Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  Everything about Portia’s body was too neat for Preach. When the children had been young and they had all gone to the one or two black homes with swimming pools on Sunday afternoons in the summer, Ada would be in a muumuu and Portia would be in a bikini. You could count her ribs. She remembered telling Portia years before, “You have an amazing body.”

  Portia had replied, “I have a boy’s body, and we grafted some big breasts onto it a thousand years ago. It photographs well.”

  That summer day, long past, almost forgotten, Ada knew the other preacher’s wife was profoundly lonely. She was telling Ada what she should have been telling a best friend. And she told me because I idealized her, she thought. Me, not Preach.

  Ada pointed her car toward Sylvan Park. When she arrived at her destination, she reached into her glove box and pulled out a jar of sugar-free peanut butter and a plastic spoon. It was snack time. She didn’t want it to be C.J. C.J. was her friend.

  C.J. was the fifty-something blonde woman who the kids at Preach’s church affectionately dubbed Granola Girl. She had first showed up at Full Love Gospel Tabernacle when she was thirty-two, with two small kids and husband.

  Ada had been surprised by the family the first time they showed up at a Sunday service. At the time, they lived just a few doors down from the church. Over doughnuts and coffee in the fellowship hall after the first service, it came out that Granola Girl had lived for a decade on the Farm, the hippie commune where Ada had spent a few weekends growing up. They knew some of the same people; friends had sent them. The slumming hippies were welcomed with open arms.

  It was one of the things that was eccentrically endearing about Nashville: It is ringed by utopian communities. The Farm and Rugby, the best known, were polar opposites. The Farm was a haven for a multicultural group of hippies. Rugby was founded by the second sons of British lords.

  Granola Girl had roots in both communities. She had grown up going to Rugby on weekends, traveling from a tiny house in Belle Meade, Nashville’s most posh neighborhood. One Wednesday night, in the seventies, Granola Girl had gone to a show at the Exit/In where she had met a steel guitar player who called himself Twang, renamed herself Star, and played in a psychedelic country band called Spur.

  When she turned eighteen, Twang and Star lit off, not for the territories, like Huckleberry Finn, but for the Farm.

  Twang, who didn’t like farm work but liked bars and sorority girls more than he had let on, did not last long. Star, who took to midwifery and other people’s baby-tending, settled in for a long stay.

  Eventually, a decade of babies and bickering and working every day left Star played out.

  She asked her parents if she could move back home. First thing when she hit town, she ran straight to Ivan, the hairstylist her friends from growing up said was the miracle worker who could transform her brownish hippie frizz to Belle Meade blonde.

  Ivan worked his magic. Granola Girl took possession of the house, repossession of her life, and started calling herself C.J.

  She enrolled in TSU, very, very quietly, because the historically black university gave scholarships to white kids. She got a nursing degree and a husband, who wanted to be in a band, but was a lawyer in a Music Row law firm. She had a boy and then a girl. Eventually she started getting bored. Then she started volunteering with the Baptists, after meeting Preach at his church.

  For a decade, C.J. had led a neonatal prep class out of the Full Love Gospel Tabernacle basement. She had helped many, many babies come into the world healthy; she had helped many mamas deliver unafraid.

  Granola Girl was days away from her fiftieth birthday when she opened the door for Ada. She was excited to see Ada on her doorstep. The church usually gave her a birthday present, and Ada usually delivered it. Granola Girl showed Ada into her living room, a mixture of Indian rugs, family antiques, flea-market pieces that had been smartly refinished, and DIY extravaganzas, thinking she knew the purpose of the visit.

  Ada nestled onto a sofa bed made of wooden packing pallets and blankets. Granola Girl settled into a painted director’s chair across from her. An easel obscured Ada’s view of Granola Girl. The oil-in-progress on the easel depicted the library in Rugby.

  On a table near the easel was a pot of tea, two cups, and local honey. Ada had called to announce she was on her way. Granola Girl poured Ada a cup. Ada squeezed in a bit of honey, then took a sip.

