“Go for it. What’s stopping you?”
“Well . . . I need you to tell me it’s okay.”
“Why?”
“Because I might be writing about us. In part, at least.”
“Oh.” A cloud passed over his face. “Like . . . using my name and all?”
“Yeah, unless . . .” She decided to keep it light. “You’re not wanted for something in ten states, are you?”
He wouldn’t pick up on the gag. “I like my privacy, Shawna. I love what we have, but . . . I don’t know about sharing it with strangers.”
“You just performed on a pier with a ton of strangers.”
“No,” he said quietly. “That was Ottokar. Or Sammy sometimes. But it wasn’t me. That’s why I’m able to do it.”
That made sense, in a way, but she suspected his fears ran deeper than that. “I wouldn’t be writing about our sex life,” she said. “I wouldn’t be as . . . specific as—”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what?” She was starting to feel hurt, and, worse yet, sounding that way. “Are we just not . . . that serious?”
Otto saw her mortification and grabbed her hand across the table. “Listen, ladylove . . . if we weren’t serious I wouldn’t give a shit what you put in that blog. I just don’t want to feel self-conscious about what we have. I don’t want to be weighing my words all the time. I don’t want to think of us as . . . you know . . . material.”
Anyone else who’d called her “ladylove” would have received, at the very least, a derisive snort, but Shawna found it sort of sweet. It was possible Otto had picked up that expression the summer he worked as a knight at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, but she preferred to believe it had sprung, freshly minted, from his uncorrupted heart.
She decided not to press him further about the blog. He didn’t read it anyway, and they weren’t on record as being a couple. She could call him her boo or something similarly vague and still do the kind of writing she wanted to do. He was right about the potential for self-consciousness in such an enterprise. It was better just to let the words flow, as she always had, and let Otto be Otto. The less he knew the better, really.
ON THE WAY HOME TO the Mission, they were stopped at a light under the freeway overpass when a homeless woman in a dirty red tracksuit approached the car with a ragged cardboard sign that read YOUR MAMA WOULD GIVE A DAMN. Shawna wondered how well that actually worked, if most people saw their mothers as pillars of generosity and therefore felt inspired to give. It was original, anyway, and it made her smile.
She dug around in her bag for a loose bill, with no success. Otto saw what she was doing and pulled out his wallet. “Is five enough?”
“Make it twenty,” she said. “I’ll pay you back.”
“She’s a junkie. See those sores on her neck.”
“And your point is?”
“I’m just sayin’.”
Shawna rolled down the window and held out the twenty. The woman took it without a word, then pulled up the leg of her sweatpants so she could stash the offering in her sock. Shawna caught a glimpse of putrid gray flesh, a constellation of sores. The woman’s face, by contrast, was a fiery red-brown, sun-ravaged and grimy. She looked to be anywhere between thirty and sixty. The awful agelessness of the streets.
“The world is fucked,” the woman announced.
“You got that right, sister.”
The woman cackled, showing broken teeth and rotten gums. “You got you a man in there?”
“I do,” said Shawna, casting her eyes toward Otto. “I got me a man in here.”
The woman leaned down and spoke through the window. “You be nice to her, ya hear?”
Otto looked flustered, so Shawna jumped in: “He is. He’s very nice to me.”
“I had me one for a while.”
“A man, you mean?” Shawna couldn’t help grinning. The woman might as well have been talking about a parakeet.
“Yep,” said the woman. “When I was about your age.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I was prettier’n you, too.”
“I’m sure you were” was all Shawna could think to say.
“A whole lot prettier.”
“Hey, watch it,” Shawna said jovially, “or I’ll take my money back.”
“You do, bitch, and I’ll cut you.”
Otto was obviously aghast, but Shawna caught the twinkle lurking deep in the woman’s red-rimmed eyes. “Not if I smack the shit out of you first,” she said.
This elicited another cackle. “You’re all right, kid.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Nah. You’re my kinda lady. Nothin’ scares you, does it?”
It was an interesting question. “Not the usual things, I guess.”
“Good for you. Us girls gotta be brave.”
“I guess we do, yeah.”
The woman raised her grimy fist in a show of solidarity with Shawna before trudging farther down the traffic island in search of another handout.
“How does it get that bad?” Shawna asked Otto.
He just shrugged. “Heroin.”
“That can’t be all of it.”
“You’d have to ask her.”
The light changed and Shawna drove away. She felt a shameful rush of relief as the woman grew ever smaller in the rearview mirror. That’s why the homeless beg at stoplights, she thought. It’s as much for us as it is for them. We’re shielded from the horror by glass and steel, and we can make a clean break as soon as the light changes.
“She was nice,” Shawna offered.
“It’s her routine. It’s part of signing.”
“Signing?”
“That’s what they call it. When they hold out those signs.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I work the streets, too.”
She snorted. “The mean streets of Pier 39.”
“She’s living for the next fix, so she does what she has to do.”
And we drive on, thought Shawna. We drive on and do nothing.
“What’s the matter?” asked Otto.
“Nothing. Everything. She said it herself: the world is fucked.”
“You wanna go back? Offer her a hot shower and a place to sleep?”
Otto knew the answer to that already.
“I could write about her,” Shawna said feebly.
Otto gave her a sly sideways smile. “And who would that help?”
She turned her eyes back to the road. “Bite me, clown boy.”
Chapter 9
Lady Parts
The 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 w
as 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.
AFTER 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.