SSC (2012) Adult Onset (38 page)

Delete
.

She closes her laptop, scrubs the porridge pot, calls, “Maggie!” and experiences an audible
click
as a logical conclusion in the form of a question arrives in her consciousness after a journey of forty-three years:
If I thought Andy-Patrick would have to be put in the ground if he was named after a dead brother, where did I think I was, having been named after a dead sister?

Scour, scrub, scrape, “Maggie!”

She is going to go down to Postal Station E and give some petty bureaucrat a big thorny piece of her mind. Why seek out bad drivers upon whom to vent one’s spleen when there is a Crown corporation to hand? Fucking posties, fucking pensions and benefits and backaches. She swings round with the pot and almost clocks the child on the head. “Maggie! Thank you for coming when Mumma called, sweetheart.”

Her daughter looks extra pretty today for some reason, like a little candy apple blossom. “Hey, cutie-pie, wait’ll Mummy comes home and sees how much you’ve grown!”

They will have a nice walk to the post office. They will take Daisy. They will show the postal people what a nice dog she is. Mary Rose will submit the form like a good citizen. The post office will release the mail. The suspense will end, her mother will shut up. They will stop in the park. They will have a nice time. She is a nice mother. See Jane put on her boots.

Maggie sits on the step. Mary Rose stations herself below and takes hold of one little foot with one hand and one little running shoe with the other.

“Boots,” says Maggie.

“No problemo! Do you want the ladybugs?”

“Yes, Mumma.”

Mary Rose turns to the crowded rack and spots a single shiny red boot wedged at one end. She frees it—the left one, where is the right one?

“Where’s your other ladybug boot, baby-girl?”

She starts hunting for it. It is not in the basement. It is not in the backyard. It is not in the bottom of the stroller, it is not in the car.
Where oh where is Jane’s other boot?
Other Boot, Other Boot, fly away home!
Mary Rose sighs. Where does a boot go? Does it walk away on its own? Fiendishly skipping off to Hell? It is still not in the boot rack. Where the fuck is it? She kicks through the jumble of footwear that Maggie has obviously ransacked in an effort to be helpful, and with every kick she feels the tide of anger rising—
do not fill above this line
. Relax, it’s a boot, not a priceless heirloom.

“Mumma can’t find your other ladybug boot, Maggie, you’ll have to wear these ones.”

The Bean boots with safety reflectors.

“No, Mumma, I will wear Sitdy boots.”

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart, I can only find one.” This is a grammatical infelicity, it ought to be
I can find only one
, otherwise
only
is modifying
find
—

“I can find one, Mumma.”

“You’re such a good girl!” With that, she takes Maggie’s right foot and, gently but firmly, begins to pull the ladybug boot off it. Maggie goes rigid, shoots out her leg, and her heel finds her mother’s left nipple. Mary Rose releases her hold. She smiles, unruffled.
It really does get better
. “Okay, sweetheart, you can wear one of each.” Pleased with her patience, she hands Maggie a Bean boot. Maggie throws it at the wall.

“STOP IT!” roars Mary Rose, corralling the bucking ankles, “NO!” grabbing the flailing hands, wrists, arms, “DON’T YOU FUCKING HIT ME!” She is sobbing the words with a force of violence she is diverting from her hands, “I’M GOING TO
SMASH
YOU!”
Stop
.

Maggie is still struggling. Is that a good sign? Mary Rose’s hands are still around her daughter’s arms, her knees imprisoning her daughter’s knees, angry Madonna and child. Maggie is whimpering now, wriggling more than fighting.

It is not that sound has deserted the air, it is that each sound issues briefly from a void into which it promptly returns. Dead. It is as
though Mary Rose were hearing everything from behind glass. The air itself has changed such that time cannot pass through it, must go around it instead. It is separate in here. Sterile.

