All the Anxious Girls on Earth Read online

  The women, though. The women thought it was funny.

  And all night long I was breathing deeply of his smell. I was the life of the party. Oxygenated. On.

  Oh! How utterly convincing love can be. How utterly convincing!

  Cat piss in a bottle. Against love like this, I thought, what small thing was that?

  A Monday in November. I walked down the corridor at lunch, gnawing on my heart of elk. The floors gleamed as they did every Monday. Ammonia still clung to the air, scouring my brain pan.

  He was leaning against his locker. A girl stood in front of him, not a stick insect, not a curvy glory. A solid bound-for-Oxbridge type. Field hockey calves. A Confederacy of Dunces clutched to her chest. She lifted his hair out of his eyes with the eraser tip of her pencil.

  I moved towards them. Don’t tell me I didn’t know what I was doing. I said, “Hi there!”

  Then I hipchecked him. Ever so playfully, but it threw him off balance. The girl, she just stood there looking astonished.

  I could have said: Close your mouth, young lady, before something flies in.

  I could have said: Fish in a barrel. Formed the words with my mouth.

  Measuring Death

  in Column Inches

  (a nine-week manual for girl rim pigs)

  There are no sacred cows at 3:00 A.M. when you’re measuring death in column inches. Remember, there are many rules, but only one that really counts: Rim pigs don’t cry.

  Week One: Even though you work with the alphabet in the dull of the night, try not to neglect your appearance. Wear inappropriate fabrics and colours to keep the element of surprise alive. Three-tone bowling shoes with mauve satin cowgirl shirt and worsted tweed trousers. Polo shirt, silk boxer shorts festooned with lyrics from the Poppy Family’s greatest hits, and orange espadrilles. And, for a special treat, wear your bra on the outside of your T-shirt.

  Say: Oops. Say: Kidding!

  Say (as if implying you have a life): I was just at the Grant Lee Buffalo gig at the Starfish Room and boy, am I tired.

  Anyway you put it, your fellow rim pigs—two successfully suburban fathers and two failed fathers—will not know what you’re talking about. Realize that if camaraderie is to be achieved, you’ve got to try a different tack.

  If truth be told, none of the graveyard-shift copy editors are prime physical specimens. Dave, the slotman, sports a kind of nightly uniform, sweatpants with a Super Mario print all over them. The kind of sweats they make for oversized men that you see the steroid-enhanced guys from Gold’s Gym wearing because normal clothes just won’t fit. Dave’s sweats ride low, giving him plumbers butt, dark hair tufting out from between his wedge. You imagine being one of his kids and living in terror of having him bend down to tie your shoelaces when he picks you up at school. Then there’s Gustav, a.k.a. the Montrealer, slightly soiled and desperate. He always has a button missing off his shirt. On better nights he fastens the spot with a safety pin. On worse nights the shirt gapes open when he leans forward, exposing untended flesh.

  Even the late-night reporters are pale and furtive. Little Anny on the parks board-slash-police beat only has her springy, aerobicized calves going for her. Her skin looks as if it’s been left underwater too long, and her hair looks crunchy, like you could grab a fistful and just snap it off. You will soon discover that its all that sleeping—or trying to sleep—during the day, with the aluminum foil crackling against the windowpanes. Like constant artillery fire. Earplugs give you headaches, and although they cut out some noises, they amplify others—the gurgle of a drain upstairs can sound like it comes from inside your very own chest. The thinnest wafer of light cuts through REM sleep like a hot laser. And the dreams, in your sealed-up room, in the hot summer air, can be fetid.

  Week Two: Learn quickly that you aren’t allowed to cherry-pick. The slotman puts copy to be edited and headlined, and photos that need cutlines into a little two-tiered wire basket. You’re supposed to take the first thing that happens to be on top and then call it up on screen. So during the same night you can have tacit complicity in both the twice-weekly family values homily of the in-house Pat Buchanan (“For $200: A euphemism for homophobia.”), and the heartfelt whingings of an animal rights advocate who believes even earthworms have souls. If there’s ever any actual harm in what they espouse, you can always haul out that delightful old chestnut: I was only doing my job.

