All the Anxious Girls on Earth

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  There were those students in South Korea who had set themselves on fire recently to protest unfair labour practices, and there was that Quaker who immolated himself in front of the Pentagon in a statement against the war in Vietnam. To Lewis, although they seemed insane, they were also somewhat noble. But to be willing to die for a bad, really bad, eleven-minute film in which a naked Barbie sat spinning on an old record turntable? The woman could not be serious. Besides, it wasn’t even technically a film; it was shot on video. Rules, Lewis had always believed, were rules. She wouldn’t be forced into compromising her aesthetics, and she wasn’t about to let herself be blackmailed. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be polite.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Lewis asked. “I could make a fresh pot.”

  “Ten, nine, eight,” the woman chanted, dropping to her knees on the bristly welcome mat and holding the can above her head.

  Lewis hesitated, then tried to call her bluff. “Maybe you’d prefer herbal tea?” she asked with her best hostessy smile, which she hoped wasn’t twitching.

  “Seven, six, five.” The little kids joined in. Ding, ding, ding.

  Lewis found herself inexplicably laughing as the woman flicked her Bic. She looked around, as if expecting someone to step from the shadows of an upstairs balcony, aim a video camera down into the courtyard and announce, “Smile, you’re on—”

  After all the emergency crews had come and gone, a police officer took down her name. “And your first name?” he’d said, holding his pen above his little notepad. “That is my first name,” Lewis told him. Her mother had listened to a lot of Johnny Cash before she was born. As a little girl, Lewis had pretended her name was Louise. She later went through a phase at university during which, after several beers in the student pub, she’d greet strangers by standing on a chair and bellowing, “How do you Bo-is, my name is Lew-is!” No one ever got it except a pudgy, down-to-earth girl named Lila from Hundred Mile House up north and so they became friends.

  The policeman had asked if she wanted to make a statement. When she didn’t answer, he assured her that she had nothing to worry about, that people like this always single someone out, wanting an accomplice. “My brother-in-law was driving along Marine Drive and a guy jumped out from behind a mailbox and threw himself in front of his car,” he told her. “Just like that—boom.”

  Then the policeman left, and the neighbours disappeared inside, and Lewis had stood alone on her steps. There were clumps of dried fire retardant on the door-jamb, on the charred welcome mat, and on the cedar hedges on both sides of the steps. It was an optimistic pink, like fibreglass insulation. Like cotton candy. She went inside and in the hall mirror she saw that there was a fleck of dried pink foam on the tip of her nose.

  She had phoned Lila and got her answering machine. “I just killed somebody,” Lewis said, collapsing into the corner of the couch, the spent fire extinguisher nestled in her lap like a small, cherry-red dachshund.

  Lewis had a cousin who lived in the only residential building in the entire city that was truly earthquake ready. He travelled a lot as a buyer for a swimsuit import company and had found a lover in Seoul (and in Hong Kong and in Manila), so he was often away and let Lewis stay at his place whenever she wanted.

  The building balanced on a fat stick, like half a popsicle, and wobbled slightly when there was high wind. It had a complex suspension system and was said to be able to withstand tremors of up to 7.8 on the Richter scale. The city lay at the very edge of a fault line and the seismologists said that it was due for “the big one” anytime now, the earth cracking painfully open, the ocean rearing up in towering sheets. They wrung their hands and prophesied death and destruction unless the government, the citizens, didn’t do something, didn’t build more popsicle buildings and popsicle schools and batten down the hatches. They didn’t say wrath of God—they were people of science, after all—but you could see it in their eyes. More of these buildings had been planned, but it was decided they were too expensive. And, besides, those who could afford to live in them wanted things like swimming pools, and you couldn’t put a swimming pool in an earthquake-ready building. Lewis did like the idea of doing endless lengths on her back while down below the city crumbled, although it was a thought best kept to herself.

  She felt safe up there, bobbing in the breeze.

  One of the best things about the building was the sign by the front door. Entercom, it said. Lewis would slink through the lobby to the elevator, chanting to herself, “Enter calm, enter calm, enter calm.”

