SSC (2012) Adult Onset (45 page)

Someone saw what happened to the flowers. There is always a witness. She shared a moment of her life with the people and pigeons
at this corner yesterday, now they have dispersed and what is to say it mightn’t have been an important moment?

She gets off the streetcar at the subway station and continues on foot up Bathurst. “You pick yellow,” Winnie said. And she said something else too … “You buy only one.” Mary Rose goes cold. What if she never had the first bunch of yellow tulips at all—what if she hallucinated them? But that could have been the language barrier, Winnie may have meant, “I want you to pay only for this bunch, not the previous bunch.” She stops outside Archie’s Variety—the voice of Kiri Te Kanawa soars out,
“Swing low, sweet chariot …”
She could pop in now and ask, “Winnie, did I leave with yellow tulips the first time I came in?” What if Winnie replies, “No. You come only once”? Would that prove Mary Rose went missing for … the amount of time it took to buy tulips? Has she lost a piece of time? It is one thing to speculate as to the existence of parallel worlds, it is another to realize you may have entered one. That is not science fiction, that is psychosis. Unless the other worlds are real … indeed, they are more mathematically probable than she herself is. Was the whole episode an especially vivid déjà vu? Winnie might be mistaken—forgetful, like the best of us. How can Mary Rose know for certain? Winnie waves to her from inside the store. She waves back, and keeps going.

Hil comes home. They hide Easter eggs for the children. She finds the costume that Mary Rose hid behind the brogues.

“Put it on.”

“I meant to return it.”

Hil pulls off the tags and tosses the confection at Mary Rose.

“Hil, no, it’s like I’d be in drag, it’s more your thing.”

“Mister? You have to remember something. I like women. Now put it on and get back in here.”

“…  Can I have a back rub?”

——

The faeries cease their daylight raids and resume their dream haunts. Rage is in remission. The kitchen is clean but not too clean. A storm has passed, Kansas-sized, but Mary Rose feels the prickle of renewable force, can see it in the way leaves rustle in the absence of wind, in the livid quality of evening light, smell of electricity in the air. Glimpse of old pathways, vines parting, brambles beckoning …

The psychoanalyst is in the same building as the hypnotist. Different floor. The pneumatic drills are gone. Maybe this is who her accountant was visiting—that is more disturbing than a hypnotist; Mary Rose can accept that her accountant might grind his teeth at night, she has a harder time accepting he has a subconscious.

On one side of the room, two upholstered swivel chairs face one another. On the other side is a couch—halfway down its cushioned surface she makes out the imprint of someone’s bum. She takes a chair. The analyst sits opposite.

Mary Rose says, “I’m here because everything is fine.”

It is time to make a fresh incision through the scars; allow sections of Time to bleed afresh, then re-graft them.
After
seeks
Before
. She will be her own donor this time … She clicks on the blank document called “Book” and types …

Daisy dies in May. It is almost as though she waited until it was safe.

“Where
is
she, Mumma?”

“Mumma, where is
she
?”

Like a magic trick, the city is suddenly in full leaf.

She phoned to invite him to visit her home on his own. She was in the bedroom she shared with Renée; mauve walls, a Georgia O’Keeffe print of an iris, it was the eighties. It was around four or five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Renée was puttering in her workroom, turning something into something else. Mary Rose dialed her parents’ number. Her father answered. She knew her mother was out at choir practice.

“Mum’s out at choir practice.”

“That’s okay, Dad, I wanted to speak with you.”

“Oh yeah? What’s up?”

She asked him to visit her home. He said no. She realized she had been unclear, she tried to be more specific. “I know you can’t come with Mum because Mum won’t come here, but you could come.”

No.

“You could come on your own.”

No.

“Please come.”

No.

“Please.”

She started to feel unreal, saying things she had not planned to say, things that were bypassing her head-traffic controller, the more laconic he was, the more she unravelled. “You’re my father, you could come see me, Dad, please Dad, please see me.” She sounded to herself like a robot. “I’m begging you, Dad, please, please, please come and see me in my home, Dad please. It doesn’t matter what Mum thinks, you can do what you think is right.”

“I do think it’s right.” He spoke calmly.

Dear Mary Rose, You have chosen to go down a path that we, as your parents, cannot follow …

She heard herself moan, she hugged herself with her free hand and started to undress. She went into the bathroom because she was not safe. She needed to be in a place where she could know she existed. She ran the water.

“I’m your daughter, and I am telling you that you are doing a terrible thing, Dad, a terrible thing to me, please stop doing it.” She was saying things no one in her family said, not even people in movies said these things, people in books did not say them. She sat in the tub, hot water lapping about her hips, she hugged her knees, felt her breasts soft against them, stroked her head, her shoulder, rocked, it’s okay. Water is real, it holds you, tells you you are there,
there, there, Daddy’s got you
. “You’re saying you hate me!” She screamed it.

“I’m not saying that to you. That is what you are saying to me.” His tone was detached, reasonable.
Your lifestyle is opposed to the values with which we raised you, and by insisting upon adhering to that lifestyle, you have turned your back on us …

“When you have had enough, perhaps you’ll come home.”

“I have, I visit your home all the time, why won’t you come to my home?”

“That’s not a home.”

“It is so!” She screamed it. “It’s my home!” She screamed it. “I have friends who would refuse to visit you and Mum because of what you’re doing, is that what you want?” She was shaking. Renée came in, Mary Rose waved her out.

“That’s up to you.”

… our door cannot be open to you in the way that it was in the past
.

“So if I stopped visiting you in your home, you would not seek me out.”

“That’s up to you.”

“You could let me go.”

“You let yourself go.”

“You would let go of me, and you would never come after me.”

