Ann-Marie MacDonald: Adult Onset

“Maggie?” But Maggie is … on pause. “Maggie, sweetheart.”

The child suddenly looses a siren wail and Mary Rose squints against the blast — for such a rugged little hellion, Maggie can be surprisingly sensitive. Mary Rose gets to her feet and paces the floor with the howling child, back and forth past the big kitchen windows as, deep within her middle-aged ear canal, numberless cilia curl and die, drawing nigh the day when she, like her elderly dehydrating parents, will exasperate her own adult children with repeated, “What?! Did you want a pin or a pen?!” Though it would seem from her robust and sustained protest that Maggie has in turn inherited Mary Rose’s pipes, the fact is this mother and child are not biologically related.

She hears a thump overhead, followed by the clickety-clack of canine nails on hardwood and the thundery thud of Daisy barrelling down the carpeted stairs. The dog, having heaved herself from her queen-sized Tempur-Pedic slumber at the sound of domestic disturbance, is now reporting for duty. What’s up? Pizza guy? Want me to kill him?

“It’s okay, Daisy,” Mary Rose says in answer to the dog’s RCA Victor head tilt. “Do you want to go outside?”

“Me!” cries Maggie, fully recovered, clipping her mother on the temple with the snack trap in the course of wriggling free to tackle Daisy around her thick neck.

Mary Rose unlocks the heavy oak front door and Maggie reaches up to wrestle with the handle of the exterior glass one. Daisy obligingly head-butts it open and torpedoes out and down the veranda steps, making a beeline for the gingko tree, where she drops to her side in the mulch at its base like a shot pig. The sun has come out, the earth is steaming … This is going to confuse the magnolia tree, dumb blonde of the horticultural world — already its buds look ready to pop, petals that ought to be pink, they’ll be black with frost before the month is out, it’s asking for it.

But sun is better than the unrelieved overcast of a winter that ought to have been hard and bright and blue and white. I’ll take it . She breathes deeply the scent of soil, and surveys the dowdy shades of grey and brown and dirty green in her front garden with its skeletal trellises and spectral dogwoods. Beyond her low wooden fence and across the street, the rotted leaves that crease the curb are flecked with tissues, candy wrappers and bits of recycling that got away; all the ugly promise of spring framed by the pillars of her porch. Behind her, Maggie starts ringing the doorbell. Daisy’s head jerks up, then sinks down again.

Mary Rose MacKinnon lives with her family in the Annex neighbourhood of downtown Toronto. Mature trees, cracked sidewalks, frat houses, yuppy renos and more modest, pleasantly dingy houses that cost a fortune. Theirs is somewhere between yuppy and dingy. She loves the house. It is down the street from a park where a nine-year-old girl was abducted in 1985, but Mary Rose no longer thinks about that every time she looks out the front door. She knows her neighbours and likes them — with the possible exception of Rochelle three doors up, who tried to block their renovation. There are young families — VWs and Subarus — plus a few old-school Italian holdovers: Chevy Caprice. Among the latter is an elderly widow who has a Virgin Mary in the middle of her patch of front lawn that is otherwise distinguished in summer by the closest greenest shave in the neighbourhood — Daria pours Mary Rose a limoncello every Christmas, and dresses up as an elf. Mary Rose’s children are as safe as she can make them. She uses non-chemical cleaning agents and washes all fruit, even those with inedible rinds. She volunteers for all the field trips so Matthew won’t have to take the school bus. Recently she was on her front porch when two children ran past followed by their mother, who was shrieking, “Sebastian, Kayla, don’t run in flip-flops!” She isn’t that bad. Nearby are good schools, a community centre and an arena, not to mention great shops a short walk away on Bloor Street. It is a shabby chic neighbourhood where the cosmos runs wild outside wooden fences in summer, sidewalk chalk and dandelions proliferate, and higgledy-piggledy hedges and trumpet vines proclaim the prevailing left-leaning sympathies of the residents. Most of all, it is the only home her children have ever known — a fact that forces her to admit that growing up on the move must have cost her something, given she has chosen to raise her own children differently.

“Maggie, no more bell ringing, please.”

Bingbongbingbongbingbong .

Though she has failed to cultivate a fondness for dandelions, Mary Rose has toiled to achieve a laid-back raggedness in her own garden with old-fashioned flowering bushes and climbers, and she chides herself afresh now for having missed the boat on the roses this year — is it too late to get out there and prune above every five-leafed stem in hopes of a strong showing this summer? Or too early? She squints — what are those fluorescent orange runes spray-painted on the sidewalk in front of her gate? Is the city planning to tear up her garden to lay fresh pipes? Is this to be a season of sewage and seepage and burly butt-cracks trampling the oakleaf hydrangea? Has her house been supplied by lead pipes all this time? Has the poison already made its way into the teeth and bones of her children?

Bingbong—

“Maggie—”

The child eludes her grasp, fleeing the porch, snack trap in hand, to join Daisy in the mulch. Adorable.

For another thing, while like her mother before her Mary Rose does not tolerate dandelions, neither does she yell at them and go at them with a knife while wearing an old flowered housedress. And swearing in Arabic.

“Maggie, don’t feed grapes to Daisy.” Grapes are not good for dogs. Daisy’s system is particularly sensitive — witness the slime on the floor. People think pit bulls are indestructible. They’re not. Mary Rose descends the steps and reaches for the snack trap. “Ow, Maggie, don’t hit Mumma.”

She picks her up—

“No, Mumma!”

— and goes back into the house, leaving Daisy to lounge in the yard.

She returns to her laptop and remains standing while she reads an e-mail from her friend Kate. “Hey Mister, come see Water with me and Bridget Wednesday night.” Her father coined the nickname because of her initials, and Mary Rose prefers it. She has never been comfortable with her name, it is too flowery and feminine. Exposed. On her book jackets, she is MR MacKinnon. The stark use of initials and the calculated absence of an author photo misled readers to assume at first that she was male, a fact which didn’t hurt sales. To this day, many are unaware of what the letters stand for, and she likes it that way — she does not enjoy hearing strangers say her first name, does not like them having it in their mouth. She types a hasty reply — it’ll be good to get out of the house and hang with friends who don’t own a diaper bag. Especially on a Wednesday night.

Maggie seizes the phone anew and reprises her gleeful getaway down the hall — some things never get old when you’re two. Mary Rose wavers: ought she to break down and put on a Dora the Explorer video? No one need know Mary Rose has resorted to TV before noon … But she’ll pay for it: the screen, regardless of content, is brain sugar and a half-hour of peace is purchased with two hours of hell. Instead, she lures Maggie from her hiding place beneath the piano with the offer of her car key. Maggie takes it in exchange for the phone. The harmless switchblade-style key is good for a whole three minutes and it is worth the risk that Maggie might set off the car alarm.

She unplugs her laptop, jams the child safety plug back into the outlet, bangs her head on the table getting up, and dons her genuine chef’s apron — the tomatoes are starting to smell good — she opens the fridge and takes out a raw chicken that she air-chilled overnight, sets it on an antimicrobial cutting board, washes her hands, slips her cooking magazine into her recipe stand and is reaching contentedly for her scissors when the phone rings. She sighs and picks up.