All the Anxious Girls on Earth (3 page)

Edgar ran faster than this dog Decker and everyone was amazed. Angus recorded this amazing thing on his home video camera and took it to a television station.

Now Edgar has a scrapbook full of Cheetah Boy stories, because he won some races against much older boys, and one picture of him pretending to be the periscope of a submarine at his parents’ funeral. No one looking at the picture would realize this, though. It is one of those things you have to have explained to you.

Just before Marie and Angus died, they talked to a man who wanted Edgar to be in a detergent commercial on television. Edgar would run with a dog, not Decker, and then slide into a pile of mud. Then this mother, not Marie, but a television mother the man would pick, would wash the clothes and be surprised and happy that the detergent made these clothes all clean. I clean Edgar’s clothes and I have tried that detergent and I know no detergent would get them so clean. The man called here once and told me they actually use new clothes for the “after” picture. “Then you are a big, fat liar,” I told him. Edgar sat on the kitchen counter with his arm around my neck and whooped when I gave the man what for. So I said it again.

Marie and Angus are dead, and I say, “No way, Jose!” even though the man wants to give Edgar a lot of money. I know what happens to television stars—drugs, tattoos,
sex with people you never saw before in your life. They cut off pieces of your behind and sew them somewhere else to make you better looking! They change your nose so that your relatives cannot even recognize you. I will take care of Edgar. We will stay home and drink hot chocolate and plant vegetables.

Me and Marie went to tap-dancing lessons together. This is before I started taking medicines that made me fat. I was three years older than Marie, but she had to hold onto my hand before I could cross the street. On the way home one day, Marie took my tap shoes and shook them by my ear. “Guess what’s in there?” she said. “Pennies,” Marie told me. “There are hundreds of millions of pennies in there dying to get out.” I sat down on the sidewalk and banged one of my tap shoes as hard as I could. The heel popped off and hundreds of ants came spilling out. They crawled all over my legs and up my arms and I couldn’t stop crying. Now the ants crawl on Marie and I watch television in the evenings with Edgar. Sometimes I don’t think I deserve to be so happy.

The librarian says she recognizes me from the television news. I’m amazed she recognizes me, because in real life I am much smaller than on television. “You’re that woman who’s mentally unfit to be a legal guardian,” she says. She doesn’t say this meanly, I just think she’s surprised to find someone from television right here in her library. After all, this is not the main library, only a small branch that I can take one bus to without transferring
and getting confused. I think she tries very hard to please because she wants to be promoted. She has four genius facts ready for me when I get there.

I tell her I’m not unfit, not like that girl who put the baby in the oven, thinking it was a turkey. When the parents came home, they found the turkey upstairs in the crib still frozen, with diapers on. I threw up when I heard about that. “That’s not a true story,” the librarian says. “You can’t possibly believe that’s true. It’s an urban myth. It’s a story teenagers have been telling at sleepover parties for twenty years.” She looks like she wants to take my shoulders and shake me.

On the news last week, Carol with the chipmunk cheeks said that a man in Surrey set his wife on fire after tying her to a chair with garden twine. The same twine I tied up my tomatoes with when they got heavy! All week, every time I watered my tomatoes, I kept thinking of that poor woman on fire on her dining-room chair. Now I am so relieved. That also must be an urban myth.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet/dramatist. Died at age 83.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, physiologist (?!?) Died at age 87. Michelangelo (one name, like Cher!), artist. Died at age 89.

Mary Somerville, mathematician. Died at age 92.

Now I am amazed. All these geniuses lived to be very old. I am also surprised to find a woman genius. I didn’t think there was such a thing. “She’s not in the canon, you
know” the librarian says. She crosses her arms on her chest to protect herself from something. Women geniuses were probably not fired from cannons because in those days they all wore skirts. I
see London! I see France!
the men would tease when they saw her underwear.

