Adult Onset Read online

  The rage zooms up from Mary Rose’s gut and she’s off. She grabs the phone from its base—impossible to “tear” a phone from its receiver anymore, where is a mad housewife to turn for an inanimate answer to her rage?—and is scrolling down the list of calls, on the point of speed-dialing Hilary’s BlackBerry—she’ll be in a meeting, but why should that take priority over Mary Rose’s ability to cut up a chicken for the freezer against her homecoming next week?—when it rings in her hand. She crashes it back onto its base just as the car alarm starts up again. She would storm out in her apron in search of the bleeping car but that she mustn’t leave her child unattended—like luggage containing a bomb. She pauses. Amid the beeps and br-r-rings, the only sound is that of Daisy snoring in the living room. Maggie must be asleep—would it do any harm if she nipped out? It isn’t as though she is deserting her family—she remembers her own mother threatening on a regular basis, “One day I’ll go out the door and never come back!” By the time she was fourteen, Mary Rose had taken to muttering, “Go ahead”—but well out of earshot.

  Meep! Meep! Meep! goes the car, like the Road Runner on steroids.

  She tiptoes down the hall and peeks into the living room. Daisy is flaked out on her side, eyelids twitching, her belly with its ramshackle teats heaving. Maggie is still sitting with her back to the doorway playing peacefully on her own. It takes Mary Rose a moment to process what she sees: Maggie surrounded by shreds, strips, all manner of shapes of newspaper—not torn, cleanly cut. She distinguishes another sound beneath the cadence of Daisy’s snores and the jabbing of the car alarm: rhusk-rhusk …

  “Maggie?” She speaks quietly.

  Maggie turns, deep contentment in her eyes.

  “Give Mumma the scissors, sweetheart.”

  Intelligence and forbearance are in Maggie’s smile. She says, kindly, “No, Mumma,” and resumes cutting out a column on post-imperial India.

  Mary Rose returns to the kitchen, takes the phone and dials her mother … “Hi, Mum?”

  “Was it the packeege?!”

  “No.” She walks calmly back to the living room—no sudden moves—“I’m going to put you on speaker, Mum, Maggie wants to talk to you—”

  “Hi, Maggie, it’s Sitdy!”

  “Sitdy!” cries Maggie, and drops the scissors.

  Mary Rose gives her child the phone and picks up the scissors.

  “How are ya, fuhss?!” shouts Dolly.

  Maggie shakes the phone with both hands as though to throttle it with elation.

  Mary Rose is shaking. What fresh hell was set to open, and how had she stumbled to its lip? How did Maggie manage to get the scissors from where they were safely wedged like a sword in stone, out of reach in the knife block? She has yet to register the balm of silence in the wake of the car alarm that has randomly ceased when the doorbell rings and Daisy goes crazy. Mary Rose hesitates—she is not expecting anyone. What if it is the mailman returning with Animal Control? Did Daisy actually bite him? We have an order to seize and destroy your dog. Feeling suddenly sick to her stomach, she peers through the eyehole. It is Rochelle from three doors up. Mary Rose opens the door.

  There is nothing definably wrong with Rochelle. But she is the kid in grade six with whom you dread to be partnered on square-dancing day.

  “Do you know your car alarm’s been going off all morning?” Voice like a sack of cement.

  Mary Rose is about to reply but experiences a linguistic derailment—this used to happen to her in elementary school, then years later at the odd book signing when she’d get overloaded. Since Maggie came along, she frequently loses nouns, occasionally verbs and whole sentences, leaving her scrabbling for purchase in a scree of prepositions.

  Rochelle, perhaps misinterpreting Mary Rose’s fleeting aphasia, glances at the scissors in her hand and adds with uncharacteristic geniality, “Just thought you might like to know.” Her mouth stretches in a rictus of goodwill and she backs away from the door. Horse teeth.

  “Thanks,” says Mary Rose and, absently raising the scissors in a wan salute, realizes that, though she has always thought of Rochelle as “an old bat,” the woman is probably younger than she is. She closes the door, feels in her pocket for her car key—Meep! Meep!—and finds the button. Silence. She sets the key on the front hall table out of range of her apparently hair-trigger hip-bone, and slips into the powder room.

