SSC (2012) Adult Onset (33 page)

Sigh
. “I thought I mentioned, she’s directing
The Importance of Being Earnest
.”

“You said she was doing that in Winnipeg.”

“…  Did I?”

“That’s where your sister was born.”

“Maureen was born in Cape Breton, Mum.”

“Not Maureen, Other Mary Rose!”

It is difficult to determine which is more arresting: her mother’s sudden reference to “Other Mary Rose” as “your sister” or the stage-farcical tone she has employed.

“Oh right, thanks, Mum.”

“She was born dead.”

“I know, Mum, is Dad there? I need to know when you’re arriving.”
Stop
. For God’s sake, Mary Rose, listen behind the tone, the woman is elderly, drifting into dementia, her manner may be offhand but the words, the words …

“Let me get my purse.”

“Mum? Mum, before you get your purse.” Go for it, robot. “That must have been a hard time.”

“What time?”

“When you lost Other Mary Rose.”

“Oh … Well, you know, I popped into the Hudson’s Bay store on my way home, I didn’t get into Winnipeg that often, and the saleslady said, ‘When’re you due?’ And I said, ‘The baby’s dead,’ and she started crying, and I said—”

“Did you hold her?”

“Hold her? No, no.”

“What … did they do with her?”

“Oh, I think she was incinerated, listen now, we’re stopping over at eleven on the seventh, have you got a pin?”

Mary Rose pauses while her neocortex tries to sort out the difference between the two halves of the sentence her mother has just spoken, for Dolly’s tone has given no indication that they are anything but twinned, when in fact they are as different as … Winnipeg and Calgary.

“Are you still there?”

“Yes—”

“We’re getting on the train today.”

“Today?!”

“We arrive on the seventh.”

“Okay, wait—” Where is her datebook? “Maggie, sweetheart, where is Mumma’s big book?”

“Hi, Maggie!” Dolly yells in Mary Rose’s ear as behind her there rises a clatter, and a cry from Matthew.

“Maggie!” she yells before she has time to turn around.

But it is Daisy—usually so dainty around toys and toes. Is she dragging her left hind paw slightly? Dolly bursts into song, “…  
Hut-Sut Rawl-son on the rillerah and a brawla, brawla sooit …!”
Maggie grabs at the phone.

Where is her datebook? Her whole life is in there. What was she doing before her mother called? “When does your train get in, Mum? The seventh?”

“That’s it, or wait now, the eleventh.”

Matthew is crying.

“Seven, two, one, two, two, two!” yells Maggie, trying to open the dishwasher—Mary Rose pulls her back, and grabs a pencil from the telephone drawer—the lead is broken. She grabs another, it is new and yet to be sharpened. She snatches a scented marker from the craft table.

“Okay.” She turns to the foot calendar and writes 7 in the square marked
11
in root beer Smencil.

“That’s right,” says Dolly, “seventh at eleventh.”

“…  Do you mean seven o’clock on the eleventh or eleven o’clock on the—”

“Eleven. Will we see Hil?”

She writes
11
on the
7
square.

“No, Mum, she’s out west—”

“We’ll see you on eleventh, then.”

“The seventh—Maggie, don’t touch! Matthew, hush for goodness sake.”

“I meant to give it to you last summer.”

“Give me what?”

“It’s a small little thing. I think you were looking for it.”

“You mean the packeege?”

“I better hang up now, Daddy’s got lunch on the table.”

“He does?” Is she dreaming? Is she dead? “Dad made lunch?” Her father can barely boil water.

“Bye, doll.”

Click
.

She stands for a moment, in the rubble of the phone call. Then rallies and puts on a
Teletubbies
DVD for the kids on a portable player at the craft table and they squeal with joy at the sight of the big baby face in the sun. Something about the face makes Mary Rose uneasy, it is … slurry. In the kitchen she turns on CBC radio while she tries to think what to make for supper—a woman in Yellowknife can play “Jingle Bells” on her dentures and the Catholic Church has just made another large payout but no admission of guilt to victims of sexual abuse.

“Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po and Tinky Winky!”

