Mary Ann in Autumn (17 page)
Read Mary Ann in Autumn Online
Authors: Armistead Maupin
O
tto, still panting from the bike ride through the Mission, set the box on Shawna’s kitchen table. He had ended up taking his two-wheeler, though he’d argued compellingly for the unicycle, claiming it would lend an air of whimsy to the proceedings and make the whole thing more of a celebration. The idea had actually appealed to her, for a moment or two, until she made herself picture a unicycle arriving at a crematorium, or—worse yet—leaving. It might have seemed a tad indecorous.
Otto used both his hands to rake his unruly hair. “Did you know they call them cremains?” he said, sitting down at the table. “Whatever happened to ‘ashes’? ‘Ashes’ is poetic. ‘Cremains’ sounds like some sorta powdered shit you put in your coffee.”
Shawna smiled at him. “You want some?”
“Sure.”
She rose and poured him a cup of coffee, bringing it back to the table. “I didn’t do any better at the coroner’s office. I had to fill out something called a Homeless Death Form. I’m not sure which word is less depressing: Homeless, Death, or Form.”
“That’s cold, all right.”
“They just wanted it filled out. It didn’t seem to matter much if it was the truth. They told me to write ‘unknown’ when I didn’t know the answer, and I must’ve written it a dozen times. It felt like I was erasing her life.”
Otto held the coffee cup under his nose and sniffed it. This was one of his funny rituals around food, something he called Active Appreciation. “Any luck with that?” he asked, meaning Alexandra’s lunch box, which was next to her ashes on the table.
Shawna shook her head. “Too bad a picture isn’t
really
worth a thousand words.” She’d hoped to find something in the photos that might lead her to one of Alexandra’s survivors, if such a person existed. There had been those parents, of course, the ones who’d rented their child to strangers, and that creepy Mr. Williams, who may or may not have been a client, but Shawna had no illusions about bringing them to justice thirty years after the fact. All she was hoping was that someone, at some point in Alexandra’s short, miserable life, had loved her enough to wonder what had happened to her.
“How many pictures are there?” asked Otto.
“Not many. The young one at Barbary Lane and maybe a dozen others that were obviously taken before she started using. The other people in the pictures seem friendly enough. Coworkers, maybe. Or friends, even. But who the fuck
are
they?”
Otto opened the lunch box and riffled through the photos.
“Damn, she was fine.”
“Tell me about it.”
He held up one of the photos. “What about this fabric store?”
“I called them already. Nobody’s heard of her. It was at least fifteen years ago.”
“You said she worked at a Foot Locker, too. West Portal, right?”
“Same thing. Those places have a huge turnover.”
“And you Googled Lemke.”
“Of course. They’re all over the place, believe it or not. There are even some other Alexandra Lemkes. The Web tells you
too
much sometimes.”
Otto took the lunch box and dumped the contents on the table. Amid the photos was a pathetic tangle of costume jewelry and condom wrappers, glinting with sooty shards of aluminum foil that Alexandra must have used for smoking crack. Otto seemed fascinated by the inside of the lunch box itself, where Obi-Wan Kenobi was gazing up from the bottom with melancholy wisdom. He began to pick at the corner of the image.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s cardboard. I think it comes out.” He fiddled with it until the bottom pulled away completely, revealing the raw tin innards of the lunchbox. “
Et
voilà!
Princess Leia’s secret hiding place.”
There was a letter there, still in its envelope, though it had already been opened. It was stuck to the tin, so Otto pried it away and handed it to Shawna. “Would you like to do the honors?”
There was a major revelation even before she removed the letter. The envelope was addressed to Alexandra Lemke at 437 Tandy Street, San Francisco, California.
“She had an address! She lived somewhere!”
“What’s the postmark say? What year?”
She squinted at the faded numbers. “1995. So she was . . . what? . . . in her late twenties?”
Otto was enjoying her excitement. “Open it.”
Her hands were actually shaking as she read aloud to him.
