Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

“Hi, Maggie, it’s Sitdy!”

“Sitdy!” cries Maggie, and drops the scissors.

Mary Rose gives her child the phone and picks up the scissors.

“How are ya, fuhss ?!” shouts Dolly.

Maggie shakes the phone with both hands as though to throttle it with elation.

Mary Rose is shaking. What fresh hell was set to open, and how had she stumbled to its lip? How did Maggie manage to get the scissors from where they were safely wedged like a sword in stone, out of reach in the knife block? She has yet to register the balm of silence in the wake of the car alarm that has randomly ceased when the doorbell rings and Daisy goes crazy. Mary Rose hesitates — she is not expecting anyone. What if it is the mailman returning with Animal Control? Did Daisy actually bite him? We have an order to seize and destroy your dog . Feeling suddenly sick to her stomach, she peers through the eyehole. It is Rochelle from three doors up. Mary Rose opens the door.

There is nothing definably wrong with Rochelle. But she is the kid in grade six with whom you dread to be partnered on square-dancing day.

“Do you know your car alarm’s been going off all morning?” Voice like a sack of cement.

Mary Rose is about to reply but experiences a linguistic derailment — this used to happen to her in elementary school, then years later at the odd book signing when she’d get overloaded. Since Maggie came along, she frequently loses nouns, occasionally verbs and whole sentences, leaving her scrabbling for purchase in a scree of prepositions.

Rochelle, perhaps misinterpreting Mary Rose’s fleeting aphasia, glances at the scissors in her hand and adds with uncharacteristic geniality, “Just thought you might like to know.” Her mouth stretches in a rictus of goodwill and she backs away from the door. Horse teeth.

“Thanks,” says Mary Rose and, absently raising the scissors in a wan salute, realizes that, though she has always thought of Rochelle as “an old bat,” the woman is probably younger than she is. She closes the door, feels in her pocket for her car key— Meep! Meep! — and finds the button. Silence. She sets the key on the front hall table out of range of her apparently hair-trigger hip-bone, and slips into the powder room.

She releases the new child safety lock on the toilet lid — she does not have to wonder what Hil would say, but she thinks it makes sense: Maggie could actually fall into the toilet and drown. It has happened. Somewhere. Mary Rose sits and has one of those pees of improbable duration. Through the half-open door she hears Maggie screaming with laughter and her mother’s voice singing nonsense songs. She rubs her arm, the left one, it’s bugging her again. She does not recall having bumped it, but it doesn’t take much. Boxers are sometimes referred to as having a “glass jaw.” Mary Rose has a glass arm. Graze of a car door, corner of a bookshelf, a playful squeeze — these can kick off a deep, radiating pain with never a bruise to show for it. She may have bumped it unawares in her furious search for the scissors, or perhaps Maggie kicked her there.

“… Hut-Sut Rawl-son on the rillerah and a brawla, brawla sooit …!”

She bares her teeth in the mirror. Still good. Not unnaturally white in the bleach-crazed way that makes anyone over thirty-five look like a corpse by comparison with their teeth. But not yellowed like the soles of someone’s feet in that poem. Mary Rose has naturally beautiful dentition but weak enamel. She sometimes wonders if her tendency to cavities is related to the old problem she had with her arm as a child—“Benign Pediatric Bone Cysts” put her in hospital more than once. It was unclear whether she had inherited them from her father or mother but, being an adoptive parent, Mary Rose is in no danger of passing them on to her own children. She opens her mouth and peers at the expensive new crowns toward the back.

There was a period after her second book came out when she ground her teeth in her sleep to the point where the enamel cracked and the nerves got upset, so the dentist killed them. Dark thrashing snakes of pain, he speared them, then immured them in orthodontic burial vaults that will outlast her skeleton and drop, one day, clink , to the floor of her casket. Or be raked from her ashes if she opts for cremation. She has a high pain threshold thanks to her adventures with her humerus — the long bone of the upper arm — long since surgically corrected. Even so, tooth pain occupies an exquisite category all its own. Mahler versus Beethoven. Mary Rose is something of a pain connoisseur — maybe even a pain snob. But it is a fact that a certain amount of it has a calming effect on her. She is at home with it.

She stopped tooth grinding thanks to a session of hypnosis in a nondescript office building in an otherwise swanky part of town called Yorkville. It was being renovated at the time and pneumatic drills were going in the hallway while she was “under.” She remains uncertain whether she was ever really under, but at the time asked friends to tell her if she displayed tics such as clucking like a chicken at the snap of someone’s fingers, just in case. Somehow it did the trick and she was able to throw away her chewed-up night guard. Now there is just her knee and the uterine fibroids — the recent arm pain doesn’t count, being not only fickle but phantom.

She runs her fingers through her short dark hair — sprinkled with grey, but less so than many people a decade younger. She is an “older mother,” one of a growing demographic who, in a previous era, would have been grandmothers by now. But she feels she brings certain advantages to the table: financial stability, patience — even if the latter is tried these days by Maggie in ways it never was by Matthew.

“One-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot cross buns!”

From her mother Mary Rose inherited, along with “the pipes,” youthful skin, thanks to a Mediterranean heritage and an olive oily diet. Skin, hair, teeth: the great indicators. It is often a ball of these tissues that turns up lodged in the body of a perfectly healthy adult who is unaware, until the surgical removal of the benign lump, that they would have been a twin … and that by incubating the stunted tissues of their sibling, they have been in fact a living grave.

She has always taken an interest in the fringes of science — the kind of fascination that leads to great discoveries, crackpot conspiracy theories, and novels. In JonKitty McCrae: Journey to Otherwhere , eleven-year-old Kitty has one blue eye and one brown. She also has begun to have “spells.” They transport her to another world, where she discovers the truth behind her eyes …

“Psychosenzoic Epilepsy Spectrum Seizure.” Such is the diagnosis according to a neuropsychologist who e-mailed her after the book came out to tell her that Kitty shows signs of “seizure due to kindling”; that the child’s ability to trigger a “trance state” is in fact “a manifestation of trauma.” Gimme a break , she thought. So is the ability to fly with the aid of an umbrella, or step through a looking glass .

It has made her a living, this morbid fascination, but she is at a loss to explain it fully, and in answer to the most oft-asked question at literary readings, “Where do you get your ideas?” has taken to answering, “The dead people.” It always produces a laugh, but it feels true even if she has never yet, at forty-eight, really lost anyone — certainly not a close family member.

She met neither of her grandmothers, both of whom died shy of sixty. She met her paternal grandfather once, at the veterans’ hospital in Halifax. He’d had a stroke and could not speak, but he laughed. Her maternal grandfather lived longest, and she recalls being perplexed by his Arabic accent but not unduly perturbed since he seldom spoke to her, she being the extra daughter of an extra daughter. He did once address a full sentence to her sister, Maureen: “Close your legs.”