All the Anxious Girls on Earth

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  The bathrooms at the Blue Cellar were marked Mommies and Daddies. Robyn ended up in the Daddies room, setting toilet paper on fire with a guy who said he knew Cronenberg. And so Jack had gone home with Daisy.

  “I wouldn’t tell Daisy about this little snack you just had,” Jack told Glenn, who had stretched himself out on the couch and was leafing through The Dharma Bums (“‘Rucksack’—I love that word. Don’t you love that word?”).

  “Why not?”

  “She had this baby brother who died.”

  “Harsh. When?”

  Jack looked out the window. A smiling man swaddled in about half a dozen layers of clothing rattled down the middle of the street with a shopping cart, a filing cabinet bouncing inside. Jack had seen him go by before, hauling old turntables, toaster ovens, and, once, a bean-bag chair. He considered the man a kind of jinx, a black cat across his path, a contagion of some terrible sadness.

  “A while ago,” Jack said.

  Daisy tells the fetus about Jack. She tells what she considers the definitive story, Jack in a nutshell, The Compleat Jack, the ultimate psychological profile. “When I want him to do something he doesn’t want to do, he always says, ‘I’m thirty-two years old,’ like it means something. I’ll say, ‘Check the expiry date on the mayonnaise,’ and he’ll say, ‘I’m thirty-two years old,’ and start spreading it on the bread without checking the date. So I’ll grab the jar to check the date and he’ll grab it back and I’ll grab it again, and then he’ll…” Daisy notices that the fetus doesn’t appear to be listening. He’s wrapping the umbilical cord around his left wrist and then tugging on it as if to test for tensile strength. He must feel her watching, because he suddenly looks dead at her. His eyes are large and swampy. Bayou eyes. Daisy hears a crooked accordion, the snap of alligator teeth. “I can’t really relate. I have no concept of age or time,” the fetus says. Her heart splays.

  At that moment Daisy’s mother must have stepped outside onto a porch flooded with sunlight, because suddenly the fetus is backlit, his outline edged in orange as if he were on fire.

  “Go ahead, dude, ask me something in ancient Hebrew,” the guy said to Jack. He dragged another wedge of focaccia through the shallow dish of olive oil and balsamic vinegar and stuffed it into his mouth.

  “How about a miracle,” Jack said, holding up a glass of San Pellegrino. “How about turning some water into wine?”

  The guy laughed a big, full-blooded laugh, his motivational speaker teeth glinting in the candlelight, flecks of oregano stuck to them here and there. People at the surrounding tables turned to look at them, but the guy, Daisy’s new client, seemed completely unselfconscious. He was an entrepreneur from Cleveland, a whiz-kid designer of ergonomically sound computer keyboards who had self-published a book detailing his past-life experiences as Paul of Tarsus and his adventures with Jesus of Nazareth.

  “Teddie is going to put me in touch with someone who’ll help me find out if I used to be anyone before,” Daisy said. “You should try it too, Jack.” Although she was still pouchy under the eyes and her face had a shiny tear-stained look as if she’d been dumped in a tub of shellac, Daisy was all abuzz. Even her hair was alive, big curls bouncing around as she laughed, defying gravity. By the time Jack had arrived, Daisy and her client were having a big old time. The guy kept calling her dudette, which for some reason made Jack think of her as a giant chocolate-covered peanut.

  “That’s right, dudette,” Teddie/St. Paul said, reeling off a bunch of big names from the past—Nefertiti, Josephine, Madame Curie, Amelia Earhart, Anne Frank—like he was plucking them from a Rolodex, casting for some kind of Hollywood blockbuster about great dames.

  When Daisy had phoned to tell Jack they were going to Sorrento, he thought Irene must have relented after their lunch, that her mothering instinct had kicked in and she was going to help resolve this baby-brother thing, wrestle it to the mat. The only time they ever went to cloth-napkin restaurants was when Daisy felt brave enough to sit at the same table as her mother, who would eye every forkful that went into Daisy’s mouth as if it contained strontium 90. He was disappointed that it wasn’t Irene but an author Daisy was promoting who was taking them to dinner. But two restaurant meals in one day—Jack wasn’t going to complain. Besides, this was a first. Daisy usually publicized fringe theatre plays, small poetry launches, and AIDs benefits for organizations that couldn’t afford to spring for a cup of coffee, let alone platters of air-dried carpaccio.

