All the Anxious Girls on Earth (20 page)

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.

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 your 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.

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.

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.