Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  “I’m a Dixie girl.”

  “That’s what I love about you.”

  “I’d wither far from home.”

  “It could work.”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever read about Garrison Keillor and how he left his wife and married his high school sweetheart and took the wife’s name out of all his books?”

  “Do you mean the Lake Wobegon man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You comparing me to the Prairie Home Companion guy?”

  “I’m saying it happens.”

  “I’m saying, if you see a clock going backward, it’s broke.”

  “That’s your daddy talking.”

  “Naw.”

  “What is it?”

  “That’s the Deep South talking.”

  “That’s Preach’s wife talking.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “What’s he got?”

  “You see me. We be we.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “What is it?”

  “A language I don’t have time to teach you.”

  “Preach is a lucky man.”

  “You’ll get lucky.”

  The band laid into “Baby Love,” and they were back at Hampton, doing the Bop in a dorm room on a Sunday afternoon. They were as close as they were ever going to come to sex, and so far away from it. He left the reception early. Early to bed, he hit the highway first light.

  She woke up Sunday morning two pounds lighter than she had been the Sunday before.

  In the excitement of her upcoming reunion, these two pounds seemed a paltry thing. And the text from Mason, saying he had met Ruth and some of her friends while touring the Dockery Plantation, seemed absolutely inconsequential.

  44

  DRAW A MAP OF YOUR BODY

  MONDAY MORNING ADA was back at KidPlay, subbing with the five-year-olds, showing them a globe and an atlas of the world. She was pointing out Nashville and North America and the Atlantic and Africa. Somewhere between their questions, and the beginning of their drawing outline maps of Africa, Ada knew she wanted to draw a map of her body.

  During her lunch break she closed her office door, took out a sheet of paper, snatched up a few crayons, grabbed a pocket mirror from her purse, and started to draw. She had no skill, but she wasn’t trying for something artistic. She achieved the shape of a pear with big watermelon breasts.

  Then she started adding details. She began with the toes and went all the way up to her original curly head. On her map she did not wear a China chop. She drew some of the stretch marks. She nodded to the fact that no bones had been broken. She drew on the belly button.

  The belly button seemed important. And blighted. When she had had her own daughters, so efficiently, two girls, one pregnancy, her belly had become marbled with the light marks. It had broken her heart. Later, after the girls had been born, she had gotten back most of the flatness of her belly.

  Thinking of that, she drew a cesarean scar on the map, and she put a date. She drew her hymen and put the date it got broken through. She drew the skin tags on her neck and put a date. She drew the lines in her forehead and her knees, and the scar on her knee. In the margins she wrote the details that seemed important. The day her ears were pierced, the year her wisdom teeth were removed. She drew the inner body parts that she could remember and thought important: her heart and kidneys and ovaries and bladder and uterus; and because all of this was somehow related to being under Preach and taking him into her body through the slit between her legs, she drew that.

  It was a work in progress. And it was a new rule: Draw a map of your body. If she was leaving something, or some part of herself, behind, she wanted to know what it was.

  So she drew a map of Lucius Howard. It was a silhouette of a man with a giant question mark inside it.

  45

  UPDATE YOUR GOALS

  SHE TOLD PREACH she was running down the road to see Ruth. It was the first outright lie she had ever told him. She had four names on a list, and none crossed out. Beside the names were four addresses. Ada was on a truth hunt. It was an overnight trip.

  Naptime had done it. She had been sitting in the playground with baby Jarius on her lap, chanting a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem, “Little Brown Baby,” when two girls sitting nearby started playing an old tickle game, the one where you pinch and squeeze and grab after you finger-walk and blow air: “We’re going on a treasure hunt, X marks the spot, three big dots and a question mark! A pinch, a squeeze, a tropical breeze, blood running down your back got you!”

  It was time. The little brown angels were telling her so. She had gone on her first honeymoon innocent. She needed to go on her second honeymoon wise. Armed with celery sticks and turkey jerky, 149 pounds of Ada hit the road.

  “Are you sleeping with my husband?”

  “It took you long enough to ask,” the girl said flatly. As if she was almost bored. She was a pretty girl, the color of coffee with a splash of cream. She wore her hair in a little halo of braids. She was wearing a backless dress that made it obvious she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her unharnessed breasts were small and round, perfect apples. Her legs were hard biker’s legs, and she had a yoga ass. There was one tattoo visible on her ankle and another on the inside of a forearm. On the arm that wasn’t tattooed was a silver chain with a heart from Tiffany. It had been a sixteenth-birthday present from Ada and Preach. At the time it seemed the perfect gift; at least, it was the standard present they gave goddaughters on the sixteenth birthday. The heart dangling from the chain on this girl’s wrist terrified Ada. She didn’t want that heart to be her husband’s heart. And if it was her husband’s heart, the idea that she had pinned the medal on the child made her want to vomit.

  The girl—her name was Thea, and she was twenty-two now—saw the wave of nausea cross Ada’s face. Thea didn’t know what she was seeing. She let it be what she wanted it to be, her mother’s remorse that she had let her stepfather fuck her every day for a week after the year she turned sixteen. Then Thea had stopped it. Blackmailed him. Moved across the country with the money.

