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It is five o’clock: witching hour for children and puppies, who tend to go rangy around then, bitching hour for those returning home from work, worry-and-wander hour for old folks suffering from sundowning. It is the primal tilt between day and night that strikes low-grade dread into the heart of Homo sapiens, a holdover from the time when we were prey. It is why cocktail hour was invented.
Mary Rose is successfully negotiating a cocktail-free hour, blowing bubbles in the front yard for Maggie and Daisy who lunge and snap joyously while Matthew draws calmly with chalk on the flagstones. His flaxen hair falls across his serious blue eyes as he outlines a car, a dinosaur … His ability to focus goes with a strong, well-coordinated little body and lends his demeanour a degree of maturity beyond his five years. Before leaving to pick him up, Mary Rose attempted to restore the fractal tracks and to situate Percy, Thomas, Annabel and the others amid the possibilities, but he smelled a rat. “It’s not the same,” he pronounced gravely. She considered telling him the trains had come alive and rearranged things on their own. Would he buy it? Would it be wrong? “I’m afraid Maggie was playing with your train set, Matthew.”
She braced herself, but he was philosophical. Even indulgent. “Oh, Maggie,” he said. “She’s still a baby.”
So it is with a sense of her tranquility being ruffled, like a glassy lake by a finger of wind at dusk, that she watches her brother, Andy-Patrick, pull up in a shiny new BMW. He is not a frequent visitor—likely to drop by only when the interval between girlfriends becomes a drought of more than a few days or, more recently, whenever he renews his resolution to remain faithful to his fiancée, Shereen, who is often away in the course of her job as a drug pusher. Pharmaceutical sales rep. Mary Rose tends to get worked up when obliging Andy-Patrick with a sisterly lecture as to his shortcomings. Like a ringside coach, patching him up, sending him back in, “get up off the couch, listen to her without trying to fix her, change your sweatpants.”
“Shereen left, eh,” he says, and closes the car door with a substantial Bavarian thunk.
The kids mob him, Daisy dances him up the flagstones, administering kisses of bovine heft.
“Where’s she off to this time?”
“She left left.”
“Oh.”
“It’s okay,” he says, beeping the car locked. “I’ve healed.”
The scent of the Euro-male is upon him: coffee, cigarettes, cologne pour lui. He joins them for grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup, broccoli and real-fruit freezie pops. He plays hide-and-seek and horsey all over the house and even helps with bath time, reading to the children afterwards—Here Come the Aliens! before “tuckling” them in—his hybrid of tucking and tickling. He heads back downstairs, and Mary Rose goes about settling them in the wake of their uncle’s stimulating glamour—even Matthew’s hamster is up and running early in its metal wheel, while the expiring balloons from his fifth birthday party have revived to float above the floor, riding the gusts of hilarity. One nudges her as she sits on the edge of her son’s bed in the darkness and she bats it away—God bless Balloon King and their money’s-worth helium. He is cuddled with beloved Bun, the tattered lapinary recipient of many a grooming by Daisy. She rubs her little boy’s back and he sighs contentedly. “You brushed the cloud away, Mumma.”
“I brushed away the balloon, sweetheart.”
“It was a cloud on my back.”
“Is it gone now?”
“You brushed it away.”
Surely he is too young to be burdened by a “cloud.” He says spooky things sometimes, I remember the first time I got born … Maybe he is psychic. Or maybe he is just sad. He has already been dealt a blow. Anna’s heartbeat, her voice and rhythm, the scent of his birth mother. Then, gone. On his dresser is a photo of her with the big striped circus tent in the background; she is decked out in safety vest and hard hat, waving. Gone to myth. It’s all for the best, but somewhere he must remember the loss, in his cells. He knows what it is to be haunted. But he also knows how to be consoled. She winds his glass unicorn and it tinkles its tune.
She goes into Maggie’s room, leans over the side of the crib and tucks the duvet around her shoulders. Maggie kicks it off. “Milk,” she says, ominously.
Mary Rose gives in and brings her a bottle. Just this once. She tries to cuddle her, but Maggie does not wish to be held. At least not by Mumma. She claims the bottle and rolls onto her side.
