Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

“You want me to be alone for the rest of my life.”

“Being homosexual is not wrong. Practising homosexuality is.”

“Oh. I’m supposed to become a nun?”

Silence.

“Wow. Okay, you’re wrong. That’s a bad reason to become a nun or a priest. What you’re doing to your own daughter now is a sin. You want me to hate myself.”

“I don’t know what happened along the way to pervert the normal course of your development. I’m in the dark about that. If you had let us know early on that you had these tendencies, we would have been able to help you. But you shut us out. If you’d had a broken leg—”

“I had a broken arm, and you didn’t do anything.”

“We didn’t know it was broken.”

“Why didn’t I get an X-ray?”

“No one thought your arm could possibly be broken.”

“It hurt. All the time.”

“We’re getting off topic here.” topeec “If you were a drug addict, I would not be doing my job as a father by giving you more drugs when you beg for them.”

Absurdity can be a balm. She splashed her face clear of mucus and tears, and spoke calmly. “If I had told you when I was a teenager and still living at home, you would have taken me to a psychiatrist.”

“That’s right.”

“And you would have had me hospitalized and treated. Electroshock, maybe.”

“That’s one option, but you never gave us the chance. You hid your disorder from us.”

She cried again, but not in anger. “I haven’t believed in God since I was fourteen, Dad, but I believe in Good because I have been looked after and I believe in Love because somehow I knew enough not to show anyone, not even myself, who I was while I was still in your hands. I am so scared when I think of what you would have done to me, and when I think of that, I think that what you are doing to me now is something I can handle because I’m twenty-three and all you can do to me now is hate me.” She was shaking when she got out of the bath, but she had the information.

The next time she saw her parents, it was as though she and her father had never had the conversation. Her mother did her laundry. Her father poured her a Scotch and asked about her work. They ate, they chatted, she and Dolly played Scrabble. At some point, the three of them found themselves at the kitchen table. Her father’s gaze drifted to a corner of the ceiling as the crazy light entered her mother’s eye and it began again.

When Odysseus finally makes it home, he is much changed, but his loved ones know him by his scar. Will she make it home? Will she recognize herself?

Grafts leave scars on the skin, yes, but on bone too. Scars make you stronger, and they help tell a story; like striations in igneous rock, a story of eruptions and epochal inches. Her scars can take her home. Down to the bone, into the marrow, down among the stem cells where the stories germinate.

It will all go back to carbon one day, back to gemstones and crystals and star stuff. She has a vantage point for the moment. An “I.”

Pinhole aperture, like an old-fashioned camera. All she can do is try to bear witness. Writer, write thyself …

It must have been the pill they gave her that made the bus ride into something that slipped time and space, because that bus is still lumbering, big-eyed and heaving, over the ruts of the road … Dolly is there still, in her kerchief, forehead vibrating against the glass, staring out at the gaping sky, her belly a grave …

Mary Rose has a picture of Alexander’s grave. She knows where his physical remains are, she could go there. Everything is somewhere. She could go to Winnipeg, to the hospital, and find the smokestack. She could place her hands against the warm bricks. My sister . And she could say her name: Mary Rose .

She can go to Kingston and look up at the windows of the General Hospital — two of them were hers. She can say a prayer for her bone donor. And she can say a prayer for herself: the child of ten, immobilized on the operating table. And the girl of fourteen, standing next to her mother in the surgeon’s office. They’ve come back .

You cut me to the bone, Dr. Sorokin. Laid bare my humerus, riddled with history; tamped in cadaver bone, and I grew. Thank you. Four years later, you cut through the scar, raked the fallen leaves, drained strange fluid and returned it to the earth. Cut my hip, harvested the hill of bone; transplanted it to the valley of my arm and filled in the shadows. Bless your hands.

Pray for the baby who stands pounding the glass. Pray for the mother lying on the couch. Pray for the young woman immobilized at the kitchen table, I would rather you’d been born dead . Pray for her, and all others who have been whipped from the door so they will know they are loved.

Pray for the children in the sunroom at night, where the table is set for supper beneath the big black windows, and the brave damaged toys care for one another. They are there, still. Like the big blue city bus that rolls and dips and labours on. Pray for the young woman in the kerchief at the back, her belly big and lifeless, you’ll have more babies …

The marks on a body are the marks on a map. They tell you where you have been, and how to get home again so that you can stop going round inside yourself. Look down at the map. Look up at the sky. Where is the sun? Now walk. Make a new pathway, walk out of the forest.

She can go back to Germany, land of horror and sweetness, where a Mädchen in white waits, a person of two and a half. Together they can look down at the stone, flush against the grass.

Ask me whatever you want, I will answer .

Your arm hurts because it is broken .

No, he does not need to breathe down there .

No, you did not do this .

That is what remains of his body, his soul has left it .

His body has returned to the earth to make more grass and food and air and rain .

That is where all the flowers have gone .

But you will always have one in your name .

Maggie is drawing hieroglyphs in Mary Rose’s datebook, which she has looted from her bag. Mary Rose tips the contents onto the kitchen floor and sits cross-legged next to the child.

“Purse,” says Maggie.

“Bag,” says Mary Rose. “That is a lesbian word for ‘purse.’ ”

Hil says, “I’m a lesbian and I have a purse.”

Mary Rose looks up. “Did you feel that just now?”

“What?”

“Happy.”

Re: Some things really do get batter

Dear Dad,

Sometimes things need to get worse before they can get better.

Love,

Mary Rose

End

Thank you. Without whom …

Beatrice Ahad

Katherine Ashenburg

Bill Bolton Women’s Hockey League

Tracy Bohan

Susan Burns

Sarah Chalfant

Trudy Chernin

Anne Collins

Trish Convery

Louise Dennys

Jerry Doiron

Margaret Anne Fitzpatrick-Hanly

Margaret Gaffney

Ken Girotti

Mary Giuliano

Robert Gordon

Janet Hanna

Kendra Hawke

Kate Icely

Honora Johannesen

Mara Nicolaou

Arland O’Hara

Alanna Palmer

Alisa Palmer

Marven Palmer

Pam Plant

Maria Popoff

Lisa Robertson

John Robinson

Wendy Katherine

Sharon Klein

Sarka Kalusova

Eleanor Koldofsky

Melanie Lane

Amanda Lewis

Mary Paula Lizewski

Isabel MacDonald-Palmer

John-Hugh MacDonald

Lora MacDonald-Palmer

Malcolm MacDonald

Mary MacDonald

Jackie Maxwell

Nancy McKinnon

Clare Meridew