All the Anxious Girls on Earth

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  “In that case, we’ll see who has a better time. I’m going to curl up with a fat novel, my box of Quality Street and some Bessie Smith. I hate borscht, anyways.”

  “Atta girl,” Stanley said and chucked her affectionately under the chin.

  The next day, Hedy showed up at work with swollen eyes bulging like tennis balls. Tiny blood vessels had burst in her nose from a night of crying. “Allergies,” Hedy said brightly in response to the receptionist’s concerned look. Brigit, the salesperson at the next desk who had taken it upon herself to become Hedy’s best friend, took one look at her and led her into the Ladies. When Hedy told her Stanley had come home after the wedding, packed a suitcase and left because it had been his own wedding, Brigit put her hands over her mouth and looked liked she’d stopped breathing.

  “Oh, Hedy!”

  “It’s all right,” Hedy sniffed.

  “It’s terrible. It’s so weird. He must be insane.”

  Hedy shook her head. “He’s quite normal.”

  “If he’s not crazy, then he’s pure evil.”

  Hedy looks to see if there’s anyone within hearing distance and then starts to dial. At the time management company she works for, the employees pride themselves on organizing their days effectively, conquering gridlock of the mind. They talk of things like Time Bandits and the Time Crunch Decade. By prioritizing their activities, they are seldom stuck working at their desks through the lunch hour. Instead, they are at liberty to go shop for the perfect wedding gift, pick up their dry cleaning, or stroll the mall, a hot dog in hand, pretending to be free spirits while dodging skateboards piloted by heavily pierced and tattooed waifs. As a result, there is usually no one in the office at the tail end of the lunch hour, except for the substitute receptionist and employees organizing house parties who don’t want to be caught squandering company time.

  The first time Hedy called in a bomb threat, she did it without any forethought. She was on the telephone to a potential client, a paint wholesaler, on the verge of selling him a seminar package for his office staff, when through the big plate-glass windows of the nineteenth floor she saw Stanley walk into the Four Seasons, arm in arm with a woman. She was sure it was Stanley. His red bomber jacket, his bouncy gait. This was one week after she had carefully ironed his white tuxedo shirt and sent him off to his own wedding. The iron had hissed with that reassuring sound she loved. She had even straightened his bow tie.

  She told the potential client that a colleague had just collapsed—heart attack, cholesterol, angina, epilepsy, fish bone—it was hard to see from where she was sitting, and she had better go. Her St. John Ambulance training might be needed. Hedy surprised herself with her quick, bubbly lie. She had always been the carefully honest one, the one who admitted to the bus driver that her handful of change was a penny short of the fare, the one who had always come home at least half an hour before curfew.

  Her throat tightened at the thought of Stanley taking his bride to lunch at Chartwell. They had gone to Chartwell, once, after they first moved in together. The tomato-gin soup had tickled her nose and Stanley had made a big show of choosing a martini “like Roger Moore would of drunk.” In that dark room, with fox-hunt wallpaper and sturdy chairs upholstered in tapestry, Hedy had imagined they were now legitimately in love. What if Stanley and his bride, his wife, now sat at the same table, toying with the same cutlery? What if his wife put the very same silver fork into her mouth that Hedy had used to pierce the crisp skin of her stuffed quail seven years ago?

  Hedy opened the telephone book, looked up the Four Seasons, and dialled.

  She had been surprised how easy it was. People pouring out onto Georgia and Howe streets, dodging traffic and then standing, craning their necks from across the road, waiting for the explosion. The police cars and fire trucks whirring up from all directions, and Hedy standing alongside her colleagues who anxiously lined the office windows wondering what in the world was going on down there. She had pinched her forearms to keep from laughing. All those people milling around on the sidewalks, scared, excited, all because of her one little phone call. And there was Stanley, standing by himself in the crowd, practically right below her window, goose-necking for a better view, his new bride momentarily forgotten.

  The newspapers wrote righteous and relieved editorials about the false alarm. But Hedy realized that people had enjoyed the incident. They got to go home and say, “You wouldn’t believe what happened today!” People had something to discuss while they waited at bus stops and SkyTrain stations. They were talking to each other. By casting them out into the street, Hedy had done them all a favour. Like Jesus.

