All the Anxious Girls on Earth

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  He was prepared to tell her it was okay. He was prepared to bestow a blessing, like some kind of fairy godfather. Plink her on the shoulder with his magic wand and say, Daisy, I just want you to be happy. And if that takes flying off to Cleveland with a zesty former saint, well, fly away then, fly! Be free! Be rich!

  “You know that scene at the end of Lone Star where the lovers discover that they’re actually brother and sister but decide to keep doing it anyway?” Jack asked.

  Daisy just tilted her head as if she was emptying water out of one ear. She was unnervingly silent.

  Through the front window, through the tracks of yesterday’s tear stains, Jack could see the woman from next door being carried down her walkway on a stretcher. Her mother fluttered behind the paramedics, hands vibrating around her head like a propeller just before lift-off.

  Daisy took his face in her hands and started kissing him. She straddled Jack and rubbed his chest. She squeezed one of his earlobes and her tongue ticked around between his lips. Jack thought it would help if he closed his eyes. If her breasts hadn’t been pressing against him, too heavy, too familiar, she could have been anyone. Daisy lifted her head. Jack opened his eyes. She was propped up by her arms on either side of his chest, smiling. He thought he’d heard her say, “I think we should have a baby.”

  “What?”

  “I think we should have a baby,” she said.

  The words dripped from her mouth like stalactites. It felt, to Jack, as if whole hours passed before he could answer, the day sliding into night.

  Jack expected her to eventually start crying and pounding at him with a balled up fist. But she just perched there above him, dry-eyed, waiting, and the only pounding he felt came from within, the pacing back and forth of his own heart, that drooling hyena, in the cage of his chest.

  boys growing

  I had fallen in love by then with three dark-haired boys fiercely loyal to their mamas and I swore I’d never do it again. My own mama said: Never go out with a boy prettier than yourself.

  I tried to listen to her, but a noise got in the way. Sound of my blood motoring through my veins. A dull roar. Sometimes that.

  Sometimes nothing.

  A Saturday before the first day back at school, Labour Day weekend. He filled up the tank of my car and then asked if he should check the oil, his hair flicking in and out of his eyes in a wind that seemed to be coming from all directions. Hot, weasly wind. The foothills smouldering. Too far away to see, wild horses ran—tails on fire, trailing smoke. But you could smell it. The whole city reeked of burning hair, cooked tar, sweat. Dull brown rivers of gophers, smoked from their holes, flowed across fields, small boys mowing them down with BB guns like they were on a buffalo kill. For a quarter a corpse. Small boys who didn’t get to sleep that night, their nostrils thick with blood sport, their trigger fingers, their everything, twitching. Bones growing faster than their skin. You could hear it—a terrible sound, canvas sails tearing on a tall ship at sea, a border guard grinding his teeth. Boys growing. It kept me awake. Their mothers the next day would have to strip their beds and wash the sheets. Nervous mothers, wondering how babies grow up to be cowboys. Bewildered mothers, wondering how they didn’t notice. One, one of them, dared press her face to the moist spot on the sheet, a faded sheet dancing with purple Barneys, and inhaled. Then her heart pinwheeled with guilt and shame filled her mouth like sand.

  An elk calf came out of the scrub that Saturday at the edge of the barracks, angled across Sarcee Trail—horns bleeting, metal kissing metal, siren wail—and down the ravine, long front legs buckling, spraying scree. It ended up caught in the school field, chest ripped open against a ragged hole in the fence, tranquilizer dart in its quivering left haunch, deep in its meat. On Tuesday I would find a thread of its heart still dangling from the fence.

  How do I know it was the heart? I know. He filled up the tank of my car and then handed me my change. His fingernails were cut short and amazingly clean. Later, I found out he went to the bathroom after each fill-up and scrubbed until his skin was almost raw.

  I counted the change slowly just to keep him there. He was new in town. He was going to Diefenbaker, my school.

  “Maybe you’ll be in my class.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” He shrugged. Green fruit. Motherless child.

  That evening it looked to be snowing. Ash falling from the sky.

