SSC (2012) Adult Onset (28 page)

S
he leaves Daisy leashed outside the Starbucks, in her pink fun-fur coat. The snow has melted and it is too warm for the coat, but it makes her look less like a pit bull. Somewhere online Mary Rose could probably buy a pink fun-fur muzzle. A fuzzle.

She manoevers the stroller through the door and looks around for a table. The place is packed. The bag lady with the elephant ankles heaves herself out of a chair and makes for the door. Mary Rose makes their way over to the newly vacated spot, digs a baby wipe out of the diaper bag and runs it over the tabletop and chair before sitting.

She waits. She commits to a latte. “Can I have your name for the cup?”

“No, thank you.”

The young man in the green apron regards her with equal parts surprise and pity. “No problem.” He smiles. Smirks? “You can be smiley face.” And he draws one on her cup. Why is she here? There is a better café across the street—Starbucks’ pro–gay marriage stance notwithstanding.

“Hi!”

She turns warily. Another nice young man in a green apron. “You’re Dolly’s daughter! How
is
she?”

“She’s great, thanks.” Brittle smile.

His name is Daniel. For some reason, Mary Rose remembers this but has trouble recalling which city her own wife is in—what is this thing called “brain”?

“Smiley face?” chirps the barista.

She slinks over and claims her cup.

Maggie dissects a muffin. Mary Rose takes out her antique flip-phone and calls her brother’s BlackBerry. “You’ve reached Captain MacKinnon, liaison officer for the federal government and special envoy to the provincial legislature …”

“Hi, A&P, it’s Mister Sister, just making sure we’re on the same page re the Starbucks at Bloor and Howland, see you soon.”

His phone is probably being monitored by CSIS which will pass on the info to the CIA which will hand it to the NSA which will alert the RCMP and he will be disciplined for using it for personal calls. Then renditioned to Syria once they discover he is half Mahmoud. And it will be her fault. Maybe he has left a message on her home voice mail. But why would he do that when he obviously has her cell number?

Maggie is through with her muffin and bored with the sugar packets, her best-before fast approaching. Nearby, a fashionably ill-shaven metrosexual in tapered brogues is fussing with his iPhone and preparing to pounce on her table the moment she stirs. She avoids his eye and calls the home voice mail on the off chance … there is indeed a message from Andy-Pat. He sounds busy. Preoccupied with manly
concerns. Keeping-the-world-safe-for-women-and-children concerns. His ceremony in Kingston went “later than originally scheduled” and he “had to crash with a colleague” and drive straight back to Queen’s Park this morning for an “important” meeting. “Hope you get this in time, Mister, I don’t have your cell number with me.”

She sweeps crumbs, crystals and stir sticks into a paper napkin—as the mist leaves no scar, so I with my toddler—but Mr. Metrosexual descends, blocking her cumbersome exit.
Does he want me to leave or not?!

“Excuse me,” he says in the arrogant tones of the freshly minted thirty-something.

In a previous era, a guy like this would have had to be gay or Italian, but because of the sacrifices Mary Rose and her generation made, he is free to be straight. He flaunts his phone—the type of guy who, if he ever bothered to open a book, would tap the page.

“Are you MR MacKinnon?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Oh my God, I
love
your books, they saved me, wow I can’t believe I’m meeting you, I just texted my girlfriend and she freaked.”

“Thank you.”

“Can I—I’m sorry, this is so rude, but can I get a picture with you?”

“Sure.”

She puts her arm around him and smiles. He holds the phone in his outstretched hand and flashes.

“When’s the next one coming out?”

Such an intelligent, sensitive young man. Some things do get better.

“I’m not sure,” she says. “I’m hoping I’m writing it right now in a parallel universe.”

He smiles politely, but remains in earnest. “I know I shouldn’t ask. But will Kitty get to see her mother’s face in the third one?”

Mary Rose hesitates. It is as though they are discussing family members she hasn’t seen in a long time. “But she did see her mother. In book one.”

The young man is respectful yet firm. “No. She saw Jon’s mother. But that’s not really her mother. Not her mother from her own world. Not the mother who can see her back.”

With his large brown eyes, he looks like a supplicant. What does that make her?