It was two days after her sixteen-hour personal power outage on her father-in-law’s couch in Halifax—where she had listened to the sounds of Maggie’s second birthday party below—when they pulled into the driveway of her parents’ comfortable condo late. Every year, she formed the intention of setting out early enough to arrive before sundown, and every year they drove the final gruelling two hours in darkness on a stretch of road she’d come to think of as “Night Danger Highway” for the number of warning signs illustrated with leaping deer and charging moose. The first leg of their journey back home to Toronto was done, and they would stopover for a few days with Dunc and Dolly in Ottawa.

They carried the sleeping children from the car and the warm night air hit them with the force of frangipani. Her parents were backlit at the open door, “Hello-hello-hello!” Daisy shot like a bullet from the back of the station wagon, pausing on her houseward trajectory to squat and pee in the grass. Dolly woke the children with kisses, Duncan managed an end run and succeeded in carrying in the bags.

The dog went straight to Dolly, whose late-onset affection for the species might be another sign of cognitive decay—dogs were vermin
where she had come from. “Is he hungry, do you think?” All dogs were male for Dolly.

In the kitchen, Dolly said, “You’ll have a cup of tea.” And ushered them to a table full of food. She was disappointed they hadn’t brought any dirty laundry.

Mary Rose, Hil and the kids spent the following day at a wading pool followed by a trip to the Museum of Science and Technology. When the lovely afternoon was finally over, she gratefully accepted her father’s offer of a “libation” and waited in the kitchen while he went to his “medicine cabinet” to make a selection.

Maggie was sitting on the floor eating a packet of high-fructose chemicals in the shape of Dora and Boots that Sitdy had just given her a half-hour before supper—not that there’s ever a good time. She wondered if her parents had remembered Maggie’s birthday—there was no sign of a cake. She decided not to say anything—one birthday party was enough, and besides, at two, Maggie was too young to know. Sitdy stumbled over Maggie on her way from the fridge to the counter with a pot, but neither seemed to notice. Mary Rose considered moving the child out of the path of Hurricane Dolly, but Hil was close by, dicing onions—she derived pleasure from the sight of her blue-eyed partner towering over her little brown mother. Dolly shoved the pot at Mary Rose—“Hold this”—and proceeded to clear space on the stovetop. Her mother had always kept a kitchen with a degree of what other people would call clutter. The difference these days was that she had got into the habit of using her glass stovetop as an extension of her counter space, and at present it was heaped with
TV Times
crosswords, bills, scrap paper and several issues of
Living with Christ
. “Mum, your stovetop is not an extension of your countertop.”

Dolly replied, “Where’s the kettle?”

They’d be living with Christ soon enough if her mother burned the house down. Her father reappeared with two generous drams—“You sure you won’t join us, Hilary?”

“No thanks, Duncan, I’m sous-chefing for Dolly.”

“Then you’d better keep your wits about you.” He chuckled, adding, “I got some of that fancy French water too, what’s it called, Perrier?” The way he said it rhymed with “terrier,” and the twinkle in his eye attested to his self-mocking intention. Hil laughed, and Mary Rose watched as she brushed her hair back from her eyes with her wrist and turned her best Natalie Wood smile on him … Is my wife flirting with my father? Is my father flirting with my wife? Is it okay that I like it?

Dolly, having plunked the pot on the stove, was now safely anchored at the small kitchen table with Matthew and a deck of cards. Mary Rose followed her father over to the spacious living room area and sank into a gold-upholstered bucket chair.

“Slainte,”
he said, and they drank—he had taken to using the Gaelic expression.

The ice snapped in her glass and she breathed a sigh. Daisy was passed out in a patch of fat afternoon light—she looked appetizing, like a side of cured pork.
“Your soft pop station in the nation’s capital,”
was playing Ferrante and Teicher’s “Bright Elusive Butterfly of Love” on what her parents still called the hi-fi.

“There is such a thing as genetic memory,” he said. He was in his armchair next to her, a side table between them. “I think we remember not only our ancestors’ experience but our cellular experience.” His blue gaze was directed toward the glass patio door where an orange
X
was taped at eye level owing to a recent mishap involving his nose; he blamed Dolly for having cleaned the pane without telling him. “I think it’s possible we could trace our origins to a deep-time spaceship wreck.”

She thought of the surprise cheek-swab kit even now winging its way to him from Texas, and hoped it would not be a letdown; evidently he was after bigger game than a handful of hairy chieftains. She paralleled his gaze through the glass, past the railings of the back porch that gave onto the patio and the retreating perspective of
lawns, differentiated by umbrellas, barbecues and the occasional sprinkler lazily combing the light, tossing its tresses, sending up wet sparks. She sipped.

