They carried the sleeping children from the car and the warm night air hit them with the force of frangipani. Her parents were backlit at the open door, “Hello-hello-hello!” Daisy shot like a bullet from the back of the station wagon, pausing on her houseward trajectory to squat and pee in the grass. Dolly woke the children with kisses, Duncan managed an end run and succeeded in carrying in the bags.
The dog went straight to Dolly, whose late-onset affection for the species might be another sign of cognitive decay—dogs were vermin where she had come from. “Is he hungry, do you think?” All dogs were male for Dolly.
In the kitchen, Dolly said, “You’ll have a cup of tea.” And ushered them to a table full of food. She was disappointed they hadn’t brought any dirty laundry.
Mary Rose, Hil and the kids spent the following day at a wading pool followed by a trip to the Museum of Science and Technology. When the lovely afternoon was finally over, she gratefully accepted her father’s offer of a “libation” and waited in the kitchen while he went to his “medicine cabinet” to make a selection.
Maggie was sitting on the floor eating a packet of high-fructose chemicals in the shape of Dora and Boots that Sitdy had just given her a half-hour before supper—not that there’s ever a good time. She wondered if her parents had remembered Maggie’s birthday—there was no sign of a cake. She decided not to say anything—one birthday party was enough, and besides, at two, Maggie was too young to know. Sitdy stumbled over Maggie on her way from the fridge to the counter with a pot, but neither seemed to notice. Mary Rose considered moving the child out of the path of Hurricane Dolly, but Hil was close by, dicing onions—she derived pleasure from the sight of her blue-eyed partner towering over her little brown mother. Dolly shoved the pot at Mary Rose—“Hold this”—and proceeded to clear space on the stovetop. Her mother had always kept a kitchen with a degree of what other people would call clutter. The difference these days was that she had got into the habit of using her glass stovetop as an extension of her counter space, and at present it was heaped with TV Times crosswords, bills, scrap paper and several issues of Living with Christ. “Mum, your stovetop is not an extension of your countertop.”
Dolly replied, “Where’s the kettle?”
They’d be living with Christ soon enough if her mother burned the house down. Her father reappeared with two generous drams—“You sure you won’t join us, Hilary?”
“No thanks, Duncan, I’m sous-chefing for Dolly.”
“Then you’d better keep your wits about you.” He chuckled, adding, “I got some of that fancy French water too, what’s it called, Perrier?” The way he said it rhymed with “terrier,” and the twinkle in his eye attested to his self-mocking intention. Hil laughed, and Mary Rose watched as she brushed her hair back from her eyes with her wrist and turned her best Natalie Wood smile on him … Is my wife flirting with my father? Is my father flirting with my wife? Is it okay that I like it?
Dolly, having plunked the pot on the stove, was now safely anchored at the small kitchen table with Matthew and a deck of cards. Mary Rose followed her father over to the spacious living room area and sank into a gold-upholstered bucket chair.
“Slainte,” he said, and they drank—he had taken to using the Gaelic expression.
The ice snapped in her glass and she breathed a sigh. Daisy was passed out in a patch of fat afternoon light—she looked appetizing, like a side of cured pork. “Your soft pop station in the nation’s capital,” was playing Ferrante and Teicher’s “Bright Elusive Butterfly of Love” on what her parents still called the hi-fi.
“There is such a thing as genetic memory,” he said. He was in his armchair next to her, a side table between them. “I think we remember not only our ancestors’ experience but our cellular experience.” His blue gaze was directed toward the glass patio door where an orange X was taped at eye level owing to a recent mishap involving his nose; he blamed Dolly for having cleaned the pane without telling him. “I think it’s possible we could trace our origins to a deep-time spaceship wreck.”
She thought of the surprise cheek-swab kit even now winging its way to him from Texas, and hoped it would not be a letdown; evidently he was after bigger game than a handful of hairy chieftains. She paralleled his gaze through the glass, past the railings of the back porch that gave onto the patio and the retreating perspective of lawns, differentiated by umbrellas, barbecues and the occasional sprinkler lazily combing the light, tossing its tresses, sending up wet sparks. She sipped.
“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.
Also on the menu, Dolly’s cinnamony roast chicken with green mashed potatoes called hushweh—try them, try them! Baked with herbs and juices from the bird. She began to relax regarding the E. coli, if not the mad-cow … whatever happened to that, anyway? Perhaps it was implicated in the epidemic in dementia—unless the spike was simply an effect of mass longevity. No doubt it would soon have its own ribbon. A grey one.