Her hands are still around her daughter’s arms. Her hands can feel the small bones within their sleeves of flesh, bones like flutes. She watches her hands as, without warning, they pulse. Maggie screams. The hands loosen their grip but do not let go. They remain like manacles, encircling the arms. Like paper chains on a Christmas tree. She watches the hands: what will they do next? Something is going to happen, she cannot remember what.

A bark from upstairs, a thundering descent followed by clacketing across the kitchen floor. The dog appears at the top of the steps, stops and looks at her.

“It’s okay, Daisy, it’s just Mumma.” Mary Rose hears her own voice as though it belongs to someone else, someone who has arrived just in time. The dog growls. She lets go of Maggie. But the dog remains planted, ears pricked, eyes fixed.

Maggie is staring up at a corner of the ceiling. Mary Rose understands she is feeling fear when she hears herself cry, “Maggie?!”

The child is in a trance.

“Maggie!” Is she breathing?

She lowers her gaze and looks at Mary Rose, her expression blank. She is not breathing. Mary Rose picks her up and, as though kick-started by the movement, breath rushes back in the form of a gasp and a scream. She clings to Mary Rose like a monkey, so hard. She hangs on and cries so hard, hanging on to Mumma.

•

•

Mary Rose watches Maggie climb into the stroller and do up her own buckle. She is wearing the ladybug boots. The child was right when she said, “I can find one.” She
had
found it, buried in the boot rack all along, she had even been attempting to put it on the correct foot. Mary Rose feels bad as she watches her child patiently manipulate the buckle, her little face tear-stained but content now, and she feels something else too: love. She closes it promptly—like a laptop. She is sufficiently aware to know that accessing love on the heels of rage is not right, it is part of an abusive dynamic. Having ticked that box, she gets on with the day.

The day the daytheday the day is too bright. there are sequential actions that add up to sanity going for a walk to the post office is one of them just do these correct things no one needs to know that you are untethered maybe everyone is. and then andthenand then prepositions grafting one thought to another if they take you have continuity if not you have fractured bits

They go out by the back gate, down the driveway, onto the sidewalk along the peterpiperpickedapeckofprepositions what if she just keeps walking?
One day I’ll walk out of the house and never come back
. Daisy lifts her leg and pees on the corner of the fence where the indestructible cosmos will soon spring back to life. Mary Rose sees Rochelle getting into her Tercel. “Hi, Rochelle!”

Rochelle does not immediately return the greeting.

“Isn’t it an amazing day?” chirps Mary Rose.

“It’s nice.” Rochelle sounds wary.

“We’re going for a hike. We’ve got snacks, we’ve got juice, we even have our sled dog in case it snows again! We’re all set, aren’t we, Maggie, can you say hi to Rochelle?” Something is wrong with Mary Rose’s face.

“Hi Wochewwe.”

“Hi.”

“I know she looks like me, but I adopted Maggie, but all babies look like me, and if all babies look like Winston Churchill, then I
must look like Winston Churchill.” A smile has landed on her face like a space alien.

Rochelle says nothing.

Perhaps that’s because she knows she is talking to a crazy lady
. “We’re going to walk all the way across town to Postal Station E and then drop off a form because Daisy almost bit the mailman, she didn’t bite him, she bit the box with the Christmas tree stand because I was writing an e-mail to my dad, and now they’re coming on the train and my mother sent me a packeege but I didn’t get it yet.” Has she said all this with an English accent? Mewwy Wose is going to start waffing. She sucks her cheek between her teeth, bites down, and tears flood her eyes.
We shall fight on the beaches …
Has she said it out loud?

Rochelle says, “I can take the form in for you.”

“Really? Are you going by there?”

“I work there.” Voice like a canvas mailbag.

Don’t laugh. One day you may start laughing and never be able to stop. “Thanks.” She hands the form to Rochelle.

Rochelle gets into her car. “Need any stamps?”

“Ha-ha-hahahaha—” She bites her cheek. “I don’t think so, no, hahahahah. Thanks, Rochelle.”