  “I hope you like sassafras.”

  “I thought it was illegal now?”

  Granola Girl shrugged. “The law is not in this room.”

  “Happy birthday.” Ada pulled a small suede bag from her purse. She handed it to Granola Girl, who opened the package. It was a pouch full of beautiful one-of-a-kind beads.

  “Nice. Very, very nice. I can use some of these in my half-century necklace.”

  Granola Girl got out of her chair and walked over to a desk on which there were many, many tiny drawers. Opening one, she took out an intricate piece and fastened it about her neck. It almost looked Egyptian. Granola Girl sat back down in the chair and began fingering the beads as she talked. She was rubbing what appeared to be a black pearl.

  “It’s a reckoning. A reckoning for my birthday. The numbers of babies delivered. This”—she now pointed to the black pearl—“was the first black baby I delivered. Years lived. Concerts attended. Men kissed. Lovers had—”

  “Lovers—you cheat?”

  “I don’t do everything. I do what wives don’t like to do and hippie chicks …”

  “And that would be?”

  “BJs.”

  “Blow jobs?”

  “Exactly.”

  “God!”

  “They can be very reviving. BJs are not really cheating.”

  “You are using Clinton/Lewinsky logic?”

  “I didn’t do it in the wife’s house, or with anyone working under me.”

  “Did you ever offer one to my husband?”

  “In my thirty-something youth, and maybe once in my forties.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he was already completely taken care of in that regard.”

  “Thank God!”

  “Then I tried to blow it off by saying BJs weren’t really sex, and he interrupted me and told me that when you, I will never forget his phrase, ‘addressed him with your mouth most quietly,’ it was ‘most decidedly sex.’ He said it was entering into the center of the universe.”

  “My baby said that?”

  “Your man said that. Last year I asked him what he had meant when he said it. It wasn’t a come-on. I wanted to know. He told me. He said, when he entered into your body in the regular way, it was like entering into your soul. But when you took him in your mouth, he felt like he was entering into the center of the universe.”

  “My baby said that?”

  “Why do you think he wanted a shower in the office during the renovation?”

  “I haven’t been able to figure that one out.”

  “He thought he was coming home too funky for you to want him.”

  “Funky how?”

  “Funky playing basketball with the young bronze gods that run through that church basement. All the hospital germs. The plain smell of death.”

  “Do you think he cheats on me?”

  “He’d betray God before he betrayed you.”

  “Good people cheat. I’m looking at one.”

  “If he said it once, he said it a dozen times. ‘God’s got everybody. Ada got me.’”

  “And he got me.”

  “You ever don’t want him, pass him along.”

  Some say the distance from Nashville to Sewanee is two hours and one hundred years. Crossing Monteagle Pass, Ada was thinking about distances and dangerous angles. Once she was inside the town limits of Sewanee, all she could think about was cozy.

  And taking a walk. As strange a day as it was, Ada was walking her thirty minutes before she knocked on her last door of the day. Once inside the Sewanee gates, first easy plac
e to park, she did. Taking note of the time on her phone, she walked seventeen minutes straight ahead, then thirteen minutes back. Then she did ten more minutes. Her last stop might be her hardest.

  Ada and Virgil sat across from each other in front of the fire in a room Virgil called his parlor. The room was tailored and plaid, in every way moderate. If a Brooks Brothers suit could be a house, it would be Virgil’s sensible cottage.

  When she came up to Monteagle or to Sewanee, she preferred to stay in Clifftops, with its modern and extravagant mansions, rather than in the Assembly, with the picture-perfect cottages, where Virgil lived. She had felt too loud, too black, and too bluesy for the Assembly.

  Virgil fit right in. Part of it was the collar. The simple black Episcopal pants and shirt and jacket didn’t hurt either. But Virgil didn’t need the collar to achieve black Anglo-Saxon Protestant respectability. He was trim. Quiet. Reserved. Fastidious. Classic. Right now he was playing Bach’s Art of Fugue, and he was pouring Ada a second glass of a fine malbec to go with the Stilton cheese he had already served. She was sitting on Virgil’s plaid couch, clutching a cashmere pillow, charmed and worried.

