SSC (2012) Adult Onset

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  •

  Mary Rose did not harbour hope of her parents’ coming round, nor did she cut them off for it came to her that sanity would not survive the severing. That part of the brain known as “executive function,” in its crisp white shirt and narrow tie, picked up and deciphered a dark, thrashing message from several neural floors below, the racket and shit-flung panic of which she remained consciously unaware, and coolly articulated it: Your parents lived to adulthood before you came along and are thus equipped to recognize themselves in a world without you. But you have never known a world without them. They were the sky. Her mother was a thunderhead, but living without a sky was not an option.

  So she continued to visit their home, alone. She got on with her life—which was what she called her career. She drank and raged and laughed, saw dots and big yellow orbs, forgot how to blink and breathe, all while cleaving to a notion of wholeness and the wisdom of embattled contradictions. Yet she could not bring herself to say “we” in their presence when referring to Renée. Renée was a word that went to glue on the roof of her mouth and sucked her down to the undertow place of no-language. She experienced an interruption of reality when she spoke the name—as though in the real world, the one her parents inhabited, there was no such word, and she was crazy for having made the sound. Nothing is lonelier than crazy. She was “out” to the whole world, but her parents could obliterate her with their refusal to acknowledge a name.

  Maureen went to visit Dolly and Dunc with Zoltan and their young family shortly after Mary Rose came out. Mo phoned from their parents’ home to say that, while she still loved her as her sister, Mary Rose was not welcome to bring Renée, or any other “friend with that lifestyle,” into contact with her children. It lasted a few months, at which point Mo phoned again, this time from her own home, and apologized with the dazed remorse of an ex–cult member. Soon after, she adopted a policy of refusing to discuss the subject with their mother, hoping thereby to starve the fire of oxygen.

  Mary Rose’s father sent a letter by registered mail. It must have taken him quite a while to hunt and peck it out on the old Remington typewriter. She read it once and tore it up. She recalls nothing beyond the first sentence but knows it was as different from “Some things really do get batter” as possible.

  Dear Mary Rose, You have chosen to go down a path that we, as your parents, cannot follow …

  “I’d rather you had cancer.” But Dolly never wrote it down.

  Her anger turned out to be more frightening in its power to endure than it had been in its power to erupt. “Who touched you?” she took to asking Mary Rose. “Did someone touch you? Did your father touch you?”

  The air was shocked.

  Her father’s gaze remained pinned to the corner of the ceiling—what was it in his own story that enabled him to leave the room without leaving his chair?

  Who touched you?

  It was as though Dolly were telling a story over and over again—or rather, a story was working its way through her.

  Did your father touch you?

  With Herculean effort, as though hauling herself up from an afternoon death sleep, and with a disorienting sense of betrayal of what up to that point had been the agreed-upon reality at the kitchen table, she finally said to her mother in the midst of one of these performances, “No, Mum, my father never touched me. Did your father touch you?”

  The moment she spoke the words, she felt a coolness against her face like cool water as she understood that reality was what she was in now, and that a moment ago she had been inhabiting a state akin to the drug-induced numbness preparatory to a surgical procedure.

  The light changed in her mother’s eye again. She looked like a mischievous child as she replied, “Why would you ask that?” And giggled.

  Dolly never posed the question again.

  The lesser liturgy remained:

  … shit.

  … cancer.

  … dead.

  It lasted ten years.

  The curse lifted without fanfare. It was just after her first book came out. She and Renée were visiting Andy-Patrick, who was living in Ottawa at the time—this was before his first divorce. He had not been around when she came out; he was busy getting tied naked to a tree somewhere in New Brunswick and force-fed alcohol in the course of basic military training before switching to the RCMP in search of a kinder, gentler way to serve his country. He never bothered forbidding her to “influence” his children with her “lifestyle.” Mary Rose has never doubted that he relied on long-suffering Mary Lou as a moral compass, the way some men do—as their father did—downloading their emotional lives along with the attendant thank-you-note writing and telephone chit-chat onto their wives, not to mention the task of disowning their children … As for Mary Lou, Mary Rose pegged her as one of those straight women who romanticize lesbianism as an orgy of empathy—one long back rub.

