All the Anxious Girls on Earth

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composer. Died at age 35.

  I buy some sheet music and leave it on the kitchen table. Edgar ignores it. This is a big relief. I make us hot chocolate even though it is not night yet and not cold.

  Edgar’s parents, my sister Marie and her husband Angus, were smart. A few times I would visit when they had guests over and all that talk never made much sense to me. Even if I listened very hard it all turned into blah blah blah blah. Once I pulled Marie into the bathroom and shut the door behind us. She had a very strong-smelling cigarette in her hand that gave me a sick feeling in my stomach, but she looked pretty with all that smoke around her face, like an angel on a calendar. “What language are those people talking out there?” I asked her. “English,” she said. “Oh, Pearly, they’re just talking plain English.”

  Edgar’s parents liked parties very much. On New Year’s Eve they did a terrible thing, though. They drank too many cocktails and then got in the car and drove into another car parked at the side of the road. At the funeral, Edgar wore a little black bow tie and narrowed his eyes as if he was trying hard not to cry. Later he told me he was pretending his eyes were the periscope of a submarine and he was trying to find a target to sink.

  I cried a lot at that funeral. After all, Edgar’s mother was my sister. But I was happy to inherit Edgar. I don’t know what it is really, but ever since he was born I’ve liked his little face. I used to lick it when Marie wasn’t looking. I never tell Edgar. I used to lick his face. He’s disgusted when he sees the cat cleaning her kittens. He has made a suggestion that we cut out the cat’s tongue, but I let him know this wasn’t a very good idea.

  I am larger than average, but not as big as those people they bury in piano cases. Edgar, though, is a thread. I tease him with the poem: “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean…” Edgar’s eyes go small. “You’re not my wife,” he says. And he disappears for the rest of the day.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet. Died at age 30. Vincent van Gogh, painter. Died at age 37. (My age!) John Keats, another poet! Died at age 26.

  I don’t know who these people are, but the librarian tells me they are certified geniuses. “They are in the canon,” she says. I picture the geniuses fired through the air at the circus. They wear helmets, of course. They land in the net and jump up and everyone claps, glad they have not broken their necks. I ask the librarian why they died so young. “Blew their fuse, I guess,” she says.

  The TV people are at the door again. You would think they could telephone before they come. The woman says they did telephone but the line kept ringing busy. That could be. I was listening to the weather report around the province. The names they come up with for places—Hope, Kamloops, Ucluelet. It’s much better than dial-a-joke, which many times I don’t get. The reporter has the most amazing outfit on, like the scales of a fish. I ask her if I can touch it and she agrees! This makes me shy and I reach out just one finger and touch it so quickly I don’t even feel anything.

  “Where is the boy?’’ she says. “Where is the Cheetah Boy?”

  I tell her he comes and goes.

  “He comes and goes?” she says, nudging the camera guy, and I see a little red light go on.

  I look right into the camera. “He comes and goes, talking of Michelangelo.” This cracks the camera guy up, so I say it again, this time moving my hands like a movie star, like the air in front of me is water.

  On the TV news later, I look fatter than I am. I wonder if they did that on purpose. After they show Edgar running, so fast he’s almost a blur, they show me, as big as a house, saying the thing I said. Then two people talk to Carol, the host. I like Carol. She has cheeks like a chipmunk and smiles often. If I meet her on the street, I think I might even say hello. The man is very serious and says he doesn’t understand why they let Edgar keep on living with me. The other person, an older woman, interrupts and talks about love. She has written a big book about love. Edgar says, “This is boring,” and changes the channel to “The Simpsons.” I can see that he gets irritated explaining the jokes to me, so I pretend I have to go to the bathroom. I sit on the toilet and cry and remember when I used to lick his little face.

  The woman at the library has become curious about my interest in geniuses. “My boy might be a genius,” I tell her—quietly, because it is a library—thinking now she will feel sorry for me. She snorts. “All parents want their kids to be geniuses.” How can a librarian be so stupid?