All these geniuses, all so old. I feel like the ocean is inside my belly, making gushing waves. The library looks bigger, even. Or maybe in my relief I have my eyes open very wide. There is a little boy with white hair and thick glasses reading a book with a magnifying glass. I feel sorry for him because he reads so slowly, more slowly than even me if you can imagine! I am not worried anymore about Edgar being a genius. Now I am hoping he is. One dummy in the family is enough. Ha! I ask the librarian for books about cheetahs, but she only finds two about tigers. I will have to go to the main library downtown. I will take Edgar with me and he can hold onto the bus transfers. He will hold them tight and not lose them, because I am trying to turn him into a responsible boy. Maybe downtown we will ride an escalator, something I have never done. Maybe Edgar will run up the down escalator and I will try not to cheer him on. I will pretend to get mad like a proper parent.

I am standing on the porch with Edgar the Human Cheetah, watching the rain whack everything flat in the garden. Edgar tells me he’s decided to change his name.

“You can’t change it to Bob,” I tell him. “Anything but Bob.”

“Why not?”

“It just makes me feel funny. I pictured a Bob as bald and you have such nice brown hair.” I try to smooth his hair, but he is too fast for me.

“I wasn’t thinking of Bob,” he says. “I was thinking of changing the spelling—E-D-G-R-R-R.”

I think he’s trying to trick me, but then he growls and I get it. “Okey-dokey, Edgrrrrrrr!”

“Holy wow, where’s all this rain coming from?” Edgrrr wants to know.

“It’s God’s sweat,” I say.

“God must be even fatter than you.”

“Maybe a whole lot fatter,” I say, and I think he maybe believes me.

S
ooner or later, everyone in the country came to this city by the mountains and the sea. Some just to ogle, many to stay. People here liked it with something that bordered on religious fervour. They acted as if they should be heartily congratulated for where they lived, much the same way the contestants on
Jeopardy!
are applauded when they pick the Daily Double even though they haven’t really done anything yet. Their enthusiasm made Lewis feel small and mean. How could she hate paradise? “It gets caught in my teeth,” she told her friend Lila, “like spinach.”

All around her, people did things for kicks that to Lewis seemed nothing short of death defying. Trooping into the wilderness with foil packets of dehydrated food, like astronauts, determined to ride the rapids, scale icefalls, bounce down mountain faces with their feet
bound to fibreglass boards, Dr. Seuss hats on their heads. She shook her head and hung onto her coffee mug with both hands. Caffeine, that was her wild ride.

She who had looked into the face of death with its tired living-room eyes and laughed.

The little green-haired girl was back in the store, lingering over the soaps, dipping her fingers into the pots of face masks and hair creams. She had been in almost every day this week, but never bought anything.

Lewis worked in a place that looked like a cheese shop but sold soap. A cosmetic deli. She cut wedges of soaps like Guava Nun and Rabbit Cool from huge slabs with a thing very much like a cheese cutter, weighed them, wrapped them, and stuck on the little price per gram sticker the machine spit out. The face masks and creams and shampoos were scooped into little plastic tubs like coleslaw, mashed down, weighed and priced. There were also massage bars that looked and smelled like chocolate, and shampoo bars that looked and smelled like oatcakes with raisins. The customers all said the same thing (over and over)—”MMMmmm, this smells good enough to eat!”—but Lewis kept smiling. It was all stupidly expensive and the customers were mostly pleasant—clean, pleasant people with lots of money. No deranged artists threatening to set themselves on fire.

The green-haired girl dragged three fingers through the vat of apple-mint face mask and then, looking right at Lewis through a cluster of very blonde private school
students in hiked-up kilts, she pulled her fingers down her right cheek and then her left. As she turned to leave the store, Lewis felt a little tribal beat in the vicinity of her heart. Something deeply carnivorous and sinewy. Something to do with meat and flames. A clue to her secret city? Or heartburn from the onion flan from Meinhardt’s she’d had for lunch?

Lewis wished she’d said something. Later that night, lying in bed, it came to her, what she should have said.

“Don’t smile or it’ll crack.”

Several months back, Lewis had had what most people would consider a great job. She was one of the programmers at the film festival the city hosted each fall and all of her friends envied her—
imagine getting paid to watch movies!
But it wasn’t long before earnest student filmmakers from the city’s four (four!) film schools started descending on the festival office, like infant spiders parachuting out of their pods, demanding to know why she had rejected their mini-mockumentaries or Tarantino rip-offs. At least half of their films were about people who go through a whole bunch of bad shit and then wake up to find out it’s all just a dream. If only life were like that, Lewis often found herself thinking.

