All the Anxious Girls on Earth (7 page)

The fetus looks so much like some Hollywood version of an alien that Daisy wonders if she isn’t hallucinating an abduction. Maybe they’ve already stuck a tube down her throat and up her ass and shone bright lights in her eyes and scraped away enough tissue samples to create a whole new race of Über Daisy’s. A Daisy chain. She laughs. Air bubbles spill out of her mouth and dance around in the warm amniotic fluid. The fetus bats at them with his little curled fists. Daisy bats one back. Soon they’re enjoying a game of in utero badminton and Daisy feels so utterly peaceful tumbling around defying gravity. And besides, she’s always wanted a brother.

Jack found it hard to concentrate after lunch. He was copy-editing a new Dummies™ book.
Pest Control for Dummies™
. The only good thing about this contract was that he’d become an instant expert in things he’d previously cared nothing about, giving him something to talk about at parties. He now had opinions on
Chinese opera, S.A.T. scores, Frisbee golf, and furniture reupholstering.

“I’m sure the plural is silverfish and not silverfishes,” he told the author, who kept calling up and trying to engage Jack in long literary conversations as if he were Thomas Wolfe to Jacks Maxwell Perkins. This was a man who got excited about the fact that crumbled bay leaves scattered along a windowsill will deter ants. He jocularly called Jack “Grammar Boy,” but with an increasing edge to his voice over the past few days. The man was, by trade, an organic exterminator. But, as he’d told Jack, he once had a poem published in
Fiddlehead
, a literary magazine in the Maritimes, so he knew something about
writing
, too.

“But doesn’t silverfishes just sound so much better?” the exterminator/poet asked.

“Well, it rhymes with delicious,” Jack said. “Maybe you could include cooking tips. That’d make you the Martha Stewart of insects and vermin.”

“Are you mocking me?” The man sounded as if he was drawing himself up to full height on the other end of the telephone line, getting ready to rumble.

“Chocolate-covered grasshoppers, an excellent source of protein,” Jack said. “Rats on a stick—with your eyes closed, I’m told it tastes just like chicken.”

The exterminator hung up.

Jack clenched his thighs. On his desk, an ant was rolling around with a crumb as if working out on an exercise ball. It looked stupidly heroic. Jack clenched his toes in their threadbare Work Warehouse socks. He
wondered how the ant would get the crumb ball off the desk and onto the floor and out to its anthill without killing itself. He clenched his stomach. He clenched his butt. He clenched his sphincter. He brought his fist down on the ant and crumb ball and then wondered why he’d done that.

If she doesn’t look directly at him, doesn’t dwell on his unsettling translucence, Daisy finds talking to the fetus easy. The first encounter had been strange and utterly magical, much the same as she’d always imagined love at first sight—that unbearable tingle of reverse déjà vu that can have you frolicking giddily through familiar streets as if you’ve never seen them before in your life, falling into fountains with your clothes on and not caring if anyone thought you were crazy. Laughing so hard you almost peed yourself. Except with the fetus it was a different kind of love, of course. He
was
her brother.

She’s becoming used to the fetus’s burbly voice. He’s been teaching her to relax, to bob lightly in the fluid without tensing her muscles. Sort of like drown-proofing. He’s lecturing her about living in the moment, going with the flow. Daisy is surprised at how much the fetus knows.

“I watch, I listen,” the fetus says. “It’s not like I have much of anything else to do.” He indicates the twisted cord that tethers him to their mothers placenta and shrugs.

Daisy explores the coral reef of their mother’s womb.
Skin polyps undulate like sea anemone, membrane tender and swollen like fire sponge. A triggerfish swims by.

And there is her brother, reef urchin. Heart urchin. Sea biscuit. And it’s all Daisy can do not to gobble him up.

Jack looked at the photograph of the West Coast banana slug, thinking it must have been enlarged for effect. In small print, under the photo, it read:
Actual Size
. “Bullshit,” Jack said. The thing was almost the size of his own prick. He found it difficult to read the description of how to keep the slugs from destroying basil and lettuce and other leafy greens without involuntarily cringing. Diatomaceous earth, made up of the crushed, glass-shard bodies of other bugs, sliced the slugs abdomen to shreds. Judiciously applied salt would sizzle it to pus in minutes, turning it into an open wound. Organic pest control, Jack decided, was for sadists.

