All the Anxious Girls on Earth

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  The whole Vatican thing is just peeing up a wind tunnel, as her mother would’ve said. But there’s no denying Gloria has a following. That young singer, the one from the Maritimes who now lives in Vancouver and has a platinum record and some kind of girl-power concert tour, has even written a song about her: “Feline Spirit”—an atonal little number, in Dot’s opinion, but popular with teenaged girls who don’t shave their legs and wear thick woollen toques even in warm weather.

  Dot has no idea what she can possibly do on the show that would pack the right degree of emotional wallop, short of having Gloria rise from the dead and forgive her killer, live-to-tape right there in front of a studio audience. Her thumb, which is firmly circling her left instep, slowly comes to a stop. A cool mist, a mountain-fresh blast of an idea, wafts through her brain, tightening the skin over her skull as it grows. The idea hurls Dot, still in her stocking feet, down the hall towards the producer’s office.

  “The little kid last week with the sandwich was good, but I can’t believe he didn’t cry when the dead boy’s mother read that poem by her son. I almost cried,” Dot’s producer is telling someone over the phone. She motions for Dot to have a seat, then makes a little yap yap yap motion with her thumb and fingers and rolls her eyes. “Of course it wasn’t a great poem. He was what? Five? Can you hold a sec?” She glances up to see Dot still standing. “No, actually I gotta go.”

  She looks at Dot intensely. “Dot, honestly, what do you think of my bangs? Too long? Too short?” She palms her hair flat against her forehead so Dot can see the full effect and then sighs. “Who am I kidding? I’m too old for that Bettie Page shtick, unless I want to go for the aging-dominatrix look.” She’d been manic like this lately. Dot figured it was menopause, something Dot herself was trying to stave off with a pre-emptive strike—a full-frontal estrogen assault. She’d mainline estrogen until all her veins collapsed if it would help. She’d inject it under her toenails the way models did with heroin to avoid track marks.

  The producer loves the idea. She even claps her hands together like a delighted child. Dot will forgive her daughter’s killer, will envelop her in her now-famous-coast-to-coast embrace, with Gloria looking down on them from enormous screens. Multiple beatific Glorias. Of course, Dot has forgiven the teen terrorist, forgiven them all, as she’s often said on the show, but never in person, never in the flesh. The producer tells Dot she can already feel the ratings swell and soar, shooting right up through the stratosphere. Kleenex will be a sponsor. And just think of the cat food ads they’ll sell. Meow meow meow! She playfully rakes the air with invisible claws. Then she shakes her head. “But no one’s seen her for what? Almost eight years. Since she got out of juvie for good behaviour. She’s disappeared into thin air. The news people can’t even find her.”

  “No one disappears into thin air,” Dot says.

  She pauses in the producer’s doorway. “Too short,” she says. “Your bangs are too short. They make you look surprised all the time.”

  Her assistant is holding out the phone as Dot walks back into her office. “Our Lady of Sorrows. Guest sermon. The twenty-fifth.” The girl was always breathless, her eyes red-rimmed under black plastic cats-eye glasses with mica glittering across the top. At least once a week, Dot has to send her home in a cab when she looks in danger of short-circuiting. Dot takes the receiver with a secret sigh. The Catholics were becoming so demanding and they didn’t even pay as well as the Evangelicals, or sing as good either. “Yup, yup,” Dot says to the person at the other end of the phone, “okay, but you do realize I’m—” she puts her hand over the receiver and turns to her assistant. “Ecumenical,” the girl stage-whispers. “Ecumenical,” Dot says into the telephone, relieved that she hadn’t said, “economical” by mistake.

  “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain,” Dot trills as she hangs up.

  On cue, her assistant asks in a half-hearted sing-song, pointing the tip of her pen at Dot. “And where’s that blasted plain?” This is why Dot pays her the big bucks.

  “In Spain! In Spain!” Dot raises her arms. “In Spaaaain!”

  The fact that she’d practised that with marbles in her mouth was something nobody needed to know.

