SSC (2012) Adult Onset

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  “Of course not.”

  On screen, Tony Soprano was frozen, lids half closed, finger raised as though poised to order a hit or a pizza. Play.

  “It is new,” said Hil.

  Pause.

  “What is?”

  “Every time it hurt, it was broken. That is new information.”

  There was no winning an argument with Hilary Creaghan once she had you in her Socratic sites—she had missed her calling as a Crown attorney. Maybe it wasn’t too late for her to go to law school and get a job with a benefits package so Mary Rose need never write the third in the trilogy.

  “Fine, you’re right. But it doesn’t change anything, which is my point—”

  “It means you grew up normalizing pain.”

  “I already knew that.”

  “No, you knew you had a high pain threshold, but you didn’t know why. I don’t think a pain threshold is something you’re born with, like bone cysts, it’s something you learn. If Maggie had a sore arm—”

  “Well, she doesn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m her mother.”

  “You just answered your own question.”

  “Hil, why are you cross-examining me, I’m just telling you what he said.”

  “Why are you so angry at me?”

  “I hate arguing, you enjoy it, I hate debating, I was forced into the debating club in high school and it scarred me for life, Dwight Dumphy was president, he had a damp little beard. I’m not angry, I’m making a joke, you’re the one who’s angry, you sound hostile.”

  “I’m really not, Mister. And it hurts me when you talk to me like that.”

  Sigh. “Like what?”

  “Like I’m your enemy.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s cultural, okay? I’m half Mediterranean, I’m not a WASP, you’re the one who sounds scary, all calm and rational—where are you going?”

  “I think I’ll go to bed.”

  “Don’t walk away! It makes me crazy when you—”

  Mary Rose balled her fists and jammed them against her forehead.

  Hilary sat down again. “What do you want me to do, Mary Rose?”

  Mary Rose bored her knuckles into her scalp, rigid with anger, furious at herself for being furious. The only way to get unfurious would be to have a huge fight with Hilary, during which Hil would unleash her victimy wrath before becoming rehumanized in Mary Rose’s eyes by crying, after which she would reassuringly resume her pedestal by being coldly critical of Mary Rose who would silently batter her own head and wind up rocking in the fetal position on the guest room bed so as not to wake the children while she waited for the corrosive tide of neurochemicals to retreat, repenting of everything, most fervently of the fact that she had ever been born. Unless Hil was going to slap her. She stole an upward glance from between clenched fists.

  But Hil wasn’t crying. Nor did she look poised to strike. She was looking at Mary Rose in a way that made her feel … disoriented. Which was a change from furious.

  “Watch The Sopranos with me,” Mary Rose answered meekly.

  “Okay.”

  Play. Tony was mad at Dr. Melfi for dissing his mother who had just put out a contract on his life. Mary Rose laughed. Hilary was silent.

  Mary Rose said, “I just remembered something my mum used to say when I would tell her about my arm being sore, she’d say, ‘If it’s sore, that’s your badness coming out in you.’ ”

  “I thought you said she didn’t know it was sore.”

  She decided to let Hil have the last word. She was a woman after all. So was Mary Rose, of course, but … Hil was more traditionally feminine … even if she was a lot like Mary Rose’s father. What does it mean when you marry your father and she’s a woman who favours heels and handbags?

  Later that night they were in bed and Mary Rose was slipping deliciously down the slope when she zoomed awake for no reason. She listened. Hil was asleep. “Hil? Are you awake?”

  “Hmm?”

  She felt Hilary’s hand find its way around her waist—even through sleep, Hil’s touch was elegant. She laced her fingers through Hil’s and turned toward her. Maybe they could just have sleepy sex—like the good old days, when Hil could get right into it without the aid of a twenty-minute back rub. But as though she had heard Mary Rose’s thought, Hil suddenly got out of bed.

  “Sorry,” said Mary Rose.

  “What for?”

  “Waking you up.”

  “You didn’t wake me up, I’m hungry.”

  “Oh, I thought you were—I thought you thought I was trying to—never mind.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” said Hil, “I woke you up.”

  “Actually, I woke you.”

  “Oh, did you want to have sex?”

  “No, no, I was just, um …”

  “I’m going to get some cereal.”

