Adult Onset

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  Andy-Pat would cease, meek once more, and might be rewarded with a breathless “visit” from the real Mary Rose, who was able to break through intermittently—

  “Andy-Pat, you have to do whatever Zygote says, don’t tell him I’ve been here, and remember, even when you think it’s me, it’s really him doing a perfect imitation of me, but I have a plan, I’ve found an ally on Zytox, just pretend—”

  A screed of static would intervene and reptilian Zygote would be back:

  “Andrew-Patrick, who was here in my absence?”

  A&P would tremble. “No one.”

  The ante was upped when Zygote’s mother, Zygrette, broke in and, in kinder elderly metallic tones, said, “My son is evil, dear Andy-Patrick, you must be brave, I am trying to save your sister—” But Zygote ousted her and, with larynx-shredding cold-bloodedness, delivered the coup de grâce, “In a moment, the woman who calls herself your mother will call you for supper. Go upstairs and act normal. She is an imposter from the Planet Zytox. So is the man who calls himself your father. Your real parents are both being held prisoner on the Planet Zytox. If you don’t act normal, they will be killed.”

  And from upstairs would issue their mother’s summons, “Kids, come for supper!”

  She walked her brother to school on the days when he was neither sick nor suspended, and they never knew when, in an eerily neutral voice, she might inquire, “Who do you think that is, putting the sprinkler out on his front lawn?”

  “Mr. Chown.”

  “No,” she would say serenely, “it looks like Mr. Chown, it sounds like him, but it’s not him. It’s a man called Mr. Mannington. What street are we on?”

  “Our street.”

  “It looks like our street. The houses look the same and have families that are identical to the families on our street, but this is not our street. It is actually a street called Prince Duke Avenue on the Planet Mearth. You think we are speaking English, but we are not. We are speaking Mearthingian.”

  One fall day, Maureen bundled her and Andy-Patrick into the family Buick to get them out of the house because Mum was hurling herself into the walls. Mary Rose had seen Maureen’s room and thought that was why Mum was angry—it was even messier than usual, drawers yanked out and overturned, closet looted of clothes that lay strewn across the floor, some still on hangers, looking like people who’d been mowed down by gunfire. But it turned out Mum had done it.

  It was after lunch and Mum was still in her shortie nightgown and nylon slippers that Aunt Sadie had knitted. Her powerful pony legs were bare, her varicose veins, “from carrying you kids,” stood out against the frills of her nightgown. She was staggering and bellowing, but Mary Rose caught only a glimpse because Maureen seized her head, jammed it face-first against her chest and marched her backward out to the front porch where she had already put Andy-Patrick. “Get in the car.” Maureen had turned fifteen. Old enough to flee the advance of the Red Army with a family in tow, older than her grandmother by the time she had had three children. But not old enough to drive. Mary Rose and Andy-Patrick sat at attention in the back seat grinning while Maureen muttered something and lurched into reverse.

  She drove out to the locks at Kingston Mills. It rained. They looked at the canal. There were places where you could drive a car right in if you weren’t careful. Andy-Patrick and Mary Rose listened respectfully as Maureen explained the feat of nineteenth-century engineering. “Wow, Mo, that’s really neat.” Their sister was good, and they clung to her and her clean knowledge fiercely like the demons they were, grateful to those who mistook them for human children.

  Their father was back in Hamilton, finishing up his MBA, paralyzed with concentration over a stats book. For them.

  It was just before or after her first operation, for her arm was in a sling, when Mary Rose succumbed to temptation yet again. Taking the photo album along with a flashlight, she ducked, careful not to bump her arm, through the small door in the rec room wall and into the crawl space. She sat cross-legged, hunched beneath the joists, with the album in her lap and closed her eyes. She felt for the particular series of three notches along the edge of the velvety old page, opened the album, and then her eyes. To see a blank spot. The photo was gone. All that remained was a darker black square where it had been, and the caption, written in white pencil in her mother’s hand, “Cemetery.” The flush of shame was immediate, she felt her face turn red in the dark. Her mother must have seen the way she looked at the picture over and over again … And taken it away.

