All the Anxious Girls on Earth (9 page)

The fetus is proving remarkably uncooperative, claiming no prior knowledge of ancient Hebrew and insisting that as far as he knows “Jesus Christ” is just a curse their mother frequently uses. Daisy says, “Were going to try some word association. I’m going to say a word and you just blurt out the first thing that pops into your head.” Even as they begin, the fetus is losing interest and his answers come to her as if from behind a distant pane of glass. “Light?” “Dark.” “Road?” “Car.” “Damascus?” “Table-cloth.” Daisy can’t contain her fury. She grabs him by the umbilical cord and yanks him towards her. “You’re not even trying.” The fetus’s eyes go wide. “Go easy on me, sis, I haven’t even been born yet!”

It’s clear to Daisy that she doesn’t scare him. Not a bit. Reef urchin, mud urchin, swamp biscuit. She could chew him up, stick her finger down her throat, and puke up the pieces. Daisy is certain her mother would like that.

Jack woke up on the couch, Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god, imprinted on his face from the embroidered throw cushion wedged under his pounding head. He felt so cramped he thought he’d need help from a team
of experts just to get his legs unfolded. It was morning—still dark out, but he could hear a garbage truck grinding by, cans clanking against the sidewalk.

He must have fallen asleep in the cab and then barely made it through the door. Now he was becoming the kind of guy who couldn’t even make it upstairs to bed before passing out with his pants off, but his socks and shirt still on. The kind of guy whose girlfriend believed in reincarnation and was capable of leaving him for someone she thought was not only one of the apostles in a past life, but her own brother as well. At least that’s what Jack thought Daisy thought.

Wouldn’t that make it incest? They’d have to move to a remote hamlet in the mountains and moonlight in all sorts of odd jobs in order to feed their brood of hypnotically pale, jug-eared children. They’d have goats, and no television. Maybe a ham radio. There’d be a stack of placenta casseroles in the deep freeze for a rainy day. Maybe they’d be happy. Didn’t Daisy deserve to be happy?

Daisy’s laughter rang out, enveloping him warmly in a kind of nostalgia. She was already in the kitchen, making coffee. “That was great last night, wasn’t it, Jack?” she called out, as if Jack wasn’t scrunched into a painful shape on the couch, an elephant-headed deity etched into the skin on the left side of his face. As if everything was back to normal and they were huddled together upstairs under the duvet, each of them hesitant to be the first to break away. “He’s just got so much energy,” Daisy sang out, almost operatically, as she headed upstairs to the bath. She was the only person he’d ever known who
took baths instead of showers, even in the morning. “So much zest for life!”

He should tell Irene, Jack thought. A mother deserved to know when her only child was in danger of going off the rails. They could have lunch again. Cocktails! Maybe she’d invite him to come by. I
know it might sound foolish
, Jack would tell her, sweating lightly under his Kevlar vest, looking furtively left, then right,
but now I’m worried about Daisy because she seems too happy
.

Jack reached for the phone on the floor beside the couch. Irene was probably still in bed, sleeping off the evening shift at Mount Sinai’s emergency ward. He pictured her beside Claude, the latest in a string of youngish, exotic men she met in the emergency ward waiting room. Daisy called them her stray pets. “Notice that none of them has ever graduated from high school,” Daisy once pointed out. “What does that tell you?” Claude, a dry-waller from Chicoutimi, had big hard hands and short legs. He was missing half a thumb. Maybe the two of them were tangled together, still sweating from a predawn grope. When Daisy’s mother pulled herself away to answer the phone, their skin would separate with a rude sucking sound and she’d have to put her hand over the receiver to laugh and wave Claude away with a kiss.

“Hello?” Irene’s voice was thick with sleep. Or something else. Maybe Claude was calibrating the angle of her scar with his forefinger and remaining thumb. Jack softly hung up. The phone rang almost immediately. Jack looked at it as if it was a small enraged animal. A feral cat. A rabid squirrel. It was literally quivering on the floor.

Daisy stood dripping in front of him, bathrobe open, water pooling around her feet. “Can’t you answer it?”

She snatched up the receiver. “Hello? No, I didn’t call you. No, Jack didn’t call you. Why would he call
you?”
Daisy nudged Jack’s crotch with her bare foot and silently mouthed
my mother
, twirling her index finger in circles around her ear. Jack rolled his eyes as if to concur,
Yeah, your mom, such a kook
.

“Well, maybe call display screwed up,” Daisy said. “It happens.”

