All the Anxious Girls on Earth (16 page)

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.

T
he 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.

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.

She considers showing her mother the tattoo of her teachers boyfriends (soon to be
hers)
initials on her belly. She’s penned them on backwards so that she can read them in the mirror.

A little trick she picked up in Shanghai.

Herself—variously known as Panda Bear, pussycat, Miss Molly (as in Good Golly!), Katy Kadiddle, just plain Kate, and Katherine
(Kawtheryn
by her piano teacher who has come from England and personally knows the Queen)—has seen a dead man.

At her recital she plays “Für Elise” with real feeling, knowing that having seen a dead man has changed her forever. The clapping is thunderous, so to show her emotion she bursts into tears. The audience, all the other Royal Conservatory students parents, can’t believe how sensitive she is and they clap even more loudly until she can see there’s a danger the roof of this small auditorium might cave in on them. Under her teachers arm, a chihuahua shivers uncontrollably, its eyes wet and bulging.

Herself on the stage bowing. Not the same girl she was yesterday.

The dead man was lying in the field just outside the barracks at the end of her street, past where the city workers were laying tar on the road. A wasp hovered
around the rim of his ear. It was disappointing that he had all his clothes on. She toed his crotch with her bare, tar-caked feet. She pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, smelled the leather, thought she could almost smell something else, distributed the money, just some coins, into the three pockets of her smock top. She sat and stared at him, the longish hairs that hung from his nostrils, the sweat slicked across his forehead, something in the corner of his mouth (a fleck of burnt toast?), and then put a rock across his ear (oh yes!), trapping the wasp.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” The dead man shot up, darkening the sky.

She ran so fast the road smoked under her feet.

So that’s what it’s like to raise a man from the dead.

Jesus fucking Christ. The words like chocolate-covered cherries in her mouth.

Herself slips a leather barrette into her pocket at The Bay downtown while her mother looks at nylons. The barrette has two holes and a sharp wooden stick to hold her hair in place. It will look great with her new peasant blouse. She already has half a dozen of these things at home, all of them presents from other girls for her tenth birthday last month.

Her mother picks out a pair of two-for-one pantyhose with reinforced toes.

“Those are for old ladies,” she tells her mother. “You’ll never get a date.” She sighs and smiles the crooked smile she knows tightens the crown of thorns around her
mothers heart. She wants her mother to be sexy so they can dance together like sisters in the living room to “Waterloo,” licking at little squares of paper with Charles Manson’s face on them and blowing their minds while the neighbours watch from behind their curtains, stupid with jealousy, thinking “That Kate can really cook!”

A salesclerk hovers, his breath like hot-dog relish.

She stares at him, looks right into his little piggy eyes without blinking until he’s forced to look away.

Herself at the Ice Capades, the costumes so lush and skaters so spectacular her stomach churns and her limbs twitch. The audience is enraptured with a small, blonde, muscular girl with an enormous pink feather headdress who spins like a gyroscope while rows of elegant men fold over like dominoes in her wake. Herself finds the fingers of her right hand convulsing as if pumping a trigger, spraying bullets at the girl.

She stands up on her seat, number 32, row 12, section C, and sways, then crumples to the concrete floor, Coffee Crisp wrapper and spilled Fresca sticky under her cheek. The entire stadium shudders as her body hits the ground. At least a 4.5 on the Richter scale.

“She must have a fever,” her mother says, worried hand on her forehead.

They make way for her and her mother and a kindly man who helps support her stumbling through the parted, standing crowd.

The peacock on the ice forgotten. All eyes on her now.

Herself kneeling, heady from the incense and the thickness of the hymns and all that blood she’s losing, so pale now she is sure she positively glows, the cotton pad between her legs still so unfamiliar. In front of her the priest is waiting, communion wafer pinched between thumb and forefinger. She opens her mouth and before he can pull back his hand she traps his fìnger between her lips. Just because she can.

His skin rough and chalky, the fìnger filling more of her mouth than she thought it would. She narrows her eyes at his shock and her own and sucks hard.

The nail pressing up against the roof of her mouth, but gently, as he slowly pulls his fìnger out.

