Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

Dolly swept her belongings from the table back into her purse in one motion, causing the Living with Christ pamphlet to flap to the floor. Mary Rose bent to retrieve it along with a small “Sunday Offering” envelope that she tucked back into it. She wondered how much was in the envelope and how her mother squared supporting the church with her love for “you and your friends specially.”

Daniel wiped up the spill and retreated. Mary Rose watched as Dolly slipped the ring back onto her finger. Home . She put her warm hand over Mary Rose’s cold one, saying, “I guess it really was a hard time, now that I think of it.”

“Yes, it was.”

“And it couldn’t have been easy on you, you were so young.”

“That’s right.”

“I was so afraid.”

Mary Rose was amazed. She was in reality after all. Her mother was making it real. Her mother, in her leopard print tam, sweeping into Mary Rose’s hospital room, making everything okay … She tried not to move a muscle.

Together, she and her mother had crossed over into a world where people call things by their name and love their children and are sorry for having injured them and say I see you . She hunted frantically about inside herself for an appropriate feeling state, but all she found were lumps, frost-bearded comestibles. She grabbed one at random and set it on the counter to thaw. She would find out later what she felt; for now, it was important simply to witness …

“I understand, Mum. Fear of the unknown.” And she returned the pressure of her mother’s hand.

“ ‘Unknown’ nothing! I knew what I was afraid of, I was afraid I was going to hurt you.”

“You … did hurt me.”

“I did?”

Mary Rose nodded.

Dolly’s brow furrowed. “Is that what happened to your arm?”

“What? No, Mum. I mean hurt me emotionally.”

“Oh.” This appeared to strike Dolly as a novel idea. “You’d’ve been too young to remember any of that.”

“I wasn’t too young.”

“You remember that far back?”

“Yes.”

Dolly’s manner was mildly perturbed, as one who recollects trials in tranquility. “I didn’t know what to do or where to turn, and some days I couldn’t even get up off the couch and you’d be crying so hard—”

“When did I cry?”

“You cried all the time! Oh, it made me so mad sometimes and I’d get up and go in to you and then I’d really scare myself so I’d lie back down, and you’d stop crying and that got me really scared—”

“Mum, I didn’t cry, I’m not a crier, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you tell me you didn’t cry, I was the one who was alone with you day in day out, you cried . And you ran everywhere, I was afraid you were going to run right into the glass—”

“Mum, I wasn’t even living at home.”

Her mother had lost it. It was Mary Rose’s fault, dredging up bad stuff, torturing Dolly over a transgression for which she had already amply atoned with love and gifts and garrulity, God loves you and your friends specially … She was going to bring her mother back to her father this afternoon in a state of geriatric distress.

“It’s okay, Mum, would you like another candy cane whip?”

“Dammit all, Mary Rose, you’ve got me all confused, I’m talking about when I came out of hospital after Alexander was born! What in the name of time are you talking about?!”

“… Oh. That hard time.”

“Yes, ‘that hard time,’ what ‘hard time’ did you mean?” It was the old Dolly. Straight from the lip.

“Never mind.”

“Don’t you ‘never mind’ me, tell me.” A flash of the old ferocity.

“I was talking about … when I came out to you and Dad.”

“Came out of where?”

“Came out as a lesbian.” There was the word in all its scaly ignominy.

“Oh, that!” Dolly laughed.

“You said you would rather I had cancer.”

Dolly paused. “Did I object that strongly, Mary Rose?”

Mary Rose nodded.

Dolly’s forehead creased. She shook her head slowly, regretfully, and said, “I don’t remember.”

She looked past Mary Rose toward the window, as though the memory, recently released, might still be playing about on the other side of the glass before darting up and away. Then she turned her liquid eyes full on her daughter, seeming to enclose the two of them in a grotto, a kind of sacred darkness that was as close to an embrace as Mary Rose could bear from her mother, and said with a note of sincere bewilderment, “I’m sorry, Mary Rose.”

Daniel caught them on their way out the door. He gave Dolly a gift certificate for “a beverage of your choice at any of our stores.”

“Aren’t ya nice!”

“I’m sorry about your husband, Dolly.”

“My husband? What about my husband?”

For the first time, Daniel looked at a loss. He turned to Mary Rose, but she stone-faced him. Go back to your own mother who loves you just because you’re you, you wimp, and quit sucking up to mine. She’d’ve had your balls for bookends .

He turned back to Dolly. “I thought you said he died.”

“That wasn’t my husband, that was my son!”

Dolly delivered it with the force of a punchline and supplied her own laugh track.

Out on the street, Mary Rose offered her left arm and Dolly took it. “What were you afraid of, Mum?”

“When was I afraid?”

“When I was a baby.”

“I went to a psychiatrist.”

Mary Rose stopped in her tracks. This was more surprising than her mother’s embrace of Queer Nation. “You did?”

“I told the doctor I was scared and he told me I should see a psychiatrist, so I did. In Munich.”

She was conscious of keeping her tone neutral so as not to startle her mother off whatever track she had stumbled upon. Was this how it worked? Some neural pathways got gummed over while others became unmasked? A psychiatrist ? Her mother might as well have said Mary Rose’s father had been moonlighting as a trapeze artist. Her parents were from Cape Breton. They didn’t go in for “head-shrinkers.”

“Did Dad know?”

“Daddy drove me.”

The phrase gave Mary Rose slight pause — a bird alighting on a twig in her mind, but off it flew before she could identify it. “Did it help?”

“Oh, I think it must have.”

“Why?”

“Well, here we are.” They were outside Wiener’s Home Hardware.

“Did Dad want us to pick something up?” He had announced his intention to replace the weatherstripping on her deck door— “You’re heating the outdoors!” Should she buy caulking? And a caulking gun? She could caulk it herself, how hard could it be?

“I don’t think so,” said Dolly. “Do you need something in there?”

“No, I thought you did. You said ‘here we are.’ ”

In the display window, next to sacks of road salt and sand, the holiday scene was still up, teddy bear conductor on a choo-choo train winding through a snowy olde tyme towne.

“That’s right,” said Dolly.

Santa was drinking a Coke.

“But we’re not here.”

“We are so.”

“Mum, this is the hardware store, we’re going to the bra shop.”

“I didn’t mean we were there , I meant we’re here .”

Was dementia contagious? Who’s on first?

“Where’s ‘here,’ Mum?”

“Here!”

Dolly flung Mary Rose’s arm loose and waved her hands in a gesture of general here ness. Mary Rose’s arm twanged briefly, her brain clanked and shifted like a funhouse floor. Dolly said, “I wasn’t good at having babies.”

Her mother seemed to have switched tracks again, but at least Mary Rose was familiar with this one. She took a deep breath and felt it catch, as though something were lodged in her chest — maybe they had a tool in the store that could remove it, a crowbar. “Let’s go, Mum.”