SSC (2012) Adult Onset

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  He knows the answer, he taught her the answer, coached and rooted for her till she breached every last barrier—Do it your way, Mister—to the point of coming out of the closet long before anyone thought “it gets better,” at which point he stopped cheering. Still, it is nothing new, it goes all the way back to Germany and one of her earliest memories.

  She is sitting on his lap, steering the car—before the days of seat belts and child safety laws. It does not get better than this: you may not be fully toilet trained, but you can steer the car. “That’s it, Mister, nice and easy, turn the wheel.” His hands halo hers as the wheel spools beneath her fingers. There is the smell of diesel and leather. I AM STEERING THE CAR. Over the red dashboard is the horizon of windshield, the clown nose at the centre of the wheel is the horn. “You’re a good driver, Mister.” I AM A GOOD DRIVER. “Now let’s shift gears.” She feels his leg tighten beneath her as he steps on the clutch. She cups her palm over the ball of the gear stick with its strange carved symbols, and feels the force of his hand bearing down on hers as he thrusts them through the thunking. DON’T BE SCARED OF THAT. “Good stuff, now we’re in second.” The shaft of the stick is impaled in a soft leather pouch, like the wrinkly snout of an animal that is getting wrenched about the nose, but it doesn’t hurt it—it is just a thing—and you’re not supposed to look at that part of the car anyway, KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD. It was a cream-coloured VW Beetle with red leather interior. At some point he took to teasing her. “When the boy is born, you’ll have to sit in the back seat and he’ll steer the car.”

  “No, I steer.”

  “Boys sit in the front, girls sit in the back.”

  “No, me do that.”

  “Nope. You’ll be in the back seat with your sister.”

  “No!”

  “The boy will be up front with me.”

  “NO!”

  He laughed until she saw his gold tooth. The rage tore up her throat like grit—gone was the horizon over the dash in the blur of an eye, she was turning into a tangle, as if she were scribbling over herself with black crayon, until finally, “I HATE THE BOY!”

  Clotted words, flung like ink, she was black but she was back.

  His voice was suddenly sad. “Don’t say that, Mister, he’s just a baby. He’s going to be your little brother.”

  He looked sad and bewildered. She had hurt him. And she had hurt a poor dear baby. Her own brother. Shame engulfed her, rising from within like the warm, wet odour of pee. “Sorry, Daddy.” Tears.

  Back then it was not possible to know the sex of a fetus, so while her father’s certainty must have been wishful thinking, he was right. The baby she cursed was a boy.

  Mary Rose does not need to pay a psychotherapist to know that deep down she is convinced she killed Alexander, robbed him of his birthright and deserves to be punished for her place in the driver’s seat. It is right there in the pages of her own book: Kitty and Jon McRae are twins who, in their respective worlds, absorbed one another in utero and were born as singles. Each has one blue eye and one brown, a vestige of their missing sibling. And each, merely by having been born, has robbed the other of that which could heal their respective worlds … Even if she failed to see it until she had written the second book.

  Perhaps that is why she used to pore over the graveside photo in secret. She was returning to the scene of a crime, stealing away with the album to the bathroom or the crawl space—almost as if it were a dirty picture; limiting her viewings so it would retain its “power.” Closing her eyes, she would turn to the correct page, count to three then open them … as though to catch the photo in the act. Of what? She once enlisted Andy-Patrick in a furtive viewing, but cut it short. “You’re too young,” she said, closing the album. Then she scuttled from the crawl space and held the door closed on him in the darkness until he stopped crying.

  Is it her fault Andy-Patrick is a mess?

  She was five when she heard her mother make the call to Cape Breton, a catch in her voice as she cradled the phone receiver in both hands and told her own father, “Pa? Pa, I’ve had a son! I’ve had a son, Pa!” She was nine when her father took to sitting her and Maureen down and regretfully laying at their feet their brother’s inability to stay out of trouble at school or get along at home—not to mention his taste for playing dress-up: “You have to remember he’s a boy in a family of girls. He doesn’t have a brother. He is outnumbered by sisters.” He spoke in the ultra-expository tones he reserved for math problems and travel directions. But with a plaintive note. “You can’t expect him to act like a little girl. He’s a boy.”

