All the Anxious Girls on Earth (17 page)

The anarchists are easy enough to convince, although they want to know: why Tony’s Pizza & Donair, and not McDonald’s? Herself on her toes, reeling them in like eager trout.
Think globally, act locally
. Besides, there’s no security at Tony’s, it’s smaller, closes earlier,
and
the owner keeps a Playboy calendar behind the counter.
Sexist pig!
They pace around impatiently, kicking at the walls, looking to her for direction.

All the yoga man has to do is drive the getaway car. “What car?” one of the anarchists asks. Herself buzzing now, already jumping into the burgundy Toyota Cressida
with a maple leaf-shaped cardboard air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror that she’s seen parked outside the Peter Pan Daycare—day after day at 3:30
P.M.
, key in the ignition, running—and roaring away from the building that’s about to blow.

He shakes his head weakly,
no
. He hasn’t eaten for eight days to protest some injustice she can’t recall. The anarchists, they cant
stop
eating. Being angry just burns up so much energy. They pounce on anything she brings home, only stopping to ask if it has meat in it. She always says no, no meat, of course. A few days ago they ate a couple of jet-hot curried Jamaican patties with ground beef and peas. “With meat substitutes this good,” one of them exclaimed, “people only continue to kill animals because were all just so conditioned by the military industrial complex.”

In the middle of the night, she pulls at the divine boys thin toes. Separates each one gently from the rest and wiggles it. “You can pretend you’re a taxi,” she says, her voice threading his ear, “just cruising along looking for one last fare.”

“It just doesn’t seem very pacifist,” he says. “I’ve been trying really hard.

“But I can’t drive,” he finally tells her after she scrambles over him, tattooing his limbs with her mouth.

Herself crashing through the brush near Squamish with her swami while helicopters rattle by so low overhead they flatten the treetops. His hand, which she grips, is remarkably dry; his thin, diaper-like pants billow out,
catching in the branches, and they stumble, slipping to the ground on wet pine cones. “What have we done?” he breathes, almost crying, as megaphones thunder their garbled names across the sky. Her nose is up against his neck, and caught in the crosshairs of her vision are a spray of birthmarks that spell out her name.

“You are a lovely boy,” she whispers.

The one true thing she has ever said.

Only this is a dream.

Just one week later he will be a human potato chip, lying on oiled plastic sheets at St. Paul’s so no more skin will peel off, the machinery whirring all around him determined to keep him alive so that he might face the music, this silver-tongued Svengali, as the news reports will call him, with no lips left with which to tell his story.

This part is not a dream.

Herself alone on the street in the leaky silence between the explosion and the sirens, the streetlights shattered, casting no shadow.

Getting up from where she’s been thrown to the ground and running, her own footsteps echoing in the hollow of her throat.

The car, empty childseat in the back, entombed in a woof of heat, sealed tight, skinny man’s hands gripping the wheel at ten and two o’clock, just the way he’d been taught by her that afternoon. Foot forgetting which pedal was the gas.

Herself at her trial, remembering to sit up straight, breathe slowly through her nose. She’s sure she’s never felt more controlled, more in charge of herself, than at this moment when her name is on everyone’s lips. A thin whisper. Like a consecrated host.

The two anarchist girls—who had chickened out at the last minute, forcing her to go into the all-night store at the corner of Venables for a pack of matches that the woman actually made her pay for because she wasn’t buying anything else—can’t look at her. That elephant-sized woman, the mother of the girl who died in the blast, who is drawing attention away from herself with her undignified, spasmodic weeping, just won’t
stop
looking at her. Peeling the skin from her bones with her big watery eyes.

But her own mother won’t even look at her.

This is how she thinks she’ll remember her mother years from now: frozen-faced, in profile, defeated by bad odds. Her mother, stuck in a time warp in front of a big, industrial-strength adding machine that shudders on her desk as she bangs in numbers that print out on a tight, seemingly endless roll of white paper. The paper curls onto the edge of the desk in a quivering mound before tumbling onto the floor. Her mother, bent over, tongue running back and forth in concentration across already receding lower gums, trying to determine the odds that her daughter is alive and well, the odds that she’d ever see her again, the odds that, all things considered, she’d someday be happy.

