All the Anxious Girls on Earth (19 page)

The parks board had finally approved that statue for Stanley Park that the SPCA & Friends had lobbied for. The bombing site was now a free walk-in veterinary clinic mostly used by squeegee kids for their inevitable dogs, although Dot thinks the vets should delouse the kids, with their gnarled hair and wasps-nest clothing, while they’re at it. (Once, a few months after the fire-bombing, Dot, then still Dorothy, had stood at the edge of the small crater and stared hard into it, but it was like looking into space when you didn’t have a bloody clue what you were searching for. In a movie she would’ve found something, a locket? a bracelet? a watch stopped at zero hour? that whispered of lost possibilities. Or, at the very least, a bloodied hand would’ve shot up out of the earth and tried to claw the heart out of her chest. But nothing.) Then there’s the group that’s written to the pope about beatifying Gloria, which Dot understands is like being an apprentice saint, sort of like an assistant electrician, or the first runner-up in the Miss Universe pageant.
And should the winner not be able to fulfill her term …
She likes the sound of it, beatifying, like sending Gloria off to some swanky spa for a complete makeover.
Dear John Paul Two, while you’re at it, could you do something about her complexion if its not too much trouble?

The whole Vatican thing is just peeing up a wind tunnel, as her mother would’ve said. But there’s no denying Gloria has a following. That young singer, the one from the Maritimes who now lives in Vancouver and has a platinum record and some kind of girl-power concert tour, has even written a song about her: “Feline Spirit”—an atonal little number, in Dot’s opinion, but popular with teenaged girls who don’t shave their legs and wear thick woollen toques even in warm weather.

Dot has no idea what she can possibly do on the show that would pack the right degree of emotional wallop, short of having Gloria rise from the dead and forgive her killer, live-to-tape right there in front of a studio audience. Her thumb, which is firmly circling her left instep, slowly comes to a stop. A cool mist, a mountain-fresh blast of an idea, wafts through her brain, tightening the skin over her skull as it grows. The idea hurls Dot, still in her stocking feet, down the hall towards the producer’s office.

“The little kid last week with the sandwich was good, but I can’t believe he didn’t cry when the dead boy’s mother read that poem by her son. I almost cried,” Dot’s producer is telling someone over the phone. She motions for Dot to have a seat, then makes a little yap yap yap motion with her thumb and fingers and rolls her eyes. “Of course it wasn’t a great poem. He was what? Five? Can you hold a sec?” She glances up to see Dot still standing. “No, actually I gotta go.”

She looks at Dot intensely. “Dot, honestly, what do you think of my bangs? Too long? Too short?” She palms
her hair flat against her forehead so Dot can see the full effect and then sighs. “Who am I kidding? I’m too old for that Bettie Page shtick, unless I want to go for the aging-dominatrix look.” She’d been manic like this lately. Dot figured it was menopause, something Dot herself was trying to stave off with a pre-emptive strike—a full-frontal estrogen assault. She’d mainline estrogen until all her veins collapsed if it would help. She’d inject it under her toenails the way models did with heroin to avoid track marks.

The producer loves the idea. She even claps her hands together like a delighted child. Dot will forgive her daughter’s killer, will envelop her in her now-famous-coast-to-coast embrace, with Gloria looking down on them from enormous screens. Multiple beatific Glorias. Of course, Dot has forgiven the teen terrorist, forgiven them all, as she’s often said on the show, but never in person, never in the flesh. The producer tells Dot she can already feel the ratings swell and soar, shooting right up through the stratosphere. Kleenex will be a sponsor. And just think of the cat food ads they’ll sell.
Meow meow meow!
She playfully rakes the air with invisible claws. Then she shakes her head. “But no one’s seen her for what? Almost eight years. Since she got out of juvie for good behaviour. She’s disappeared into thin air. The news people can’t even find her.”

“No one disappears into thin air,” Dot says.

She pauses in the producer’s doorway. “Too short,” she says. “Your bangs are too short. They make you look surprised all the time.”

