They say it only took a second, but when you’re in the middle of the vortex time really does stand still. The pressed meat unfurled from the spit, almost elegantly, with a kind of balletic grace. Bottles of hot sauce heaved, then spewed upwards like small volcanoes. A broom waltzed across the floor. Elliott the cat spun end over end overhead as if tumbling around in an industrial-strength dryer. And for the first and last time while I was alive, I thought about the kid. Before that I couldn’t imagine it as anything much more than a jelly bean once the candy-coating had been sucked off. This translucent kidney bean of snarled DNA wedged somewhere above my coiled intestines, this thing that could destroy me. As Tony’s burst into flame, I thought… maybe the kid’d be cute, smell of oven-fresh buns, as they say. Maybe I once did, too. Maybe there was a moment when my mother bent to sniff the top of my head and tears filled the corners of her mouth (sharply, as they say) because she caught a whiff of possibility from the milky sweat of my scalp.
Maybe Enzo would’ve liked his kid, maybe it would’ve had a chance. It was Enzo that was supposed to find me when he opened up in the morning, his dopey Sly Stallone eyes opening wide, lids pressing up against gravity, his little mouth saying, “Noooooooo!” as his whole crummy world collapsed all around him.
When your dead love hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore!
They always realize too late that they actually loved you.
My tongue, that fat slug that snapped back like a window blind to block my throat every time I slid from my desk and rattled around on the floor—voodoo curse, epilepsy—scaring the shit out of everyone while the teacher struggled with a ruler to separate my tongue from my throat, scraping the skin off the roof of my mouth, skin that later hung like tattered cobwebs and that I loved to worry with the tip of that same tongue until I couldn’t stand it any more and tore the strips off and ate them, that same tongue is now quicksilver—skywriting, bronc-busting, slipping into your bed, tasting everything first, the small blue spot you see on your television screen before the picture snuffs out completely.
Being martyred is a class act.
I’m supposed to be wise now, like a genie or something. Grant you three wishes, that kind of thing.
Tell you what. When that statue of me and Elliott goes up in Stanley Park near Lumberman’s Arch, you’re welcome to come and kiss my shiny bronze ass. Then see what happens.
V. HER APPEARANCE
A P.A. is attaching Dot’s wireless mike backstage when Lucy is brought over to meet her. Dot is surprised to find Lucy so plain, she’d remembered the teen terrorists mother as a handsome woman from the trial. And all that grey, in this day and age when, if you can’t afford to go to a salon, all you need is five minutes, a bathroom sink, and a pair of rubber gloves.
Lucy is surprised as well. Not a day has gone by over the past ten years when she hasn’t found her hands shaking so uncontrollably she could barely punch a few numbers accurately into a calculator without the aid of beta blockers. But today, of all days, not a tremor. She could pluck a pin off a slippery linoleum floor, conduct brain surgery, skin a flea.
The former teen terrorist is surprised to find herself there at all, sitting high up in the packed temporary bleachers near the back of the studio with the overflow audience, sunglasses on, a baseball cap pulled low over her forehead, watching the still empty set. The ads said her mother would be there. The ads said she would be there, even after she’d said no, absolutely not, piss off. She smiles to think what fools these TV people are to assume she’d show up after all and parade, contrite, in front of their cameras. Did they think they’d just flush her out like some kind of grouse?
Dot walks onto the set. The show’s theme music starts up and mushroom clouds explode across the expanse of multiple video screens spelling out Dot!
The pancake makeup on Lucy’s face feels like a mask. She blinks her eyes and wiggles her lips just to make sure she’s still real.
The two women on either side of the former teen terrorist, wearing ski jackets and dress pants, hoot and holler and stamp their feet. She can feel the bleacher rumbling under the soles of her shoes.
The producer, her bangs longer now, fluffier, sings into Dot’s earpiece from the control booth, Meow meow meow!
