Mary Ann in Autumn (6 page)

Chapter 9
Lady Parts

T
he cottage seemed even smaller on the inside, which was fine with Mary Ann. The last thing she needed was room for rattling around. She’d had that in spades back in Darien, and that cavern of a house, minus husband and stepson, only amplified her despair. She wanted to feel cozy now—confined, even—and here, in this doll’s house of a room, with the guys just across the garden, she could be alone but not alone.

She was touched to see how they’d prepared for her arrival: a Mason jar of pink tea roses by the bed and a little wooden crate of artisanal goat soap on the dresser. There was even a Quan Yin—a jade one with a sweet smile—though that might have always been there. She set down her suitcase with an appreciative sigh. “Perfect.”

Michael rolled his eyes. “Hardly.”

She turned and laid her head against his chest. “No, Mouse . . . I appreciate it more than you can know.” He patted her shoulder awkwardly. She wondered how much trouble she had caused. Ben had
seemed
all right about it, but it was sometimes hard to read the emotions behind that gap-toothed Huck Finn smile.

“You can put your suitcase there,” Michael said, indicating the only patch of unoccupied floor in the room. “And there’s a rod in the bathroom where you can hang stuff. If there’s not enough room, let me know. We can hang it in the house.”

She assured him she was fine, that she planned to live as simply as possible during her stay, that all she needed was access to their washer and dryer and maybe a shelf in their refrigerator. It felt good, actually, to pare down her life like this.

“We’re vegetarian these days,” Michael told her.

“You
are
? Since when?”

“Six weeks, maybe.”

“You never mentioned it.”

He shrugged. “I don’t wanna be an asshole about it.”

As long as she’d known him, Michael had been a bacon-double-cheeseburger kind of guy. This had to be Ben’s influence. “Do you just . . . disapprove of meat?”

“It disapproves of me. I asked Ben to take me to this Brazilian steakhouse on Market Street for my birthday, and we ate, like, half a barnyard—cows, chickens, pigs,
and
their internal organs—and three days later I had a major attack of gout.”

“Gout?” The word sounded so archaic. “Like Henry the Eighth?”

“Yeah . . . most of those bloated old British kings. And Mel Brooks, for God’s sake! At least that’s what Wikipedia says. I’m in elegant company.”

She smiled. “How does it . . . you know, manifest itself?”

“Mine was in my big toe. It felt like broken glass under the skin. It hurt whenever my toe touched the sheet. So I figured it was time to change my diet.”

“I remember when you ate nothing
but
meat for years. Meat and cheese and strawberries with heavy cream.”

“The Atkins Diet,” said Michael. “The gateway to gout. The thing is, I was already starting to get grossed out by the idea of animal flesh. I was chopping chicken breasts into smaller and smaller pieces. And I saw this documentary where they were prodding a half-dead cow with a forklift, and it just revolted me. So . . . I thought I should listen to that. Plus Ben and I both have high cholesterol, so vegan made sense.”

“
Vegan?
I thought you said vegetarian?”

“Ben’s doing vegan. I have to have my cheese. And I buy those cartons of egg whites. We’re not fanatical about it. We can stock up on meat for you, if that’s what you’d like. We can go to Trader Joe’s together and get what you need.”

She wasn’t prepared to commit to vegetarianism, even briefly, so she kept it vague. “You know me. I’m happy with my yogurt and half a sandwich.”

“That’s why you’re still so skinny and pretty.”

It was such a lovely thing to say, and there was really no way to keep the tears back. “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I swear it won’t be like this.”

“Oh, c’mon.”

“What?”

“Of course it’s gonna be like this. We’re saying good-bye to your uterus. We’ll need a few tears for that if we’re gonna have a proper send-off.”

He had summed up the situation with his usual charming candor, but it was the sound of “we” that made her terrible burden suddenly seem lighter.
We’ll need a few tears for that.
She had almost forgotten the sweet solace of the first-person plural.

She kept things light to keep from crying again. “Don’t tell me there’s a ritual or something.”

“For what?”

“Sending off your uterus.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, twelve crones in purple robes smear your body with patchouli oil and dance the sacred Farewell Womb Dance. Jesus, woman!”