From the outset Mary Rose was less able to console her daughter than her son. To a degree this was natural—Hil was Maggie’s biological mother and was breastfeeding. Mary Rose understood this was what fathers often felt: second fiddle not only in the mother’s but the baby’s affections, despite long nights of walking the floor with her infant. Her own father walked the floor with her in the wee hours for the first several weeks—months?—while her mother was kept in hospital. Despite his gender and generation, he mothered her during the crucial early time, with the result that, for her, his body was the soft one, his voice, his gaze, safe in his arms on the balcony at sunset, Good night, sweetie pie. See you in the morning … Mary Rose herself has been the very model of a modern Other Mother: supportive at the birth, game for night feedings, endlessly patient while she waited for the honeymoon to resume with Hil. And waited.
She hears Andy-Pat downstairs playing the theme from A Charlie Brown Christmas on the piano—it’s almost Easter, maybe he could use a foot calendar. Her arm feels too warm. She dekes into the bathroom and pops an Advil—although, considering the pain in her arm is all in her head, she ought to be popping a placebo.
At the kitchen table she pours them each a Scotch. He says, “Want to see the birthday present I got for Shereen?”
“Why are you buying her a present if you’ve broken up, what are you hoping to achieve?” She kicks herself for lapsing into lecture mode again—the guy is forty-three years old even if he is her baby brother.
“Just ask me to show you her present.”
“Okay, show me her present.”
He holds out his wrist and flashes his chunky new TAG Heuer watch.
“What about the BMW?”
“Oh that’s not retail therapy, that’s a necessity.” He leans forward, conspiratorial. “It’s a cheap lease, okay? This mechanic, I may have mentioned him, Slavko, who was looking after the Hyundai?” A warm smile breaks across his boyish face. “He’s this great huge bear of a man, eh, totally foul-mouthed, could snap you in half, but the type of guy’d give you the shirt off his back, you know? So he puts me in touch with this dealership that’s essentially virtual, okay?” His tone becomes brisk, manly. “They don’t keep any actual cars on any one lot, they move them around as needed, so zero overhead, which is good news for me.” He sits back, nonchalant, and rests his gaze on a corner of the ceiling.
Mary Rose knows that look, it is her father’s look, she used to cultivate it herself to advantage—the old still-waters-run-deep look. As far as she can tell, it masks chronic low-grade dissociation and self-deceit, but her brother gets away with it because he’s a guy—it even helps him get laid. He does look great, though. Both he and Mary Rose have an advantage in the conventional good looks department: their mother has a schnozz, their father sports a beak, their older sister boasts a Roman profile, but the two youngest, by some stroke of recessive luck, have cute little noses. Maybe it goes with the lucky blood type.
While Andy-Patrick has his share of good looks, however, it is the glint in his eye that makes him attractive, and it is back. Gone are the saggy chinos, the faded fleece of Christmas Past, along with five or six pounds. He is wearing a hip new T-shirt with a silk-screened vintage coffee ad, Diesel jeans and a groovy cowboy belt. He’s had a total heartbreak-over.
He narrows his eyes—Bond, James Bond—“I’m getting my hair done Wednesday, just some discreet highlights, want to come?”
He is a liaison officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which seems to mean he can show up for work when he wants bu
t has to be ready to don his scarlets and head for a podium at a moment’s notice. People don’t think cops go in for retail therapy of the sumptuary kind. A new snowmobile or flat-screen TV, sure, but hair? Great-ass jeans? “Look, I’m not going to sit here and drop the C-bomb like some guys I know, but Shereen is … you know, she’s young, she’s got stuff to do, she’s a … she’s not a bitch just because she left me.”
“The C-bomb?”
He grins. “I’m watching The Sopranos again, eh, it’s my therapy.”
“I know, it’s so comforting.”
“I know, weird, eh? So I’m not going to sit here and call her a—” He gives an apologetic wince that reminds her of their father, then mouths the word, cunt. Which does not.
She sips. “What did you mean, you’ve ‘healed’?”
He flashes a roguish smile in answer.
She deadpans, “Do the words ‘Gerald McBoing-Boing’ mean anything to you?”
