Adult Onset

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  With his large brown eyes, he looks like a supplicant. What does that make her?

  “Oh.” She nods—sagely, she hopes, then feels a grin stretch across her face. “By your readers be ye taught!” Is she a crazy lady and doesn’t know it? At least she doesn’t pretend to slap him.

  But his gaze is steady, and he speaks again. “I love you. I can’t believe I just said that.”

  “Thank you.” She flees, an imposter in her own life; husk of whoever it was that, once upon a time, created a world that others could claim, a world in which readers could immerse themselves … and feel they belonged. It is a world from which she blithely exiled herself, confident she could return any time. Perhaps Hilary is right, she needs to start working again. But what if she attempts a return only to find the portal barred? Like Narnia. She fears she may have committed herself to a life in which a closet is just a closet.

  Daisy trots to keep up as Mary Rose pushes the stroller along Bloor Street to the Shoppers Drug Mart that has the post office at the back. She re-musters the troops for another assault on the great indoors, but when she gets to the counter there is no package waiting. There is no mail, period. It turns out her mail is being held across town at Postal Station E, which is also where she needs to submit the signed form. No, they do not have any forms here, but she can download one from the Canada Post website.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She buys Advil, swallows one red pill dry and rubs her arm. Maybe her grafty old bone is becoming arthritic … reacting to the damp April day and the thousand natural shocks that climate change is heir to.

  “Candy, Mumma?”

  “No, sweetheart, medicine.”

  Is Postal Station E too far to walk? Cabs are smelly, the drivers are homophobic immigrants—or is that internalized racism rearing its head? Her own grandfather was a homophobic immigrant, a marrier of child brides, a mumbler of “close your legs.” Yes, it is her own internalized racism. Feeling better already for having shed a character flaw, she nonetheless forbears to hail a cab for the psychology-free reason that she cannot have Maggie ride with no car seat. Not to mention Daisy—few drivers, regardless of their origins, would welcome a tank of a pit bull into their cab.

  “Maggie, no.”

  The child has kicked off her winter boots and is attempting to climb out of the stroller—impossible but annoying. Mary Rose jams the boots back onto the little feet.

  “We’ll go to the other post office then we’ll play in the park.”

  “Hutsutwah!” rails Maggie.

  Mary Rose does not turn in the direction of Postal Station E, however, rather she power-pushes the stroller east up Bloor Street, toward downtown. Daisy canters alongside, teats swinging, through the crowded intersection at Spadina—

  “… Can you spare a loonie for my son and I …?”

  Of course, that is what Kitty would see if she were to time travel: her real mother. What else do the readers know that she does not know she knows? An old saying floats to mind, “Physician, heal thyself.” Maggie points at a parkette, but Mary Rose is on a mission now, the purpose of which will become clear as she marches. In the display window of Williams-Sonoma she sees a splendid hanging pot rack; romantically lit, dripping with copper cast cookware—her feet slow and her heart beats a little faster, but she presses on. She is suddenly surging with energy. Her phone rings, it is Gigi but she doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t stop till they get to Baby Gap.

  •

  She was fourteen with the second surgery, so they put her on the children’s ward again. Her room was at the end of the hall with a view of the smokestack. “That’s where they put the body parts and crap,” said the girl in the next bed. She was Mary Rose’s age, and had just had some kind of “abdominal surgery,” which put Mary Rose in mind of the Abominable Snowman in the animated Rudolph movie. The girl was pale and in pain and showing it. She was from a reform school. She clutched her belly and told of the staff “doing stuff” to her and of some of the girls also “doing stuff” with each other. “The matron’s a pervert, eh.” Mary Rose pretended to be asleep. She saw the girl’s words turn to black crayon squiggles so they couldn’t go in her ears. The girl said she’d had “a D&C. Which is proof I’m not a perv, eh.”

  She did not ask what the letters stood for intuiting a queasy female connection. “They scrape it out of you, eh,” said the girl. She wanted to keep in touch with Mary Rose after they got out of hospital. The girl had no visitors. She was gone when Mary Rose returned from surgery, so she had the room to herself. There were two other teenagers on the ward, but the girl cried constantly and the boy, while nice, had leukemia. It did not occur to Mary Rose to visit the sunroom at suppertime, she was too old.

