All the Anxious Girls on Earth

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  She considers showing her mother the tattoo of her teachers boyfriends (soon to be hers) initials on her belly. She’s penned them on backwards so that she can read them in the mirror.

  A little trick she picked up in Shanghai.

  Herself—variously known as Panda Bear, pussycat, Miss Molly (as in Good Golly!), Katy Kadiddle, just plain Kate, and Katherine (Kawtheryn by her piano teacher who has come from England and personally knows the Queen)—has seen a dead man.

  At her recital she plays “Für Elise” with real feeling, knowing that having seen a dead man has changed her forever. The clapping is thunderous, so to show her emotion she bursts into tears. The audience, all the other Royal Conservatory students parents, can’t believe how sensitive she is and they clap even more loudly until she can see there’s a danger the roof of this small auditorium might cave in on them. Under her teachers arm, a chihuahua shivers uncontrollably, its eyes wet and bulging.

  Herself on the stage bowing. Not the same girl she was yesterday.

  The dead man was lying in the field just outside the barracks at the end of her street, past where the city workers were laying tar on the road. A wasp hovered around the rim of his ear. It was disappointing that he had all his clothes on. She toed his crotch with her bare, tar-caked feet. She pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, smelled the leather, thought she could almost smell something else, distributed the money, just some coins, into the three pockets of her smock top. She sat and stared at him, the longish hairs that hung from his nostrils, the sweat slicked across his forehead, something in the corner of his mouth (a fleck of burnt toast?), and then put a rock across his ear (oh yes!), trapping the wasp.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” The dead man shot up, darkening the sky.

  She ran so fast the road smoked under her feet.

  So that’s what it’s like to raise a man from the dead.

  Jesus fucking Christ. The words like chocolate-covered cherries in her mouth.

  Herself slips a leather barrette into her pocket at The Bay downtown while her mother looks at nylons. The barrette has two holes and a sharp wooden stick to hold her hair in place. It will look great with her new peasant blouse. She already has half a dozen of these things at home, all of them presents from other girls for her tenth birthday last month.

  Her mother picks out a pair of two-for-one pantyhose with reinforced toes.

  “Those are for old ladies,” she tells her mother. “You’ll never get a date.” She sighs and smiles the crooked smile she knows tightens the crown of thorns around her mothers heart. She wants her mother to be sexy so they can dance together like sisters in the living room to “Waterloo,” licking at little squares of paper with Charles Manson’s face on them and blowing their minds while the neighbours watch from behind their curtains, stupid with jealousy, thinking “That Kate can really cook!”

  A salesclerk hovers, his breath like hot-dog relish.

  She stares at him, looks right into his little piggy eyes without blinking until he’s forced to look away.

  Herself at the Ice Capades, the costumes so lush and skaters so spectacular her stomach churns and her limbs twitch. The audience is enraptured with a small, blonde, muscular girl with an enormous pink feather headdress who spins like a gyroscope while rows of elegant men fold over like dominoes in her wake. Herself finds the fingers of her right hand convulsing as if pumping a trigger, spraying bullets at the girl.

  She stands up on her seat, number 32, row 12, section C, and sways, then crumples to the concrete floor, Coffee Crisp wrapper and spilled Fresca sticky under her cheek. The entire stadium shudders as her body hits the ground. At least a 4.5 on the Richter scale.

  “She must have a fever,” her mother says, worried hand on her forehead.

  They make way for her and her mother and a kindly man who helps support her stumbling through the parted, standing crowd.

  The peacock on the ice forgotten. All eyes on her now.

  Herself kneeling, heady from the incense and the thickness of the hymns and all that blood she’s losing, so pale now she is sure she positively glows, the cotton pad between her legs still so unfamiliar. In front of her the priest is waiting, communion wafer pinched between thumb and forefinger. She opens her mouth and before he can pull back his hand she traps his fìnger between her lips. Just because she can.

  His skin rough and chalky, the fìnger filling more of her mouth than she thought it would. She narrows her eyes at his shock and her own and sucks hard.

  The nail pressing up against the roof of her mouth, but gently, as he slowly pulls his fìnger out.