  You and your confreres are the last line of defence between the newsmakers and the public. Often your concoctions—the headlines, decks and cutlines—are all anyone will read. Pride yourself on your tallies of death and destruction, your puns, your ability to always find a verb that fits. Your Peanut Buster Parfaits of disaster, both man-made and natural.

  There is something about working in the dead of night, with the fluorescent lights singing unevenly in their tubes overhead, that arouses in you a primitive and playful spirit. Fish a CP wire story on unemployment rates out of the basket without leaving your seat, smartly spearing the corner with your pen of choice, a red Uni-ball. Feel a vague sense of communion with bears who can swat trout out of a mountain stream just like that. Feel clever, even though no one has noticed. Feel a twinge in your neck because you contorted it at an unruly angle in order to nab the story without having to scurry all around the rim to Dave’s desk.

  The ink bleeds through the hole.

  A feeling of continual exhaustion will descend like a musty furniture blanket in the second week. You will be tempted to fight back.

  There used to be an empty lot behind your apartment building, a lovely wreck of a lot littered with exploded chunks of concrete laced with twisted rebar, big-headed purple thistles waving in the wind, the candy wrappers caught in their prickly leaves fluttering like hideous moths, discarded syringes poised like scorpions. The kind of place you would most certainly act out your post-apocalyptic fantasies if you were still a kid. Its a reminder of how the world, your world, would look if we all just stopped being so damn careful. Now someone has decided to build a house there and the activity makes mincemeat of your sleep. It sounds as if a small army is stapling the house together, instead of using proper, old-fashioned tools like hammers. Dull thuds you might be able to take, but this feels like Gene Kelly and his cartoon mice practicing on the ceiling of your frontal lobes.

  Storm over to check it out, but not before first scrubbing the stalagmites of sleep off your bottom lashes and flattening your bangs with the moistened heel of your hand so you don’t look as deranged as you feel. “Why yes, ma am,” one of the guys says. “Yes, we are stapling it together.” And the workmen all hold their staple guns out towards you, as if they’re a firing squad and you’ve been convicted of stealing bread in a country with zero tolerance for bad behaviour.

  Ask (in what you think is a queenly manner): “But how long will it last?”

  “Oh, a good thirty years, give or take. These aren’t your ordinary staples,” one of the guys says.

  You, of course, meant the noise.

  Week Three: Accept that mistakes are made. Usually harmless ones. Say the guy is called Jack Greene in the story and Jeff Green in the cutline under the photo. Readers will pounce on this. “Lookit this,” they’ll say, poking at your cutline with their forks, egg dribbling down the page, congealing in a pearly strand. “Whatta buncha idiots.” Well, yes, that’s right, you may think, we are idiots. Idiots who know the difference between concrete and cement, between careening and careering, and CARE!

  Tell your friends: “You have to have an idiot gene of some sort to do a job like this.” Wait for them to disagree vehemently. Stir your coffee thoughtfully even though the cup is empty. Keep waiting. Ask for a refill. Change the topic.

  The late night reporters ignore you—cut a wide swath as they walk by, sneer. Its a caste system and you’re one of the untouchables. But instead of collecting garbage and burning it, you’re elevating it. There’s an element of fear, too, for sure. There, but for the grace of God and goodwill of the managing editor,
go I. Maybe rim-pigitis is a contagious disease. Remember grade five when all the boys scribbled “Julia fleas” on the backs of their hands with coloured pens. Think about how Julia must have felt. Wonder if it screwed up her adulthood. Wonder if it’s the kind of thing you’d tell your children. “I was the biggest nerd of my elementary school class. I got caught lining the inside of my desk with little balls of snot and didn’t have any friends.” Decide not. Most definitely not.

  Anny, the dishevelled little go-getter with the Ron Zalko-cized calves bounces through your part of the newsroom, coolly averting her eyes. You shake your bag of Skittles at her, even though you hate to share the treats that help you make it through the night. “Hey, Anny, have a candy.” She barely breaks stride, flapping her dead-fish hand in your direction. “Thanks. I’m on deadline.” Sisterhood is no match for the latest high jinks of the Vancouver Parks Board. All that self-satisfied wrangling over whether some dumpy parkette is better served by mounting yet another statue of a WWII soldier or a metal cube representing the victims of a more contemporary ill. Lest we forget.

