SSC (2012) Adult Onset (34 page)

Spare a quarter for a loony?
“The only constant,” said Mary Rose.

“A way of keeping tabs on the tricks that energy and matter get up to. If I was auditor general of the universe, I’d separate those two.”

She smiled in appreciation. “I don’t know if you can.”

“When I reach for this glass, what keeps my hand from passing right through it?”

“Maybe the fact you haven’t drunk enough to be seeing double.”

He chuckled. “There’s that. But there’s also ‘the swerve.’ ”

“The what?”

“Haven’t you read your Lucretius?”

“Not … recently.”

“What’re they teachin’ you in school these days?
De rerum natura
. In which the poet invokes ‘the necessary flaw,’ ” he said with a magical mystery tour flourish.

“Flaw in what?”

“Everything.”

“Why is it ‘necessary’?”

“You just answered your own question.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well. Here we are.”

She paused. “I feel like I’m remembering the future.”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” he said.

Had her father ever smoked marijuana?

“Dad, have you ever experimented with—”

“I’m not going to cook this kibbeh,” Dolly announced from the kitchen. “I watched the butcher cut the meat and grind it and I made him sterilize the blade beforehand.”

Mary Rose shuddered. Food standards were no longer what they had been in the golden age of government regulation. Her family was going to eat a dish the principal ingredient of which was raw beef; the children and the old people were going to die, her mother was going to kill herself and them. Hil and Mary Rose would see out the rest of their shortened, miserable lives as names on a waiting list for kidney transplants. Mary Rose, with her O negative blood type, was likely a goner. She wondered, would Andy-Patrick give her a kidney? Had she been nice enough to him since they’d grown up?
Your sister is being held prisoner in a dialysis machine on the Planet …

She turned to see her mother scrubbing her hands and holding them up to drip-dry like the O.R. nurse she had been, before plunging them into the big old enamel bowl, where she began kneading away, adding salt, pepper and cinnamon to the meat, folding in the onion and the softened bulgur wheat.

Hil said, “I’m watching carefully, Dolly, I want to be able to make this at home.”

“Well, ysallem ideyki, dear. That means ‘bless your hands.’ ”

The aroma of eggplant, garlic, tomatoes and pine nuts wafted from the oven—a dish infelicitously named “shucklemushy.” At least that was what her mother called it. Recent Lebanese immigrants had different names for things and different ways of preparing food, as Dolly had been astonished to discover. For example, she had yet to meet any Lebanese in Ottawa who ate
kibbeh nayeh
—raw kibbeh. Mary Rose was willing to bet Dolly hadn’t met any child brides either.

Also on the menu, Dolly’s cinnamony roast chicken with green mashed potatoes called
hushweh—try them, try them!
Baked with herbs and juices from the bird. She began to relax regarding the E. coli, if not the mad-cow … whatever happened to that, anyway? Perhaps it was implicated in the epidemic in dementia—unless the spike was simply an effect of mass longevity. No doubt it would soon have its own ribbon. A grey one.

“Do you want the other wing?” Duncan asked, indicating their glasses, half rising.

“Sure. I’ll get it.”

She rose and carried their glasses over to the kitchen.

“I
bought
the chicken,” Dolly announced balefully.

“You’re falling down on the job, Missus,” said Duncan, mock stern.

“I better watch out or he’ll fire me.” Dolly winked at Hilary, who was crouched before the open fridge. “What are you looking for, dear?”

“The olives,” said Hil.

“They’re in a Becel tub.”

Hil stayed staring.

“It’s Yoplait on the bottom.”

There ought to be a sign over her mother’s fridge:
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
. Dolly had reused and recycled long before it was fashionable or urgent. A tin of Hershey’s chocolate sauce might contain
solidified bacon fat; raw egg yolks nested in a Cool Whip tub, and God knows what’s in the Nutella jar; she would have purchased the original products exactly once. By the time you got through the decoys, you’d forgotten what you were looking for.

Mary Rose asked, “Matthew, what are you eating?”

He had a chocolate moustache.

“Nutella on a cracker,” said Dolly. “It’s healthy, they eat it in Europe.”

“So that’s what was in the Nutella jar.”

“What else would it be?”

