Ada's Rules (23 page)

Preach had put a cup of yogurt with almonds and spices in her hand. She didn't know he could do that. Cook anything that wasn't barbecue or a fish fry. The surprise excited her. She had stood up on her tiptoes and kissed Preach. That surprise had excited him.

He had put his arms around her and had kissed her again in response. With his arms wrapped round her, he felt there was distinctly less of her. He felt it, and she felt him feel it. She felt: and still too much. He felt: and when I close my eyes, I miss the curves that don't pillow me—like something dear snatched away.

He said to himself, I must get inside her snatch to snatch it back. This startled him. That he would say in his head “snatch,” that he would give her sweet woman parts a name other than the gentle and black “jellyroll” or their private “Eden,” startled and thrilled him.

He hadn't known the thrill was gone until it started to come back. Until he told himself what he felt: How hard it is to let
her go out the door to help and teach those babies, when I would like to sit down in the nearest kitchen chair, take off her panties, and have her jump on top of me. As he handed her a paper cup of yogurt and got an open-mouth kiss in return, he hoped she could read his mind. Until he was startled by the smallness of her into acknowledging what he had seen in other minutes in other places—times she was headed out the door to walk around the block, on the treadmill—not just that she was losing weight but that he might be losing her. Not for certain, but might be.

Her body had changed. The body she had now, he had never seen fully naked in the daytime. And he had never been inside it. He wanted that privilege, to get inside the soft abundance, and he wanted it more now that she put the soft abundance on the inside, where only he could get to it, than he had wanted it when it hung on the outside like globs of fatty love for the kids and every comer to grab.

He wished it wasn't that way, but it was. He looked at her now and wanted her in old ways. I want to get inside Eden. Eden was his name for her most precious lady part. Eden.

He wanted to say so many things that seemed too late to say, so he simply noticed she had not gotten down to make her breakfast, noticed she had not been to the Dayani Center in three days, so he made breakfast for her and put it in her hand. She had kissed him. He prayed that the body she was working toward, he would be invited into. He prayed he would be able to enter it.

She felt that prayer. He was her husband by more than law. Silently she said amen with him.

Then she prayed for herself. “Please God let me know why I am doing what I am doing. Am I walking back to my old body, or walking toward a new body, or stepping toward a future love I have not met, or stepping toward my husband, or am I doing all those things at once?”

One more thing that needed to be done that she didn't have time or money to do—see a therapist to sort this part out. The only way she could think to afford that was to steal a guitar from her father. Except she wanted him to give her one. She didn't want to steal a guitar from her father.

She did the next best thing. She would drink eight glasses of water today and sleep eight hours and walk on the treadmill for thirty minutes. She would act like a sane person until she was one. She would act like someone who loved her body and was settled enough in her marriage to get her sexy back and still act sensible.

One day at a time.

NOT LONG ENOUGH after their close encounter with West Nile, Preach was out golfing with his friends when somebody got struck by lightning on the same course.

Ada started to think exercising was dangerous. Refusing to count Mason as a “bad thing,” she wanted to know when the next bad thing would happen.

“Bad things come in threes,” Ada said.

Preach contradicted her.

“In the Christian tradition, good things come in threes. Jesus. Mary. Joseph. Father. Son. Holy Ghost.”

“Something's comin'.”

It wasn't lightning that struck. It was a parked car wielded by a sixteen-year-old girl.

Ada had continued to encounter the redheaded boy on the strange bike on her walks through the neighborhood. After months of his calling out to her, “I'm getting mine, you getting yours,” Ada had hollered back a question.

“Exercise?”

“Our pretty-pretty back.”

Ada had nodded her assent. The boy was fitter than he had been at the beginning, when he seemed a huge bronze bear on a bike too frail for his weight. Now the bike seemed too big. She hoped he saw she was fitter too.