  Decide you are a statue. Sit there frozen in position, hands poised like crabs above the keyboard, vowing to not move until someone touches you and breaks the spell. Be prepared to wait an awfully long time.

  On your only night off, go to a party with your new boyfriend where you don’t know a soul. Everyone there seems to be associated with films. Not movies, films. And not just any old films, but something called visual essays, which you later learn are actually just documentaries that don’t make a lot of sense unless you have a doctorate in post-colonial post-feminist post-gender studies.

  If someone asks you what you do, tell them you’re a carpenter. Talk knowledgeably about revolutionary new advances in house construction, namely, the use of staplers. Talk about how the kickback action really builds muscles, namely, pectorals.

  Tell your incredulous audience that they can go ahead and feel your pecs. Your boyfriend comes over with an achingly cool Japanese beer just as you’re striking a which-way-to-the-beach? pose and asks, “Rodin’s Thinker with menstrual cramps?”

  Decide you dislike him for his inability to comprehend your shame and fatigue.

  Decide you like him for his ability to mock menstrual cramps while surrounded by a post-colonial post-feminist post-gendered crowd.

  Later, after many Sapporos, corner the guy who made a visual essay about Bertrand Russell and ask him to tell you what the difference is between concrete and cement. Decide that his inability to differentiate means he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.

  He says: “You should know. You’re in construction.”

  Phone your mother long-distance and tell her you hate your job. “But you have a good job,” she says.

  Say: I sleep with aluminum foil in the windows. I feel like a turkey basting in my bed.

  Say: I eat open-faced chili burgers for lunch at four A.M.

  Ask (petulantly): Is this why I got a poli-sci degree?

  She tells you to be thankful you have a bed and be thankful you have lunch. She reserves judgment on the poli-sci degree, because, well, lets just say she warned you. You hang up before she starts telling you about how the only time she and her sisters got oranges was when they left their shoes (with the cardboard soles) out on the porch on the eve of Saint Nicholas Day.

  Across the alley, the staple-gun men are singing a cappella—”Up on the Roof,” of all things. You wonder if someone has slipped Xanax into their Cheerios, or Ativan into their thermoses. You wish a talent scout would come by and spirit them away in a long, tacky white limo with a soft-drink logo on the side. They’re young, agile. They’re Canadian boys and probably already know how to skate, so they could join the Ice Capades doing some sort of Village People redux act. And why not? Just why the heck not? Stamp your little foot for effect. Dust bunnies rise from the parquet floor in a fury—rabid, grey, feral, gathering courage and growing in number through your neglect. They trust in Nietzsche: Those who do not destroy us, make us stronger.

  Although, if you were to be perfectly honest, all the Nietzsche you know could be gleaned from the opening credits of Conan the Barbarian.

  Week Four: Make an effort to get to know your fellow rim pigs, after all, they’re the only ones who’ll talk to you instead of at you besides the donut-cart woman. Decide Dave the slotman’s not so bad. He’s tacked magazine photos of Susan Sarandon all over the pillar beside his desk along with a crayon drawing by his daughter Kristal of what looks like a Sikh temple, but could be a birdcage. It lends him a hint of complexity, this attraction to an actress of a certain age. After all, it could have been Pamela Anderson Lee. You find something reassuring about Dave—his comfortable slovenliness, the way he whistles theme songs from kiddie cartoons as he dummies up the pages, the way his wife makes sure that at least his socks match.

  Gustav the Montrealer, on the other hand, has the look of an unloved man. It’s not just the missing button, it’s his needy air. He used to work as a reporter at Le Devoir, or so he tells you, and he never lets a night go by without reminding everyone that he’s a real journalist and this rim-pig thing is only a temporary gig. He confides in you one night, thinking you can relate. To sensitive men. Because you’re a gal. He tells you he left a son behind out east after his wife kicked him out. He spends a good part of his time sending E-mail messages to his son, who’s only five but can evidently read at grade six level—in English and French. He tells you he wants to pitch a column to the features editor on contemporary men’s issues.