One guy even tried to bribe her with a descrambler. He had a little goatee and long fingernails. He snapped a
TV Times
open and shook it at her. “Look at all these channels,” he said. “All these channels could be yours.” She moved down the hall and he followed, flapping the TV listings at her and wailing, “My movie’s only three
minutes long!” Three minutes too long, Lewis thought. She tried picturing him as someone’s son, the cream in some doting mothers coffee. She tried feeling sorry for him because he was already growing jowls. Too late. Her heart was forming a thin, but impenetrable crust like the one that covered the earth while it was still young and fragile and lava bubbled just below the surface. When she asked him to leave, he started crying.

Then there was the fidgety young man who showed up on his skateboard. He whooshed right through her office door, then braked abruptly. The skateboard, an orange goat painted on it with X’s for eyes, shot straight up into the air. He caught it in one meaty paw and stuffed it under his armpit.

“You didn’t answer my phone calls,” he said. She thought the stud drilled through his tongue should have caused a slight lisp, but it didn’t.

“And you are?”

“Justin.”

“Justin what?” They all seemed to be named Justin.

“I made the film about the dude who goes through all this bad shit and then wakes up and finds out it was all just a dream.”

Lewis sighed.

“Watch it backwards,” Justin hissed, his eyes startlingly like Charles Manson’s. “What?”

“Just watch it backwards.” And he was gone, wheels grinding down the corridor.

Paul is dead?
Lewis thought.

“Shouldn’t we get a security guard,” she asked the festival director, “or a Doberman or something?”

But nothing could have prepared Lewis for the woman who showed up on her doorstep at home on that Saturday morning. She wasn’t a kid, either. She was about Lewis’s age, early thirties, but with this real lived-in look in her eyes. Her eyes were a living room of despair, full of mismatched furniture and candles stuck in Chianti bottles, dripping all over the place, a syringe under the wicker chair, a Ouija board on the coffee table. She held a tin can with a plastic nozzle in one hand and a Bic lighter in the other. Her neck was dishpan-hand red and streaked with sweat. Tiny neighbour kids trundled back and forth across the common area on their trikes, oblivious to what was going on, ringing their little bells feebly with inexperienced thumbs and veering into the cedar hedges. The woman stood there on the step of Lewis’s co-op and threatened to douse herself with gasoline and set herself on fire if Lewis didn’t program her film.

There were those students in South Korea who had set themselves on fire recently to protest unfair labour practices, and there was that Quaker who immolated himself in front of the Pentagon in a statement against the war in Vietnam. To Lewis, although they seemed insane, they were also somewhat noble. But to be willing to die for a bad, really bad, eleven-minute film in which a naked Barbie sat spinning on an old record turntable? The woman could not be serious. Besides, it wasn’t even technically a film; it was shot on video. Rules, Lewis had always believed, were rules. She wouldn’t
be forced into compromising her aesthetics, and she wasn’t about to let herself be blackmailed. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be polite.

“Would you like some coffee?” Lewis asked. “I could make a fresh pot.”

“Ten, nine, eight,” the woman chanted, dropping to her knees on the bristly welcome mat and holding the can above her head.

Lewis hesitated, then tried to call her bluff. “Maybe you’d prefer herbal tea?” she asked with her best hostessy smile, which she hoped wasn’t twitching.

“Seven, six, five.” The little kids joined in.
Ding, ding, ding
.

Lewis found herself inexplicably laughing as the woman flicked her Bic. She looked around, as if expecting someone to step from the shadows of an upstairs balcony, aim a video camera down into the courtyard and announce, “Smile, you’re on—”

After all the emergency crews had come and gone, a police officer took down her name. “And your first name?” he’d said, holding his pen above his little notepad. “That is my first name,” Lewis told him. Her mother had listened to a lot of Johnny Cash before she was born. As a little girl, Lewis had pretended her name was Louise. She later went through a phase at university during which, after several beers in the student pub, she’d greet strangers by standing on a chair and bellowing, “How do you
Bo-is
, my name is
Lew-is!”
No one ever got it except a pudgy, down-to-earth girl named Lila from Hundred
Mile House up north and so they became friends.