SSC (2012) Adult Onset (13 page)

S
he has just returned with Maggie from a harrowing parents-and-tots swim class in the tepid pool at the community centre. The pallid dads and moms all bobbed about, clutching their eighteen-to-twenty-four-month-olds in controlled chaos under the eye of a teenaged instructor wearing nose plugs. Those parents with a hint of colour in their heritage looked especially unhealthy, any pigment-imparted gloss dulled by chlourescence—the Libyan dad got the worst of it. They all sang “Wheels on the Bus” and swam the gauntlet of “London Bridge,” chest hair streaming, arm flab jiggling and, in Mary Rose’s case, middle-aged sinews straining, while the tiny future-adults screamed or rejoiced according to their allotment of nature-nurture. Finally, the red plastic slide was produced that really separated the stamp collectors from the venture capitalists. Maggie
dutifully waited her turn then clambered up the two steps—itself a risk-barnacled undertaking for any toddler—as Mary Rose slipped back into the water, poised to catch her. “Okay, Maggie!” And instead of going down on her bottom, Maggie dove straight at Mary Rose’s head. They went to the bottom butt-first, Mary Rose hanging on to Maggie and scrabbling for purchase on the slippery tiles. They finally shot to the surface with a sputtering laugh from Maggie, a heart-barfing gasp from Mary Rose and the stunned looks of the other parents.

“Maggie, you must go down on your bum next time.”

“Okay.”

She climbed the slide and did it again.

It is now 9:30 a.m. on that most innocuous of weekdays, Tuesday, and Mary Rose is safe in her kitchen. Her skin smells like chlorine and she has a bad case of hat-hair, but she is basking in
gemütlichkeit
—that untranslatable but universally recognized sense of well-being. The one that arises when you’ve cleared your inbox or survived a plane crash. Maggie is on the floor rearranging the Tupperware cupboard—it isn’t really Tupperware and Mary Rose will have to replace it all with BPA-free stuff anyhow. Perhaps she oughtn’t to allow Maggie to play with it, but she isn’t putting it in her mouth, so … Daisy appears and goes to her bowl where she hoovers a late breakfast with a series of grunts—the pooch is keeping dowager hours these days.

Mary Rose leans against her soapstone counter in front of her big kitchen windows and reads the
Toronto Star
—in the food section is an article about an ordinary woman who makes her own ricotta … and runs a corporation. Tuesday is Candace’s morning, she’ll be here soon—Mary Rose ought to get down on the floor and play with Maggie before she arrives. She closes the newspaper and in glancing up her eye is caught by a woman standing on the corner. She has a toddler by the hand and a baby in a stroller weighed down with grocery bags. She is trying to cross the street, but her toddler refuses.
He sits. He cries. The mother waits—she is doing the right thing. The hard thing. Mary Rose has been there.

Recently she read in the paper about a woman who killed herself and her husband, and tried to kill their three young children. This happened a ten-minute walk away, on Harmony Street. The article mentioned a dog “found wandering at the scene.”

She looks at Daisy, out cold now in front of the sliding door to the deck, legs twitching—chasing a dream squirrel.

The article quoted a neighbour saying she saw the woman, “a nice, quiet young woman, they were a nice couple,” walking down the street from the Loblaws store, pushing her baby in the stroller, laden with grocery bags, her toddler and six-year-old in tow. “She had a blank look on her face.” Mary Rose recalls something her friend Andrea said—Andrea is a midwife, the one who “caught” Maggie. In the flush of that first hour when bliss had kicked in full force and they were still hugging and weeping and laughing, Andrea turned to Hilary. “I’m going to say to you what I say to every mother post-partum: three months from now when you want to throw that baby out the window, call me.”

What if someone had come up to the nice young woman from Harmony Street and said, “Can I help you with those bags?” Or was she already too far gone?

The children survived. The dog probably had something to do with that.

The mother tried to cut their throats.

