Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

Maggie picks up her bowl and displays it, sufficiently empty now to reveal the Bunnykin family loading a picnic into the back of their VW Beetle — the manufacturers were apparently unaware that the trunk in a Bug is up front, a flaw that Mary Rose suspects will make it a collectors’ item. She takes it from Maggie before she can drop it — meanwhile, Matthew’s porridge is growing cold. She goes to the foot of the stairs and calls him. No answer. She goes up to his room.

He is sitting on the edge of his bed, having struggled into his undershirt and pants, one sock on — he has begun dressing himself, and Mary Rose has learned to let inside-out shirts and odd socks lie.

“Do you need help, sweetheart?”

He starts crying.

“Matthew, love, what’s the matter?”

His distress always exerts a mortal pressure on her heart, as if the spot reserved for him were pre-tenderized from some previous injury. He does not answer, his head is down.

“What is it, honeybun, is it Tico?” She peers into the plastic network of tunnels and cubbies, but the hamster is curled and breathing in its pod. Thank God.

She joins him on the side of his bed. His little hand is closed over something.

“What are you holding?”

He moans.

She makes to pry open his hand gently, but he pulls away — not before she glimpses what is in it. Glass.

“Are you cut?”

He shakes his head but will not meet her eye.

She glances toward his windowsill. The glass unicorn is standing there, headless.

No! “What happened?”

He shakes his head.

She keeps her voice level. “Did Maggie come in your room and drop your unicorn?”

No answer.

She gets up. Before she is out the door, it is out of her, “Maggie!”

“No!” screams Matthew — he sounds hysterical—“No, No!” and with each word he strikes his head with his fist.

She rushes to his side and catches his arm. “It’s okay, sweetheart, it was an accident, here, give it to Mumma please, I don’t want you to cut yourself.”

She puts her arm around him and he opens his hand. She takes the glass head with its tiny horn. Nothing a little Krazy Glue won’t fix. She slips it into her pocket.

“Mumma can fix that.”

“I don’t want you to fix it.”

“Matthew, why not?”

He clamps his lips together.

She kisses the top of his head.

He stiffens. “I don’t like it when you yell.”

—

She drives her son to school, then heads for Whole Foods. Halfway through tony Yorkville, she slows as she passes the hypnotism building. Remarkably, there is a parking spot available right out front. It is a sign. She is about to back in when she sees her accountant coming out — she puts it in forward and drives off.

He was likely visiting another office — there is a payroll company in there — but she takes it as another sign: if a hypnotist can trick her into forgetting the pain in her arm, what else might they pick from her psychic pocket? Or maybe it’s a sign she shouldn’t be spending so much money at Whole Foods. She pulls a U-turn and heads back toward her own neighbourhood. It starts to rain.

She glances in the rear-view mirror at Maggie strapped into her car seat and playing with stacking cups — she has been talking nonstop back there. There’s to be no nap this morning, perhaps after grocery shopping they’ll go to the Early Years Drop-In so Maggie can run around and build up her immune system with the germy toys. It’s in the community centre at their local park. She was last there in February, seated on a miniature chair in the stuffy gym as toddlers staggered and gnawed on things while it sleeted outside. An attractive younger — they were all younger — mum sat next to her. Her name was Anya. She was pretty but tired, her hair in a fly-away ponytail and her Lululemon yoga wear had gone through the dryer once too often. She looked as though she had probably been in peak shape two years ago. Anya started talking and Mary Rose soon realized she couldn’t stop. Her smile was lovely, chapped lips notwithstanding and she spoke rapidly, one eye on her two toddlers as she told Mary Rose all about the miscarriage she had had. Last week.

She drives past Honest Ed’s on one side, Secrets from Your Sister on the other, and is into the strip of Korean restaurants. She turns right and the great basin that is Christie Pits Park spreads out on her left. A green gouge in the city that started out as a gravel pit, it encompasses an outdoor rink, a pool, a playground and has become the tobogganing destination of choice for new Canadians in winter, while in summer it draws shirtless self-styled soccer stars from every non-hockey-playing nation on earth. On hot nights a giant light standard reigns over the diamond where serious games are called from the booth and cheered from the hill. In the early thirties Christie Pits was the scene of a riot sparked by swastikas at a baseball game, but Toronto, like much of Canada, has cultivated a selective memory, such that few of the dog walkers down there today have any clue of its checkered past. She pulls into the big lot at Fiesta Farms supermarket — unlovely depot on the outside, garden of Eden on the inside.

She lifts Maggie into the shopping cart seat and hands her a snack trap of organic Cheddar Bunnies. Mary Rose loves Fiesta Farms. The CBC National News anchorman shops here — he looks strange without a tie. Her elderly Italian neighbour with the Virgin Mary in her front yard shops here—

“Hi hawney, how are you, kids okay?”

“Hi, Daria, they’re great, say hi, Maggie.”

Funny how you think of someone and then you run into them—

“Hi, Dawia.”

“Ma bellissima!” She gives Maggie a Hershey’s chocolate Kiss without asking Mary Rose — Daria is old school. “You take one for Matthew too, okay, hawney?”

She heads up the dairy aisle and encounters a heavily tattooed musician she used to see at parties. He is sporting his signature porkpie hat but has a baby strapped to his chest. She tells him about the recyclable disposable diapers she and Hil discovered, he says it’s all about papaya these days. He is glazed in that four a.m. feeding way, they speak rapidly then move on, veterans who know enough to spare each other the niceties.

In the pasta aisle, she sees Anya — is there something special about today? If she thinks about Renée, will she appear? Anya has her two toddlers and is looking quite attractive, not so tired, her hair is shiny. Mary Rose feels a rush of warmth. “Hi, Anya”—slowing her cart in benevolent anticipation of a chat tsunami. But Anya smiles and moves on without a flicker of recognition — Mary Rose loses sight of her behind a pyramid of Paris Toasts.

She tries to imagine pouring her heart out about a dead baby to a strange woman, only to forget all about it. Perhaps she has done so and can’t remember. That’s what forgetting is … She stops, momentarily caught in an Escher print of her own psyche, pondering, not for the first time, the degree to which a set of agreed-upon facts, combined with functional memory, determines reality. What is it that holds her, meshed, in this moment? Why is she not falling through time in a vertigo of identity displacement? Does Anya know she is missing a piece? Has her psyche grafted a patch of donor memory over the blank spot? Or did she rip the memory out herself and suture the flaps together? Does she have a scar? Yes, but she would be at a loss to explain it. That’s what “invisible scars” are.

“Mumma,” says Maggie pleasantly. “Peace?”

“Sure,” she says, and lets Maggie choose the pasta.

“Sank you, Mumma.”

Whatever Mary Rose might share incontinently with a stranger, it would not involve a dead baby — that’s her mother’s shtick. While it may seem heartless to refer to it, even inwardly, as “shtick,” it does capture the odd Borscht Belt timing and tone with which her mother has taken to repeating the tales. Like so much trauma chatter.