“I’m not on the rebound, Mister, this one’s strictly … recreational.”
“Is that why Shereen left?”
“No. No, no, no way, this postdates that.”
She waits for the “tell.” He scratches his cheek. Vindicated, she inquires, “Do we bother with names?”
“Naw, she’s nice, but …”
“How old is she?”
“She’s a big fan of yours.”
“Please tell me she’s at the twenty-five-year-old end of the YA readership spectrum.” She has spoken with asperity but suppresses a vicarious macho buzz—as if she were chalking up a sexual conquest of her own.
“She’ll be twenty-three in two weeks. I stopped her for an illegal left turn.”
“You don’t do traffic.”
“I’m always on duty.”
She feels her face heating up. “Andy-Pat, you have to stay away from young ones, they’re a waste of time, even women in their thirties, the thirties are when people let themselves go ’cause they don’t realize they’re getting older, plus their divorce is too fresh and they’re dealing with custody. Find a nice teacher in her forties, her kids are older, she’s intelligent, well-rounded, plus she’s looking after herself now, she’s a frost-free tower of perimenopausal sex with no waxy buildup. You don’t have to look great to get a great woman, Andy-Pat, you just have to be an employed straight white male with a pulse.” She freshens their glasses. “Up yer kilt.”
“We’re not actually, technically, white, Mary Rose. Mum is a visible minority.”
He’s had sensitivity training through the Force.
“She’s not not-white, Andy-Pat, she’s just Lebanese, she’s Canadian—”
“She’s of Arab extraction. I think we both know what that means nowadays, Mister Sister.” He swirls his Scotch a tad ruefully.
“It means everyone wants to eat our food even though they made fun of us for it when we were kids.”
“Try entering the US with the name Mahmoud stamped on your passport instead of MacKinnon,” he says with police-forcely gravitas.
Try growing up as a lesbian in our family. But she doesn’t say it.
“What happened to your fridge?” he asks.
She tells him: she threw Maggie’s doll stroller across the kitchen. The doll wasn’t in it at the time. She’d been ransacking the house, looking for something—lost objects are her bêtes noires—her gaze fell on the stroller and she allowed herself the outlet.
“Do you remember the time Dad broke his hand on the doorstep?” she says with a grin. Her question is rhetorical: the Time Dad Broke His Hand is canonical, a stock “remember-when.” Or, as Andy-Patrick used to say when he was little, “me-member.”
Their mother was the one with the short wick, but their father used to assault inanimate objects, always with an expression of outraged innocence followed by red-faced Highland triumph. “There! That’ll teach that godforsaken lawn mower a thing or two. Probably designed by a Frenchman!” Garden hoses, bicycle spokes, boot racks, all manner of things tasted his wrath—except for the time he throttled Mo over the missing tent pegs, but that became a funny story almost immediately.
The doorstep thing happened way back when they lived in Kingston; the screen door caught Dad on the heel and he yelped—dangerously funny to Mary Rose and Andy-Patrick, who must have laughed, perhaps triggering the face-saving assault on the doorstep, for their father turned, genuflected and brought down his fist like a gavel, breaking one of the myriad tiny fishbones that make up the human hand. It required a cast, of which they were perversely proud, and their father told the story better than anyone, insisting, with a twinkle, that the door frame had been dealt “just retribution.” Was that before or after her first surgery when she wound up in a cast of her own? Was it before or after her mother’s last miscarriage? Time measured out in dead babies, broken bones and postings. You had to be there to know it was actually loads of fun a lot of the time.
She expects Andy-Patrick to laugh about her dented fridge—she is laughing. But he says, “We were raised with a lot of rage.”
She nods. If he wants to go there, she can go there with the best of them. “Exactly,” she says. “Which is how I know the difference between a dented fridge and a battered child.”
“What? I, I didn’t mean that.”
“I know how we were raised, Andy-Pat, I was there long before you came along.”
“I’m sorry, I know you’re not like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like Mum.”
“Are you saying Mum battered us?” she retorts casually.
“No! No, no.”
“Some people would call it that.”
“… Would you call it that?”
