Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

With each move the MacKinnons left something behind: broken toys, outgrown clothes, babies. What they left they did not remember so much as mythologize. Mary Rose left her tonsils in Hamilton. Though less lyrical than a heart left in San Francisco, they did, according to her father, enjoy the distinction of being flushed into the Niagara sewage system and going over the Falls. “Now you can say you’ve been over the Falls without a barrel,” he said with a grin. It made her feel quirky and brave, took the edge off the fiery sword in her throat.

She got older and realized her tonsils had more likely been incinerated as hospital waste and gone up the smokestack. In any case, they were somewhere. Everything was. Each night in her prayers: “God bless Mum and Dad and Maureen and Other Mary Rose and Alexander-Who-Died and Andy-Patrick and the other Others …” The latter were the souls of her would-have-been siblings. They accounted for Dolly’s frequent, “There would have been seven of you kids, not three. Or wait now, you might have been eight.” The miscarriages. Nameless “others” who became part of family lore, like Other Mary Rose and Alexander-Who-Died.

The Rh factor was responsible for all the deaths: the first pregnancy is fine, but after that if the fetus’s blood is not Rh negative, the mother’s antibodies attack it. Mary Rose has always thought of herself as a lucky person, a belief rooted perhaps in having been born between two dead siblings: she won the blood-type roulette. It is why she is here — that, and the fact that her older sister didn’t drop her from the balcony back in Germany.

There is a cartoon she once came across in the New Yorker : A kangaroo stands on a busy street corner. At its feet, face down on the sidewalk lies a man in a business suit, a bullet hole in his back. The kangaroo’s eyes are shifted guiltily to one side. The caption consists of its thought: That was meant for me .

Whenever the past started piling up behind Mary Rose, threatening to collapse, the family would move and presto, she would get another second chance. She got good at being new. They all did. The MacKinnons were always new, always almost just like everyone else. Always next door to normal. It was like growing up in the witness protection programme without changing your name.

It isn’t just luck — her shiny life despite the cold draft at her back. Although she will not say it aloud, Mary Rose MacKinnon believes herself to have been the beneficiary of divine intervention. A feat for an atheist. Her grade one teacher had written “slow” on her report card back in Trenton. It was a designation that dogged her through two schools and was set to blight the third when they were posted four hours back up the shore of Lake Ontario to Kingston.

It was known as the “limestone city,” with its historic forts and prisons, its universities and hospitals. Numbered among the latter was the loony bin, which was what everyone called The Ontario Hospital — itself a name that had acquired, by its very blandness, a sinister aspect. Kingston was where Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s “Father of Confederation,” had hatched the plot that would become a country, and the older buildings harboured a trillion stories, constructed as they were of the fossilized remains of plants and animals that had gone to sediment and turned to stone.

She was set to enter grade four at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School when Duncan made an appointment to see the principal.

Mary Rose was, by then, accustomed to being slow. Other kids would unaccountably take books from their desks and turn to page seventy-nine, or produce potatoes they’d brought from home and commence carving them into letters, dipping them in paint. She could neither draw a simple circle nor colour inside the lines. These were yardsticking offences. The blows were not severe, it being more about the humiliation factor: boys got the yardstick. To be a girl and get the yardstick meant you were outcast. Mercifully, she was already so otherwhere, she was unaware of being cast out. It began in kindergarten when she failed nap, and went downhill from there.

She focused on faces, tones of voice, on the pulsations of air around the speaker, the shape and texture of sounds, colour and character of numbers and letters —a was red, e was green, 4 was brown, 5 was red, 3 was female, 7 was male, b was dumb, 3 was mean, 4 was kind, m was blue, q was yellow, j was a loner, 7 was sexy, 8 was orange, 2 was white like a stone tablet … She missed a great deal of what was actually said. “Pay attention!” Letters traded places, words vaulted the page. See Jane fall! Did the universe cease to exist each time she blinked? Black void, yawning for one second. Or, if not, was everyone eating chocolate cake each time she blinked then hiding it the moment she opened her eyes? See Jane run!

The principal of Our Lady of Lourdes was Sister O’Halloran — a modern nun in boxy skirt suit, her crucifix and lipstick-free face the only clues that she was a bride of Christ. Duncan met with her and together they cooked up a plan to have Mary Rose skip grade four. A new mythology put forth its petals: her problem was not that she was slow, it was that she was smart. “I’m not an ugly duckling. I’m a beautiful swan!”

She had been bored, her father told her, merely in need of a challenge. “Like Einstein,” he said. No pressure . “You’re going to be accelerated.” She was eight, she took it in: I am going to be excelerated . He framed it as an experiment in which either outcome would be honourable: If, after a trial period, she wished to fall back to grade four with her own age group, she could. No harm done. But if she thrived in grade five, then … “The sky’s the limit.”

Time opened up and swallowed grade four (which was brown). It was a change so entire that all that had come before was Chaos, and all that followed was Light. She entered grade five (red) and went from Dunce to Brain. It was a miracle on the order of Lourdes itself: Our Lady made her skip a grade. She paid attention, and got used to being the youngest.

These days she is getting used to being the oldest, hanging out in playgrounds with women a good ten or fifteen years her junior. There are worse things than having a free pass to the yummy mummy club. Not that she flirts. From her living room come strains of her mother singing Carmen through the phone. “Toreado-rah don’t spit on the floo-rah, use the cuspidor-ah, that’s-ah what it’s for-ah …!”

She leaves the bathroom, returns the scissors to the knife block — and remembers where she last saw them: in her own hand, opening the box with the Christmas tree stand. She must have left them on the kitchen floor amid the packing materials, and Maggie dropped the car key in exchange for them. Though it crosses her mind to blame Jesus for having invented Christmas, Mary Rose knows it was her own fault that her child was playing with scissors. Scissors that could sever a finger, sink through the soft bone of a child …

In the living room, Maggie is now demolishing Matthew’s wooden tracks while Sitdy sings “Hello, Dolly!” indefatigably through the phone receiver face down on the floor. Mary Rose bends and picks it up.

“Hi, Mum, thanks for entertaining Maggie.”

“Where’s Hilary?”

Listening comprehension has never been her mother’s strong suit.

“Mum, she’s in Winnipeg, she’s—”

“Have you heard from your brother?”

“What? Not recently, no.”

She is starting to get that old familiar hazed feeling — why try to keep hold of a train of thought when it is bound to be derailed?

“What in the name o’ time is goin’ on, we haven’t heard from him in—”