“Do you want the other wing?” Duncan asked, indicating their glasses, half rising.
“Sure. I’ll get it.”
She rose and carried their glasses over to the kitchen.
“I bought the chicken,” Dolly announced balefully.
“You’re falling down on the job, Missus,” said Duncan, mock stern.
“I better watch out or he’ll fire me.” Dolly winked at Hilary, who was crouched before the open fridge. “What are you looking for, dear?”
“The olives,” said Hil.
“They’re in a Becel tub.”
Hil stayed staring.
“It’s Yoplait on the bottom.”
There ought to be a sign over her mother’s fridge: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Dolly had reused and recycled long before it was fashionable or urgent. A tin of Hershey’s chocolate sauce might contain solidified bacon fat; raw egg yolks nested in a Cool Whip tub, and God knows what’s in the Nutella jar; she would have purchased the original products exactly once. By the time you got through the decoys, you’d forgotten what you were looking for.
Mary Rose asked, “Matthew, what are you eating?”
He had a chocolate moustache.
“Nutella on a cracker,” said Dolly. “It’s healthy, they eat it in Europe.”
“So that’s what was in the Nutella jar.”
“What else would it be?”
Maggie was now surrounded by the contents of Dolly’s purse, which was capsized like a tugboat amid bobbing cargo. Mary Rose was about to step around her when she noticed the child was playing with a plastic pill container—the rectangular kind with the days of the week stamped on the compartments. She bent and took it from her. “Mine!” objected Maggie.
A whistling from the stove. Dolly poured boiling water into a waiting bowl of pink Jell-O crystals, picked it up and swung it with its scalding contents from counter to table. Mary Rose scooped Maggie from the floor—“Here, Hil”—and thrust the thrashing child at her.
She moved to rejoin her father with the drinks but Dolly was right on her heels. She groaned, saying, “I’m going to go take a suppository.”
“I now know that,” said Mary Rose. “And cannot now unknow it.”
“You’re saucy.” Dolly pretended to slap her. “Have you heard from your brother?”
“Not recently.”
“When’s he coming home?”
“I don’t know.”
Dolly smiled mischievously. “Do you think he and Shereen will have a baby?”
“I don’t know.” She meant to sip but gulped and coughed.
“When’re we going to play Scrabble?”
“We can play now. Do you ever use the German Scrabble game I gave you?”
“Do you remember what you said when I told you we were going to call him Alexander—”
“Yes, Mum, I—”
“Hilary, do you know what she said, dear, when Andy-Patrick was born? I said to her, ‘Mary Rose, will we call the baby Alexander?’ And she said, “ ‘Don’t call him Alexander. If you call him Alexander, you’ll have to put him in de gwound!’ ”
Hil shot Mary Rose a questioning look—she didn’t know it was a funny story. Don’t even try, Hil.
“I’m surprised you remember that, Mary Rose,” said Dolly, “y
ou were only, how old were you?”
“Five.”
“I mean when Alexander was born.”
“Oh, I … I guess I actually don’t know.”
Dolly was suddenly shouting again, firing the words past Mary Rose’s head. She felt them graze her scalp—“Dunc, how old was Mary Rose when Alexander-Who-Died was born?!”
“What?” he answered irritably. “What’re you worried about that for?”
“I’m not ‘worried,’ Dunc!” And to Hil, “She would have been, let me think now …”
“Where’s that picture, Mum? The one of us visiting his grave.”
“Was there a picture?”
“Dad took it, remember?” She looked over at her father for corroboration but he appeared to be dozing off. She set his drink down at his elbow and removed the cup and saucer. She returned to her mother, speaking quietly. “It’s of me and you and Maureen. It was cold, you gave me your sweater.”
“It wasn’t cold, it was April.”
“See, you do remember.”
Matthew piped up, “Jitdy, can I have some ice cream?”
“Shh, Matthew.”
“Sure,” replied Dunc, rallying, hands on the armrests, about to rise.
“No, Dad, not yet, please.”
He winked at Matthew. “She’s the boss. Come here, Matt, and keep me company while the women finish making supper. Did you know all the best chefs in the world are men?”
“I was going to do something, now what was it?” said Dolly.
“Solve Fermat’s Last Theorem?”
“I was going to take a suppository, come.”
“I am not going into the bathroom with you.”
“You’re saucy, come with me now, I want to give you something.”