Adult Onset

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  Behind her, she hears Candace say, “Here now, Maggie Muggins, what’s got your knickers in a twist?”

  •

  After Christmas, her mother dies. She does not go home to Canada for the funeral. She has no baby but she still has a little one. She hears it crying. Is it big enough to climb from its crib? She lies down on the couch. The light on the balcony stays the same for a long time. She hears her two-year-old crying. Feels it clawing her hair.

  •

  Twelve minutes later, Mary Rose is locking her bike out front of Mount Sinai Hospital downtown on University Avenue, a six-laned wind tunnel lined with medical centres and insurance towers, when her brother phones and says, “I need you to come look at my butt.” He is at the Roots store in the Eaton Centre a couple of blocks away on Yonge Street.

  “I’d love to, but I’m about to get a sonohystogram.” He doesn’t ask what that is.

  By 10:45 a.m. she is on the table in the examination room, feet in the stirrups. The gynecologist, Dr. Goldfinger—he can’t help it, he was born with the name—removes the “wand” and hands it to the nurse. It has a camera at the tip and is wearing a condom. Mary Rose was assured she would be getting a female gynecologist but has wound up not caring because Dr. Goldfinger is over sixty and very good at his job. And it isn’t as if female Dr. Irons—another birth defect—had the lightest touch with the speculum when she diagnosed the “benign fibroids” that have been shredding the lining of Mary Rose’s uterus.

  She was given a choice: tough it out till after menopause, when the estrogen-guzzling fibroids will waste away on their own; or have a new procedure wherein the surgeon will cut off the blood supply to her uterus, thereby inducing an infarction, then implant her with a morphine pump for a few days—in other words, her uterus will have a heart attack and die and it will hurt like hell. Or she can have a hysterectomy. Her mother had a hysterectomy back when they lived in Kingston. It was after her second miscarriage—third?—and the doctor pretty much ordered it, but Dolly asked the priest for permission first. Afterwards, she started taking what she called her “nice mother pills.” Sometimes she would forget.

  Mary Rose’s uterus is one organ she has always preferred to forget she has, and this she managed pretty well, its monthly Calvarys notwithstanding, but she cannot bring herself to mount an all-out assault on it. “A poor thing, Sir, but mine own.” Her journey through the gynecological-industrial complex has taught her that the “perimenopausal” uterus is seen the way the appendix used to be: as a disease magnet that ought to be removed at the first peep. But who really knows? While it is too late for her tonsils, Mary Rose does still have her appendix, that vestigial organ of digestion, and thus is among those who stand to survive should the species be reduced to eating bark for survival post–climate change. It is like the section found at the end of some books: Appendix. Stuff which isn’t necessary now but might be vital later. It is difficult, however, to imagine the other organ doubling as a literary term: Uterus.

  Mo said, “They’ll try to tell you it’s useless, but it isn’t. It’s doing something, hang on to it.” So she toughed it out until six months ago when she overheard a conversation through the fug of the change room at the pool: “Try soy milk, it’s loaded with phytoestrogens and it’s better than taking pregnant horse piss, which is what Premarin is.” It took a moment for the meaning to congeal, but when it did, she froze. In an attempt to be virtuously vegetarian, Mary Rose had, for the previous year, been replacing everything with soy. Soy milk, soy burgers, soy bacon—there is nothing that cannot be textured into soy, the great shape-shifter. Like syphilis, it disguises itself, the Zelig of the food world. She had always suspected there was something spooky about soy. Now she realized she had been feeding the fibroids all along. She went straight home from the pool and flushed her entire soy stash like a drug dealer a step ahead of the cops.