The week after Preach was on the golf course that got zapped by lightning, Ada was looking at the boy, noticing that he had metamorphosed into a handsome young man, when she saw him lift his cap. Ada called out, “Looking good,” just as she noticed a blonde girl sitting in a Prius. She could have been the encouraging biker's skinny sister. The girl opened her car door, a car door that the young biker didn't anticipate. How it was the girl in the Prius didn't see the formerly fat redheaded boy on the tiny and tall bike, Ada couldn't imagine. Later she was told that the girl was texting as she parked. But that seemed an inadequate explanation. Ada would have thought the girl should have been able to feel, not just see, the passing extravagance.

There was no small warning for any of them. Ada was walking, the boy was pedaling, the girl was texting, then the door opened and the boy was still pedaling, and Ada stopped walking.

She saw the once chubby redheaded cyclist fly through the air, smiling. It appeared he was certain he would land, that he was enjoying the sail over the handlebars into the air. Then he landed in just the wrong way, on his shoulder, then on his head—and matter from his head that Ada prayed was just blood stained the street, in a flashing, head-bouncing second. The girl who had opened the car door was screaming as Ada spoke with a quiet and steady voice to the 911 operator. She wanted help to arrive
as soon as possible. She knelt beside the boy. He said, “I'm fucked.” Then he laughed, squeezed Ada's hand, and died with a smile on his face.

And so the young man—the obituary would say he was a busboy, but he was in Nashville writing songs—was dead before his first song had been recorded.

Later Preach said, “Bad things don't come in threes; these bad things came in three.”

That night in bed Preach held Ada as she cried. She wanted him to make love to her but couldn't find the strength to kiss his neck and let him know. He wanted to make love to her but wasn't sure he should even try, that it wouldn't be all wrong.

Ada went to the funeral. As a preacher's wife she had been to many funerals of people she didn't know. This one was different. She sat off to the side, and she cried hard for this boy who had been a fellow traveler. She prayed he knew he was beautiful, but she didn't think he knew. She prayed he knew his encouragement had meant much to her. She hoped her hollers back had meant something to him.

Healthing was dangerous. Ada had suspected this; now she knew it for a fact. Three very strange things had happened that wouldn't have happened if the family hadn't been exercising more. She didn't want to stop, but she was stopped, by the Prius car door. She didn't walk in the immediate days after the funeral. Every day she ate an ice cream cone with hot fudge and nuts because she was going to die and she didn't know when. Young people don't believe death is coming. Old people beckon it near. Middle age gets scared.

On day four Inez Whitfield, summoned by Preach, came for a visit. The women sat in the living room. Ada brought them both a bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with warm homemade fudge.

“You haven't just fallen off the wagon, you've gotten yourself run over by the wheels.”

“Run over by the wheels.”

“What you gonna do about it?”

“What should I do?”

“Get back on.”

“I don't know how.”

Her friend handed her the name and phone number of a psychiatrist. He specialized in issues related to death and dying. He was in semiretirement, but he agreed to see Ada, for Inez and Preach's sake.

They figured out what was bothering her in a single session. The boy had had no tomorrows. He would have been better off enjoying getting fat or even getting fatter.

The shrink only had one question for her. “Do you expect to live for a thousand more tomorrows?”

“A thousand tomorrows?”

“Three years.”

“Yes.”

“Well, then.”

The day after the visit to the psychiatrist's office, Ada got back on the treadmill at the Dayani Center. She ate her yogurt for breakfast, a Kashi meal for lunch, and chicken and broccoli for dinner.

That night she wrote a new rule—Get therapy—in her body journal, then she rewrote a previous rule for new emphasis: When you fall off the wagon—and you will fall off the wagon—get back on.

Even if a mule kicks you off. Even if that mule is God.

THE FIRST SWALLOWS of the long June that would be wedding season were the invitations. The first one to arrive carried a stamp Ada hadn't noticed before—a tiny man carrying a great big heart.

By the time all the invitations had arrived and wedding season had actually begun, engraved, e-mailed, handwritten, xeroxed, and calligraphed invitations were all waiting to be hung up on a special board Ada made each year with ribbon and cloth. This year, as in earlier years, the day Ada hung the board was the day she considered wedding season officially begun.

