The Ada Decades

by Paula Martinac

  The woman’s face scrunched up in confusion, and a dismissive pfft escaped her lips. “I don’t take tips for basic human decency, Scarlett O’Hara,” she said. “And only tourists call it ‘the Big Apple.’” The woman turned on her heels and left them on the sidewalk.

  “Well, I take it back. I guess New Yorkers are just as rude as Lu warned,” Ada said, smarting from the Scarlett O’Hara comment. She continued to eye Cam’s arm. “I don’t like not getting that looked at.”

  “I said I’m fine,” Cam said, her words turning crisp. “Don’t play mama.”

  Ada bristled. They hadn’t been talking about her drinking, but the words tumbled out of her mouth just the same. “Well, you act like you still need one. I am sick to death of trying to rein you in when you drink.”

  “I can control my drinking fine. I had just one too many tonight.”

  “This isn’t the first time, Cam. It’s just the worst.”

  “I admit that was mighty scary back there, but . . .”

  “I want you to stop drinking,” Ada said, surprising herself as much as Cam. The words echoed in her ears like she was in a cave. She’d made plenty of demands on Cam over the years, like getting her to church on Christmas and Easter, but never this. She had gone along with the drinking, accepting it as part of Cam’s makeup or heritage, something she couldn’t help because she’d learned it from an unhappy father who died with a pickled liver. But then, maybe Cam could help it. Ada’s daddy drank, too, but she rarely touched the stuff. “I would like you to stop,” she said, softening her choice of words so the notion would go down easier for Cam, like a swig of bourbon.

  They stood facing off for several long seconds. Cam scratched nervously at her cheek. Ada broke her gaze and examined the pin the bouncer had given her before dropping it into her bag.

  “I won’t go to AA, if that’s what you mean,” Cam said finally, and Ada’s heart picked up a beat of hope.

  “Whatever you need to do.” She motioned toward the avenue. “Let’s go now.”

  Ada started walking first, and Cam followed a few steps behind, only catching up at the corner. The DYKE cap was tossed on the sidewalk there, like it was waiting for them, and Cam reached to retrieve it.

  “Looks like you can still wear it for the parade,” Ada said, taking it from her and brushing it off. Then she went to the curb and extended her arm, like a signal flag, the way she had seen New Yorkers doing. A cab flew out of a pack of headlights and swerved to meet them.

  Raised That Way

  1990

  When the call came, Ada was sipping coffee and staring at a morning TV host whose perkiness would be cloying at any time but was downright unbearable just after dawn. In her bones it felt like a Shady Ada kind of day—Cam’s name for the mood shifts Ada still suffered, even after going through the change.

  Her brain was too foggy to make sense of what the journalist was saying, but it sounded like Nelson Mandela had spoken at Yankee Stadium, of all places; in the news clip, he said, “I am a Yankee!” Ada flicked off the TV and grabbed the phone on the third ring.

  On the other end of the line, Clay Junior was in mid-sentence: “. . . old man’s heart.” It took a few seconds for her older brother’s voice to register. Usually, Clay’s wife, Big Junie, was the one on the line.

  “Clay?” she said. “What did you say?”

  Her brother oozed annoyance at her for not understanding right away. Their father had had a heart attack. It hadn’t killed him, but close enough. A neighbor saw him collapse while reaching for the paper on the front stoop.

  “You better get yourself to the ER,” Clay directed, the first-born who ran the show. “Somebody has to be there. I have a business meeting.” She knew the meeting was probably a fabrication. Clay owned a GM dealership in South Charlotte with multiple salesmen and a general manager. Their younger brother, Foster, claimed Clay had a work schedule “as loose as the change in my pocket.”

  Ada had been dreading this call for years, but she had expected a different disease to get her father. His lungs were as dense as a coal miner’s from years of inhaling lint at the cotton mill and smoking Camels. His barking cough commanded a room. After her mother passed, there was no one to chide him to watch his habit or take it to the back yard, and a pack and a half a day inched up to two and then more. He should have been dead years ago but he just kept on going, like her old Timex. Now in the late stage of emphysema, he had oxygen always at the ready.

