Ann-Marie MacDonald: Adult Onset

She is collapsing the Christmas tree stand box for the recycling when she spots her car key amid the packing materials— Maggie! She salvages the key and jams it into the pocket of her jeans. Talk about a close call … She folds the box and goes to open the deep drawer that houses her recycling bin, only to be momentarily stymied by the child safety lock, which she fumbles free, but not before pinching her finger on its quick-release. Washing her hands once more, she returns to the chicken, pallid and limp on the counter next to the recipe stand. Could we take the frustration out of deboning?

Mary Rose has mastered her squeamishness with most aspects of cooking, but one remains: when handling a raw chicken, she never holds it by the wing. There is something about the sight of the skin straining between wing and body … It looks like it hurts. She recalls, as a child, watching her mother prepare a chicken for the oven, slinging it by the wing from sink to counter with a thud. More of a splud, really. It didn’t matter that the chicken was dead and couldn’t feel it. She could feel it.

Still, as phobias go, it is a distant third behind the dire duo: vertigo and claustrophobia — which are really two faces of the same thing. Mary Rose is on intimate terms with both, having been ambushed by the latter in her twenties while climbing the narrow tower of Münster Cathedral behind her sister, Maureen; and by the former upon walking out onto its gargoyle-encrusted spire three hundred feet above the Black Forest. Mo read her mind and held her gaze. “It’s all right, Rosie. Walk to me.” Until then she had had no fear of heights. Indeed, one of her earliest memories is of hanging placidly by the wrists from a third floor balcony. In the same country, come to think of it. And with the same person.

•

“We lost the baby,” the mother tells her three-year-old.

“Where?” asks the child.

The father explains, “The baby died.”

“Because you lost it?”

“No, it just happens sometimes.” He didn’t see it either. It was taken away.

“Where is it?”

“It’s with God,” she says.

“Where?”

The mother doesn’t answer.

“She’s in Heaven,” says the father.

“Can I pray to her?”

“Sure,” says the father.

“Can she give me candy?”

“Don’t be silly, Maureen,” says the mother.

The mother knows that the baby is not in Heaven, it is in Limbo, “the other place,” reserved for those who have not received the Sacrament of Baptism and whose souls therefore retain the taint of Original Sin, rendering them unworthy of the Beatific Vision. They do not suffer, but nor do they see God.

“But where is she? Where is she ?”

Nowhere.

“Is she in a grave?”

No grave.

“Is she going to live in Winnipeg?”

“Hush now, Maureen,” says the father.

“What’s her name?”

Technically, the baby had no name, not having been baptized.

The mother answers, “We were going to …” But she is unable to say it.

The father says, “We were going to call her Mary Rose.”

•

Eyes on her recipe, she is reaching for her scissors when she hears someone’s car alarm go off somewhere outside. Hand arrested mid-air, she glances up, wishing once again that she lived in a simpler time before everything beeped — say the fifties, minus polio, homophobia and wringer washers. She hooks a thumb in her jeans pocket, waiting for the sound to cease once the hapless motorist finds the right button — everyone knows car alarms are never set off by actual thieves — and it does, abruptly. She returns to Cooks Illustrated with its drawing of a chicken breast effortlessly yielding up its bone — only to hear the alarm start up again — is she not to be vouchsafed a single cotton-pickin’ unmolested moment to unwind with a recipe? She glares out her big kitchen windows, but none of the cars parked on the street is flashing. She leans forward against the counter for a better look, but the wretched sound stops again. Returning her gaze to the magazine, she reaches for the knife block only to paw empty air. She looks up. The niche is empty. She looks around. Her scissors are gone. How is it possible? The best scissors she has ever owned. The Shopping Channel scissors. The Sloan Kettering surgical-grade never-dull kitchen scissors, capable of felling a sapling, subtly curved for ease of deboning; scissors so good she could be buried with them one day, their blades still lethal with shine. Where do things go? Who takes things? Did Hilary put them in the utility drawer? Mary Rose has, on more than one occasion and as reasonably as possible, implored Hilary to place the scissors in the special niche in the knife block — she is aware that this might not seem like a priority to someone who goes to a rehearsal room every day in fresh clothes, often in a different city, and has yet to be home for a bout of preschool head lice, but it matters to Mary Rose. She is the one who cooks and shops and takes seriously the steep domestic learning curve that is homemaking. Indeed, in military parlance, Mary Rose is at the domestic sharp end. How can Hilary call herself a feminist, much less a lesbian, if she can’t even respect Mary Rose enough to put the scissors back in the right spot? But then, of course, Hilary doesn’t actually call herself a lesbian, she refuses to “call” herself anything, which is so typical of bisexuals!

The rage zooms up from Mary Rose’s gut and she’s off. She grabs the phone from its base — impossible to “tear” a phone from its receiver anymore, where is a mad housewife to turn for an inanimate answer to her rage? — and is scrolling down the list of calls, on the point of speed-dialing Hilary’s BlackBerry — she’ll be in a meeting, but why should that take priority over Mary Rose’s ability to cut up a chicken for the freezer against her homecoming next week? — when it rings in her hand. She crashes it back onto its base just as the car alarm starts up again. She would storm out in her apron in search of the bleeping car but that she mustn’t leave her child unattended — like luggage containing a bomb. She pauses. Amid the beeps and br-r-rings, the only sound is that of Daisy snoring in the living room. Maggie must be asleep — would it do any harm if she nipped out? It isn’t as though she is deserting her family — she remembers her own mother threatening on a regular basis, “One day I’ll go out the door and never come back!” By the time she was fourteen, Mary Rose had taken to muttering, “Go ahead”—but well out of earshot.

Meep! Meep! Meep! goes the car, like the Road Runner on steroids.

She tiptoes down the hall and peeks into the living room. Daisy is flaked out on her side, eyelids twitching, her belly with its ramshackle teats heaving. Maggie is still sitting with her back to the doorway playing peacefully on her own. It takes Mary Rose a moment to process what she sees: Maggie surrounded by shreds, strips, all manner of shapes of newspaper — not torn, cleanly cut. She distinguishes another sound beneath the cadence of Daisy’s snores and the jabbing of the car alarm: rhusk-rhusk …

“Maggie?” She speaks quietly.

Maggie turns, deep contentment in her eyes.

“Give Mumma the scissors, sweetheart.”

Intelligence and forbearance are in Maggie’s smile. She says, kindly, “No, Mumma,” and resumes cutting out a column on post-imperial India.

Mary Rose returns to the kitchen, takes the phone and dials her mother … “Hi, Mum?”

“Was it the packeege?!”

“No.” She walks calmly back to the living room — no sudden moves—“I’m going to put you on speaker, Mum, Maggie wants to talk to you—”