Ten minutes later, they were back on the street, Dolly having acquired Kinder Eggs for the children along with the lady’s life story. Her name was Winnie, she had been a university professor back in Seoul. “And her with a math degree, imagine!”
They walked south.
“ ‘Grapefruit Moon Restaurant,’ ” said Dolly.
Mary Rose saw Rochelle disappearing into the restaurant and looked down in order to spare them both the necessity of a greeting. But bloody Rochelle stopped and said an unprecedented, “Hi.” Mary Rose introduced her mother, then feigned interest in the dry cleaner’s next door till her mother rejoined her. “Now that little gal has a back problem—”
“What ‘little gal’?”
“Your neighbour, Rachel.”
“Rochelle.”
“ ‘Freeman Real Estate,’ ” said Dolly.
“Let’s cross at the lights, Mum.”
They crossed Bathurst and proceeded down quiet, signless Howland Avenue beneath the bony-fingered trees, and to her surprise Mary Rose was able to keep up with her mother. At four foot eleven and a half, Dolly nonetheless had a stride—rather, she had had one—and on every back-to-school shopping excursion, “Walk tall, Mary Rose, walk as if you own the place.” “Mum, it’s the Kmart.” “I don’t care if it’s the Taj Mahal!” Now Mary Rose realized her mother might need to rest. When they got to the corner of Bloor, she said, “Would you like a cup of tea, Mum?”
“Oh, that’d be lovely!” she groaned, and they stepped into the Starbucks.
They found a table by the steamy window that was stencilled with non-denominational snowflakes. A sleek young man in signature green apron approached their table with a tray. “Would you like to sample a mini-cup of our festive chocolate peppermint candy cane holiday whip?”
“Golly Moses!” said Dolly, and knocked one back.
The young man offered her another.
“You’re bad!” she giggled.
“Sister, you got that right!”
She downed the second one—her blood sugar had to be going through the roof—then ordered the real thing.
“Can I get your name for the cup?”
“It’s Dolly.”
“Well hello, Dolly,” he said.
On cue, they belted out the first few bars together. Customers nearby applauded. He told Dolly what he was studying, where his parents were from, he told her about his bee sting allergy, and before Mary Rose knew it, he was calling her Sitdy and hugging her. Another lucky winner in the instant intimacy sweepstakes. Mary Rose sat on the sidelines with her tall, humourless no-foam latte.
Though she often felt like a killjoy in her presence—spectre at the feast, ghost of murdered Banquo—Mary Rose was nonetheless proud of her mother’s ability to connect with people. Stewardesses sent her photos of their babies. Cops smiled at her, she got a few dollars off everything.
“You’re not eighty!” the young man exclaimed.
“I’m eighty-one,” declared Dolly with mock solemnity.
He told her how close he had been to his grandmother who had come here from the Philippines and raised five children from behind the cash register of a corner store. Dolly told him the story of how her father had sold dry goods from a donkey in the back country of Cape Breton Island, of how he had eloped with her mother. The young man had tears in his eyes. Mary Rose thought, but did not say, “I’ll give you something to cry about, buddy, my grandmother was twelve.”
The young man slipped away but soon returned with a grande version of the mini-cup—that was another thing: Dolly got table service at Starbucks. Mary Rose took one look at the candy-striped confection and wondered if she would recognize the signs of diabetic shock. What if her mother went into a coma? Collapsed? Died at Starbucks? Can I get your name for the gravestone?
The young man said, “My name is Daniel? So just let me know if there’s anything else you need, okay?” He withdrew, and Dolly leaned confidingly over her minaret of whipped cream. “Now that young fella is gay, is that right?”
“That’s right, Mum, in all likelihood.”
“I love you, doll.”
Mary Rose felt guilty for not feeling warm and happy. Instead of melting into a smile, she felt her face go positively Soviet in a pre-glasnost kind of way. She knew she looked like Brezhnev and there was nothing she could do about it. If she rummaged in her basement, she could probably find the box marked WARM AND HAPPY. But who knew what else might be down there, she didn’t have time to go through it all. Nyet. She hesitated. Was it worth it to disturb the peace? On the other hand, her mother had raised the subject … maybe she wanted to talk about it. Fill in the missing bit. In movies, this was the poignant conversation that led to “closure.”
