Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

Chapter 1
Single-Family Dwelling
    T here should be a rabbit hole was what she was thinking. There should be something about this hillside, some lingering sense memory—the view of Alcatraz, say, or the foghorns or the mossy smell of the planks beneath her feet—that would lead her back to her lost wonderland. Everything around her was familiar but somehow foreign to her own experience, like a place she had seen in a movie but had never actually visited. She had climbed these weathered steps—what?—thousands of times before, but there wasn’t a hint of homecoming, nothing to take her back to where she used to be.
    The past doesn’t catch up with us, she thought. It escapes from us.
    At the landing she stopped to catch her breath. Beneath her, the street intersecting with Barbary Lane tilted dizzily toward the bay, a collision of perspectives, like one of those wonky Escher prints that were everywhere in the seventies. The bay was bright blue today, the hard fierce blue of a gas flame. If there was fog rolling in—and there must be, given the insistence of those horns—she couldn’t see it from here.
    When she reached the path at the top of the steps, one of her heels got stuck in the paving stones. Yanking it free with a grunt, she chided herself for not leaving her Ferragamos back at the Four Seasons. Those stones, if memory served, had been used as ballast on the sailing ships that came around the horn—or so her landlady Mrs. Madrigal had claimed, once upon a time. Twenty years later the chunky granite blocks looked suspiciously ordinary, like the pavers in her driveway back in Connecticut.
    As soon as she caught sight of the lych-gate at Number 28, a flock of wild parrots swooped low over the lane, cackling like crones. Those birds—or ones just like them—had been here when she was here, long before they became global celebrities in a popular documentary. She remembered how proud she had felt when she saw that film in Darien, and how utterly irrational that feeling had been, as if she were claiming intimacy with someone she had known slightly in high school who had grown up to be famous.
    Those birds did not belong to her anymore.
    The lych-gate was the same, only new. The redwood shingles on its roof had been crumbly with dry rot when she moved to the East Coast in the late eighties. Now they were made of slate—or a good imitation thereof. The gate itself, once creaky but welcoming, had been fitted with a lock and a buzzer and something under the eaves that looked like a security camera. So much for a quick snoop around the garden.
    She peered through a hole in the lattice at what she could see of the house. The shingle siding had been replaced, and fairly recently. The trim around the windows was painted a hard, glossy black. There were now French doors opening onto the courtyard in roughly the spot where Mrs. Madrigal’s front door had been. (Had anyone even thought to save that door with its wonderful stained-glass panels?) Most of the outside stairways, she noticed with a shiver, had been removed or modified to serve the transformation of an apartment house into—what was the official term?—a Single-Family Dwelling.
    We had been a family, she thought. Even in our separate dwellings.
    From this angle, of course, she couldn’t see the little house on the roof, the funky matchbox studio Mrs. Madrigal’s tenants had referred to as “the pentshack.” Her guess was it no longer existed, given the extensive nature of this remodeling. It had probably been replaced by a deck—or another floor entirely—and she wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Her memories of the place held both dread and delight.
    T WO BLOCKS AWAY, WHILE LOOKING for lunch, she found the corner mom-and-pop still intact, still called the Searchlight Market. Next door her old Laundromat had been stylishly renovated and a little too cutely renamed “The Missing Sock.” It pleased her to find the original thirties’ lettering still silvering the plate glass at Woo’s Cleaners, though the place was obviously empty. The windows were blocked by pale blue wrapping paper, the very paper her laundry had once been wrapped in. Across the street, a pristine gallery of tiny objets had sprouted next to what had once been Marcel & Henri, the butcher shop where she had sometimes splurged on pâté, just to keep from feeling like a secretary.
    And there was Swensen’s, the ice cream shop at Hyde and Union that had been her