  If there was a moment when her world irrevocably turned from black and white to colour, if Dorothy could actually pinpoint it, she would have to say it was in the Mondi boutique on level three of the Holt Renfrew off Granville Street, while she was trying on a dress to wear for the premiere of “Dot!” on BCTV (before “Dot!” was syndicated and really took off) following the unprecedented success of her weekly Rogers Cable show. She’d never even dared enter the store before (T-shirts were three hundred bucks. T-shirts! That’d be for people with more money than brains.), and gliding up the escalator she felt like she was in Buckingham Palace. She thought maybe she should’ve bought a ticket just to be allowed a look-see. At the bottom of the escalator, an elegant girl with a black velvet bow in her hair had misted her wrist with perfume and as Dorothy rose above the glittering concourse the scent swirled around her like the sweet, alien breath of some fairy godmother.

  The saleswoman, who looked like she rode horses sidesaddle in her spare time, said, “I must say, that looks incredible with your skin tone.”

  Dorothy twirled in front of the three-way mirror, thinking the woman was just blowing sunshine up her arse. But she had to admit she couldn’t recognize herself.

  “Do you have this in any other colour?” she asked.

  “Zabaglione, persimmon, tamarind, and quince.”

  There were colours in the world she hadn’t even known existed and this woman—who, when you stopped to think about it, was just a clerk, right?—was reeling them off casually like she was reciting the alphabet.

  Gloria, Dorothy whispered, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore. Shocking herself that she was talking to her dead daughter. But then again, maybe not that much had changed. Gloria didn’t answer.

  The “Dot!” team is caught up in a debate over a promo for the Gloria! special which uses a bit of footage from the bombing of Hiroshima. (“My grandparents were put in an internment camp right here in B.C.,” says the associate producer, who Dot always assumed was Scottish. “Its a death-to-life thing,” the editor tells her in that patient tone used with four-year-olds while pulling on their socks, “a visual metaphor.”) One of the chase producers, who has spent weeks with the phone glued to her ear tracking down the former teen terrorist, appears in the doorway of the editing suite, her mouth opening and closing silently as if she was underwater gumming fish flakes. Finally, she blurts, “I found her!” The editor pauses the tape and everyone looks up.

  The chase producer is quiet for a moment, kneading her abdomen as if she has cramps. On the video monitor a puffy mushroom cloud is three-quarters through its transformation into the word Dot! “She says she doesn’t want to be forgiven.”

  She doesn’t want to be forgiven? All the women blink in the half-light—they’re all women here in this forgiveness business (surprise!)—and take it up as a mantra. She doesn’t want to he forgiven. Then, one by one, they look towards Dot, faces pinched into question marks, even the executive producer, a wisecracking TV veteran who got her start as the voice of a famously androgynous puppet on a long-running kids show.

  Is this what they call being up against the wall? These women, with all their B.A.S and M.A.S and phi beta cum laudy laudies have little imagination and even less faith,

  Dot thinks. They’ve never had to really work at anything. They’ve never had their stomachs stapled, their rent cheques bounce, daughters who left used Kotexes balled up under their beds for the cat to drag out and bat around the apartment, never had to handle bloody, leaking packages of meat for customers who would sooner spit at her than say, Gee thanks, never had people come up to them at bus stops, complete strangers, and tell them that if they just tried a little harder, used that old willpower, laid off the Timbits, they could get, well, you know—

  “I’ll for
give her skanky little butt whether she likes it or not,” Dot tells them, the long-dead Dorothy creeping into her voice. She starts giving orders, telling them to book the teen terrorist’s mother, the guy with the plate in his head, the man whose pacifist son burned to eventual death, the chorus line of Cats, now playing at the Ford Centre, that girl-power singer, who could perform her Gloria anthem. Maybe even one of those Three Tenors—Pavarotti, or Domingo, or that other guy—anyone could be had for a price. Why not?! My dad’s got a barn, let’s put on a show!