  This guy was, at least on surface evidence, raking it in. He had people. He had yet to appear on “Oprah,” but his people were working on it. He wore a deliberately rumpled Prada suit and a diamond stud flashed in his right earlobe. He had slurped back two Hennessy XOs as if they were Kool-Aid, and then good-naturedly stubbed out a Cohiba when it was pointed out to him by the surgically enhanced redhead at the next table that city bylaws prohibited smoking in restaurants.

  “If you could have been anybody who would you have been?” the guy leaned over and asked Jack while Daisy was off in the washroom. “You’re a writer, right? How about Shakespeare, dude? No, I’ve got it—Hemingway. Am I right or am I right?”

  “You’re right,” Jack said. “I’ve always been curious about what it would be like to blow my own brains out.”

  That was the trouble with the reincarnated, they were always famous people in their past lives. Like that woman on the West Coast who discovered through channelling that she was Guinevere and wrote a screenplay about her life in Camelot. Why were they never just tax collectors or lepers or chambermaids? Or silverfish?

  Daisy returned from the washroom and sat down even closer to the reincarnation guy. Her eyes gleamed as he described how Jesus, contrary to popular belief, actually had a terrific sense of humour. Dry as bone. He explained that many of the parables were highly sophisticated dirty jokes, well, dirty for the times, anyway, but humour doesn’t travel through the centuries all that well—and he hadn’t put that in his book as it would have turned off potential Christian book buyers of a New-Age bent. He was a businessman, after all, in this life, anyway.

  “‘If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering,’” he said, reaching out and pulling down one of Daisy’s curls until it reached well past her shoulders. “First Corinthians 11:15. I wrote that. In my first book.” He waited until Daisy laughed and then he laughed as well. Jack drank some more wine. He couldn’t figure out why Daisy was suddenly in such a good mood and why she was clinging to every word this con artist uttered like some kind of mindless groupie. Those Anthony Robbins teeth alone should’ve been worth ten demerit points. Jack kept waiting for Daisy to kick him under the table to indicate they could start sniggering at the guy’s expense.

  “This morning,” Daisy said, “Teddie was so good on ‘Canada AM.’ Valerie Pringle asked him, ‘What message would Paul of Tarsus have for the Middle East today?’“

  “And I said—”

  Daisy jumped in, “And he said, ‘Lighten up!’“

  Jack clenched his thighs. Or rather, they clenched him.

  He drained his glass.

  Daisy and her client clinked their wineglasses in a jaunty Hepburn-Tracy kind of way. Their laughter ran together like a zipper, pinching the skin between Jack’s eyes.

  Toes. Stomach. Buttocks.

  Teddie laid a hand lightly on Daisy’s bare arm. “Dudette. That was one smokin’ interview. I owe you.”

  Asshole.

  The guy smiled so widely that The Ten Commandments, in 70mm Dolby Digital, could have been projected onto his ultra-white teeth. That would have been appropriate. Jack was convinced most people got their ideas about reincarnation from the movies. All those people who thought they had been Moses were really thinking, Wouldn’t it be great to be Charlton Heston and have a toga-clad Anne Baxter admiring your pecs? Jack, if he was a reincarnation of anything, Jack would have been the anonymous, emaciated old guy stomping mud for the brick makers who collapses and is carrie
d off while Charlton Heston takes his place in the bog. Behind them the pyramids grow large, the men and women scurrying hither and dither like ants. Nothing a little crumbled bay leaf wouldn’t take care of, Jack thought, or was that salt? He found himself emptying the contents of the salt mill onto the table. He’d never paid much attention to salt before. Never realized it was so white. So salty. Neither Daisy nor the guy were paying attention to him.