Her assistant is holding out the phone as Dot walks back into her office. “Our Lady of Sorrows. Guest sermon. The twenty-fifth.” The girl was always breathless, her eyes red-rimmed under black plastic cats-eye glasses with mica glittering across the top. At least once a week, Dot has to send her home in a cab when she looks in danger of short-circuiting. Dot takes the receiver with a secret sigh. The Catholics were becoming so demanding and they didn’t even pay as well as the Evangelicals, or sing as good either. “Yup, yup,” Dot says to the person at the other end of the phone, “okay, but you do realize I’m—” she puts her hand over the receiver and turns to her assistant. “Ecumenical,” the girl stage-whispers. “Ecumenical,” Dot says into the telephone, relieved that she hadn’t said, “economical” by mistake.

“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain,” Dot trills as she hangs up.

On cue, her assistant asks in a half-hearted sing-song, pointing the tip of her pen at Dot. “And where’s that blasted plain?” This is why Dot pays her the big bucks.

“In Spain! In Spain!” Dot raises her arms. “In Spaaaain!”

The fact that she’d practised that with marbles in her mouth was something nobody needed to know.

If there was a moment when her world irrevocably turned from black and white to colour, if Dorothy could actually pinpoint it, she would have to say it was in the Mondi boutique on level three of the Holt Renfrew off Granville Street, while she was trying on a dress to wear for the premiere of “Dot!” on BCTV (before “Dot!” was
syndicated and really took off) following the unprecedented success of her weekly Rogers Cable show. She’d never even dared enter the store before (T-shirts were three hundred bucks.
T-shirts!
That’d be for people with more money than brains.), and gliding up the escalator she felt like she was in Buckingham Palace. She thought maybe she should’ve bought a ticket just to be allowed a look-see. At the bottom of the escalator, an elegant girl with a black velvet bow in her hair had misted her wrist with perfume and as Dorothy rose above the glittering concourse the scent swirled around her like the sweet, alien breath of some fairy godmother.

The saleswoman, who looked like she rode horses sidesaddle in her spare time, said, “I must say, that looks incredible with your skin tone.”

Dorothy twirled in front of the three-way mirror, thinking the woman was just blowing sunshine up her arse. But she had to admit she couldn’t recognize herself.

“Do you have this in any other colour?” she asked.

“Zabaglione, persimmon, tamarind, and quince.”

There were colours in the world she hadn’t even known existed and this woman—who, when you stopped to think about it, was just a clerk, right?—was reeling them off casually like she was reciting the alphabet.

Gloria
, Dorothy whispered, I
don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore
. Shocking herself that she was talking to her dead daughter. But then again, maybe not that much had changed. Gloria didn’t answer.

The “Dot!” team is caught up in a debate over a promo for the
Gloria!
special which uses a bit of footage from the bombing of Hiroshima. (“My grandparents were put in an internment camp right here in B.C.,” says the associate producer, who Dot always assumed was Scottish. “Its a death-to-life thing,” the editor tells her in that patient tone used with four-year-olds while pulling on their socks, “a visual metaphor.”) One of the chase producers, who has spent weeks with the phone glued to her ear tracking down the former teen terrorist, appears in the doorway of the editing suite, her mouth opening and closing silently as if she was underwater gumming fish flakes. Finally, she blurts, “I found her!” The editor pauses the tape and everyone looks up.

The chase producer is quiet for a moment, kneading her abdomen as if she has cramps. On the video monitor a puffy mushroom cloud is three-quarters through its transformation into the word
Dot!
“She says she doesn’t want to be forgiven.”

She doesn’t want to be forgiven? All the women blink in the half-light—they’re all women here in this forgiveness business (surprise!)—and take it up as a mantra.
She doesn’t want to he forgiven
. Then, one by one, they look towards Dot, faces pinched into question marks, even the executive producer, a wisecracking TV veteran who got her start as the voice of a famously androgynous puppet on a long-running kids show.