Jack was clenching so frantically it was as if a midway carny was yelling, “Do you wanna go faster!!??” and his muscles screamed, “Yeahhh!!” while Jack white knuckled it all the way, jacket sleeve stuffed between his teeth, vomit riding up his throat.

The fetus claims to see things. He describes them to Daisy as if they were a series of snapshots. He stands on a front porch bundled up against the cold like a little astronaut, his face half in shadow. In the next one he’s flat on his face in the snow and a laughing woman (their mother!) reaches for him. There’s one under a Christmas tree. He holds an empty fishbowl in front of himself, his eyes distorted, lips flattened out behind the glass. He hears laughter. A green Cougar sits in the driveway. It’s full of teenagers and his legs hang out the back window, his feet in sealskin boots. More laughter. There’s a strip from a photo booth in a mall. Him and his girlfriend (Daisy’s old best friend Lynda!) making kissy faces, putting
their hands up each others shirts. His feathered hair hiding his eyes. He wears a T-shirt with a freaked-out cat dangling from a ledge that reads, “Hang in there, baby!”

Daisy is filled with pity towards this sea creature who would steal what is hers. His desire to live has made him weak, he’s laid his cards on the table, forgotten how to bluff.

He haunts her no longer. She feels supple and lively.

Daisy starts to dance as if she’s a little girl skipping around a Maypole with other laughing little girls, wrapping bright white crepe ribbon around it. Only this cord is both solid and stringy, and warm in her hand.

In the diffused light of the womb she dances with her brother one last time.

Jack was sprawled on the couch thumbing through a Bible when Daisy came home. He heard her dragging her bike up the front steps and then ding dinging the little Yogi Bear bell on the handlebars.

He’d been clenching up a storm all day, lying on the couch, ignoring the phone—including half a dozen calls from the organic exterminator wondering what was happening with his book.
(“Cucaracha!
That’s cockroach in Spanish,” he crowed on one message. “And I’ll bet you thought it was some kind of dance.”) Jack’s muscles burned—from his toes to his tortured anus. If he stood up now, his whole body would start to spasm. So he just lay there, trying to look relaxed, calling out, “You’re home early,” as Daisy came in the door.

The Bible was a little red Gideon’s that he’d taken from a Best Western in Syracuse. For research purposes. Someone who’d read through it before had made all kinds of complicated numerical calculations in the margins based on numbers found in Deuteronomy. This person was probably now hunkered down in a bunker somewhere in the Arizona desert, watching for flaming balls cartwheeling across the sky.

“Did you know that there are all these liquid and dry measures in the back of the Bible? Omers, kabs, pots, firkins,” Jack said. “I guess that’s in case you wanted to try the recipes.”

Daisy nudged his legs over and sat down beside him. She looked serious. “There’s something I want to talk about, Jack,” she said.

He was prepared to tell her it was okay. He was prepared to bestow a blessing, like some kind of fairy godfather. Plink her on the shoulder with his magic wand and say, Daisy, I just want you to be happy. And if that takes flying off to Cleveland with a zesty former saint, well, fly away then, fly!
Be free! Be rich!

“You know that scene at the end of
Lone Star
where the lovers discover that they’re actually brother and sister but decide to keep doing it anyway?” Jack asked.

Daisy just tilted her head as if she was emptying water out of one ear. She was unnervingly silent.

Through the front window, through the tracks of yesterday’s tear stains, Jack could see the woman from next door being carried down her walkway on a stretcher. Her mother fluttered behind the paramedics, hands
vibrating around her head like a propeller just before lift-off.

Daisy took his face in her hands and started kissing him. She straddled Jack and rubbed his chest. She squeezed one of his earlobes and her tongue ticked around between his lips. Jack thought it would help if he closed his eyes. If her breasts hadn’t been pressing against him, too heavy, too familiar, she could have been anyone. Daisy lifted her head. Jack opened his eyes. She was propped up by her arms on either side of his chest, smiling. He thought he’d heard her say, “I think we should have a baby.”

“What?”

“I think we should have a baby,” she said.

The words dripped from her mouth like stalactites. It felt, to Jack, as if whole hours passed before he could answer, the day sliding into night.

Jack expected her to eventually start crying and pounding at him with a balled up fist. But she just perched there above him, dry-eyed, waiting, and the only pounding he felt came from within, the pacing back and forth of his own heart, that drooling hyena, in the cage of his chest.

I
had fallen in love by then with three dark-haired boys fiercely loyal to their mamas and I swore I’d never do it again. My own mama said: Never go out with a boy prettier than yourself.

I tried to listen to her, but a noise got in the way. Sound of my blood motoring through my veins. A dull roar. Sometimes that.

Sometimes nothing.