  As Hedy’s best friend, Brigit felt compelled to launch a crusade to prove Stanley was evil. Whenever Hedy insisted Stanley had never been the slightest bit crazy, Brigit said, “Then he must be pure evil. There’s no other explanation for that kind of behaviour.” Hedy found her friend’s efforts on her behalf embarrassing. Brigit would haul her up to a colleague’s desk and say, “Tell Tina/ Shaffin/Morgan/Pascal, et cetera, exactly what Stanley did.” After Hedy finished the Reader’s Digest version, with much prodding from Brigit, Brigit would say, “Now, don’t you find that insane?” The colleague would agree, after glancing at Hedy, that yes, Stanley’s actions sounded a touch insane. “But if he’s not crazy, then what?” Brigit would ask. “If he’s perfectly normal, wouldn’t you say he was pure evil?”

  Brigit showed Hedy magazine articles about people without consciences—people who, on a mere whim, crushed children’s heads like melons, sold fake and fatal remedies to the elderly, or were secretly polygamous. None of them showed any remorse. “It’s not just the deed itself, its the lack of remorse that makes them evil,” Brigit said.

  It was true Stanley had shown no remorse. “Gotta go, kiddo, Steph’s waiting in the car,” he had said as Hedy handed him his folded shirts, which he carefully laid into the largest of their burgundy Samsonite bags, along with a handful of the fresh-smelling cedar eggs they kept in the underwear drawer. The luggage was a gift from her mother, who had felt sorry for them when they showed up at the airport one Christmas years ago with their clothes in an old Adidas hockey bag mended with silver duct tape. Hedy considered the set of luggage theirs as opposed to just hers. That’s what happens with things after you live together for seven years. She had wanted to ask what “their” song had been at the wedding. She needed to know it wasn’t their song, Rod Stewart’s “You’re in My Heart, You’re in My Soul.” She sort of doubted it—Rod Stewart didn’t seem to be held in high regard these days. Still, some things remain sacred.

  She wanted to ask whether Steph—or was it Stephanie?—knew about her, but she realized of course she must; he’s up here packing his clothes and has asked her to wait downstairs. Hedy had felt giddy, almost hurrying him along, thinking, His wife’s waiting downstairs, as if she was anxious not to be labelled the other woman, some dame spread-eagled across the bed in filmy lingerie, cooing B-movie enticements.

  Hedy had wanted to ask him why he was doing this. But she believed that if he knew, he probably would have told her.

  “Hitler, Clifford Olson, David Koresh, those blond monsters in St. Catharines, all anonymous albino hitmen everywhere,” Brigit said, “and Stanley.”

  Hedy has it all down pat now. If she’s not creepily specific, this may be the time they decide the caller is crying wolf. They might call her bluff. But then, perhaps they cant afford to take that chance. Not with all those children in the art gallery, Hedy thinks, the ones there for the regular Wednesday children’s tour.

  Last time, she detailed the type of bomb and the group responsible, which resulted in an even quicker evacuation and a SWAT team—a SWAT team! The entire TD Tower and adjoining mall had been emptied out. They weren’t allowed to take the elevators, for fear that might trigger the bomb, so everyone in the tower trooped down the stairs, some barely concealing their panic, others skeptical and cursing about sales they’d be losing to competitors. As Hedy was jostled do
wn the stairs, she thought of the adulterers who might not be at work that day due to an illicit rendezvous at Horseshoe Bay or the Reifel Bird Sanctuary. “Bob!” “Sue!” their innocent loves would say when they arrived home. “I was so worried about you because of that bomb threat. I tried to phone but all the lines kept ringing busy.” The adulterers, still in a postcoital haze, would let slip, “Bomb threat? What bomb threat?” And the cat, claws and all, would tumble out of the bag.