Is this what they call being up against the wall? These women, with all their B.A.S and M.A.S and phi beta cum laudy laudies have little imagination and even less faith,

Dot thinks. They’ve never had to really work at anything. They’ve never had their stomachs stapled, their rent cheques bounce, daughters who left used Kotexes balled up under their beds for the cat to drag out and bat around the apartment, never had to handle bloody, leaking packages of meat for customers who would sooner spit at her than say,
Gee thanks
, never had people come up to them at bus stops, complete strangers, and tell them that if they just tried a little harder, used that old willpower, laid off the Timbits, they could get, well, you know—

“I’ll forgive her skanky little butt whether she likes it or not,” Dot tells them, the long-dead Dorothy creeping into her voice. She starts giving orders, telling them to book the teen terrorist’s mother, the guy with the plate in his head, the man whose pacifist son burned to eventual death, the chorus line of
Cats
, now playing at the Ford Centre, that girl-power singer, who could perform her Gloria anthem. Maybe even one of those Three Tenors—Pavarotti, or Domingo, or that other guy—anyone could be had for a price. Why not?!
My dad’s got a barn, let’s put on a show!

The marrow in Dot’s bones thickens and she can feel the blood moving through her body, slamming in and out of the sluice gates of her heart. She’s clamped onto that circus wire with an iron jaw and she’ll keep hanging on, even if her teeth splinter and her gums shred, as high above her on a platform a handsome man in purple tights twirls her in tight circles until she’s nothing but a blur of airborne colour, and the crowd, though they’ve seen her do this a hundred times before, holds its breath.

The trick is to keep your tongue away from the roof of your mouth.

You try with a child. You even strain their shit, pushing it through a sieve with the back of a spoon to make sure they’ve passed the marble they’ve swallowed in a fit of pique. You dress them up as gypsy fortunetellers, lady-bugs, and mermaids, sewing each sequin on by hand in the dampish 4
A.M
. basement, so as not to spoil the surprise, so as to finish the damn thing in all its glory before making yet another Sanka and leaving for work, bags billowing under your eyes, nerves jitterbugging, phantom sequins scratching the back of your throat. But Lucy, as an actuary, as a woman whose profession it is to calculate risk, usually knows how to figure out the balance of probability in favour of something happening. The one risk she hadn’t calculated, though, were the odds that a child could strip-mine your heart.

But what about the odds that in April 1965 a child will be born who is perfect, glistening like a rainbow trout, but with ears and fingers and toes and a potential for greatness that makes her father swell with a pride so large he can barely squeeze his hard hat back on after leaving the hospital called Holy Something, and that exactly four years to the day this child is born, this same father will tragically (later perversely recalled by the child as intentionally)
stall his 1967 Valiant on the railway tracks he and his wife and the shiny child live on the right side of (thank God), and that in the aftermath of this indescribable mess, this psychic black hole, the mother decides that the life of the second child, another daughter (she
feels
it), the one no one yet knows of, will not be worth a copper penny, so that she proceeds accordingly but is never again without the sensation that a small animal is chewing a hole through her throat from the inside out?

Or the odds that a mother wouldn’t notice that a child never sleeps, or notices but convinces herself that the girl is sleeping, eyes open wide, skin glowing in the moonlight like phosphorescence?

Or the odds that when your teenage daughter jangles around the kitchen, trying to make herself understood, trying to tell you that she has no idea what it means to be happy, while you’re up to your elbows in suds, hands crabbing for cutlery in the sink, you’ll have the right answer to the question, “Why can’t I be up all the time? Why can’t I be on?”

Or the odds that when the phone call comes you will keep thinking, despite the facts at hand, the evidence, as it’s called, that it’s your own daughter who’s dead, because then you can let yourself drop into the soft pocket of grief, whereas the truth has its undefinable ragged edges, its welcome-to-the-funhouse tilt that keeps you so off balance it’s hard to know if you’re coming or going—or
gone? So off balance in fact that when the time comes you cant tell the requisite stories, the ones everyone expects to hear, the ones that begin:
She wouldn’t hurt a fly…