Adult Onset

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  “Right, so based on all that,” she says, “why do you think you go from conquest to conquest, seeking your reflection in the adoring eyes of younger and younger women whom you do not allow to stick around long enough to find out what a worthless person you are so they can’t shame you for it all over again?”

  He furrows his brow.

  She continues, “You have a deep sense of inadequacy that was engendered by Mum’s rage and reinforced by Dad’s blind eye—except for when he gave you the belt, of course—but the point is: it cost you two marriages, an engagement, it’s put your relationship with your daughters at risk, and it’s preventing you from being happy in your own skin.”

  “As opposed to someone else’s,” he says with rakish good cheer.

  “Ideally both.”

  “I know you’re right, Mary Rose? And I totally appreciate it, but …” The gleam re-enters his eye. “I’m actually having a pretty good time at the moment.”

  “I’m just a jealous housewife, you look great.”

  “No, you’re right, I’m a shit—”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Dad always said that, I mean, he’s the gold standard, right? Dad’s a gentleman.”

  “You’re a gentleman.” She wishes she sounded more convincing.

  “Not like Dad.”

  How to support him while not enabling his sexism? “You’re a nice uncle,” she says feebly. On the other hand, why rain on his parade? If it doesn’t matter to him, why should it matter to her that Andy-Patrick has baggage? Steamer trunks and duffle bags and fanny packs …

  “And now he has a stolen car,” says Hil on the phone later that night.

  “No he hasn’t. He’s a cop, he would know.”

  “I’m sure he does.” Hil has a light touch and it goes for her voice too; satiny, a slight breathy quality. Mary Rose found it sexy at first—still does, of course, but after several years of marriage she has become attuned as well to the undertone of steely authority. Which is also, of course, sexy.

  “Oh my God, are you saying he knows?” Mary Rose is leaning against the kitchen counter in front of the big black windows.

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to know that he knows, which is why he’s telling you in such loving detail about Boris …”

  “Slavko.”

  “Slavko, whom he talks about with the same warm … zeal that people who’ve just met your mother talk about her.”

  “You’re comparing my mother to a car mechanic with ties to the Russian mob?”

  Silence.

  “Hil, that was a joke.” Hil is adept at using silence—tweezery bits of it—to advantage. Another skill that eludes Mary Rose. “Why do you have to cut through everything with your brain-diamond, why can’t you just laugh along with the absurdity of things?”

  “Why would I laugh? Your brother’s in crisis.” Steel creeping in …

  “He’s not, he’s just—he’s an overly entitled, overly charming, middle-aged, middle-class white guy, he’s right in the demographic sweet spot.”

  “You’re in one too.”

  “Oh, you mean the middle-aged lesbian single-mother housewife sweet spot?”

  Mary Rose is uncertain whether she has pitched it with jam or vinegar until Hilary laughs. “That’s the one!” Jam. Phone-fight averted.

  She tells her about Rochelle and the car alarm—but not the scissors—and Hil laughs again. She moves from counter to table and relaxes, stroking Daisy’s broad head as the old girl lumbers past, en route from her basement bed to her upstairs bed. “Then my mother called back just as Maggie started changing her own diaper.”

  “I think she may be ready to start toilet training,” says Hil.

  Mary Rose suppresses a sigh. The prospect of the painstaking attention required, the random trips to the potty for long unproductive stints followed immediately by accidents, strikes Sisyphean ennui into her heart. Surely it can wait until Hil gets home next week.

  “I don’t want to rush her into anything. How’s it going?” she asks, steering into safer waters. “Have you done a run-through yet?”

  “We had our first dress rehearsal today. Maury had to do the second act without a wig.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Maury’s playing Lady Bracknell.

  “Yeah.”

  “How many previews does Alberta Theatre Projects give you?”

  “Eight.”

  Eight chances to get it right in front of a paying audience before opening night. “Excellent.” Hil normally pulls rabbits out of her hat with far less.