  But his heart? Well, Foster had noted after a recent visit that their father didn’t seem to eat anything but biscuits and sausage for breakfast, and Bojangles fried chicken with biscuits for supper. “He calls it his heritage. Sounds more like heart-attack-age,” her brother quipped. A poor joke, but she did laugh, and now the memory embarrassed her. What kind of Christian daughter was she, to be so cavalier about her father’s health?

  “Cam,” she said, nudging her partner awake with some difficulty. “Honey, wake up.”

  Cam sat up stiffly and glanced at the alarm. “Lord, darlin’, did you forget it’s June?” During the school year, they would have both been up and showered by now, but in the summer, Cam slept till eight.

  “Clay Senior went and had himself a heart attack,” Ada said. “I have to get to the hospital.” She threw on clean clothes and ran a brush through her hair before hiding it under a bandana. At the last moment, she splashed some Jean Naté on her neck and arms—“a whore’s bath,” Granny Shook used to call it.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  Ada pretended to be preoccupied with locating her pocketbook and car keys. She didn’t want to have to explain Cam’s presence to anyone at the hospital. Suppose the ER staff didn’t like gay people—would her father still get good care?

  “Thanks, honey, but you stay and hold down the fort,” Ada said at last. “I only woke you so you wouldn’t worry. I’ll try to call from the hospital and let you know what’s what.”

  § § §

  She found her father in a faded hospital gown, hoses and instruments attached to various parts of his body. His closed eyelids and cracked lips had a faint blue tinge, matching the gown. “Death warmed over,” one of her mother’s many sayings, popped into her head.

  Ada hadn’t seen him since Christmas Day, when she traveled the five miles that separated them to bring him a poinsettia to brighten up the house. Every month after that she told herself she would visit him, take him a ham, give the place a good cleaning, but the calendar pages kept on flipping until it was June and he was lying on a gurney. She wanted to reach out and pet his hand, but they’d never had that kind of relationship.

  “Hey, Daddy,” she said several times, until his eyes popped open. A coughing jag was his first response.

  “Sugar, your old man’s falling apart.”

  “Oh, you’ll outlive us all,” Ada said.

  “You here to spring me?”

  “Daddy, you had a heart attack. A big one. You’re not going home for a while.” Her stomach listed at the thought that he wouldn’t be able to take care of himself when it was time to go home. Ada had no reason to think Clay Junior or Foster would step up to the plate, or that their wives would allow it, for that matter—Big Junie and Bobbie Ann were daughters, too, and their own folks were getting on.

  It was too early to start worrying, but Ada fretted just the same. She thought about Georgia, a colleague at school whose life had flip-flopped when her mother’s dementia got so bad she set the kitchen curtains on fire. One day, Georgia and her husband were enjoying their empty nest, sharing snapshots of their train trip across Canada. The next, she was retiring early to become a full-time caretaker. “I’m the only girl,” she had said at her going-away shindig, as if that were explanation enough.

  § § §

  “You will not,” Cam said, a week later, putting down her fork and refusing to eat any more of the blueberry pancakes Ada had made, special. “It doesn’t have to be you. Foster’s closer to him. Clay’s the oldest. They’v
e both got big houses to take him in. Hell, you don’t even like him.”

  That last bit stung, but only because it was true. Ada was grateful her father had never skipped out on his family, or taken up with a younger woman, or drunk up his paycheck. She had smarted from his slaps, but he’d never crept into her room at night or touched her in an improper way, or slammed her into walls like he had her brothers.

  Still, there wasn’t much to like about him. She and Foster called him Archie Bunker behind his back. Somewhere along the way, her mother had stopped chiding him for using the N-word and it still popped up in his speech from time to time. “He was raised that way,” her mother told Ada years back. “That’s what folks said in the country. He doesn’t mean it as hateful as you think.”

