All the Anxious Girls on Earth (13 page)

Try not to be embarrassed when the woman from the Label Clippers store shakes you awake and flags you a cab. Brush slivers of glass nonchalantly from your jeans with a crumpled chocolate bar wrapper.

Back at work, several miles away, the windows are intact. The glass on the picture of Pamela, tucked away in your mail slot, has a hairline fracture, invisible to the human eye.

Week Eight: Resist the temptation towards melancholy. This will be difficult, but not impossible. Very difficult, but not quite impossible. Okay, formidable. But you’re a big girl with lots of outer defences. A regular rhino skin. Ex-Catholic, ex-virgin, ex-dreamer, ex-fighter pilot. All these exes make for great epidermis.
You have grown somewhat preoccupied by death in these waning days of summer. Your childhood best friends mother dies of a disease she shouldn’t have had. Lung cancer. A woman who’s never smoked a cigarette in her life. Must have been from all those chemicals she was breathing in all those years of cleaning other peoples toilets, your mother tells you. You never knew. She lived in a beautiful big house in a leafy subdivision with her husband and three children. A Fisher-Price life. An immigrants dream. She could afford to have someone come and scrub her own toilet, stick their head in her Jenn-Air. You find yourself in a parking lot outside the Arts Club Lounge on Granville Island howling at the cloud-shrouded moon.

Your soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend says: “Get up. You’re drunk.” Which is somewhat true.

Tell him: “This is true grief. I’m howling at the moon to mourn, okay?”

These are full-blown werewolfian howls. Your throat aches and you fully expect thick hairs to sprout from the backs of your hands. You later wonder how you got those little bits of gravel embedded in your knees.

Your eyes glow green when you cry this much and the next day you walk the streets with alien orbs, chewing over the mutability of human life, wondering why the rocks that spin out from under the rear wheels of cabs accelerating too quickly at intersections don’t puncture veins in fragile necks—the fragile necks of those you love and your own fragile neck in particular—forgetting that rim pigs don’t cry You pass the Sweet Marie Variety
and through the window you see the owner’s little girl—the one with the deadly straight bangs—sitting on the counter by the cash register, trying to balance a spoon on her nose. You want to tell her to keep practising because life is the ultimate balancing act.

Mouth advice at her through the glass: Don’t eat yellow snow. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Don’t clean other peoples toilets. And don’t mess around with Jim. Somehow this makes you feel better.

During the night, at work, things are easier. But during the day, death lurks in every corner of your dreams. A friend comes out of the shadows at twilight in a green Austin Mini to pick lilacs from your garden for her eighty-five-year-old father—to bring him back from confused anger to gentle lucidity. She doesn’t tell you this. You just know. He rages in your closet, garbled animal noises. You can’t make out what he’s saying, but you know he wants to die. You clip the lilacs like big clumps of grapes and your friend leaves with an armful, their smell sweetly sickening. You wake up to the crackle of foil and the whoop of a car alarm from up the street somewhere.

Phone your mother long-distance every day, twice a day sometimes—just to say hi—until she asks, “What are you, nuts?”

Across the alley, the staple-gun guys are oddly silent. No show tunes, no rat-a-tat-tat. And its 2:00
P.M.
, past their lunchtime and well into the most cacophonous part of
the day. You wonder if the house is done, ready to receive its owners, bright young things with lots of money who will sleep peacefully under exquisite percale sheets—240 threads per inch—on the former post-apocalyptic playground. Look out your kitchen window just in time to witness a terrifying sight. One of the men, the youngest—honestly, he couldn’t be more than sixteen—is standing on the newly finished chimney, arms extended. You can’t see his face, but you can see the sharp little shoulder blades sticking out of his sweaty back like the beginnings of wings. He sways a little. One man carefully straddles the roof, holding his right arm out to the boy, saying something soothing that you can’t quite hear, while the rest wait on the ground. You notice that the sky behind them drips like molten lead, clouds churn, fingertips touch in chiaroscuro light, thunder claps—applause from on high for a moment brought to you by Michelangelo.

Say: Whew, its just a dream.

Say (trying not to sound clichéd): But it seemed so real.

Say—

Just then the man trying to save the boy slips, sending cedar shakes into the air, and a man on the ground, who looks like he could be his brother, screams, “Tony!” in a way that is anything but dreamlike.