  That winter, Dolly took a ceramics class and fired no fewer than thirty miniature Christmas trees.

  •

  Mary Rose was standing next to her father before the Hudson’s Bay department store window in downtown Kingston, watching teddy bears skate on a silver pond as a train wove through glittering hills. Santa was in the caboose, drinking a Coke. Her arm was in a sling made from her mother’s scarf. It was dark out. The pit of her stomach felt hot and wet. She was keenly aware of the privilege of being on her own with her father, no Andy-Patrick there to share the limelight, no Mum to hurry them along, and yet something was not right. She was conscious of an unbidden sexual excitement as she watched Santa tipping the bottle to his lips. She knew something the teddy bears did not know. She was not worthy to be watching them along with her father and the other innocent children. She had a secret simmering within her. A bad one. It was connected to the pain in her arm. Pain like extra information she carried around. Pain that was no more than she deserved.

  Being with her father sometimes made the pain worse; perhaps because he lived in such a sunny place—a place that was at times too bright, like the glassy pond. When the pain went away, so did the sense of being exiled to a narrow vantage point, a crack in the rocks. It was a pain that dwelt in darkness. The pain that dared not speak its name.

  •

  It is snowing. Outside her kitchen windows, the sky has turned opaque and produced a razzle of crazy flakes. Mary Rose is barely able to make out the fence much less the hopeful crocuses on the ground—it is as if February had snuck up on April, whacked it on the head and taken its place. She turns on the radio, Hi there, and happy Wednesday … The mummified Christmas cake sits on the counter looking like something from the Royal Ontario Museum.

  She wonders if it is freezer-dead or if it can be resurrected. She should learn to make these things. Andy-Patrick makes their mother’s Lebanese Easter bread, she should get him to come over and show her how. Her kids are not growing up with the same smells as she did, they don’t have a mother who covers her hair with a cloth diaper and flips dough in the air while singing made-up words to Carmen. A mother who uses Arabic endearments. And calls them “demon.” And chases them through the house with a wooden spoon. And threatens to “annihilate” them, and swears to “massacre” them. And promises to “smash” them. And wears Chanel No. 5 and moonstones.

  She belongs in the loony bin is what she heard Maureen mutter that day when they escaped in the car. It made Mary Rose feel something beyond sad or scared or even ashamed—those are clean words that can be read and said—it made her feel like there was tar melting inside her.

  From then on it seemed the days when their mother yelled and failed to change out of her nightgown or do her hair were coming up more frequently in the revolving bingo ball of life. The Dolly who canvassed for the Heart Fund and the Liberal Party, ran the Catholic Women’s League, conducted the choir, made her own wine with a catheter tube and two vats, balanced the bank book, sewed matching outfits and regularly fed an army of guests was less in evidence. “C’mere till I smash you.” When hollered, it was no more than turbulence, but when spoken with level tone and lowering gaze it was terrifying. Mary Rose was nine and standing in the kitchen. Slaps and pinches, yanks and shoves, were merely sticks and stones, but words hurt. On this day the words issuing from her mother were dark and heavy, and she was immobilized under the weight of them, able neither to put up an arm against them nor outrun them, laughing
. She saw herself from behind and slightly above, as though she were hovering near the ceiling. Then she witnessed a kind of miracle—it did not cross her mind to attribute it to Our Lady, so perhaps it was more of a scientific phenomenon: she watched as a transparent but impermeable shield like a force field took shape around her, and suddenly she was back in her body, behind her own eyes, within a hard transparent dome. She saw the dark shapes of her mother’s incoming words stop short upon contact with it, and fall to the floor, and she understood, “They are just sounds.”

  Behind her, on the floor, Maggie is “swimming” in a laundry basket full of plastic balls—an idea Mary Rose got from a McDonald’s they stopped at in desperation on the 401 last summer.

  Now is Mary Rose’s chance to slip into the living room, lie down on the couch and close her eyes—ten minutes is all she needs. Churchill napped, naps won the war. As long as she’s lying down, she can’t lose her scissors, her yoga mat or her temper, as long as she is lying down nothing bad can happen. But she returns the cake to the stainless steel drawer, so like a morgue, and closes her dented freezer. “Let’s go pick up your brother and Youssef from school now.”

