Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

It wasn’t safe.

“Everything you do is a reflection of me. You’re saying to the world, ‘I had a terrible mother, I had a terrible father.’ ”

She refused to set foot in the home Mary Rose shared with Renée.

“Would you visit Hell?”

Refused to allow Renée or any other “friend like that” to set foot in her home. She issued it like an edict — a fatwa.

“Would you let the devil in?”

They were sitting at the kitchen table.

“I didn’t give you shit to eat, why are you living in it now?”

Her father was staring up at a corner of the ceiling.

“I’d rather you were a murderer,” said Dolly.

Mary Rose saw the words float toward her, hot foul shapes that glanced off an invisible shield.

Duncan spoke. “If you had a broken leg, we’d have taken you to the doctor. In this case it is your mind that is broken, and how were we to know ? You kept it from us. You didn’t give us the chance to help you.”

“I’d rather you were burnt at the stake.”

Friends assured her they were bound to “come round.”

“If you want to be close to that part of a woman, I’ll come live with you when I’m old and senile and you can change my shitty diaper.”

Friends urged her to cut them off.

“I’d rather you had cancer.”

It was always at the kitchen table. In Dolly’s eye would be the glint Mary Rose recognized from when her mother read tea leaves; an indication that she was seeing through something to something else. But in this case, someone else. Who?

Her father would turn away, eyes on the ceiling. Smooth, impenetrable. Glass.

Down below, Mary Rose sat immobilized as the air changed around them, thickened like a welt.

“I’d rather you’d never been born.”

She sat watching herself watching, and waited for it to be over.

She thought she was calm.

“I’d rather you’d been born dead.”

Then they would play Scrabble.

The very hyperbole of her mother’s curses had a prophylactic effect, sealing them in shrink wrap, allowing Mary Rose to swallow them like drugs she thought would pass through her harmlessly.

She was twenty-three.

Around this time, she experienced the first of the episodes that would persist for over a decade. They struck in clusters. Panic attack. What’s in a name? Not enough. Beyond, “I was terrified.” For whole hours, there was no “I.” At times, preceded by a visual sense of the world constricting and retreating as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope — so-called tunnelling; at others by a dread that mushroomed into disorientation. Vertigo, with both feet on the ground. Lost on an ordinary day, in an ordinary place. A parking lot. Wedged at an odd angle behind her own eyes, she would make her way home and lie down in the most dangerous place in the world, her body. To misplace car keys in those days might be to drop into the void, to misread the clock or forget someone’s name set off adrenal terror fuelled by an outsized guilt that made no sense; as though, along with the “synesthesia” of numbers and colours, her emotions were cross-wired. Nothing stayed where she put it, including herself.

She hit bottom in a hotel room on a book tour in her mother’s hometown, retreating alone to the Cape Bretoner Motor Inn, knowing it was the least unsafe place — it is worse to be among those who are living in the normal world when one has lost hold of it. The carpet was orange, the bedspread was orange, the sunset painting above the bed was orange. There was no one she could call, the sound of a familiar voice would serve only to confirm the gulf between herself and the normal world and push her out of it for good. After a while, her hand turned on the television. A documentary about the last days of the Third Reich was playing. Himmler’s children lay dead in their nightgowns, as though sleeping, on the floor of the bunker, killed by their parents with strychnine-laced cocoa. She prayed. Our Lady spoke to her and told her the only thing that mattered was Love. She remained abject with fear all night, but survived. Maybe none of it happened. Maybe it was happening all the time.

•

When she could sit up, she gazed at it. It was compelling. The left side of her chest as well as her shoulder above the surgical dressing was painted yellow — probably some sort of disinfectant. The snowy white dressing was wound round her upper arm as if she were an Egyptian mummy, at its centre a bright red stain dulled to burgundy at the slow-spreading edges. Below, the fingers of her left hand were pain-free and bewildered, like survivors of a car crash who have walked away without a scratch. It hurt to touch anywhere on the yellow paint, so perhaps it was a bruise.

•

Mary Rose did not harbour hope of her parents’ coming round, nor did she cut them off for it came to her that sanity would not survive the severing. That part of the brain known as “executive function,” in its crisp white shirt and narrow tie, picked up and deciphered a dark, thrashing message from several neural floors below, the racket and shit-flung panic of which she remained consciously unaware, and coolly articulated it: Your parents lived to adulthood before you came along and are thus equipped to recognize themselves in a world without you. But you have never known a world without them . They were the sky. Her mother was a thunderhead, but living without a sky was not an option.

So she continued to visit their home, alone. She got on with her life — which was what she called her career. She drank and raged and laughed, saw dots and big yellow orbs, forgot how to blink and breathe, all while cleaving to a notion of wholeness and the wisdom of embattled contradictions. Yet she could not bring herself to say “we” in their presence when referring to Renée. Renée was a word that went to glue on the roof of her mouth and sucked her down to the undertow place of no-language. She experienced an interruption of reality when she spoke the name — as though in the real world, the one her parents inhabited, there was no such word, and she was crazy for having made the sound. Nothing is lonelier than crazy. She was “out” to the whole world, but her parents could obliterate her with their refusal to acknowledge a name.

Maureen went to visit Dolly and Dunc with Zoltan and their young family shortly after Mary Rose came out. Mo phoned from their parents’ home to say that, while she still loved her as her sister, Mary Rose was not welcome to bring Renée, or any other “friend with that lifestyle,” into contact with her children. It lasted a few months, at which point Mo phoned again, this time from her own home, and apologized with the dazed remorse of an ex — cult member. Soon after, she adopted a policy of refusing to discuss the subject with their mother, hoping thereby to starve the fire of oxygen.

Mary Rose’s father sent a letter by registered mail. It must have taken him quite a while to hunt and peck it out on the old Remington typewriter. She read it once and tore it up. She recalls nothing beyond the first sentence but knows it was as different from “Some things really do get batter” as possible.

Dear Mary Rose, You have chosen to go down a path that we, as your parents, cannot follow …

“I’d rather you had cancer.” But Dolly never wrote it down.

Her anger turned out to be more frightening in its power to endure than it had been in its power to erupt. “Who touched you?” she took to asking Mary Rose. “Did someone touch you? Did your father touch you?”

The air was shocked.

Her father’s gaze remained pinned to the corner of the ceiling — what was it in his own story that enabled him to leave the room without leaving his chair?