Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

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