Adult Onset Read online

  “Dance, dance!”

  For another thing, unlike her mother, Mary Rose has never borne a child, much less buried one.

  Her partner, Hilary, being ten years younger, is closer to the start of her career trajectory and when they talked about having a family, Mary Rose welcomed the chance to be the woman behind the woman, no need for the spotlight anymore; like John Lennon, she was going to sit and watch the wheels go round and round. Except it turns out she has very little time to sit, nor is she a big “sitter” in any case. In that way she is like her mother: she has difficulty sitting and watching. And listening. All of which are what Hil does for a living, being a theatre director.

  So Mary Rose gardened really hard. She cooked really hard. She cleaned like a white tornado, baby on her hip till he started toddling and Maggie came along and there were suddenly two in diapers. A writer she admires has described sex as “indescribable.” The same goes for a day with two toddlers. That early period is now a blur, but Mary Rose still has the reflexes to show for it: like a war vet throwing himself over the body of a bystander at the sound of a car door slamming, she rushes in with tissues to staunch other people’s spills in cafés, and has to repress the urge to cup her hand beneath the chin of a coughing stranger. She used to think she was busy when she was all about her career, but she did not know from busy till she had children. Now her life is like a Richard Scarry book, Mom’s Busy Day in Busy Town.

  She never dreamt she would be married. She never expected to become a mother. She never imagined she would be a “morning person” or drive a station wagon or be capable of following printed instructions for an array of domestic contraptions that come with some-assembly-required; until now, the only thing she had ever been able to assemble was a story.

  “Dance chicken!”

  They hired a part-time nanny: Candace from northern England, a real-life hard-ass Mary Poppins. Mary Rose started yoga. Wrecked her knee doing the tree. Met other moms, went to playgroups, caught all the colds, felt shame when she failed to pack snacks and had to accept the cheerful charity of the shiny mums, preened with goodwill when she was the one with the extra rice cake or unscented baby wipe. She bought stuff for the house, she renovated the kitchen, researched appliances and didn’t waste time bargain hunting—another way in which she differs from her mother. She forged a new domestic infrastructure for their lives, All Clad all the time.

  A mere three years before Matthew was born, she was living in boozy boho twilight with erratic Renée, three to five cats and the occasional panic attack. Then, in a few blinks of an eye, she was married to blue-eyed striding Hil, living in a bright semi-detached corner house, other-mother to two wonderful children. It was as though she had waved a wand and presto, she had a life.

  But it was also as though she were a factory, tooled for a wartime economy. Apparently it was peacetime now, but she could not seem to find the switch to kill the turbines. Before leaving for the gig out in Winnipeg, Hilary asked if she wanted to start working again, to come out of her self-appointed retirement. Like a groundhog poking its head up out of its den, thought Mary Rose, except she’d see her shadow and dive for cover. “I can’t believe you’re saying this, Hil. It’s like you want me to start using drugs again. I need to find out who I am without work. I’m tired of being a demon elf, spinning cotton into gold, I am a human being, I want a human life, I want a garden, I want peace, I want to hammer swords into ploughshares, don’t make me wiggle my nose, Darren!” Hil didn’t laugh. She asked if Mary Rose would consider “seeing someone.”

  Dear Dad,

  I should have know the e-mail was from you right off the bat because of the address—I remember you telling me that’s what the Germans called the Highland regiments when they came over the top in their leather kilts to the skirl of the pipes: “the ladies from hell.” Was Granddaddy in both wars? He was a medic, wasn’t he?

  “Flap you dance chicken flap!!” A Thracian ferocity has crept into Maggie’s tone. She presses Elmo’s foot again—and again—and—

  “Let Elmo finish his song, sweetheart.”

  Was Granddaddy an alcoholic? Is that why you sometimes had a hard time talking about certain

  Delete.

