Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  When she slipped off his lap and they slept together until he woke her and this time she was on her back and her ankles were on his shoulders, he was a sugarcane stalk, or so it seemed, crazy drunk on well-aged crazy love.

  Well-aged love is hallucinogenic. She hadn’t known it until she had come more times in an hour than she could count. Till they were sitting alone on the balcony of their house, looking out to the ocean just at dusk, and his fingers made their way around and around the smallest circles of her and into the frills and folds of her, until she was wrapped in his love and saying, again, “Here, I come.”

  It was prophesy, predicament, and truth. “Here, I come.” The place that she was going to was the place that she was. The place they were going to was the place they were.

  The place they had was the place that they wanted.

  49

  DON’T STOP SHORT OF YOUR GOAL

  THEY DOZED AFTER they made love. When they awoke, they walked to the little grocery store and bought coffee and cookies. As they nibbled, sitting at an umbrella table just outside the store, he on the cookies, she on his fingers, they took turns asking themselves “What were you thinking then?” questions.

  Playing Scrabble back at their house after their snack, they both agreed the house afforded “a watch-God view.” They were not talking about the balcony’s view of the water. They were talking about the way Ada and Lucius inhabited the space and how it put them eye to eye with God’s greatest creation.

  They played Scrabble, their own version. One made a word, and the other had to name a way the word had been important in their life, and all the words they made had to have something to do with love.

  It was something Lucius had learned in a “How to Save Your Congregants’ Marriage” workshop. The one making the word got the number of points on the word, the one making the association also got the same number of points. The game always ended in a tie and a bouquet of shared memories provoked by the words constructed. It was a game he had taught many husbands but had not taken the time to play with his wife. And now they did.

  They had an early dinner served in the room and fell asleep reading Cane aloud to each other.

  Ada awoke early as the sun was coming up, and she got out of bed naked and walked to the bathroom, still naked. She did her business, and was going back to the bed when she spied the scale underneath the sink. She stepped on the scale; she was sixty-nine pounds lighter than the day she started. It wasn’t the hundred pounds she had thought she wanted to lose, but it was almost just right.

  She was very near to journey’s end. She would drink hot herbal teas and suck on special ice cubes and restrict carbs, and sleep eight hours; she would walk thirty minutes a day, the rest of her life.

  She would separate herself from one last pound and declare victory. She would finish what she started. And part of it would be celebrating the reality—she still had a magic box, and he still had a key.

  She brushed her teeth and found her way back into the bed. Lucius was sleeping beside her, snoring loudly. The noise amused her. Wanting to see the dawn with her beloved, she started to bite him softly.

  He awoke and pulled her to him. Then rolled away. He hit the bathroom, then the shower. Seven minutes later he was back in the bed, whispering to her, “Finish what you started.”

  She did. And after, while he slept, she walked naked up the stairs to the balcony, and she walked naked beneath the sky when the moon and the sun still hung.

  She had never stood naked in the open air. She didn’t know how she looked, but she knew how she felt—wonderful. Awake.

  Finish what you start. Drunk on all the possibilities of morning, particularly the possibility of making love to Lucius again and soon, Ada wondered if it was possible that God had invented orgasm not just to encourage us to have babies but because God wanted to teach us to finish what you start—and get well rewarded.

  She was finishing what she got started. Once he had chosen her. Now she was proof he had chosen well. Once she had chosen him. Now he was proof she had chosen well. I am a wall, and my breasts like towers, then was I in his eyes as one that found favor.

  How much more to be the one who had kept favor, the one who had proved Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.

  The road to freedom passes through discipline and creativity. Embracing limits and boundaries as well as desire, Ada had whittled herself down to an essential big brown beauty.

  She went and found her body journal. In the euphoria of reunion sex, Ada found it the sweetest rule of all.

  Finish what you start.

  50

  CELEBRATE DAPPLED BEAUTY DAILY: THE POWER OF THE IMPERFECT AND GOOD-ENOUGH

  WHEN LUCIUS AWOKE, he was scribbled over. Head-to-toe flowers and love notes. Ada had done it with her new lipstick.

  He smiled at her. In this place, all the surprises were good.

  “What is this?”

  “A reason to take a shower together.”

  “Isn’t that how we got the twins?”

  “Another advantage of getting old.”

  “Can you love a dappled thing?”

  “Dappled you, yes.”

  He soaped her up and down, reciting to her the words he didn’t expect had ever been recited before in a shower. He found the dichotomy uplifting. He continued to recite as he soaped her up and rose to the challenge of middle-aged morning.

  “Glory be to God for dappled things—For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; What is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise her.”

  Ada slipped to her knees and took Preach into her mouth. For a moment he could continue to recite, “How many loved your moments of glad grace or loved your beauty with love false or true, this man loved the pilgrim soul in you and loves the beauties of your changing face.” Then she stopped him with her tongue.

  Just after, lavish with the hot water a hotel affords, they bubble bathed.

