All the Anxious Girls on Earth (11 page)

The exchange student from Osaka put up his hand and asked, “Please, miss, will this be on the test?”

The whole class in the hall afterwards, lockers open, surreptitiously sniffing their pits. And him skidding into the showers, clothes still in mid-air as the water pulsed on, scrubbing until blood beaded the surface of his skin.

In his wallet there was a photograph of a beach. In the background a fat man lay on a picnic table. In the foreground sat a small boy sucking in his smile, a woman half-hugging him, half-tickling him. Plastic shovel in his hand, blocking her face. She had her mouth to his ear and was telling him he’d made the best sandcastle in the world. That he would be an architect someday and build her a room touching the sky. Sunspots burned above their heads like painful lesions.

“With an elevator?” he asked.

With an elevator. She promised him
that
.

During the night she shredded the back of my couch, the wallpaper in the hallway, thin strips fluttering above the forced-air vent.

I paced the hall, quietly cajoling,
here kitty kitty kitty
.

The afternoon before the costume party I sat in the stands, hugging my knees and watching football practice. A new student teacher sat beside me, eager, slapping her hands together against the cold. “They look like aliens,” she said, “running around down there.”

The ground rumbled underneath my feet. Boys growing heavier as they ran, soon to crack the crust of the earth wide open.

I casually approached the field when the practice broke up and asked him a favour. I whispered it. Told him it was for a joke. His sudden laughter shaved my heart. Moth boy. It was all I could do not to put my hand to his cheek. Then I went home to dress for the party. The lawn was already frosted over. In the distance the mountains were white.

That evening the science teacher took one look at me and said, “You’re not going like that?” I wore faded blue hospital garb, white sneakers, a stethoscope around my neck, and on my face something to protect me from the nip of the night. He looked down at my doormat, scratched at something on his palm. He turned his head and stared towards the mountains. Then he said, “You do know that’s a jockstrap, don’t you?”

“Oh my God,” I collapsed against him laughing, “OH MY GAWD! I thought it was a surgical mask.”

It took him a few seconds, but he laughed too. Although not when I said I was going to wear it anyway.

At the party there was some whispering and then I heard him say loudly, so everyone could hear, just in case there was any doubt, “She thought it was a surgical mask!” I twirled around demonstrating my ignorance, pumpkin lights twinkling above my head, while formaldehyde man stayed as far away from me as he could. Apples bobbed in a bowl of spit.

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.

T
here 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.