Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

It was the same tone Mary Ann would have used with a saleslady at Bergdorf Goodman who’d just offered to throw in free alterations. It occurred to her that this was Dr. Ginny’s gift: the ability to make something casual out of the cataclysmic.
    “So here’s the deal. From now on, I’ll do all the fretting, because I intend to do this as perfectly as possible. I’m funny that way.”
    Under other circumstances, such cavalier boasting might have annoyed the hell out of Mary Ann, but certainly not here, not now; she craved the steel-reinforced tenderness that Dr. Ginny was offering, and that made her a believer on the spot.
    “I’ll warn you,” the doctor continued, “you may feel a little depressed afterwards, but that’s just part of the healing process.”
    Mary Ann figured that couldn’t possibly be worse than the suffocating gloom she was feeling now.
    “Are you staying with DeDe and D’or?” asked the doctor.
    “No. Friends in the city.”
    “Would you like a hospital there?”
    “If possible.”
    “Of course.” Another smile. “We’re in this together, Mary Ann.”
    T HAT NIGHT, WHILE M ICHAEL AND Ben were visiting friends on Potrero Hill, Mary Ann brewed a pot of peppermint tea and took it out to her cottage in the garden. There was finally a nip in the air, a pungent dampness that suggested the onset of winter. She found herself grateful for the jokey gift the guys had bought her several days earlier: a ridiculous blanket with sleeves they had all seen on television and laughed about.
    Sitting in her only chair with her laptop on her lap, the lights of the hillside winking through her window, she logged onto Facebook and posted her status report:
Mary Ann Singleton is drinking peppermint tea in her Snuggie, wondering if life is going to get better.
    Then she waited, like a fisherman, for a nibble on the line.
    As usual, she’d been careful not to betray her location. She didn’t want Bob—or any of her friends in Darien—to start making inquiries. She was savoring the sensation of floating free in cyberspace, tethered only to a growing number of capital-F Friends who, with half a dozen exceptions, were not her friends at all. In the beginning most of these people had some connection to Michael or Ben, but now she was engulfed in an ever-widening vortex of friend requests, and she was recklessly accepting them all.
    Most of them, as Ben had predicted, recognized her name from the old days in San Francisco:
i watched yr show when I stayed home sick from school, freeze-dried pets, lol
My dad thought you were way hot
I am soooooo honored to be your friend
I love that dress you wore when the Queen of England ate at Trader Vic’s
Are you really THAT Mary Ann Singleton?
    Using her maiden name had not only severed her from all things Bob but also unearthed people who actually predated her celebrity in San Francisco. There were three high school classmates, all looking ancient and only one of whom she remembered, because of her weird-looking close-set eyes. There was a lumpy old Irish guy who had worked on “the floor”—as he had called it—when she was still a secretary at Lassiter Fertilizer in Cleveland. This wasn’t so much her youth as a previous incarnation.
    From her San Francisco days she had found people who’d been featured on her show: a white witch she had interviewed one Halloween, a beefy Samoan guy who had made scrap-wood sculptures on the Emeryville flats. She had never really known these people; their value at the moment lay in the fact that they had passed through her life without lingering. This enabled her to create a manageable version of the past, an epic drama with a cast composed entirely of walk-ons. These near-strangers with whom she bantered so breezily could hold a mirror to her life without ever reflecting the pain.
    A week earlier she’d imagined scaling down her life to the size of this cottage, but, in reality, she’d shrunk it smaller still. Tonight, as DeDe had driven her home from Hillsborough, uttering sweet reassurances, Mary Ann’s mind had already been racing ahead to the cozy hearth-glow of her laptop. She assured herself that this was not addictive behavior, since there was really nothing else for her to do right now. Social networking was just a salve for her troubles, a harmless diversion to fill the hours until she went under the knife—or the laparoscope—and knew where she was heading.
    While waiting for a response to her post, she