  She was worried her cousin would move on a whim. Then she’d be banished from this earthquake-ready building with its Entercom. And she would miss it fiercely She would miss the ten-gallon plastic kegs of water stored in all the available closets. He even had a couple stacked in the bedroom closet, behind the box containing the bench press he never used. There were emergency candles. Matches. Lots of AA-batteries and a transistor radio. Canned food. Oodles of dried pasta and fruit leather. This was the place to be if Armageddon ever threatened. A wrath-of-God-proof dwelling, with a view.

  After a week or so of her cumin-smelling, cat-infested, spider plant-ridden co-op full of overly friendly Sesame Street-style neighbours, Lewis loved to slip into the expensive, scentless lobby of the Entercom building with its David Hockney exhibition poster on the wall and speed up to the seventeenth floor in the almost silent elevator, the apartment key tight in her hand. Once, she found she was gripping it so hard that it left the imprint of a fish in her palm—a fat, archetypal fish, like a third eye. She pressed her hand flat against the big living-room window and showed it the enormous, fog-shrouded tankers in the inlet. “All this could be yours,” she told the fish.

  Lila, who was on the housing co-op board and had helped Lewis get a subsidized unit by vouching for her character even though the rest of the board suspected she wasn’t a true co-op type at heart, couldn’t understand what she liked about the Entercom building. “It’s so sterile,” she said, standing near the big window, but not touching it. “I’d get nosebleeds living up this high. You can’t even see any grass.”

  Lewis had brought her old boyfriend there, just once, hoping some altitude would revive her waning interest in this pleasant, sturdy man who wore good-quality T-shirts and had dropped a lacklustre freelance magazine career to manage a mutual fund. He even laughed when she said, intending to be nasty, “The Dow Jones Average, so they play 70s power rock or what?” But lying in bed with him up there, she felt her sense of calm threatened, her sacred space violated. The relationship was like a woman standing on her front steps threatening to set herself on fire—something Lewis couldn’t consider seriously until it was too late. “What if I took tap-dancing lessons and got a little sailor suit?” she asked him while twisting the corner of the duvet cover until it looked like the spire of a gingerbread church in the Black Forest. Her boyfriend had turned from leafing through one of her cousins body-building magazines and looked at Lewis. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  What she really loved was being up there by herself, ready for anything. It was the only time she didn’t feel the urge to flee to that place she combed her tangled mind for while she cut and measured soap and swept the sweet-smelling flakes into shimmery mounds.

  She imagined saying nonchalantly to interested strangers while dragging a tea bag—Russian Caravan, luxuriously caffeinated—back and forth in a china cup, as if dredging a river for a body, the tea spreading like a rust stain through the water, “The city of my dreams, oh, it’s equal parts whimsy and rot.” The interested strangers nodded their heads and murmured encouragement in faintly foreign accents.

  The trouble was, Lewis had no idea where this city was. It couldn’t be a place as well-worn as Paris or New York with their centuries of ghosts. Besides, she had been to both and found them lacking. The most wonderful thing about Paris had been the multitude of public washrooms. There were ancient, subterranean ones, moist like caves, and modern, nuclear-age-looking
cylinders set along the boulevards with doors that slid open when you dropped a franc into a slot. Once inside, music played—old David Bowie, “Lets Dance,” a McCartney/ Jackson duet, “The Doggone Girl Is Mine” (what were they thinking?)—and the toilet automatically washed and dried you. But you couldn’t move somewhere just for the public washrooms. And in New York she had felt needy, as if the city continually dangled baubles in her face that she couldn’t have. And that was after only three days. If she lived there, she would grow frenzied with desires and most likely end up at Grand Central, aggressively shaking a Dean & Deluca paper cup with lipstick marks around the rim, yelling, “Money for baubles, not booze. Must have an Hermes handbag!” while at her elbow a Vietnam vet with one leg and a Welsh terrier in his lap whistled “The Star-Spangled Banner” while the dog yipped crossly.

  What she wanted was a place to love that was hers, and hers alone. An oasis with good taxi takeout. A contemporary Xanadu.

  The soap shop was always bright and cheerful. The colours were primary, the packaging minimal and ecologically sound. Just being in there made you feel like you were a better person—at least that was the effect the owners, represented by a numbered holding company somewhere in England, appeared to be gunning for. When was the last time buying soap made you feel like Mother Teresa?

