Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

But Hil said, “You’re right. I just wonder if you really need to clean that hard.”

“Cleaning is important to me. It’s part of my job.”

“We have a cleaning lady.”

“She does the broad strokes.”

“We could ask her to Q-tip the kitchen.” Hil looked amused.

Mary Rose realized she had been yearning to see that look, to have the forgiving Hilary back, the easygoing one who could laugh at Mary Rose’s faults and turn them into foibles. And here she was, beautiful, smiling, surpassing even her sympathetic forbearance of the night before when Mary Rose had been channelling Tony Soprano. I love you, Hil .

But she said, “Well, you may consider it beneath contempt, but I don’t think it’s a waste of my time, there are Zen masters who do this.”

Hil straight out laughed, but Mary Rose maintained her stony composure.

“As long as you’re happy,” said Hil.

“I’m happy,” she hissed through clenched teeth. And watched the amusement die in Hilary’s eyes.

•

The child is standing with its hands pressed against the glass door to the balcony.

“Come away from there.” says Dolly.

Bang. Bang, bang .

It is a warm sunny day. April, now. But she has closed and locked the door — her husband says the bars are too close to allow the child to slip through, but Dolly can’t be sure.

Bang, bang!

“Cut it out, now.”

Bang. Bang. Bang .

She turns her face to the back of the couch. She can stay lying down, nothing bad will happen.

•

The alarm does not sound — not that she can hear — but she runs down the six or seven flights of stairs anyway. At the very bottom she exits through another fire door, expecting to emerge onto Mount Sinai Hospital’s retail concourse and food court, only to find herself in a quiet corridor, its walls of cinder block painted a grief-green. A wheeled yellow bin is parked directly in front of her, its side stamped in black letters, INCINERATE. She bangs back into the stairwell and does not breathe until she has crossed the busy concourse and emerged onto University Avenue where she takes a big gulp of healthy Tuesday traffic. It is 11:10 a.m., she has fifty minutes all to herself before she has to be home to relieve Candace.

She hops on her bike and, conscious of a not altogether unpleasant squishiness left over from the lube, rides up the urban canyon. To her left, Princess Margaret, the hospital that cancer built; to her right, the Hospital for Sick Children, its main entrance adorned with a neon train to mitigate terror — most of it the parents’. She stands on the pedals, ascending the slope of an ancient lakebed, rolling over millennial mysteries, over bones and battles up to Queen’s Park, the noble neo-Gothic pile where the provincial government sits and her brother liaises with it. She sails around the Legislature and coasts into the park proper, where a copper-cast King Edward VII presides astride his fiery steed. Despite municipal efforts, the horse’s penis is perpetually painted red, owing perhaps to the proximity of the University of Toronto and its scheming spires. She looks up as she glides along — overhead the threnody of bare branches hums with new life set to burst into song. This year she will catch the moment when the world turns green.

She exits the park at the war memorial, to her left the Royal Ontario Museum — the ROM — rite of passage for schoolchildren province-wide with its dinosaur skeletons and mummies, its totem poles and tomb treasure — all that separates a memorial from a museum is time. And power. To the victor the stories … She reaches Bloor Street and turns left, heading west.

The Museum was recently the subject of lively controversy owing to a glass addition that some hailed as a “world-class” architectural landmark and others reviled as a barnacle. Toronto is like that. Its truly beautiful buildings do their job without drawing a lot of attention, neither soaring nor splitting light. Some, like City Hall, testify to the optimism of the sixties when space was there for the curving, and as for the rest, it is a preponderance of Victorian utility that in some quarters has lent itself to gentrification, in others hipsterfication, while vast tracts retain the spartan rectitude that earned the city its nickname, “Toronto the Good.” A combination of corruption and consensus has often stymied visionaries such that the city has not gelled in the popular imagination around any one icon. The CN Tower is tall. So are a lot of things. What Toronto boasts is life, bulges with it, a metropolis of non-joiners, a collection of communities from all parts of the planet that swell and spill into one another. At the corner of Spadina Avenue, she stops at the lights — maybe she ought to nip across and rejoin the Jewish Community Centre, start getting back into serious shape—“You don’t have to be Jewish to join!” But as she navigates the crush of pedestrians she spots her ex, Renée, sitting in the window of the adjacent Second Cup, and presses on, pausing to give a loonie to the woman who, for the past ten years, has stood at the northwest corner of Spadina and Bloor chanting, “Can you spare a loonie for my son and I?” Mary Rose again resists correcting her, “For my son and me ,” as she drops the dollar coin into the chewed-looking Tim Hortons coffee cup. She has never seen any sign of a son — clearly the woman has worse problems than faulty grammar. She continues west along Bloor, past the Shoppers Drug Mart where she and Hil spent a fortune on pee sticks, and wonders what to do with her extra forty minutes.

She has lived here long enough to have seen the street change clothes if not character, and behind every new facade she can still see earlier ones layered like old movie posters. She passes the Bloor Superfresh that everyone still calls the Bloor Super Save — it was the first twenty-four-hour store on the strip and in the days before Sunday shopping, certain aisles were cordoned off, it being for some reason legal to buy milk but not Q-tips on the Lord’s Day. She sees one of the dads from Matthew’s school.

“Hi, Mary Rose.”

He is a political cartoonist — or is he the physicist? She slows.

“Hi … Keith.”

“When’s the book coming out?”

It’s a funny turn of phrase, as though the book were cowering in the closet. “When Maggie’s in university!” she replies. Past the natural food store with its medicinal whiff of buckwheat. Vegetarians used to be cadaverous killjoys with no use for food other than to push the food that was already in them out, but now the woods are full of friendly vegans — some things really do get better.

Past the corner of Brunswick Avenue where academic loafers huddle over cappuccinos on the crumbling patio of By the Way Café that used to be Lickin’ Chicken; a woman at a rickety table raises a hand in greeting. Mary Rose waves back, “Hi … ( Blank ).” The woman used to run the box office at the Poor Alex Theatre — she looks old. Perhaps she just looks her age. Note to self: when past fifty, avoid Bolivian shawls unless you are Bolivian. Past the candy store that used to be a Hungarian restaurant, past the hip clothing store that used to be a Hungarian restaurant, past the Wiener’s Hardware that has always been Wiener’s Hardware — outside Indra Crafts a knot of schoolgirls sample sticks of incense and examine tiny carved elephants on a table crammed with wares; amid a thickening braid of pedestrians from every sidewalk of life she spots the Native guy striding with his German shepherd off-leash at his side. She rides on, past the old Bloor Cinema on one side and Lee’s Palace on the other, temple of indie rock where she did performance art back in the day and got drunk and met Renée — its exterior is still graffitied, but professionally so now; past a Lebanese restaurant that used to be a Hungarian restaurant, past a Hungarian restaurant, past the bookstore that is still a bookstore, and the Starbucks that used to be everything else.