She laughed. “Well, you never know. Not around here.”

“You’ve been in Connecticut too long.”

“Tell me about it.” She pecked him on the cheek. “Go to work, Mouse. I’m gonna settle in. Maybe take a nap.” She was already savoring the thought of snoozing on those sun-warmed sheets while hummingbirds idled in the window.

“I left the house open,” Michael added, “in case you wanna hang out there. Watch TV, read a book or something. Just lock up if you decide to head out. You know the neighborhood. There’s shopping in both directions . . . down on 24th or the Castro.” He paused, considering something. “You’re okay with walking, right?”

She nodded. “I’m not feeling anything so far . . . if that’s what you mean.”

“I guess that
is
what I meant.” He fell tellingly silent for a moment. “So you’ve got the doctor lined up and all?”

“I did. I mean . . . my doctor in Darien hooked me up with somebody at Mount Zion but . . . he’s not gonna work out.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “He’s got a penis.”

Michael absorbed that. “You want a lady handling the lady parts.”

“Is that silly?”

“Not at all. I totally get it.”

She’d felt sure he would say that, but it helped to hear it anyway. “I thought I might call DeDe and D’or,” she told him. “See if they can recommend somebody.”

“I dunno.” A mischievous glint came into his eye. “That could very well involve twelve crones in purple with patchouli oil.”

“C’mon, Mouse. They’re the least New-Agey lesbians I know.”

“How many lesbians do you know these days?”

He had always loved teasing her like this, making her seem more out of it than she actually was. It was part of their ancient ritual. “We have lesbians in Darien,” she told him. “There’s one on the board of the country club. She’s a Bush Republican.”

He smirked. “So to speak.”

To her amazement, she heard herself giggling. Michael could still do that for her, she realized, still make her feel that giddy release. For a fleeting moment, they might have been back at Barbary Lane, holed up together in his room on a dateless Saturday night, wisecracking their troubles away. And how minuscule those troubles had been.

Michael pecked her on the cheek. “I’m outta here.”

“Go. Make pretty things grow.”

As he crossed the doorstep he pulled out the key and handed it to her with a decidedly tentative look. “Maybe I shouldn’t bring this up.”

She felt an instant tightening in her belly. “Go ahead.”

“You know Shawna’s back from New York, right?”

Mary Ann had guessed as much from Shawna’s Web site, where recent entries had focused on San Francisco. She avoided Shawna’s blog, for the most part, since she was put off by the material. The last time she checked, Shawna was writing about a high-end spa somewhere back East that offered sperm facials to its clients. (And not in the crude vernacular sense, either—actual facials made of sperm from who-the-hell-knows-where.) Mary Ann didn’t need this information from anyone, much less from the only Shawna she had ever known, the little girl with whom she’d sing along to Billy Joel on the drive home from Presidio Hill School. It was too much for her. She was far from being a prude; she just couldn’t make the trip from there to here.

And it worried her sometimes that Shawna might suddenly decide to get personal in the blog. There was already an autobiographical element to her work, and sooner or later she would get around to her rocky childhood and the selfish adoptive mother who left when she was five. Shawna saw herself as an artist, and that’s what artists did.

“I had a feeling she was here,” she told Michael.

“Do you want me to say anything about . . . what’s going on with you?”

“No . . . please. I don’t want her to feel she has to do anything.” She flashed on the hideously uncomfortable afternoon she had spent with Shawna in Darien. Shawna had taken the train from the city and had made an earnest effort at bridging the gap, but they had both begun to squirm before the day was over. They were different people with different histories and no valid reason, biological or otherwise, to relate to each other.

“Should I tell Anna?”

“I’d rather you not tell anyone, Mouse. Not until it’s over, anyway.”

“No problem. She probably knows you’re here, though.”

“Why?”

“Because Jake already knows . . . and Jake rooms with Anna.”

“Oh . . . right.”
This town,
she thought,
this tiny little town.

“I’ll keep the details quiet, though.”

“Thanks, Mouse.”

“Get some rest. I’ll be back by six. Ben wants to cook for us.”