  Hil thinks that because she is in therapy it must be right for everyone, but Mary Rose is not about to risk having her creativity dismantled by a well-meaning therapist who might mistake the riches of her unconscious for hazardous waste. Even if her creativity is on hold at the moment. The cursor blinks. There is something just out of reach. Something she knows … witness her fingers hovering over the keyboard even as her mind draws a blank and she sits staring, as though someone has pressed pause … Her eyes skid involuntarily from side to side—is it possible to experience a seizure without knowing it? People have mini-strokes all the time and never know till they show up on a CT scan. She should google it. Something familiar is bobbing on the horizon of consciousness, something she knows but cannot name … she can almost see it, like a package, a crate on the sea. But when she looks directly at it, it vanishes. Slips her mind as though somewhere in her brain there is a sheer strip that interrupts the flow of neural goods and services. Like a scar.

  Dear Dad,

  I

  Elmo has fallen silent and Maggie is climbing onto her lap. Mary Rose moves to hug her little girl, who so seldom reaches out for this kind of affection from her, and realizes too late that her lap has been scaled as a means to her laptop. Maggie thrusts out her hand and clicks send before Mary Rose can stop her—“No!”

  She has roared it on reflex and is immediately regretful, having inherited her pipes from her mother, who definitely wore the baritone in the family. Her child sits, immobilized. “It’s okay, Maggie.”

  It’s no big deal, the letter was blank but for Dear Dad, I. It isn’t as if Mary Rose had typed Dear Dad, go fuck yourself—itself an intrusive thought of the kind with which she has been plagued all her life; the flotsam and jetsam of her psyche, she knows to be part and parcel of the creativity that has served her so well she has been able to enter semi-retirement in her forties and arrive, against all odds, at this kitchen table with her child. That said, is it too much to ask not to have jam on her trackpad?

  “Maggie?” But Maggie is … on pause. “Maggie, sweetheart.”

  The child suddenly looses a siren wail and Mary Rose squints against the blast—for such a rugged little hellion, Maggie can be surprisingly sensitive. Mary Rose gets to her feet and paces the floor with the howling child, back and forth past the big kitchen windows as, deep within her middle-aged ear canal, numberless cilia curl and die, drawing nigh the day when she, like her elderly dehydrating parents, will exasperate her own adult children with repeated, “What?! Did you want a pin or a pen?!” Though it would seem from her robust and sustained protest that Maggie has in turn inherited Mary Rose’s pipes, the fact is this mother and child are not biologically related.

  She hears a thump overhead, followed by the clickety-clack of canine nails on hardwood and the thundery thud of Daisy barrelling down the carpeted stairs. The dog, having heaved herself from her queen-sized Tempur-Pedic slumber at the sound of domestic disturbance, is now reporting for duty. What’s up? Pizza guy? Want me to kill him?

  “It’s okay, Daisy,” Mary Rose says in answer to the dog’s RCA Victor head tilt. “Do you want to go outside?”

  “Me!” cries Maggie, fully recovered, clipping her mother on the temple with the snack trap in the course of wriggling free to tackle Daisy around her thick neck.

  Mary Rose unlocks the heavy oak front door and Maggie reaches up to wrestle with the handle of the exterior glass one. Daisy obligingly head-butts it open and torpedoes out and down the veranda steps, making a beeline for the gingko tree, where she drops to her side in the mulch at its base like a shot pig. The sun has come out, the earth is steaming … This is going to confuse the magnolia tree, dumb blonde of the horticultural world—already its buds look ready to pop, petals that ought to be pink, they’ll
be black with frost before the month is out, it’s asking for it.

  But sun is better than the unrelieved overcast of a winter that ought to have been hard and bright and blue and white. I’ll take it. She breathes deeply the scent of soil, and surveys the dowdy shades of grey and brown and dirty green in her front garden with its skeletal trellises and spectral dogwoods. Beyond her low wooden fence and across the street, the rotted leaves that crease the curb are flecked with tissues, candy wrappers and bits of recycling that got away; all the ugly promise of spring framed by the pillars of her porch. Behind her, Maggie starts ringing the doorbell. Daisy’s head jerks up, then sinks down again.