  There would be a pause. She would feel shame seeping warm and sickly. “Mary Rose, you’re closest to him in age, you have the biggest influence.” Whenever he used her actual name, she felt pinned. This is what is behind the tomboy nickname and the carefree wink from Dad: a girl’s name. You can hurt yourself on it if you forget it’s there. “You’ve got to let him be a boy.”

  Few things were more shaming than knowing you were preventing your brother from being a boy—like barging into a bathroom lined with urinals, who do you think you are? Molesting his masculinity, that sacred, powerful, delicate thing that was none of her business yet her business to protect. This seemed to mean that Andy-Patrick was to be supported in wreaking havoc, lest he grow up weak and effeminate. Mary Rose robbed her dead sister too, of course, but only of a name.

  She opens her dented freezer to put away a container of cut-up bananas for smoothies, but it is a tight fit. She reaches into the back, extracts an opaque brick and sets it on the counter. Wrapped in layers of what looks to be surgical dressing, stained with something dark … her mother’s Christmas cake.

  It has to be eaten before next Christmas. It must not be discovered intact next January when her mother brings another Christmas cake … unless her mother has died by then and this Christmas cake turns out to have been the last one. Her throat thickens painfully at the thought of her mother’s busy brown hands stirring the batter in the white vat set atop the banged-up freezer out in the garage, “C’mere kids and give the Christmas cake a stir for luck!”

  Who is going to look after her parents if the emergency comes while Dolly and Dunc are at their home in Ottawa? Mary Rose is four and a half hours away by car, and even if Andy-Patrick gets posted to RCMP headquarters there, how will he cope if—when—something happens? He will shatter. He will swallow his tongue and pee his pants. She and Maureen need to find him a solid, capable woman they can rely on to find their parents dead one day. Otherwise it will be a nice neighbour. “We noticed the mail piling up, dear, and your parents hadn’t mentioned they were going out of town, so I used the key they gave me, and …”

  As it is, the best she can hope for is that her parents drop dead in Victoria, where people are used to scraping seniors off the sidewalk and defibrillating them in malls. Her father, a poster-senior for successful bypass surgery, is still a candidate for heart attack. What if he infarcts behind the wheel, mounts the curb and kills a pedestrian pushing a stroller?

  Dolly had wanted to call the new baby Alexander, but Mary Rose said, “If you call him Alexander, you’ll have to put him in the ground.” She thinks she remembers this, but it is so much a stock part of family lore that perhaps she merely remembers having been told the story. No wonder she clung to the old graveside photo; it was a moment captured in time, unlike the unstable atoms of memory. Considering the intensity with which she examined the photo, every detail ought to be burnt into her brain, including the dates on the stone. But memory plays tricks, recording the flotsam of a flowered sweater and erasing the lifespan of a lost baby boy. In any event, thanks to Mary Rose Andrew-Patrick got a fresh name.

  He would have been around a year old, and she would have been six, back on the air force base at Trenton. He was sitting in a heap of baby fat at the bottom of the stairs, dressed in a plaid jumpsuit, crying. Clear baby drool mixed with tears. Mary Rose was consoling him when her father came and crouched next to
them. She expected him to pick Andy-Patrick up and comfort him—Dad was patient and loving. But Duncan looked straight at fat little Andy-Pat and said, “What’re you crying for like a sissy girl?”

  Mary Rose went hot. She felt dreadful for her father for having said this in front of her. For a moment it was as though the air were made of sheet metal, searing like the sun on the wing of a fighter jet. How could she stand up for herself while allowing room for him to have meant something different?

  “Dad? All girls aren’t sissies.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” he said in his harmless voice. “It’s perfectly normal for girls to cry, but what you have to understand is, we don’t want anyone giving your brother a hard time when he’s older.”

  “I’m a girl and I don’t cry.”

  “I know, little buddy.”

  She never cried, whether she fell off her bike or was facing shots in net in exchange for playing road hockey with the boys. She thought, but would not say, “I didn’t even cry when you gave me the airplane swing,” because that would be like saying, “You hurt me, Dad.”

  “Not all girls are sissies,” she said. “Most of them are, but I’m not.”

  “I know, Mister, you’re tough.”