  “So, Teddie,” Jack said, his brain a raft bobbing dangerously on a red sea, “did Jesus and Mary M. ever—or, whoa! You and her… ?” He let his jaw drop in that vacant way Daisy always found funny, but now she only narrowed her eyes at him. The author formerly known as Paul laughed, though. A bone-dry laugh.

  On the way home in a cab, after dropping the reincarnation guy off at the Park Plaza, Daisy whispered a date in his ear. Jack wondered if it should mean anything to him: July 14, 1964. “Bastille Day?” Jack said. “Vive le Quebec Libre?”

  Daisy leaned close, her breath a mélange of chlorophyll gum and pesto. “Its the day my brother died. And,” she paused, “its also the day Teddie was born.” She sat back. “You probably think that’s just a coincidence.”

  Then she laid her cheek against the back of the front passenger seat and just looked at Jack as the streetlights cast elongated shadows across her features like small children making shadow puppets with their hands. I want the one that looks like a rabbit with big floppy ears, Jack thought, just before closing his eyes against the crackle of the taxis dispatch radio and Daisy’s altogether too bright face.

  The fetus is proving remarkably uncooperative, claiming no prior knowledge of ancient Hebrew and insisting that as far as he knows “Jesus Christ” is just a curse their mother frequently uses. Daisy says, “Were going to try some word association. I’m going to say a word and you just blurt out the first thing that pops into your head.” Even as they begin, the fetus is losing interest and his answers come to her as if from behind a distant pane of glass. “Light?” “Dark.” “Road?” “Car.” “Damascus?” “Table-cloth.” Daisy can’t contain her fury. She grabs him by the umbilical cord and yanks him towards her. “You’re not even trying.” The fetus’s eyes go wide. “Go easy on me, sis, I haven’t even been born yet!”

  It’s clear to Daisy that she doesn’t scare him. Not a bit. Reef urchin, mud urchin, swamp biscuit. She could chew him up, stick her finger down her throat, and puke up the pieces. Daisy is certain her mother would like that.

  Jack woke up on the couch, Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god, imprinted on his face from the embroidered throw cushion wedged under his pounding head. He felt so cramped he thought he’d need help from a team of experts just to get his legs unfolded. It was morning—still dark out, but he could hear a garbage truck grinding by, cans clanking against the sidewalk.

  He must have fallen asleep in the cab and then barely made it through the door. Now he was becoming the kind of guy who couldn’t even make it upstairs to bed before passing out with his pants off, but his socks and shirt still on. The kind of guy whose girlfriend believed in reincarnation and was capable of leaving him for someone she thought was not only one of the apostles in a past life, but her own brother as well. At least that’s what Jack thought Daisy thought.

  Wouldn’t that make it incest? They’d have to move to a remote hamlet in the mountains and moonlight in all sorts of odd jobs in order to feed their brood of hypnotically pale, jug-eared children. They’d have goats, and no television. Maybe a ham radio. There’d be a stack of placenta casseroles in the deep freeze for a rainy day. Maybe they’d be happy. Didn’t Daisy deserve to be happy?

  Daisy’s laughter rang out, enveloping him warmly in a kind of nostalgia. She was already in the kitchen, making coffee. “That was great last night, wasn’t it, Jack?” she called out, as if Jack wasn’t scrunched into a painful shape on the couch, an elephant-headed deity etched into the skin on the left side of his face. As if everything was back to normal and they were huddled together upstairs under the duvet, each of them hesitant to be the first to break away. “He’s just got so much energy,” Daisy sang out, almost operatically, as she headed upstairs to the bath. She was the only person he’d ever known who took baths instead of showers, even in the morning. “So much zest for life!”

  He should tell Irene, Jack thought. A mother deserved to know when her only child was in danger of going off the rails. They could have lunch again. Cocktails! Maybe she’d invite him to come by. I know it might sound foolish, Jack would tell her, sweating lightly under his Kevlar vest, looking furtively left, then right, but now I’m worried about Daisy because she seems too happy.