  Boy #2 once told me this, as if he thought it was funny: “My mum would carve you up with a butcher knife if she knew.”

  “Would she,” I said, as if I couldn’t care less, barely looking up from what I was doing. “Oh, would she.”

  One other thing my own mama said: Always aim for effervescence.

  Only now does the thought occur to me: It was him thinking he could carve me up. Boys are always more dangerous in hindsight.

  Boy #2, though, he was a scary one.

  Jennifer Hermann. Teresa Kowalsky. Eddie Lau. I called out their names, making eye contact when necessary, ignoring the grunters, the slouchers, the dispossessed. One more year of school and they’d all be sprung on the world and there was nothing I could do about it. Sioux O’Hearn. Brittany-Jane Staples. Rajit Singh.

  Then the shock of his name in my mouth. I let it swell like a communion wafer and then pried it slowly off the roof of my mouth with my tongue.

  Just outside the classroom window a thread of essential organ meat hung from a wire fence, twisting in the breeze. Gopher shit littered the field, crunching underfoot like dry dog food. Just south of the foothills, militia men were shooting the wild horses.

  The Hershey-sponsored world map rolled up to the top of the blackboard with a violent snap.

  “Here,” he said.

  I cant remember exactly when the smell of men my own age began to be invasive. Like a jar of marinated artichoke hearts, like wet metal.

  Boy #1 asked: “When I get a real gig, will you come and watch me?”

  He was really a very unmusical boy. His mother encouraged him, though. The kind of bottom-dwelling burbot who thought it would be fun to have a rock star for a son. The father pushed a broom somewhere and left her fantasies unfulfilled. Mothers are so often unaware of the harm they do. At least that’s what I used to think.

  “Its not enough to want it,” I told him.

  Later, I saw him sometimes out of the corner of my eye, like one of those dark spots that appear after you’ve been out in the sun too long—slouching down the hall with his Walkman on, tapping on the lockers. Usually alone. After Kurt Cobain died, Boy #1 wore a noose around his neck for days, his hair in blueberry Kool-Aid-streaked dreadlocks down over his sorrowful eyes.

  It was all I could do not to laugh.

  That strand of elk heart from the fence? I took it home. Something to rub back and forth between my fingers. Something to do while I watched the changing weather.

  I always wanted them to tell me about their girlfriends. I encouraged them. Girls like stick insects. But instead, this is what they did. They talked about their mothers. Even him. Ghost woman who choked me in my sleep with her perfume, something he remembered came in a bottle shaped like a cat. Her fur collar still cold from outdoor air when she came into his room to kiss him goodnight. He always pretended to be asleep. He knew that it pleased her.

  All that energy boys use up trying to please their mamas. Could keep space junk in permanent orbit. Could.

  There is stuff up there you would not believe.

  The new science teacher was nothing if not persistent. Complimented me on my hair. The kind of crimson glow strontium nitrate gives pyrotechnics, he told me. (Originally from Minnesota, like most middle-Americans he had fireworks on the brain.) Before I could admit I found this moderately interesting, I moved quickly out of his airspace.

  Grown men and their sorry skins. Don’t they know?

  Boy #3 said: “I like these lines around your eyes.” And I hadn’t even noticed them myself.

  He was one smooth boy. He worked in a deli part-time and
little stick insects came from miles just to hang around and watch him shave pastrami. I was sitting at the corner table one afternoon when a woman came in, much too elegant for the neighbourhood. She seemed to vibrate like a hydro line. Her hair was anchor-woman perfect. She made a big show of ordering, as if she wanted a sandwich as perfect as her hair. Boy #3 listed all the options, with or without this, with or without that. After she paid, she leaned over the deli counter—she was that tall—and kissed him on the cheek and told him not to be late for supper.

  I said: “So why didn’t you introduce me?”

  He rolled his eyes up into his head.

  I told him they’d stay stuck like that forever.

