Adult Onset

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  “How are you, Fluffy?”

  Why did I let myself think of Renée?

  “Hi, Renée,” whom I would not dream of addressing as “Frisky.”

  “Hi, Maggie, it’s great to see you, kiddo, do you still like cats?”

  Maggie loves Renée. Mary Rose reflects that Renée’s narcissism plays well with children—not unlike Dolly’s. Within moments she has Maggie enthralled by her necklace—an eclection of electrical cable sheathing, seashells and a handful of fox bones that Mary Rose found on their last camping trip together. Maggie carefully examines the necklace. Renée leans forward and her wavy mass of auburn hair frames the face that is fuller with age, but brighter too. Surely, however, it is too early in the day for cleavage. Mary Rose fights the twin urges to flee and to fling herself into a big smothery hug. Somewhere in a parallel universe the past is playing like a movie rerun wherein she loves and desires a slim, supple Renée; the one whose kiss tastes like Camels and tequila, the dyke with the purple crewcut and three silver earrings whom she has just met at a Pride Day brunch. Flash forward through cherishing, perishing codependence, the dearth then death of sex, drunken scenes and slaps, to Mary Rose driving away in her VW Rabbit through a grinding of gears with Renée in tears, unemployed and bellicose on the front porch. To Fiesta Farms grocery store here on a Wednesday morning.

  “Bring the kids over sometime.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll put down plastic and we’ll do action painting with vegetable dye.”

  “Excellent.”

  She is at the checkout. Maggie is handing her the groceries to put on the conveyor belt—she breathes patience. She has no reason to hurry, merely a hurry-habit, a metabolic hair-trigger. It has got her where she is today, but it will also strike her down with an autoimmune disorder that has twenty-five different names but that used to have just one—“hysteria”—if she doesn’t smarten up and smell the roses.

  “You’re doing a good job, Maggie.”

  The man behind them in line gives her the evil eye. She feels her scalp prickle. He sighs. She stares, prepared to go postal. Go ahead, make my fucking day. He looks away. Maggie hands her the apples, one by one.

  Maggie does look like her. A lot of children do, she has generic good looks. All babies look like Winston Churchill and all children look like her. And all white guys look like her brother.

  In the parking lot, she is buckling Maggie into her car seat when suddenly the child hugs her fiercely and emits a roar of happiness. It was worth the whole painstaking apple by carton by tube process. Her cellphone rings in her pocket. She straightens to dig for it and bangs her head on the door frame—“Shit!” Maggie laughs. The call display says Harlots.

  “Hello?”

  Andy-Patrick is calling from a Queen Street salon. “You gotta get down here, Mister, I look like Billy Idol without the track marks.” He puts the hairdresser on the phone and she and Mary Rose joke like old friends. The girl asks if “Andrew” is an actor because she can’t believe such a cool guy is a cop.

  “Hey, Maggie, want to go see Uncle Andy-Pat?”

  She drives down to Queen Street and in another fell swoop of parking karma finds a spot steps from the salon. She unbuckles Maggie and hauls her out. She lets her walk. It has stopped raining.

  It is turning out to be a good day, the chill grey notwithstanding. Maggie is being really good … a real “little buddy.” Mary Rose decides not to confront her with the broken unicorn. Of course she covets her brother’s special things, she may even have broken it on purpose. She is two: capable of anything, guilty of nothing. Still, it hurts her heart when she thinks of Matthew this morning, shielding his sister, pretending he is the one who broke the unicorn.

  They amble past a small art gallery and a knot of grizzled homeless men out front of St. Christopher House, to the lights—“What colour is the light, Maggie?”

  “Geen.”

  “Good!”

  They enter the salon, athrob with an unfamiliar song that has mugged a familiar one … a folk song in whips and chains. She surveys the line of severely hip stylists, scissors nibbling at customers’ napes, blow-dryers trained on glossy heads—he is not in sight, he must be in the bathroom.

  The Goth receptionist listens to Mary Rose with an empty expression. Is she stoned? Perhaps she recognizes her—she is young enough to be a fan. Her neck piercing is oddly alluring. She swivels her raven head and announces, “This lady’s looking for her brother.”

  Mary Rose used to live over the Legion in an actual loft—not a “loft conversion”—on this strip before it was cool, she did radical street mime and wore a biker jacket through the winter in the days when winter was cold, she is not anyone’s “this lady”—you suburban twit, you’ll live to regret that tattoo.

  The girl turns back to Mary Rose. “You just missed him, ma’am.”

  What did she expect? She kicked the football again and wound up flat on her back—her brother has probably already gone home with the stylist. He may have dropped Mary Rose’s name and scored. It would not be the first time.

  “Here we go home again, jiggedy jig!” she sings as she buckles Maggie back into the car seat.

  “No!”

  Maggie does not want to go home, she wants to see Uncle Andy-Pat. Mary Rose pulls out into traffic—she ought to call someone for an impromptu play date. Like Sue—but then she’d have to listen to her talk about her trek over the West Coast Trail with her husband, Steve, and, somehow, their two kids and the baby. The windshield is suddenly rattling with hail. Maggie stops screaming. “Maggie, look, the sky is falling.” No. “Not really, love, it is hailing.”