Dear Lexy,
Only 2 or 3 more days in Coos Bay and then I’m coming home to you. My aunt is very sick and they say she doesn’t have much longer. Please don’t do any more of the bad stuff. You know what I mean. I know its hard when I’m not their, but I will help you get better. I know you had it bad when you were little, but I truely believe that our love will make it better. Your my angel and you always will be. You are safe now. I will always be grateful to God that you married me—and that I went to buy those shoes. Ha ha.
See you soon!
Love always,
C
Shawna set the letter down and gaped at Otto. “Jesus. She was married.”
“Yep.”
“And it sounds like she was already using.” She pondered that for a moment. “Why do you think she kept this so long? Because he never came home again?”
“Why would you say that?”
Good question
,
Shawna
.
Why are you projecting your own half-assed desertion issues onto a dead homeless woman?
“What . . . then?” she asked. “You think she was too fucked-up to stick around? That she left
him
?”
“Maybe. Or they could’ve had a few more years together before she hit the skids. Who knows? It’s a nice letter. She probably saved it for sentimental reasons.”
“She must’ve met him at the Shoe Locker.”
“Yeah.” Otto tilted his chair back and rocked on it, his long, denimed legs extended, as if he were trying out a new prop for his act.
“Ever heard of Tandy Street?” she asked.
“It’s behind the Mint, I think. Up there on the hill.”
“Wanna go for a ride?”
Otto winced. “Aw . . . jeez.”
“What?”
“I thought we were gonna take her to Stow Lake.”
“We can do that later,” she told him. “If that’s what we wanna do.”
“This woman is dead, Shawna. It’s over. Do you really wanna make a pilgrimage to some place she lived thirteen years ago?”
“What if her husband still lives there? That’s possible, isn’t it?”
“Pretty remote, I’d say.”
“Yeah, but if he
is
still there
,
wouldn’t he like to know what happened to her?”
“Right. That she ended up turning tricks in Cocksuck Alley.”
“
I
would like to know,” she said. “If it were you, for instance. If you ended up, say, disappearing into the sordid underbelly of Pier 39.”
He smiled at her like a sleepy forest cat. He was used to her jokes about that venue. “We have to leave the ashes in the car. We can’t just show up with his wife in a box.”
“Please. Gimme some credit.”
“And what do we do if the current Mrs. Lemke answers the door?”
That threw her for a moment. “Then . . . we’ll deal.”
“
You’ll
deal.”
“Fine. Whatever.” It hadn’t occurred to her, actually, that Lemke might have been Alexandra’s married name. This opened a whole new range of possibilities.
“Are you down with this?” she asked. “I can do it on my own.”
Otto brought his chair down with a thud, clapping his hand around the box of ashes.
“Why don’t we ask
her
?” He held the box out as if he were Hamlet addressing the skull of Yorick. “Alexandra, are you down with this? Do you wanna go to Tandy Street?”
“Fuck no,” he said, assuming a high-pitched voice that was nothing at all like Alexandra’s gravelly growl. “Tell that pesky cunt to leave me the fuck alone. I’m over this shit. I need my beauty sleep.”
Shawna laughed. “Stick with the monkey, kid.”
“And tell me, Alexandra, do you think Shawna will go to Tandy Street anyway, no matter
what
we think?”
“Fuckin’-A! She needs an end to her motherfuckin’ story.”
“Very funny.”
“And she’ll probably wanna scatter my cremains all over some stranger’s motherfuckin’ yard.”
His intuition amazed her sometimes.
T
here was a rosy dawn on the day of Mary Ann’s hysterectomy, so she took that as a good omen. DeDe was arriving at six a.m. to drive her to St. Sebastian’s Hospital; the surgery would be at eight. She’d asked Ben and Michael—ordered them, in fact—not to get up early on her account and to go about their usual workdays. She didn’t want a fuss made unless (or until) she actually needed one. It had been a stupid instruction, driven largely by superstition, so she was glad to see the guys had ignored it. She was locking up the garden house when she found the floral-patterned gift bag on the doorstep.
Inside, bundled with a curly pink ribbon, was a T-shirt that read
PINYON CITY: THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
. She’d seen these shirts at the general store, so Ben must have bought it when he came back from snowboarding at Kirkwood. Unless, of course, Michael had grabbed it on a whim when he went to get those Neolithic marshmallows for their hot chocolate. Either way, the subtext of the gift made her smile. The guys weren’t taking no for an answer. They were marking this passage in her life—her
womb voyage
, as Dr. Ginny had once called it—whether she liked it or not.