  •

  Home again—no time for the park, she has to make a pit stop before doubling back to pick up Matthew; it won’t do to show up at his school laden with shopping bags, she doesn’t want to look like one of those women. She leaves Maggie in the backyard, resisting but safely restrained by the stroller with Daisy to guard her, and slips into the house, down the stairs to the laundry room, where she stuffs all the new Baby Gap clothes straight into the wash; partly to get the factory chemicals out of them, partly so they won’t look screamingly new when Hil gets home. Hil doesn’t criticize Mary Rose’s spending, and it’s hers to spend, it’s just …

  She runs back up the basement steps and out the door to find Maggie asleep in the stroller. “Maggie, wake up! No nap, no nap, sweetheart!”

  Maggie wakes with a moan. Mary Rose rummages in the diaper bag for a juice box. “Let’s go, guys.”

  Daisy doesn’t budge. Mary Rose pulls at the leash, but the dog is sitting with a force of gravity akin to a collapsed star. “Daisy, come.” Daisy looks up from beneath an obstinate brow. Her chin has started to go grey recently. Is it greyer today than yesterday?

  Mary Rose goes into the house and returns with the water dish, then stands back while Daisy laps up a tidal wave.

  “Do you want to go in the house?”

  Daisy wags her tail and hauls herself to standing. The morning’s excursion actually must have tired her out—good to know it’s possible. She opens the door and watches Daisy haltingly ascend the four steps to the kitchen and disappear round the corner. She turns. “Let’s go, Maggie.”

  The boots are off. How did the child manage it? Maggie stares up at her—a hint of triumph in her face. Mary Rose withdraws into the house without a word and returns with a roll of duct tape. She has the advantage, Maggie is a prisoner of the stroller. She puts up her hood so the child can’t claw her hair, and withstands the rain of blows while she calmly duct-tapes each winter boot back onto each little foot.

  •

  Somewhere down the hall was a baby that cried all night. Dark, etching cries that woke her, full of diesel and desperation, like a car spinning its tires in a snowbank. She would forget him during the day when his distress was either lost amid hospital clatter or soothed by visitors. She saw him once.

  She’d been making her way down the hall for the first time since the surgery—her mother said she had to because one day you might lie down and never get up again. Her arm bound and slung, hip bandaged—the incisions this time were sutured with a wire that rippled beneath her skin—she inched along the wall. She heard him wailing. She got closer and realized the cries were issuing from her old room. It took her several minutes to pass the open doorway, so she could not help but see.

  He was lying on his back in her old bed, eyes squeezed shut, profile blue with strain. Tears stood stiff on his cheeks, as though they’d erupted straight from his face. He appeared to be no more than a year old, but his anger was fully grown, as though, too young for words, he nonetheless KNEW, and would not be soothed. His legs were elevated in stirrups rigged to a metal frame, he had no feet.

  •

  When she gets to the corner near the school, she pauses and considers whether to remove the duct tape before
arriving. If she does, will that be like saying she was wrong to have applied it in the first place? It isn’t as though she has taped the child’s legs to the stroller. She presses on toward the school, ready to make a joke at her own expense should anyone comment or give a look.

  Time plays tricks. It feels to Mary Rose as if it has taken hours to cover the final block. The grey of morning has turned to glare. A stillness is forming within her like a bulge, slowing her down. Heavy, unmoving. She arrives at the school door.

  The cheerful cacophony of parents and children becomes a cardboardy jumble all around her like empty boxes filling the air. She is part of it, chatting with Philip and Saleema. She feels a smile manipulating her face in socially appropriate ways. Hears her mouth making socially appropriate noises. She is not quite behind her eyes—she is set back a ways. Probably hungry.

  She reflects that this is the retail counterpart to a sugar crash; she shopped voraciously and now she is as spent as her money. “Hi, sweetheart!”

  Matthew is running up the steps, proudly thrusting something at her.

  “It’s for you.”

  “Matthew, it’s beautiful.”

  “I made it.”

  A macaroni necklace. She puts it on.