  “Do you want a back rub?”

  “No, I’m just hungry.”

  “Do you mind if I come down with you?”

  “You make me sound like the common cold, of course I don’t mind, Mister.”

  She could not shake an abject feeling—perhaps it was the disorientation of not having had a huge fight with Hil—it was as though she were back in grade three with a shameful crush on Lisa Snodgrass. Rising, she felt the familiar capsule break in the pit of her stomach and the dark elixir seep into her bloodstream. Guilt. But why? Her Catholic upbringing had left her prone to attacks of it like recurring bouts of malaria in old soldiers. Maybe she’d been born with a low guilt threshold, the way people are born with green eyes or black hair. Or bone cysts.

  She followed Hilary down the stairs, Daisy barged past, a four-legged emergency vehicle, and it came to her: she was guilty of having wasted the taxpayers’ money with her trip to the bone doctor today, bingo. The dark elixir gave way to a malodorous shame cloud, as though she had been caught masturbating in Dr. Ostroph’s waiting room—another unbidden thought, not to mention absurd, humerus clitoris!

  She would take guilt over shame any day—the dark elixir over the smelly cloud. Dark elixir … like the Black Tears with which the Ebony Elf replenishes her enchanted pool. In the second book, Kitty is aided in her quest to save Jon by a girl with pretty but painful feet who is really a unicorn under a spell of disenchantment. The girl can lead Kitty to the Land With No Name where the Black Tears flow, but only if Kitty brings her the magical instrument whose song will restore her true nature: a flute fashioned from the bone of a Bird of Pray … But what, Mary Rose now wondered, were the Black Tears actually made of? And how might Dr. Quinn use them to further his evil plan? These were questions for the third in the trilogy: Return to Otherwhere.

  She reached for the magnetic pen next to the phone and jotted on the grocery list, Black Tears = grief/guilt? Cure/cause cancer?

  Hil was at the pantry cupboard, pouring cereal into a bowl. “Do you need me to pick something up tomorrow? I can do the shopping.”

  “No, I just thought of something.”

  “For the third?”

  “Maybe.”

  She felt Hil kiss the back of her neck, but she slipped the embrace, went to the fridge, pulled open the freezer and promptly forgot what she was looking for.

  “Do you want to go back to work?” asked Hil.

  “Why? Am I doing such a lousy job here?” She tried to make it sound like a joke.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m cleaning the vinyl stripping on the freezer drawer,” said Mary Rose. “You should see it, it’s ready to sprout.”

  “Look at these Halloween cookie cutters,” she said the next day, hauling jute bags up the back steps into the kitchen. “I got them two for a loonie.”

  “You didn’t have to do the shopping, babe, I was going to,” said Hil.

  “You can help unpack.”

  Hil held up a blue package. “We already have Q-tips.”

  “We have them in our bathroom. These are for the kitchen.”

  “
… Why?”

  “How do you think I got the vinyl stripping on the freezer so clean? And look at the buttons on the Bose, you can see the edges now, they were gummed over. And see? Everyone thinks a dishwasher is clean by definition, right?” She opened it and pointed with relish. “Well, all along the inside edge here … gross, eh? …” She tore the plastic from the fresh box of Q-tips.

  “Can’t you just go upstairs and get Q-tips whenever you want?” asked Hil.

  Mary Rose straightened and sighed, unaware, until she spoke, of the depth of her outrage. “Why should I have to? Why, in my own house, can I not have a box of kitchen-specific Q-tips? You never have to see them, you never have to use them—why would you, since I’m the one who does the shopping and the deep cleaning anyway”—she could hear herself over-articulating, like her father, a caricature of expository calm, but she could not stop—“I fail to understand why, at forty-eight, I have not earned, along with a decent amount of money, the right to have kitchen Q-tips.”

  She saw Hilary’s expression harden, and quailed. She had gone too far. She laughed. “Hilary, I’m just making fun of myself.”

  Maggie climbed onto the stepstool, turned the water on and started “doing the dishes.” Matthew drove his train into the kitchen. Mary Rose knew she didn’t have a chance, Hilary would zero in for the kill, knowing Mary Rose would not risk escalating in front of the children and therefore would take anything Hil dished out.

