Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

Who touched you?

It was as though Dolly were telling a story over and over again — or rather, a story was working its way through her.

Did your father touch you?

With Herculean effort, as though hauling herself up from an afternoon death sleep, and with a disorienting sense of betrayal of what up to that point had been the agreed-upon reality at the kitchen table, she finally said to her mother in the midst of one of these performances, “No, Mum, my father never touched me. Did your father touch you?”

The moment she spoke the words, she felt a coolness against her face like cool water as she understood that reality was what she was in now, and that a moment ago she had been inhabiting a state akin to the drug-induced numbness preparatory to a surgical procedure.

The light changed in her mother’s eye again. She looked like a mischievous child as she replied, “Why would you ask that?” And giggled.

Dolly never posed the question again.

The lesser liturgy remained:

… shit .

… cancer .

… dead .

It lasted ten years.

The curse lifted without fanfare. It was just after her first book came out. She and Renée were visiting Andy-Patrick, who was living in Ottawa at the time — this was before his first divorce. He had not been around when she came out; he was busy getting tied naked to a tree somewhere in New Brunswick and force-fed alcohol in the course of basic military training before switching to the RCMP in search of a kinder, gentler way to serve his country. He never bothered forbidding her to “influence” his children with her “lifestyle.” Mary Rose has never doubted that he relied on long-suffering Mary Lou as a moral compass, the way some men do — as their father did — downloading their emotional lives along with the attendant thank-you-note writing and telephone chit-chat onto their wives, not to mention the task of disowning their children … As for Mary Lou, Mary Rose pegged her as one of those straight women who romanticize lesbianism as an orgy of empathy — one long back rub.

They were hanging out in his kitchen while he cooked supper and Mary Lou fed the baby, Renée regaling her with tales from the empathic crypt over a third glass of wine, when Dolly phoned and asked him to come for supper with his family.

“I can’t, Mum. Mary Rose and Renée are here. We’re having supper together.”

Mary Rose gestured for him to shut up. He was either stupid or evincing the blissful ignorance of the entitled male, casually tossing that incendiary name around.

He passed her the phone. “Mum wants to talk to you.”

She cringed. “Hi, Mum.”

“Come home.”

“I can’t. I’m … not alone.” She still could not say the name.

“Bring Renée,” said her mother. “I’ve lost enough babies.”

She didn’t go. She figured, so this is how it ends: Andy-Pat declines the summons and Dolly lifts the curse; not because she does not wish to lose her daughter, but because she fears losing her son.

•

The nurse changed the dressing a couple of days after the surgery. She supported Mary Rose’s elbow with one hand while with the other she deftly unwound the bandage. It hurt, but they had given her a needle for the pain, so it wasn’t too bad. Also, this nurse was nice, she was pretty and knew how to do everything just right. Mary Rose watched the cool fingers as the stain grew darker and the bandage stiffer until there it was. Puckered, withered. Stitched.

“That’s a beautiful incision,” said her mother in unusually measured tones. She was a nurse; such things were beautiful.

“Isn’t it?” said the young nurse. “Gorgeous.” And she smiled.

Mary Rose stared at it. The arm looked like a badly laced sneaker. Black threads poked out at intervals along either side of the raw seam, like insect legs encrusted with blood … she went to touch it—

“Don’t touch,” said her mother quickly.

The nurse said calmly, “Go ahead and touch the skin but not the incision.”

Mary Rose did, and it was with wonderment that she felt the shrivelled skin of her arm respond with a sensitivity so acute, she thought, “This must be what it’s like for babies.”

The nurse gently sponged her chest and shoulder. The yellow had begun to recede, leaving in its wake a streaky violet, as though the sun were setting on her chest. The nurse had nice breath, cool and light. She wrapped the arm in a fresh dressing and it looked clean and sane.

Mary Rose knew, however, what was under the dressing. It was there when she closed her eyes, imprinted on her lids: something bad, through no fault of its own. Like a demon that could not help having been born.

•

Mary Rose broke up with Renée and got together with Hil. Duncan declared Hilary to be the spitting image of his revered Aunt Chrissie — unmarried nurse-veteran of the Great War. Dolly stood on tiptoe and gave Hilary three kisses on alternating cheeks, “that’s what the Lebanese do!” And just like that, Hilary was part of the family.

Soon after, Dolly paid them a solo visit to Toronto in time for International Women’s Day. She wore a sequined caftan, a red turban, a gold rope with a Blessed Virgin Mary medallion, and dangly earrings. They took her to the Five Minute Feminist Cabaret. Afterwards, she read tea leaves in the backroom of a College Street bar till three a.m.

She told an astonished dub poet, “You’re going to fly. Just you in mid-air, I don’t know how, but you are.”

To which the poet replied, “I just booked a skydive for myself, oh my God, am I going to be okay?”

“Yes, dear, I see only good.”

In the cup of Cherry Pitts, of the punk band Cuntry, Dolly saw “someone who loves you and wants to be close to you but they’re afraid to show it,” and went on to provide initials, at the mention of which punk-pallid Cherry was seen to blush.

She saw a new house in the cup of a flamenco dancer, a cooking class for a stand-up comedian and a trip to Niagara Falls in the cup of a taciturn piano virtuoso who had eschewed melody on political grounds and had recently survived a suicide attempt, though Dolly could not have known that.

“Do I come back from the Falls?” asked the pianist.

“Oh yes, and you’ve brought … not exactly a souvenir, a … well, it’s a dog, dear. You’re going to get a dog there, whether you mean to or not … it’s an ugly dog … you don’t seem to mind that.”

At which Li Meileen was seen to smile.

In Hil’s cup she saw “birds, lots of birds, I forget now, are birds happiness or babies? Well, what’s the difference, they’re the same thing! Oh, Hilary, there’s so much love in this cup …”

Hilary smiled, her hair fell forward and caressed her cheek, and Mary Rose swelled with the pleasure of feeling … normal. My girlfriend likes my mother. My mother likes my girlfriend. We’re going to have a family. An entire missile base vanished from the landscape … Never mind the resulting crater, it will grow over in time, a slight depression filled with dandelions.

“Do you want babies, Hilary?” asked Dolly.

Hil blushed and nodded, wept and smiled. Dolly stroked her cheek, brown on white.

In Mary Rose’s cup she saw, “Money.”

She plucked off her sparkly earrings and gave them to a bleach-blond leather-dyke who admired them. “Your mum’s amazing.”

“I love your mum,” said Phat Klown, who earlier in the evening had performed a trick onstage involving a nipple ring and a string of pearls.

“You know, Mary Rose,” said Dolly at dawn over corned beef hash in Mars diner, “God loves you and your friends specially, because you are making the most of the gifts He gave you.”