  Her own spit glistening on the priests finger as he reaches for another host and turns from her.

  There’s a whole row of kneeling people, eyes closed, softly perspiring. Herself, electric, grinning up at Jesus who may or may not care what’s going on.

  Herself straightening the limbs of a severely palsied child. This is what all the girls are doing, volunteering with the retarded. It’s called citizenship.

  The child lies on his back in a bed in a sour-scented room full of other narrow beds, his knees to his chest, his elbows by his ears, mouth twisted, spit coursing down his right cheek in a thin steady stream. She moves one of his thighs in a small circle at the pelvis, the way the nurse demonstrated, otherwise the leg could snap. She turns her head to the side, trying not to look at his face, or her gorge will rise. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the child stretch his lips into what could be construed as a smile and his rocking increases in severity.

  “Oh, look, he’s excited,” the nurse says, teasing her from the other side of the bed.

  The boy has a hard-on.

  “Well, he is sixteen and you’re a good-looking girl.” The nurse winks.

  Sixteen, her age. She looks at the grimacing pretzel rocking on the bed and covers her mouth. Vomit creeps up her throat, she swallows it back. Control is everything.

  There’s some screaming in the corridor and the nurse is off. She reaches for the boy, locking eyes with him, until he comes and groans and screws his eyes shut.

  Not even looking at her.

  Herself at her desk, staring down at another A-plus, staring until her eyes cross. The teacher beaming at her from the front of the classroom with her large cracked mouth.

  Only the second week of grade twelve and already the boredom’s a live animal crawling all over her skin, making her so twitchy she has to sit on her hands to keep from clawing herself bloody, jumping up, screaming, Get it off, get it off get it off. Over the intercom she hears her name: herself, herself, herself. All around her sit the dumb and the dead, oblivious, scratching hieroglyphics onto paper, doodling their own names, their epitaphs. Passing notes of limited ambitions. So-and-so wants to fuck you. The teacher straightening piles of paper on her desk, the concentration needed for this beading her forehead with sweat. The supreme effort of it all.

  She needs to raise the dead, to blow something to kingdom come. When was the last time she’s heard a good burst of anything—fireworks, applause, a man shooting up to the sky, an explosion?

  Her thumbnails—moons glowing, cuticles perfectly tamed—press into her palms so hard she breaks skin.

  She raises a hand for permission to leave the room.

  The teacher smiles benignly at her and nods, not noticing the thin crescent of blood. Her stigmata.

  Herself playing with fire.

  In an east-side squat she burns wood ticks off the rump of a part-golden retriever, part-something else. What she likes best is the smell of sulfur as she strikes match after match. Or the flame itself. Or the burnt head of the matchstick she crumbles between her fingers and rubs playfully onto the forehead of the guy beside her who sits in yoga position reading a book of collected Doonesbury comics.

  Rubs it into the shape of a cross. “Ash Wednesday,” she jokes.

  The yoga man was at an ashram near Benares. Now he sits and longs for Bodhisattva, this gaunt young satyagrahi.

 
; The two other girls there, older than herself, are anarchists. Pissed off about everything and anything.

  On the door of the squat they’ve spray-painted “EXPOtation” and “World’s Fair No Fair!” and “Meat is Murder!” They stomp around in new Doc Martens, leather creaking, talking loudly about what an idiot this guy they used to like is working at McDonalds. Every so often one of them bends down to kiss the dog on the head.

  Herself in her corner of the squat, still the A student, studying books by candlelight, all from the Britannia Library up the street: The Poor Mans James Bond, Molotov & Other Cocktails, The Blaster’s Handbook. One of the anarchists offers to lend her a shoplifting poncho, a pilly brown-and-white thing smelling of creosote and cumin. But she doesn’t need camouflage.

  She’s the original Benday Dot girl. From far away, there she is, solid, bright, with a cartoon smile, bouncing along the street and you would swear that’s a tennis racket in her hand, a trophy under her arm, but the closer you get the more disembodied she seems until—hello? A little trick she picked up from a guy from Nazareth.

  This way of disappearing right under people’s noses.

