All the Anxious Girls on Earth

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  Brigit would find some fault with happiness, anyways. Yesterday, she showed Hedy a magazine article about a British psychiatrist who thinks happiness should be classified as a mental condition—because it’s a highly abnormal state of being. The psychiatrist wasn’t referring to bliss, but a plain, old-fashioned level of contentment and calm. In which case perhaps Stanley is crazy after all, not evil, because he seemed so happy the last time Hedy saw him, unapologetically happy.

  She wonders why people haven’t started pouring out of the art gallery yet. It’s been almost ten minutes since her phone call, yet there are no signs of panic, no sirens piercing the air, no men in stiff black coveralls stealthily slipping through the side entrances of the gallery, their intricate bomb diffusion kits strapped to their belts. Hedy’s mood loses a little of its fine buoyancy. She decides she must make the call again. She glances toward her telephone, but sees that Brigit is back at the neighbouring desk.

  “I was just listening to the CBC news in the car,” Brigit says, as Hedy roots around in her top drawer for a quarter, “and did you know that there’s a trend away from accepting pleas of insanity in cases of aggravated assault? Its an acknowledgement of mans baser instincts. I mean men and women, of course.” Hedy nods as if she’s paying attention, and then smiles as her fingers close around a quarter that’s been nesting in a pile of paper clips. She tells Brigit that she’s forgotten to pay an important bill and has to run down to the bank for a few minutes, just in case anyone asks. Brigit tut tuts, “Oh, those darn Time Bandits!” and waves her off with a conspiratorial wink.

  Hedy starts counting as she enters the elevator, needing to know how long it will take to get back upstairs. She wants to be there in time to watch all the people streaming out of the gallery, the panicked milling around with the merely curious, the emergency vehicles dramatically screeching to a halt, the children noisily demanding to be told what’s going on. As she walks through the shiny lobby toward the row of pay phones, Hedy feels positively grand. She is the one without sin striding quickly across the burning desert, thin sandals moulded to her calloused feet, the quarter hot and round and flat in the hollow of her hand.

  Anxious Objects

  for Dr. Spock, R.I.P.

  The child has everything it could possibly want and now it comes to you, this evening after the first day of junior kindergarten, and says, “I’d like some pajamas.”

  This child who already has a goldfish and rabbits (yet unnamed), a music box with one of those tiny ballerinas that pop up and twirl slowly to Swan Lake, a porcelain tea set bearing the likeness of that little Parisienne Madeline, a skipping rope (yet unused), a horse (named Conan, after her favourite late-night talk-show host), her own home page and Internet account, and an Air Miles card boasting 29,342 points; this child who has an indoor speed-skating oval (which, you must admit, you and your wife have tried out, once maybe, zipping along feeling like Hans Brinker and his love, cheeks ruddy, hand in mitted hand, though only when the child wasn’t around as you would never encroach so aggressively upon the child’s space); this child who has a safety deposit box containing the following: a chunk of the Berlin Wall, a swatch from the Shroud of Turin, and a signed, first-edition Tropic of Cancer; this child who has an older sister, stillborn, whom the child keeps in a jar of formaldehyde hidden away someplace known only to the child (although you suspect she has traded the former with a friend up the street for a Pocahontas poster, but, well, kids will be kids); this child of whom you still carry an ultrasound photograph in your wallet from the time before you even knew she would be a she (not that you cared), who is the glue that holds your marriage together, who is the indelible ink of your heart, who is now standing in front of you saying that all the other children at school have pajamas.

  You have, up until now, found it difficult, and largely unnecessary, to deny your child anything. Somewhere up there, invisible to the naked eye, orbits a man-made satellite named in her honour, and it wasn’t cheap. Would that it were a planet. But pajamas?

  What kind of place is this school where children of all races and abilities learn together in harmony and yet claim to all have pajamas? (Note: Find out who this Italian pedagogue Montessori really is and what kind of social experiment he or she is up to.) You might as well be sending the child to that public school down the block where syringes litter the schoolyard like space debris and twelve-year-old girls hanging around the sagging metal fence claim to be able to do outrageous things with their sturdy, black-licorice-stained lips.