Maggie was now surrounded by the contents of Dolly’s purse, which was capsized like a tugboat amid bobbing cargo. Mary Rose was about to step around her when she noticed the child was playing with a plastic pill container—the rectangular kind with the days of the week stamped on the compartments. She bent and took it from her. “Mine!” objected Maggie.

A whistling from the stove. Dolly poured boiling water into a waiting bowl of pink Jell-O crystals, picked it up and swung it with its scalding contents from counter to table. Mary Rose scooped Maggie from the floor—“Here, Hil”—and thrust the thrashing child at her.

She moved to rejoin her father with the drinks but Dolly was right on her heels. She groaned, saying, “I’m going to go take a suppository.”

“I now know that,” said Mary Rose. “And cannot now unknow it.”

“You’re saucy.” Dolly pretended to slap her. “Have you heard from your brother?”

“Not recently.”

“When’s he coming home?”

“I don’t know.”

Dolly smiled mischievously. “Do you think he and Shereen will have a baby?”

“I don’t know.” She meant to sip but gulped and coughed.

“When’re we going to play Scrabble?”

“We can play now. Do you ever use the German Scrabble game I gave you?”

“Do you remember what you said when I told you we were going to call him Alexander—”

“Yes, Mum, I—”

“Hilary, do you know what she said, dear, when Andy-Patrick was born? I said to her, ‘Mary Rose, will we call the baby Alexander?’ And she said, “ ‘Don’t call him Alexander. If you call him Alexander, you’ll have to put him in de gwound!’ ”

Hil shot Mary Rose a questioning look—she didn’t know it was a funny story.
Don’t even try, Hil
.

“I’m surprised you remember that, Mary Rose,” said Dolly, “you were only, how old were you?”

“Five.”

“I mean when Alexander was born.”

“Oh, I … I guess I actually don’t know.”

Dolly was suddenly shouting again, firing the words past Mary Rose’s head. She felt them graze her scalp—“Dunc, how old was Mary Rose when Alexander-Who-Died was born?!”

“What?” he answered irritably. “What’re you worried about that for?”

“I’m not ‘worried,’ Dunc!” And to Hil, “She would have been, let me think now …”

“Where’s that picture, Mum? The one of us visiting his grave.”

“Was there a picture?”

“Dad took it, remember?” She looked over at her father for corroboration but he appeared to be dozing off. She set his drink down at his elbow and removed the cup and saucer. She returned to her mother, speaking quietly. “It’s of me and you and Maureen. It was cold, you gave me your sweater.”

“It wasn’t cold, it was April.”

“See, you do remember.”

Matthew piped up, “Jitdy, can I have some ice cream?”

“Shh, Matthew.”

“Sure,” replied Dunc, rallying, hands on the armrests, about to rise.

“No, Dad, not yet, please.”

He winked at Matthew. “She’s the boss. Come here, Matt, and keep me company while the women finish making supper. Did you know all the best chefs in the world are men?”

“I was going to do something, now what was it?” said Dolly.

“Solve Fermat’s Last Theorem?”

“I was going to take a suppository, come.”

“I am not going into the bathroom with you.”

“You’re saucy, come with me now, I want to give you something.”

She topped up her Scotch again and followed her mother into her bedroom where Dolly started going through her jewellery box. Mary Rose braced herself—what was her mother about to bestow upon her? A diamond? A dime-store bracelet? Would she be able to tell the difference?

Dolly had moved on to a bottom drawer in her dresser and now she threw something at Mary Rose with a flapping sound. A calendar. “He painted the whole thing with his foot!”

“Really. What happened to his arms?”

“What was I going to give you?” Dolly dropped her arms to her sides with a jangle of bangles. “Golly Moses, Mary Roses, your mother’s losin’ ’er mind.”

This was not different. The confusion, the juggling act. There was no new ingredient, just an old one missing: anger. Like a maze without a minotaur.

“It’s okay, Mum.”

From the living room came the velvet tones of Nat King Cole posing the age-old question to Mona Lisa. As though summoned, Dolly left the room. Mary Rose followed to see her father dancing a
slow, bouncy circle with Maggie in his arms—the child had one hand on his shoulder and the other fastened round his thumb. She was gazing at him with a gravity and contentment that Mary Rose recognized, and she paused, held, too, by the evening light that had inhabited the room. Splendid. Impossible to believe that light could be anything but particulate, so thick and honey-sweet it was, light reflecting light, pouring through the glass doors, suffusing the room with an aching loveliness, rendering the moment at once immortal and irretrievably lost. The song ended, he set her down, and Mary Rose watched as Maggie made a run for the sun.