  Selling soap was an occupation, Lewis told herself, that was a balm to her besieged senses. She forced herself to count her blessings—small, fuzzy blessings with hard centres, like little lint-covered candies you’d find wedged between car seats—to have a job at all. Look at the little green-haired girl, who wasn’t really a girl, Lewis now realized, but a very small, almost wraith-like person, maybe in her late teens or early twenties. It was obvious she didn’t have a job. And what did she do? She came in and ate the oatmeal and avocado face masks when she thought Lewis wasn’t looking. Spooned them into her mouth with the wooden paddles that were used to mush the stuff into containers. Lewis wondered if she’d come across her in some back alley, stiffened into a board, her insides smooth and poreless and glowing with health, while flies buzzed in and out of her algae-coloured dreadlocks. But she didn’t say anything. She never looked at her kindly and said, “It’ll crack if you smile.”

  The little green-haired person never smiled.

  And Lewis, who certainly wasn’t a girl anymore, became a girl again the moment she stepped behind the counter at the shop. “Ask the soap girl,” people would say to each other. “The soap girl will know.”

  A handsome man came into the soap shop and leaned smiling against the counter, drumming his fingers lightly on its surface. His cufflinks clinked against the chrome trim, tiny garnets flashing in the light. “Do you have any asiago?” Lewis laughed, and then wondered why she was laughing at the uninspired jokes of self-consciously handsome men who wore cufflinks.

  What was happening to her? What had happened to her brain? It was as if she was here, while her brain was back at home soaking in a bucket of ammonia-based solution. It was this city, she decided, this city with its aggressive mellowness like chicory coffee. Too many people told her to relax when they were going off the rails themselves. Cyclists clashed with drivers, and although she had once seen a guy jump from his Isuzu Trooper in front of the Pocky Store on Cambie hefting something that might have been a crowbar, it was the bicycle people who were generally nastier. Coming out of the liquor store by the IGA on Broadway the week before, she had watched a long, lean cyclist with bulging calves and an exhaust mask across his face righteously shaking a fist at the sky. “Its assholes like you who are ruining the planet,” he yelled at no one in particular as cars tried to nose around him and out of the parking lot.

  In the city of her dreams, only small children rode bicycles.

  In the city of her dreams, soap made you clean but not holy.

  It had been a strange spring. People both grumbled about it and made jokes, but underneath it all was a distinct layer of worry. The media speculated about the causes: global warming, el Nino, the next ice age, weather patterns manipulated by the Russians (postulated by those who weren’t yet aware the Cold War had ended and the only Commie Pinkos to be found were the vodka and beet juice martinis at an after-hours club called Gouzenko’s in Yaletown), cattle hormones, keloid earth, growth fatigue, mutant minerals, a Coca-Cola/Nike/ Disney™ conspiracy, wormholes in space, every expert—right-wing, left-wing, or just regular-wing nut—had a theory. Lewis found it interesting that no one wanted to admit that it was just plain weird and they didn’t have a clue what was going on. They wanted someone or something to blame.

  Crocuses usually thrust themselves out of the cold ground in late January, while the rest of the country was still covered in snow. Magnolia blossoms, thick and fleshy, and cherry blossoms, frilly, pungent, were not uncommon in February, but here it was May already, and the only glorious things sprang from the cracks in the sidewalks and in empty lots full of ground glass and tired earth. Purple-headed thistle, wild dill, six feet tall, bolting, and dandelions ran rampant through the crab-grass. Nothing wanted to grow in the fertilized, loam-rich, well-tended public and private gardens. Not even weeds.

  And the squirrels. Everyone agreed that there were more of them than usual. They zigzagged back and forth across the streets in a frenzy, peanuts (Lewis had no idea where they got all those peanuts) clamped in their little jaws. Someone used the word infestation and suddenly that’s what it was. The trees rustled with squabbling squirrels and dried squirrel shit rattled down the rooftops and clogged the eavestroughs. A child in her co-op had been attacked. A red squirrel ran right up the front of his body, leaving mean claw marks, and snatched a granola bar out of his hand as he was about to put it into his mouth. The parents’ council was divided between teaching their children survival skills for the urban wilderness or just poisoning the buggers. Tempers flared.