“You’ve turned your back on us.”

If you had a broken leg, we would take you to a doctor. In this case, it is your mind that is broken, but you kept it from us …

“My heart is breaking, Dad, it is breaking right now.”

He was implacable.

“We are prepared to come see you when you decide to take the help we are offering.”

He was glass.

“What help?!” She shrieked it, shocking herself, yet even amid the sense of unreality, another sense was emerging, a deep recognition. Naked and shrieking, she made a decision to listen to everything he had to say so she would have all the information. Get him to say it. Don’t tear up the letter this time. “I’m your daughter,” she said.

“Not this part of you.”

“No ‘part’!”
Bang!
on the glass. “Only one Mary Rose!”
Bang bang!
“I am the same one you loved and were proud of, I am the same, I am the one you carried, I am the one!” Sobbing, deciding, knowing this sorrow was already in the past.

“The Mary Rose I know does not choose to live the way you are living now.”

“You said, ‘Do it your way.’ I am brave.”

“You are sick.”

She cried into the phone. Renée returned with a glass of wine, set it on the edge of the tub and withdrew. He didn’t hang up. Was that a good thing? Or was he determined to show he was impervious? As long as she was the crazy one, he was the sane one.

“I love you, Dad, why don’t you love me?” Calm now.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But if I don’t change, you will never welcome me or come into my home.” No more banging. Just hand smears.

“You have chosen to go down a path that—”

“You don’t want me to have love.”

“What you have is not love.”

She curled over her knees. “What if someone had said that to you about Mum?”

“There’s no comparison.”

“I love Renée, she is my family.”

“She’s not my family.”

“What if you hadn’t been allowed to marry? You were considered to be different colours in those days.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You want me to be alone for the rest of my life.”

“Being
homosexual is not wrong.
Practising
homosexuality is.”

“Oh. I’m supposed to become a nun?”

Silence.

“Wow. Okay, you’re wrong. That’s a bad reason to become a nun or a priest. What you’re doing to your own daughter now is a sin. You want me to hate myself.”

“I don’t know what happened along the way to pervert the normal course of your development. I’m in the dark about that. If you had let us know early on that you had these tendencies, we would have been able to help you. But you shut us out. If you’d had a broken leg—”

“I had a broken arm, and you didn’t do anything.”

“We didn’t know it was broken.”

“Why didn’t I get an X-ray?”

“No one thought your arm could possibly be broken.”

“It hurt. All the time.”

“We’re getting off topic here.”
topeec
“If you were a drug addict, I would not be doing my job as a father by giving you more drugs when you beg for them.”

Absurdity can be a balm. She splashed her face clear of mucus and tears, and spoke calmly. “If I had told you when I was a teenager and still living at home, you would have taken me to a psychiatrist.”

“That’s right.”

“And you would have had me hospitalized and treated. Electroshock, maybe.”

“That’s one option, but you never gave us the chance. You hid your disorder from us.”

She cried again, but not in anger. “I haven’t believed in God since I was fourteen, Dad, but I believe in Good because I have been looked after and I believe in Love because somehow I knew enough not to show anyone, not even myself, who I was while I was still in your hands. I am so scared when I think of what you would have done to me, and when I think of that, I think that what you are doing to me now is something I can handle because I’m twenty-three and all you can do to me now is hate me.” She was shaking when she got out of the bath, but she had the information.

The next time she saw her parents, it was as though she and her father had never had the conversation. Her mother did her laundry. Her father poured her a Scotch and asked about her work. They ate, they chatted, she and Dolly played Scrabble. At some point, the three of them found themselves at the kitchen table. Her father’s gaze drifted to a corner of the ceiling as the crazy light entered her mother’s eye and it began again.

When Odysseus finally makes it home, he is much changed, but his loved ones know him by his scar. Will she make it home? Will she recognize herself?

Grafts leave scars on the skin, yes, but on bone too. Scars make you stronger, and they help tell a story; like striations in igneous rock, a story of eruptions and epochal inches. Her scars can take her home. Down to the bone, into the marrow, down among the stem cells where the stories germinate.

It will all go back to carbon one day, back to gemstones and crystals and star stuff. She has a vantage point for the moment. An “I.”

Pinhole aperture, like an old-fashioned camera. All she can do is try to bear witness. Writer, write thyself …

Mary Rose has a picture of Alexander’s grave. She knows where his physical remains are, she could go there. Everything is somewhere. She could go to Winnipeg, to the hospital, and find the smokestack. She could place her hands against the warm bricks.
My sister
. And she could say her name:
Mary Rose
.

She can go to Kingston and look up at the windows of the General Hospital—two of them were hers. She can say a prayer for her bone donor. And she can say a prayer for herself: the child of ten, immobilized on the operating table. And the girl of fourteen, standing next to her mother in the surgeon’s office.
They’ve come back
.

You cut me to the bone, Dr. Sorokin. Laid bare my humerus, riddled with history; tamped in cadaver bone, and I grew. Thank you. Four years later, you cut through the scar, raked the fallen leaves, drained strange fluid and returned it to the earth. Cut my hip, harvested the hill of bone; transplanted it to the valley of my arm and filled in the shadows. Bless your hands.

Pray for the baby who stands pounding the glass. Pray for the mother lying on the couch. Pray for the young woman immobilized at the kitchen table,
I would rather you’d been born dead
. Pray for her, and all others who have been whipped from the door so they will know they are loved.

Pray for the children in the sunroom at night, where the table is set for supper beneath the big black windows, and the brave damaged toys
care for one another. They are there, still. Like the big blue city bus that rolls and dips and labours on. Pray for the young woman in the kerchief at the back, her belly big and lifeless,
you’ll have more babies …