Adult Onset Read online

  •

  December in Winnipeg, 1956.

  The sky is huge and grey. The regional bus groans, its exhaust thick with carbon—no one is worried yet, air and water and trees are still in the majority, especially in Canada—and it rocks a little, blindsided by wind at the corner of Portage and Main, before labouring toward the edge of town, leaving behind a modest skyline distinguished by grain elevators at one end and the hospital smokestack at the other. It rolls past a Salvation Army Mission, a tavern with a Ladies and Escorts entrance, past an arena, a cemetery. City outskirts have yet to become franchise strips, people still save money and pay cash for homes, income is not yet disposable, but the boom that will fuel the eventual bust is well under way; factories are humming, employment is high. It doesn’t take long before the big baby-faced bus is pushing between snow-streaked fields of stubble on its way north.

  The view from the window is such that the bus might be standing still, so unchanging is the prairie … unless you were born here, in which case it is richly textured and in flux, each field unique beneath the vast overarching sky. But the young woman in the kerchief, seated alone toward the back and staring out the window, is not from here. Like so many nowadays, she is far from home.

  She has opened the window a crack—a man who got on back at the arena has lit a cigarette. She has a Hudson’s Bay department store bag on her lap with her purse. She’s big as a house. Second pregnancies can be like that. Her husband is at work in his office on the base. Her three-year-old is with a lady from the Officers’ Wives Club, but she’ll be home in time to cook supper—she has taken a chicken from the freezer, it is thawing in the sink.

  The doctor said, “Go home and wait. Come back when the contractions start.”

  “When’ll that be?”

  “About two weeks. If they don’t start, come in anyway.”

  She is a nurse, she knows this.

  Before catching this bus back to the air force base at Gimli, she stopped off at the Hudson’s Bay department store—she doesn’t get downtown that often, and it’s right by the doctor’s office. There was a Christmas scene in the window: Santa on a train drinking a Coke. Inside, she bought gloves. They weren’t even on sale. The lady at the counter smiled and said, “Oh, when’re you due?”

  “The baby’s dead,” she said.

  And the saleslady started crying.

  “Don’t cry,” said the pregnant young woman. “I’m not crying, don’t you cry.”

  She consoled the saleslady, and bought the gloves to make her feel better.

  •

  Mary Rose is reaching for her scissors when the phone rings again. She looks longingly at the raw chicken on the counter; at the scissors in their knife block niche; at the illustrated step-by-step surgical guide to dismemberment in her Cooks Illustrated magazine, and picks up. “Hi, Mum.”

  “I mailed you a package!” cries Dolly, triumphant.

  She pronounces it packeege. Mary Rose has noticed her parents’ accent coming to the fore recently, although it has been more than fifty years since they left Cape Breton Island.

  “What’s in it?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  A volley of barking reaches Mary Rose from out front.

  “What am I hearing?”

  “It’s just the dog, Mum.”

  “You better go.”

  “It’s okay, the gate is closed.”

  Another volley. She glances down the hallway and catches sight of a movement through the glass door. “Mum, can you hang on a second?”

  “Hang on nuthin’, this is long distance! Call me back. Call collect!”

  She hurries toward the door with the phone to her ear in time to see the mailman vaulting backward over the low fence. “Daisy!”

  “Hi, Daisy!” hollers her mother all the way from Victoria, British Columbia, into her ear. “It’s Sitdy!” If it were Maggie, Mary Rose would tell her to use her indoor voice, but Dolly doesn’t have one.

  “I have to go, Mum.” She hangs up. “Daisy”—outdoor voice—“get in here!”

  Daisy comes, grinning, body slung low in shame. Mary Rose waves to the Canada Post guy, but he speeds off in his van. Uncharacteristically, and perhaps against regulations, he has dropped his delivery on the flagstone walk: a sizable package. The packeege! It has teeth marks in it—Daisy didn’t actually bite the mailman, did she? Closer inspection reveals it is not from her mother. L.L. Bean, reads the label. Sticking the phone in her back pocket, she picks up the box, rapturous—O sweet mystery of life at last I’ve found you!—and carries it to the porch where she intercepts Maggie who is making for the four-foot drop over the side. Mary Rose grabs her by the arm and Maggie screams. One hand on her child, the other balancing the box, she struggles with the screen door and sees from the corner of her eye that the lid of the rain barrel, which stands flush against the porch, is loose and missing its bolt—she flashes on an image of Maggie floating face down in the dark water. She tightens her grip and is rewarded with a kick—she will get out there this afternoon, while Maggie naps and Matthew builds a Brio train bridge, and fix the thing. And once she has given up trying to fix it with the one tool she is capable of wielding, namely duct tape, she will call someone in to fix it … what’s the name on the side of that van she keeps seeing in the neighbourhood? Rent-a-Husband? She will do all this right after she has called the chimney guy and got him to come at the same time as the furnace guy, filled out a “simple” form for Canada Revenue Agency, booked her mammogram and phoned her mother back. How does anyone manage to keep a child alive in this world of distractions?