  A weekend in early October. The new boy (he, him) was coming around often by then. He didn’t talk much. Stood on the front steps of my condo and looked out towards the mountains. This was deeply satisfying. I’d had enough of restless boys, boys jittery with the future, boys who didn’t know when enough was enough. The sky was so clear that I could almost forget how the air had looked in early September. Along the windowsills, though, there was still a thin film of ash soft as mouse fur.

  I just wished he wouldn’t wash so often. Most of the time, he didn’t smell like anything at all.

  The mother, on the other hand, some nights she smoked me out of my own bed. Perfume in a cat-shaped bottle. Like hot stinking piss.

  The science teacher wouldn’t take no for an answer. Rang my classroom phone. Said, “Sr(NO 3)2. Say, it’s got a catchy beat!” One of the English teachers, the one with the limp and the pouchy smile, thought he was handsome in a second-hand, draft-dodger kind of way “You’re nuts,” she said in the lunchroom. “If it were me” Her breath leprous with want.

  She liked the way he made a poetry of science.

  I could smell his wet rot. Creosote flesh. Gave me flash headaches, like being trapped in abandoned cabins while shifting timbers sweated sap. Like pressing my nose to a telephone pole. I had to stand upwind of him just to have a conversation.

  Then there were the girls, the ones that leaned so close I could smell their smoky, minty breath as they explained why they couldn’t stay for the test. Their thin lies whistled through my ears like razor kites. Stick insects with their arms pressed to their sides, never meeting my eyes. Outside there was an engine idling, torn vinyl seats, The Prodigy blaring from six speakers, “Smack my bitch up!” They’re not the ones I had to watch out for, though. It was the huggers. The girls with naturally flushed cheeks. The Save the Planet girls with little platinum rings glinting in their navels. Curvy girls rampant with optimism.

  Girls are growing from the minute they leave the womb. And if it’s very quiet, you can hear it. A soft, continual swish swish swish. Like something cloaked in taffeta coming to get you in the night.

  Boys growing. Now that can wake the dead.

  He went for milk in the driving rain wearing only shorts and my trench coat, bare feet in Nikes, umbrella held so high above his head it did no good. I found this so endearing I would have chewed my right leg out of a steel trap to follow him if I had thought he wasn’t coming back. On all fours, my own blood puddling off my chin.

  Hot chocolate and a thin jolt, then backgammon with our eyes wide open, skulls flaring like jack-o’-lanterns.

  I lined up all the other dark-haired boys I’d ever loved, and shot them like ducks in an arcade.

  Boy #2, scary boy, said: “I need a sister.”

  I called him up at home one night and his mother answered. Just Boy #2 and her in the house. The father, he had done something foolish and irreparable some years ago involving his car, a garage, and a hose. Nothing you could speak of. Boy #2, he was a hacker. Down in the basement, tooling around on his Pentium 166. Making decent money changing classmates’ grades, deleting infractions. The whole public school system was going to him by then. Skin white as bleached cotton.

  The mother answered with her very Swiss accent. I winced at the thought of cloth napkins folded with military precision, bed sheets pulled taut enough to bruise hips, bust skin at the bone. Cheese served mild, gutless. I recalled that she looked like an amphibian of some sort. Blood barely moving through her veins to that creaky, dark chamber of horrors, her heart. She said he was busy with his homework.

  When he finally came to the phone, I said: “Hey there, it’s your big sister.”

  The next night he put his foot through the door of my hall closet. Splinters ringed his tapioca calf. Spiny blowfish. Pulled out all the kitchen drawers and threw them against the walls. Twist-ties rained from the ceiling. Grabbed a fondue fork and pressed it to my forehead, right between my eyes.

  His mother had been listening on the other line.

  Then him.

  We watched the news together. He was utterly addicted to newscasts, drawn to the flickering wreckage of other lives. A moth to light. His mother had been newsworthy. Leapt to her death holding onto his spina-bifida sister, fluid leaking from both their brains.

  One night there was an item on a new treatment. The rest of the evening he sat picking at the threads in the carpet until it was time to go to work.

  I lifted his hair out of his eyes. But he looked right on through me.

  The science teacher finally wore me down. Showed me the tattoo of a formaldehyde baby on his right arm and I agreed to go to a Halloween party with him.