  “Am I fucking the preacher?” The girl asked her question with the smile she smiled to mask confusion, a smile that looked dumb and smug and pretty. A smile that vexed other girls because it was a smile boys wanted to put themselves inside.

  Ada slapped the girl. Slapped the smile right off her. Ada’s hand flew up before she could stop it. Her hand was on the girl’s face. All at once she felt the hot, hard contact of her flesh against the child’s soft skin. She had done something she hadn’t meant to do. Her hand just flew up before she could stop it. She just touched the girl before she knew what she was doing. And she wondered if this was exactly how it had been for her husband. His penis got hard before he could stop it. The child said something vulgar and unexpected, and before he knew it, he was touching her face. Ada didn’t mean to do it, she just did it. Maybe it had been that way for Preach too.

  The absurdity of the entire situation got Ada laughing. Much to her surprise, the girl, Thea, started laughing as well. The slap had brought her to her senses.

  “You a mess,” the girl told the woman. It was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but Ada didn’t think it wise to point that out. She had slapped a young woman she had known from infancy because she might have been Preach’s lover. Only she couldn’t believe that. Standing in front of the girl, even with the nasty words said, even with all the girl had implied, it was impossible to believe Preach would steal an inch of innocence.

  On the other hand, touching this girl might not be a matter of stealing innocence but rather a matter of swimming in sin. The girl’s eyes were older than Ada’s own. Her eyes were like the old folks say, older than salt, old as pepper.

  “I go to work in an hour. I’m not inviting you into my house. Meet me around the corner at Starbucks.”

  It was a long twenty minutes. Eventually Thea showed up. Eventually Ada and Thea were seated
at a small round table sucking down tall chais.

  Ada felt like she had felt sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for mammogram results, waiting to find out if her life had turned to shit while she wasn’t looking.

  “I tried.”

  “You tried?”

  “There were two summers I saw Preach a lot. The first was the summer we got rid of my stepmonster-rapist, and the second was my first summer after college. I had tried to kill myself that first year away. I told him, and he kept me under him the rest of the summer. I ran the paint table at vacation Bible school. He was good to me. He even got me a shelter puppy. I named him Chaos. He was a little dustball. He slept with me in the bed. I carried him to camp in my purse. One day Preach said, looking at me painting Chaos’s toenails, “I would like to be Chaos,” and it got me to thinking. When we were alone in the art room, later that day, he turned to do something. When he turned back, I was standing there naked except for my sandals and my bracelets and my jewelry. I had pulled the dress up over my head and dropped it on the floor. I didn’t wear panties. I still don’t wear a bra. So I was just like Eve. He just stared at me. I knew I was good to look at, so that didn’t surprise me. I thought he would stare for a moment, then he would come jump on me. I even knew how I wanted to do it. But he didn’t move, and I thought he needed some encouragement, so I asked him a question. I asked, ‘You ever seen one all grown up and bald? You ever see one pierced?’

  “‘Lord, child.’

  “‘I’m nineteen, I’m not a child.’

  “‘Our second date, my Ada made a box out of playing cards that blew smoke rings.’

  “‘Bar trick.’

  “‘I was impressed.’

  “‘When was the last time you slept with your wife?’

  “‘I’m not going to answer that question.’

  “‘Why?’

  “‘It’s the wrong question.’

  “‘What’s the right question?’

  “‘When’s the last time I wanted to?’

  “‘When’s the last time you wanted to?’

  “‘Right now.’

  “‘You looking at me, looking like this, and you want that fat woman?’

  “‘That fine fat woman got something make a man crawl over glass and fire to get to again after he get to it once. A whole lot of that is a good thing. And she bought the shoes you’re standing in. Put your dress back on.’

  “‘You’re not getting any.’

  “‘I can wait.’

  “‘It’s that good when you get it?’

  “‘It’s that good when I get it.’”

  Thea shivered as she came to the end of her tale. It was a shiver of relief. It felt good to confess, so she plowed forward.

  “I kept a crush on Preach. I’ve got a boyfriend, but I’ve kept a crush on Preach. He didn’t take it, but the way he pushed it away, I felt special for just being a woman. Wouldn’t mind having what it takes to make a man feel the way Preach feel about you.”

  “Why did you act like you were sleeping with him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And she didn’t. She only knew she was sorry. And she was. Ada refused to judge Thea for the betrayal. The child, and she was a child, had been through too much. She was thinking she would go strangle that stepfather, except he was already dead, and if she ever saw that mother again—well, she hoped she didn’t.

  Ada walked out of the Starbucks door thinking about the magic box she had made of cards a very long time before. And she was thinking that girl’s whatnot was not the first one Preach had seen grown and bald. Ada had waxed for a first and near only time, back when waxing was very, very new, back before she got pregnant and dropped out of graduate school. She wanted to prove to Preach divinity school students could be very wholesome and very sexy. She remembered he laughed and told her it looked “too young to fuck.” She had slapped him and bitten him for saying “fuck,” and then they had made love. So long ago.