  Sue nabs her before she can escape. “MacKinnon,” she says with jockish good cheer. Mary Rose turns to her and smiles but keeps the stroller pointing away—don’t let Sue, of all people, see the duct tape.

  “Come for supper tonight,” she commands, straddling her bike with the kid cart hitched to the back.

  “I’d love to, Sue, thanks so much, I can’t, I thought I could, but …”

  “Chicken pot pie.”

  “Wow, that sounds amazing, it’s just, I promised my friend Gigi …”

  “Let’s make it happen.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Mac ’n’ cheese ’n’ peas.

  The message light …

  “It’s Mum, you’re not there. You know we’re coming on the seventh at …” Mary Rose digs her cinder block of a datebook out of the diaper bag, is poised with a pen— “Dammit, where’s my—did you get the packeege yet? It’s something you wanted. Did I give it to you last time? I can’t remember now what it was. Check and see if I already gave it to you.” Click.

  Hi there, and happy Thursday … She turns off the radio, closes her datebook, and stands staring out the window, on momentary neurological overload, while Matthew clears his lunch plate, and Maggie follows suit, loading her bowl, spoon, cup and everything in sight into the dishwasher, including the placemats, the ketchup …

  “Good job, Maggie,” she says absently.

  The last time she saw her parents was in January when they stopped off in Toronto for three days on the way from Ottawa to Victoria on the west coast.

  She bundled Maggie up and went to meet their train.

  She had left in plenty of time but wound up late with the effort to find parking—the station was being “renovated to serve you better!” By the time she got there with the stroller, her parents were nowhere to be seen. She waited at Arrivals next to the deserted Traveller’s Aid counter, but that was no guarantee; at Union Station nothing guided the traveller toward Arrivals, itself an undefined limbo, whereas an imposing granite ramp drew them up into the heroic main hall where two sets of brass doors opened, she knew, onto a perilous moat of perpetual construction where the sidewalk used to be. Who knew how many elderly people had already pitched into that polyurethane tangle never to be seen again? Maybe her parents were out there now, drifting toward a beeping backhoe—was her father wearing his hearing aids? Worse, she dreaded lest they had ventured down an escalator and into the PATH: a twenty-seven-kilometre maze of weather-indifferent retail. She pictured them: two little old babes in the wood, jostled mercilessly … Nonsense, they had travelled the world, Dolly had fended off muggers in Red Square with the centrifugal power of her purse, wielding it like a mace—Duncan still told the story. But that was back in Dolly’s glory days of rage and roses. Now she would simply fall, break a hip and die of pneumonia, and it would be Mary Rose’s fault for having been late to the station.

  She checked to make sure her cellphone was on, though she knew her parents would not call it, regarding it with equal parts reverence and mistrust. They too had a cellphone but never turned it on. It was for “emergencies.” She risked venturing up the ramp, and emerged into the hall where a throng eddied about the base of the soaring digital display. If she called Andy-Patrick, perhaps he could have her parents’ cellphone located by the RCMP. Maggie cried out, “Sitdy!”

  She hung up to see her mother cannoning from the crowd, all four-foot-eleven-and-a-half of her, jaunty in her beret, her bling, her snow-blindingly new running shoes, hurrying toward them with a funny splay-foot walk that reminded Mary Rose of Maggie. Was that new?

  “Hi, doll!”

  Duncan came into view behind her, walking stolidly as though over rugged terrain, his mouth set in the Highland perseverance that peopled the globe and its boards of directors, dapper in his peaked cap, yellow windbreaker and rubber-soled brogues.

  “Hi, Mum.”

  Dolly’s brows arched above her big dark eyes, her mouth formed an O! of astonishment, she raised both hands, framing her face with delight, and swooped down on Maggie, assaulting her with “Sitdy kisses”—this used to make Matthew cry, but Maggie screamed with laughter. Duncan looked on, amused, then after the first flurry he crouched, took Maggie’s hand and said softly, “Hi there, Maggie, how are you, sweetie pie?”

  “Jitdy,” said Maggie, just as softly, and reached for his cap. He gave it to her.