“It was hard before you … arrived at that.” She sounded like a robot in her own ears.
Dolly looked at her quizzically. “It was?” Head cocked, like Daisy.
Dolly’s expressions were often like caricatures of real expressions; as if she was in constant clown mode. Larger than life. But, Mary Rose wondered now, what’s wrong with life-sized? What remains when the trumpets and bells fall silent and the ringmaster sets down his megaphone? When the dancer pulls the red shoes from her bloodied feet?
“Yes,” said Mary Rose.
“Why? What did I do?”
This café table was a world away from the kitchen table of yore, and yet she was still … anaesthetized. There must be considerable emotion collecting within her somewhere—as with fluids in a corpse. “You wouldn’t set foot in my home. Remember?” She felt like she was lying. It wasn’t that the words she was saying were untrue; it was the fact of her speaking them at all. “And you wouldn’t have Renée in your home, remember?”
Dolly looked perplexed.
Coffee table, kitchen table, operating table … like a Sesame Street song, one of these tables is not like the others …
“You said some bad things,” said Mary Rose. Her hands were cold. She had stumbled into a chilly gap in time.
“I did? What did I say?”
I would rather you had cancer.
There was no point speaking the words, they were only sounds and might wound her mother unnecessarily.
I didn’t give you shit to eat …
“Mum?”
“Yes, doll?” Dolly leaned forward and placed her hand in the centre of the table. Brown and still smooth, it was an old hand now, exquisitely veined; hard-working but fine. Mary Rose loved this hand. It was somehow like a whole other mother. As if her mother had two faces, and this hand was one. The real one. What would it say? Did it remember? Mary Rose was suddenly alive again, no longer a puppet under a spell, she had a lump in her flesh-and-blood throat. She wanted to lay her face on that hand, feel it turn and cup her cheek in its palm, and take the weight of her head. Tears welled up and, rather than trickling down, they stood, liquid lenses whose function seemed to be to impart acuteness to her vision, for it was then that she noticed: “Mum? Where’s your moonstone?”
Dolly looked at her hand, alarmed. “Golly Moses!” And lurched to look beneath the table—a thousand calories leapt from her cup and she nearly tumbled from the chair.
“Mum!”
“I must’ve dropped it.”
“It’s okay, I’ll look.”
Mary Rose got up, already scanning the floor.
The server was on them. “Did you lose something?”
“It’s okay,” she said.
“It’s not okay!” cried Dolly, and the cry pierced Mary Rose’s heart.
She was shocked to find herself in danger of sobbing at the pathos: the moonstone ring that her father had given her mother way back in Germany during the sweet years, the years of Rhine and roses … kicking around now on the floor of the Starbucks. Or lodged in a sidewalk crack between here and home, on its way back, back, back … She bit the inside of her cheek and blinked away the blur.
“What did you lose?” asked lovely gay Daniel.
“My ring!?
?? moaned Dolly. “My husband gave it to me when our son was born.”
“That sounds really special.”
“It is really special, he died.”
Dolly sounded like a first-grader pleading for help in sorting out what and how much she felt: Is this too much? What if it spills on the way home?
“I’m so sorry, why don’t you leave me your number and if anyone finds it, I promise—”
Dolly was already emptying her purse onto the table. Mary Rose looked away, grey in the soul, and headed for the door, eyes on the floor, unable to bear her mother’s frank distress, desperate to recover it—stone marker for a dead baby gone to grass long ago in another land across the sea, now it was lost and the genie was out. Memory was zooming around Starbucks like a bird trying to escape, bang against the glass … Bang bang!
“I found it!”
She turned. Her mother was smiling broadly, holding the small grey velvet box.
“It was in my purse!”
Daniel embraced Dolly and she held him and patted his back like a baby.
Mary Rose returned to the table, oddly drained, revisited by the sense that half of her had shut down. The humorous half. Humerus. She should be the one embracing her vibrant mother, mirroring the ups and downs; after all, a diva is just an extroverted martyr. But Mary Rose was brittle. Bag of bones. She sat back down at the table. Shclink went the bones.
Dolly swept her belongings from the table back into her purse in one motion, causing the Living with Christ pamphlet to flap to the floor. Mary Rose bent to retrieve it along with a small “Sunday Offering” envelope that she tucked back into it. She wondered how much was in the envelope and how her mother squared supporting the church with her love for “you and your friends specially.”
Daniel wiped up the spill and retreated. Mary Rose watched as Dolly slipped the ring back onto her finger. Home. She put her warm hand over Mary Rose’s cold one, saying, “I guess it really was a hard time, now that I think of it.”
“Yes, it was.”
“And it couldn’t have been easy on you, you were so young.”
“That’s right.”
“I was so afraid.”
Mary Rose was amazed. She was in reality after all. Her mother was making it real. Her mother, in her leopard print tam, sweeping into Mary Rose’s hospital room, making everything okay … She tried not to move a muscle.
Together, she and her mother had crossed over into a world where people call things by their name and love their children and are sorry for having injured them and say I see you. She hunted frantically about inside herself for an appropriate feeling state, but all she found were lumps, frost-bearded comestibles. She grabbed one at random and set it on the counter to thaw. She would find out later what she felt; for now, it was important simply to witness …
“I understand, Mum. Fear of the unknown.” And she returned the pressure of her mother’s hand.
“ ‘Unknown’ nothing! I knew what I was afraid of, I was afraid I was going to hurt you.”
“You … did hurt me.”
“I did?”
Mary Rose nodded.
Dolly’s brow furrowed. “Is that what happened to your arm?”
“What? No, Mum. I mean hurt me emotionally.”
“Oh.” This appeared to strike Dolly as a novel idea. “You’d’ve been too young to remember any of that.”
“I wasn’t too young.”
“You remember that far back?”
“Yes.”
Dolly’s manner was mildly perturbed, as one who recollects trials in tranquility. “I didn’t know what to do or where to turn, and some days I couldn’t even get up off the couch and you’d be crying so hard—”
“When did I cry?”
“You cried all the time! Oh, it made me so mad sometimes and I’d get up and go in to you and then I’d really scare myself so I’d lie back down, and you’d stop crying and that got me really scared—”
“Mum, I didn’t cry, I’m not a crier, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t you tell me you didn’t cry, I was the one who was alone with you day in day out, you cried. And you ran everywhere, I was afraid you were going to run right into the glass—”
“Mum, I wasn’t even living at home.”
Her mother had lost it. It was Mary Rose’s fault, dredging up bad stuff, torturing Dolly over a transgression for which she had already amply atoned with love and gifts and garrulity, God loves you and your friends specially … She was going to bring her mother back to her father this afternoon in a state of geriatric distress.
“It’s okay, Mum, would you like another candy cane whip?”
“Dammit all, Mary Rose, you’ve got me all confused, I’m talking about when I came out of hospital after Alexander was born! What in the name of time are you talking about?!”
“… Oh. That hard time.”
“Yes, ‘that hard time,’ what ‘hard time’ did you mean?” It was the old Dolly. Straight from the lip.
“Never mind.”
“Don’t you ‘never mind’ me, tell me.” A flash of the old ferocity.
“I was talking about … when I came out to you and Dad.”
“Came out of where?”
“Came out as a lesbian.” There was the word in all its scaly ignominy.
“Oh, that!” Dolly laughed.
“You said you would rather I had cancer.”
Dolly paused. “Did I object that strongly, Mary Rose?”
Mary Rose nodded.
Dolly’s forehead creased. She shook her head slowly, regretfully, and said, “I don’t remember.”
She looked past Mary Rose toward the window, as though the memory, recently released, might still be playing about on the other side of the glass before darting up and away. Then she turned her liquid eyes full on her daughter, seeming to enclose the two of them in a grotto, a kind of sacred darkness that was as close to an embrace as Mary Rose could bear from her mother, and said with a note of sincere bewilderment, “I’m sorry, Mary Rose.”
Daniel caught them on their way out the door. He gave Dolly a gift certificate for “a beverage of your choice at any of our stores.”
“Aren’t ya nice!”
“I’m sorry about your husband, Dolly.”
“My husband? What about my husband?”
For the first time, Daniel looked at a loss. He turned to Mary Rose, but she stone-faced him. Go back to your own mother who loves you just because you’re you, you wimp, and quit sucking up to mine. She’d’ve had your balls for bookends.
He turned back to Dolly. “I thought you said he died.”
“That wasn’t my husband, that was my son!”
Dolly delivered it with the force of a punchline and supplied her own laugh track.
Out on the street, Mary Rose offered her left arm and Dolly took it. “What were you afraid of, Mum?”
“When was I afraid?”
“When I was a baby.”
“I went to a psychiatrist.”
Mary Rose stopped in her tracks. This was more surprising than her mother’s embrace of Queer Nation. “You did?”
“I told the doctor I was scared and he told me I should see a psychiatrist, so I did. In Munich.”
She was conscious of keeping her tone neutral so as not to startle her mother off whatever track she had stumbled upon. Was this how it worked? Some neural pathways got gummed over while others became unmasked? A psychiatrist? Her mother might as well have said Mary Rose’s father had been moonlighting as a trapeze artist. Her parents were from Cape Breton. They didn’t go in for “head-shrinkers.”
“Did Dad know?”
“Daddy drove me.”
The phrase gave Mary Rose slight pause—a bird alighting on a twig in her mind, but off it flew before she could identify it. “Did it help?”
“Oh, I think it must have.”
“Why?”
“Well, here we are.” They were outside Wiener’s Home Hardware. br />
“Did Dad want us to pick something up?” He had announced his intention to replace the weatherstripping on her deck door—“You’re heating the outdoors!” Should she buy caulking? And a caulking gun? She could caulk it herself, how hard could it be?
“I don’t think so,” said Dolly. “Do you need something in there?”
“No, I thought you did. You said ‘here we are.’ ”
In the display window, next to sacks of road salt and sand, the holiday scene was still up, teddy bear conductor on a choo-choo train winding through a snowy olde tyme towne.
“That’s right,” said Dolly.
Santa was drinking a Coke.
“But we’re not here.”
“We are so.”
“Mum, this is the hardware store, we’re going to the bra shop.”
“I didn’t mean we were there, I meant we’re here.”
Was dementia contagious? Who’s on first?
“Where’s ‘here,’ Mum?”
“Here!”
Dolly flung Mary Rose’s arm loose and waved her hands in a gesture of general hereness. Mary Rose’s arm twanged briefly, her brain clanked and shifted like a funhouse floor. Dolly said, “I wasn’t good at having babies.”
Her mother seemed to have switched tracks again, but at least Mary Rose was familiar with this one. She took a deep breath and felt it catch, as though something were lodged in her chest—maybe they had a tool in the store that could remove it, a crowbar. “Let’s go, Mum.”
Unless she was having a heart attack—heart disease often went undiagnosed in women. What were the symptoms? She would google it when they got home. She got them moving again down the crowded sidewalk. Pigeons poked along in front of them, incense wafted sweet and cloying from Indra Crafts, the Native guy with the bandana bounced past them looking free but purposeful, his dog loose at his side. Across the busy street, the neon swirls of Honest Ed’s were still bolstered by blinking wreaths and angels. Outside, a line had formed, women in saris and parkas, people from the four corners, the darker faces among them diminished by drab winter clothes, all waiting to cash in on the special. It might be chickpeas, it might be towels, turkeys or toothpaste, all for a dollar ninety-nine.
“ ‘Come in and get lost!’ ” cried Dolly. She stepped abruptly from the curb and onto busy Bathurst Street—