  Jack reached for the phone on the floor beside the couch. Irene was probably still in bed, sleeping off the evening shift at Mount Sinai’s emergency ward. He pictured her beside Claude, the latest in a string of youngish, exotic men she met in the emergency ward waiting room. Daisy called them her stray pets. “Notice that none of them has ever graduated from high school,” Daisy once pointed out. “What does that tell you?” Claude, a dry-waller from Chicoutimi, had big hard hands and short legs. He was missing half a thumb. Maybe the two of them were tangled together, still sweating from a predawn grope. When Daisy’s mother pulled herself away to answer the phone, their skin would separate with a rude sucking sound and she’d have to put her hand over the receiver to laugh and wave Claude away with a kiss.

  “Hello?” Irene’s voice was thick with sleep. Or something else. Maybe Claude was calibrating the angle of her scar with his forefinger and remaining thumb. Jack softly hung up. The phone rang almost immediately. Jack looked at it as if it was a small enraged animal. A feral cat. A rabid squirrel. It was literally quivering on the floor.

  Daisy stood dripping in front of him, bathrobe open, water pooling around her feet. “Can’t you answer it?”

  She snatched up the receiver. “Hello? No, I didn’t call you. No, Jack didn’t call you. Why would he call you?” Daisy nudged Jack’s crotch with her bare foot and silently mouthed my mother, twirling her index finger in circles around her ear. Jack rolled his eyes as if to concur, Yeah, your mom, such a kook.

  “Well, maybe call display screwed up,” Daisy said. “It happens.”

  Jack was clenching so frantically it was as if a midway carny was yelling, “Do you wanna go faster!!??” and his muscles screamed, “Yeahhh!!” while Jack white knuckled it all the way, jacket sleeve stuffed between his teeth, vomit riding up his throat.

  The fetus claims to see things. He describes them to Daisy as if they were a series of snapshots. He stands on a front porch bundled up against the cold like a little astronaut, his face half in shadow. In the next one he’s flat on his face in the snow and a laughing woman (their mother!) reaches for him. There’s one under a Christmas tree. He holds an empty fishbowl in front of himself, his eyes distorted, lips flattened out behind the glass. He hears laughter. A green Cougar sits in the driveway. It’s full of teenagers and his legs hang out the back window, his feet in sealskin boots. More laughter. There’s a strip from a photo booth in a mall. Him and his girlfriend (Daisy’s old best friend Lynda!) making kissy faces, putting their hands up each others shirts. His feathered hair hiding his eyes. He wears a T-shirt with a freaked-out cat dangling from a ledge that reads, “Hang in there, baby!”

  Daisy is filled with pity towards this sea creature who would steal what is hers. His desire to live has made him weak, he’s laid his cards on the table, forgotten how to bluff.

  He haunts her no longer. She feels supple and lively.

  Daisy starts to dance as if she’s a little girl skipping around a Maypole with other laughing little girls, wrapping bright white crepe ribbon around it. Only this cord is both solid and stringy, and warm in her hand.

  In the diffused light of the womb she dances with her brother one last time.

  Jack was sprawled on the couch thumbing through a Bible when Daisy came home. He heard her dragging her bike up the front steps and then ding dinging the little
Yogi Bear bell on the handlebars.

  He’d been clenching up a storm all day, lying on the couch, ignoring the phone—including half a dozen calls from the organic exterminator wondering what was happening with his book. (“Cucaracha! That’s cockroach in Spanish,” he crowed on one message. “And I’ll bet you thought it was some kind of dance.”) Jack’s muscles burned—from his toes to his tortured anus. If he stood up now, his whole body would start to spasm. So he just lay there, trying to look relaxed, calling out, “You’re home early,” as Daisy came in the door.

  The Bible was a little red Gideon’s that he’d taken from a Best Western in Syracuse. For research purposes. Someone who’d read through it before had made all kinds of complicated numerical calculations in the margins based on numbers found in Deuteronomy. This person was probably now hunkered down in a bunker somewhere in the Arizona desert, watching for flaming balls cartwheeling across the sky.

  “Did you know that there are all these liquid and dry measures in the back of the Bible? Omers, kabs, pots, firkins,” Jack said. “I guess that’s in case you wanted to try the recipes.”

  Daisy nudged his legs over and sat down beside him. She looked serious. “There’s something I want to talk about, Jack,” she said.