“Oh.” She nods—sagely, she hopes, then feels a grin stretch across her face. “By your readers be ye taught!” Is she a crazy lady and doesn’t know it? At least she doesn’t pretend to slap him.

But his gaze is steady, and he speaks again. “I love you. I can’t believe I just said that.”

“Thank you.” She flees, an imposter in her own life; husk of whoever it was that, once upon a time, created a world that others could claim, a world in which readers could immerse themselves … and feel they belonged. It is a world from which she blithely exiled herself, confident she could return any time. Perhaps Hilary is right, she needs to start working again. But what if she attempts a return only to find the portal barred? Like Narnia. She fears she may have committed herself to a life in which a closet is just a closet.

Daisy trots to keep up as Mary Rose pushes the stroller along Bloor Street to the Shoppers Drug Mart that has the post office at the back. She re-musters the troops for another assault on the great indoors, but when she gets to the counter there is no package waiting. There is no mail, period. It turns out her mail is being held across town at Postal Station E, which is also where she needs to submit the signed form. No, they do not have any forms here, but she can download one from the Canada Post website.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

She buys Advil, swallows one red pill dry and rubs her arm. Maybe her grafty old bone is becoming arthritic … reacting to the damp April day and the thousand natural shocks that climate change is heir to.

“Candy, Mumma?”

“No, sweetheart, medicine.”

Is Postal Station E too far to walk? Cabs are smelly, the drivers are homophobic immigrants—or is that internalized racism rearing its head? Her own grandfather was a homophobic immigrant, a marrier of child brides, a mumbler of “close your legs.” Yes, it is her own internalized racism. Feeling better already for having shed a character flaw, she nonetheless forbears to hail a cab for the psychology-free reason that she cannot have Maggie ride with no car seat. Not to mention Daisy—few drivers, regardless of their origins, would welcome a tank of a pit bull into their cab.

“Maggie, no.”

The child has kicked off her winter boots and is attempting to climb out of the stroller—impossible but annoying. Mary Rose jams the boots back onto the little feet.

“We’ll go to the other post office then we’ll play in the park.”

“Hutsutwah!” rails Maggie.

Mary Rose does not turn in the direction of Postal Station E, however, rather she power-pushes the stroller east up Bloor Street, toward downtown. Daisy canters alongside, teats swinging, through the crowded intersection at Spadina—

“…  Can you spare a loonie for my son and I …?”

Of course, that is what Kitty would see if she were to time travel: her real mother. What else do the readers know that she does not know she knows? An old saying floats to mind, “Physician, heal thyself.” Maggie points at a parkette, but Mary Rose is on a mission now, the purpose of which will become clear as she marches. In the display window of Williams-Sonoma she sees a splendid hanging pot rack; romantically lit, dripping with copper cast cookware—her feet slow and her heart beats a little faster, but she presses on. She is suddenly surging with energy. Her phone rings, it is Gigi but she doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t stop till they get to Baby Gap.

•

She was fourteen with the second surgery, so they put her on the children’s ward again. Her room was at the end of the hall with a view of the smokestack. “That’s where they put the body parts and crap,” said the girl in the next bed. She was Mary Rose’s age, and had just had some kind of “abdominal surgery,” which put Mary Rose in mind of the Abominable Snowman in the animated Rudolph movie. The girl was pale and in pain and showing it. She was from a reform school. She clutched her belly and told of the staff “doing stuff” to her and of some of the girls also “doing stuff” with each other. “The matron’s a pervert, eh.” Mary Rose pretended to be asleep. She saw the girl’s words turn to black crayon squiggles so they couldn’t go in her ears. The girl said she’d had “a D&C. Which is proof I’m not a perv, eh.”

She did not ask what the letters stood for intuiting a queasy female connection. “They scrape it out of you, eh,” said the girl. She wanted to keep in touch with Mary Rose after they got out of hospital. The girl had no visitors. She was gone when Mary Rose returned from surgery, so she had the room to herself. There were two other teenagers on the ward, but the girl cried constantly and the boy, while nice, had leukemia. It did not occur to Mary Rose to visit the sunroom at suppertime, she was too old.