  The second address was on West End Avenue. On the way Ada pulled into a drugstore where she bought, then guzzled, sixteen ounces of water. Portia, the other preacher’s wife, scared Ada. Somewhere between a size 6 and a size 8, she was small but not too small. At five foot eight, she was tall but not too tall. In every way she was what the old folks called one of God’s best days of work. Portia was an intimidatingly perfect woman.

  And she was the woman Ada had wanted to poison.

  Where Ada’s house was always clean, fairly neat, and antiquey, Portia’s house was immaculately clean, perfectly neat, and modern. Her aesthetic was stark and glossy. Her children, five boys, were tall and lean and usually gone. They did however, show up for all the appropriate holidays: Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and Easter, and birthdays, bringing presents and pictures and clippings of accomplishments. Each was married, and each had a single boy. When the grandsons got together, it was like Portia was a young mother again, except her husband was gone. Everybody thought she would go to pieces when her husband died, but she didn’t. After a while it was hard not to notice that widowhood seemed to become the woman.

  Portia, once the queen of the frozen chosen, had periods of thaw. Unfortunately, the sun that seemed to be melting her was Ada’s very own Preach.

  At the beginning, it was just leaving both of them baskets of vegetables on their back porch. That became baskets of the preserves that he loved and the pie that he loved. Eventually a dinner, once a week, appeared as well. When Ada settled deep into her diet and said something about the pies and fried chicken that Portia dropped off being too tempting, Portia used that as an excuse to stop bringing “the family” dinner on Tuesday. She started bringing the preacher lunch on Thursday. And strangest of all, at least to Ada, was when she started baking the communion bread.

  Ada hated that. She hated not having thought of it first. She hated not having done it for Preach herself. Portia made Ada feel all kinds of ways inadequate.

  Once when she had been invited to Portia’s house for a Link meeting, Ada did something awful. She peeked into some of Portia’s drawers. Perfect rows of perfectly folded silk cappuccinocolored panties, and perfectly matching C-cup brassieres, one cup spooning the other, filled the top drawer of her lingerie chest. In the next drawer were lace nightgown sets, all in a champagne or light coffee color. Folded in one of the nightgowns was a handkerchief monogrammed with Preach’s initials. She prayed Portia was a thief.

  Ada looked at the pristine bed with monogrammed linens, and she wondered what sex had been like in it for Portia when her husband was alive. Ada could only imagine it had been efficient. As far as she knew, neither of them liked mess of any kind. But they had had five children, so surely they had had sex. Ada shuddered as she walked out of the room.

  Standing on Portia’s doorstep, uninvited, ringing the bell, listing to Portia’s bell echo through Portia’s house, watching her open the door, surprised, Ada was wondering if Preach had ever rolled in Portia’s monogrammed linens.

  Portia opened the door. Even with a blue bandanna tied round her head, wearing jeans and a denim shirt, Portia looked every inch a frozen mochaccino husband stealer.

  “May I come in?”

  “Of course.”

  Portia led Ada through the front hall back to the kitchen—a room Ada had never sat down in, had barely passed through. The kitchen could have been a surgery. Everything was bright and white. There was even a little bowl of eggs on the counter. A Swiffer mop leaning against the refrigerator and a box of Swiffer pads out by the sink, together with the jeans outfit, told Ada Portia had just finished cleaning house. Portia moved the mop and pads and washed her hands before opening the refrigerator and pulling out two green bottles of Perrier. She offered one to Ada, and they both took a seat at her kitchen table.

  “Are you in love with my husband?”

  “A little.”

  “Is my husband in love with you?”

  “Not even a little.”

  “Have you had sex?”

 
; “No.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Thank your husband.”

  “Did you try?”

  “Just after Justin died.”

  “What happened?”

  “I asked him to comfort me. And when I was in his arms, I asked him if, when he died, he would want you to be comforted as intimately as possible.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he would want you to have anything you needed.”

  “And then?”

  “I said I needed him. And he said, ‘Anything Ada might want, I got to save for Ada.’ I told him Justin only wanted me starched and pressed and dry, still and quiet. I said, God would understand. And he said it had nothing to do with God or vows or propriety, just love. He loved you and he couldn’t do anything about it. He said he wanted to be my brother.

  “I told him it gave me hope to know a man could love a woman like that.

  “He said, once he woke up and there was a feather on you, a pillow had broke, and he thought for a second he had died and gone to heaven and you were an angel he had made love with. He saw a feather on you and thought you were an angel.”

  Ada remembered the time the pillow had broken. She had seen the feathers too; she had thought, for a moment, almost the very same thing.

  “He’d be too messy and stinky and loud for you,” said Ada.

  “If I had a man thought I was an angel loving him in heaven, I would set up house in a tent above a pigsty.”

  Portia rose. She was finished. Ada took in the full measure of her beauty. Ada had thought Preach might be curious to slip between perfectly ironed sheets, or far more sadly, between her perfectly proportioned and thin tapered thighs. She had been mistaken.