In a Perfect World by Laura Kasischke Page B

her feet, and her body emerging from the muck made a genuine sucking sound, and they started to laugh so hard again that Sam lost his grip on her hand, and she was lying on her back in the muck again.
     
     
    “What were you thinking?”
    She looked up. She hadn’t heard Mark pull in the driveway, although she’d known he was on his way home. She and Sam were sitting beside each other on the couch, reading from the Hans Christian Andersen collection, “The Happy Family,” in which a family of naive snails foolishly envy their cousins, the escargots. Mark stood in the center of the family room holding his bag in his hand as if he might not bother to set it down.
    Jiselle tried to keep her voice from trembling as she said, “He had head lice, Mark.”
    She had already told Mark this news over the phone. Camilla had gotten home from school, seen Sam’s shaved head, and gasped, “Does Dad know about this?” She let her mouth hang open, staring at her brother, and then looked at Jiselle.
    Jiselle had flushed. Hot. Sweaty. Except for the most casual criticism (“Our mother used to squeeze the orange juice herself”), Camilla had never said anything before to Jiselle’s face that wasn’t full of sugary approval— Great! Thank you! How cool! —and Jiselle felt now, seeing her look of deep disapproval, that something shameful was being exposed. Dirty underwear, smelly feet. That shameful thing was, she realized, her own willful naiveté. Jiselle had known (how could she not?) that the girl hated her, had overheard what she had to say to her sister from behind the curtains of their rooms, but she had let herself pretend it was something it wasn’t, anyway, and that determined ignorance had made her even more detestable, she realized now as Camilla walked swiftly out of the room.
    Sara had simply come in, looked at Sam, and turned around. Her shoulders, Jiselle thought, seemed to be shaking. With laughter?
    A few minutes later Jiselle heard Camilla whispering from her bedroom on her cell phone, “She just totally shaved Sam’s head, Dad. She’s gone crazy.”
    A few minutes after that, Mark called Jiselle on the house telephone, pretending he didn’t know. He started by telling Jiselle that he was in an airport lounge in Newfoundland. That there was so much wind that a corporate jet had been tipped over on the runway. He asked her how she was, how the kids were, how the weather was, and finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and just blurted out, “I shaved Sam’s head because he had head lice.”
    There was a sigh, and then a clearing of the throat, and then, “You’re kidding, right? Jiselle? Tell me you’re kidding?”
    “No,” Jiselle said, and even to herself, it sounded like pleading. “He would have hated the shampoo.”
    She did not, and never would, tell Mark about the secretary, and what she’d said. If he were my son, I’d shave his head. She knew what Mark would say about that—about superstition, about hysteria, about the flu.
    He said, sounding weary, “I guess, Jiselle, we’ll have to discuss this when I get home.”
     
     
    Now, still holding his black leather bag, Mark walked over to Sam, took his son’s chin in his palm, moved his head around, inspecting, and then he looked over at Jiselle, and said, “There are ways to get rid of head lice without shaving the kid’s head, Jiselle. Jesus Christ.” He shook his own head. “Surely,” he said, “you must have thought…” He trailed off.
    “Thought what?” Jiselle asked, but no sooner had the words come out of her mouth than she realized, suddenly, clearly, what.
    Joy.
    Her curls.
    Those cascades of strawberry-blond ringlets ribboned with satin on her wedding day. What that hair must have looked like beside Mark, stretching from her pillow to his in the mornings. The smell of it after she’d washed it. Rain. There was a rain barrel in the backyard, and Camilla had pointed it out one day and said, “Our mother used to wash her