  Mary Rose MacKinnon lives with her family in the Annex neighbourhood of downtown Toronto. Mature trees, cracked sidewalks, frat houses, yuppy renos and more modest, pleasantly dingy houses that cost a fortune. Theirs is somewhere between yuppy and dingy. She loves the house. It is down the street from a park where a nine-year-old girl was abducted in 1985, but Mary Rose no longer thinks about that every time she looks out the front door. She knows her neighbours and likes them—with the possible exception of Rochelle three doors up, who tried to block their renovation. There are young families—VWs and Subarus—plus a few old-school Italian holdovers: Chevy Caprice. Among the latter is an elderly widow who has a Virgin Mary in the middle of her patch of front lawn that is otherwise distinguished in summer by the closest greenest shave in the neighbourhood—Daria pours Mary Rose a limoncello every Christmas, and dresses up as an elf. Mary Rose’s children are as safe as she can make them. She uses non-chemical cleaning agents and washes all fruit, even those with inedible rinds. She volunteers for all the field trips so Matthew won’t have to take the school bus. Recently she was on her front porch when two children ran past followed by their mother, who was shrieking, “Sebastian, Kayla, don’t run in flip-flops!” She isn’t that bad. Nearby are good schools, a community centre and an arena, not to mention great shops a short walk away on Bloor Street. It is a shabby chic neighbourhood where the cosmos runs wild outside wooden fences in summer, sidewalk chalk and dandelions proliferate, and higgledy-piggledy hedges and trumpet vines proclaim the prevailing left-leaning sympathies of the residents. Most of all, it is the only home her children have ever known—a fact that forces her to admit that growing up on the move must have cost her something, given she has chosen to raise her own children differently.

  “Maggie, no more bell ringing, please.”

  Bingbongbingbongbingbong.

  Though she has failed to cultivate a fondness for dandelions, Mary Rose has toiled to achieve a laid-back raggedness in her own garden with old-fashioned flowering bushes and climbers, and she chides herself afresh now for having missed the boat on the roses this year—is it too late to get out there and prune above every five-leafed stem in hopes of a strong showing this summer? Or too early? She squints—what are those fluorescent orange runes spray-painted on the sidewalk in front of her gate? Is the city planning to tear up her garden to lay fresh pipes? Is this to be a season of sewage and seepage and burly butt-cracks trampling the oakleaf hydrangea? Has her house been supplied by lead pipes all this time? Has the poison already made its way into the teeth and bones of her children?

  Bingbong—

  “Maggie—”

  The child eludes her grasp, fleeing the porch, snack trap in hand, to join Daisy in the mulch. Adorable.

  For another thing, while like her mother before her Mary Rose does not tolerate dandelions, neither does she yell at them and go at them with a knife while wearing an old flowered housedress. And swearing in Arabic.

  “Maggie, don’t feed grapes to Daisy.” Grapes are not good for dogs. Daisy’s system is particularly sensitive—witness the slime on the floor. People think pit bulls are indestructible. They’re not. Mary Rose descends the steps and reaches for the snack trap. “Ow, Maggie, don’t hit Mumma.”

  She picks her up—

  “No, Mumma!”

  —and goes back into the house, leaving Daisy to lounge in the yard.

  She returns to her laptop and remains standing while she reads an e-mail from her friend Kate. “Hey Mister, come see Water with me and Bridget Wednesday night.” Her father coined the nickname because of her initials, and Mary Rose prefers it. She has never been comfortable with her name, it is too flowery and feminine. Exposed. On her book jackets, she is MR MacKinnon. The stark use of initials and the calculated absence of an author photo misled readers to assume at first that she was male, a fact which didn’t hurt sales. To this day, many are unaware of what the letters stand for, and she likes it that way—she does not enjoy hearing strangers say her first name, does not like them having it in their mouth. She types a hasty reply—it’ll be good to get out of the house and hang with friends who don’t own a diaper bag. Especially on a Wednesday night.