A face appears on the video screens. Multiple beatific Glorias. The twice-platinum girl-power singer, hair held off her face with tiny, plastic duck barrettes, sings “Feline Spirit.” A cluster of sad-mouthed young women in the audience, dressed in long India-cotton skirts with Guatemalan scarves looped around their necks entwine fingers and sway back and forth, singing along to the chorus.
Dot looks up at the sunny, smiling blonde teen on the video screens and the lump in her throat feels unaccountably real.
Lucy, watching on a monitor off-set, shuts her lids over her burning eyes.
The former teen terrorist watches with disbelief from behind her dark glasses as she looks into her own face, her own high school photo, projected on the screens above the set, with the name Gloria scrawled underneath.
Dot hugs Lucy. The audience applauds. Like Lennon’s auntie hugging Chapman’s mom, a newspaper reporter stage-whispers to another, then writes this down. Dot throws to a commercial for Purina Cat Chow. The audience, prompted by an androgynous teenager wearing a Cat in the Hat T-shirt, sings the chorus from “Feline Spirit” again. Waiting in the green room, the man with the plastic disc in his head thinks he’s finally tuned in to the right station.
The audience is hushed as Dot announces the former teen terrorist. They want to see her forgiven—and they don’t. They don’t know. A young woman with poor posture, head hanging, dark hair covering her eyes, makes her way on to the set. She drops to her knees in front of Dot and Lucy and the man with the disc in his head. Dot urges her to stand up and then wraps her arms around her in a full embrace. The audience goes wild, whistling, clapping, stamping their feet like a drum roll. From her place high in the bleachers, the former teen terrorist numbly watches as this dumpy actress who looks nothing like her is forgiven. The producer watches the ratings visibly swell and soar.
Lucy daydreams of a child, born perfect, glistening like a rainbow trout.
While still hugging the penitent to her breast, Dot closes her eyes and lets the applause wash over her. Purging her.
But if anyone dared ask, say a someone at a book signing while she held her Waterford mid Dot!, or a curious seamstress with a mouth full of pins kneeling at her feet while she was trying on an outfit at Boboli for the annual Black & White fundraiser at the Vancouver Art Gallery, or, yes, another mother right here in the studio, if that someone, looked right into her eyes and asked the question, the only real question, the Frank Capra question: If you could have your daughter alive again and everything went back to the way it was before… the mother of the victim, this Dorothy who’s now a Dot, who’s five sizes smaller and who feels so alive, alive in her electrifying sadness and her Italian leather shoes, would open her mouth to answer, but instead of words something else would come out. A small bat, blind under the studio lights, swooping in drunken helixes back and forth overhead while everyone screams and runs for cover, their fingers splayed wide over their hair.
acknowledgements
I am indebted to the now sadly defunct Explorations Program of the Canada Council and Richard Holden, wherever he may be; The New Quarterly for being first; and Keith Maillard and Linda Svendsen. Big thanks to Caroline Adderson, Roxanna Bikadoroff, Peter Eastwood, Anne Fleming, Jillian Hull, Murray (phone buddy) Logan, Shelley MacDonald, Maureen Medved, Shannon Stewart, and Shelley Youngblut for expansive hearts and minds. Very special thanks to Patty Jones for her particular brand of cunning, and to Ginny Ratsoy, Jim Satterthwaite, Allison Sullings, Dianna Symonds, and my mother, Irma Varadi, for never doubting writers matter; and, above all, to my editor, Patrick Crean, for Perkinsesque patience, enthusiasm, wisdom & cheer beyond the call of duty. And, of course, of course, there is John Dippong, my alpha and omega.
&n
bsp; AN ANCHOR ORIGINAL, JUNE 2000
Copyright © 1999 by Zsuzsi Gartner
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in paperback
in Canada by Key Porter Books Limited, Toronto, in 1999.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Some of these stories have been previously published, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “How to Survive in the Bush” in Saturday Night; “The Tragedy of Premature Death Among Geniuses” in Prairie Fire: “The Nature of Pure Evil” in Western Living and in Vital Signs:
New Canadian Women Writers (Oberon Press, 1997).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data on file.
eISBN: 978-0-307-48129-0
www.anchorbooks.com
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