  “You sweat a lot,” Edgar said to me today.

  “Yes, I do, I do sweat a lot, Edgar.”

  “More than average?”

  “I don’t know about averages.”

  “I’ll bet your sweat could drown a whole village of Indians.”

  “Edgar!”

  “A town of monkeys! A country of people! The whole world gushing down a mountain, drowning in B.O. juice!

  Edgar became the Human Cheetah while my sister Marie and her husband Angus were still alive. Edgar was only four, which would make him one year younger than he is now. They were picnicking in a park and some men were throwing a Frisbee around. Edgar raced their dog for it and beat the dog every time! This was one of those wonder dogs that had been a star on television. I have even seen it. It wears a blue handkerchief around its neck and is called Decker. But I think it might be dead by now. In the dog world it would have been considered a genius.

  Edgar ran faster than this dog Decker and everyone was amazed. Angus recorded this amazing thing on his home video camera and took it to a television station.

  Now Edgar has a scrapbook full of Cheetah Boy stories, because he won some races against much older boys, and one picture of him pretending to be the periscope of a submarine at his parents’ funeral. No one looking at the picture would realize this, though. It is one of those things you have to have explained to you.

  Just before Marie and Angus died, they talked to a man who wanted Edgar to be in a detergent commercial on television. Edgar would run with a dog, not Decker, and then slide into a pile of mud. Then this mother, not Marie, but a television mother the man would pick, would wash the clothes and be surprised and happy that the detergent made these clothes all clean. I clean Edgar’s clothes and I have tried that detergent and I know no detergent would get them so clean. The man called here once and told me they actually use new clothes for the “after” picture. “Then you are a big, fat liar,” I told him. Edgar sat on the kitchen counter with his arm around my neck and whooped when I gave the man what for. So I said it again.

  Marie and Angus are dead, and I say, “No way, Jose!” even though the man wants to give Edgar a lot of money. I know what happens to television stars—drugs, tattoos, sex with people you never saw before in your life. They cut off pieces of your behind and sew them somewhere else to make you better looking! They change your nose so that your relatives cannot even recognize you. I will take care of Edgar. We will stay home and drink hot chocolate and plant vegetables.

  Me and Marie went to tap-dancing lessons together. This is before I started taking medicines that made me fat. I was three years older than Marie, but she had to hold onto my hand before I could cross the street. On the way home one day, Marie took my tap shoes and shook them by my ear. “Guess what’s in there?” she said. “Pennies,” Marie told me. “There are hundreds of millions of pennies in there dying to get out.” I sat down on the sidewalk and banged one of my tap shoes as hard as I could. The heel popped off and hundreds of ants came spilling out. They crawled all over my legs and up my arms and I couldn’t stop crying. Now the ants crawl on Marie and I watch television in the evenings with Edgar. Sometimes I don’t think I deserve to be so happy.

  The librarian says she recognizes me from the television news. I’m amazed she recognizes me, because in real life I am much smaller than on television. “You’re that woman who’s mentally unfit to be a legal guardian,” she says. She doesn’t say this meanly, I just think she’s surprised to find someone from television right here in
her library. After all, this is not the main library, only a small branch that I can take one bus to without transferring and getting confused. I think she tries very hard to please because she wants to be promoted. She has four genius facts ready for me when I get there.

  I tell her I’m not unfit, not like that girl who put the baby in the oven, thinking it was a turkey. When the parents came home, they found the turkey upstairs in the crib still frozen, with diapers on. I threw up when I heard about that. “That’s not a true story,” the librarian says. “You can’t possibly believe that’s true. It’s an urban myth. It’s a story teenagers have been telling at sleepover parties for twenty years.” She looks like she wants to take my shoulders and shake me.

