All the Anxious Girls on Earth Read online

  Piles of baby skulls, smooth as china cups, heave out of vaults below Shaughnessy mansions that once housed convents. Nudists scramble madly up the cliff face from their beach, clutching at branches and swollen arbutus roots, brambles tearing at their pubic hair and genitals, as the ocean roars behind them, a towering inferno of water swallowing pan pipes, arthritic dogs and coolers of dope and sangria. They’re shocked, not because the end has come, but because it’s so Old Testament when they had thought it would be man-made— a cold, clinical apocalypse so that they could say, We told you so.

  Suddenly, there’s no cliff and they’re all clutching at air.

  Lewis hurries along the street, looking for the green-haired girl.

  When she finds her, she knows the thing to do would be to make their way together, as quickly and calmly as possible, back to the apartment in the Entercom building.

  Then the thing to do would be to lock the door and wait for the city to crumble.

  Pest Control for Dummies™

  Just a flutter and then he was gone. Daisy was mourning her brother. She had been mourning him for almost a month now, ever since her mother had told her he’d died. Her mother couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. She was sure she’d told Daisy ages ago, but Daisy just doesn’t listen.

  Jack sat, not without a flush of guilty pleasure, at a tiny marble-topped table outside L’Imperio, having lunch with Daisy’s mother. His breaded veal sandwich, the meat covered with slick tongues of sweet, roasted red pepper, was so good he tried hard not to stuff it all into his mouth at once in case he started to choke. Irene actually cut each of her agnolotti in half with a knife and fork and paused between bites to make another point. For fun, or effect, Jack wasn’t sure, Irene always called him Jacques. Although, the way she pronounced it, it sounded like “shock” and made him feel like a live wire quivering from an exposed light socket, or a wet finger on a car battery, his hair up the back of his neck singed from wild brush fire. Alive and dangerous—shiv clamped between his teeth, ready for combat—that’s how Jack felt around Irene. She’d had a mastectomy last year and, since then, Jack frequently found his eyes travelling across her boyish body, trying to picture the exact angle of the scar and finding the thought of running his tongue along the seam disturbingly sexy. Ohmegawd, your own girlfriend’s own mother! the little anal Jack in Jack’s head said, as if everyone didn’t have wayward thoughts. As if everyone didn’t think one thing and then do altogether another. As if the whole of civilization wasn’t precariously balanced on a funeral pyre of lies.

  “Shock,” Irene said, laying down her fork and knife like a crucifix across her plate, “I think you should tell Daisy that if he had lived, I wouldn’t have had her ten months later. I wasn’t ever crazy about babies. One was, is, enough.”

  “I couldn’t tell her that.”

  “Imply it. Emphasize the implications.”

  Irene didn’t even bother with a prosthesis, and yet, unless you knew, you couldn’t tell. Daisy, on the other hand, Daisy would look lopsided.

  “I think she’s mourning what he might have been.” Jack found it strange to be solemnly repeating Daisy’s own words. They were like alien food in his mouth, lightly braised monkey brains. He felt brave—an anthropologist in the field who’s determined to adhere to some throwback tribes incomprehensible rites. Like the indomitable Shirley MacLaine drinking ox blood in Africa, eyes impishly twinkling, gag reflex in admirable check. He holds a small metal shovel with serrated edges and cracks down hard on the monkey’s skull as the elder tribesmen clap him on the back. His interpreter tells him he’s the first white man to be so daring. The monkeys grey matter squishes into the spaces between his teeth and threatens to rush back out his nose.

  Irene snorted. “He would have been chunky and insecure like Daisy. And, unlike Daisy, to give her credit, he’d still be living at home with me because mamas’ boys are like that and I would certainly have had the bad luck to raise a mamas boy. Shock, puppet, don’t act so nonplussed, I’m just being realistic.”

  That morning Daisy had stood looking out the living-room window, griping about a couple of four-wheel drives with frat-house bumper stickers parked facing the wrong way up the street. “There’s no reason for it, there’s lots of room on the other side,” she had said. “Those assholes just do it to be annoying.” Then her shoulders started shaking and she pressed her forehead to the glass and sobbed, her tears making crooked tracks down the dusty pane before settling on the even dustier windowsill. Jack, sitting there behind her cross-legged on the old kilim rug, gently stretching his groin which he’d pulled trying to hacky-sack with some guys ten years younger, had joked, “Do you want me to go out there and beat them up?” That had only made her cry harder. He just sat there not knowing what to do. Not knowing how much more of this he could take. So when Daisy pulled herself together and left for work, wobbling towards Bloor on her old Fred MacMurray bicycle, blue plastic milkcrate full of press kits bungee-corded to the back fender, artificially black corkscrew curls bouncing in her wake like rogue bedsprings, he called Irene to tell her he was worried about her daughter, who also happened to be the woman he thought he loved.

