Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

that help?”
    She turned her eyes back to the road. “Bite me, clown boy.”

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