Week Nine: Realize that this is more careening than careering.
The photograph, of a skinny man in a cheap cardigan, is the kind of thing you’ve been trying to avoid. You’ve been doing the unthinkable—cherry-picking—and you haven’t been caught yet. You’ve been deft, but you’ve mostly been lucky. A sleepy item on Senate reform; a quirky tidbit on virtual spelunking (Caving for Claustrophobics!); a gushy feature on the reunion of twin sisters separated for forty-five years who find each other through a recipe club specializing in marshmallow dishes—a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, brought to you by Kraft. Those are the kinds of things you can handle. But here it is, the first thing you grab, a face, the face of Matias Zupan, grieving Slovenian father, a face that speaks for the wounded. Matias Zupan, a bony fellow of indeterminate age in a cheap cardigan, a garment so unlike a decent sweater that you have to wonder where it came from. Perhaps it was sent by a harried relation—a guilt-ridden second cousin? younger brother?—who’s now in Hamilton. He saw the writing on the wall and left the day after Tito died and now is successful enough with his dry-cleaning business? janitorial service? pizza joint? to be able to send pillowcases full of clothes from Honest Ed’s to those he left behind. But trying to make a story of it, making light, doesn’t change anything. Matias Zupan, in a carefully knotted tie, contorts his face in anguish. He is held up by two other men at a graveside, his toes, in old Adidas, barely skimming the ground. You slip it under the newspaper on your desk, this obscene portrait of grief, but not before touching the tip of your pinkie finger to the man’s
lips. Overhead, the fluorescent lights sing. One tube flickers, then pops.

There’s a telephone call for you way across the room, at the entertainment desk for some reason. It can’t be your soon-to-be-ex since he knows which number to call. Your heart tumbles around like a crazed acrobat as you cross the newsroom in slow motion, wondering why the worst phone calls come in the middle of the night.

It’s your mother. You ask what’s happened, your nerves jangling.

She says: “I’m just calling to say hi.”

You don’t respond.

She laughs: “Hi, hi, hi!”

She says: “It’s about your father.”

But your father, and this is a fact, has been dead for seventeen years.

Back at your desk which is not really
your
desk, someone’s moved the newspaper and the photograph of the skinny man at his son’s graveside lies exposed at your elbow. His pants are so sharply ironed that you can see the fine crease even in this poor wire copy. Did his wife cry as she ironed them? Are the tears pressed into the slacks? Did she iron to erase the ache in her heart? You know that under the same circumstances you couldn’t iron. You couldn’t plug it in. You couldn’t get the crease just so. You can’t even iron under the best circumstances. The tears charge forward, undammed, damned, unstoppable. They shoot from your fingertips and pour from your ears.

As the ground drops away, you crawl into Matias Zupan’s mouth, so wide and welcoming in its grief. All of you fits easily inside the cavity of his body. Here in the dark it feels good to lie quietly for long minutes, listening to his breath and yours, trying to get your breathing in sync with his, but you’re always a little off. As if his is the real thing and yours just the echo. Light a candle and look around. His rib cage gleams in the flamelight. Its stunningly fragile and beautiful, like forbidden ivory. You’re the ship in the ship in the bottle. Run your tongue over his ribs. They taste like tar.

After that, just sit and watch the wax drip onto your hand and listen to the fluorescent lights out there, somewhere overhead, faintly sizzle and hiss.

H
edy reaches for the telephone to make another bomb threat. In minutes, from the corner windows of this office on the nineteenth floor of the TD Tower, she will see people empty like ants from the art gallery across the way. Last week it was her own building, the week before an entire city block—including the Hotel Georgia, Albear Jewellers and the Nightcourt Pub—and before that the Four Seasons Hotel. She knows it’s illegal, but has convinced herself that its not wrong, nor even harmful. Its a disruption of commerce, nothing more. Even the city gallery, with its reproductions shop and elegant little cafe, is a place of commerce. Hedy is like Jesus in the temple, screaming, “Get out!”

Only, Jesus most likely wasn’t seized with mirth after ordering the people out of the temple. Although Hedy’s
major acquaintance with the Saviour is not by way of the Bible, but through the rock opera
Jesus Christ Superstar
, she can well imagine that Jesus didn’t shake with uncontrollable laughter after knocking over tables of dovecotes and chasing the money-changers and their customers into the street. And what would Jesus think of the temples of today anyway, some of them as violently rococo as the court of the Sun King, shamelessly passing their gilded collection plates at every opportunity? Her next target would be Christ Church Cathedral, no question about it.

Hedy has to admit that her original impetus for disrupting daily commerce had not been half so noble as Jesus’s. His was the sanctity of prayer. Hers was Stanley.

Hedy ironed the pleats of Stanleys white tuxedo shirt as he stood in the kitchen alcove in his undershirt, shaking Nuts ‘n Bolts into his mouth from the box and trying not to get any onto his freshly creased tuxedo pants. Hedy lifted the iron and it hissed like a small dragon. She pressed it down one more time. Stanley came over and traced her spine lightly with his hand. “That’s perfect, honey. Bang-on job.”

After Hedy helped adjust Stanley’s bow tie, she asked him one more time, “So how come I don’t get to come to this wedding with you?”

“Aw, Hedy, come on. Don’t start with that again.”

“I’m not starting with anything. It just seems funny.”

Stanley shrugged. “I told you, I’m the only one invited.”

“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?