  In the kitchen, she lets Maggie help open the parcel for as long as she can stand it, then takes the scissors from their niche in the knife block. She loves these scissors; she bought them from a shopping channel in her room at the Fort Garry Hotel out west in Calgary on her last book tour, the only scissors you’ll ever need! She kneels, slits open the box … and beholds within the ingenious foolproof Christmas tree stand she ordered. She lifts it from its foam core nest, taking a moment to admire the smooth green dome, its ergonomic clamps poised to bite into a freshly trimmed trunk. Unlike the disaster-prone stands of her childhood, it has a stable base, a patented easy-tilt mechanism and built-in water reservoir. She shakes off the pang of disloyalty that accompanies her pride in having surpassed her own father and an entire generation of family men who sweated and swore under their breath through so many festive seasons, and heads back down the hall with it. She slips through the baby gate, locks it behind her—more protests—and carries the stand lovingly all the way up to the attic, where she places it in an easily accessible spot, knowing that even though they’ll use it but once a year, she’ll thank herself every time she doesn’t have to fight her way through a ton of junk to haul it out, cursing, hot, hurt and exhausted. Mary Rose MacKinnon has a Christmas tree stand that works and is effortlessly accessible. She has that house. She has that attic. She has that life.

  She listens as the protests subside two floors below, confident there is nothing down there that can harm Maggie in the minutes she will be absent, having thoroughly childproofed their home.

  •

  The contractions are faint, it is taking too long, that can be dangerous, so they induce. They put the pit drip in her arm and rig a surgical curtain so she won’t see and she goes into labour.

  They make the delivery easier on her by compressing the infant’s skull—she is not a big woman, there is no need for her to tear. She is a nurse, she knows what they do. They had wanted to do it to her first baby, born breech way down east in Cape Breton; remove it limb by limb in order to save the mother, “That’s what we would do in my country,” said the West Indian nurse. But the young mother said, “Save the baby.” She requested a priest, who came and administered to her the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. But mother and daughter both survived. “Traumatic Parturition.” She saw it scribbled on her chart.

  This baby, however, has been dead for weeks. She
knew something was wrong from the start. When she first found out she was pregnant again so soon, she felt guilty for not being happier. She confessed to the priest, who told her it was normal to miss her own mother at a time like this but that God never sends us more than we can bear. He absolved her, but she was unable to shake the bad thoughts: If only God had waited till I was less tired. If only Mumma weren’t so far away. If only I weren’t pregnant …

  When she told the doctor she thought something was wrong, he said, “Don’t be silly,” but since she had come all the way into Winnipeg, he might as well examine her. He laid the cold metal disc on her belly and listened. He moved the disc. He moved it again. He listened, but could not find a heartbeat. He threw down his stethoscope and walked out without a word. She got off the table, collected her mouton coat and told the receptionist, “I think he’s really disgusted with me.”

  Now she wonders, did she have bad thoughts because the baby was dead? Or was it the other way around?

  Behind the curtain, no one speaks above a whisper. They have given her a sedative, but she is awake and able to push. It is big, the way blue babies often are. It does not take long. She feels a tugging. Then it is gone, and she is empty.

  A rustling sound … sound of fabric, the nurse is wrapping it up. Soft-soled footsteps retreat. They take it away.

  •

  Upon descending the stairs, Mary Rose meets with a remarkable sight: in the living room, Maggie, her back to the doorway, is sitting still, engaged in some kind of fine-motor activity obscured from view. She must be in the midst of a developmental surge. Nearby, Daisy is innocently nibbling her paw and avoiding Mary Rose’s gaze—she is a dear old thing, if a little impulsive and, like the best dogs, endlessly shame-absorbent. Pit bulls are banned in Ontario, but Daisy is “grandfathered”: having been born before the law came in, she is permitted to live but may be summarily executed if deemed a danger. As it is, she must be muzzled in public, a law Mary Rose feels befits more the authors of the legislation than the dogs themselves.

  Daisy was her name when they got her from the Toronto Humane Society—they were going to change it to Lola, but one look at her eight tired teats told them she’d been through enough. She is a tawny, brawny American Staffordshire terrier of indeterminate elderliness who snores louder than Mary Rose’s late Aunt Sadie and lives in terror of having her nails clipped. Her skull is the shape of a World War II German army helmet. Her anal glands need to be expressed every few months by the vet, an effect of her having borne so many puppies. She dozes on her belly in the midst of screeching birthday parties, legs splayed like a pressed quail. She looks like Mickey Rooney when she smiles. If the vet doesn’t express her anal glands, she drags her butt across the carpet till they express themselves.

  She watches now as Daisy rolls onto her side and stretches out behind Maggie, providing her with a backrest. Lovely—as long as Maggie doesn’t fall asleep, for there will go the morning nap. Hilary is all for letting go of said nap, arguing that Maggie will sleep better at night. Mary Rose thought, but did not say, “You mean you’ll sleep better. What about me with a cranky toddler all day?”