“Aliens crash-landed here,” mused Duncan. “And their genetic material dispersed among the cells that were already percolating in Earth’s primordial soup.”

Waiter, there’s a family tree in my primordial soup
. She swirled the spirit in her glass. “Dad, what do you think time is?”

“It’s four thirty-seven!” bellowed Dolly.

“That’s why, as a species, we yearn to travel into space,” continued Duncan. Had he not heard her question? “It’s not just that we want to explore. It’s that we want to go home. It’s why we situate ‘Heaven’ up there in the sky, and why so many of us believe that one day we’ll return. And until now we couldn’t think of any way to ‘go home’ and be reunited with ‘the Father’ except to die.”

Her mother bustled over, cup and saucer rattling in her hand, “I just poured you some hot, Dunc, don’t burn your mouth on it.”

They were drinking Scotch, not tea, but Dolly placed the cup and saucer on the side table at his elbow, returned to the kitchen and burst into the theme from
Carmen. “ ‘Toreador-ah don’t spit on the floor-ah, use the cuspidor-ah, that’s-ah what it’s for-ah!’ ”

Quiet conversations had always worked like a red flag on her mother. Ditto the sight of anyone reading a book. It was possible Mary Rose had become an author in self-defence.

“You have a beautiful voice, Dolly,” said Hil.

Her father got up to put on a CD. Cape Breton fiddle music filled the air as he returned to his chair. “That young gal picked up a fiddle when she was three years old and never looked back.” He spoke in the tragic tones of Scottish high praise.

“If the Father is up there, then where’s the Mother?” Mary Rose asked.

“Mother Earth.”

“So she’s down there. So is Hell.”

“Well.” He winced. “We call it that, but it’s really just a reflection of our fear of mortality.”

“Then why don’t we talk about being reunited with the Mother?”

“Hm. I guess we don’t have to reunite with her because she’s always right here. Holding us up. Feeding us. Tucking us back in when we die.”

“What’s the Father doing while she’s busy doing all this?”

He laughed. “Good question.”

“He’s above the fray.”

“That’s an old management trick.” His tone was conspiratorial. “It’s why the boss has his office upstairs.”

Her gaze strays up to a corner of the ceiling.

“Maybe we associate our power of higher thought with the sky because it’s been closest to our head ever since we started walking upright,” he said.

“The Egyptians believed the heart was the organ of thought. They threw the brain away.”

“And now science has discovered neurons in the lining of the heart.”

“And the intestines.”

“Exactly, that’s where you get ‘gut feelings.’ ”

“And a broken heart.”

“Yuh.” He aspirated the assenting syllable in a manner as characteristic of his east coast roots as it was inimitable—a means of rendering even a simple
yes
fatalistic. She watched his eyes close and his head nod in barely perceptible time with the reel.

She heard Matthew ask, “Sitdy, what’s for supper?”

In Mary Rose’s day, her mother would have barked,
Chudda b’chall!
Shit and vinegar! Masculine form. But she heard Dolly reply gently, “We’re having a smorgasbord, Matthew, do you know what that is?”

She looked over her shoulder to see Matthew shake his head no.

“It’s a little bit of everything.” Sitdy smiled and dealt a new hand. “Habibi.”
Darling
: masculine form.

Mary Rose wonders how young Dolly managed to go against “Puppa’s” wishes and enter nurses’ training all those years ago. Maureen once told her that their mother had experienced “a nervous breakdown” at seventeen. The statement was like a title with no book; another fragment that she had accepted as though it were whole. Another stranded station of the cross.
Dolly breaks the first time
.

The reel ended and a jig began. Her father opened his eyes, reached for his glass, encountered the teacup and it sloshed in his grasp. He looked bewildered, then vexed. Mary Rose moved to help, but he made a calming gesture with his hand that rankled her slightly—it wasn’t as if she was “paneeking”—and used his hanky to mop up the spill.

“I’m only putting onions in half!” her mother hollered from the kitchen.

“Put them all the way through!” Duncan hollered back.

“Oh Dunc, you know what’ll happen!”

“What’ll happen?!” He sounded annoyed. He must be deeply content. “ ‘Time’ … now that’s tricky,” he said, picking up the thread. “Time is an illusion. A way of keeping track of change.”