  Hil brings Mary Rose up to date on the crew guys and the flies—the ones that haul sets through the air, not the ones you swat—relishing technical challenges as much as aesthetic ones, loving how they are linked. “He keeps them lubricated, but no one has actually used them in years.”

  “Who does?”

  “The Tech Director. Paul.”

  “Great. It’ll be amazing if you can just fly in the hedge maze.”

  “I know, plus funny.”

  The Importance of Being Earnest features one of Mary Rose’s all-time favourite lines, and she speaks it now for Hil in Lady Bracknell’s craggy voice: “ ‘To lose one child may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.’ ”

  She tells Hil about the lost “packeege!” and her father’s lovely e-mail. “Some things really do get batter.’ ” She tells her about Daisy almost biting the mailman, about the Christmas tree stand—

  “I thought we already had one.”

  “Not one like this.”

  “Are we getting rid of the old one?”

  “We’ll keep it as a backup.”

  “Why do we need a backup if the new one’s perfect?”

  “Okay, we’ll get rid of it, I don’t care.”

  “What are you going to do tomorrow when Candace comes?” The question rankles Mary Rose. What does she think I’m going to do with my nanny time? Get together with “the girls” for lunch? Buy a new hat? “I have a doctor’s appointment,” she replies grimly. Long-sufferingly.

  “Is it your arm?”

  “My arm? No.”

  “It was bothering you.”

  “Yeah, and I dealt with it, it’s basically demon.”

  “Demon?”

  “Phantom, it’s nothing, I’ll google it.”

  “Don’t google it! Go to the doctor.”

  “I went to the doctor, it’s nothing.” She coughs.

  “Are you coming down with something?”

  “No, I just did too much laundry tonight and now I’m a bit tired.”

  “Don’t let yourself get rundown.”

  “I can be tired, Hil, I’m single-handed here—”

  “You’re doing a wonderful job.”

  “They’re alive, anyway.”

  “I love you. I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You’re beautiful,” says Hil. “I hope you don’t mind … I’ve been using you.”

  “Be my guest.”

  Warm silence.

  From upstairs comes a sleepy cry.

  “Maggie’s up, I should go before she wakes Matthew.”

  “She’s still waking up at night?”

  “Yeah.” Martyred sigh.

  “Even without the morning nap?”

  “I better go.”

  “I love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  “Wait, when’re your parents coming?”

  “I don’t know, soon.”

  “Let me know.”

  “Why? It’s like early next week sometime. Or late this week.”

  “I know, but … I know it’s not nothing when you see them.”

  They’ve had some of their worst fights on the heels of visits with her parents, no matter how nice a time it has been—why does Hil have to dredge that up now?

  “Don’t worry, Hil, you won’t even be here.”

  “That’s not what I mean, love.”

&nb
sp; She has braced herself for archness, but Hil’s tone is … kind. She stiffens. “I better go.” Upstairs, Maggie has started singing. “It’ll be fine, really, my mum’s so jovial now, it’s bizarre, it’s almost worth it that she’s losing her marbles.”

  “You think she’s got some dementia?”

  “No, I don’t know, not like that, it’s just, she’s starting to come loose like an old sweater.”

  “… She doesn’t seem that different to me.”

  “Well, she’s not your mother. I can tell, she’s looping.”

  “She’s loopy?”

  “Looping, you know, round and round, the package, the babies, the package.”

  “What babies?”

  “The dead ones, plus she asked me twenty times today where you were, I kept saying, Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnie-the-Pooh Peg!”

  Silence.

  “Hil?”

  “… I’m in Calgary.”

  Upstairs, Maggie is quiet again—perhaps she was singing in her sleep, Hil sometimes laughs in her sleep. Mary Rose swallows. Does she have early onset?

  Hil is saying, “Sweetheart, you’ve got a lot going on—”

  “You’re in Calgary. Jesus Murphy.”

  “It doesn’t matter where I am, the point is, I’m not home and—”

  “I knew that, I know you’re at ATP.” Alberta Theatre Projects. Mary Rose lives in Toronto, smack in the middle of the country if not the universe, but she does know the difference between the provinces of Alberta and Manitoba. “God.”

  “They’re both west,” says Hilary kindly.

  “God.” Mountains versus Prairies.

  “You’re focused on the kids and that’s all you need to—”

  “I better go, I can hear Maggie.” Lie.

  “I love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  Her arm was not bothering her when Hil asked, but it is now. Her large bag is hanging over the railing post at the top of the back steps. She digs out the tube of Advil she has taken to carrying and swallows one. That makes three today, but it’s best to get the jump on pain because once it starts it creates its own momentum. There is nothing actually wrong with her arm—she consulted an orthopaedic surgeon last fall; the pain is apparently merely a nuisance. He called it something … not “phantom” per se, something else … she can’t remember. She ought to go to bed now, but the imp of the perverse lives in her laptop—how else to explain why a tired adult who needs to get up early with children lifts the lid on that glowing box of ills?

  She refrains from googling “Adult Onset Pediatric Bone Cysts,” less due to the absurdity of the search words than to the certainty that she will diagnose herself with bone cancer in minutes. Over Christmas she innocently researched home remedies for a sinus infection and wound up with a rare paranasal tumour.

  There is an e-mail from Kate confirming the movie Wednesday night—it’ll be good to get out for the evening—out of her own head before she goes out of her mind. Bridget and Kate are rich and really fun—in the intervals when they’re not on the rocks. They donate a lot of money to women’s health causes, and renovate a great deal. There is an e-mail from her old buddy Hank, who is somewhere in Mexico—he’s sent a photo, “Does this Harley-Davidson chopper make my prostate look big?” Best friends from back in their twenties, Hank is the last of the very few guys she ever more or less slept with, Mary Rose having approached heterosexuality rather like math: she worked at it until she achieved a C then felt justified in dropping it. While she might prefer to forget the awkward episode, the fact of their once, long ago, having “kissed with tongues” has injected a companionable wry note into their friendship. Hank cooked his way to the top of the Toronto food chain during the culinary explosion of the nineties and now has his face on bottles of sauce, but claims, “If I could write like you, Mister, I’d trade it in a heartbeat.” He has also advised her that she could make a fortune writing lesbian porn. “But tastefully, you know,” he added. “Fifty Shades of Gay.” He got some iffy results on his last checkup, and went out and bought the bike.

  Bing!

  Duncan MacKinnon, we have found 454 3rd degree relatives!

  It is from Origin-eology.com in Texas. She ordered her father a DNA kit online for his eightieth birthday and is now the regular recipient of special offers to do with the Y chromosome. Duncan has been working on a family tree for years now, tracing the first of their forbears to board a plague ship from Scotland for the New World. Why are people so pumped about nth degree relatives they’ve never met, when they can barely cope with the ones they know? Bing!

  RE: Some things really do get batter

  Dear Mister,

  Well that was a heck of a cliffhanger! You ought to try your hand at writing;-) (I just learned how to do that winking face!) What were you going to say? You’ve got me in suspense now.

  Love,

  Dad

  She glances down the thread.

  Dear Dad,

  I

  And hits reply.

  Dear Dad,

  Sorry, Maggie hit “send” then the doorbell rang at the same time as the phone, and Daisy just about ate the mailman! Do you think Mum may be experiencing the early stages of

  Delete.

  Mum tells me you’ll be leaving Victoria and heading east again in the next few days. I’m really looking forward to seeing you both at the station for the usual “stopover.” I’ll alert the Tim Hortons! Would you mind dropping me a line to let me know when your train will be arriving? By the way, did Mum mail a package for me?—speaking of “cliffhangers” (hey, can you do that?!)

  What kind of “reply” is that? She has written two books and she can’t even write one lousy e-mail to her father. She is evading his touching e-mail of this morning. No she isn’t, she is tired—her eyes skitter side to side again as though to prove the point. She is not a retired management consultant, she does not have time to compose touching e-mails. She will call him on the phone tomorrow and have an actual conversation.

  Delete.

  … unless there is something wrong with her visual cortex. She googles “involuntary rapid sideways eye movement, symptom of stroke?” It takes less than thirty seconds to confirm that she has experienced a series of Transient Ischemic Strokes. It is unlikely they will kill her. They mimic the effects of déjà vu and “a sense of unreality” that is symptomatic of depersonalization, depression and psychosis. Otherwise they are asymptomatic. “Autopsy can confirm the presence of neural scar tissue.” If only she could be present at her own autopsy to exclaim, “I knew it!” She decides to keep it to herself: why worry Hil?

  For some reason, Mary Rose told Hil she had done laundry tonight, which was untrue but only according to the rules of this universe wherein we recall the past but not the future; she had no reason to lie about laundry. Is there a tear in the amniotic sac between worlds? Memories leaking, mingling … she’ll make a note of this just as soon as she’s put in a load.

  She heads upstairs, picks up the children’s overflowing hamper and, on the way back down, steps on the hem of her housecoat and nearly pitches headfirst to the bottom. She needs to be more mindful or she’ll wind up painting calendars with her mouth. In the basement rec room, she switches on the baby monitor, puts in a load of teensy T-shirts and tiny Y-fronts, and tunes into a rerun of Law and Order. Jerry Orbach and Chris Noth barge into a Manhattan boardroom and collar some fat cat—her favourite type of episode. She reclines on the shameless La-Z-Boy couch and relaxes, kind of wishing Hil were here with her, kind of glad she isn’t. On the walls, framed show posters and book jackets have been upstaged by laminated crayon renderings of murky flora and fauna and various wheeled objects, along with family photos—including an Olde Tyme portrait of the four of them dressed as outlaws with Daisy in a bonnet.

  Chris and Jerry have just stopped at a hot dog stand in midtown Manhattan when the monitor emits the first tinny snufflings that Mary Rose knows will shortly become a full-blown—“Mumma-a-a!�
�� She runs up the stairs. After she has changed Maggie, brought Matthew a glass of water, rewound his unicorn and settled Maggie with yet another bottle, she goes to her bathroom, takes another Advil—four in a day is hardly an overdose—and hauls up her sleeve.

  Down the front of her left arm, from pit level to a few inches above her elbow run the scars, one superimposed upon the other, layered—sedimentary scars. Like limestone, they tell a story. The longer scar is the older one, having grown with her from the time she was ten. Her father told her she would be getting bone from the bone bank, and she pictured a metal safety deposit box with a bit of bone in it. “Probably a piece of someone’s kneecap,” he added with a grin, making it sound quirky and mischievous. She thought of her Halloween skeleton costume and grinned back. The base of the shorter scar widens into a slight depression: site of a post-op infection that she understood to be serious when her mother calmly said, “Tsk-tsk,” as she dabbed at the ooze with a sterile Q-tip. This shorter scar dates from the second bone surgery, when she was fourteen. She was her own donor that time.

  Mary Rose is O negative, which means she is a universal donor. As such she can donate tissue to any human on the planet, but only someone with her blood type can donate to her. So the second time round, the surgeon harvested bone from her iliac crest—which sounds more important than “hip bone”—thus there is a third scar down there at her “bikini line” that tends to mind its own business unless clipped by the corner of a countertop, at which it kicks up a scintillating sort of pain like a vampire awakened at noon.

  The bone grafts were done to repair bone cysts. Unlike other kinds of cysts, which are the presence of unhealthy tissue, bone cysts are an absence: cavities in the bone that fill with a yellowish fluid. Sometimes they contain bone fragments—bits that flake and fall from within, so-called “fallen leaf fractures.” If the cysts go untreated, they can invade the growth plate and you end up with one limb shorter than the other—a limb that will just go on breaking. Mary Rose was lucky and she has the scars to prove it.