  Boy #1 said (more than once): “My mom loves this song.”

  I was taking a bath. He sat on the toilet lid, torturing my old Gibson acoustic. I flicked some bubbles at him and told him to stop. He started wailing away even louder, in his seriously unmusical manner. The bottom-feeder was in the tub, darting about under my knees, tonguing the bathtub ring, swallowing my soap, egging him on. Panic grabbed me right between my ribs, grip like an angry preacher, and squeezed. I realized if I didn’t do something, he would never stop, ever, he would play on in hell with his mother clapping and cheering, mouth moving like a catfish’s, moustache quivering.

  What happened next: I rose out of the water, a tsunami of rage, fifty feet tall, and grabbed the guitar out of his hands. I slammed it against the sink, swung it at the edge of the tub.

  “Rock on,” I said, handing the busted guts back to him as he started to cry.

  Teaching the Elizabethans, I decided to make a small detour. The Elizabethans, as my students already knew (and seemed to approve), didn’t bathe very often. Even the aristocracy was rather ripe.

  I told them that men and women were attracted to each others body odour. Someone made an inspired gagging noise and they all laughed. I told them that the Elizabethans would have considered deodorant a form of birth control. Even the dispossessed in their low-cloud formations at the back of the room found this amusing. I told them that when a noblewoman took a fancy to a gentleman, she would carefully peel an apple and place it in her armpit for a number of days until it was deemed appropriately aromatic. (She could, I didn’t add, choose to place it elsewhere.) Then she would present it to her suitor.

  I said: “They called this a Love Apple.”

  “That,” buzzed an agitated stick insect, “is like so, pardon me, incredibly fucking gross.”

  The exchange student from Osaka put up his hand and asked, “Please, miss, will this be on the test?”

  The whole class in the hall afterwards, lockers open, surreptitiously sniffing their pits. And him skidding into the showers, clothes still in mid-air as the water pulsed on, scrubbing until blood beaded the surface of his skin.

  In his wallet there was a photograph of a beach. In the background a fat man lay on a picnic table. In the foreground sat a small boy sucking in his smile, a woman half-hugging him, half-tickling him. Plastic shovel in his hand, blocking her face. She had her mouth to his ear and was telling him he’d made the best sandcastle in the world. That he would be an architect someday and build her a room touching the sky. Sunspots burned above their heads like painful lesions.

  “With an elevator?” he asked.

  Wit
h an elevator. She promised him that.

  During the night she shredded the back of my couch, the wallpaper in the hallway, thin strips fluttering above the forced-air vent.

  I paced the hall, quietly cajoling, here kitty kitty kitty.

  The afternoon before the costume party I sat in the stands, hugging my knees and watching football practice. A new student teacher sat beside me, eager, slapping her hands together against the cold. “They look like aliens,” she said, “running around down there.”

  The ground rumbled underneath my feet. Boys growing heavier as they ran, soon to crack the crust of the earth wide open.

  I casually approached the field when the practice broke up and asked him a favour. I whispered it. Told him it was for a joke. His sudden laughter shaved my heart. Moth boy. It was all I could do not to put my hand to his cheek. Then I went home to dress for the party. The lawn was already frosted over. In the distance the mountains were white.

  That evening the science teacher took one look at me and said, “You’re not going like that?” I wore faded blue hospital garb, white sneakers, a stethoscope around my neck, and on my face something to protect me from the nip of the night. He looked down at my doormat, scratched at something on his palm. He turned his head and stared towards the mountains. Then he said, “You do know that’s a jockstrap, don’t you?”

  “Oh my God,” I collapsed against him laughing, “OH MY GAWD! I thought it was a surgical mask.”

  It took him a few seconds, but he laughed too. Although not when I said I was going to wear it anyway.

  At the party there was some whispering and then I heard him say loudly, so everyone could hear, just in case there was any doubt, “She thought it was a surgical mask!” I twirled around demonstrating my ignorance, pumpkin lights twinkling above my head, while formaldehyde man stayed as far away from me as he could. Apples bobbed in a bowl of spit.