  Isn’t there a point in a child’s life, in your life together as parents and child, that you have to lay down the law?

  “Pussywillow, kittycat, caramel corn, l’il Amy March, pigeon pie, Sailor Moon, apple-o’-my-eye,” you say, carefully modulating your tone so as to spare the child any distress, “whatever do you need pajamas for?”

  Innocently, not aware that she’s about to bring the whole sound structure of your Benzedrine-fuelled lives down upon your heads, she leans her face adorably to one side, folds both tiny hands together in a perfect simulacrum of prayer, and presses them alongside her tilted cheek.

  “For sleeping,” the child says.

  And surely as if it were actually happening, the joists in the ceiling groan and the house shifts on its foundations. Plaster dust swirls down thick and chalky as you struggle to see the child through die sudden whiteout, through this authentic, circa 1890s Manitoba snowstorm. The wind howls in your ears, your frostbitten toes and left hand will need amputating. In your arms there’s an infant in a coarse saddle blanket who’ll be stiff as a board soon, a blue boy. You’ve only completed grade five. Cows are all you’ve ever learned anything about, the only thing you’re good at, and now they’re stuck far out in the fields, the sky lowering down on them. You’re Swedish, they won’t let you forget. They (they, them) say you smell. It is your duty to brood. Your wife, dear God … but right now all you can think, brain hot with jumbled coals, is, read Dog, save my child.

  But the child is still standing there in front of you in the kitchen, bathed in halogen light, smiling sweetly, the corners of her mouth smudged chocolatey from an Energy Bar, saying, “For sleeping.”

  The chamber ensemble you’ve engaged to accompany all of the child’s pronouncements stirs and launches into Schubert’s string quartet in D minor, but you abruptly hold up the palm of your hand. The musicians move closer together, chairs squealing against the linoleum, and begin to mutter quietly among themselves, bows across their laps.

  These other children sleep? When do they have time for ballet and kick-boxing, glass-blowing and oenology, snowboarding and target practice? And what about citizenship—staffing polling stations, canvassing door-to-door for the Vancouver Aquarium’s new whale pool, and volunteering at St. Paul’s Eating Disorders Clinic, not to mention all those guided tours to the sewage treatment plant on Annacis Island? How do they keep up? Can these children do a triple lutz? Can they even drive a four-by-four? Have they climbed K-2 yet (without oxygen)?

  Upstairs, your wife is on-line, preregistering the child for an undergraduate year abroad at either the University of Strasbourg or the University of Kyoto (playing it safe, as neither of you, even after commissioning an exhaustive poll with a margin of sampling error of +/-3.5 per cent, can predict with any degree of accuracy whether the next century belongs to the new Europe or the Pacific Rim). She is coolly oblivious to the drama unfolding down here in the kitchen. You seek to distract the child. “Let’s check with mom, cherry popsicle. Meanwhile, why don’t you practise some composition?” The child is currently undertaking the score for an opera bouffe and appears to have a nice light touch. The chamber players, glancing over her shoulder at the computer screen, have more than once nodded their honest salt-and-pepper heads in approval.

  She says she prefers to finish the chess game you started last week. You want to concentrate, give it your best shot, but the queens knight, as you lower your hand to advance its pawn, flares its nostrils, snorting
steam hot enough to scald your fingertips.

  Your wife descends half an hour later, looking marvellously thin and fingering the buttons on her blouse.

  “Zöe,” she says, sitting down on the bottom stair and calling to her daughter. Every day the child has a new name but none of them stick, no name ever seems le nom juste. Now you are at the end of the alphabet and must start again. Tomorrow the child will be Amelia or Agnes or Andrea or Aphrodite. And she will react accordingly, trying on the name like a new swimsuit, squirming a little—sometimes in discomfort, sometimes in delight. Tamara was one she liked, but it made her a touch too dreamy for your tastes. Other names make her sweat, like Debbie. “I feel fat,” she had complained all day. And hadn’t her inner thighs rubbed together a little, her tiny OshKosh corduroys singing like crickets when she walked?