“Maggie!”—Mary Rose caught her round the middle before she could bang into the glass, and the child screamed in protest.

“Gently!” cried Duncan, his voice reedy with alarm.

Mary Rose set Maggie down and tapped on the glass to show her the door was closed.

“Is she all right?”

She turned. Her father was white as paper.

“She’s fine, Dad.”

“Don’t be getting after her now.” His voice had splintered to a whisper.

“I’m not, Dad, I’m not angry at her.”

“All right, then, no paneek.” He turned to his CD tower.

“Are you okay, Dad?”

He cleared his throat. “Oh I’m fine, it’s just you’ve got to be careful when you grab hold of a child like that.”

“Golly Moses,” said Dolly. “I thought she was going to run right off the balcony.”

From the hi-fi issued sounds of impending battle, a massed drum roll heralding a blast of bagpipes.

Duncan taped an orange cross on the glass at toddler-eye level. Dolly turned the raw kibbeh onto a serving platter, mounded it smooth and
imprinted a crucifix with the edge of her hand. “In the name of the Father!” she intoned, raising her other hand in the sign of the cross and looking like the conductor of an orchestra. Duncan lowered the volume on “The Massacre at Glencoe” and they gathered round the dining table, Matthew on his booster seat, Maggie in her high chair.

She watched as Dolly, in accordance with long custom, stood and dismembered the chicken by hand, tearing a wing from the bird and offering it to her. “You don’t want the wing? No—Maureen’s the one who likes the wing, Hilary, do you like the wing?”

“Sure, Dolly.”

She plopped the wing onto Hil’s plate.

“Einmal wein, Fraulein?” said Duncan, graciously pouring Liebfraumilch into Hil’s glass—a medium-sweet German white wine to accompany raw kibbeh to the tune of muted Highland outrage.

The table was groaning, Dolly had somehow managed to make tabbouleh along with everything else. Now she was pouring powdered milk for the children from a recycled tomato sauce bottle.

“Mum, there’s real milk in the fridge, I brought some—”

But Matthew drained his glass and held it out for more, while Maggie sucked hers back two-fisted from a sippy cup.

“Is that what happened to your arm?” asked Dolly.

Mary Rose felt her stomach drop. “What do you mean, Mum?”

“Where’s the chow chow?” asked Duncan, looking up suddenly.

“What do you want chow chow for?” asked Dolly.

“For the kibbeh.”

“You don’t eat chow chow with kibbeh,” cried Dolly, “that’s a desecration!”

Duncan gave his grandson a crafty smile. “Eat it all up now, Matthew, it’ll put hair on your chest.”

Mary Rose caught Hil’s eye. Had her father not heard what her mother had just asked her? Mixing up a balcony with a patio door in a moment of fear was understandable, but for her mother to forget that
Mary Rose had had bone cysts … Unless he was in denial. Or keeping something from her and her siblings—a diagnosis … 
Alzheimer’s
. She felt the old gluey sensation stir in her esophagus at the mere thought of speaking the word. But if she allowed her mother’s question to be derailed by her father, she would be enabling the family dynamic of denial and suppression.

“I had bone cysts, Mum. Remember?”

“Of course I do, dear, I’m your mother.”

Relief. No need to ask her father anything point-blank, they could stick to neurology and the cosmos. She reached for the Liebfraumilch. Her parents’ wineglasses were small, in keeping with their generation—having grown up during the Great Depression when a whole family shared one pair of shoes, a china cabinet full of 1950s stemware must have looked like Versailles—thus she calculated she was really still on her first glass of wine.

Maggie had green potatoes in her hair, Matthew was somehow already in possession of a bowl of chocolate ice cream. Duncan was regaling Hil, “I remember Gordie Howe’s last game at the Montreal Forum …”

Was it the familiarity of the story her father was telling? Or the conflation of a patio with a balcony door, slabs of time jammed up against one another like ice on Lake Ontario … They were eating at the very table at which she had sat so often while her mother cursed her and her father sat by, eyes on the ceiling. It had served as the kitchen table back before her parents downsized. Light being what it is, those scenes were still being played out somewhere … Only time separated those events from this one. Twenty years ago, in this very seat, she was shell-shocked.