  But Hil said, “You’re right. I just wonder if you really need to clean that hard.”

  “Cleaning is important to me. It’s part of my job.”

  “We have a cleaning lady.”

  “She does the broad strokes.”

  “We could ask her to Q-tip the kitchen.” Hil looked amused.

  Mary Rose realized she had been yearning to see that look, to have the forgiving Hilary back, the easygoing one who could laugh at Mary Rose’s faults and turn them into foibles. And here she was, beautiful, smiling, surpassing even her sympathetic forbearance of the night before when Mary Rose had been channelling Tony Soprano. I love you, Hil.

  But she said, “Well, you may consider it beneath contempt, but I don’t think it’s a waste of my time, there are Zen masters who do this.”

  Hil straight out laughed, but Mary Rose maintained her stony composure.

  “As long as you’re happy,” said Hil.

  “I’m happy,” she hissed through clenched teeth. And watched the amusement die in Hilary’s eyes.

  •

  The child is standing with its hands pressed against the glass door to the balcony.

  “Come away from there.” says Dolly.

  Bang. Bang, bang.

  It is a warm sunny day. April, now. But she has closed and locked the door—her husband says the bars are too close to allow the child to slip through, but Dolly can’t be sure.

  Bang, bang!

  “Cut it out, now.”

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  She turns her face to the back of the couch. She can stay lying down, nothing bad will happen.

  •

  The alarm does not sound—not that she can hear—but she runs down the six or seven flights of stairs anyway. At the very bottom she exits through another fire door, expecting to emerge onto Mount Sinai Hospital’s retail concourse and food court, only to find herself in a quiet corridor, its walls of cinder block painted a grief-green. A wheeled yellow bin is parked directly in front of her, its side stamped in black letters, INCINERATE. She bangs back into the stairwell and does not breathe until she has crossed the busy concourse and emerged onto University Avenue where she takes a big gulp of healthy Tuesday traffic. It is 11:10 a.m., she has fifty minutes all to herself before she has to be home to relieve Candace.

  She hops on her bike and, conscious of a not altogether unpleasant squishiness left over from the lube, rides up the urban canyon. To her left, Princess Margaret, the hospital that cancer built; to her right, the Hospital for Sick Children, its main entrance adorned with a neon train to mitigate terror—most of it the parents’. She stands on the pedals, ascending the slope of an ancient lakebed, rolling over millennial mysteries, over bones and battles up to Queen’s Park, the noble neo-Gothic pile where the provincial government sits and her brother liaises with it. She sails around the Legislature and coasts into the park proper, where a copper-cast King Edward VII presides astride his fiery steed. Despite municipal efforts, the horse’s penis is perpetually painted red, owing perhaps to the proximity of the University of Toronto and its scheming spires. She looks up as she glides along—overhead the threnody of bare branches hums with new life set to burst into song. This year she will catch the moment when the world turns green.

  She exits the park at the war memorial, to her left the Royal Ontario Museum—the ROM—rite of passage for schoolchildren province-wide with its dinosaur skeletons and mummies, its totem poles and tomb treasure—all that separates a memorial from a museum is time. And power. To the victor the stories … She reaches Bloor Street and turns left, heading west.

  The Museum was recently the subject of lively controversy owing to a glass addition that some hailed as a “world-class” architectural landmark and others reviled as a barnacle. Toronto is like that. Its truly beautiful buildings do their job without drawing a lot of attention, neither soaring nor splitting light. Some, like City Hall, testify to the optimism of the sixties when space was there for the curving, and as for the rest, it is a preponderance of Victorian utility that in some quarters has lent itself to gentrification, in others hipsterfication, while vast tracts retain the spartan rectitude that earned the city its nickname, “Toronto the Good.” A combination of corruption and consensus has often stymied visionaries such that the city has not gelled in the popular imagination around any one icon. The CN Tower is tall. So are a lot of things. What Toronto boasts is life, bulges with it, a metropolis of non-joiners, a collection of communities from all parts of the planet that swell and spill into one another. At the corner of Spadina Avenue, she stops at the lights—maybe she ought to nip across and rejoin the Jewish Community Centre, start getting back into serious shape—“You don’t have to be Jewish to join!” But as she navigates the crush of pedestrians she spots her ex, Renée, sitting in the window of the adjacent Second Cup, and presses on, pausing to give a loonie to the woman who, for the past ten years, has stood at the northwest corner of Spadina and Bloor chanting, “Can you spare a loonie for my son and I?” Mary Rose again resists correcting her, “For my son and me,” as she drops the dollar coin into the chewed-looking Tim Hortons coffee cup. She has never seen any sign of a son—clearly the woman has worse problems than faulty grammar. She continues west along Bloor, past the Shoppers Drug Mart where she and Hil spent a fortune on pee sticks, and wonders what to do with her extra forty minutes.