  She turns her head to watch Dr. Goldfinger as he peers at the pulsating field of grey on his computer screen that is a window unto her womb. She strains to spot them amid the murk—they are only fibroids, but are they getting better or worse? A nurse swishes in, whisks the condom off the camera and swishes out again. It is probably safe to take her feet from the stirrups now—bare steel, unlike the ones in her family physician’s office, thoughtfully covered with oven mitts. She searches Dr. Goldfinger’s face for a sign of the verdict. In a previous era he would be wearing a waistcoat and cravat and treating her for “hysterical pregnancy”—it’s what got Charlotte Brontë. A second nurse swishes in for no apparent reason, and swishes back out. Mary Rose knows how lucky she is: not only does she not live next to a graveyard in Yorkshire, she has merely had to endure month-long periods with their attendant child-birth-calibre contractions, referred to as “cramps” by the uninitiated, along with “heavy days” wherein she has been delivered of miscarriage-sized clots of uterine tissue. They dropped from her body into the toilet with the plop of a hearty soup—evidence of a transitioning female reproductive system that will not go down without a gorey fight. It all flies in the face of the lithe androgyny she has cultivated her entire life.

  She didn’t tell Hil what her doctor’s appointment was about, no need to get all menopausy with your girlfriend. Partner. Wife. Whatever. Why isn’t there a better word? Apart from the flagrant lover, sexless partner, and dowdy spouse … She dislikes most of the words associated with femaleness. She can barely say the word period unless referring to a BBC miniseries. They are icky words, embarrassing to say. Or else inadequate: Vagina—as if that told the whole story. Lesbian: lizardy. Menopause: a bilious woman sitting next to you on the bus to Brockville. Oddly, uterus is okay, resembling, as it does, an order of nuns.

  “They’re shrinking,” says Dr. Goldfinger. He smiles briefly, and leaves the room.

  Yes! She could fist-pump for joy, but that would be too American.

  Nurse number one swishes in again and passes her a massive sterile wipe for the lubricant, and as she is mopping up, the second nurse returns and the two of them, smiling shyly, produce copies of JonKitty McRae: Journey to Otherwhere and JonKitty McRae: Escape from Otherwhere along with a pen.

  She writes:

  Then she puts on her pants.

  “When’s the third one coming out?”

  •

  She thinks it may still be winter, but it is difficult to tell because even if she were to sit up, from her vantage point on the couch, the balcony door affords a view only of treetops and sky—the Black Forest is thick with evergreens so, unless there is snow, she cannot be sure. It occurs to her to pin a calendar to the wall so that she will be reminded, without getting up, what season it is. She is lying on her side on the couch, one hand beneath her cheek, the other extended, palm up. The moonstone is on this hand, and her baby is dead. She wants to phone her mother long distance and tell her, “Mumma, I lost the boy.” Then she remembers, her mother is dead.

  She has let the German go. There is no need for help, she just has the one child at home during the day.

  It is standing on the other side of the coffee table, in diaper and undershirt, howling. Rigid. On its cheeks, taut drops look to have burst straight from its face. Dolly closes her eyes. As long as she stays lying down, nothing bad will happen.

  •

  Mary Rose leaves Room UL230B and is immediately lost. Did she come up the orange elevators or were they yellow? She peers down a corridor, at the end of which stands a set of double doors, marked PROCEDURE ROOM. She sets out in the opposite direction, wishing she had thought to bring a sack of breadcrumbs, trying not to breathe too deeply. Perfectly clean words become queasy when used in a medical context: procedure … the euphemism taking on a quality it was calculated to conceal. She is not a fan of hospitals, but is grateful for the absence in this wing of the smell of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol; surgical smells that reawaken dread, make her shiver, and bring ghost-story tears to her eyes. The smell of piercing … She reminds herself that in fact the worst smell is that of ho
spital food; truly the bread—and applesauce and mushy peas—of sorrow. She has never understood why anyone would wish to make a career in a hospital. Her own mother was a Registered Nurse; an O.R. nurse to boot, having had no fear of blood.

  She passes Mammography—at least she is to be spared the panini press today. She turns the corner, BONE DENSITY CLINIC. Is that what is behind the capricious pain in her arm? Is it perhaps not phantom at all, but a symptom of osteoporosis? More of “the riches of menopause”? Nothing showed up on the X-ray. Still, that was six months ago …

  She feels like Detective Columbo from the old seventies TV series. Rumpled, blind in one eye and with a shambling gait, he was master of the false exit: just when the suspect thought the bumbling detective was leaving empty-handed, Columbo would pause in the doorway, then turn and say, “You know, somethin’s been botherin’ me at the back of my mind …” And nail the perpetrator.