  And having been offered a sliver of space, she squeezed under the umbrella.

  Brother and sister did, however, maintain a bond. When he started toddling, their mother would tie him around the waist with two diapers knotted end to end and fastened to a bar of his crib, “so he won’t climb out and hurt himself.” Sometimes at night Mary Rose would steal into his room, kneel at his crib-side and, closing her hands round the bars, whisper consolation. He would respond with pleading hazel eyes and downy brows—she cried too, because they were pretending he was in jail. She once made the mistake of untying him, which meant it was her own fault when he got out and pulled her hair. Mum hauled her away by the arm, which hurt but only because it was her sore arm anyhow.

  By then they were living in Hamilton, “the Steel City,” beneath its yellow cloud that was visible for miles—you could not see the cloud when you were under it, but often you could smell it: rotten eggs. “That’s the smell of prosperity,” said Duncan. The smelters worked day and night, eternal flames shot from smokestacks into the sky, effluent ran from pipes into Lake Ontario, and framing it all like a dirty rainbow was the mighty Skyway bridge. Up there, wind buffeted cars and rocked the trucks, and anyone foolhardy enough to get out of their car with a camera might be blown over the rail.

  It was winter. Aunt Sadie had come to stay while Uncle Leo was “sorting things out back home” again. They were outside playing, Andy-Pat was Michelined into his snowsuit, teetering on tiny galoshes. Mary Rose does not recall what precipitated it, but recalls vividly her aunt’s advice. “Dolly, don’t hit him in the face. Hit his little hands, like this.” Mary Rose watched as Aunt Sadie demonstrated the proper way to hit a child, taking Andy-Pat’s hand in one of her own and smacking it sharply with her other. “See? Don’t hit him anywhere on the head.” Smack. Andy-Pat’s face turned red and he cried.

  They lived in Hamilton for nine months while Duncan did his MBA at McMaster University. Maureen started high school at Cathedral Catholic Secondary and played guitar in the groovy new folk masses, Andy-Patrick discovered that blobs of tar on the sidewalk could be chewed like gum, and Dolly had another miscarriage. Mary Rose entered grade three at St. Anne’s Catholic Elementary School and fell in love.

  The sight of Lisa Snodgrass in the next row was like lemonade on a scorching day, like vanilla ice cream on a sore throat, like—Pay attention! Mary Rose looked up. Mrs. Peters resembled a pterodactyl with lipstick. She had a visible mole on her scalp and a frightening habit of smiling when displeased.

  “Show me that note,” she said, beaming.

  Mary Rose had not intended to pass the note, having written it only in order to see the words on paper. Mrs. Peters read it silently then looked at her strangely before saying, “That makes no sense at all,” and tearing it up.

  Mary Rose waited until she was home to rewrite the note in pencil on a scrap of paper by the phone. She looked at the words for a long while, then for some reason she tore up that note too.

  They moved to Kingston, where, for the first time, her parents purchased a house. Her father planted a flowering crab in the front lawn, its endearing sparseness reminiscent of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. “This tree will be flowering long after we’ve moved away again,” he said in the mournful tones of Scottish contentment.

  They lived in a new subdivision. These were the days when children “went out and played”; there were woods and creeks that had yet to be tamed into suburban lots, and for endless summer days Mary Rose could “light out” like Huck and not return till supper, socks burred, runners soaked.

  To get to the Royal Military College where her father worked you had to drive past the Dairy Queen, the Kmart, three prisons, the loony bin, Sir John A. Macdonald’s house—with his small bed and undersized boots that showed what life had been like before vitamins—Queen’s University, Kingston General Hospital and across the lift bridge to the stone archway that led to the ivy-bearded walls wherein her father taught economics, “the dismal science.” Eventually Maureen would get a weekend job lifeguarding at the pool there and meet Zoltan Zivcovic, an officer cadet whose pillbox hat and sticking-out ears made him look like a tall, serious monkey. Andy-Patrick moved from a crib into a room of his own equipped with everything Mary Rose could desire in the way of vehicles and weaponry, not to mention clothing—she felt like an imposter in girls’ clothes. But she continued to love her brother when he was sad, sick or asleep—he got mononucleosis shortly after they moved in and he was adorable.