  She had walked into the pages of the southern preppie handbook—the entry that read “black Episcopal.” On his walls were all the books they read, books she had seen on the shelves of certain of her Link sisters’ homes as well: Shakespeare and C. S. Lewis and Evelyn Waugh and Black Ice and the collected speeches of Wallace Thurman and Martin Luther King and more Shakespeare and always a King James Bible from childhood.

  “Which room does Preach stay in when he stays with you?”

  “The library—it has a pull-out couch.”

  “You have three guest bedrooms, and he sleeps in the library?”

  “He likes sleeping with the books. He likes the fireplace. He likes being on his own floor and having his own bathroom. I like having him in a room I love.”

  “That sounds stranger than you meant it to sound, or did you mean it to sound strange?”

  “It sounds stranger than I meant. I always put a stack of books by the bed for him. I like to prepare for guests.”

  “He told me that.”

  “He told you.”

  “He tells me everything.”

  “Does that sound stranger than you meant it to sound, or did you mean it to sound strange?”

  “Do you pick from what you’ve been reading, at random, or for who’s coming?”

  “For who’s coming.”

  “What did you pick for me?”

  “Waiting to Exhale.”

  “You funny.”

  “I thought you would enjoy a Terry McMillan heart-lift.”

  “Does Preach sleep well in this house?”

  “I hope so. We stay up fairly late figuring out how to fix the world and the church and how to best confess to God our sins so that we might be forgiven. But he’s down in the kitchen fresh in the morning, so yes.”

  “Your fishing trips are fishing trips?”

  “Our fishing trips are fishing trips. I did put the New Yorker with Brokeback Mountain by the bed. It’s probably still up there somewhere.”

  “Did he read it?”

  “He never said. He never said if he read Gentleman Jigger either. Or Other Voices, Other Rooms. The only book he ever really talked about was A River Runs Through It. I told him I was in love with Emily Lloyd. He didn’t see the attraction. I liked that.”

  “Episcopal priests can marry.”

  “Not a man. Not and be black and stay happy on this happy mountain.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “And it would have to be a white man. There are few black men up on this mountain, except for Lucius, when he comes to visit.”

  “That’s sad, too.”

  “I spend a lot of time alone in this house, reading.”

  “Have you and my husband ever been lovers?”

  “If I say yes, will you run out of the house screaming into the night?”

  “Probably.”

  “Then I would like to be able to say yes and see that.”

  “Are you saying yes?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I invited him once. But he turned me down.”

  “In this house?”

  “No. Out on the Domain. I had just caught a fish. It seemed the moment. It was 1997. The twins were about ten. He pretended he didn’t know what I was saying to him. Last year I tried again. He seemed a bit lost. I was thinking he might be missing me, missing us, missing what we never got to be. He was missing you. We were sitting in this very room. There was a fire, and he said, ‘You know, once, she wrote the entire Song of Songs all over my body.’”

  “He shouldn’t have told that.”

  “He told it.”

  Virgil closed his eyes. He was back in the room with her Preach, his Lucius.

  “‘No, she didn’t,’ I said.

  “‘Yes, she did,’ he said.

  “‘That might make me want a woman,’ I said.

  “‘You’ve never been with a woman?’ he asked.

  “‘I didn’t say I never been with one. I said, I never wanted one.’ That’s what I told him. Then I said, ‘What I never been with is a man.’

  “‘Go find your true love,’ he said.

  “‘Even if it’s a man?’ I asked.

  “‘Even if it’s a man,’ he said.

  “Then he said, ‘I would trade anything for two days of me and Ada when we good. When we good, I can do what I’m s’posed to do because God didn’t make me wait for heaven to taste heaven. Sometimes I get a preview.’