  On the news last week, Carol with the chipmunk cheeks said that a man in Surrey set his wife on fire after tying her to a chair with garden twine. The same twine I tied up my tomatoes with when they got heavy! All week, every time I watered my tomatoes, I kept thinking of that poor woman on fire on her dining-room chair. Now I am so relieved. That also must be an urban myth.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet/dramatist. Died at age 83.

  Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, physiologist (?!?) Died at age 87. Michelangelo (one name, like Cher!), artist. Died at age 89.

  Mary Somerville, mathematician. Died at age 92.

  Now I am amazed. All these geniuses lived to be very old. I am also surprised to find a woman genius. I didn’t think there was such a thing. “She’s not in the canon, you know” the librarian says. She crosses her arms on her chest to protect herself from something. Women geniuses were probably not fired from cannons because in those days they all wore skirts. I see London! I see France! the men would tease when they saw her underwear.

  All these geniuses, all so old. I feel like the ocean is inside my belly, making gushing waves. The library looks bigger, even. Or maybe in my relief I have my eyes open very wide. There is a little boy with white hair and thick glasses reading a book with a magnifying glass. I feel sorry for him because he reads so slowly, more slowly than even me if you can imagine! I am not worried anymore about Edgar being a genius. Now I am hoping he is. One dummy in the family is enough. Ha! I ask the librarian for books about cheetahs, but she only finds two about tigers. I will have to go to the main library downtown. I will take Edgar with me and he can hold onto the bus transfers. He will hold them tight and not lose them, because I am trying to turn him into a responsible boy. Maybe downtown we will ride an escalator, something I have never done. Maybe Edgar will run up the down escalator and I will try not to cheer him on. I will pretend to get mad like a proper parent.

  I am standing on the porch with Edgar the Human Cheetah, watching the rain whack everything flat in the garden. Edgar tells me he’s decided to change his name.

  “You can’t change it to Bob,” I tell him. “Anything but Bob.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just makes me feel funny. I pictured a Bob as bald and you have such nice brown hair.” I try to smooth his hair, but he is too fast for me.

  “I wasn’t thinking of Bob,” he says. “I was thinking of changing the spelling—E-D-G-R-R-R.”

  I think he’s trying to trick me, but then he growls and I get it. “Okey-dokey, Edgrrrrrrr!”

  “Holy wow, where’s all this rain coming from?” Edgrrr wants to know.

  “It’s God’s sweat,” I say.

  “God must be even fatter than you.”

  “Maybe a whole lot fatter,” I say, and I think he maybe believes me.

  City of my dreams

  Sooner or later, everyone in the country came to this city by the mountains and the sea. Some just to ogle, many to stay. People here liked it with something that bordered on religious fervour. They acted as if they should be heartily congratulated for where they lived, much the same way the contestants on Jeopardy! are applauded when they pick the Daily Double even though they haven’t really done anything yet. Their enthusiasm made Lewis feel small and mean. How could she hate paradise? “It gets caught in my teeth,” she told her friend Lila, “like spinach.”

  All around her, people did things for kicks that to Lewis seemed nothing short of death defying. Trooping into the wilderness with foil packets of dehydrated food, like astronauts, determined to ride the rapids, scale icefalls, bounce down mountain faces with their feet bound to fibreglass boards, Dr. Seuss hats on their heads. She shook her head and hung onto her coffee mug with both hands. Caffeine, that was her wild ride.

  She who had looked into the face of death with its tired living-room eyes and laughed.

  The little green-haired girl was back in the store, lingering over the soaps, dipping her fingers into the pots of face masks and hair creams. She had been in almost every day this week, but never bought anything.

