Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

“She’ll be twenty-three in two weeks. I stopped her for an illegal left turn.”

“You don’t do traffic.”

“I’m always on duty.”

She feels her face heating up. “Andy-Pat, you have to stay away from young ones, they’re a waste of time, even women in their thirties, the thirties are when people let themselves go ’cause they don’t realize they’re getting older, plus their divorce is too fresh and they’re dealing with custody. Find a nice teacher in her forties, her kids are older, she’s intelligent, well-rounded, plus she’s looking after herself now, she’s a frost-free tower of perimenopausal sex with no waxy buildup. You don’t have to look great to get a great woman, Andy-Pat, you just have to be an employed straight white male with a pulse.” She freshens their glasses. “Up yer kilt.”

“We’re not actually, technically, white , Mary Rose. Mum is a visible minority.”

He’s had sensitivity training through the Force.

“She’s not not-white, Andy-Pat, she’s just Lebanese, she’s Canadian—”

“She’s of Arab extraction. I think we both know what that means nowadays, Mister Sister.” He swirls his Scotch a tad ruefully.

“It means everyone wants to eat our food even though they made fun of us for it when we were kids.”

“Try entering the US with the name Mahmoud stamped on your passport instead of MacKinnon,” he says with police-forcely gravitas .

Try growing up as a lesbian in our family. But she doesn’t say it .

“What happened to your fridge?” he asks.

She tells him: she threw Maggie’s doll stroller across the kitchen. The doll wasn’t in it at the time. She’d been ransacking the house, looking for something — lost objects are her bêtes noires —her gaze fell on the stroller and she allowed herself the outlet.

“Do you remember the time Dad broke his hand on the doorstep?” she says with a grin. Her question is rhetorical: the Time Dad Broke His Hand is canonical, a stock “remember-when.” Or, as Andy-Patrick used to say when he was little, “me-member.”

Their mother was the one with the short wick, but their father used to assault inanimate objects, always with an expression of outraged innocence followed by red-faced Highland triumph. “There! That’ll teach that godforsaken lawn mower a thing or two. Probably designed by a Frenchman!” Garden hoses, bicycle spokes, boot racks, all manner of things tasted his wrath — except for the time he throttled Mo over the missing tent pegs, but that became a funny story almost immediately.

The doorstep thing happened way back when they lived in Kingston; the screen door caught Dad on the heel and he yelped — dangerously funny to Mary Rose and Andy-Patrick, who must have laughed, perhaps triggering the face-saving assault on the doorstep, for their father turned, genuflected and brought down his fist like a gavel, breaking one of the myriad tiny fishbones that make up the human hand. It required a cast, of which they were perversely proud, and their father told the story better than anyone, insisting, with a twinkle, that the door frame had been dealt “just retribution.” Was that before or after her first surgery when she wound up in a cast of her own? Was it before or after her mother’s last miscarriage? Time measured out in dead babies, broken bones and postings. You had to be there to know it was actually loads of fun a lot of the time.

She expects Andy-Patrick to laugh about her dented fridge — she is laughing. But he says, “We were raised with a lot of rage.”

She nods. If he wants to go there, she can go there with the best of them. “Exactly,” she says. “Which is how I know the difference between a dented fridge and a battered child.”

“What? I, I didn’t mean that.”

“I know how we were raised, Andy-Pat, I was there long before you came along.”

“I’m sorry, I know you’re not like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like Mum.”

“Are you saying Mum battered us?” she retorts casually.

“No! No, no.”

“Some people would call it that.”

“… Would you call it that?”

“I’d call it …” —she pauses—“… colourful.”

“Me too.”

She bellows suddenly, “ ‘C’mere till I annihilate the both o’ ya!’ ”

“ ‘C’mere till I beat the daylights outta ya!’ ” He captures the quivering vulnerability at the white core of anger.

“ ‘C’mere, demon!’ ”

“ ‘C’mere, hateful!’ ”

They laugh.

Sip.

“Mum was from a different time and place,” he says, relaxing, stretching out his legs.

“Mum was incredible, it’s incredible what she accomplished, she was the only one in her family to go past high school.”

“Apart from the priest and nun,” he points out.

“Exactly. Mum was amazing. Remember the time she conducted the church choir and got them to sing ‘Hava Nagila’?”

“Remember when you opened the back door on my birthday cake and she iced it anyway and called it a ‘hurricane cake’?”

They get giddy again. They sip.

“People did all kinds of things to their kids back then without batting an eye.”

“I got the strap at school,” he says.

“I got the yardstick.”

“Did you get the belt?”

She looks up. “No. Did you?”

“Once or twice.”

“Mum never gave me the belt.”

“Not Mum. Dad.”

“Dad gave you the belt?”

She hesitates. Does this change anything? Mum-on-the-rampage is one thing, but Dad … discerning, even-tempered Dad — the mere fact he might think you deserving of such humiliation, never mind mete it out …

“When?”

“Aunt Sadie was visiting, I think I was five.”

“Why?” she asks.

“I don’t know, I was a brat—”

“He must have been under some kind of pressure. Well, can you imagine living with Mum?”

“We don’t have to imagine it,” he says with a grin.

Does the belt mean her brother suffered more? Surely she is the winner of the family suffering sweepstakes. The thought has landed like a stray ball over the fence … She will examine it more closely later, but for now Andy-Pat needs the benefit of her clarity.

“Okay, that’s my point, A&P.” She knows he has never minded being nicknamed after a grocery store chain — it beats being named after a dead sibling. “I’ve got Hilary and the kids now and I don’t dwell on what I went through with Mum and Dad, but you need to take a good hard look at some unresolved issues—”

“I want to meet someone like Hilary. Someone beautiful and nice and funny who’s a bit smarter than me.”

“She’s not smarter than me.”

“In the Dad way, yes she is, you know, someone with a tidy mind.”

“I mean, Hilary’s smart, but …”

“I wish I was a lesbian.”

“Mum was … rough with us — okay? — by today’s standards, but …” The Scotch feels to be dissolving her stomach lining — it’s okay to drink booze with Advil, it’s Tylenol that’s the problem. “Whether it’s physical or verbal, it’s all … it’s the shame factor, right? I mean, it didn’t wreck us or anything, we had a lot of great times …”

“We had tons of great times.”

“But we’re kind of wrecked,” she says.

“We’re a bit wrecked.”

“We’re great, too. Mum and Dad were great.”

“They were great.”

“But it makes you hate yourself,” she says.

“And that makes you dangerous.”

“… Say that again?”

“It makes you dangerous,” he says. “A person who hates themself is dangerous.”

“Andy-Patrick, that is really smart.”

“I got it from Amber.”