  They were hanging out in his kitchen while he cooked supper and Mary Lou fed the baby, Renée regaling her with tales from the empathic crypt over a third glass of wine, when Dolly phoned and asked him to come for supper with his family.

  “I can’t, Mum. Mary Rose and Renée are here. We’re having supper together.”

  Mary Rose gestured for him to shut up. He was either stupid or evincing the blissful ignorance of the entitled male, casually tossing that incendiary name around.

  He passed her the phone. “Mum wants to talk to you.”

  She cringed. “Hi, Mum.”

  “Come home.”

  “I can’t. I’m … not alone.” She still could not say the name.

  “Bring Renée,” said her mother. “I’ve lost enough babies.”

  She didn’t go. She figured, so this is how it ends: Andy-Pat declines the summons and Dolly lifts the curse; not because she does not wish to lose her daughter, but because she fears losing her son.

  •

  The nurse changed the dressing a couple of days after the surgery. She supported Mary Rose’s elbow with one hand while with the other she deftly unwound the bandage. It hurt, but they had given her a needle for the pain, so it wasn’t too bad. Also, this nurse was nice, she was pretty and knew how to do everything just right. Mary Rose watched the cool fingers as the stain grew darker and the bandage stiffer until there it was. Puckered, withered. Stitched.

  “That’s a beautiful incision,” said her mother in unusually measured tones. She was a nurse; such things were beautiful.

  “Isn’t it?” said the young nurse. “Gorgeous.” And she smiled.

  Mary Rose stared at it. The arm looked like a badly laced sneaker. Black threads poked out at intervals along either side of the raw seam, like insect legs encrusted with blood … she went to touch it—

  “Don’t touch,” said her mother quickly.

  The nurse said calmly, “Go ahead and touch the skin but not the incision.”

  Mary Rose did, and it was with wonderment that she felt the shrivelled skin of her arm respond with a sensitivity so acute, she thought, “This must be what it’s like for babies.”

  The nurse gently sponged her chest and shoulder. The yellow had begun to recede, leaving in its wake a streaky violet, as though the sun were setting on her chest. The nurse had nice breath, cool and light. She wrapped the arm in a fresh dressing and it looked clean and sane.

  Mary Rose knew, however, what was under the dressing. It was there when she closed her eyes, imprinted on her lids: something bad, through no fault of its own. Like a demon that could not help having been born.

  •

  Mary Rose broke up with Renée and got together with Hil. Duncan declared Hilary to be the spitting image of his revered Aunt Chrissie—unmarried nurse-veteran of the Great War. Dolly stood on tiptoe and gave Hilary three kisses on alternating cheeks, “that’s what the Lebanese do!” And just like that, Hilary was part of the family.

  Soon after, Dolly paid them a solo visit to Toronto in time for International Women’s Day. She wore a sequined caftan, a red turban, a
gold rope with a Blessed Virgin Mary medallion, and dangly earrings. They took her to the Five Minute Feminist Cabaret. Afterwards, she read tea leaves in the backroom of a College Street bar till three a.m.

  She told an astonished dub poet, “You’re going to fly. Just you in mid-air, I don’t know how, but you are.”

  To which the poet replied, “I just booked a skydive for myself, oh my God, am I going to be okay?”

  “Yes, dear, I see only good.”

  In the cup of Cherry Pitts, of the punk band Cuntry, Dolly saw “someone who loves you and wants to be close to you but they’re afraid to show it,” and went on to provide initials, at the mention of which punk-pallid Cherry was seen to blush.

  She saw a new house in the cup of a flamenco dancer, a cooking class for a stand-up comedian and a trip to Niagara Falls in the cup of a taciturn piano virtuoso who had eschewed melody on political grounds and had recently survived a suicide attempt, though Dolly could not have known that.

  “Do I come back from the Falls?” asked the pianist.