  “Plastic explosives,” Hedy says to the hysterical gallery attendant on the other end of the line. “Even trained dogs cant smell them.” She knows enough to keep it short so the call cant be traced. Last week the employee who answered the phone at the TD branch downstairs had maintained the presence of mind to try to keep her on the line. “I have two little children,” the woman had said. “Louise and Adrienne, two lovely girls. Do you happen to have any children, ma’am?” Hedy had hung up, admiring the woman’s outward calm.

  But this giddy gallery attendant has already dropped the receiver and is yelling something wildly in the background. Hedy hears the receiver bump against the counter, once, twice, three times, and pictures it dangling on the end of its line, twisting a little like a freshly hooked fish. Someone picks up the receiver and Hedy hears the carefully varnished tones of a Kerrisdale matron, “Who do you think you are?”

  Didn’t Jesus say, Let he who is without sin cast the first stone? Everyone knows that from their elementary school catechism. And Hedy, well, she is without sin. She is the lamb.

  “It’s not like it was the love affair of the century,” Hedy told Brigit. “We were just comfortable.”

  “That’s still no excuse to treat you like that.”

  Hedy and Brigit entered the Frog & Peach, a lovely, rustic little French restaurant on the west side of the city.

  “These women you’re about to meet, they’re very good people,” Brigit said. “You’ll like them. You spend way too much time alone. Women need female friends.”

  “Please promise you won’t bring up Stanley.”

  Brigit made as if she was zipping up her mouth with her fingers and then tossing the key over her shoulder. She made such a show of it that Hedy could almost hear the key tinkle on the restaurants terra-cotta tiles.

  Hedy had finished her trout with persimmon chutney and sweet potato gratin, and was toying with her fudge cake on raspberry coulis when Brigit brought up the subject of evil. To be fair, she didn’t exactly bring it up, but grasped the opportunity when it arose. Mary Tam, who was a French immersion teacher, looked at the praline slice she’d ordered and said, “Oh, c’est diabolique, c’est mauvais, je l’aime.” Then she automatically translated, out of habit: “It’s devilish, it’s evil, I love it.”

  “Would you say that people who do unspeakable things are plain crazy?” Brigit asked as if the thought just happened to descend on her from the pastoral fresco overhead. Her fork swayed dreamily above her lemon mousse. “Or is there such a thing as pure evil?” Hedy picked up her knife and made a quick sawing motion across her throat. Brigit ignored her.

  “It depends on what you mean by evil,” said Donna von something, who was unbelievably thin despite her seven-month pregnancy. She had attended university in the States and throughout dinner she fumed about an American professor of hers named Bloom who had decried moral relativism. He had even published a book on the topic, The Closing of the American Mind, or something like that. When Hedy weakly joked that she thought the American mind was already closed, Donna had looked at her with pity.

  “What’s evil in some cultures isn’t considered evil in others.” Donna’s tone implied she would mentally thrash all dissenters.

  “By evil, I mean doing something that causes irreparable pain or harm to innocent people,” Brigit said. “I don’t think it’s relative at all.”

  “Female circumcision. That’s brutal any way you look at it.”

  “Please, I’m still eating.”

  Mary put down her fork and took a big swallow of red wine. “Hurting children is evil, rape is evil, eating people is evil.”

  “What if you eat someone to survive, like those rugby players that crashed in the Andes? And look at how curious everyone was, wanting to know what it tasted like.” Hedy thought Donna’s smile looked wickedly jejune, as if she had just scored a point at a high school debating tournament.

  “When you’ve come into contact with pure evil, there’s no mistaking it,” Claudia, a practising family therapist, said slowly. She had been rather quiet all through dinner and now the unexpected sound of her voice commanded attention. “When I was living in Ottawa a few years ago, I went to an open house one Sunday. It was a beautiful place in Sandy Hill, right near the University of Ottawa. A three-storey sandstone, with enormous red maple leaves brushing against the front windows because it was fall.”

  “Fall in Ottawa is fabulous,” Brigit said. Everyone shushed her.

  “It was full of people, and the real estate agent had put out a platter of petits fours and was serving coffee in real china cups. It felt like some exquisite afternoon salon as people wandered in and out of rooms, chatting, sipping at coffee and nibbling little cakes. But there was this one room on the third floor, sort of an attic bedroom, that people seemed to walk out of really quickly. They came hurrying down the stairs, dribbling coffee and crumbs.”