It occurs to Mary Rose to go out there and help that woman; maybe she isn’t patient, maybe she is depressed. Maybe she is going to go home and murder those children, and it will be Mary Rose’s fault—she hears a rattling behind her. Maggie is shaking something in a plastic container … a penny! Hil was sorting pocket change before she left and dropped some on the kitchen floor. She swore she had picked it all up and now Maggie has it in her hand, halfway to her mouth, poised to choke on it.

“Here, luvvie, give the penny to Mumma.”

“No.” She closes her fist over it. “Mine.”

Mary Rose pries open the little hand and Maggie bops her in the face with the container.

Mary Rose rips the container from Maggie’s hand and hurls it down the hall, regretting the action even before the thing bounces harmlessly off the front door. The child screams as though she has just witnessed the evisceration of a pet rabbit.

“It’s okay, sweetheart, Mumma didn’t break it.”

She retrieves the container and returns it to Maggie, who promptly hurls it back down the hall. So much for the teachable moment. Hil is a worse mother for leaving pennies on the floor. Mary Rose lies down suddenly, pretending to be asleep, and lets Maggie wake her up over and over again. Soon the big brown eyes are wet with laughter and Mary Rose catches the child as she flings herself repeatedly at Mumma—the closest thing to a hug Maggie will consent to from her.

The back door opens, Daisy
mwuffs
and Candace walks up the four steps to the kitchen, already pushing up the sleeves of her skintight, long-sleeved T and exuding the air of cheerful authority that owes less perhaps to her training as a professional nanny than to her years as a Manchester barmaid. Daisy’s back-end fishtails in greeting, Maggie deserts her and runs to hug “Candies!” She watches as Maggie buries herself in Candace’s ample embrace and reflects that if she spent only hours a week with her child, perhaps Maggie would love her too—then catches herself; after all, she
wants
Maggie to love Candace. Mary Rose is just jealous—though whether of Candace or of Maggie, it is hard to say.

Candace addresses her charge in forthright full sentences. “Hello, Maggie, how are you today?”

Maggie responds in kind. “I fine, Candies, I will go to the park with you.”

Mary Rose follows suit. “Maggie, what would you like to do at the park?”

“No.”

Mary Rose laughs in order to show Candace how easygoing she is, then takes charge. “By the way, Candace, we’re going to try phasing out Maggie’s morning nap.”

“Oh, I thought we’d already done with that, I’ve been keeping her up my mornings, sorry, did you want me to put her down now?”

“No, no, yeah, we’ve done with it, I just didn’t know if I’d mentioned it. Great, thanks.”

Maggie sobs hysterically when her mother goes out the door. Mary Rose tells herself it is a sign of healthy attachment.

Behind her, she hears Candace say, “Here now, Maggie Muggins, what’s got your knickers in a twist?”

•

•

Twelve minutes later, Mary Rose is locking her bike out front of Mount Sinai Hospital downtown on University Avenue, a six-laned wind tunnel lined with medical centres and insurance towers, when her brother phones and says, “I need you to come look at my butt.” He is at the Roots store in the Eaton Centre a couple of blocks away on Yonge Street.

“I’d love to, but I’m about to get a sonohystogram.” He doesn’t ask what that is.

By 10:45 a.m. she is on the table in the examination room, feet in the stirrups. The gynecologist, Dr. Goldfinger—he can’t help it, he was born with the name—removes the “wand” and hands it to the nurse. It has a camera at the tip and is wearing a condom. Mary Rose was assured she would be getting a female gynecologist but has wound up not caring because Dr. Goldfinger is over sixty and very good at his job. And it isn’t as if female Dr. Irons—another birth defect—had the lightest touch with the speculum when she diagnosed the “benign fibroids” that have been shredding the lining of Mary Rose’s uterus.

She was given a choice: tough it out till after menopause, when the estrogen-guzzling fibroids will waste away on their own; or have a new procedure wherein the surgeon will cut off the blood supply to her uterus, thereby inducing an infarction, then implant her with a morphine pump for a few days—in other words, her uterus will have a heart attack and die and it will hurt like hell. Or she can have a hysterectomy. Her mother had a hysterectomy back when they lived in Kingston. It was after her second miscarriage—third?—and the doctor pretty much ordered it, but Dolly asked the priest for permission first. Afterwards, she started taking what she called her “nice mother pills.” Sometimes she would forget.