“I’d call it …” —she pauses—“… colourful.”
“Me too.”
She bellows suddenly, “ ‘C’mere till I annihilate the both o’ ya!’ ”
“ ‘C’mere till I beat the daylights outta ya!’ ” He captures the quivering vulnerability at the white core of anger.
“ ‘C’mere, demon!’ ”
“ ‘C’mere, hateful!’ ”
They laugh.
Sip.
“Mum was from a different time and place,” he says, relaxing, stretching out his legs.
“Mum was incredible, it’s incredible what she accomplished, she was the only one in her family to go past high school.”
“Apart from the priest and nun,” he points out.
“Exactly. Mum was amazing. Remember the time she conducted the church choir and got them to sing ‘Hava Nagila’?”
“Remember when you opened the back door on my birthday cake and she iced it anyway and called it a ‘hurricane cake’?”
They get giddy again. They sip.
“People did all kinds of things to their kids back then without batting an eye.”
“I got the strap at school,” he says.
“I got the yardstick.”
“Did you get the belt?”
She looks up. “No. Did you?”
“Once or twice.”
“Mum never gave me the belt.”
“Not Mum. Dad.”
“Dad gave you the belt?”
She hesitates. Does this change anything? Mum-on-the-rampage is one thing, but Dad … discerning, even-tempered Dad—the mere fact he might think you deserving of such humiliation, never mind mete it out …
“When?”
“Aunt Sadie was visiting, I think I was five.”
“Why?” she asks.
“I don’t know, I was a brat—”
“He must have been under some kind of pressure. Well, can you imagine living with Mum?”
“We don’t have to imagine it,” he says with a grin.
Does the belt mean her brother suffered more? Surely she is the winner of the family suffering sweepstakes. The thought has landed like a stray ball over the fence … She will examine it more closely later, but for now Andy-Pat needs the benefit of her clarity.
“Okay, that’s my
point, A&P.” She knows he has never minded being nicknamed after a grocery store chain—it beats being named after a dead sibling. “I’ve got Hilary and the kids now and I don’t dwell on what I went through with Mum and Dad, but you need to take a good hard look at some unresolved issues—”
“I want to meet someone like Hilary. Someone beautiful and nice and funny who’s a bit smarter than me.”
“She’s not smarter than me.”
“In the Dad way, yes she is, you know, someone with a tidy mind.”
“I mean, Hilary’s smart, but …”
“I wish I was a lesbian.”
“Mum was … rough with us—okay?—by today’s standards, but …” The Scotch feels to be dissolving her stomach lining—it’s okay to drink booze with Advil, it’s Tylenol that’s the problem. “Whether it’s physical or verbal, it’s all … it’s the shame factor, right? I mean, it didn’t wreck us or anything, we had a lot of great times …”
“We had tons of great times.”
“But we’re kind of wrecked,” she says.
“We’re a bit wrecked.”
“We’re great, too. Mum and Dad were great.”
“They were great.”
“But it makes you hate yourself,” she says.
“And that makes you dangerous.”
“… Say that again?”
“It makes you dangerous,” he says. “A person who hates themself is dangerous.”
“Andy-Patrick, that is really smart.”
“I got it from Amber.”
“Who’s Amber?”
“The marriage counsellor—Mary Lou and I saw her together, then I kept going for my own, you know, issues.”
“Wow, Andy-Pat. Good. Really good.”
Her brother has actually had psychotherapy. The RCMP will have paid for it, of course, courtesy of the Government of Canada … which bugs her a bit, her commitment to social democracy notwithstanding, because if she needed psychotherapy, she would have to pay for it herself. It wouldn’t even be tax-deductible. She cannot deduct so much as a Pilates class from her income, even though her core strength is keeping her off the public tit to the tune of a future double hip replacement. She has literally outrun the family curse of high cholesterol at the expense of her knee, for which she is on an arthroscopic waiting list behind a bunch of fat slobs who never get up off the couch, and should she seek therapy so as not to beat her children or chase them screaming through the house with a wooden spoon, the cost-saving ripple effect of her sparing society two more screwed-up people will merit not a penny’s deduction come tax time.