  Like every other room in the house, the living room is a hazard-free zone—unless one counts Maggie as a hazard. Just last week, Mary Rose fitted the coffee table with a shock-absorbent expandable table-edge bumper (which Hil is sure to remove when she returns) while on the table are harmless objects—books mostly, plus a neat stack of the New York Review of Books that Mary Rose is saving for when she has time or bronchitis, which amounts to the same thing. She will savour them through a haze of antibiotics once Hil is home and she can afford to get sick. On the carpet is a vectoring network of Brio train tracks where Thomas and his variously smiling and scowling friends are coupled up waiting for Matthew’s return—he will know if one is out of place. But Maggie shows no sign of robbing the trains or blowing up the tracks—all quiet on the western front. Mary Rose takes the chance and steals back to the kitchen.

  She is collapsing the Christmas tree stand box for the recycling when she spots her car key amid the packing materials—Maggie! She salvages the key and jams it into the pocket of her jeans. Talk about a close call … She folds the box and goes to open the deep drawer that houses her recycling bin, only to be momentarily stymied by the child safety lock, which she fumbles free, but not before pinching her finger on its quick-release. Washing her hands once more, she returns to the chicken, pallid and limp on the counter next to the recipe stand. Could we take the frustration out of deboning?

  Mary Rose has mastered her squeamishness with most aspects of cooking, but one remains: when handling a raw chicken, she never holds it by the wing. There is something about the sight of the skin straining between wing and body … It looks like it hurts. She recalls, as a child, watching her mother prepare a chicken for the oven, slinging it by the wing from sink to counter with a thud. More of a splud, really. It didn’t matter that the chicken was dead and couldn’t feel it. She could feel it.

  Still, as phobias go, it is a distant third behind the dire duo: vertigo and claustrophobia—which are really two faces of the same thing. Mary Rose is on intimate terms with both, having been ambushed by the latter in her twenties while climbing the narrow tower of Münster Cathedral behind her sister, Maureen; and by the former upon walking out onto its gargoyle-encrusted spire three hundred feet above the Black Forest. Mo read her mind and held her gaze. “It’s all right, Rosie. Walk to me.” Until then she had had no fear of heights. Indeed, one of her earliest memories is of hanging placidly by the wrists from a third floor balcony. In the same country, come to think of it. And with the same person.

  •

  “We lost the baby,” the mother tells her three-year-old.

  “Where?” asks the child.

  The father explains, “The baby died.”

  “Because you lost it?”

  “No, it just happens sometimes.” He didn’t see it either. It was taken away.

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s with God,” she says.

  “Where?”

  The mother doesn’t answer.

  “She’s in Heaven,” says the father.

  “Can I pray to her?”

  “Sure,” says the father.

  “Can she give me candy?”

  “Don’t be silly, Maureen,” says the mother.

  The mother knows that the baby is not in Heaven, it is in Limbo, “the other place,” reserved for those who have not received the Sacrament of Baptism and whose souls therefore retain the taint of Original Sin, rendering them unworthy of the Beatific Vision. They do not suffer, but nor do they see God.

  “But where is she? Where is she?”

  Nowhere.

  “Is she in a grave?”

  No grave.

  “Is she going to live in Winnipeg?”

  “Hush now, Maureen,” says the father.

  “What’s her name?”

  Technically, the baby had no name, not having been baptized.

  The mother answers, “We were going to …” But she is unable to say it.

  The father says, “We were going to call her Mary Rose.”

  •

  Eyes on her recipe, she is reaching for her scissors when she hears someone’s car alarm go off somewhere outside. Hand arrested mid-air, she glances up, wishing once again that she lived in a simpler time before everything beeped—say the fifties, minus polio, homophobia and wringer washers. She hooks a thumb in her jeans pocket, waiting for the sound to cease once the hapless motorist finds the right button—everyone knows car alarms are never set off by actual thieves—and it does, abruptly. She returns to Cooks Illustrated with its drawing of a chicken breast effortlessly yielding up its bone—only to hear the alarm start up again—is she not to be vouchsafed a single cotton-pickin’ unmolested moment to unwind with a recipe? She glares out her big kitchen windows, but none of the cars parked on the street is flashing. She leans forward against the counter for a better l
ook, but the wretched sound stops again. Returning her gaze to the magazine, she reaches for the knife block only to paw empty air. She looks up. The niche is empty. She looks around. Her scissors are gone. How is it possible? The best scissors she has ever owned. The Shopping Channel scissors. The Sloan Kettering surgical-grade never-dull kitchen scissors, capable of felling a sapling, subtly curved for ease of deboning; scissors so good she could be buried with them one day, their blades still lethal with shine. Where do things go? Who takes things? Did Hilary put them in the utility drawer? Mary Rose has, on more than one occasion and as reasonably as possible, implored Hilary to place the scissors in the special niche in the knife block—she is aware that this might not seem like a priority to someone who goes to a rehearsal room every day in fresh clothes, often in a different city, and has yet to be home for a bout of preschool head lice, but it matters to Mary Rose. She is the one who cooks and shops and takes seriously the steep domestic learning curve that is homemaking. Indeed, in military parlance, Mary Rose is at the domestic sharp end. How can Hilary call herself a feminist, much less a lesbian, if she can’t even respect Mary Rose enough to put the scissors back in the right spot? But then, of course, Hilary doesn’t actually call herself a lesbian, she refuses to “call” herself anything, which is so typical of bisexuals!