  “Oh yes, and you’ve brought … not exactly a souvenir, a … well, it’s a dog, dear. You’re going to get a dog there, whether you mean to or not … it’s an ugly dog … you don’t seem to mind that.”

  At which Li Meileen was seen to smile.

  In Hil’s cup she saw “birds, lots of birds, I forget now, are birds happiness or babies? Well, what’s the difference, they’re the same thing! Oh, Hilary, there’s so much love in this cup …”

  Hilary smiled, her hair fell forward and caressed her cheek, and Mary Rose swelled with the pleasure of feeling … normal. My girlfriend likes my mother. My mother likes my girlfriend. We’re going to have a family. An entire missile base vanished from the landscape … Never mind the resulting crater, it will grow over in time, a slight depression filled with dandelions.

  “Do you want babies, Hilary?” asked Dolly.

  Hil blushed and nodded, wept and smiled. Dolly stroked her cheek, brown on white.

  In Mary Rose’s cup she saw, “Money.”

  She plucked off her sparkly earrings and gave them to a bleach-blond leather-dyke who admired them. “Your mum’s amazing.”

  “I love your mum,” said Phat Klown, who earlier in the evening had performed a trick onstage involving a nipple ring and a string of pearls.

  “You know, Mary Rose,” said Dolly at dawn over corned beef hash in Mars diner, “God loves you and your friends specially, because you are making the most of the gifts He gave you.”

  They turned the page.

  Mary Rose wrote another book. She got serious money for the first time, mortgage-torpedoing money. She and Hil married as soon as the law came in—they eloped, it was simpler—so while Dolly didn’t sing “My Best to You” at their wedding, when Matthew was born, along with the cheque from her and Dunc, Dolly sent them a card. On the cover was the Blessed Virgin Mary. Inside, it said, Prayer for a Wonderful Mother. Dolly had crossed out the a and added an s to Mother.

  Maybe the crack in the Berlin Wall had been Dolly’s fear of losing her son, but she wasted no time tearing it down and driving west in a Lada. Or east in a VW … It was a miracle on the order of Our Lady of Lourdes. And Duncan followed. Or perhaps he was along for the ride in the back seat.

  •

  The hardest part of being in the hospital was having her father visit on his own on his way home from work.

  “How’re you feelin’, sweetie pie?” He tossed his air force hat onto a hook near the door of the room she shared with Tracy-the-snowmobile-girl. “Have you had a bite to eat yet?”

  She wished he would just go straight home. Now she would have to worry about him driving in the dark. It was February, five o’clock. “Not yet.”

  The worry was an ache that echoed—spooned around—the physical pain: Dad’s new green Buick overturned on Days Road between the Kmart and the penitentiary. Just because there was a Dairy Queen on the corner didn’t mean you couldn’t die there.

  “It’s a ten-minute drive, old buddy, I’ll be home before you know it.”

  You could drown in a cup of water, five seconds was all you’d need in a car.

  “I’m worried, Dad.”

  “What are you worried about?” He gave her his incredulous grin. She saw his gold tooth.

  She tried not to say it, but couldn’t help it this time. “What if you have an accident?”

  “Are you kiddin’?” he said with a chuckle.

  “No. I’m scared you’re going to have a car accident.”

  She had never gone this far before, she felt like she was breaking a pact. Or revealing her true identity to both of them in a way that wasn’t very nice. But it felt involuntary, I have only a moment for this transmission, I am the real Mary Rose, and I am being held prisoner on the Planet—

  “I won’t have an accident, Mister.”

  “But what if you did?” And it slipped from her like something dark and dense, a lump of driftwood, charred from a long-ago campfire, “What if you died?”

  He lowered his chin and regarded her from beneath hawk-like brows, mock stern. “There’s an old saying: ‘Don’t shake hands with the devil before you meet him.’ ”

  She smiled, so he would believe he had reassured her.

  Her supper came.

  “Eat it all up now, it’ll put hair on your chest.”