Just before throwing to a Saturn commercial, Dot says, “Remember, the world won’t heal unless we do.” Her tag line. She waves her hand, “See you tomorrow.” Her smile cracks the crust of her face. The red lights on cameras one and two blink off.

“Dorothy,” someone calls from the studio audience. Dot’s smile peels back off her teeth as she peers into the stands. Someone from the old days—everyone calls her Dot now, or rather, “Dot!” a tiny perfect name for the tiny perfect talk-show host she has become. There’s one at almost every taping. People way back from high school days in Haney mothers of old boyfriends, customers from the Broadway Supervalu, her former boss. Him she wanted down on his hands and knees, pants down around his ankles, a flaming whip in her hand smartly snapping the air as she pressed the heel of her cream-coloured Ferragamo pump slowly into his right eye. Instead, she opened her arms wide (the same arms that had held disgraced politicians, wife beaters, tree spikers, pimps, arsonists, dealers, fraud artists, clear-cutters, a former leader of the Aryan Nations, a triad member, and a Catholic bishop who had liked native girls a little too much) while he stood there nervously picking at his teeth with an expired lotto ticket until his beaming wife gave him a shove right into Dot’s embrace. No meat-locker boner this time, pal? Dot thought. Whassamattah, cat got your Oscar Mayers? By the time she’d released him his fear smelled winegum sour.

“Dorothy Hay.” In front of her stood one of Glorias old high-school teachers, a tall woman Dot remembers as a nervous Nellie, her fingertips continually smoothing her throat as she spoke. This woman had once implied that Gloria might well be a little retarded. She hadn’t actually come out and said it. She used the lingo. Difficulty grasping simple concepts. No spatial skills. Inappropriate laughter. She suggested Gloria might be better off at a special school. Then, as delicately as she could, she tried to explain how Gloria sometimes sat at her desk completely preoccupied with the contents of her nostrils—playing with them,
even ingesting them
. She said Glorias activities made her the scapegoat of all of the grade tens.

“Are you saying my kid eats her snot?” Dot, then still Dorothy, asked. The teacher nodded, her fingers scrabbling at her throat as if she were trying to untangle a knot. Dorothy had gone home and tried to beat the shit out of Gloria, chasing her around the townhouse with a wet dishrag. But Dorothy, with almost 185 pounds back then on her five foot two frame, wasn’t much for running those days. “You hate me!” Gloria screamed. And Dorothy, panting against the fridge, wiping her face with the dishrag, hadn’t answered.

Now this teacher stood in front of Dot, proposing a memorial to mark the tenth anniversary of Glorias tragic death. “Something delicate,” the teacher says, “in keeping with her sensitive spirit.” Her fingers are nowhere near her throat and Dot’s not sure if this is in fact the same woman. “She loved nature,” the teacher continues, “so I’m thinking a tree. A silver birch.”

She loved nature?
Dot wants to snort. The nearest Gloria ever got to nature was squashing carpet beetles against the floorboards in her bedroom with her thumb.

“We would have a dedication ceremony. The girls are very into things Celtic these days, so I’m thinking something with Druids, like at Stonehenge but without all that nudity, of course. And one of our mothers makes these little chocolates in the shape of Haida characters—the frog, the raven, the whale. We could pass those around. She’s not actually native herself, but they look
very
authentic.” Dot wonders whatever happened to Rice Krispie squares.

“We would extend an invitation to all of Gloria’s old classmates, those who still live in the Lower Mainland. They were very traumatized when it happened. I’m sure some of them still have nightmares.” Oh yeah, Dot thinks, nightmares of Gloria rolling up a great big rubbery one, popping it into her mouth, and then trying to deep-tongue kiss them. Dot would like to get her hands on some of these vicious kids, most of whom have now grown up and no doubt had some vicious kids of their own, tie them behind an eastbound semi like links of sausage and drag them down the Lougheed Highway.

