Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

of his smirking face, which was what she’d been aiming for.
    “She’s thrown down the gauntlet,” said Michael.
    “That’s right, you little turd.”
    “Look who’s picked it up.” Ben was now pointing to Roman, who was prancing triumphantly out of the room with the five-fingered treat in his jaws.
    Michael went after him, laughing. When he was out of the room, Ben shoehorned in a moment for just the two of them. “Don’t take it personally, Mary Ann.”
    “Oh, I don’t. I’ve known him too long for that.”
    “No. I mean … the howler. It probably wasn’t about you at all.” Ben cast his eyes toward the window, toward somewhere-out-yonder, then lowered his voice as if somewhere-out-yonder might be listening. “There’s meth in them thar hills.”
    She nodded soberly. “So tell me again why you love this place.”
    He smiled just enough to reveal that beguiling gap between his teeth, the gap she’d explored vicariously when she’d first imagined Ben and Michael in the throes of sex. The thought of that made her squirm, knowing them as she did now, but she had definitely gone there, semi-incestuously, in her head.
    “We’ll get an early start in the morning,” he said. “You can see for yourself.”

Chapter 20
Look Again
    I t was twilight when Shawna returned to Anna’s flat. Jake met her in front and led the way down the passageway past the furred antlers of the air plants on the wall of the house next door. This sliver of green offered only a dim echo of the garden Anna had presided over on Barbary Lane. Shawna remembered that paradise well—and how wildly her heart would race as she ran across the courtyard to show Anna her latest treasure: a rock, a seashell, an ivory elephant her dad had bought her in Chinatown.
    Her heart was racing now, for entirely different reasons.
    And the “treasure” in her knapsack was anything but.
    “She’s expecting you,” Jake told her. “She’s been looking forward to it.”
    Shawna almost apologized for disrupting Jake’s afternoon tryst, until it occurred to her that he might not want to discuss it, whatever the outcome had been. How easy could it be to be him? If Jake was shy, it was mostly because he’d been burned in his search for a man who would love (and desire!) the man he wanted to be. Shawna’s own appetites were catholic—as she liked to put it in her blog—but her body and her gender had never warred with each other. Even when wearing a strap-on and pounding her sweet hippie boo into his futon, she’d never felt like anything but a girl.
    Maybe that was why she loved coming here. Not just because of Anna, though Anna’s loving counsel had certainly been part of it, but because both these singular souls, by their very existence, challenged Shawna’s comfortable assumptions about what it meant to be male or female. They compelled her, if only temporarily, to live in the genderless neutrality of the human heart.
    Jake was leading her to the backyard, she realized.
    “What’s happening here?” She had just spotted a whimsical wooden structure she didn’t recognize, an enclosed gazebo with a pointed roof.
    “I guess you haven’t been here for a while.”
    “Well … a month or so, I guess.” She knew Jake hadn’t meant to make her feel guilty, but she had gone there anyway, all on her own. A month was too long to risk at this stage of Anna’s life. Anna deserved better from a member of her “logical family”—Anna’s pet term for her chosen brood—logical, that is, as opposed to biological.
    But Anna was still there, bundled up in a black fur blanket, looking like a dowager empress trying out a brand-new throne. Shawna leaned down and kissed her cool, dry cheek. “So soft and cozy,” she said, caressing the blanket.
    “It’s not real,” said Anna. “Don’t fret.”
    “I did wonder.”
    “Don’t be silly. Jake got it for me at the Pottery Shed.”
    “Barn,” said Jake, winking at Shawna.
    “Did you do this all yourself?” asked Shawna, perusing the gazebo with genuine admiration.
    Jake shrugged sheepishly. “Don’t look too close at it.”
    “No, Jake. It’s a total work of art.”
    He was actually blushing, she realized. “I’ll leave you two to talk,” he mumbled, before tromping back to the house.
    Shawna pulled off her backpack and set it on the floor with unnatural care, as if it contained a nest of sleeping rattlesnakes. She perched on the edge of the chair and took Anna’s hand as she