Ann-Marie MacDonald: Adult Onset

The sound of splashing brings her to her feet.

“Maggie, no, sweetheart, that’s Daisy’s water.”

She bends and pulls the child gently back from the dog dish.

“No!”

“Are you thirsty?”

“Aisy.”

“Is Daisy thirsty?”

“Me!”

“Are you being Daisy?”

Maggie dives for the dog bowl and gets in a slurp before Mary Rose lifts it to the counter.

“No!” cries the child with a clutch at her mother’s right buttock.

Mary Rose fills a sippy cup with filtered water from the fridge dispenser and hands it to Maggie. The child launches it across the floor. The mother escalates with the offer of jam on a rice cake. The child, after a dangerous pause, accepts. Détente. Another placated potentate. The mother returns to her laptop. Ask not for whom the cursor blinks …

The phone rings. A long-distance ring. She feels adrenalin spurt in the pit of her stomach. A glance at the display dispels the faint hope that it might be Hilary calling from out west. It is her mother. She stares at the phone, cordless but no less umbilical for that. She can’t talk to her mother right now, she is busy formulating a fitting reply to her father’s e-mail. Her father, who always had time for her. Ring-ring! Her father, who never raised his voice; whose faith in her gifts allowed her to achieve liftoff from the slough of despond of childhood — and grow up to write books about the slough of despond of childhood. Ring-ring! Besides, talking on the phone works like a red flag on Maggie; Mary Rose will wind up having to cut the call short and there will go her precious scrap of time to deal with e-mail and all manner of domestic detritus before grocery shopping, then picking up Matthew and then hurrying home to purée the slow-roasted tomatoes into an “easy rustic Tuscan sauce.” Ring-ring!

On the other hand, maybe her father is dead and this is the phone call for which she has been bracing all her life … His lovely e-mail will end up having been his last words to her. Maybe that’s what killed him — he finally got in touch with his emotions and now he is dead. And it is her fault. Unless her mother is dead and it is her father calling, which has always seemed less likely — Dad rarely makes phone calls. Besides, in the event of an emergency, her parents would phone her older sister, Maureen, and Maureen would phone Mary Rose. She breathes. Her parents are safe and sound in their sublet condo in Victoria, where they spend the mild west coast winters close to her big sister and her family.

No sooner has she allowed it to ring through to voice mail, however, than she experiences another spurt of fear: it might indeed be Maureen calling … from their parents’ condo . Mo visits daily and perhaps she arrived this morning to find both their parents dead — one from a stroke, the other from a heart attack brought on by discovering the deceased spouse. Though her neocortex deems this unlikely, Mary Rose’s hand, being on closer terms with her amygdala, is already cold as she picks up the phone and, feeling like the traitor she is, presses flash so as to screen the call just in case someone isn’t dead. Her mother’s big rich voice chops through. “You’re not there! I just called”—here she bursts into song—“to say, I love you!”

From the floor, Maggie cries, “Sitdy!”—this being Arabic for grandmother because nothing in Mary Rose’s life is simple — and reaches for the phone. Mary Rose could kick herself. She presses end , cutting her mother off mid-warble with a stab of guilt, but hands Maggie the phone to stave off a complete toddler meltdown and feels even guiltier since it is rather like handing the child an empty candy wrapper. Maggie pushes buttons, trying to retrieve “Sitdy!” An urgent beeping gives way to the implacable female automaton, “Please hang up and try your call again.”

Maggie responds with a stream of toddler invective.

“Please hang up … now ,” commands the voice, cool and beyond supplication, as though the speaker has witnessed too many of one’s crimes to be moved now by one’s cries. “ This is a recording.”

“Maggie, give Mumma the phone, sweetheart.”

“No!” Still frantically pressing buttons. She is a beautiful child, dimples and sparkly hazel eyes. She does everything fast, runs everywhere, and her curls have an electromagnetic life of their own.

“Sitdy’s gone, honey, she hung up.” Another deception.

“Hello?” A female voice, but neither a frosty recording nor the jolly gollywoggle of Sitdy, it is—

“Mummy!” cries Maggie, phone jammed to the side of her head. “Hi, hi!”

“Give Mumma the phone, Maggie. Maggie, give it to me.”

“No!” she screams. “Mummy!” She runs away down the hall.

Hilary’s going to think I’m beating our child —“Hil!” she calls in pursuit, tripping over the stroller, slipping on something viscous — dog bile—“Maggie speed-dialed by accident!”

“That’s okay,” comes Hil’s voice, tinny but merry through the phone. “How are you, Maggie Muggins?”

Maggie holes up under the piano bench in the living room. “I love you, Mummy.” Hil is Mummy to Mary Rose’s Mumma —the latter’s claim to “ethnicity” on her Lebanese mother’s side informing her designation, and Hilary’s WASP heritage reflected in hers.

She retreats to the kitchen table — Hilary can always hang up if she has to — now is her chance to frame a worthy reply to her father’s enlightened and loving e-mail. She takes a breath. Of course it would be Dad who would appreciate the socio-political importance of the video — he was always the rational one, the one who sat still and read books, the one who saw her intelligence shining like a beacon through the fog of her early school failures. What can she say that will encompass how grateful she is, how much she loves him? Love . The word is like a red bird she catches mid-flight, “Dad, look what I got you!” Look, before I have to let it go! He isn’t just her father, he was her saviour. She has written this in cards to him in the past, but she can’t have said it quite right because he never offers much indication that he has received them — he’ll greet her with the usual smile and pat on the head but never say, “I got your note.” She once asked him, “Did you get my note?” He nodded absently, “Mm-hm,” then asked how her work was going. At these times it was as if he were coated in something pristine but impenetrable. Perhaps she had crossed the line in presuming to tell him he was a wonderful father. Are her notes too emotional? Mushy was the word when she was a kid. Regardless of how she words them, she always feels there is something fevered in her letters; as though she were writing from the heart of some disaster in which he is implicated — from a hospital bed or a war zone, from death row. The kind of letter haunted by an unwritten qualifier: in spite of .

Dear Dad,

I was touched to deceive

Delete .

I wery much appreciated your

Delete .

Thank your for you note. I love you and your message feels very healing

Delete .

“Ow!”

The child has hung up the phone on her foot. “Sowwy”—sly smile, all curls and creamy cheeks.

Mary Rose heads to the hall closet, where she takes Tickle Me Elmo down from the shelf — he sings and does the chicken dance when you press his foot, they have two of them, both gifts from childless friends — sets the fuzzy red imp on the kitchen floor. She wipes up the dog slime, fills a non-BPA plastic “snack trap” with peeled, cut-up organic grapes and thrusts it at her child. She feels like Davy Crockett at the Alamo — that oughta hold ’em for a few minutes. Maggie presses Elmo’s foot and he erupts with an invitation to do the chicken dance. Mary Rose returns to her laptop, tight in the chest, annoyed that she seems suddenly to be annoyed for no reason.