Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

Connecticut.”
    Anna’s watery blue eyes blinked at him, absorbing the news. “Mary Ann’s in town?”
    “Mmm.”
    Anna drew back, frowning a little. “Why do you say it like that?”
    “I didn’t say anything. I said ‘Mmm.’ ”
    “Yes, dear … but your tone .”
    Jake shrugged. “I just think … she’s kind of a pain.”
    Anna seemed to take this personally. “You’ve met her only once.”
    Jake remembered it well. Mary Ann had flown into town (in her husband’s private jet, no less) when Anna was already deep in her coma. It was a nice enough gesture, Jake supposed, but Mary Ann would never have known about Anna at all if Michael hadn’t tracked her down. Sure, she must have been nervous about facing friends she hadn’t seen for decades, but beyond that there was something off-putting about her: a certain aloofness that made Jake feel instantly judged and dismissed.
    Since that time Mary Ann and Michael had been talking a lot on the phone. According to Ben, who shared Jake’s assessment of this woman, Mary Ann would call to unload at least four times a week. And it was always about her: her distant husband and unappreciative stepson, her dead dream of being a network anchor, her really lousy night at the country club. To hear Ben tell it, Michael rarely got a word in edgewise.
    “It’s not like I hate her,” said Jake. “I’m just not real big on her.”
    Anna regarded him soberly over her teacup. “Do you know why she’s here?”
    Jake shook his head. “Ben doesn’t even know. Whatever it is, she was saving it for a face-to-face with Michael.”
    “Which is when?”
    “Now … I guess.”
    The old lady nodded methodically, her beach-glass eyes fixed on the sycamore across the street. Jake wondered if she was hurt, if she felt left out of the loop. Mary Ann had been her darling once upon a time, her ingénue on Barbary Lane.
    Anna fidgeted with a strand of snowy hair before tucking it behind her ear.
    “I wonder if Shawna knows,” she said quietly.

Chapter 4
The Puppy Stuff
    T hat morning, of all mornings, Shawna had seriously considered changing her hair. The Bettie Page look had served her well, but it just didn’t pack the same wallop anymore. These days the Mission was awash with wannabe Betties in glossy black pageboys and crimson lipstick. Last week, in fact, when Shawna was shopping at a clothes-by-the-pound shop on Valencia Street, the chick who weighed her seed-pearl sweater set could easily have been her double. To say nothing of that über-obnoxious woman on last season’s Project Runway . Clearly it was time to throw in the bangs.
    She was finishing her frittata when she got the tweet—four words screaming obscenely from her BlackBerry—BETTIE PAGE IS DEAD. One of Shawna’s fans, the self-described Piercing Diva of Dubuque, had jumped at the chance to share the news with her. The iconic fifties pinup who had somehow made naughty so nice had suffered a fatal heart attack after a bout with pneumonia. She was eighty-five.
    Shawna was surprised by how hard it hit her. She had always loved Bettie—or at least the idea of her—but Bettie had also seemed slightly unreal, a human-size Minnie Mouse in the Disneyland of desire. Now all she could see was an old woman who’d been living with her brother somewhere in L.A. She remembered Bettie’s three divorces and her struggles with schizophrenia and how she’d regretted tossing out her fishnet stockings after she found Jesus and went to work for the Billy Graham Crusade. Mostly she remembered how Bettie had avoided cameras after her “rediscovery” in the nineties, striving to protect her myth. That myth was finally safe. Now that she was dead.
    Shawna rose from the kitchen table with a sigh and went to the rose-tinted mirror at the end of the hall. She studied herself soberly for a moment, checking her lipstick, testing the silken weight of her pageboy in her hands. What now? Do I hang on to this pelt out of respect for Bettie or abandon it for the same reason?
    She would think about that later. Her blog needed attention (not to mention her advertisers), so there was really no time for reinvention. Besides, she was meeting her boyfriend for lunch, and he might have some thoughts on the subject.
    F OR THE FOURTH TIME THAT month Shawna met Otto at the Circus Center. This was a yellow-brick building on Frederick, an old high school gymnasium, very Deco-looking, with huge metal-frame windows that filled the room with