SSC (2012) Adult Onset Read Online Free PDF Page B

her car key amid the packing materials—
Maggie!
She salvages the key and jams it into the pocket of her jeans. Talk about a close call … She folds the box and goes to open the deep drawer that houses her recycling bin, only to be momentarily stymied by the child safety lock, which she fumbles free, but not before pinching her finger on its quick-release. Washing her hands once more, she returns to the chicken, pallid and limp on the counter next to the recipe stand.
Could we take the frustration out of deboning?
    Mary Rose has mastered her squeamishness with most aspects of cooking, but one remains: when handling a raw chicken, she never holds it by the wing. There is something about the sight of the skin straining between wing and body … It looks like it hurts. She recalls, as a child, watching her mother prepare a chicken for the oven, slinging it by the wing from sink to counter with a thud. More of a splud, really. It didn’t matter that the chicken was dead and couldn’t feel it.
She
could feel it.
    Still, as phobias go, it is a distant third behind the dire duo: vertigo and claustrophobia—which are really two faces of the same thing. MaryRose is on intimate terms with both, having been ambushed by the latter in her twenties while climbing the narrow tower of Münster Cathedral behind her sister, Maureen; and by the former upon walking out onto its gargoyle-encrusted spire three hundred feet above the Black Forest. Mo read her mind and held her gaze. “It’s all right, Rosie. Walk to me.” Until then she had had no fear of heights. Indeed, one of her earliest memories is of hanging placidly by the wrists from a third floor balcony. In the same country, come to think of it. And with the same person.
    •
    “We lost the baby,” the mother tells her three-year-old.
    “Where?” asks the child.
    The father explains, “The baby died.”
    “Because you lost it?”
    “No, it just happens sometimes.” He didn’t see it either. It was taken away.
    “Where is it?”
    “It’s with God,” she says.
    “Where?”
    The mother doesn’t answer.
    “She’s in Heaven,” says the father.
    “Can I pray to her?”
    “Sure,” says the father.
    “Can she give me candy?”
    “Don’t be silly, Maureen,” says the mother.
    The mother knows that the baby is not in Heaven, it is in Limbo, “the other place,” reserved for those who have not received the Sacrament of Baptism and whose souls therefore retain the taint of Original Sin, rendering them unworthy of the Beatific Vision. They do not suffer, but nor do they see God.
    “But where is she? Where is
she
?”
    Nowhere.
    “Is she in a grave?”
    No grave.
    “Is she going to live in Winnipeg?”
    “Hush now, Maureen,” says the father.
    “What’s her name?”
    Technically, the baby had no name, not having been baptized.
    The mother answers, “We were going to …” But she is unable to say it.
    The father says, “We were going to call her Mary Rose.”
    •
    Eyes on her recipe, she is reaching for her scissors when she hears someone’s car alarm go off somewhere outside. Hand arrested mid-air, she glances up, wishing once again that she lived in a simpler time before everything beeped—say the fifties, minus polio, homophobia and wringer washers. She hooks a thumb in her jeans pocket, waiting for the sound to cease once the hapless motorist finds the right button—everyone knows car alarms are never set off by actual thieves—and it does, abruptly. She returns to
Cooks Illustrated
with its drawing of a chicken breast effortlessly yielding up its bone—only to hear the alarm start up again—is she not to be vouchsafed a single cotton-pickin’ unmolested moment to unwind with a recipe? She glares out her big kitchen windows, but none of the cars parked on the street is flashing. She leans forward against the counter for a better look, but the wretched sound stops again. Returning her gaze to the magazine, she reaches for the knife block only