SSC (2012) Adult Onset

I
n the midway of this, our mortal life, Mary Rose MacKinnon is at her cheerful kitchen table checking e-mail. It is Monday. Her two-year-old is busy driving a doll stroller into the baseboard, so she has a few minutes.

Your 99 friends are waiting to join you on Facebook
. She deletes it, flinches at another invitation to appear at a literary festival, skims her five-year-old’s school newsletter online and signs up to accompany his class to the reptile museum. She skips guiltily over unanswered messages and cute links sent by friends—including one from her brother that shows a fat woman whose naked torso looks like Homer Simpson’s face—and is about to close it down when her laptop
bings
in time with the oven and the incoming e-mail catches her eye. It is highlighted in queasy cyber yellow and bears a dialogue box:
Mail thinks this is junk
. She eyes it gingerly, fearing a virus or another ad for Viagra. It is from some joker—as
her father would say—with the address [email protected] and in the subject line:

A baking newsletter from a mad housewife? She bites, and clicks.

My goodness.

She types:

No, that sounds sarcastic.
Delete
.

She is proud that he is proud. And that he is proud that Mum is proud; of whom Mary Rose is also proud.
Sigh
. She does not like
screens, convinced as she is they have some sort of neurologically hazing effect. She ought to write her father an actual card with an actual pen to let him know how much this means to her. She gets up and slides a tray of vine-ripened tomatoes into the oven to slow-roast—they are from Israel, is that wrong?

“Ow. Careful, Maggie.”

“No,” croons the child in reply.

She returns to the table, its bright non-toxic vinyl IKEA cloth obscured by bills and reminders for service calls she needs to book for the various internal organs of her house.
Bing! Your 100 friends are waiting …
A month or so ago she tripped on a root in cyberspace and accidentally joined Facebook; now she can’t figure out how to unjoin. She has visited her page once, its silhouette of a human head empty but for a question mark at the centre, awaiting her picture, like an unetched tombstone
—we know you’re coming … eventually
. Her unadorned wall was full of names, many of which she did not recognize, some of which bore the rank odour of the crypt of high school. What is this mania for keeping in touch? she wonders. Mary Rose MacKinnon is unused to continuity. She grew up in a family that moved every few years until she was a teenager, and each time it was as if everything and everyone vanished behind them. Or entered a different realm, a mythic one wherein time stopped, the children she had known never grew older and, as in a cartoon, people and places retained the same clothes and aspect day after day, regardless of weather, explosions or being shot by Elmer Fudd. She would not change a thing, however, each move having brought with it a sense of renewal; as though she had outrun a shameful past—starting at age three. Nowadays, she reflects, no one is allowed to outrun anything. If one kid slugs another in the park, they’re packed off to therapy.

Delete
.

People used to joke about Xeroxed newsletters sent by relentlessly chipper housewives at Christmas. Their effect, and perhaps their purpose,
was to make everyone who received them feel bad about their own lives. Nowadays people torture one another online with pictures of their golden-retriever lifestyles and tweets about must-see plays in New York with one-word titles, new restaurants in Toronto with four tables, human rights abuses in China and the truth behind the down duvet industry. Where is the meadow of yesteryear? Whither the sound of one insect scaling a stalk of grass? The time-silvered fence post in the afternoon sun? What has become of time itself in its expansive, unparcelled state, uncorseted by language? Where have all the tiny eternities gone? Gone to urgencies, every one.

As she types this e-mail to her father, icebergs are evaporating and falling as rain on her February garden, where a water-boarded tulip has foolishly put its head up—are things getting better or worse?
Bing! Matthew is invited to Eli’s Big Boy Birthday Party! Click here to view your e-vite!
A birthday party at some obscure suburban facility north of Yonge and the 401, do these parents have no compassion? She peers into the depths of
info and goodies!
trying to find a date and time amid exploding balloons and floating dinosaurs.

She used to console herself with the notion that the human species would burn itself out like a virus and Earth would recover Her bounty and diversity. But that was before she became a mother.

Nowadays
? How old is she? No one says
nowadays
nowadays. She’ll be making references to the Great Depression before she knows it.

It is April, today is the first—though anyone might be forgiven for getting the months muddled considering it did rain all through February. She wonders if that impacted the usual February suicide rate.
Impacted
did not used to be a verb. Sometime in the nineties it got verbed, like so many other unsuspecting nouns.

“It Gets Better” is an online video project aimed at supporting Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered and Queer youth in response to a recent spate of suicides and assaults. Healthy adults speak into the camera and share stories of how desperate they were when, as younger people, they suffered the hatred of their peers, their parents and, worst of all, themselves. Each story ends with the assurance that “it gets better.” Hilary watched it and cried. Mary Rose didn’t need to watch the whole thing, she got the point and thought it was wonderful, etc.… It has been shown in schools, even some churches, ordinary people the world over have been watching it. There are even people in Russia and Iran watching it. But the evolutionary layers that have led Dolly and Duncan MacKinnon to watch it constitute a sedimentary journey as unlikely as the emergence of intelligent life itself. At least that is how it strikes Mary Rose for, although things have been just fine—more than fine, wonderful—between her and her parents for years now, they weren’t always. So she is all the more impressed that they are, at their advanced age, making connections between the daughter they love and an actual social issue. The cursor blinks.

The sound of splashing brings her to her feet.

“Maggie, no, sweetheart, that’s Daisy’s water.”

She bends and pulls the child gently back from the dog dish.

“No!”

“Are you thirsty?”

“Aisy.”

“Is Daisy thirsty?”

“Me!”

“Are you being Daisy?”

Maggie dives for the dog bowl and gets in a slurp before Mary Rose lifts it to the counter.

“No!” cries the child with a clutch at her mother’s right buttock.

Mary Rose fills a sippy cup with filtered water from the fridge dispenser and hands it to Maggie. The child launches it across the
floor. The mother escalates with the offer of jam on a rice cake. The child, after a dangerous pause, accepts. Détente. Another placated potentate. The mother returns to her laptop. Ask not for whom the cursor blinks …

The phone rings. A long-distance ring. She feels adrenalin spurt in the pit of her stomach. A glance at the display dispels the faint hope that it might be Hilary calling from out west. It is her mother. She stares at the phone, cordless but no less umbilical for that. She can’t talk to her mother right now, she is busy formulating a fitting reply to her father’s e-mail. Her father, who always had time for her.
Ring-ring!
Her father, who never raised his voice; whose faith in her gifts allowed her to achieve liftoff from the slough of despond of childhood—and grow up to write books about the slough of despond of childhood.
Ring-ring!
Besides, talking on the phone works like a red flag on Maggie; Mary Rose will wind up having to cut the call short and there will go her precious scrap of time to deal with e-mail and all manner of domestic detritus before grocery shopping, then picking up Matthew and then hurrying home to purée the slow-roasted tomatoes into an “easy rustic Tuscan sauce.”
Ring-ring!