  “Helling!” Exactly.

  They could drop by Early Years—the weather is foul enough—but she might run into the happy English child-deserter. Maybe they really should drop in on Renée, she doesn’t smoke in the house anymore and the vagina sculptures have almost all sold—she tried to get Mary Rose to “sit” for one shortly before they broke up, but something told her to decline; proof there really is such a thing as a guardian angel. She dials her cell while driving but puts it on speaker.

  “Hi, still feel like doing some action painting?”

  “What’s that? Oh. Gee, Fluff, I’m just so tired suddenly, I could barely pick up the phone, I thought you were the cleaning lady calling back. I had to cancel, I can’t handle the stimulation.”

  “Are you okay? Do you want me to drop something by?”

  “Nooo.” The resigned upper register of the mild invalid. “I just need some downtime to recharge creatively.” She’s in bed with the cats, the new Alice Munro and a box of Timbits. Fair enough.

  A glance in the rear-view mirror reveals Maggie asleep. “Maggie, wake up! Wake up, sweetheart!” If she naps now, she won’t nap this afternoon. “Maggie, where’s Daisy?!”

  She watches as Maggie opens her eyes and registers in one bleak existential blink that there is no Dog. Her face—and perhaps, too, her faith—crumples, and she cries. It was a dirty trick, but it worked. “Daisy’s at home, sweetheart, waiting for us.”

  A piteous wail rises to a howl when they make the turn onto Bathurst Street and head north.

  She turns up the defogger and remembers the mulch. She’ll have to get out there and spread it over the garden before the frost hits. Then she remembers it is April. Can she blame climate change? Perhaps it is a sign that something is cooking in the back of her mind. The third in the trilogy, gestating … shifting through Time … She has the sudden conviction that it will have something to do with time travel … It makes perfect sense: from Otherwheres to Otherwhens …

  She feels around in the glove compartment for a pen. In the rear-view mirror she sees Maggie, tear-stained but calm, with a crayon in her fist.

  “Maggie, give Mumma the crayon.”

  “No.”

  She reaches into the back, her hand like the head of an anaconda looking for prey. Her phone rings: Captain A.P. MacKinnon. It is no longer legal to use
a cellphone while driving in Ontario, but she answers—after all, it’s a cop calling.

  “Where the heck are you? I went all the way down to the hair salon.” He does not answer. She hears the whoosh of ambient reality at his end.

  “A&P? Hello? What’s that sound, are you there?”

  He is gulping air.

  “Are you crying?” Oh my God, it’s Mum, it’s Dad, this is the phone call—she always thought it would be Maureen breaking the news. “What’s happened?”

  “Nothing.” He gasps. “I don’t … I can’t …”

  “Andy-Patrick, breathe.” No one has died. He is having a panic attack. “Where are you?”

  “My car.”

  “You shouldn’t be talking while driving.” She swerves to avoid a cyclist and turns onto her street. Maggie renews her protest. “I’m not talking to you till you pull over.”

  “Okay. I’ve stopped.”

  “Are you in park?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Now what’s wrong?”

  He has been triggered—by what, he does not know—and cannot find the off switch. Maureen has her comfy autoimmune disorder, while the two younger MacKinnons are united in pointless panic: the garden-variety plunge into an “I”-free zone of bowel-searing fear. For no reason. Occasionally accompanied by visual phenomena, elevated heart rate and esophageal spasm, some restrictions may apply, see website for details. “Where are you?” she says. “I’m coming.”

  “I’m on the 401 at Cobourg.”

  He must have flown! “I can’t come there. I have to pick up Matthew at noon.”

  She turns into her driveway and puts the car in park, jams the phone between her face and shoulder, leans into the back seat to undo the five-point restraint buckle, and Maggie knuckle-punches her in the ear. She carries her brother and her child to the back door, both of them crying.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, Mary Rose, I’m going to get out of my car and walk into the road, I can’t—I can’t—can’t—

  “Stay in the car.” Six lanes of superhighway. “Do you hear me? Answer me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now breathe through your nose, it’s going to be okay.”

  She listens to his convulsive breathing as she makes it inside and up the four steps to the kitchen. Maggie allows herself to be consoled by Daisy, who goes to work on the salty toddler cheeks, while Mary Rose goes to the fridge for her daughter’s drug of choice, mango juice—it’s organic, but the mangoes come from China, so …? “Andy-Pat, are you still in counselling? Are you still seeing that therapist? What was her name?”

  “Amber.”

  “Is she a real therapist? She sounds like a stripper.”

  He chuckles. That’s better.

  “She’s real,” he says.

  “Are you still seeing her?”

  “No. Yeah, but …”

  He has slept with her—oh for God’s sake—Mary Rose does not want to know, she wants to hunt Amber down and get her tax money back. Pin it to the corkboard next to the dead clown magnet: Amber, five thousand dollars.

  “Mary Rose? How come I’m such a fuck-up?”

  “You’re not. Well, you are somewhat, but I think you’re within the normal range. For a straight white male cop.”