  Her father sent her off on the first day of school with a firm pat on the head, “Do it your way, Rosie.” She lined up outside Our Lady of Lourdes with the grade fives, awaiting the bell, conscious of the butterflies in her stomach aflutter with the secret of the miracle, You have skipped a grade! She looked up and down the line, assessing which girl would be the object of her crush, a worthy successor to Lisa Snodgrass … and stopped herself, suddenly aware that it was wrong. And they knew they were naked. Having crushes on girls was something to be left behind along with her place in the slow readers’ group. It belonged to a benighted past that need never cast its shadow so long as she did her best, then better than her best. She looked up and down the line again. And chose Danny Pinder. Another miracle. Our Lady made her become normal.

  She was unable, however, to leave behind the soreness in her arm. It smelled of the grave.

  “Maureen! Come, I need you!” cried Dolly.

  It was the middle of the day, but her mother was taking a bath. They were not at school so perhaps it was the weekend. Mary Rose followed her sister up the stairs but Mo hurried in and closed the bathroom door behind her. She pressed her ear to it, then opened it a crack. Her mother was in the tub, the water was red. Maureen turned, saw Mary Rose and slammed the door in her face, shouting at the same time, “It’s okay, Rosie!” That night her mother was quiet and they got to order pizza.

  It was the last “other.”

  One summer day, Mary Rose ransacked the steamer trunk in the basement for Aunt Sadie’s sateen dressing gown from the forties, a flowing affair in gold and scarlet paisley, and other mothbally sundries—her mother’s nursing cape, a plastic sword from a giant bag of puffed rice—and she and Andy-Pat along with a couple of neighbourhood kids devised and put on a play. They wrestled the lawn mower and snow shovels out of the aluminum garden shed, using it and its dented sliding doors as a proscenium stage, thus linking forever the magic of theatre to the smell of grass cuttings and motor oil. The Curse of Roderigo. Mary Rose had cast five-year-old Andy-Pat in the title role, furnishing him with a hunchback courtesy of a couch cushion, but he insisted on playing the damsel in distress, “Lady Jenniah,” with lipstick, fan and Aunt Sadie’s sateen.

  She summoned the family and neighbours
to the driveway, where they watched from the comfort of lawn chairs. The sun set, swords were drawn, Lady Jenniah wept and danced, Roderigo fought and swore to avenge her death. Andy-Pat was brilliant. Everyone clapped. Afterwards her father took her aside, “Don’t be getting your brother to dress up like a girl, Mister.”

  She did not question him this time. She was old enough to identify the scent of shame. Andy-Pat retired from the stage and went back to pulling out clumps of her hair and she went back to hating that little brat. The end of their mother’s rope was frayed. “C’mere till I annihilate the both of you!”

  No matter how many clumps of hair he pulled from her head, or how often she told their father on him—“Dad is going to kill you!”—she and Andy-Patrick returned to one another, compelled by a folie à deux, or merely their job description that mirrored that of the sheepdog and coyote in the old cartoon, each punching the clock at the dawn of the workday—“Mornin’ Ralph,”

  “Mornin’ Fred”—then proceeding to do battle.

  She took to terrorizing them both with an entity called Zygote from the Planet Zytox. They’d be in the basement rec room that their father had finished with wood panelling and scalloped plaster on the ceiling—this was the room where the whole family had watched the moon landing. The room with the crawl space. Heralded by an intergalactic beeping that she produced by sucking in air backward through her larynx, the alien who had inhabited Mary Rose’s body would croak in a metallic voice, “I am Zygote from the Planet Zytox. Your sister, Mary Rose, is being held prisoner there.”

  She had bangs and a pixie cut. A&P had a brush cut—his eyelashes were extra curly, having been recently singed when he leaned over the manhole where Travis Orr had emptied go-kart fuel and followed it with a lit match.

  “If you do not follow my instructions, she will be killed immediately,” rasped Zygote. Andy-Pat’s lip quivered and he swore to do whatever he was told to save his sister—he even attempted to assault Zygote, who nipped it in the bud: “Your feeble attempts to harm me only make it worse for your sister, who at this very instant is being tortured on Zytox.”