  “I was born to be a self-absorbed bastard. I loved you too much to watch you not have what you need.”

  Ada and Lucius were up to their shoulders in hot water and soapy bubbles. They didn’t move. They didn’t talk. They didn’t do it. It was their first taste of old-folks’ sex, and it wasn’t half bad.

  51

  CULTIVATE NEW INTERESTS

  ONE FLY IN the ointment of the honied-moon was a call from the Delta. The girls had been told not to call. Ruth ignored instructions and called to ask her mother if she, Ada, had ever dated Matt Mason, because she, Ruth, wanted to date him. It seemed Ruth had spent an afternoon at the B. B. King Museum with Mason; this followed on the heels of three Dockery visits, a dinner at the Alluvian, and God-only-knows-what-else with Mason.

  “He’s fifty years old.”

  “He’s brilliant.”

  “He’s like an uncle to you.”

  “I’ve never met him before in my life.”

  “We dated in college.”

  “You married Daddy. And you didn’t date date, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Then grown is grown.”

  “Grown is grown.”

  Ada said it, and she meant it. Then her daughter said something she immediately forgave her daughter for repeating, but would never forgive Mason for saying.

  “He says I look more like you to him, than you look like you.”

  “You look like you, baby. And you prettier than I ever thought of being, but I take that as a compliment. A big compliment.”

  “I think I love him, Mama.”

  “The thing about love, baby, only time tells.”

  Time had told Ada Preach was Ada’s man, and Ada was Preach’s woman.

  That night, be
fore they went home to Nashville, Ada had two confessions to make. She picked her moment. They were on the balcony, counting shooting stars.

  “I’ve got something to tell you about Matt.”

  “Matt who?”

  “Matt Mason.”

  “What?”

  “He went on a date with Ruth.”

  Preach looked shocked. He expected Ada to start crying, to fall apart, to be heading to the roof to jump off. Ada was smiling. Finally he got it.

  “You never slept with Matt Mason?”

  “Never. Not even close. Wasn’t even interested.”

  “Why you tell me you did?”

  “It was the only way I was going to get you to sleep with me before the wedding.”

  “Matt Mason’s seeing our Ruth?”

  “They’re probably about the same emotional age.”

  “He couldn’t do better, but she could do worse.”

  “I’m sure glad you didn’t let me make him a godfather.”

  “I knew.”

  Ada was lucky. He wasn’t saying, but she could see that Lucius couldn’t imagine why any man would want to start all over with a young twenty-something. Ada couldn’t imagine that any man wouldn’t want either twin at the center of his life.

  She was no longer worried about the girls getting married. Her confidence in her own romantic choices had inspired in Ada a confidence in her daughters’. They were far more likely to marry than she was to learn the solo her daddy taught Duane Allman, and she was learning the solo her Daddy taught Duane Allman. She was bringing beauty back to her house every way she knew how.

  And she knew a whole lot of ways to beckon beauty. Ada thought about them all on their flight back home. And she thought about something she promised herself she would not think about after the plane landed. She thought about how she had tasted Delila on Preach’s tongue, Delila, from the time just before she got sober. Ada had felt it in her body. There had been a fifth name. She would not let it be a devastation. She wasn’t about to ever lose Delila, and she wasn’t about to lose Preach. Whatever they had done—once, not twice, she had not tasted that level of betrayal—had scared Delila into sobriety and might have gotten Winky on the blink. They had all paid enough. It was time to live and forgive. She would gift to Preach the forgiveness he had given her for Matt Mason. She didn’t need it. Then. Now. Or ever.

  Bird and Temple stopped the service when they entered Preach’s church. Ada turned her head to see what had caused the quiet.

  She thought it was the hat: a giant plumed purple and velvet turban. It wasn’t the hat. Bird and Temple entered on a solo. When Bird lifted her voice to accompany the soloist, the soloist stopped singing. Bird’s voice eclipsed. Temple nudged Bird in the ribs with his elbow while nodding with a bandleader’s emphatic chin for the soloist on stage to continue. When she did, Bird and Temple quietly took a seat on the front pew beside their daughter. Bird eased in gracefully, like she always sat in the front row with her daughter, wearing a gigantic hat with old feathers and lots and lots of shiny stuff sewn or pinned to what she secretly called her pirate hat.

  Preach preached. The service continued. When they passed the offering plate, Bird took out a tiny scissors from her purse, golden scissors, the kind fancy women used for their afterdinner needlework, and she cut a jeweled flower off the hat and threw it into the collection plate. Even down to the lake, they had heard about Preach’s crazy tithing sermon.

  When the service was over, Ada invited her mother and father to stay for lunch. They had to get back to the lake house and make Sunday dinner for the boarders. With more of the space cleaned out, there were more boarders.

  “We are the colored division of the retired musicians union,” Temple said.

  Everyone laughed. Bird got out a big laundry basket she had in the backseat.

  “I have not had a drink in twenty-six days. I made these for you.”