  “You know what?” She hears him clear his throat, staving off more tears. “I love you and Maureen more than anyone in the world, I’d be dead without you guys.”

  “No you wouldn’t, but you might be less screwed-up.”

  “That’s what Dad always said.”

  “He was afraid it would turn you gay, having sisters and no brother.”

  “How ironic. I wish I was gay.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Mary Rose? How come—” He breaks off, crying in the choked way of a boy fighting the humiliation of tears.

  “It’s okay, Andy-Pat. Andy-Pat? I love you. Maggie’s here. You want to say hi?”

  “What’s the matter with me, Mister?”

  “Shereen left.”

  Perhaps all their panic attacks are this simple, a choreography of chaos designed to avoid the quiet thing behind the curtain: loss.

  He whimpers. She starts singing “Boom Boom, Ain’t It Great to Be Crazy?” They used to sing it on family car trips—in between her bouts of carsickness. She sings it softly now, as though it were a lullaby, wondering dispassionately as she does so, How did this get to be my life? But he says, “No. The other one.”

  She sings the whole thing. Somewhere around the verse about the soldiers who have all gone missing, she hears him blow his nose. His voice is ragged but steady. “Mister, how come you always help me, but I can never help you? I never help anyone. Dad was right, I’m a ‘useless shit.’ ”

  “That’s not true. He was probably jealous of you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because you had a father.”

  “… Wow.”

  “That’ll be a hundred and twenty-five dollars plus HST.”

  “See?” he moans.

  “You’ve helped me.”

  “When?”

  But she can’t think of an example. Maggie spills her juice and starts fingerpainting with it. Daisy starts licking it up—she will have diarrhea later, her system is that sensitive. “You help just by being my brother.” She has spoken like a Hallmark card but suddenly it hurts, like a splinter in her throat, the word: brother. She mustn’t cry too. Through her kitchen window she sees a stolid middle-aged man jog by. He is in the here and now.

  “I better go,” he says. He is back. “I look like I’ve been crying.”

  “You probably just look hungover like all the other cops.”

  “I’m a man.”

  “Yes you am.”

  He is off to Kingston to stand next to the premier at the dedication of a new monument to “the fallen” in Afghanistan—as if they’d tripped on something. See Jane fall. He asks if they can meet for coffee tomorrow morning at nine. “Sure, I’ll come right after I drop Matthew at 8:45.” She feels a pang of remorse over how ticked off at A&P she was for standing her up at the salon. Hil was right, he was actually in crisis. His binge of shopping and primping on the heels of a breakup ought to have tipped her off that he was heading for a crash. He was on the rebound, falling for himself all over again, getting infatuated only to find there was no one on the other end of the embrace—existential horreur! Why can’t she and her brother just be sad when it is sad? Sad = Cry = Feel Better. Even Maureen cries. Why do she and A&P need to go through so many hoops? Krazy Klowns.

  They hang up. It will be good to see him tomorrow, they will have an unfraught coffee. She tears off a wad of paper towels and swipes through the mangoey mess on the floor, having broken a rule from The Parents’ Guide to Survival: never pour more than you plan to wipe up.

  “No!” shrieks Maggie.

  Mary Rose forgot it was art. Maggie laments bitterly, sticky hands clawing the floor in Trojan Women–sized despair. Mary Rose leans down to pick her up from behind, just as the child jacks to her feet and Mary Rose sustains the toddler head-snap to the bridge of her nose. “Oh my God.” No blood, just pain.

  These are the wages of cold turkey—there is forty-five minutes before she has to go get Matthew, time enough for Maggie to have a mini-nap—a methadone nap. Mary Rose herself could do with a twenty-minute “sizz.” What would Hil do?

  She turns on the faucet, puts it to “spray” and pulls it from its retractable base. “Here you go, Maggs … Aim into the sink, that’s right. The sink!” Mary Rose moves out of range to the small utility sink where she unpacks the produce and starts the wash along the rind.

  She buys organic but avoids the subject with her mother, who scorns the term—“I don’t buy anything organeek!” Her father is fond of inquiring with MBA-ular skepticism, “How do you know it’s organeek? Where’s the proof?” She has explained to her parents that organic is not new, it is what they grew up with. It is one reason why their generation
will probably wind up having been at the apex of human longevity. “Just think of it as food. It’s all the other stuff that should be hyphenated. Why do you think cancer rates are soaring, along with allergies and obesity?”

  “ ‘By your children be ye taught!’ ” declaimed Dolly, and pretended to slap her.

  Mary Rose tries not to rant, but her parents must enjoy baiting her. Why else would her mother see a rejection of her own values in Mary Rose’s healthy choices when Dolly herself paved the way with Lebanese cuisine and a refusal to waste money on processed “fog”? Why would her father persist in making right-wing remarks when he is in fact well left of many people far younger?

  He likes to wait till the end of a visit. “I see where there’s a new auto mechanic shop opened up downtown and their claim to fame is that all the mechanics are female. Why are they making such a big deal of their gender, it just begs the question, if you’re so great, where’ve you been for the past two thousand years?” Mechaneek.