  Herself with an action plan, standing on her grassy knoll, shifting her weight from one hip to the other.

  The anarchists are easy enough to convince, although they want to know: why Tony’s Pizza & Donair, and not McDonald’s? Herself on her toes, reeling them in like eager trout. Think globally, act locally. Besides, there’s no security at Tony’s, it’s smaller, closes earlier, and the owner keeps a Playboy calendar behind the counter. Sexist pig! They pace around impatiently, kicking at the walls, looking to her for direction.

  All the yoga man has to do is drive the getaway car. “What car?” one of the anarchists asks. Herself buzzing now, already jumping into the burgundy Toyota Cressida with a maple leaf-shaped cardboard air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror that she’s seen parked outside the Peter Pan Daycare—day after day at 3:30 P.M., key in the ignition, running—and roaring away from the building that’s about to blow.

  He shakes his head weakly, no. He hasn’t eaten for eight days to protest some injustice she can’t recall. The anarchists, they cant stop eating. Being angry just burns up so much energy. They pounce on anything she brings home, only stopping to ask if it has meat in it. She always says no, no meat, of course. A few days ago they ate a couple of jet-hot curried Jamaican patties with ground beef and peas. “With meat substitutes this good,” one of them exclaimed, “people only continue to kill animals because were all just so conditioned by the military industrial complex.”

  In the middle of the night, she pulls at the divine boys thin toes. Separates each one gently from the rest and wiggles it. “You can pretend you’re a taxi,” she says, her voice threading his ear, “just cruising along looking for one last fare.”

  “It just doesn’t seem very pacifist,” he says. “I’ve been trying really hard.

  “But I can’t drive,” he finally tells her after she scrambles over him, tattooing his limbs with her mouth.

  Herself crashing through the brush near Squamish with her swami while helicopters rattle by so low overhead they flatten the treetops. His hand, which she grips, is remarkably dry; his thin, diaper-like pants billow out, catching in the branches, and they stumble, slipping to the ground on wet pine cones. “What have we done?” he breathes, almost crying, as megaphones thunder their garbled names across the sky. Her nose is up against his neck, and caught in the crosshairs of her vision are a spray of birthmarks that spell out her name.

  “You are a lovely boy,” she whispers.

  The one true thing she has ever said.

  Only this is a dream.

  Just one week later he will be a human potato chip, lying on oiled plastic sheets at St. Paul’s so no more skin will peel off, the machinery whirring all around him determined to keep him alive so that he might face the music, this silver-tongued Svengali, as the news reports will call him, with no lips left with which to tell his story.

  This part is not a dream.

  Herself alone on the street in the leaky silence between the explosion and the sirens, the streetlights shattered, casting no shadow.

  Getting up from where she’s been thrown to the ground and running, her own footsteps echoing in the hollow of her throat.

  The car, empty childseat in the back, entombed in a woof of heat, sealed tight, skinny man’s hands gripping the wheel at ten and two o’clock, just the way he’d been taught by her that afternoon. Foot forgetting which pedal was the gas.

  Herself at her trial, remembering to sit up straight, breathe slowly through her nose. She’s sure she’s never felt more controlled, more in charge of herself, than at this moment when her name is on everyone’s lips. A thin whisper. Like a consecrated host.

  The two anarchist girls—who had chickened out at the last minute, forcing her to go into the all-night store at the corner of Venables for a pack of matches that the woman actually made her pay for because she wasn’t buying anything else—can’t look at her. That elephant-sized woman, the mother of the girl who died in the blast, who is drawing attention away from herself with her undignified, spasmodic weeping, just won’t stop looking at her. Peeling the skin from her bones with her big watery eyes.

  But her own mother won’t even look at her.

  This is how she thinks she’ll remember her mother years from now: frozen-faced, in profile, defeated by bad odds. Her mother, stuck in a time warp in front of a big, industrial-strength adding machine that shudders on her desk as she bangs in numbers that print out on a tight, seemingly endless roll of white paper. The paper curls onto the edge of the desk in a quivering mound before tumbling onto the floor. Her mother, bent over, tongue running back and forth in concentration across already receding lower gums, trying to determine the odds that her daughter is alive and well, the odds that she’d ever see her again, the odds that, all things considered, she’d someday be happy.