  Your wife unbuttons her blouse and the child settles herself into her mothers lap. The child has lost two of her milk teeth already and has grown a snaggletooth. So it was decided last month that braces were in order. The child’s smile will be beautiful, but your wife’s breasts are a mess of scrapes and hard-blooming bruises. You’ve discussed weaning the child, but not with any real conviction. You both know that nothing is as good for a child as mother’s milk, and nothing is too good for the child. And besides, it keeps your wife’s breasts large and the rest of her body thin, which pleases you both.

  There was a time, not so long ago, when the space between the two of you was large and growing. At first the size of an audible sigh, then an American-style football field, it became, over the course of a few years, a tundra of migrating caribou which, viewed from above through the window of a turbulent single-engine, resembled a swift, dirty river, but from up close thundered by so loud and hard your heart almost stopped. Now the space between you is the size and shape of one small child, a not unbridgeable distance. For there is always the child to consider. The things it would know. The things it might choose to imagine.

  All night long, you and your wife discuss this pajama thing in hushed tones, in hushed Latvian tones, as that is the only language, living or dead, that your child has yet to master. Unaware of what is at stake, the child has various feng shui manuals opened up on the living-room rug and is carefully rearranging the furniture in order to maximize the flow of positive ch’l. Every so often she implores you to help her drag the Eames chair or the

  Nienkämper couch to another location. She’s so small and determined that it almost cracks you in two. The various objects, lined up on the mantel, look anxious.

  The tired eyes of your wife are a holy purple—like the cloths draped over statues in churches at Easter—and tissue-paper thin. Its true that none of you have slept since the night the child was a giddy blue line in the home pregnancy kit—some four years, eleven months, twenty-three days and six hours ago. A blue line wavering like a mirage that you and your wife regarded together as you sat on the cold edge of the tub and she on the toilet seat, both electrocuted with joy. Its true that you have pouches under your own eyes the size and heft of a kilo of coke and that the skin over your skull feels like Saran Wrap pulled tight and airless. Sometimes, sitting at your desk at work, you’ll jerk violently as if breaking a fall, much like you used to do in your sleep, but you won’t be sleeping. On the Burrard SkyTrain platform you’ve visualized jumping, a quick belly flop onto the tracks, just to relieve the pressure in your head. It’s true that the child’s eyes are so wide sometimes and so glassy that they look like they might just pop out and land in the soup.

  The doorbell rings. Your wife yelps, even though the visit isn’t unexpected. “I actually yelped,” she says, forcing a laugh, because the child now looks worried. It’s not all the moonlighting you both do that your wife minds, but this. Guys named Dougie and Chin coming to the back door with envelopes of money at 4:00 A.M.You get up, your knees popping stiffly, and go take the package out of the hall linen closet where its shoved in behind the Christmas table runner, a porridge of guilt assembling in your gut. Your wife folds and unfolds the cuff of her blouse. The child is on tiptoes, reaching for the stars, her whole body vibrating like piano wire.

  In the suburbs outside of Tokyo, just across the ocean, the next day’s sun is already shining and schoolchildren rain from the sky, their smart little backpacks like parachutes that won’t open. They spill off balconies like thread unspooling. They slip through your fingers. They land in your coffee, jangling your nerves.

  The child is kneeling on the front windowsill when you get back, looking out into the darkness, silently working her way through the periodic table, her sweet milk breath misting the glass as she mouths the names of the chemicals. The chamber players play Prokofiev’s string quartet no. 1 in B minor, music so discordant yet compelling it occurs to you that it could only have come to him in a sea-pitched dream. Your wife folds and unfolds the cuff of her blouse. The door of the hall closet is ajar.

  The child turns her head and says, in a voice on tiptoes, vibrating like piano wire, “Radon, a radioactive, gaseous, chemical element formed, together with alpha rays, as a first product in the atomic disintegration of radium: symbol, Rn; at. wt., 222.00; at. no., 86; sp. gr., 973 g/1; melt pt., -71° C; boil. pt., -68° C.”

  The music folds and unfolds.

  Tomorrow, you and your wife just might send the child out with the nanny to find some pajamas.

  And tomorrow night, tomorrow night you might turn out the lights, and with your wife pressed to your stomach in one of your old T-shirts, sore breasts leaking, and with you naked because you’re always so hot, and with your daughter in her new pajamas (my jammies, she’ll call them, already one step ahead of you), all three of you will close your eyes and try very hard to sleep. Just as a lark. To see what it’s like.

  A child, after all, must be resilient enough to take any curveball life throws at it. But a terrible fear stalks the neighbourhood of your heart, as you think you may be unleashing a force you can’t control, some yet undiscovered monster.

  Odds that,

  all things

  considered, she’d someday

  be happy

  “But thank God for all those turns in my life,

  even the bad ones—maybe especially the bad ones.”

  —Roman Polanski, The New Yorker, December 5, 1994

  PROLOGUE

  The former teen terrorist, sitting on the back porch—which isn’t really a back porch as such, but a fire escape overlooking an alley lined with three-foot fennel gone to seed, the deranged beauty of panic weed bursting through a seam in the pavement, graffiti-splattered garbage cans, some so dented by angry ex-boyfriends behind the wheels of circa 1981 Camaros that they look doubled over from a sucker punch (as well as blue boxes heaped with wine bottles, Costco-size Prego jars, and empty four-litre plastic milk jugs because these buildings backing onto the alley house many growing, fatherless children, two of whom wobble by below on second-hand in-line skates pushing at each other and yelling, “Don’t be such a fag!”)—her bare feet up on the hot metal railing, the two elongated second toes (index toes?) humped like camels from the time, years ago when she was still afflicted with caring what people thought, she bought a pair of Frye boots a full size too small, but on sale, and permanently reconfigured her feet between which now, framed in a V and shimmering in the Indian-summer heat, she can see Tibetan prayer flags flutter across the alley on the clothesline of a fuzzy-haired young couple just back from a trek in Nepal, her ringless fingers peeling an orange, the juice spraying lightly across her bare knees, beading them like small gems, finds herself thinking that life couldn’t possibly be better.

  At this very moment, the girl trekker, the sturdier and fuzzier of the pair (the boy is the one with the delicate frame and high cheekbones, the one who gets propositioned by both men and women outside Yaletown clubs while his patchouli-scented girlfriend studies maps at their seed-strewn kitchen table planning their next escape, the Dalai Lama looking impishly down on her from a steam-wrinkled calendar on the
wall) steps outside onto her own porch but not porch. With a moon-glow expression, she pitches a rinsed-out tahini sauce bottle in a perfect arc into a blue box below where it explodes with that always teeth-wrenching shatter of glass on glass.

  The former teen terrorists hands spring involuntarily to her ears. Orange squelches against her temple, already matted with sweat, and juice drips down the back of her right ear and along her neck. Like a thin trickle of blood, she can’t help but think. Like blood you don’t notice until later when you’re taking off your shirt and wondering what all that pink around the neckline is before stuffing it, along with all your other clothes from that night, into a garbage bag.

  Her ears, they won’t stop ringing. Through the heavy curtains of heat, through the very weight of the dazzling light, the sound comes to her as if from under water, and it takes a while before she realizes it’s the telephone.

  I. HERSELF

  Herself doing cartwheels across the lawn. The whole world standing by the peony bush applauding. She’s so quick her tiny hands and feet ignite small fires, tufts of flame in the grass, while her audience oohs and aahs. “Thank you, thank you very much,” she says, lowering her upside-down voice like radio Elvis, “Thank you, thankyouverymuch.” Fireworks go off overhead, spelling out her name. She curls her lip as if she doesn’t care.

  Later, at supper, her mother says, “Sit still, pussycat.”

  Never, never, never.

  Tomorrow, before her mother’s even up, herself will cartwheel all the way to somewhere, maybe Nashville, maybe even Gay Paree.

  “This place is deadsville,” she says, something she heard her kindergarten teacher’s hippie boyfriend say. He made boobs on the little Paki kids plasticine rabbit (with nipples!) and the whole class went berserk right there in the basement of St. Matthews United Church. Except herself, who kept her cool. Her mother laughs.