  Jitdy was Arabic for “grandfather,” a name that, for Mary Rose’s blue-eyed father, was a source of pride and amusement.

  Dolly cupped Mary Rose’s face in her warm hands and looked up into her eyes. Mary Rose looked down into the familiar overheated expression of affection; the old eye-laden look that staked mute claim to martyrdom. She formed a smile and received the slightly too-long hug, registering a guilty yet inexplicable annoyance with her adorable little mother.

  Duncan rose with an attempt at spryness. “How are you, Mister, you’re lookin’ great.” He bonked her on the head with the flat of his hand like a shingle—the Scottish equivalent of a hug. She was almost feverishly glad to see her father. It was always this way, as if an engine revved inside her, stoked with an urgent message. Dear Dad, I!

  “How was your trip, Dad?”

  “Like the fella says, ‘uneventful,’ ” he replied heartily if a mite hoarsely, she thought.

  No sooner had she lost the battle with him over who would carry their overnight bag—it was on wheels, but he insisted on carrying it by the handle—than she turned to see the stroller standing empty.

  “Where’s Maggie?”

  “I let her out,” confessed Dolly with a mischievous glint.

  “Jesus Christ, Mum!” Mary Rose swung to face the crowd—a blur, a black inland lake. “Maggie!”

  “Relax.” Her father’s voice behind her, the one he used on her mother. “There’s no panic, Rosie.” Paneek.

  She looked down. Maggie was sitting on the stone floor, going through Dolly’s purse, grown-up legs scissoring past her.

  Dolly said, “Golly Moses, Mary Roses, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  Maggie made to scoot off into the human thresher, but Mary Rose reached out and caught her by the arm.

  “Gently!” yelped Duncan.

  It snagged her attention, she turned. “Dad, it’s okay.” Maggie exploited the distraction and swung out. “Ow!”

  “She’s got a great left hook.” He laughed.

  She plunked her daughter back into the stroller, asserting her authority over her child, her parents and the entire spoiled Depression-era generation with its full employment and exceeded expectations, its freakish longevity and insatiable demand for filial gratitude from its stressed out, greying, autoimmuning offspring by swiftly engag
ing five points of restraint with one click.

  “Noooo!”

  “You tell ’em, Maggie!” he said with a grin.

  Dolly giggled. “I’ve finally got my revenge, Mary Rose. She’s just like you!” And she laughed. That is, she did an impression of a saucy stage laugh in which Matthew would have recognized a very creditable na-na-na-na-boo-boo!

  Mary Rose blinked, dry and humourless as an iguana.

  “Aren’t you, fuhss?!” continued Dolly, kneeling on the floor, covering Maggie with kisses, turning toddler tears to laughter.

  Arabic is a beautiful language. Thanks to her mother, Mary Rose knows terms of endearment and a lot of food words, otherwise her vocabulary is limited to shit (feminine and masculine forms), shut up, slap on the ear, money, enjoy your meal! God-willing and fart—which was what Dolly had just called Maggie.

  An incomprehensible announcement echoed over the PA system in French and English.

  Duncan commandeered the stroller and was on the move. Working swiftly, Mary Rose deployed the telescoping handle on the overnight bag with one hand and took her mother’s in the other—it was surprisingly soft. They set out against a tide of commuters a hundred thousand strong and together entered the PATH.

  “How’s Hilary?” asked her mother. “How’s Mark, I mean Matthew?”

  “They’re fine, Hilary’s heading out west soon to direct The—”

  “ ‘Same day heel replacement,’ ” said Dolly, reading a sign. “ ‘We deliver.’ Did I tell you, we ran into Catherine—Catherine?—Dunc, is it Catherine or Eileen we ran into on the train who wanted Mary Rose to sign a book?”

  “Darned if I know,” he replied.

  She turned back to Mary Rose. “She was so thrilled when she saw me, she said, ‘You’re Mary Rose MacKinnon’s mother!’ ”

  Mary Rose braced herself and Dolly continued, “I used to be Abe Mahmoud’s daughter, then I was Duncan MacKinnon’s wife, now I’m Mary Rose MacKinnon’s mother!”

  You could almost beat time to it.