Some things are hard to kill, almost impossible. Others are dead easy, even by accident. Daisy’s brother had been born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Three times. Actually, he had barely been born. “Just a flutter and then he was gone,” Jack heard her say over and over as she called friends across the city and across the country, wallowing in an anguish he found baffling, bathing in it as if in a lukewarm tub with unpleasant little islands of oil and hair floating on top. For almost a month she had been mooning around, crying, screaming, taking time off work. Wearing black. Which she always wore, its true, but this seemed more
deliberate. More… black. He tried reasoning with her. She had never known him. It was over thirty years ago. He’d never really even been alive. He didn’t even have a name.

What Jack didn’t say, couldn’t say, was that if he had lived, there would have never been a Daisy. She knew that. She had to know that.

Jack has thought of leaving Daisy. Not because of this brother thing, but because he doesn’t find her attractive. He finds his lack of desire baffling, because, the thing is this: he loves Daisy. Or did. Or still does. And yet.

And yet.

Jack has this thing about skinny women. His thighs prickle and his anus tingles just thinking about Daisy’s mother deftly rolling up a slice of prosciutto with her long, bony, prostate-probing physician’s fingers and holding it to her mouth like a cigarette. He doesn’t even really like her. She seems to lack a moral core. No guilt. Who has no guilt? And yet.

A few months back he had been fascinated by the new woman next door, the way she flitted around her deck, watering her herbs, bending over to poke at something that was refusing to grow inside of an old olive oil tin. Her spine strained against her skin through her thin tank tops, an aggressive row of hard little knobs like helmeted soldiers marching off to war—to blow up bridges while lice swam in their underwear, doing all those things that men at war must do. Her shoulder blades like fighter kites. Jack could see her back deck from the kitchen window and so he spent a lot of time
washing dishes, wondering what it would be like to hold someone so sharp-edged in his arms. Would she feel like a bat? Would her heart beat alarmingly close to the surface of her chest?

When it finally dawned on him that she was deliberately wasting away, he felt sickened and stupid. Now the herbs had bolted and dried into spindly skeletal shapes with spiderwebs stretched between them. The woman’s mother often came over and spent her entire visits sitting in a weather-stained old easy chair on the deck, raking her fingers through her own hair as if looking for something. The woman walked stooped, a reusable Starbucks cup with its bendable straw fastened to her lips, her skin sucked to the bones, ashen around the eyes and shiny on her bare temples which were hatch-marked with veins.

Just the other day, when she shuffled by him outside the Harbord Bakery, weakly slurping at whatever life-sustaining liquid was contained in her cup, Jack had turned his head and pretended to be intently hailing a cab.

The fetus never sleeps so he doesn’t know what dreaming is. Daisy tries to explain and finds herself describing how being in the womb with him has all the elements of a dream even though she knows it isn’t a dream—which, she is forced to add, is often the hallmark of a dream. She confuses the fetus.

She confuses herself.

Maybe Jack didn’t fully understand the concept of pest control. He generally admired insects and vermin. Unlike Jack, they never sat around doing nothing. They always seemed weirdly imbued with purpose, so intractably drawn to whatever they were drawn to, like flies to carrion.

People, on the other hand, people could be pests. Like his friend Glenn, who’d drop by all the time just to tell Jack how terribly an audition had gone and then stay for hours, drinking whatever beer was in the fridge and pulling books off the shelves at random. He would read out loud to Jack, who hated to be read out loud to, from books Jack had already read. Glenn was hoping to get a lucrative audio book gig, but Jack thought his stringy tenor would make people drive off the road.

“I just did the coolest thing,” Glenn said, pushing past Jack in the tight front hall and dropping himself onto the living-room couch. “You remember Simone and Geoff? They own that hemp store on Baldwin. They had a baby last week and today they had this ceremony with the placenta.”

“What? They smoked it?” If he judiciously applied salt to Glenn, would he sizzle and spit and then disappear?