  Mary refilled the wineglasses. “I don’t know if I can listen to this.”

  “I went up the stairs behind the real estate agent, who seemed almost hesitant to show me that room. I walked right into it and immediately I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck and arms. The real estate agent stood in the doorway, just outside the room, and tried to direct my view out the window toward the Ottawa River. But something made me look up. The ceiling was painted black, with thin red lines connected to form a pentagram.”

  “Look, the hairs on my arms are standing up right now!” Mary held her thin arms out over the table. The black hairs glistened silver in the candlelight. The hairs on Hedy’s arms were rising, too. She felt like she used to at sleepover parties when the girls tried to outdo each other with horror stories just before falling off to sleep. Maybe that’s what evil was, just another party game.

  Donna looked disdainful. “I find it really hard to believe they wouldn’t have painted the ceiling over before attempting to sell such a prime piece of real estate.”

  “That’s what I thought, too” Claudia said. “But I found out they had tried. They went through half a dozen professional painters and a couple of university students. Nobody could stay in that room more than five minutes. There was something evil in there, I could feel it. I’ve never come across a feeling like that before or since.”

  “I was talking about evil people,” Brigit said, sounding irritated. “Not spirits.”

  Hedy looked up at the fresco and saw a bucolic scene of little satyrs chasing plump nymphs across faux-distressed plaster. The candlelight flicked shadows across it, creating the illusion that the creatures were moving, darting in and out of flames. She thought of Stanley and his bride, Stephanie, tousling on a king-size brass bed with jungle-motif sheets and decided that if Brigit brought up the subject of Stanley she would be forced to tip a burning candle into her lap.

  “What about that person who’s been calling in all those fake bomb threats?” Mary asked.

  “Oh, that person,” Brigit said. “That persons just nuts.”

  “I think we’re talking about someone who desperately craves attention. Someone deprived of adequate affection in childhood.”

  “Original. I don’t think you need a psych degree to figure that one out.”

  “I think it’s pretty harmless.”

  “What if someone gets hurt, gets so scared they have a fatal heart attack right there on the street in front of their building?”

  Hedy drifted in and out of the conversation. She thought about her childhood, a textbook case of love and understanding. Pork chops and applesauce, Snakes and Ladders, ba
ckyard swing sets, and a mother who hadn’t been too embarrassed to hold a snowy white cotton pad in her hand and carefully explain what womanhood had to do with Hedy. She thought about Stanley, her affection for the springy rust-coloured hairs on his chest and his ability to bluster through most awkward social situations in an amiably anti-intellectual manner. But was that love?

  “If hurting someone wasn’t the intent, I would say it wasn’t evil.”

  “Especially if they’re sorry.”

  “What if they say they’re sorry, but they’re not.”

  “It’s easy to say you’re sorry.”

  “Only God really knows.”

  “What if you don’t believe in God, or any gods?”

  “Right.”

  God could really make people scurry, Hedy thought. God of Thunder, God of Lightning. Raining frogs down from the sky, now there was a feat. Where had she heard that? How could a booming giant like God have had a gentle son like Jesus? But it was always the quiet ones who surprised everyone when they finally opened their mouths to roar, wasn’t it? Or perhaps she was putting too much stock in the Jesus of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

  “Evil has nothing to do with what’s legal or illegal.”

  “I agree, I mean, there are so many unjust laws.”

  “Like which ones, for instance?”

  “Always the devils advocate.”

  “There’s that word again.”

  “What word?”

  “Devil.”

  “Ha ha.”

  Hedy stands at the window across the room from her desk, looking out toward the art gallery. A small person with green hair skateboards down the granite steps. The Iranians are there, passing out their pamphlets, counting on the milk of human kindness. Others steal a moment from a busy day to sit on the steps and hold their faces to the sun. She feels happy, although she would never tell Brigit that. In Brigit’s judgment, she has every right to feel paralysed with unhappiness, catatonic with indignation. But Hedy has combed her heart and found no detritus, no coiled reddish hairs, no rust flakes.