  Maggie seizes the phone anew and reprises her gleeful getaway down the hall—some things never get old when you’re two. Mary Rose wavers: ought she to break down and put on a Dora the Explorer video? No one need know Mary Rose has resorted to TV before noon … But she’ll pay for it: the screen, regardless of content, is brain sugar and a half-hour of peace is purchased with two hours of hell. Instead, she lures Maggie from her hiding place beneath the piano with the offer of her car key. Maggie takes it in exchange for the phone. The harmless switchblade-style key is good for a whole three minutes and it is worth the risk that Maggie might set off the car alarm.

  She unplugs her laptop, jams the child safety plug back into the outlet, bangs her head on the table getting up, and dons her genuine chef’s apron—the tomatoes are starting to smell good—she opens the fridge and takes out a raw chicken that she air-chilled overnight, sets it on an antimicrobial cutting board, washes her hands, slips her cooking magazine into her recipe stand and is reaching contentedly for her scissors when the phone rings. She sighs and picks up.

  “Hi, Mum.”

  “You’re there!”

  “Yes, how are—”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, I’m—”

  “How’re the kids?”

  “They’re great, they’re—”

  “How’s Hilary?”

  “She’s in Winnipeg—”

  “What’s she doing there?”

  “She’s directing The Importance of—”

  “You’re alone with the kids?”

  “Well, I’m not really alone—”

  “That’s a lot of work for you.”

  “Matthew’s at school all morning, it’s just Maggie and—”

  “You know you’re not twenty-five, dear.”

  “That’s right, Mum, I’m not resenting my children for wrecking my career, I don’t want to go out dancing every night, I’m healthier than I’ve ever—”

  “You’re a wonderful mother, doll, you both are—”

  “Except I’m old and decrepit—”

  “That’s not what I mean, Sadie, Thelma, Minnie, Maureen—”

  “Mary Rose.”

  “I know, dear, wait now, why did you call me?”

  “You called me, Mum.”

  “That’s right, now why was that?”

  “I don’t know, Mum.”

  Silence.

  “Dammit, I’ll have to call you back.”

  Her mother is the original multi-tasker. She probably has a pot on the stove, a Jehovah’s Witness at the door and a Bell telephone supervisor on hold at that very moment.

  “Okay, Mum, have a good—”

  Click. Her mother has hung up.

  Mary Rose is used to being called by a slew of names before her mother arrives at hers. Sometimes Dolly runs through all six of her own sisters’ names first, including big fat Aunt Sadie, now dead. It is not evidence of dementia, merely a vestige of having grown up somewhat chaotically as one of twelve, herself the child of a child—Mary Rose’s Lebanese grandmother was, despite having been born in Canada, a bride at twelve and a mother at thirteen. Mary Rose’s grandfather had
come from “the old country” and brought with him certain “old country” ways. Ibrahim Mahmoud—Abe—entered Canada just before immigration from “Oriental countries” was banned. Indeed, Dolly herself was classified as non-white back in Cape Breton. When, as a young woman in the 1940s, she was poised to enter nurse’s training, she overcame a daunting hurdle—according to Abe nurses were “tramps”—only to face another: the hospital in her home town of Sydney, Cape Breton, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, invoked the “colour bar” against her. She went nine miles down the road to New Waterford, where she was deemed white enough to be accepted into training. And met her future husband—it was Duncan’s hometown. Racism is why Mary Rose is here.

  Dolly’s fallback has always been to call everyone—everyone female—“doll.” It has occurred to Mary Rose that it is a term of endearment with the potential to double as an aide-mémoire should Dolly ever forget her own name. She returns the phone to its base and washes her hands again. While she has long since enumerated the ways in which she is unlike her mother, only lately has she been struck by the yawning gap between herself and her grandmother: the child bride whom she never met but who loomed large as legend. She grew up with the story: Your grandfather was twenty and your grandmother was twelve when they fell in love and eloped … It is one of several aspects of her family history that Mary Rose has begun to see afresh, as though awakening from an anaesthetic. Perhaps it is a function of having become a mother herself, this reassessment of the tropes and stock accounts of her own childhood: My grandmother was a child … Mary Rose’s mother, by contrast, married at a ripe old twenty-five but still likes to say, “Mumma was good at having babies.” The inference being that she herself was not.