  They were patchwork quilts made out of her old stage gowns. And in the back of their old car sat three old trunks. Bird pointed to them. Then she linked arms with Ada and started talking.

  “I cleaned all the best stuff and made a dress-up trunk. One for each of your girls.”

  “They’re too old for dress-up, Mama.”

  “For their daughters.”

  “Thank you, Mama.”

  “Playing pretty-pretty is not the same as whoring.”

  “Nobody says it is.”

  “Everybody used to say it. Folks lie. Men cheat. Babies die.”

  “I know, Mama.”

  “The difference between a woman and a girl is, a woman finds a way to enjoy herself despite life being lived on a pile of shit. Me, I got to get back home and cook. I’m looking to find some of the pounds you lost. I ain’t letting you have none of ’em back.”

  Bird kissed Ada on the lips. Their lipsticks mingled. Bird thought, If I get killed in a car accident on the way home, I will die happy. For the first time in years, Ada wasn’t praying for the Lord to quick come take them. One of the days on her treadmill, Ada had weaned herself off inertia. Moving on, she had stumbled into her mother’s remaining sugar tit.

  52

  MAKE A HEALTH AND BEAUTY CALENDAR

  IT HAD BEEN a bit over a year since Ada had been to her doctor. She was excited to let the woman see her progress. She had lost the last pound. Seventy pounds down.

  The appointment didn’t go as she expected. The doctor had lost more weight than she had—probably thirty pounds more. The doctor looked extraordinary. She had lost a hundred pounds.

  Willie Angel had had weight-loss surgery.

  For a hot minute Ada wondered if she had made the right decision—not because the work had been too hard, but because her friend had gotten seemingly better results.

  But that was only apparently. Where Ada had enjoyed her year, her doctor friend related that she had experienced her year as something of a tunnel. She had eaten a narrower and narrower range of food. She had taken something out of her life, while leaving it almost exactly as it was before. In the end, the doctor was a woman with a hole in her life. But she was magnificently transformed, and that served to confer a kind of buoyancy, hole or no hole.

  She put Ada through the paces: mammogram (she insisted on digital), colonoscopy (she suggested IV sedation, and recommended a Demerol-Versed mix). In-depth eye exam to check for glaucoma. Full panel of blood work. Skin cancer screen with punch biopsies. The modern midlife black woman works.

  The glaucoma tests came back suspicious. She was called back for another test. She sat and looked through goggles at something like a video game screen, squeezing a hand-held device every time she saw a light, indicating the direction it had appeared in. After she got the hang of the device, which wasn’t easy because Ada didn’t play any computer games, Ada’s eyes were cleared. No glaucoma, medicine, or surgery in her immediate future.

  Everything else came back great. Willie Angel announced that Ada had taken six years off her life.

  Ada reread her food diary. She took another look at the map of her body. She drew a picture of herself standing naked in the mirror of the Seaside house. She needed a life plan.

  She wanted it all down on paper so she could stop carrying her beauty calendar in her head.

  She started with the simple things, like the daily thirty-minute walk. She put in the yearly big medical tests. In between she put in the mani-pedis, the haircuts, the waxing. She put in changing up the uniforms and reviewing the uniforms. The daily flossing, because flossing is good for the heart. She made a little schedule of all that she needed to do to maintain a bit of shimmer.

  And when she had it all laid out, she signed her name to the bottom of the calendar. It was more than a contract; it was a promise to keep. And it was the beginning of her novel. Ada was going to write a novel. The first line was going to be, “I lost seventy pounds writing this book.”

  She threw out her last box of tampons, then thought better of it and put the box in the twins’ bathroom,
and slept the sleep of the grown.

  53

  DO IT FOR YOU

  ADA WAS ADA skinny: healthy and happy in her skin. The size-8 tulip dress was packed. With the proper foundations, it looked great. Mainly she wore a 12 but she treasured her one size 8 that fit. All her reunion materials, including the first invitation that had arrived just over a year before, were packed too. In the morning she was flying to Baltimore. A friend—a girlfriend—was picking her up at BWI, and they were driving to Hampton together.

  Ada was already in bed and half asleep when Preach sat down on her side of the bed and stroked her arm. She half opened her eyes to see what he wanted.

  It wasn’t passion, or company; it was the surety she would return. He knew she was going, and he wanted to be sure she would return. He wanted her to be his boomerang. He couldn’t say any of that. He was fifty-one years old, but in this place he might lose her, might lose her in the full bloom of autumn roses, because of what he had done, and because of what he had left undone. He was a little boy watching the prettiest creature on earth walk away from him, and he felt too small and too puny to do anything about it. His arms went all over gooseflesh. She felt it and reached for his face with her lips. She kissed him, two pillows to two pillows. He started to sing her a blues song, of his own creation: “Ada stay right there, Ada stay right here, baby turn around, lay your body down, Ada stay right here, don’t go to Hampton town, don’t make your good man frown, I beg you now.”