Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

“Mary Rose? How come I’m such a fuck-up?”

“You’re not. Well, you are somewhat, but I think you’re within the normal range. For a straight white male cop.”

“You know what?” She hears him clear his throat, staving off more tears. “I love you and Maureen more than anyone in the world, I’d be dead without you guys.”

“No you wouldn’t, but you might be less screwed-up.”

“That’s what Dad always said.”

“He was afraid it would turn you gay, having sisters and no brother.”

“How ironic. I wish I was gay.”

“No you don’t.”

“Mary Rose? How come—” He breaks off, crying in the choked way of a boy fighting the humiliation of tears.

“It’s okay, Andy-Pat. Andy-Pat? I love you. Maggie’s here. You want to say hi?”

“What’s the matter with me, Mister?”

“Shereen left.”

Perhaps all their panic attacks are this simple, a choreography of chaos designed to avoid the quiet thing behind the curtain: loss.

He whimpers. She starts singing “Boom Boom, Ain’t It Great to Be Crazy?” They used to sing it on family car trips — in between her bouts of carsickness. She sings it softly now, as though it were a lullaby, wondering dispassionately as she does so, How did this get to be my life? But he says, “No. The other one.”

She sings the whole thing. Somewhere around the verse about the soldiers who have all gone missing, she hears him blow his nose. His voice is ragged but steady. “Mister, how come you always help me, but I can never help you? I never help anyone. Dad was right, I’m a ‘useless shit.’ ”

“That’s not true. He was probably jealous of you.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you had a father.”

“… Wow.”

“That’ll be a hundred and twenty-five dollars plus HST.”

“See?” he moans.

“You’ve helped me.”

“When?”

But she can’t think of an example. Maggie spills her juice and starts fingerpainting with it. Daisy starts licking it up — she will have diarrhea later, her system is that sensitive. “You help just by being my brother.” She has spoken like a Hallmark card but suddenly it hurts, like a splinter in her throat, the word: brother . She mustn’t cry too. Through her kitchen window she sees a stolid middle-aged man jog by. He is in the here and now.

“I better go,” he says. He is back. “I look like I’ve been crying.”

“You probably just look hungover like all the other cops.”

“I’m a man.”

“Yes you am.”

He is off to Kingston to stand next to the premier at the dedication of a new monument to “the fallen” in Afghanistan — as if they’d tripped on something. See Jane fall . He asks if they can meet for coffee tomorrow morning at nine. “Sure, I’ll come right after I drop Matthew at 8:45.” She feels a pang of remorse over how ticked off at A&P she was for standing her up at the salon. Hil was right, he was actually in crisis. His binge of shopping and primping on the heels of a breakup ought to have tipped her off that he was heading for a crash. He was on the rebound, falling for himself all over again, getting infatuated only to find there was no one on the other end of the embrace — existential horreur ! Why can’t she and her brother just be sad when it is sad? Sad = Cry = Feel Better. Even Maureen cries. Why do she and A&P need to go through so many hoops? Krazy Klowns.

They hang up. It will be good to see him tomorrow, they will have an unfraught coffee. She tears off a wad of paper towels and swipes through the mangoey mess on the floor, having broken a rule from The Parents’ Guide to Survival: never pour more than you plan to wipe up.

“No!” shrieks Maggie.

Mary Rose forgot it was art. Maggie laments bitterly, sticky hands clawing the floor in Trojan Women — sized despair. Mary Rose leans down to pick her up from behind, just as the child jacks to her feet and Mary Rose sustains the toddler head-snap to the bridge of her nose. “Oh my God.” No blood, just pain.

These are the wages of cold turkey — there is forty-five minutes before she has to go get Matthew, time enough for Maggie to have a mini-nap — a methadone nap. Mary Rose herself could do with a twenty-minute “sizz.” What would Hil do?

She turns on the faucet, puts it to “spray” and pulls it from its retractable base. “Here you go, Maggs … Aim into the sink, that’s right. The sink!” Mary Rose moves out of range to the small utility sink where she unpacks the produce and starts the wash along the rind.

She buys organic but avoids the subject with her mother, who scorns the term—“I don’t buy anything organeek!” Her father is fond of inquiring with MBA-ular skepticism, “How do you know it’s organeek? Where’s the proof?” She has explained to her parents that organic is not new, it is what they grew up with. It is one reason why their generation will probably wind up having been at the apex of human longevity. “Just think of it as food. It’s all the other stuff that should be hyphenated. Why do you think cancer rates are soaring, along with allergies and obesity?”

“ ‘By your children be ye taught!’ ” declaimed Dolly, and pretended to slap her.

Mary Rose tries not to rant, but her parents must enjoy baiting her. Why else would her mother see a rejection of her own values in Mary Rose’s healthy choices when Dolly herself paved the way with Lebanese cuisine and a refusal to waste money on processed “fog”? Why would her father persist in making right-wing remarks when he is in fact well left of many people far younger?

He likes to wait till the end of a visit. “I see where there’s a new auto mechanic shop opened up downtown and their claim to fame is that all the mechanics are female. Why are they making such a big deal of their gender, it just begs the question, if you’re so great, where’ve you been for the past two thousand years?” Mechaneek .

He knows the answer, he taught her the answer, coached and rooted for her till she breached every last barrier —Do it your way, Mister —to the point of coming out of the closet long before anyone thought “it gets better,” at which point he stopped cheering. Still, it is nothing new, it goes all the way back to Germany and one of her earliest memories.

She is sitting on his lap, steering the car — before the days of seat belts and child safety laws. It does not get better than this: you may not be fully toilet trained, but you can steer the car. “That’s it, Mister, nice and easy, turn the wheel.” His hands halo hers as the wheel spools beneath her fingers. There is the smell of diesel and leather. I AM STEERING THE CAR. Over the red dashboard is the horizon of windshield, the clown nose at the centre of the wheel is the horn. “You’re a good driver, Mister.” I AM A GOOD DRIVER. “Now let’s shift gears.” She feels his leg tighten beneath her as he steps on the clutch. She cups her palm over the ball of the gear stick with its strange carved symbols, and feels the force of his hand bearing down on hers as he thrusts them through the thunking. DON’T BE SCARED OF THAT. “Good stuff, now we’re in second.” The shaft of the stick is impaled in a soft leather pouch, like the wrinkly snout of an animal that is getting wrenched about the nose, but it doesn’t hurt it — it is just a thing — and you’re not supposed to look at that part of the car anyway, KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD. It was a cream-coloured VW Beetle with red leather interior. At some point he took to teasing her. “When the boy is born, you’ll have to sit in the back seat and he’ll steer the car.”

“No, I steer.”

“Boys sit in the front, girls sit in the back.”