  She has lived here long enough to have seen the street change clothes if not character, and behind every new facade she can still see earlier ones layered like old movie posters. She passes the Bloor Superfresh that everyone still calls the Bloor Super Save—it was the first twenty-four-hour store on the strip and in the days before Sunday shopping, certain aisles were cordoned off, it being for some reason legal to buy milk but not Q-tips on the Lord’s Day. She sees one of the dads from Matthew’s school.

  “Hi, Mary Rose.”

  He is a political cartoonist—or is he the physicist? She slows.

  “Hi … Keith.”

  “When’s the book coming out?”

  It’s a funny turn of phrase, as though the book were cowering in the closet. “When Maggie’s in university!” she replies. Past the natural food store with its medicinal whiff of buckwheat. Vegetarians used to be cadaverous killjoys with no use for food other than to push the food that was already in them out, but now the woods are full of friendly vegans—some things really do get better.

  Past the corner of Brunswick Avenue where academic loafers huddle over cappuccinos on the crumbling patio of By the Way Café that used t
o be Lickin’ Chicken; a woman at a rickety table raises a hand in greeting. Mary Rose waves back, “Hi … (Blank).” The woman used to run the box office at the Poor Alex Theatre—she looks old. Perhaps she just looks her age. Note to self: when past fifty, avoid Bolivian shawls unless you are Bolivian. Past the candy store that used to be a Hungarian restaurant, past the hip clothing store that used to be a Hungarian restaurant, past the Wiener’s Hardware that has always been Wiener’s Hardware—outside Indra Crafts a knot of schoolgirls sample sticks of incense and examine tiny carved elephants on a table crammed with wares; amid a thickening braid of pedestrians from every sidewalk of life she spots the Native guy striding with his German shepherd off-leash at his side. She rides on, past the old Bloor Cinema on one side and Lee’s Palace on the other, temple of indie rock where she did performance art back in the day and got drunk and met Renée—its exterior is still graffitied, but professionally so now; past a Lebanese restaurant that used to be a Hungarian restaurant, past a Hungarian restaurant, past the bookstore that is still a bookstore, and the Starbucks that used to be everything else.

  She thinks Renée may have put on a few pounds, but she looked good just now, she has grown her hair, she looks a bit like Carole King if Carole King wore a blue boiled-wool caftan and jewellery made of river rocks and computer parts. Mary Rose and Renée have been on cordial terms for years. Even Hilary has overcome her allergy to Mary Rose’s ex. Renée is someone who can make art out of anything, but when they were together she was also someone who couldn’t make anything into a job. Mary Rose was racked with guilt when she finally left, convinced Renée would fall apart, drink herself to death and wind up homeless. Spare a loonie? Renée got a full-time job at a community college and bought a condo. She kept the cats, one of which is still alive at eighteen.

  Mary Rose brakes at the lights and considers heading across to Honest Ed’s, the flashing neon emporium where “only the floors are crooked!” But she would need more time for that, not to mention a GPS to find her way out again. She crosses the street and hesitates before Secrets from Your Sister. Professional bra fitters with nary a gnarly old lady in sight to bully you into the right brassiere—the word itself a burpy bugle-bleat, herald of humiliation and Aunt Sadie palpating Mary Rose’s eleven-year-old chest, “She’s gettin’ bumps, Dolly!” Mary Rose locks her bike—she is a middle-aged, very married mother, there is nothing remotely suggestive in a spontaneous bra fitting mid-week mid-morning. She could use a sturdy new bustenhalter, as they say in Germany.