•

Home again—no time for the park, she has to make a pit stop before doubling back to pick up Matthew; it won’t do to show up at his school laden with shopping bags, she doesn’t want to look like one of those women. She leaves Maggie in the backyard, resisting but safely restrained by the stroller with Daisy to guard her, and slips into the house, down the stairs to the laundry room, where she stuffs all the new Baby Gap clothes straight into the wash; partly to get the factory
chemicals out of them, partly so they won’t look screamingly new when Hil gets home. Hil doesn’t criticize Mary Rose’s spending, and it’s hers to spend, it’s just …

She runs back up the basement steps and out the door to find Maggie asleep in the stroller. “Maggie, wake up! No nap, no nap, sweetheart!”

Maggie wakes with a moan. Mary Rose rummages in the diaper bag for a juice box. “Let’s go, guys.”

Daisy doesn’t budge. Mary Rose pulls at the leash, but the dog is sitting with a force of gravity akin to a collapsed star. “Daisy, come.” Daisy looks up from beneath an obstinate brow. Her chin has started to go grey recently. Is it greyer today than yesterday?

Mary Rose goes into the house and returns with the water dish, then stands back while Daisy laps up a tidal wave.

“Do you want to go in the house?”

Daisy wags her tail and hauls herself to standing. The morning’s excursion actually must have tired her out—good to know it’s possible. She opens the door and watches Daisy haltingly ascend the four steps to the kitchen and disappear round the corner. She turns. “Let’s go, Maggie.”

The boots are off. How did the child manage it? Maggie stares up at her—a hint of triumph in her face. Mary Rose withdraws into the house without a word and returns with a roll of duct tape. She has the advantage, Maggie is a prisoner of the stroller. She puts up her hood so the child can’t claw her hair, and withstands the rain of blows while she calmly duct-tapes each winter boot back onto each little foot.

•

Somewhere down the hall was a baby that cried all night. Dark, etching cries that woke her, full of diesel and desperation, like a car spinning its tires in a snowbank. She would forget him during the day
when his distress was either lost amid hospital clatter or soothed by visitors. She saw him once.

She’d been making her way down the hall for the first time since the surgery—her mother said she had to because one day you might lie down and never get up again. Her arm bound and slung, hip bandaged—the incisions this time were sutured with a wire that rippled beneath her skin—she inched along the wall. She heard him wailing. She got closer and realized the cries were issuing from her old room. It took her several minutes to pass the open doorway, so she could not help but see.

He was lying on his back in her old bed, eyes squeezed shut, profile blue with strain. Tears stood stiff on his cheeks, as though they’d erupted straight from his face. He appeared to be no more than a year old, but his anger was fully grown, as though, too young for words, he nonetheless KNEW, and would not be soothed. His legs were elevated in stirrups rigged to a metal frame, he had no feet.

•

When she gets to the corner near the school, she pauses and considers whether to remove the duct tape before arriving. If she does, will that be like saying she was wrong to have applied it in the first place? It isn’t as though she has taped the child’s legs to the stroller. She presses on toward the school, ready to make a joke at her own expense should anyone comment or give a look.

Time plays tricks. It feels to Mary Rose as if it has taken hours to cover the final block. The grey of morning has turned to glare. A stillness is forming within her like a bulge, slowing her down. Heavy, unmoving. She arrives at the school door.

The cheerful cacophony of parents and children becomes a cardboardy jumble all around her like empty boxes filling the air. She is part of it, chatting with Philip and Saleema. She feels a smile manipulating
her face in socially appropriate ways. Hears her mouth making socially appropriate noises. She is not quite behind her eyes—she is set back a ways. Probably hungry.

She reflects that this is the retail counterpart to a sugar crash; she shopped voraciously and now she is as spent as her money. “Hi, sweetheart!”

Matthew is running up the steps, proudly thrusting something at her.

“It’s for you.”

“Matthew, it’s beautiful.”

“I made it.”

A macaroni necklace. She puts it on.

Sue nabs her before she can escape. “MacKinnon,” she says with jockish good cheer. Mary Rose turns to her and smiles but keeps the stroller pointing away—don’t let Sue, of all people, see the duct tape.

“Come for supper tonight,” she commands, straddling her bike with the kid cart hitched to the back.

“I’d love to, Sue, thanks so much, I can’t, I thought I could, but …”