She watched him shamble across the garden to his truck, a portly silver-haired figure in faded green overalls, the closest thing she had to a knight in shining armor.

She asked herself, in light of her history, if she was once again running to a man for her salvation, but the question evaporated almost as soon as it materialized.

A
FTER UNPACKING, SHE TOOK A
quick shower, put on her pajamas and crawled into bed, sleeping lightly for an hour or so, drifting in and out of consciousness to the white noise of lawn mowers and distant car alarms. There were moments, as she lay still like that, when she thought she could feel something pernicious stirring inside of her, announcing its presence. The doctor had said she might not feel anything prior to the surgery, so this could well be a product of her own neurosis, a morbid variation on hysterical pregnancy.

Or not.

She recognized the irony of equating her cancer to a pregnancy, since women who had never given birth were more likely to contract the disease.
Use it or lose it
was the phrase that had popped into her mind when the doctor explained this to her, though she hadn’t dared say it out loud. It was too on the nose, too terribly true, to be spoken.

It would be easy enough to blame her childlessness on Brian, her first husband, since his sperm, for some reason, wasn’t capable of making babies, but the truth was she had never felt the urge to raise a child. Her temperament just wasn’t suited for it, and (to her credit, she thought) she had admitted that limitation more freely than most women. If her old high school friend Connie hadn’t died giving birth to Shawna, Mary Ann could have passed up motherhood altogether and been none the worse for it. But Brian was over the moon about this freak shot at fatherhood, so she had bowed to his dream.

Restless now, she got out of bed and went to the toilet. She ordered herself not to look at her pee but found herself doing so anyway. There was a wriggly thread of red running through it, like a worm embedded in amber. She shuddered and shucked off her pajamas, heading straight to the shower again, as if she could just wash it away. She was sorely ignorant about all of this, and that ignorance, she realized, had been her legacy.

In her mother’s day, a hysterectomy had been an act of stealth, a “woman’s problem” to be whispered about, and then, of course, only among women. To Mary Ann the very sound of the word—hissssterectomy—had suggested a secret uttered under the breath. There was shame involved when a woman lost her God-given purpose in life, so (even after having two kids) Mary Ann’s mom had told everyone she knew that she was visiting her older sister in Baltimore. Mary Ann’s dad had stayed home with the kids for four days, feeding them TV dinners and pacing the family room like a caged panther.

When her mom finally returned, looking sorrowful and weak, Mary Ann had assumed this was the awkward aftermath of a brief marital breakup. That explanation had made the most sense to her, given her father’s panic in her mother’s absence, and the fact that both of them had been yelling a lot more than usual. Mary Ann had fretted over them until the following summer at their cabin in Michigan when, one night before bed, the truth was finally passed down, mother-to-daughter, like treasured heirloom jewelry.

How, then, could she draw on the memory of her mother’s experience, when she’d been kept in the dark about it? She had no way of knowing if her mom had felt this fragile in her own body, or how extensive her cancer had been, or if it had even been cancer. Like so many bodily mysteries in Mary Ann’s life, she would just have to wing it. There was no practical wisdom to be gleaned from her Greatest Generation mom, the woman who had once described periods to her preteen daughter as “the bitter tears of a disappointed womb.”

B
ACK IN THE BEDROOM
, M
ARY
Ann found DeDe Halcyon-Wilson on her BlackBerry and dialed the number. DeDe answered on the second ring.

“Well, hello there. This is a nice surprise.”

She’d known DeDe for a long time. She had worked for DeDe’s dad at his advertising agency and, several years later, had broken the story when DeDe and her lover D’orothea escaped from Jonestown via Cuba with their twin children in tow. The story had launched Mary Ann’s television career and forged a bond between her and the ex-socialite heiress that had proven resilient despite years of neglect and a continent between them. They had remained firmly on each other’s Christmas card list and had accidentally reunited several years earlier at a charity golf tournament in Boca Raton. Stuffy old Bob hadn’t known what to make of the Halcyon-Wilsons with their Hillary buttons and their easy elegance, but Mary Ann had received them like long-lost sisters.

It felt like that now, she realized, only stronger. “Oh, God, DeDe, it’s so good to hear your voice.”