The first decade of her marriage, she had loved this time in the church year. Every wedding she attended was a chance to renew her vows. In comparison to the young brides, she felt wise—she was proud to be a young matron. She liked the display of everyone knowing that she was having virtuous sex, the kind that produced the laughing babies who attended the wedding with her, or who toddled down the aisles as flower girls, then as junior bridesmaids; living proof of her beauty and her and her husband's passion.

Over the years, all that had changed. She and the girls got to be too old to be in the bridal party. Then the girls were off at college, now off at work, and she had to attend weddings sitting alone in the pew. Preach was still at the center of each wedding event. Preach was still in the wedding party. Ada was not.

She had accepted that. Then the girls started to be asked to be bridesmaids, and Ada was alone in the pews. Or they were just away at work. Either way, this was a new hard. And a new old.

Weddings were so much about the babies that would come. They made she-who-had-no-babies-to-come feel painfully irrelevant. She tried to think of weddings more politically, as strategic alliances. She tried to think of weddings more psychologically, as frames for growth. She couldn't. She knew what marriage was for—consecrating sex play and making babies.

With her husband maybe out hound-dogging and her daughters all grown up and no prospect of grandchildren on the horizon, Ada would almost rather be anywhere than at a wedding.

She had to do something about that. Diligence has its limits, and she had arrived at one. Diligence wouldn't get her through wedding season with a smile on her face.

Using wedding season as an excuse to go on a beauty hunt just might. Ada was going on a beauty hunt. The First Lady was supposed to look good at weddings. In recent years Ada looked like a cold mess. Wedding season was the perfect excuse. She needed a lift. She needed encouragement. She needed a break. She needed a time out. A Sabbath. Vaycay. She needed a spa day.

And she needed one cheap. She fantasized about checking into a day spa at Escape, where she had had her nails done, but
even a half day in a day spa was something like four hundred dollars, and she didn't want to blow the last of her spoon money in one place. Besides, she wanted more than four or five hours of spa. She wanted about twenty. And she wanted it soon. Tomorrow.
My baby loves to jump! My baby loves to jump. My baby loves to jump, now!

She pounded through an hour on the treadmill at Dayani brainstorming. Eight of the twenty-four hours would be spent sleeping. To prepare, tonight after dinner, she would do a deep clean of her bedroom, dust everything from baseboards to the highly carved mirror, which she would dust using Q-tip swabs. She would change the sheets. She would pick out a book of poetry to be her day's meditation, probably something by Lucille Clifton or the poets the twins had given her, Pablo Neruda and Yehuda Amichai. Clifton, Neruda, Amichai. These were the poets she would use to romance her body. She wanted an affair with herself. She wished that she had kept the vibrator Delila had given her as a fortieth-birthday present. No worries, she would make a little bouquet of flowers that had a scent, and she would place it by her bath and by her bed. She would buy herself a new squishy pillow. She would lay herself down.

She was walking faster and easier, well into a second hour. Planning a day of body self-indulgence got her adrenaline going. She wanted a theme. She quickly narrowed the choices to Native American and roses, then chose roses. Roses were old and fresh. And roses were weddingy. Roses it was.

But roses meant she had to go to the mall on her way to the gym.

Upon waking up on spa day, she would take a shower, and she
would spa-a-fy the shower by choosing a rose soap at Crabtree and Evelyn. Or, if she was really indulgent, she might even buy herself something from L'Occitane en Provence, a fancy body shop in the mall that had to this day intimidated Ada. So far the spa shopping list was rose soap, squishy pillow, lotion. She added pumice stone, dental floss, and emery boards.

Then she called in sick. For the first time ever. Asked one of the board members to fill in for her for the day. She didn't even think she was lying. She thought—I am sick. I need this mental health day if I am to make it through these weddings. I need to air out my brain.

She went to the mall. She cleaned her room. She cooked the meals she would eat the next day. She warned Preach to get out of her way. She went to bed exhausted.