cleaner sounded like the dual engines of a jet starting up. Or Jiselle would hear, overhead, an actual jet—a distant needle in the sky—and she’d imagine her past still taking place up there. The metal cart. The drawer of ice. The faces looking up at her. The way turbulence or exhaustion, or simply being thirty-five thousand feet in the air, could turn even the most self-satisfied businessmen and women into needy children.
They were scared.
They did not have wings. They did not know how to fly. They were incredibly grateful for the calm smile, the foil packet of pretzels.
But of course there had been the other sort of passenger. Drunk on miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Punching their flight attendant buttons for more. There had been the woman who’d said to Jiselle once, when she’d had to rouse her from a drooling sleep to put her tray table back up for landing, “I hope you burn in hell.” She didn’t miss that.
But, since quitting, the days could last so long. Sometimes Jiselle would sit down at the kitchen table and will the phone to ring. Call me, Mark. When it did ring, she’d jump, heart racing, but it usually wasn’t Mark. Once or twice, it was Brad Schmidt calling from next door, asking if Jiselle had heard this or that bad piece of news on the radio. Although their houses were separated by a long, tall hedge, Brad Schmidt seemed able to see through it, to know when Jiselle was sitting by the phone.
No, she would not have heard the news. She didn’t listen to the news. Why would she? Whales washing up on beaches. Chickens being burned alive, and some man who called himself Henry Knighton killing prostitutes in Seattle to “cleanse the earth.”
The news had to happen to her before she knew about it—and even then she wasn’t always sure what it was, like the afternoon when, while folding laundry in the bedroom, she heard a crash in the kitchen.
No one was home. Mark was flying; the children were at school. Jiselle stepped cautiously out of the bedroom and went to the kitchen, where she found that the cupboards had all swung open. A broken dish lay on the ceramic tiles. A coffee cup had rolled off the counter and into the sink. She stood with her hand to her chest for what must have been several minutes, feeling her heart beat hard, trying to get used to this new order of things, this unfamiliarity, the idea that the kitchen cupboards could open on their own and spill their contents. Then she heard Brad Schmidt shout, “Hey!” from the other side
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