  II. HER VICTIM’S MOTHER

  Just before throwing to a Saturn commercial, Dot says, “Remember, the world won’t heal unless we do.” Her tag line. She waves her hand, “See you tomorrow.” Her smile cracks the crust of her face. The red lights on cameras one and two blink off.

  “Dorothy,” someone calls from the studio audience. Dot’s smile peels back off her teeth as she peers into the stands. Someone from the old days—everyone calls her Dot now, or rather, “Dot!” a tiny perfect name for the tiny perfect talk-show host she has become. There’s one at almost every taping. People way back from high school days in Haney mothers of old boyfriends, customers from the Broadway Supervalu, her former boss. Him she wanted down on his hands and knees, pants down around his ankles, a flaming whip in her hand smartly snapping the air as she pressed the heel of her cream-coloured Ferragamo pump slowly into his right eye. Instead, she opened her arms wide (the same arms that had held disgraced politicians, wife beaters, tree spikers, pimps, arsonists, dealers, fraud artists, clear-cutters, a former leader of the Aryan Nations, a triad member, and a Catholic bishop who had liked native girls a little too much) while he stood there nervously picking at his teeth with an expired lotto ticket until his beaming wife gave him a shove right into Dot’s embrace. No meat-locker boner this time, pal? Dot thought. Whassamattah, cat got your Oscar Mayers? By the time she’d released him his fear smelled winegum sour.

  “Dorothy Hay.” In front of her stood one of Glorias old high-school teachers, a tall woman Dot remembers as a nervous Nellie, her fingertips continually smoothing her throat as she spoke. This woman had once implied that Gloria might well be a little retarded. She hadn’t actually come out and said it. She used the lingo. Difficulty grasping simple concepts. No spatial skills. Inappropriate laughter. She suggested Gloria might be better off at a special school. Then, as delicately as she could, she tried to explain how Gloria sometimes sat at her desk completely preoccupied with the contents of her nostrils—playing with them, even ingesting them. She said Glorias activi
ties made her the scapegoat of all of the grade tens.

  “Are you saying my kid eats her snot?” Dot, then still Dorothy, asked. The teacher nodded, her fingers scrabbling at her throat as if she were trying to untangle a knot. Dorothy had gone home and tried to beat the shit out of Gloria, chasing her around the townhouse with a wet dishrag. But Dorothy, with almost 185 pounds back then on her five foot two frame, wasn’t much for running those days. “You hate me!” Gloria screamed. And Dorothy, panting against the fridge, wiping her face with the dishrag, hadn’t answered.

  Now this teacher stood in front of Dot, proposing a memorial to mark the tenth anniversary of Glorias tragic death. “Something delicate,” the teacher says, “in keeping with her sensitive spirit.” Her fingers are nowhere near her throat and Dot’s not sure if this is in fact the same woman. “She loved nature,” the teacher continues, “so I’m thinking a tree. A silver birch.”

  She loved nature? Dot wants to snort. The nearest Gloria ever got to nature was squashing carpet beetles against the floorboards in her bedroom with her thumb.

  “We would have a dedication ceremony. The girls are very into things Celtic these days, so I’m thinking something with Druids, like at Stonehenge but without all that nudity, of course. And one of our mothers makes these little chocolates in the shape of Haida characters—the frog, the raven, the whale. We could pass those around. She’s not actually native herself, but they look very authentic.” Dot wonders whatever happened to Rice Krispie squares.

  “We would extend an invitation to all of Gloria’s old classmates, those who still live in the Lower Mainland. They were very traumatized when it happened. I’m sure some of them still have nightmares.” Oh yeah, Dot thinks, nightmares of Gloria rolling up a great big rubbery one, popping it into her mouth, and then trying to deep-tongue kiss them. Dot would like to get her hands on some of these vicious kids, most of whom have now grown up and no doubt had some vicious kids of their own, tie them behind an eastbound semi like links of sausage and drag them down the Lougheed Highway.