Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

Sigh . “Like what?”

“Like I’m your enemy.”

“I’m sorry, it’s cultural, okay? I’m half Mediterranean, I’m not a WASP, you’re the one who sounds scary, all calm and rational — where are you going?”

“I think I’ll go to bed.”

“Don’t walk away! It makes me crazy when you—”

Mary Rose balled her fists and jammed them against her forehead.

Hilary sat down again. “What do you want me to do, Mary Rose?”

Mary Rose bored her knuckles into her scalp, rigid with anger, furious at herself for being furious. The only way to get unfurious would be to have a huge fight with Hilary, during which Hil would unleash her victimy wrath before becoming rehumanized in Mary Rose’s eyes by crying, after which she would reassuringly resume her pedestal by being coldly critical of Mary Rose who would silently batter her own head and wind up rocking in the fetal position on the guest room bed so as not to wake the children while she waited for the corrosive tide of neurochemicals to retreat, repenting of everything, most fervently of the fact that she had ever been born. Unless Hil was going to slap her. She stole an upward glance from between clenched fists.

But Hil wasn’t crying. Nor did she look poised to strike. She was looking at Mary Rose in a way that made her feel … disoriented. Which was a change from furious.

“Watch The Sopranos with me,” Mary Rose answered meekly.

“Okay.”

Play . Tony was mad at Dr. Melfi for dissing his mother who had just put out a contract on his life. Mary Rose laughed. Hilary was silent.

Mary Rose said, “I just remembered something my mum used to say when I would tell her about my arm being sore, she’d say, ‘If it’s sore, that’s your badness coming out in you.’ ”

“I thought you said she didn’t know it was sore.”

She decided to let Hil have the last word. She was a woman after all. So was Mary Rose, of course, but … Hil was more traditionally feminine … even if she was a lot like Mary Rose’s father. What does it mean when you marry your father and she’s a woman who favours heels and handbags?

Later that night they were in bed and Mary Rose was slipping deliciously down the slope when she zoomed awake for no reason. She listened. Hil was asleep. “Hil? Are you awake?”

“Hmm?”

She felt Hilary’s hand find its way around her waist — even through sleep, Hil’s touch was elegant. She laced her fingers through Hil’s and turned toward her. Maybe they could just have sleepy sex — like the good old days, when Hil could get right into it without the aid of a twenty-minute back rub. But as though she had heard Mary Rose’s thought, Hil suddenly got out of bed.

“Sorry,” said Mary Rose.

“What for?”

“Waking you up.”

“You didn’t wake me up, I’m hungry.”

“Oh, I thought you were — I thought you thought I was trying to — never mind.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” said Hil, “I woke you up.”

“Actually, I woke you.”

“Oh, did you want to have sex?”

“No, no, I was just, um …”

“I’m going to get some cereal.”

“Do you want a back rub?”

“No, I’m just hungry.”

“Do you mind if I come down with you?”

“You make me sound like the common cold, of course I don’t mind, Mister.”

She could not shake an abject feeling — perhaps it was the disorientation of not having had a huge fight with Hil — it was as though she were back in grade three with a shameful crush on Lisa Snodgrass. Rising, she felt the familiar capsule break in the pit of her stomach and the dark elixir seep into her bloodstream. Guilt . But why? Her Catholic upbringing had left her prone to attacks of it like recurring bouts of malaria in old soldiers. Maybe she’d been born with a low guilt threshold, the way people are born with green eyes or black hair. Or bone cysts.

She followed Hilary down the stairs, Daisy barged past, a four-legged emergency vehicle, and it came to her: she was guilty of having wasted the taxpayers’ money with her trip to the bone doctor today, bingo . The dark elixir gave way to a malodorous shame cloud, as though she had been caught masturbating in Dr. Ostroph’s waiting room — another unbidden thought, not to mention absurd, humerus clitoris!

She would take guilt over shame any day — the dark elixir over the smelly cloud. Dark elixir … like the Black Tears with which the Ebony Elf replenishes her enchanted pool. In the second book, Kitty is aided in her quest to save Jon by a girl with pretty but painful feet who is really a unicorn under a spell of disenchantment. The girl can lead Kitty to the Land With No Name where the Black Tears flow, but only if Kitty brings her the magical instrument whose song will restore her true nature: a flute fashioned from the bone of a Bird of Pray … But what, Mary Rose now wondered, were the Black Tears actually made of? And how might Dr. Quinn use them to further his evil plan? These were questions for the third in the trilogy: Return to Otherwhere .

She reached for the magnetic pen next to the phone and jotted on the grocery list, Black Tears = grief/guilt? Cure/cause cancer?

Hil was at the pantry cupboard, pouring cereal into a bowl. “Do you need me to pick something up tomorrow? I can do the shopping.”

“No, I just thought of something.”

“For the third?”

“Maybe.”

She felt Hil kiss the back of her neck, but she slipped the embrace, went to the fridge, pulled open the freezer and promptly forgot what she was looking for.

“Do you want to go back to work?” asked Hil.

“Why? Am I doing such a lousy job here?” She tried to make it sound like a joke.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m cleaning the vinyl stripping on the freezer drawer,” said Mary Rose. “You should see it, it’s ready to sprout.”

“Look at these Halloween cookie cutters,” she said the next day, hauling jute bags up the back steps into the kitchen. “I got them two for a loonie.”

“You didn’t have to do the shopping, babe, I was going to,” said Hil.

“You can help unpack.”

Hil held up a blue package. “We already have Q-tips.”

“We have them in our bathroom. These are for the kitchen.”

“… Why?”

“How do you think I got the vinyl stripping on the freezer so clean? And look at the buttons on the Bose, you can see the edges now, they were gummed over. And see? Everyone thinks a dishwasher is clean by definition, right?” She opened it and pointed with relish. “Well, all along the inside edge here … gross, eh? …” She tore the plastic from the fresh box of Q-tips.

“Can’t you just go upstairs and get Q-tips whenever you want?” asked Hil.

Mary Rose straightened and sighed, unaware, until she spoke, of the depth of her outrage. “Why should I have to? Why, in my own house, can I not have a box of kitchen-specific Q-tips? You never have to see them, you never have to use them — why would you, since I’m the one who does the shopping and the deep cleaning anyway”—she could hear herself over-articulating, like her father, a caricature of expository calm, but she could not stop—“I fail to understand why, at forty-eight, I have not earned, along with a decent amount of money, the right to have kitchen Q-tips.”

She saw Hilary’s expression harden, and quailed. She had gone too far. She laughed. “Hilary, I’m just making fun of myself.”

Maggie climbed onto the stepstool, turned the water on and started “doing the dishes.” Matthew drove his train into the kitchen. Mary Rose knew she didn’t have a chance, Hilary would zero in for the kill, knowing Mary Rose would not risk escalating in front of the children and therefore would take anything Hil dished out.