  He says (sotto voce): “There’s a whole segment of the population that’s not being served in the popular press. You know, the father thing. The pain thing. The anger thing.”

  Say (in French): “You mean huffing and puffing and drumming and stuff, reclaiming the maligned little beast—sorry, little boy—within?”

  He looks quizzical and then laughs a fake jolly-hearted laugh and touches your forearm with the tips of two fingers, showing he knows his Dale Carnegie, indicating he thinks you’ve said something terribly funny. You don’t know which is worse. That you’ve mocked him, or that you’ve discovered—confirmed—that he doesn’t understand French, or that his fingers, you’ve just noticed, have been chewed until they’ve bled, the hangnails peeled off, leaving thin scabby strips. They’re the fingers of the nervous little boy you and your friends shoved into the older girls’ bathroom during one recess at Sacred Heart, alone with the Kotex machine, while you piled your squealing bodies up against the door so he couldn’t get out even though he pushed and pushed until his small heart was bursting. The boy, Eugene, ended up crawling out the window and had to be rescued from the fire escape by one of the nuns. When Sister Scholastica reached the bottom rung, she sat down and slung him across her knee and started to spank him. The crackle of plastic was shocking, even to you. But that didn’t stop you, eyes wide, from excitedly whispering, “Eugene still wears diapers.” There was no need, of course, to whisper: Pass it on.

  The Montrealer, as if he can see into your rusted-out carbody of a Catholic soul, avoids talking directly to you from this point on. Out of the corner of your eye, you’ll be aware that his hands, on occasion, tremble.

  You fare better with the Matador. The Matador has a trait you must admit you envy. He has this incredible posture. In this nocturnal universe of slouching men, he stands out, ramrod straight even under duress, like George C. Scott playing Patton. He has settled into the numbing delirium of the job with a Zen-like aplomb. Nothing seems to faze him, or move him. He is the perfect rim pig, smartly robotic, emotionless as a Vulcan, except for the deep pleasure he gets from hearing about stupid deaths. You only have to

  Say: Hungarian woman falls in barrel of cabbage juice and drowns,

  Say: Kansas man punctures brain by accidentally ramming car antenna up left nostril, Say: Toronto Blue Jay kills seagull with homer, and a deep, indecorous chortle will rise from his belly and burble up his throat and out of his mouth, masking the t
hin, prissy whine of the fluorescent lights for a few seconds. His laughter is steam—it scalds and leaves something sulfurous in its wake.

  Just don’t ask him about his daughter who lives a few miles away in Coquitlam and whom he’s not allowed to see. And she’s only three, so E-mail is not an option.

  The Pumpkin usually sits to the left of you and is what they call a lifer. He’s been here for longer than anyone can remember and perhaps thinks that if he just keeps really quiet, he can stay forever. The Pumpkin has seven children and a wife to feed. He has beautiful, long eyelashes—as do all his children—and for some reason those eyelashes break your heart.

  The Pumpkin is kind. The Pumpkin is inoffensive. The Pumpkin, you realize, might as well wear a sign reading: Kick Me.

  Pick a day, any day. “Hey, Murray,” Dave says. “Do you think they should let the U.S. extradite those two pricks from the island who killed the one guy’s parents and retarded sister in Bellingham?” The Pumpkin stops, his fingers raised above his keyboard, looking uncertain. “Sure, Dave. I guess they deserve it.”

  The Matador scoops the puck. “But, Murray, you know they’ll probably fry. Don’t you Catholics believe guys shouldn’t fry on earth, only after they’re booted out of heaven?” This is where the Pumpkin starts to sweat and looks around for moral support. You try to flash him a look of concern, smiling wryly and winking, but he just thinks you’re flirting and turns even redder. “You’re right, maybe we should keep them here.”

  Dave says, “Right, Murray. Make them do fifty pushups or ten Hail Marys or something.” Now the Pumpkin smiles a watery smile, thinking he’s said something witty, and then sees the smirk on Dave’s face and the disdain on the Matador’s. He hurries to the bathroom while everyone, including you, snickers. The Pumpkin spends a lot of time in the can summoning the strength to do his job.

  Start to say: You guys—