  She spots an emergency exit with a stairway symbol and a warning, ALARM WILL SOUND IF OPENED. She opens it.

  •

  A different sound now. Ragged, moaning protest. No longer crying. Hot breath against her face. Smell of wet cotton, urine. The word, a dry entreaty, “Mummy.” Repeated. Gathering fresh urgency—rooted in a new source, a scorched place. She feels the small hand alight on her face, hot. There is the word again, accelerating, metal on metal, the word is going to catch fire, Mummy! Fingers probe her eyelid, push it open. The hand travels to her scalp and a fistful of her hair is pulled taut, her head yanked, the child is shaking her. She keeps her eyes closed. It takes all her strength, but she manages finally to roll over and face the back of the couch. After a while the blows to her back and shoulders cease. The child is incapable of actually hurting her, it is only two years old.

  •

  In all the years since her last bone surgery at fourteen, apart from the odd histrionic bump Mary Rose has never felt a peep out of her arm until recently. It soldiered on through a summer in the militia, through the rigours of theatre school, through countless drunken escapades and bouts of contact-improv, through two babies. Until last summer.

  It was the first summer without Hil’s mum. Patricia had died of complications following minor surgery the previous fall. She was a beautiful woman with crystal blue eyes and a gracious manner—a woman who referred playfully to her husband as “the Doctor” but spoke reverently of their respective “realms”—hers having been at home with the children. Hil was grief-stricken, naturally … although at the funeral reception, Mary Rose had been shocked to hear her state bitterly to a childhood friend, “My mother died of a bad back.”

  They had come to the end of their exhausting summer holiday on the east coast. Maggie was about to turn two and Matthew had suddenly gone into reverse, demanding diapers of his own. The shore was gentle, but a child can drown in an inch of water and the woods were full of bears and Lyme disease—

  “No they’re not, Mister, not ‘full.’ ”

  “Ixodes scapularis has been migrating north, it just takes one tick.”

  Moreover, the children might wander into the forest and die of exposure. “How?” asked Hilary, who had somehow managed to read an entire novel over the course of two harrowing weeks. They closed up the old hunting cabin and loaded the car while supervising their toddlers—perhaps her mother was right, Mary Rose was just too old for this game. Finally they were ready to head into Halifax for a last overnight with Hil’s dad and younger sister. Mary Rose went upstairs to lie down on the couch in her father-in-law’s den before supper and could not get up again for sixteen hours.

  Everyone thought she was tired, but Mary Rose knew she was gone. She had dropped below some line. It was like the diagram in her high school science textbook of the earth’s crust in cross-section. Some distance down was the “water table.” She had slipped below the water table. Immobilized. Unable to blink, to sleep, she saw herself laid out and suspended in the ground. At some point she heard the family singing “Happy Birthday” downstairs, and remembered: today was Maggie’s second birthday.

  Where was the switch? She had not known it was possible one day to lie down and never get up. Was this “hysterical paralysis”? Even if she did get up this time, it would remain possible in the future to be struck still. She had gone there now, there was an event trail carved out. A pathway.

  Where was the switch? Daisy came in and face-butted her, mushy wet. Hilary plied her with juice. Hil’s father looked in on her. White-haired and tall, he was both the image of a 1960s television doctor, and a real one—“realish,” he liked to say. A psychiatrist. He pulled up a chair and gently inquired if she was “on something.” She almost answered, “The couch.” “No,” she said, “I’m just tired.” He nodded, then asked if she wanted “something.” Would he have slipped her a Valium on the spot? Hil’s mother had indeed had a bad back. There is a glass of wine, then there is a glass of wine with Percocet …

  “That’s so kind, Alisdair,” replied Mary Rose, “but I feel better now.”

  She loved her father-in-law, but was grateful not to have been the beneficiary of his modern methods back in the day. She wondered if he had ever administered shock therapy. At least he and Hil’s mother had never waged a campaign to turn their daughter “straight.” She packed up her hysterical parenthesis and put it behind her.

  They got on with the trek west, stopping over in Ottawa as usual, where her parents lived in easy-listening air-conditioned comfort in a condo development called Corrigan’s Keep for reasons as obscure as those behind the various Vales, Heights, Castle Views and Downs that surround every North American city. The pain ambushed her on the second night in the basement guest suite. She woke up, surprised. The numbers on the clock glowed red: 2:00. She rose carefully so as not to disturb Hil—the mattress was like Gyproc on springs. Hil said it merely needed a layer of memory foam. Didn’t we all? She crept between Maggie in the Pack ’n Play and Matthew on the folding IKEA chair-bed.

  She slipped into the bathroom and switched on the light. The mirror leapt into surgical view and there she was, crazy hair, sheet-wrinkled cheek. On her arm, the scars, the vein, no bruise.

  Mary Rose was accustomed to the thousand cuts that maternal flesh is heir to. She had nicks on her fingers that took months to heal because she was always rinsing something at the sink; discovered bumps on her head while washing her hair, bruises on her legs while shaving, all in a day’s work—who has time to feel the bite of a coffee table on the shin when they’re breaking a toddler’s fall? It was unsatisfying, however, to endure pain without a mark to show for it.

  The pain dogged her all the way home to Toronto and persisted into the fall. She was about to google it when Hil caught her and laid down the law, “Call Dr. Judy.” So Mary Rose dutifully made an appointment with the family physician. Then, as though the very act of seeking bona fide medical attention had dislodged a suspicion, something began “bothering her at the back of her mind …”

  Old memories took on fresh meaning. She recalled Dr. Ferry scolding her mother out in the front hall when she was ten and on her third sling, “… you know what can happen? … what it could be?!” She heard again her mother telling and retelling it as though it were a funny story—“He really gave me what-for!”—a sure sign, even then, that something was amiss. She saw once more her father’s sealed profile as he walked her down the halls of Radiology, replayed his jaunty tone, “They’re going to snap pictures of your entire skeleton just to make sure there’s no holes anywhere else,” and it dawned on her now: he had been terrified.

  Four years after the first operation, she stood with her parents in the surgeon’s consulting room, and saw something else in her mother’s face when the doctor said, “They’ve come back.”

  They were living in Ottawa by then, but had driven the two hours to Kingston General Hospital for her twice-yearly checkup—they always went for pizza afterwards and it was nice having her parents to herself. Big Dr. Sorokin stood before the X-ray that was mounted in the
light box and tapped with his pencil at the fresh shadows in her humerus. “Here, here and here.”

  Her father nodded and compressed his lips. Mary Rose and her mother, in rare emotional unison, turned to face the window—across the way stood the hospital smokestack, drab bricks against the November sky. She saw tears in her mother’s eyes and was shocked to find herself on the verge too, explaining it away inwardly with fourteen-year-old detachment, “I’m not crying, but my body is because it remembers the pain.”

  She could not recall ever having seen her mother cry. This was sobering in itself, but there was something else in her mother’s face as she stared out the window. Something grave. Something dignified. Grief.

  There was a silver lining to the surgeries: they were the best times with her mother. Dolly was in her element on a hospital ward, the only person who made Mary Rose feel safe—her face, her voice, made even the pain fresh and sane. Especially the last time when, at fourteen, Mary Rose knew enough to worry the surgeon might make a mistake.

  “It’s the left arm, the one with the scar already,” she told them as they shifted her from the gurney to the operating table. They appeared not to have heard. They were wearing masks. A big light was suspended over her. Everything was clattery and steel, the doctor’s forearms were hairy but his hands were chalky white. She could not move, but she could talk. They had given her a needle out in the hallway where she’d been parked among the other gurneys like aircraft lined up on the tarmac. A nurse had come along and jabbed it into her thigh without warning. The drug splintered painfully into her bloodstream. Mary Rose asked, “What is that?” “It’ll calm you down,” answered the nurse. She had already been calm, but now she became anxious as her limbs filled up with wet concrete. Time blinked and blanked and jumped, then it was her turn to take off. They wheeled her into the O.R. under the interrogation lights and slipped the point of a finer needle into the back of her hand—its syringe-body rested against her skin like a patient insect. Before the anaesthetic doused her with black, she said, “Don’t cut it off.” She may have heard a laugh.