  Now sitting here discussing Daisy’s seemingly pointless tears with her mother outside a bright, busy cafe made them seem less sad and more wacky. More typically Daisy. Beside them sat a couple of competitive cyclists, their Easter ham-sized quads in electric-blue Lycra splayed out from under a too small table. Their shins and calves were shaved aerodynamically smooth. What was it about speed? Jack wondered. What was it that made some people want to be fast, to be first? Jack could smell the men’s sweat as they sat there drinking expensive Italian mineral water, their million-dollar sweat, and the funny thing was, it didn’t smell any different than his own plain tap-water sweat. It was a thought that gave him comfort as he tightened his stringy thigh muscles that fit, with room to spare, under his table. Once he started tightening, though, some reflex took over and he couldn’t stop. He clenched his toes inside his roomy Keds, he clenched his abdomen, his butt muscles. He tried to keep his face relaxed.

  “She feels guilty, I think,” Jack said, as he clenched his sphincter. Sometimes this went on for hours as he sat at his desk, until he thought he was going to scream. It was always the same order: quads, toes, stomach, butt, asshole. At the end of it all he felt exhausted. He’d never told anyone, there didn’t seem to be a way to tell.

  “For what?!” Irene looked genuinely surprised.

  “For living.”

  “You know, I’ve never felt guilty a day in my life.”

  “For losing the baby?”

  “For anything. Have you?”

  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?

  Glenn smiled his patient, sensitive-New-Age-guy smile and said, “It’s the only meat you can eat that you don’t have to kill.”

  “Fuck me.” Now Glenn would become the kind of person who was into homebirthing and making a casserole out of the placenta. “I hope you brushed your teeth before coming over.”

  If Jack ever had a kid with Daisy, he’d
have to make her first promise she wouldn’t be a placenta eater. He’d make her put it in writing. It was one of those things you didn’t think about until it was too late. Like waking up one day and finding your underwear was all jumbled up in a hamper with someone else’s. Like realizing her mother’s fingers were never far from your mind. Her pale, no-nonsense mouth. Oh, Shock.

  “How’s the Daisy?” Glenn had this notion that he’d godfathered their relationship, since he’d been the one to invite Jack to Daisy’s twenty-eighth birthday party at the Blue Cellar Room two years ago. Jack had known her only peripherally as one of those daffy publicist types who occupied the fringes of his circle of bitter playwrights and aspiring screenwriters and actors who worked mainly as bicycle couriers, and languid women who played guitar in otherwise all-male bands, photographed well, and wore motorcycle jackets over flowered dresses. Jack had been going out with an Edie Sedgwick look-alike named Robyn whose last boyfriend had broken her wrist and who kept encouraging Jack to singe the hairs on her arm with a lighter. “Just see how close you can get,” she’d whisper dramatically, the tip of her tongue poking into his ear. She didn’t do this to be funny.

  Jack and Robyn had been arguing across a blue-checked tablecloth, a pyramid of empty shot glasses at their elbows, when Daisy came over and asked him to dance. “I’m the birthday girl,” she’d told him when he hesitated. I get to dance with everyone.” And just because Robyn’s kohl-ringed eyes suddenly looked so small and piggy and Daisy’s shone generously behind her big, red-plastic frames, Jack got up to dance. “So, has your girlfriend tried the Hungarian cherry cake, or has she already eaten this year?” Daisy asked. Jack laughed. Someone kept playing “Never on a Sunday” over and over on the jukebox. Jack hadn’t danced in public since junior high. And he had never necked in public. The way Jack remembers it, Daisy was wearing purple elbow-length gloves. Overtop of them, chunky Lucite rings glistened on most of her fingers. He felt feverish as he tugged gently at her thin lower lip with his teeth. They may have been on top of a table. People may have been applauding. The one thing he remembered for certain was Daisy pressing her knuckles to his neck—the rings were cool and just sharp enough to leave small dents, like teeth marks.