SSC (2012) Adult Onset (22 page)

She tries to imagine pouring her heart out about a dead baby to a strange woman, only to forget all about it. Perhaps she has done so and can’t remember. That’s what forgetting is … She stops, momentarily caught in an Escher print of her own psyche, pondering, not for the first time, the degree to which a set of agreed-upon facts, combined with functional memory, determines reality. What is it that holds her, meshed, in this moment? Why is she not falling through time in a vertigo of identity displacement? Does Anya know she is missing a piece? Has her psyche grafted a patch of donor memory over the blank spot? Or did she rip the memory out herself and suture the flaps together? Does she have a scar? Yes, but she would be at a loss to explain it. That’s what “invisible scars” are.

“Mumma,” says Maggie pleasantly. “Peace?”

“Sure,” she says, and lets Maggie choose the pasta.

“Sank you, Mumma.”

Whatever Mary Rose might share incontinently with a stranger, it would not involve a dead baby—that’s her mother’s shtick. While it may seem heartless to refer to it, even inwardly, as “shtick,” it does capture the odd Borscht Belt timing and tone with which her mother has taken to repeating the tales. Like so much trauma chatter.

She hunts for her reading glasses while scrutinizing the ingredients list on a can of tomato soup. The contents are organic, but the lining of the can contains toxins. The soup in the glass bottle, however, is not organic … She jumps when she hears her name bleated, as though speared by a gull. She turns. A beaming younger—of course—woman
is towering over her, in her cart a baby, at her feet a toddler who has already begun emptying the lower shelves. She speaks in an English accent. “Maggie looks more like you all the time, Mary Rose!” She makes it sound like
Mewwy Wose
. “Don’t you, Miss Maggie!” The woman has large square teeth. Who is she?

She launches into an account of her upcoming move, as though continuing an earlier conversation: her husband has been transferred to Columbus, Ohio, and has gone ahead while she stays behind with the children to sell the house and organize the move. Now is not the time for Mary Rose to practise her politically correct, “Actually, I’m not Maggie’s biological mother, I am her Other Mother.” Besides, she can’t get a word in edgewise—the woman is rabbiting along about having nearly lit her baby’s sock on fire while stirring spaghetti sauce—she hoots with laughter—she has parked on the street in front of the store and is worried she’ll get a ticket. “Back in two ticks, Mewwy Wose!” and she flits off down the aisle, rounds a pillar of kosher salt and disappears. Mary Rose looks at the children. “Hi, guys.”

Maggie starts climbing out of the cart. Mary Rose goes to stop her but thinks better of it and heaves her out onto the floor, where she distracts the baby and plays with the toddler. Mary Rose plays peekaboo with all three. After ten minutes she wonders if she ought to alert someone, have the woman paged. Was she cheerful or hysterical? Was she crying out for help with a smile on her face? She confessed to having almost incinerated her child—some say there are no accidents. What will become of these children if it turns out their mother has abandoned them in the pasta aisle? Will their fates be inextricably bound up with Mary Rose’s? Will what began as parallel lines become an intersection? Does it matter that it is pasta and not condiments? Just when she is set to call the manager, the woman comes flurrying back, still smiling and talking. She continues talking as Mary Rose melts away toward the hummus.

Where did she go? Perhaps she drove away then changed her mind; or considered mounting the curb and going over the side of Christie Pits, accelerating straight down in her minivan, crashing to a stop at the base of the concrete light standard, crushed hood smoking, car horn jammed on one note. Who is helping these women? All the logorrheic ladies, gushing taps of chatter with their funny stories about pain and loss, betrayal and bewilderment—
I’m not crying, don’t you cry
.

She chooses three lemons and reflects that women have their trauma chatter—like reverse Cassandras laughing at the gates,
This happened this happened this happened!
But what about Porkpie Hat? Does he have it better? With men it can take a different form. She thinks of her father with his family tree endlessly branching—“Look, you see here? In 1794 you have an Angus MacKinnon who is listed as possessing thirty-nine sheep, now you have to understand that in those days …” rendered in ultra-expository tones, the verbal equivalent of walking with prosthetic legs, one syllable placed laboriously after the other. With age, their lectures become islands of coherence disconnected from the mainland: “It took a government commission on systems analysis to systematically analyze …” “I’m going to wheel you into the sunroom now, Mr ___________.” Although they sound saner than the women, the men may be compelled to spread rich and creamy information over something that is howling just as hard. She stops dead in the produce section as it strikes her that the
Mewwy Wose
woman may indeed have been continuing an earlier conversation with her: one of which Mary Rose has no memory. What might she have poured out from the crude oil of her heart to the tall woman with the air-raid smile? She frisks her
memowy
but cannot come up with a single
miscawwiage
. And though she seeks irreverently thus to dismiss it, her hands are cold as she squeezes an avocado.

“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 Other
wheres
to Other
whens
 …

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.”