Mary Rose’s uterus is one organ she has always preferred to forget she has, and this she managed pretty well, its monthly Calvarys notwithstanding, but she cannot bring herself to mount an all-out assault on it. “A poor thing, Sir, but mine own.” Her journey through the gynecological-industrial complex has taught her that the “perimenopausal” uterus is seen the way the appendix used to be: as a disease magnet that ought to be removed at the first peep. But who really knows? While it is too late for her tonsils, Mary Rose does still have her appendix, that vestigial organ of digestion, and thus is among those who stand to survive should the species be reduced to eating bark for survival post–climate change. It is like the section found at the end of some books:
Appendix
. Stuff which isn’t necessary now but
might be vital later. It is difficult, however, to imagine the other organ doubling as a literary term:
Uterus
.

Mo said, “They’ll try to tell you it’s useless, but it isn’t. It’s doing something, hang on to it.” So she toughed it out until six months ago when she overheard a conversation through the fug of the change room at the pool: “Try soy milk, it’s loaded with phytoestrogens and it’s better than taking pregnant horse piss, which is what Premarin is.” It took a moment for the meaning to congeal, but when it did, she froze. In an attempt to be virtuously vegetarian, Mary Rose had, for the previous year, been replacing everything with soy. Soy milk, soy burgers, soy bacon—there is nothing that cannot be textured into soy, the great shape-shifter. Like syphilis, it disguises itself, the Zelig of the food world. She had always suspected there was something spooky about soy. Now she realized she had been feeding the fibroids all along. She went straight home from the pool and flushed her entire soy stash like a drug dealer a step ahead of the cops.

She turns her head to watch Dr. Goldfinger as he peers at the pulsating field of grey on his computer screen that is a window unto her womb. She strains to spot them amid the murk—they are only fibroids, but are they getting better or worse? A nurse swishes in, whisks the condom off the camera and swishes out again. It is probably safe to take her feet from the stirrups now—bare steel, unlike the ones in her family physician’s office, thoughtfully covered with oven mitts. She searches Dr. Goldfinger’s face for a sign of the verdict. In a previous era he would be wearing a waistcoat and cravat and treating her for “hysterical pregnancy”—it’s what got Charlotte Brontë. A second nurse swishes in for no apparent reason, and swishes back out. Mary Rose knows how lucky she is: not only does she not live next to a graveyard in Yorkshire, she has merely had to endure month-long periods with their attendant child-birth-calibre contractions, referred to as “cramps” by the uninitiated, along with “heavy days” wherein she has been delivered of miscarriage-sized clots of uterine tissue. They dropped from her body into the toilet with the
plop
of a
hearty soup—evidence of a transitioning female reproductive system that will not go down without a gorey fight. It all flies in the face of the lithe androgyny she has cultivated her entire life.

She didn’t tell Hil what her doctor’s appointment was about, no need to get all menopausy with your girlfriend. Partner. Wife. Whatever. Why isn’t there a better word? Apart from the flagrant
lover
, sexless
partner
, and dowdy
spouse …
She dislikes most of the words associated with femaleness. She can barely say the word
period
unless referring to a BBC miniseries. They are icky words, embarrassing to say. Or else inadequate:
Vagina
—as if that told the whole story.
Lesbian
: lizardy.
Menopause
: a bilious woman sitting next to you on the bus to Brockville. Oddly,
uterus
is okay, resembling, as it does, an order of nuns.

“They’re shrinking,” says Dr. Goldfinger. He smiles briefly, and leaves the room.

Yes!
She could fist-pump for joy, but that would be too American.

Nurse number one swishes in again and passes her a massive sterile wipe for the lubricant, and as she is mopping up, the second nurse returns and the two of them, smiling shyly, produce copies of
JonKitty McRae: Journey to Otherwhere
and
JonKitty McRae: Escape from Otherwhere
along with a pen.

She writes: