SSC (2012) Adult Onset Read Free Page A

her shadow and dive for cover. “I can’t believe you’re saying this, Hil. It’s like you want me to start using drugs again. I need to find out who I am without
work
. I’m tired of being a demon elf, spinning cotton into gold, I am a human being, I want a human life, I want a garden, I want peace, I want to hammer swords into ploughshares, don’t make me wiggle my nose, Darren!” Hil didn’t laugh. She asked if Mary Rose would consider “seeing someone.”
    Dear Dad,
    I should have know the e-mail was from you right off the bat because of the address—I remember you telling me that’s what the Germans called the Highland regiments when they came over the top in their leather kilts to the skirl of the pipes: “the ladies from hell.” Was Granddaddy in both wars? He was a medic, wasn’t he?
    “Flap you dance chicken flap!!” A Thracian ferocity has crept into Maggie’s tone. She presses Elmo’s foot again—and again—and—
    “Let Elmo finish his song, sweetheart.”
    Was Granddaddy an alcoholic? Is that why you sometimes had a hard time talking about certain
    Delete
.
    Hil thinks that because she is in therapy it must be right for everyone, but Mary Rose is not about to risk having her creativity dismantled by a well-meaning therapist who might mistake the riches of her unconscious for hazardous waste. Even if her creativity is on hold at the moment. The cursor blinks. There is something just out of reach. Something she knows … witness her fingers hovering over the keyboard even as her mind draws a blank and she sits staring, as though someone has pressed
pause
 … Her eyes skid involuntarily from side to side—is it possible to experience a seizure without knowing it? People have mini-strokes all the time and never know till they show up on a CT scan. She should google it. Something familiar is bobbing on the horizon of consciousness, something she knows but cannot name … she can almost see it, like a package, a crate on the sea. But when she looks directly at it, it vanishes. Slips her mind as though somewhere in her brain there is a sheer strip that interrupts the flow of neural goods and services. Like a scar.
    Dear Dad,
    I
    Elmo has fallen silent and Maggie is climbing onto her lap. Mary Rose moves to hug her little girl, who so seldom reaches out for this kind of affection from her, and realizes too late that her lap has been scaled as a means to her laptop. Maggie thrusts out her hand and clicks
send
before Mary Rose can stop her—“No!”
    She has roared it on reflex and is immediately regretful, having inherited her pipes from her mother, who definitely wore the baritone in the family. Her child sits, immobilized. “It’s okay, Maggie.”
    It’s no big deal, the letter was blank but for
Dear Dad, I
. It isn’t as if Mary Rose had typed
Dear Dad, go fuck yourself
—itself an intrusive thought of the kind with which she has been plagued all her life; theflotsam and jetsam of her psyche, she knows to be part and parcel of the creativity that has served her so well she has been able to enter semi-retirement in her forties and arrive, against all odds, at this kitchen table with her child. That said, is it too much to ask not to have jam on her trackpad?
    “Maggie?” But Maggie is … on pause. “Maggie, sweetheart.”
    The child suddenly looses a siren wail and Mary Rose squints against the blast—for such a rugged little hellion, Maggie can be surprisingly sensitive. Mary Rose gets to her feet and paces the floor with the howling child, back and forth past the big kitchen windows as, deep within her middle-aged ear canal, numberless cilia curl and die, drawing nigh the day when she, like her elderly dehydrating parents, will exasperate her own adult children with repeated, “What?! Did you want a pin or a pen?!” Though it would seem from her robust and sustained protest that Maggie has in turn inherited Mary Rose’s pipes, the fact is this mother and child are not