“Maybe we could get that boy, that one in that band, to sing something. I know,” the teacher’s eyes grow wide, as if on cue, “maybe you could have me on your show to talk about all the plans. Then maybe people would even fly in all the way from Toronto!” The woman’s hands. That was it. This woman teacher had been a man, a tall nervous man. Dot is suddenly delighted and makes a mental note to ask one of the chase producers to find a
slot for the teacher on that upcoming “Dot!” on gender issues and forgiveness.

All around them fans are clamouring for Dots autograph. And her musky Jôvan-scented embrace.

When the call had come, Dorothy was trying to get some shut-eye after a double shift of bagging groceries at the Supervalu for long, snaking lines of customers who looked like they were on day parole from Oakalla. She was lying over the far edge of the bed with one arm hanging down to the floor, as the middle sagged so badly with her weight the old mattress often threatened to flip up on either side of her to make a Dorothy sandwich. Sweat pooled off her in the freak mid-October heat.

Dorothy had last seen her daughter lounging on the couch with a box of Crackerjacks, watching a video. “Don’t stay up too late,” she’d said. Gloria said something Dorothy couldn’t make out, the kid’s mouth was so full of caramel corn. “Chew and swallow before you speak,” Dorothy said. This was something Dorothy herself always tried to do, no matter how hungry she felt. She’d chew slowly and swallow and then speak. The first step on the road to thinness and elegance. That and the mid-Atlantic accent she practised in front of the bathroom mirror. Something she learned from an Audrey Hepburn movie, the one with all the singing where Audrey started out poor and a mess, but later wore her hair in a humdinger of a bun like a princess. Dorothy tried to sound both adamant and girlish at the same time. She tried to send friendly fireworks rocketing from her eyes while smiling
whimsically, but only managed to look churlish and mildly constipated. What had her mother always said? “Can’t make butter with a toothpick.” It had meant something at the time.

She lay there in bed waiting and waiting to sleep, the clock radio on the floor beside her flipping its digits so slowly each second felt like a single hair being yanked from her scalp. Her whole life was like that. Like a form of Chinese water torture. Waiting to get thin. Waiting for the bus. Waiting to win a lottery. Waiting for her kid to stop being such a moron. Waiting for the right moment to lock her boss in the meat locker and claim it was an accident.

Later, what she tells people, because that’s how she remembers it, is that she picked up the phone before it even rang. A mother knows.

One of the cameramen stops and gives Dot a high-five. She has to do a little hop to even make contact with his hand—she’s so short
(petite!)
her lacquered fingernails barely touch his palm. Its their flirty game, but that’s as far as it ever goes. In her Dorothy days he was the kind of lanky man she would have given up anything for if he’d even bothered to eyeball her name tag above her left boob when she handed him his change at the checkout counter. The kind of guy who’d look good climbing slowly down a ladder with a toolbelt slung low across his hips. Now he was just another techie and she was … Dot! Although Liz Taylor had married that construction worker, that Larry somebody with the Ukrainian name,
who made a big deal about still working after they got hitched (like those lottery winners who say they’ll keep on working at the factory, just keep glue-gunning the stripes onto Adidas sneakers or whatever, just because they like the routine, maybe get a new car, something with air-conditioning so they don’t drop dead driving to Regina in August for the family reunion).

When Dot gets a break she hangs onto it with both hands, with her teeth if she has to, like those women at the circus who spin in the air with their jaws clamped tight onto a leather strap at the end of a high wire.

On one of the TV monitors, a man and woman slowly circle a car in a showroom. The man peeks through a window and sees a babyseat in the back and then looks over the roof of the car at the woman who’s smiling right at him. He circles over to her and swings her around in his arms while all the salespeople and other customers at the Saturn dealership burst into applause.