  At the back door steps she gets Maggie into her snowsuit no problem, but the child balks at the boots.

  “Sitdy boots.”

  The phone rings. A long-distance ring.

  “Maggie, it’s snowing, you need your winter boots this time.”

  Ring ring.

  Maggie kicks her. Mary Rose sighs and takes her firmly but gently by the shoulders, focusing the child’s attention just as the books advise. She does not feel angry. “Maggie, you may not kick Mumma.”

  Maggie hits her in the face.

  “NO!”

  She seizes the little arms, “STOP IT!” resisting the impulse to lift her child and slam her back down onto the steps. “DON’T DO THAT!” Resisting the impulse to yank her up, up from the steps and haul her across the kitchen floor by the elbow—instead she rages into the child’s face, “DON’T YOU EVER HIT ME!” She is not doing it, but she can see herself doing it. Up by the elbow like a chicken by the wing, and the more she does not do this, the harder she squeezes, as though to keep herself from merging with the phantom self that is giving in to lust, sobbing for release, the desire to—her hands spring open, “I DIDN’T HURT YOU!” The crazy words hang in the air, black and straining, leashed. Maggie is screaming. Mary Rose hears Daisy clicketing across the kitchen floor. The dog arrives on the top step, riding-crop tail going a mile a minute.

  Mary Rose is faint with anger. Her breath is shallow. Her hands drop to her sides—nothing bad is going to happen, she knows how to make parts of her body go dead. Daisy mwuffs and mashes her wet muzzle against Mary Rose’s throat.

  “It’s okay, Daisy.” She breathes and stares up at a corner of the ceiling. She hears Maggie rustling. Hears her say, “Do it Me-self.”

  She risks moving her hands, but only to thrust them safely into her pockets, withdrawing her left one suddenly with a yelp. She is bleeding. She has pricked her finger … She reaches back in and fishes out the broken unicorn. She mounts the stairs calmly, leaving Maggie to her boots. She puts the unicorn and its head on the kitchen counter and runs cold water over her finger.

  How do you tell yourself what you already know? If you have successfully avoided something, how do you know you have avoided it? Land mines of anger left over from a forgotten war, you step on one by chance. Sudden sinkholes of depression, you crawl back out. A weave of weeds obscures a mind-shaft but cannot break a fall, you get hurt this time. A booby-trapped terrain, it says, “Something happened here.” Trenches overgrown but still visible from space, green welts, scars that tell a story. You press on.

  Years pass and you become aware of a blind spot. A blank. White as bone. A strip of mind where fear has scorched consciousness clean, obliterated fingerprints, freckles, follicles. Smooth as a stone slab.

  As an old scar.

  •

  When she woke up in the recovery room, her throat was sore and she thought she was back in Hamilton with her tonsils out. She was very thirsty. She was lying on a hard, narrow bed on wheels called a gurney, which sounded like a type of cow. Right next to her was another gurney with a bulging sheet on it. The sheet was going up and down. A noise was coming from it. A farmyard sound. Like a cow. She managed to turn her head enough to see that it was a person. A fat old man with something like a gas mask over his face except it was see-through. A plastic snout. His eyes were closed and a tube was coming out of his mouth. It was the same kind of tube that her mother siphoned homemade wine with … there was a foamy streak in it. She turned her face to the ceiling. She tried to ask for water, but no sound came out. After a while a nurse came with a tiny paper cup like the kind you get at the dentist’s. She tried to swallow but could not and the water trickled out the side of her mouth. She wanted more, but the nurse said no, it was not safe. She saw yellow paint on her chest, and a blood patch on the white bandage, and remembered it was her arm not her tonsils.

  •

  “A lesbian gave me this mug,” said Dolly in 1982, so Mary Rose thought it might be safe to come out.

  They were in Dolly’s kitchen in Ottawa—she had a nice part-time job as staff nurse in a government building, and the lesbian had confided in her, asking for advice on how to talk to her own mother. Dolly must have helped, hence the mug: World’s Best Nurse.