“You’re welcome.”

They go to the park. She pushes Maggie on the swing. They play in the sandbox. They do all the things that can be expressed by sentences suitable for a beginner reading level. Three other toddlers are there. One goes hysterical. His mother has no nice snacks. Mary Rose has nice snacks. Mary Rose opens her bag and offers a fruit strip.

“Thanks!” says the woman. “I feel like such a terrible mother!” And she laughs.

Matthew is alive.

“Hi, Sue, thanks.”

“What for?”

The bus did not roll over—at least not in this world. There is a world in which this same crowd of parents is gathered in front of the school, keening. A world where a spot on the highway is heaped with flowers and teddy bears …

“Have a nice weekend.”

As the day progresses, a parallel reality plays itself out, as though the world were bifurcating with every move Mary Rose does not make. When it turns out the cap on the Thermos of chocolate milk she is shaking has not been fastened. When she sees from her driveway that she has missed the recycling truck by one second and the driver ignores her. In another world, the Thermos cracks the window, a crazy woman pelts down the street pushing a big blue bin on wheels, shrieking obscenities.

She does not swat Maggie on the head when the child shoves her bowl to the floor, she does not grab Matthew’s ear, cheek, hair, she does not tell him to “shut up and quit whining or I’ll give you something to whine about!” She does not hit his head or his little hands, and then she does not seize Maggie by the arm and yank, does not yank her down the hall and up and over the side of the crib,
IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?!
She makes lunch and then she cleans up andthen she does not smash them.

“Thank you, Mumma.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart. Would you like to watch a video?”

“Yes!”

For all that she abstains from doing, the capsule bursts in the pit-drip of her stomach and she feels the dark chemical release, re-blazing neural trails. It will pass and so can she; as normal in a world where she might lose touch with reality in ways that would never land her on a psychiatric ward or even on antidepressants. She would not be arrested or even questioned for any of the raging she did this morning, or even the squeezing. She has committed no crime. Yet she knows that she is full of crime.

“Would you like to watch
Bob the Builder
now?”

“Yes!”

Play all
.

By late afternoon, the undone possibilities cease to flash like old-fashioned Kodak cubes in her peripheral vision, and their place is taken by a movie that begins running in her mind. It is of herself and Maggie on the steps this morning. But it does not end with her letting go of Maggie’s arms, it continues, the movie of what she did not do: She does not let go, she gets up. Shegetsupshegetsupshe
jerks
Maggie up by the arm, hauls her up the steps and across the kitchen; close-up on raw wing tip, straining, toddler feet fill the frame, scrabbling for purchase as though in an attempt to become airborne …

Somewhere, someone is watching this, providing commentary—it is the mother’s own voice, but the voice has been left behind on the steps, the mother is now merely a motor function, a set of impulses moving through space—who will stop this? Again and again, like a scene untethered from a movie, Mary Rose sees the thing she did not do, the thing she knows so well how to do, as if she had done it already many times, as if she had trained for it. She looks down at her hands. They know something. But, like a child who won’t reveal who it was that gave them the candy, they are not telling. They can taste the tang of it, though, and they are craving satisfaction. They clench and unclench. She slips into the powder room, leans against the door and lets them batter her head as hard as they want to while she watches herself assault her two-year-old over and over again.

Out in the living room, the children know nothing of this, they are watching a different movie.

•

•

Everything will look better in the morning. She was sleep deprived when the whole boot kerfuffle happened earlier today. She ought to have had a good cry last night over the stillborn baby pictures. Suppressed sorrow for her mother and her “inadequately mourned” deceased sister was bound to surface as rage—if it had been anyone else up till all hours googling grief, Mary Rose could have told them what would happen if they failed properly to discharge their feelings. Reassured by this insight, she heads upstairs with a mug of Sleepytime tea. She overreacted today, but it isn’t as if she battered her child.