  The marrow in Dot’s bones thickens and she can feel the blood moving through her body, slamming in and out of the sluice gates of her heart. She’s clamped onto that circus wire with an iron jaw and she’ll keep hanging on, even if her teeth splinter and her gums shred, as high above her on a platform a handsome man in purple tights twirls her in tight circles until she’s nothing but a blur of airborne colour, and the crowd, though they’ve seen her do this a hundred times before, holds its breath.

  The trick is to keep your tongue away from the roof of your mouth.

  III. HER MOTHER

  You try with a child. You even strain their shit, pushing it through a sieve with the back of a spoon to make sure they’ve passed the marble they’ve swallowed in a fit of pique. You dress them up as gypsy fortunetellers, lady-bugs, and mermaids, sewing each sequin on by hand in the dampish 4 A.M. basement, so as not to spoil the surprise, so as to finish the damn thing in all its glory before making yet another Sanka and leaving for work, bags billowing under your eyes, nerves jitterbugging, phantom sequins scratching the back of your throat. But Lucy, as an actuary, as a woman whose profession it is to calculate risk, usually knows how to figure out the balance of probability in favour of something happening. The one risk she hadn’t calculated, though, were the odds that a child could strip-mine your heart.

  But what about the odds that in April 1965 a child will be born who is perfect, glistening like a rainbow trout, but with ears and fingers and toes and a potential for greatness that makes her father swell with a pride so large he can barely squeeze his hard hat back on after leaving the hospital called Holy Something, and that exactly four years to the day this child is born, this same father will tragically (later perversely recalled by the child as intentionally) stall his 1967 Valiant on the railway tracks he and his wife and the shiny child live on the right side of (thank God), and that in the aftermath of this indescribable mess, this psychic black hole, the mother decides that the life of the second child, another daughter (she feels it), the one no one yet knows of, will not be worth a copper penny, so that she proceeds accordingly but is never again without the sensation that a small animal is chewing a hole through her throat from the inside out?

  Or the odds that a mother wouldn’t notice that a child never sleeps, or notices but convinces herself that the girl is sleeping, eyes open wide, skin glowing in the moonlight like phosphorescence?

  Or the odds that when your teenage daughter jangles around the kitchen, trying to make herself understood, trying to tell you that she has no idea what it means to be happy, while you’re up to your elbows in suds, hands crabbing for cutlery in the sink, you’ll have the right answer to the question, “Why can’t I be up all the time? Why can’t I be on?”

  Or the odds that when the phone call comes you will keep thinking, despite the facts at hand, the evidence, as it’s called, that it’s your own daughter who’s dead, because then you can let yourself drop into the soft pocket of grief, whereas the truth has its undefinable ragged edges, its welcome-to-the-funhouse tilt that keeps you so off balance it’s hard to know if you’re coming or going—or gone? So off balance in fact that when the time comes you cant tell the requisite stories, the ones everyone expects to hear, the ones that begin: She wouldn’t hurt a fly…

  Then there are the odds, and these are far from slim, of dreaming night after night of a luminous girl with wide eyes, nerves wavering like tentacles above her head, then waking and always wondering, Which daughter is this? And waiting to be struck by lightning.

  IV. HER VICTIM

  What is there to say? There is the shade of this arbutus tree near where my ashes are scattered. Someone told my mother it would give my soul peace and she said, yeah okay, whatever. Its bark, the way it hangs down in spots all shaggy, brutish and short, resembles a haircut I once had. It hung down over my eyes, hiding a moonscape of pimples across my expansive, domed forehead. I could see everyone through my shag, but they couldn’t see me. I was the one who sat beside you sucking on my hair, shredding paper, my fingers spiky with hangnails, carving misspelled words into the skin of my arms till I bled.

  In life I could barely string a sentence together. In death I am eloquent. Now I write poetry in my head. Not just free verse, but everything from Spenserian sonnets and madrigals to neo-formalist villanelles. And you should see me on the uneven bars. Those anorexic little Romanian girls better watch out.

  I tell you. Death is great. Even my acne has cleared up.

  Death, the ultimate Ten-O-Six pad.

  When the reporters descended on Britannia High like members of the Canadian Airborne, everyone panicked. There were all those microphones and video cameras and pens poised over steno pads waiting to get the quotes that would get the shock waves going, start the tears flowing. I mean, what could they say? That I laughed like a hyena, that I always dropped the ball, that my breath knocked them flat on their backs, that I seemed forever to be dripping from one orifice or another? (I had some hobbies most normals wouldn’t approve of. I loved the taste and smell of myself, my own salty spew, my own jam, my personal cheese, the ongoing mystery of me.) So they had no choice, they made stuff up.

  A personality emerged, a social history, an innocent heart. Someone remembered that I sang, well, hummed under my breath, once maybe, perhaps for a second, could have been clearing my throat, could have been gagging on a potato chip, but soon I was an aspiring opera singer, a soprano who could break your heart, a Mimi, a Carmen, that guys could die of love for. It took a few days, maybe even a whole week, but old boyfriends finally began to appear, materializing out of nowhere like the ghost of Christmas yet to come. I was shy, a virgin even, but it seemed I had a gift for breaking hearts. One guy, his beautiful pouty mouth all chapped and cracked from a long summer of island tree planting, his tanned knees bursting from his jeans, appeared on “MuchWest” and told Terry David Mulligan my favourite song was something called “Rise Up!”—which I’d never even heard of. And then, his eyes filled with what looked to be real tears while Terry David Mulligan stared intently at his own ankle, his argyle-clad ankle crossed over his knee, as if to make sure it was still there. His ankle bone connected to his leg bone, his leg bone connected to his thigh bone, and so on and so on, marvelling at how connected he felt at that very moment to other people and to his very own self. Either that, or he was sadly unequipped to deal with watching another guy cry.

  People kept confusing our pictures, me and that preppy urban guerilla girl. They thought the sunny, smiling teen was the victim, while the sullen one with the bad skin who wouldn’t look at the camera was the junior terrorist. Even the newspapers did it, switching the cutlines as if trying to fix a case of mistaken identities.

  Two little girls from next door, the ones who used to call me Cousin It, tips of their tongues blue from licking Kool-Aid powder darting in and out gecko-style in my general direction, begged their mothers to take them to see where it had happened. They stood there at the edge of that small apocalypse, that sorry little pit, and threw their favourite stuffed animals in. By the following morning, the hole that’d once been Tony’s wholly mediocre Pizza & Donair was brimming with plush toys like a carnival stall. Sure, a few of the kids were encouraged to be unselfish by their parents, but if their reach didn’t exceed their grasp, what’s a parent for? (Carnies of the soul, forever crying out, “Step right up!” while all you want to do is pull the covers up over your head and sleep, breathing in your own musty fug, gathering yo
ur strength like a dust bunny gathers fur.) And you never did know whose Kirsten or Jason just might appear on page three the next day, or on the six o’clock news that very night.

  Oh, those heady days of Hallmark moments, kaleidoscope of love. And small miracles. The dirt from the pit made a deep-cleansing, cruelty-free facial mask and cured anxiety. Crocuses pushed their crowns through the ground five months early while cardboard jack-o’-lanterns still grinned from store windows. The lights along Venables turned green in succession at exactly the right moment Drivers became believers.

  All this fuss because of a cat. A cat by the name of Elliott who didn’t really belong to anyone, but who Tony and his half-wit brother Enzo let gnaw on leathery curls of pepperoni or donair meat shavings that fell to the floor in return for tussling with mice and the occasional Norwegian rat. A mercenary who, when you really think about it, had a better life than mine, who had no greater measure than his own nature to contend with, and whose tail I’d stepped on more than once just to let him know that I knew that he knew this too.

  What, then, was I doing there that time of night? My head in the pizza oven in some weak approximation of Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar ringing through my head. I had to sit on a stool and stick my head in up to the shoulder. It wasn’t until my skin started to bubble up and I realized I wasn’t dead that I knew what a true screw-up I was right to the end. It wasn’t even a gas oven. (It wasn’t even a gas oven. This repeats over and over in my mind like a punchline that takes too long to get.) I was screaming and pressing ice cubes from the pop machine to my ear when the explosion came.