  Then there was his haranguing of her mother. “Will you just shut your trap?” he would say, often with an F-bomb for accent. “You are so damn stupid, woman.” Ada couldn’t imagine any Christian saying that to another, least of all the mother of his children.

  And she didn’t like that he had tried to stand in the way of her having a career until her mother intervened. “College isn’t going to cost you a red cent,” her mother said. “The girl won herself a scholarship, Clay.”

  “That ain’t gonna help her find a husband,” her father complained. “Librarians aren’t nothin’ but old maids with too much schooling.”

  Her mother rationalized that Ada’s husband might die, or be maimed, or abandon her—all things that had befallen women in their mill community. A librarian was a solid job, one she could use if she needed to. “If something had happened to you while these children were growing up, well, we would have been on the dole for sure.” Dole was a dirty word for Clay Senior, and that was enough to convince him a college-educated daughter was not so bad.

  “He’s a good man, when you dig down,” her mother reminded her. How far down do you have to go? Ada wondered.

  But she had to weigh more than just her feelings about him. Her mother had raised her to bring casseroles to the sick, even virtual strangers; it went without saying that you would do much, much more for kin, especially parents. Honor thy father and thy mother. How much easier it would have been if her mother had needed the tending instead of her father, but she had slipped away fast and early, at just sixty.

  “Let him hire a nurse,” Cam continued, picking at her pancakes.

  “There’s not enough money, even if the boys help out.” In the pause that followed, the only sound was forks on plates. “He’s offered to leave me the house, free and clear, if I stay with him and take care of . . . things. I guess I’ll have to hire a lawyer to do it all legally, but we could come through this with a house, honey.”

  Cam grunted. The old bungalow was no prize, and Ada knew it. North Charlotte had deteriorated in the past twenty years: Yards that had once been pristine were now overgrown, businesses along the main drag were shuttered, drug deals occurred in the open, and even the theater where Ada and Cam once enjoyed movie dates had been triple X for years. Cam made it clear she worried every time Ada went to visit her father.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Ada said, because they’d lived together for almost thirty years and it was impossible not to know. “But the neighborhood’s starting to turn around. People are getting federal money for renovations—that’s what the neighbors told me. A house, Cam. No more renting. Aren’t you thinking about retirement even a little?”

  “I still have some stocks from my granny. It’s not a fortune, but it’ll help.”

  “And what about me?”

  “It’s our money, darlin’.”

  “And if something happens to you, nobody’s going to see it that way.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

  “Well, I knew you were almighty, but I didn’t know you were immortal, too.”

  Cam’s face flushed, her objections cut off. They had gay male friends who were getting wills drawn up to avoid losing everything if their lovers died of AIDS. But the process had cost Twig and his lover Jimmy almost a thousand dollars. Having a little real estate of her own, Ada argued, would help settle her mind the same way a will would.

  “And what am I supposed to do while you’re off being his nurse?”

  “Doctor says with his lungs and heart, he doesn’t have long,” Ada said. “The summer at best. I’ll be with him most days and sleep there at night, but I could still have supper with you.”

  Cam grunted and left the table.

  § § §

  In the beginning, he was a better patient than Ada expected. He greeted her each morning with a yellowed smile and told her more than once how grateful he was when she brought him his coffee. “Don’t know where I’d be without you, sugar,” he said as he watched her switch out his oxygen tank. “Probably face down somewhere.”

  “You are the king of exaggeration,” she said.

  It was one of her mother’s sayings. Living in her parents’ house, waking up in the same lumpy bed she had slept in as a girl, brushing her teeth in the pockmarked bathroom sink, spouting her mother’s old saws, made her feel like someone had pushed the rewind button on her life. At the same time, she looked older to herself than ever. Lines were coming at the

  corners of her mouth, and her neck had folds she didn’t remember seeing in her own bathroom mirror.

  “Your hair’s goin’ gray,” her father pointed out when she was leaning down to retrieve a magazine he’d dropped.