  The beaches seemed dirtier, too. E-coli counts rose and people went into the water at their own risk. A swimmer who ignored the warnings had created a wave of near hysteria that lasted almost two weeks after she came out of the water at Spanish Banks with a lesion on her stomach that resembled Salman Rushdie’s profile. The fact that this had happened on Valentines Day, on the eighth anniversary of the fatwa, was hard to overlook. No one asked, why would anyone go swimming in the ocean in February? People did that kind of thing here. People had the right.

  Of course the cyclists blamed the drivers and the drivers blamed the government.

  No one noticed the clean-shaven man wrapped in a sheet who stood in the middle of the Burrard Street Bridge, day after day, with a sign that read: deserts & wastelands will become fertile and beautiful.

  And, every day, during that week in mid-May, Lewis continued to watch the little green-haired girl feed at the colourful vats in the soap store, mechanically trowelling the stuff in as if she was filling a very large, growing crack in the walls of San Simeon.

  Lewis picked at crabgrass while the local historian made his speech, Lila beaming beside him in front of the dilapidated house. Lila had a heart like a monster truck—a V-8 engine that roared and seldom needed retooling, huge wheels that could drive over anything, fat pistons pumping for victory, a gas tank of biblical proportions, and was rust-proof to boot. Compared to Lilas, Lewis’s heart was like something that had only been driven by a little old member of the Christian right in Kelowna on Sundays.

  Lila spent much of her time saving things. Murrelets, forests, even lives. She volunteered one night a week for the Suicide Hotline, talking people out of their valleys of despair, telling them they could beat the bastards, whoever the bastards were—those ninjas of the heart who struck swiftly in the dark, or battalions of voices telling the person she was a worthless shit. Of course it was all anonymous and Lila never knew if she had really done any good. Lewis thought not knowing would drive her crazy. But Lila just shrugged her shoulders and said, “Well, you just gotta try.”

  Lila didn’t understand earthquake proof, though. The things she loved we
re sprawling and messy and about to fall apart. Like this old house. The front porch sagged, all the paint had long ago flaked off, and a section of the roof was missing. It had been brought to its knees but was still grinning, its charred filigree trim like teeth spread wide.

  Children trailing black balloons ran around screaming, mouths smeared with black icing from Lilas enormous coffin cake. She had organized this Black Birthday Party to protest the fact that the city was hedging on its promise to declare the eighty-year-old house a heritage property. Without that designation, the owner was free to tear it down and build yet another salmon-stucco sixplex. There had already been evidence of squatters and two fires had been set within the past month. The fire fighters had barely arrived in time, the historian told them.

  “This Edwardian lady,” the historian said, the mike popping and sound system hissing, “is one of the last of her generation. Just as indicative of her time as an Erickson or an Henriquez is of ours.”

  Now Lila was at the microphone, gripping its stem with emotion. “This is our past. This house is us. Ich bin tin Edwardian house!!” The small crowd of about two dozen people costumed like ghouls clapped and cheered. The light drizzle stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Lewis felt twitchy. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the owner pulled up in a tan Eldorado and swooped down on them with legal firearms to assert his rights. And really, what was his crime? That he failed to see the value of the past? Maybe he was onto something.

  The protesters looked like older, more jovial versions of the Marilyn Manson fans who accidently heaved in the huge plate-glass window at A&B Sound the other night while trying to get a glimpse of their idol. Lewis had watched them on the news and thought they looked weirdly cowed as they were dispersed down SeymourStreet by the police, as if really shaken by the unexpected violence of their numbers. After all, these weren’t hockey fans out for blood, bladders bursting with Molson’s, but chubby suburban teenagers who just wanted the new Antichrist to autograph their freshly shaved heads with a black Sharpie. But watching them, Lewis thought she could understand their rumbling hunger for something authentic, something beyond garage bands, 7-Eleven parking lots and a disembodied future. “Excuse, excuse me,” one white-faced, black-lipped, elaborately pierced young woman had said, elbowing her way through the crowd towards a TV camera. “Excuse me, but can I say something? To all you people who have recently jumped on the Marilyn Manson bandwagon”—she paused dramatically—”I just want to say: Go back to your lives of conformity.”