  She releases the new child safety lock on the toilet lid—she does not have to wonder what Hil would say, but she thinks it makes sense: Maggie could actually fall into the toilet and drown. It has happened. Somewhere. Mary Rose sits and has one of those pees of improbable duration. Through the half-open door she hears Maggie screaming with laughter and her mother’s voice singing nonsense songs. She rubs her arm, the left one, it’s bugging her again. She does not recall having bumped it, but it doesn’t take much. Boxers are sometimes referred to as having a “glass jaw.” Mary Rose has a glass arm. Graze of a car door, corner of a bookshelf, a playful squeeze—these can kick off a deep, radiating pain with never a bruise to show for it. She may have bumped it unawares in her furious search for the scissors, or perhaps Maggie kicked her there.

  “… Hut-Sut Rawl-son on the rillerah and a brawla, brawla sooit …!”

  She bares her teeth in the mirror. Still good. Not unnaturally white in the bleach-crazed way that makes anyone over thirty-five look like a corpse by comparison with their teeth. But not yellowed like the soles of someone’s feet in that poem. Mary Rose has naturally beautiful dentition but weak enamel. She sometimes wonders if her tendency to cavities is related to the old problem she had with her arm as a child—“Benign Pediatric Bone Cysts” put her in hospital more than once. It was unclear whether she had inherited them from her father or mother but, being an adoptive parent, Mary Rose is in no danger of passing them on to her own children. She opens her mouth and peers at the expensive new crowns toward the back.

  There was a period after her second book came out when she ground her teeth in her sleep to the point where the enamel cracked and the nerves got upset, so the dentist killed them. Dark thrashing snakes of pain, he speared them, then immured them in orthodontic burial vaults that will outlast her skeleton and drop, one day, clink, to the floor of her casket. Or be raked from her ashes if she opts for cremation. She has a high pain threshold thanks to her adventures with her humerus—the long bone of the upper arm—long since surgically corrected. Even so, tooth pain occupies an exquisite category all its own. Mahler versus Beethoven. Mary Rose is something of a pain connoisseur—maybe even a pain snob. But it is a fact that a certain amount of it has a calming effect on her. She is at home with it.

  She stopped tooth grinding thanks to a session of hypnosis in a nondescript office building in an otherwise swanky part of town called Yorkville. It was being renovated at the time and pneumatic drills were going in the hallway while she was “under.” She remains uncertain whether she was ever really under, but at the time asked friends to tell her if she displayed tics such as clucking like a chicken at the snap of someone’s fingers, just in case. Somehow it did the trick and she was able to throw away her chewed-up night guard. Now there is just her knee and the uterine fibroids—the recent arm pain doesn’t count, being not only fickle but phantom.

  She runs her fingers through her short dark hair—sprinkled with grey, but less so than many people a decade younger. She is an “older mother,” one of a growing demographic who, in a previous era, would have been grandmothers by now. But she feels she brings certain advantages to the table: financial stability, patience—even if the latter is tried these days by Maggie in ways it never was by Matthew.

  “One-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot cross buns!”

  From her mother Mary Rose inherited, along with “the pipes,” youthful skin, thanks to a Mediterranean heritage and an olive oily diet. Skin, hair, teeth: the great indicators. It is often a ball of these tissues that turns up lodged in the body of a perfectly healthy adult who is unaware, until the surgical r
emoval of the benign lump, that they would have been a twin … and that by incubating the stunted tissues of their sibling, they have been in fact a living grave.

  She has always taken an interest in the fringes of science—the kind of fascination that leads to great discoveries, crackpot conspiracy theories, and novels. In JonKitty McCrae: Journey to Otherwhere, eleven-year-old Kitty has one blue eye and one brown. She also has begun to have “spells.” They transport her to another world, where she discovers the truth behind her eyes …

  “Psychosenzoic Epilepsy Spectrum Seizure.” Such is the diagnosis according to a neuropsychologist who e-mailed her after the book came out to tell her that Kitty shows signs of “seizure due to kindling”; that the child’s ability to trigger a “trance state” is in fact “a manifestation of trauma.” Gimme a break, she thought. So is the ability to fly with the aid of an umbrella, or step through a looking glass.

  It has made her a living, this morbid fascination, but she is at a loss to explain it fully, and in answer to the most oft-asked question at literary readings, “Where do you get your ideas?” has taken to answering, “The dead people.” It always produces a laugh, but it feels true even if she has never yet, at forty-eight, really lost anyone—certainly not a close family member.

  She met neither of her grandmothers, both of whom died shy of sixty. She met her paternal grandfather once, at the veterans’ hospital in Halifax. He’d had a stroke and could not speak, but he laughed. Her maternal grandfather lived longest, and she recalls being perplexed by his Arabic accent but not unduly perturbed since he seldom spoke to her, she being the extra daughter of an extra daughter. He did once address a full sentence to her sister, Maureen: “Close your legs.”

  What’s more, she grew up on air force bases or in suburbs, both full of young families who reflected the sunny immortality of their early prime-time television counterparts. There were no really wrinkly people around, unless you count Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies. Her parents are the first old people she has ever known. And they still don’t think of themselves as “old.”

  She never wanted to be a biological mother. Not only had she zero desire to experience the miracle of childbirth, she figured she’d have a better chance of not screwing up her children if her id couldn’t claim them as flesh and blood. Hil had tried to get pregnant via sperm donated and banked by a friend—they opted not to go anonymous, intending that their child should know as much about its own story as possible. In the meantime, they registered with adoption agencies—most of the world was closed to them, but there were several Canadian provinces and a few American states where they were welcome. Still, the fact remained that, as a two-mom team, they would be at the bottom of the barrel in the eyes of most birth mothers. So, having set in motion the slow wheels of adoption, Hil diligently tracked her temperature and every time it spiked, Mary Rose accompanied her on the pre-dawn trek to the fertility clinic where, with a devotion befitting a station of the cross, they sat in the silent waiting room with the other grey-faced women over thirty-five who’d come for their intrauterine shot of washed sperm. They were put out of their monthly pee-stick misery when they got the call: a pregnant woman in Oregon had chosen them from a stack of Dear Birth Mother letters.

  Anna worked as a rigger for the Cirque du Soleil and travelled the world. She hailed from West Virginia but had “knocked about some.” They liked her right away. The three of them spent several weeks together before the birth, exploring the northwest coast. All Anna could or would say about Matthew’s father was that he was Russian. Mary Rose had been aquiver with speculation: Was he an acrobat? A lost Romanov? A member of the Russian mafia? But as soon as she saw Matthew, the only thing that mattered was that he was healthy. They were present for his birth. Anna signed the papers. She pressed cabbage leaves to her breasts to staunch the leaking milk. And went away. She never held him.

  They wrote to her, sent her pictures, a plane ticket. Then they lost track of her—that is, she dropped out of sight. They had been warned this was likely. Less than two years later, the sperm bank called: they were going out of business, did Hil and Mary Rose want “the material”? It was the last roll of the dice for a sibling. They got lucky. Hil got pregnant and they got Maggie.

  Their donor, Ian, is that modern invention, “Uncle Dad.” He remembers both kids’ birthdays and drops by at Christmas. Hil went to school with him. He is a math teacher in Kitchener–Waterloo who plays guitar. It doesn’t get better than that. They had toyed with asking Mary Rose’s brother, but for one thing it would have killed her parents. And she had killed them once already.

  Another reason Mary Rose is uncomfortable with her name is that it isn’t really hers. There was supposed to have been another sister between Maureen and her: a girl, born in Winnipeg. “Other Mary Rose.” Beatific. Blank. She was stillborn and, according to the Catholic Church, her soul went directly from Winnipeg to Limbo—a vast space, itself not unlike a prairie. Mary Rose has always pictured her the size and serenity of a Gerber baby, with closed eyes. Go directly to Limbo, do not pass Go, do not collect the Sacrament of Baptism.

  •

  “You’re young,” the doctor says. “You’ll have another baby.”

  “Maybe even a boy,” she thinks. Inshallah.

  When her husband is posted again, they leave the prairie behind, along with the hospital and its smokestack visible for miles. They move east this time, east even of Cape Breton. All the way to Germany.

  And she does have another baby. In the fall. Another girl. They call it Mary Rose—after the first one.

  Nothing is wrong. The baby is fine but Dolly is very tired. They keep her in the hospital on the base. Move her to a quieter floor.

  “Baby blues,” they say. But Dolly knows, any woman lucky enough to have a healthy baby has no right to be blue. Mary Rose—the second Mary Rose—goes home without her. They say it is better that way.

  “You’ll be good as new in no time,” says her husband, and she smiles so he will believe he has reassured her.

  No time is where she is. This hospital could be anywhere. She could be anyone. Or no one. She lies still, while time goes on around her.

  •

  The MacKinnons were on their second posting when Mary Rose was born in what was then West Germany. They lived on a NATO air base called 4-Wing, at the edge of the Black Forest, land of big bad wolves and cobblestones; of fairy-tale scenes painted on village walls, and the smell of woodsmoke and cows. Each morning the “honey wagons” clip-clopped past; in the village, women in kerchiefs pulled braided bread fresh from the ovens and were free with schokolade für die Kinder. Roses grew wild and the Rhine flowed fat and peaceful. In Munich there were gaps between buildings—interior walls exposed, tattooed with absence: the outline of a picture frame, a bed-head, a crucifix. Sunlight shattered the dome of the Frauenkirche, in Cologne a street sign, Jüdengasse … “Don’t dwell on it,” said Duncan. “Think nice thoughts,” said Dolly.

  They drove the length and breadth of free Europe with their children, their tent, and their big Canadian sense of adventure. They were seeing the world, thanks to a world war. And they were helping to heal that world just by enjoying it, visiting castles and fountains, the Vatican and the Riviera, canals from Venice to Amsterdam. They picnicked in the Alps—Dolly panicked at the hairpin turns and Duncan laughed until the sun glinted off his gold tooth. At a lookout on a winding mountain road, they emerged from the VW Beetle to stretch their legs and survey the invisible border with “the East,” while he explained to the children: The picturesque farmhouses on the other side of the valley with their thatched roofs looked the same as the ones on this side. But it was a grim mirror, a ghastly parallel world: it was Communist. A hiss in the very word.

  Mary Rose knows she cannot possibly remember all this; still the scenes are vivid in her mind, part of the family lore she imbibed from her sister and from her parents’ reminiscences over the years. Like Maureen’s childhood version of Mary Rose’s arrival
home from the hospital: “I was so worried you were going to be born dead like Other Mary Rose, and Mummy didn’t come home for ages because she was so tired from having you. Daddy told me you were beautiful and I pictured a princess with long blond hair. You had curly black hair like Groucho Marx and your face was red as a tomato when you cried.”

  “No wonder you hung me over the balcony.”

  “Mary Rose! I have no memory of that!”

  Which has always been tantamount, according to Mary Rose, to an admission of guilt. She has yet to tire of the reliable rise it gets out of her otherwise unflappable sister.

  •

  By day the sky is ripped with jets and split with sirens rehearsing for a hot war that never comes. But at sunset, the air is full of birdsong. He wraps the baby in a blanket and takes her onto the balcony of the apartment. The sun is a hot, huge stain, red-streaked yellow, powerful, peaceful and slow. They are on a level with the treetops. Close to the building, a row of lindens is changing colour, but beyond the uniform lawns stands the Black Forest, dense with evergreens.

  “You hear that?” he whispers. “That’s the cuckoo bird.”

  •

  Mary Rose remembers her first home in the white stucco apartment building that sparkled in the sunlight. She can see now the living room with its gleaming coffee table, and the glass door that opened onto the balcony and the beckoning blue yonder—like going from a black-and-white photo into “living colour.” The balcony was a magical place, both daring and safe. They lived on the third floor but it seems in memory a majestic height. In warm weather she played out there with Maureen, who would set up two buckets of water so Mary Rose could swim from the Atlantic to the Specific—or perhaps she only thinks she remembers because Maureen regularly told her about it—more “lore.” Just as she thinks she remembers being held by her father at sunset, encircled by his warmth, looking onto the vastness of the trees and sky. The balcony was where her father first gave her the world.