  “I’m fifty-five, Daddy. If I didn’t have some gray hairs, now that would be news.” Her words sounded as scratchy as she felt. “And I sure don’t have as much gray as you,” she added, to lighten things up. He laughed, but like her, his moods were on a pendulum, swinging to the dark side without warning.

  “This chair hurts,” he said, trying to get up. “Get me outta here.” She could see the veins popping through his skin as he attempted to lift himself from the chair.

  “Sit down, Daddy. You could fall, and then we’d have a right mess, wouldn’t we?”

  “I will get up if I want to!” The first few times they’d played this scene, she tried urging him back into his seat with a promise of some sweet tea, just the way he liked it. But his muscles still had life in them, and he slapped her away. “Jesus H. Christ, girl, let me be! I don’t want any tea! I want to get out of this goddamn chair!” Without Ada’s mother there to remind him what it meant to be Christian, his speech was riddled with curse words.

  Mealtimes, he was picky as a teenager. He was partial to all the foods the dietitian at the hospital had stripped right out of his regimen: biscuits, milk gravy, eggs, sausage, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, ice cream sundaes. The scoop of Cheerios with skim milk that she laid out for his breakfast often went soggy in the bowl. At supper, he pushed his steamed broccoli and rice around his plate, and complained that her baked chicken tasted like a rubber hose.

  “You’re trying to kill me,” he accused her.

  If I was really trying to kill you, she thought as she tossed his uneaten food, you’d be dead.

  His cardiologist chastised her when she brought him in for his checkup. “It’s good for him to lose a little weight,” the doctor observed, “but not this fast or this much. If you don’t want your father to die of malnutrition, you best learn to cook something healthy that he likes.”

  “So now you’re not just his nurse but his personal chef, too?” Cam said. “Darlin’, you have got to rethink this whole ‘good daughter’ thing. Let him go to the state hospital if he doesn’t like the way you do things.”

  “I wouldn’t send a junkyard dog there,” Ada said. “Your daddy had money for good care when he was sick. Mine doesn’t.”

  So she checked cookbooks out of the public library—titles like Better Homes and Gardens Eating Light, Fit for Life, and Fresh Ways with Chicken—and skimmed them for ideas. She learned ways to lighten up cheesy recipes, how to make “fried” chicken in the oven, and craft egg-white omelets. There was even a dessert m
ade with bananas and vanilla yogurt that bore a fair resemblance to the pudding he craved. And although her father rarely complimented her on the new dishes, at least he ate them.

  “He looks pretty good,” Cam remarked, surprised, when she dropped in one Sunday. “But beats me why you have to go out of your way to make everything so healthy. I mean, he’s dying.”

  It was a good point: If she were dying, she’d probably want

  to subsist on peach ice cream and pecan pie. Her father had blockage in three coronary arteries and the cardiologist wasn’t recommending surgery. “He’s eighty-eight years old,” the doctor said, and left it at that.

  But still, she persisted. “If he’s strong, he can sign the house papers,” Ada said. She was working with a gay woman lawyer Twig had recommended, someone who had a sliding scale for “family.” Honor thy father or not, she was going to have her house.

  § § §

  Her father was forbidden his smokes, and he seemed to have hidden them all over the house. Ada found everything from full packs to stray Camels tucked between the sofa cushions, under the mattress, in his sock drawer. The contraband went into the trash while he wasn’t looking. Later, she’d spy him tugging at the edges of his mattress or rooting through a low cabinet, cursing softly.

  “Remember what the doctor said. No smoking,” she chided him when she discovered him with a cigarette she hadn’t gotten to first.

  “What harm’s one little smoke gonna do now?”

  “Well, for one, it’ll blow us up to heaven,” she said, nodding toward his portable oxygen. “And I’m not ready to go.”

  One evening when she returned from supper, and more, with Cam (“How about a quickie?” Cam had coaxed, but it had stretched into an hour) her father wasn’t in any of his usual places: in front of the TV, on the porch, on the toilet. His wheelchair was sitting empty on the screened back porch, and Ada could see drag marks across the dirt from his walker. The door of the tool shed was wide open, the walker parked just outside it.