  It wasn’t safe.

  “Everything you do is a reflection of me. You’re saying to the world, ‘I had a terrible mother, I had a terrible father.’ ”

  She refused to set foot in the home Mary Rose shared with Renée.

  “Would you visit Hell?”

  Refused to allow Renée or any other “friend like that” to set foot in her home. She issued it like an edict—a fatwa.

  “Would you let the devil in?”

  They were sitting at the kitchen table.

  “I didn’t give you shit to eat, why are you living in it now?”

  Her father was staring up at a corner of the ceiling.

  “I’d rather you were a murderer,” said Dolly.

  Mary Rose saw the words float toward her, hot foul shapes that glanced off an invisible shield.

  Duncan spoke. “If you had a broken leg, we’d have taken you to the doctor. In this case it is your mind that is broken, and how were we to know? You kept it from us. You didn’t give us the chance to help you.”

  “I’d rather you were burnt at the stake.”

  Friends assured her they were bound to “come round.”

  “If you want to be close to that part of a woman, I’ll come live with you when I’m old and senile and you can change my shitty diaper.”

  Friends urged her to cut them off.

  “I’d rather you had cancer.”

  It was always at the kitchen table. In Dolly’s eye would be the glint Mary Rose recognized from when her mother read tea leaves; an indication that she was seeing through something to something else. But in this case, someone else. Who?

  Her father would turn away, eyes on the ceiling. Smooth, impenetrable. Glass.

  Down below, Mary Rose sat immobilized as the air changed around them, thickened like a welt.

  “I’d rather you’d never been born.”

  She sat watching herself watching, and waited for it to be over.

  She thought she was calm.

  “I’d rather you’d been born dead.”

  Then they would play Scrabble.

  The very hyperbole of her mother’s curses had a prophylactic effect, sealing them in shrink wrap, allowing Mary Rose to swallow them like drugs she thought would pass through her harmlessly.

  She was twenty-three.

  Around this time, she experienced the first of the episodes that would persist for over a decade. They struck in clusters. Panic attack. What’s in a name? Not enough. Beyond, “I was terrified.” For whole hours, there was no “I.” At times, preceded by a visual sense of the world cons
tricting and retreating as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope—so-called tunnelling; at others by a dread that mushroomed into disorientation. Vertigo, with both feet on the ground. Lost on an ordinary day, in an ordinary place. A parking lot. Wedged at an odd angle behind her own eyes, she would make her way home and lie down in the most dangerous place in the world, her body. To misplace car keys in those days might be to drop into the void, to misread the clock or forget someone’s name set off adrenal terror fuelled by an outsized guilt that made no sense; as though, along with the “synesthesia” of numbers and colours, her emotions were cross-wired. Nothing stayed where she put it, including herself.

  She hit bottom in a hotel room on a book tour in her mother’s hometown, retreating alone to the Cape Bretoner Motor Inn, knowing it was the least unsafe place—it is worse to be among those who are living in the normal world when one has lost hold of it. The carpet was orange, the bedspread was orange, the sunset painting above the bed was orange. There was no one she could call, the sound of a familiar voice would serve only to confirm the gulf between herself and the normal world and push her out of it for good. After a while, her hand turned on the television. A documentary about the last days of the Third Reich was playing. Himmler’s children lay dead in their nightgowns, as though sleeping, on the floor of the bunker, killed by their parents with strychnine-laced cocoa. She prayed. Our Lady spoke to her and told her the only thing that mattered was Love. She remained abject with fear all night, but survived. Maybe none of it happened. Maybe it was happening all the time.

  •

  When she could sit up, she gazed at it. It was compelling. The left side of her chest as well as her shoulder above the surgical dressing was painted yellow—probably some sort of disinfectant. The snowy white dressing was wound round her upper arm as if she were an Egyptian mummy, at its centre a bright red stain dulled to burgundy at the slow-spreading edges. Below, the fingers of her left hand were pain-free and bewildered, like survivors of a car crash who have walked away without a scratch. It hurt to touch anywhere on the yellow paint, so perhaps it was a bruise.