She opened the door again, and left the T-shirt on the bed, since she’d have no use for it at the hospital. It was nice to think of it waiting there upon her return. They really were her angels, those two. She’d been dead right about coming here. Darien, with its treacherous crosscurrents of pity and gossip, would have been intolerable.
Locking up again, she crossed the garden with her overnight bag and stood on the sidewalk in the clarifying light, waiting for DeDe to whisk her away to whatever came next. She felt almost buoyant, hanging in the balance like this, since she’d lost the weight of her usual distractions; everything she needed for this journey had to come from inside of her now. It was that simple. She wasn’t even bringing her laptop to the hospital, and, even more tellingly, hadn’t laid eyes on her Facebook page since they got home from Pinyon City. She was her own woman now, for better or worse.
D
E
D
E’S WELL-BRED LITTLE
A
UDI WAS
new, and Mary Ann found comfort in the virginal smell of it.
If we could just keep driving,
she thought, concocting her own pushing-sixty version of
Thelma and Louise
. Let’s just stay here forever in this clean, well-cushioned place, listening to John Mayer on the Blaupunkt, while we gab about our favorite hill towns in Italy and all the silly things we’ve ordered online. DeDe had been fastidiously avoiding the topic of the hour, and Mary Ann had so appreciated that.
“Do you see much of Shawna in New York?”
“Once. Once I saw her.”
“Oops.”
“It’s not bad. It’s just . . . nothing. I don’t blame her. I’d feel the same way myself. I don’t have any claim on her.” She gazed out the window, marveling at the girth of the passing street trees; it wasn’t the buildings here that told her how long she’d been away but the forests that had grown up around them. “It’s funny,” she added, “her dad doesn’t hold a grudge anymore. He sees how wrong we were for each other. But to her I’m still the bad guy. You can’t break a five-year-old’s heart and not expect to pay for it sooner or later.”
“C’mon now.”
“It’s true, though. Actions have consequences.
In
actions have them. We set things in motion by what we
don’t
do. I’m not saying I would have done things any different. Brian was born to raise children, and I wasn’t. Anyway, she was always Daddy’s little girl. She ended up in the right place.”
“Well, now that you’re on the same coast . . .”
“No, she’s back again. And I’m not sure
what
coast
I’m
on.”
DeDe glanced at her. “She’s back
here
, you mean?”
“Yeah. Michael keeps up with her. She lives in the Mission somewhere.”
DeDe was silent for a moment, so John Mayer’s lyrics filled the gap:
No, it won’t all go the way it should, but I know the heart of life is good.
“I love that song,” said Mary Ann.
“Me too.”
“I made it my ringtone, actually.” She smiled at her taciturn old friend. “That’s hopelessly unhip of me, right?”
“Who cares?”
“I’m sure it is. It’s gotta be. I never like anything hip. I used to like John Denver, for heaven’s sake.”
DeDe chuckled. “D’or gave me shit about that last month. We were driving out to Skylonda to get her
dosha
balanced, and I was singing along to ‘Country Roads.’ ”
“To get her
what
balanced?”
“Her
dosha
?”
“What on earth is that?”
“Who knows? I get my nails done while she’s doing it.”
Mary Ann laughed, and it felt really good.
“She loves Shawna’s blog, by the way. She’s been writing about some homeless woman, and D’or can’t get enough of it.”
“Well . . . D’or is hip. Always has been.”
DeDe caught her drift and smirked. “Too much for ya, huh?”
“I don’t read it. Well, once. Once I read it.”
DeDe chuckled. “Not my cup of tea either, I have to admit.”
This was what Mary Ann loved about her. DeDe never claimed to be hip, and really didn’t care who knew it. “I love that we can talk like this,” she said. “We have such a great bond after all these years.”
DeDe gave her a sly smile. “We know where the bodies are buried.”
W
HEN THEY ARRIVED AT
S
T.