  Slice of turkey under sheen of gravy, ice cream scoop of mashed potato, triangle of mushy peas, individually sealed portion of applesauce, pebbled plastic cup of apple juice with a paper lid like a crinoline and bendy paper straw, some kind of cake thing. It all smelt like baby food. She glanced across at Tracy’s milkshake, sitting on her tray, beading condensation—she was asleep. Tracy could eat only milkshakes because she’d been on the back of her dad’s Ski-Doo when they went through a pasture fence at night.

  Dad sat and read the paper while she ate, then she had to throw up right away.

  She pushed aside the wheeled tray and begins carefully to lift her sheet and the openwork white blanket, all of it very clean and cardboardy.

  “Where you goin’?”

  “I have to throw up.”

  He was hesitant. “Should I call the nurse?”

  She walked slightly bent over, cradling the darkness on her left side.

  Mum wasn’t here, she could rest when Mum was here—she was “in like Flynn” with the staff, Dad liked to say, indestructible. Her father was here on his own. Pale, fragile in his lovely uniform. Like a unicorn, too beloved to be durable. Breakable. She wished he would go home so she could know he was safe. “No, it’s okay,” she said.

  It took a long time to walk across the room to the toilet, it was dizzying. There was a smell—Phisohex and rubbing alcohol, needles and fluorescent lights, white sheets. The smell of metal wheels and getting sliced open, so cold so cold so cold. She knelt at the porcelain—white dignity of the Virgin Mary.

  Dad followed and stood behind her—she wanted to close the door but hadn’t managed it. She vomited, which was hard because it yanked the surgery, spasmed the streaky yellow, with each heave it seemed impossible to continue but less possible to stop—she’d had no idea how many muscles it took to throw up.

  “Y’okay, sweetie?”

  “Yup.”

  The after-trembles were friendly, they shook her gently like a leaf, shook the slime from her lip, said, It’s over now. She brushed her teeth.

  She felt him shadow her back to bed, a hovering presence in the shape of help, like a Guardian Angel, huge and beautiful but powerless. They loved you, but they couldn’t stop anything from happening to you. They worked for God.

  She had forgotten about the gaping back of the hospital gown. She climbed onto the bed and it was sweet to lie back in the Javex sheets.

  She said, “You can go home now.”

  “I don’t have to go just yet.”

  His light optimism was powerless here. Mum had power here—this labyrinth was her domain. Mary Rose felt bad about not sh
owing him how reassured she was. She slept.

  When she woke up, it was dark and he was gone.

  •

  Everything has been fine with her parents for over a decade now, but something is bothering her at the back of her mind … like one-eyed Detective Columbo, hesitating at the exit, she is aware of a blank spot. The bad time ended abruptly and everyone carried on as though nothing had happened—they turned the page. But lately she wonders if in fact they burned the book.

  •

  A few times, she had supper in the sunroom at the end of the hall with the other children on the ward. The big windows shone black with the February night. Here were no visitors and no grown-ups. Warm light was cast by reading lamps that squatted on mismatched end tables, a world away from fluorescent corridors and sterile hospital rooms. There were shabby easy chairs and worn toys; blocks with faded letters, a basket of old Lego, games of Chinese checkers and Monopoly—the money frayed with use. The smell was less clinical too, more a fug of flannel and crayons than Phisohex and isopropyl.

  On each occasion, an inner circle of children had gathered as if the hospital were their home, and this was the playroom, where they could relax and toys might come alive at midnight. Some of the children had been admitted months before, while others were in and out on such a frequent basis they all knew one another. They were not a mean clique, however, they were more like a family with no parents. Stranded. Stoic. They were kind to one another, and they opened their circle to Mary Rose.

  The leader was a girl who, though a year older, was smaller than Mary Rose and seemed like a grown-up. A nice one. She was round like a robust doll, with blue eyes and a mass of corn-coloured curls she wore in a frizzy ponytail like a pompom. Her blue sateen robe was belted snugly round her middle, she was cheerful, and she looked after the other children—one, named Norman, had “a nervous condition.” He was prone to seizures and walked leaning sideways, unblinking. Another was so lively it was hard to believe there was anything wrong with him—he wore hard shoes with his pyjamas and slid on the freshly waxed floor.