Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

“Aliens crash-landed here,” mused Duncan. “And their genetic material dispersed among the cells that were already percolating in Earth’s primordial soup.”

Waiter, there’s a family tree in my primordial soup . She swirled the spirit in her glass. “Dad, what do you think time is?”

“It’s four thirty-seven!” bellowed Dolly.

“That’s why, as a species, we yearn to travel into space,” continued Duncan. Had he not heard her question? “It’s not just that we want to explore. It’s that we want to go home. It’s why we situate ‘Heaven’ up there in the sky, and why so many of us believe that one day we’ll return. And until now we couldn’t think of any way to ‘go home’ and be reunited with ‘the Father’ except to die.”

Her mother bustled over, cup and saucer rattling in her hand, “I just poured you some hot, Dunc, don’t burn your mouth on it.”

They were drinking Scotch, not tea, but Dolly placed the cup and saucer on the side table at his elbow, returned to the kitchen and burst into the theme from Carmen. “ ‘Toreador-ah don’t spit on the floor-ah, use the cuspidor-ah, that’s-ah what it’s for-ah!’ ”

Quiet conversations had always worked like a red flag on her mother. Ditto the sight of anyone reading a book. It was possible Mary Rose had become an author in self-defence.

“You have a beautiful voice, Dolly,” said Hil.

Her father got up to put on a CD. Cape Breton fiddle music filled the air as he returned to his chair. “That young gal picked up a fiddle when she was three years old and never looked back.” He spoke in the tragic tones of Scottish high praise.

“If the Father is up there, then where’s the Mother?” Mary Rose asked.

“Mother Earth.”

“So she’s down there. So is Hell.”

“Well.” He winced. “We call it that, but it’s really just a reflection of our fear of mortality.”

“Then why don’t we talk about being reunited with the Mother?”

“Hm. I guess we don’t have to reunite with her because she’s always right here. Holding us up. Feeding us. Tucking us back in when we die.”

“What’s the Father doing while she’s busy doing all this?”

He laughed. “Good question.”

“He’s above the fray.”

“That’s an old management trick.” His tone was conspiratorial. “It’s why the boss has his office upstairs.”

Her gaze strays up to a corner of the ceiling.

“Maybe we associate our power of higher thought with the sky because it’s been closest to our head ever since we started walking upright,” he said.

“The Egyptians believed the heart was the organ of thought. They threw the brain away.”

“And now science has discovered neurons in the lining of the heart.”

“And the intestines.”

“Exactly, that’s where you get ‘gut feelings.’ ”

“And a broken heart.”

“Yuh.” He aspirated the assenting syllable in a manner as characteristic of his east coast roots as it was inimitable — a means of rendering even a simple yes fatalistic. She watched his eyes close and his head nod in barely perceptible time with the reel.

She heard Matthew ask, “Sitdy, what’s for supper?”

In Mary Rose’s day, her mother would have barked, Chudda b’chall! Shit and vinegar! Masculine form. But she heard Dolly reply gently, “We’re having a smorgasbord, Matthew, do you know what that is?”

She looked over her shoulder to see Matthew shake his head no.

“It’s a little bit of everything.” Sitdy smiled and dealt a new hand. “Habibi.” Darling : masculine form.

Mary Rose wonders how young Dolly managed to go against “Puppa’s” wishes and enter nurses’ training all those years ago. Maureen once told her that their mother had experienced “a nervous breakdown” at seventeen. The statement was like a title with no book; another fragment that she had accepted as though it were whole. Another stranded station of the cross. Dolly breaks the first time .

The reel ended and a jig began. Her father opened his eyes, reached for his glass, encountered the teacup and it sloshed in his grasp. He looked bewildered, then vexed. Mary Rose moved to help, but he made a calming gesture with his hand that rankled her slightly — it wasn’t as if she was “paneeking”—and used his hanky to mop up the spill.

“I’m only putting onions in half!” her mother hollered from the kitchen.

“Put them all the way through!” Duncan hollered back.

“Oh Dunc, you know what’ll happen!”

“What’ll happen?!” He sounded annoyed. He must be deeply content. “ ‘Time’ … now that’s tricky,” he said, picking up the thread. “Time is an illusion. A way of keeping track of change.”

Spare a quarter for a loony? “The only constant,” said Mary Rose.

“A way of keeping tabs on the tricks that energy and matter get up to. If I was auditor general of the universe, I’d separate those two.”

She smiled in appreciation. “I don’t know if you can.”

“When I reach for this glass, what keeps my hand from passing right through it?”

“Maybe the fact you haven’t drunk enough to be seeing double.”

He chuckled. “There’s that. But there’s also ‘the swerve.’ ”

“The what?”

“Haven’t you read your Lucretius?”

“Not … recently.”

“What’re they teachin’ you in school these days? De rerum natura . In which the poet invokes ‘the necessary flaw,’ ” he said with a magical mystery tour flourish.

“Flaw in what?”

“Everything.”

“Why is it ‘necessary’?”

“You just answered your own question.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well. Here we are.”

She paused. “I feel like I’m remembering the future.”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” he said.

Had her father ever smoked marijuana?

“Dad, have you ever experimented with—”

“I’m not going to cook this kibbeh,” Dolly announced from the kitchen. “I watched the butcher cut the meat and grind it and I made him sterilize the blade beforehand.”

Mary Rose shuddered. Food standards were no longer what they had been in the golden age of government regulation. Her family was going to eat a dish the principal ingredient of which was raw beef; the children and the old people were going to die, her mother was going to kill herself and them. Hil and Mary Rose would see out the rest of their shortened, miserable lives as names on a waiting list for kidney transplants. Mary Rose, with her O negative blood type, was likely a goner. She wondered, would Andy-Patrick give her a kidney? Had she been nice enough to him since they’d grown up? Your sister is being held prisoner in a dialysis machine on the Planet …

She turned to see her mother scrubbing her hands and holding them up to drip-dry like the O.R. nurse she had been, before plunging them into the big old enamel bowl, where she began kneading away, adding salt, pepper and cinnamon to the meat, folding in the onion and the softened bulgur wheat.

Hil said, “I’m watching carefully, Dolly, I want to be able to make this at home.”

“Well, ysallem ideyki, dear. That means ‘bless your hands.’ ”

The aroma of eggplant, garlic, tomatoes and pine nuts wafted from the oven — a dish infelicitously named “shucklemushy.” At least that was what her mother called it. Recent Lebanese immigrants had different names for things and different ways of preparing food, as Dolly had been astonished to discover. For example, she had yet to meet any Lebanese in Ottawa who ate kibbeh nayeh —raw kibbeh. Mary Rose was willing to bet Dolly hadn’t met any child brides either.