Her own spit glistening on the priests finger as he reaches for another host and turns from her.

There’s a whole row of kneeling people, eyes closed, softly perspiring. Herself, electric, grinning up at Jesus who may or may not care what’s going on.

Herself straightening the limbs of a severely palsied child. This is what all the girls are doing, volunteering with the retarded. It’s called citizenship.

The child lies on his back in a bed in a sour-scented room full of other narrow beds, his knees to his chest, his elbows by his ears, mouth twisted, spit coursing down his right cheek in a thin steady stream. She moves one of his thighs in a small circle at the pelvis, the way the nurse demonstrated, otherwise the leg could snap. She turns her head to the side, trying not to look at his face, or her gorge will rise. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the
child stretch his lips into what could be construed as a smile and his rocking increases in severity.

“Oh, look, he’s excited,” the nurse says, teasing her from the other side of the bed.

The boy has a hard-on.

“Well, he
is
sixteen and you’re a good-looking girl.” The nurse winks.

Sixteen, her age. She looks at the grimacing pretzel rocking on the bed and covers her mouth. Vomit creeps up her throat, she swallows it back. Control is everything.

There’s some screaming in the corridor and the nurse is off. She reaches for the boy, locking eyes with him, until he comes and groans and screws his eyes shut.

Not even looking at her
.

Herself at her desk, staring down at another A-plus, staring until her eyes cross. The teacher beaming at her from the front of the classroom with her large cracked mouth.

Only the second week of grade twelve and already the boredom’s a live animal crawling all over her skin, making her so twitchy she has to sit on her hands to keep from clawing herself bloody, jumping up, screaming,
Get it off, get it off get it off
. Over the intercom she hears her name:
herself, herself, herself
. All around her sit the dumb and the dead, oblivious, scratching hieroglyphics onto paper, doodling their own names, their epitaphs. Passing notes of limited ambitions.
So-and-so wants to fuck you
. The teacher straightening piles of paper on her desk, the concentration needed for this beading her forehead with sweat. The supreme
effort
of it all.

She needs to raise the dead, to blow something to kingdom come. When was the last time she’s heard a good burst of anything—fireworks, applause, a man shooting up to the sky, an explosion?

Her thumbnails—moons glowing, cuticles perfectly tamed—press into her palms so hard she breaks skin.

She raises a hand for permission to leave the room.

The teacher smiles benignly at her and nods, not noticing the thin crescent of blood. Her stigmata.

Herself playing with fire.

In an east-side squat she burns wood ticks off the rump of a part-golden retriever, part-something else. What she likes best is the smell of sulfur as she strikes match after match. Or the flame itself. Or the burnt head of the matchstick she crumbles between her fingers and rubs playfully onto the forehead of the guy beside her who sits in yoga position reading a book of collected Doonesbury comics.

Rubs it into the shape of a cross. “Ash Wednesday,” she jokes.

The yoga man was at an ashram near Benares. Now he sits and longs for Bodhisattva, this gaunt young satyagrahi.

The two other girls there, older than herself, are anarchists. Pissed off about everything and anything.

On the door of the squat they’ve spray-painted “EXPOtation” and “World’s Fair No Fair!” and “Meat is Murder!” They stomp around in new Doc Martens, leather creaking, talking loudly about what an idiot this guy they
used to like is working at McDonalds. Every so often one of them bends down to kiss the dog on the head.

Herself in her corner of the squat, still the A student, studying books by candlelight, all from the Britannia Library up the street:
The Poor Mans James Bond, Molotov & Other Cocktails, The Blaster’s Handbook
. One of the anarchists offers to lend her a shoplifting poncho, a pilly brown-and-white thing smelling of creosote and cumin. But she doesn’t need camouflage.

She’s the original Benday Dot girl. From far away, there she is, solid, bright, with a cartoon smile, bouncing along the street and you would swear that’s a tennis racket in her hand, a trophy under her arm, but the closer you get the more disembodied she seems until—hello? A little trick she picked up from a guy from Nazareth.

This way of disappearing right under people’s noses.

Herself with an action plan, standing on her grassy knoll, shifting her weight from one hip to the other.