  Lewis worked in a place that looked like a cheese shop but sold soap. A cosmetic deli. She cut wedges of soaps like Guava Nun and Rabbit Cool from huge slabs with a thing very much like a cheese cutter, weighed them, wrapped them, and stuck on the little price per gram sticker the machine spit out. The face masks and creams and shampoos were scooped into little plastic tubs like coleslaw, mashed down, weighed and priced. There were also massage bars that looked and smelled like chocolate, and shampoo bars that looked and smelled like oatcakes with raisins. The customers all said the same thing (over and over)—”MMMmmm, this smells good enough to eat!”—but Lewis kept smiling. It was all stupidly expensive and the customers were mostly pleasant—clean, pleasant people with lots of money. No deranged artists threatening to set themselves on fire.

  The green-haired girl dragged three fingers through the vat of apple-mint face mask and then, looking right at Lewis through a cluster of very blonde private school students in hiked-up kilts, she pulled her fingers down her right cheek and then her left. As she turned to leave the store, Lewis felt a little tribal beat in the vicinity of her heart. Something deeply carnivorous and sinewy. Something to do with meat and flames. A clue to her secret city? Or heartburn from the onion flan from Meinhardt’s she’d had for lunch?

  Lewis wished she’d said something. Later that night, lying in bed, it came to her, what she should have said.

  “Don’t smile or it’ll crack.”

  Several months back, Lewis had had what most people would consider a great job. She was one of the programmers at the film festival the city hosted each fall and all of her friends envied her—imagine getting paid to watch movies! But it wasn’t long before earnest student filmmakers from the city’s four (four!) film schools started descending on the festival office, like infant spiders parachuting out of their pods, demanding to know why she had rejected their mini-mockumentaries or Tarantino rip-offs. At least half of their films were about people who go through a whole bunch of bad shit and then wake up to find out it’s all just a dream. If only life were like that, Lewis often found herself thinking.

  One guy even tried to bribe her with a descrambler. He had a little goatee and long fingernails. He snapped a TV Times open and shook it at her. “Look at all these channels,” he said. “All these channels could be yours.” She moved down the hall and he followed, flapping the TV listings at her and wailing, “My movie’s only three minutes long!” Three minutes too long, Lewis thought. She tried picturing him as someone’s son, the cream in some doting mothers coffee. She tried feeling sorry for him because he was already growing jowls. Too late. Her heart was forming a thin, but impenetrable crust like the one that covered the earth while it was still young and fragile and lava bubbled just below the surface. When she asked him to leave, he started crying.

  Then there was the fidgety young man who showed up on his skateboard. He whooshed right through her office door, then braked abruptly. The skateboard, an orange goat painted on it with X’s for eyes, shot straight up into the air. He caught it in one meaty paw and stuffed it under his armpit.

  “You didn’t answer my phone calls,” he said. She thought the stud drilled through his tongue should have caused a slight lisp,
but it didn’t.

  “And you are?”

  “Justin.”

  “Justin what?” They all seemed to be named Justin.

  “I made the film about the dude who goes through all this bad shit and then wakes up and finds out it was all just a dream.”

  Lewis sighed.

  “Watch it backwards,” Justin hissed, his eyes startlingly like Charles Manson’s. “What?”

  “Just watch it backwards.” And he was gone, wheels grinding down the corridor.

  Paul is dead? Lewis thought.

  “Shouldn’t we get a security guard,” she asked the festival director, “or a Doberman or something?”

  But nothing could have prepared Lewis for the woman who showed up on her doorstep at home on that Saturday morning. She wasn’t a kid, either. She was about Lewis’s age, early thirties, but with this real lived-in look in her eyes. Her eyes were a living room of despair, full of mismatched furniture and candles stuck in Chianti bottles, dripping all over the place, a syringe under the wicker chair, a Ouija board on the coffee table. She held a tin can with a plastic nozzle in one hand and a Bic lighter in the other. Her neck was dishpan-hand red and streaked with sweat. Tiny neighbour kids trundled back and forth across the common area on their trikes, oblivious to what was going on, ringing their little bells feebly with inexperienced thumbs and veering into the cedar hedges. The woman stood there on the step of Lewis’s co-op and threatened to douse herself with gasoline and set herself on fire if Lewis didn’t program her film.