Sebastian’s, she was disconcerted by the number of times she was asked the purpose of her visit to the hospital. She hadn’t expected a welcoming committee, but it was bothersome and, yes, faintly demeaning to have to keep repeating herself at a time like this. It was DeDe who explained they were just making sure they didn’t remove a uterus from someone who had come there, say, for a heart transplant, though that wasn’t especially reassuring. The sense that she was losing her identity in the clanking machinery of this pastel place was only heightened when they gave her a locker key with a wristband and a plastic bag for her “personal effects.”
“What next?” she whispered. “Delousing and leg irons?”
DeDe chuckled, handing her the final humiliation, her backless hospital gown. “The ladies’ room is over there. I’ll guard the door while you change.” Mary Ann had a quick, amusing image of that: DeDe standing like a lone sentinel with her arms firmly folded across her matronly bosom. Mother Goose in a Chanel suit.
In the women’s room she slipped out of her skirt and blouse and put her cocktail rings and tennis bracelet in the plastic bag. She was glad she’d left her wedding ring back in Darien, since she didn’t have to confront the symbolism of removing it now. She had put on makeup that morning, out of old habit and something to do with pride, but she refrained from checking it in the mirror. She didn’t want to see herself in this moment.
DeDe followed her down the hall to anesthesia. “Don’t worry,” she said drily, “I’ve got your back,” by which she meant she was doing her best to block the public view of Mary Ann’s flagrantly exposed ass. “And, by the way, missy, if that were
my
booty, I’d do all these sick people a favor and let ’em see it.”
Mary Ann laughed. “You’re a shameless liar.”
But such a lovely friend,
she thought, since lately most of her female comforters had been paid professionals. First Calliope—well, that harridan hadn’t been professional, but she had certainly been paid—and now, of course, Dr. Ginny, whose strong, calm presence had been wonderful, but all in the line of duty. DeDe, however, was not being reimbursed for her support. Mary Ann had almost forgotten how good it felt to have a woman like that in her life.
The anesthesiologist was a blotchy-faced bald guy with a German accent, who wasted no time smiling as he inserted the needle into her arm. “I think you are nervous,” he said sternly, almost as if he were scolding her. It struck her as odd and inappropriate. She was about to lose a smorgasbord of organs: uterus, cervix, ovaries, even her goddamn appendix; all things considered, she thought she was holding up pretty well.
“No,” she said evenly. “I’m okay.”
He shook his head. “I think you are nervous.”
“Of course she’s nervous,” snapped DeDe. “She has cancer. What the hell do you expect her to be?” This was exactly why DeDe had worn Chanel, Mary Ann realized, so she could say things like that and not be thrown out of the room.
But it dawned on Mary Ann that what had seemed like callousness on this man’s part may have been something else entirely. “I think,” she said, casting a quick glance at DeDe, “he’s asking that because he needs to determine . . . what he needs to give me in the way of . . . mood elevators.”
“Oh,” said DeDe, looking instantly humbled. “She’s nervous, then. She’s really, really nervous.”
The anesthesiologist permitted himself a smile. “Is that your opinion, too?”
“Yes,” Mary Ann said, grinning back at him. “It is.”
Once he had made his final adjustments and they were alone again, DeDe leaned closer to Mary Ann. “That’s what you get for bringing a pushy old lesbian.”
Mary Ann smiled. “Will you stay until I’m out?”
“You bet. And I’ll be here when you wake up. They’re putting a bed in your room for me. We can have a slumber party tonight.”
“Forty-fives,” said Mary Ann.
“What?”
“You know, those little record cases we brought to slumber parties.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Tell me you did that in Hillsborough. It wasn’t just Cleveland, was it?”
“ ’Course not. I had slumber parties all the time. D’or and I still sleep in that room, in fact.”
“Sweet.” Mary Ann looked at the tube sending sleep into her arm. “Anesthesia is such a beautiful word, isn’t it? A-nes-thesia. It’s like a little town in Mendocino. ‘Let’s go up to that wonderful B&B in Anesthesia.’ ”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“No . . . I didn’t mean that liberally.”
“Literally.”
“Right, I didn’t mean it . . . what?”
“Nothing, Mary Ann. Sweet dreams.”