  “‘What kind of theology is that?’ I asked.

  “‘Baptist Sunday School 101,’ he said.

  “‘I thought that a soul was sufficient to know God,’ I said.

  “‘Nope. True love is a preview of heaven, and you do what you got to, to get it.’

  “‘No wonder your pews are full.’”

  Virgil opened his eyes. He was back with Ada.

  “He said I was a preview of heaven?”

  “A foretaste.”

  “Wow.”

  “Did you really write the whole Song of Songs over him in lipstick?”

  “Just the best verses.”

  “I might just have to walk down and off this mountain one day—if I could find me a you.”

  She kissed him on the lips, as a gift from Preach.

  When she went to sleep that night, she found the McMillan beside her bed. She read for a good long hour, then put down the book and searched for a pen and paper. She had a new rule: Update your goals.

  An affair with Matt Mason was no longer on her list. Finding out if Preach was cheating was no longer on her list. She turned out the light.

  In the dark, Ada exhaled, too.

  46

  CREATE YOUR OWN SPA WEEK

  HER HUSBAND WAS faithful. Lucius loved her. And she loved him. She got into her shower and made herself quake, remembering. It had almost been a year since they’d made love. His birthday. She had finally remembered their last time.

  She had brought him breakfast in bed, and he had put the tray on the floor and pulled her into the bed. She was wearing a white cotton gown. Her teeth were brushed, but his were not, so they had not kissed. He had not taken off her gown. He had simply pulled her on top of him. They fit together so well and so quickly, it was over before it began. Or she thought it might have been, except it wasn’t. He was just beginning. He unbuttoned the top of her nightgown. With one hand he found a breast. With the other he was drawing a pattern of flowers on her knee, a pattern that was trailing toward the top of her inner thigh. Then the phone rang, and he embraced her, not intending to answer it, and then it stopped ringing after two rings and then it started back again, and he picked it up, because that was how the old black folks signaled trouble—two rings, a hang-up, and a callback. Someone had died.

  She had rolled back in the bed, sticky, wet, and abandoned. He left to go do God’s work, and sh
e cried.

  That had been a day of rapid decline. In the middle of life the body changes quickly. Decline is never slow. Decline is always too fast. But that day had been faster than all others.

  On this new day, as the water pounded down on her almost firm-feeling body, Ada cried again. They had found themselves lost in a dry and bitter desert. She no longer knew the most intimate truths about his body, about how quick her kiss could turn him ready for her, or even what “ready” for her was these days. She feared needing a bit of help from a jelly in a tube; she feared that as a final ignominy that would be too hard to face. Maybe that shame was why she had not let him approach her. But he loved her. He had stayed within garden walls, he had not strayed. She could face whatever she had to face. Just as, years before, she had fumbled with a diaphragm before he had been snipped, a little bit of lube was no more barrier than a little bit of spermicide and a rubber dome. And that was no barrier at all—she had the twins to prove it.

  This dry time had at first been a bitter chasm in the fabric of love that threatened to unravel the marriage. Now the dry time was not a chasm, it was a hiatus. She could smell sex near.

  But first she wanted a time to prepare. This would be no poke and sample. It would be pure claim, pure surrender, pure fusion without confusion, aided by science.

  She would accept his invitation, and she would double down. She would take two weeks off work—one week to prepare and one week to be with him. She would make a spa for herself.

  She had arrived at the place where she could make a feast of her body for her husband. She would be his garden and his feast. He would be her garden and her feast.

  She would emerge from her cocoon. She would get into his bed, and he would get into her body. And they would have high and low help from the pharmacy. He would get his prescription. She would slough off—exfoliate the layers of dead skin, polish her hair and her toes, remove every stray hair and polish every hair that should be there. She would reread the Kama Sutra and do Kegel exercises. She would get a full-out expert mani-pedi. She would go to yoga classes. She would get massaged on a dry table and in water. She would know the body she was giving away—and she would know it as beautiful. She would be a good gift and await an excellent gift of him.