Ada's Rules (24 page)

Intending to spend most of the day walking and as much of it in sight of water as possible, Ada began her spa day morning at Shelby Bottoms, marching along the Cumberland River. Around lunchtime she would walk around Radnor Lake. In the afternoon she would walk out at Cheekwood through the gardens that overlooked their pond.

The day went as planned. Between the second and the third walk Ada headed into the bathroom for an old-school Epsom salt bath. Up to her ears in hot water, she covered her eyes with a warm wet washrag and blasted Billie Holiday from her little boom box and counted her favorite body memories.

Mind spa. The current moment was a favorite body memory. That was good. Very good. She sunk deeper back, wanting to remember her first favorite body memory, one before sex, one
before babies, a true girl memory. She counted backward from one hundred. She took ten-second inhales and ten-second exhales. She came to: the
vroom-vroom
feeling she had when she first went fast on her first tricycle; then the first time she noticed the sun hanging like a red ball in the sky; pressing in the tips of her nipples when her chest was still perfectly flat; the sway of a swing seat beneath her feet as she pumped hard; the scent of honeysuckle and cigarette smoke mingling with perfume, going out to her first summer-night high school party; the day Preach put the baby in her, in a tent in the rain, and she knew before morning it was two, not one baby, that was coming to that tent, to that rain; that touch of his hand on her face. The girl memories dissolved into the woman memories.

In the hot water Ada welcomed it all. She came from a culture of warm water and song. She couldn't prove it, but she knew it. Like she knew that drinking herbal tea while she soaked made her more able to retain what she needed and shed what she didn't. Finished soaking, she rubbed her arms with a pumice stone and her legs with a loofah. It felt good to shed a skin. So good she almost took too much off. Looking down at her red elbows, she wondered if there would be a scab.

She had been in the bath for an hour. It was time for her late lunch. She ate the gazpacho and chilled shrimp she had prepared the night before. She ate it listening to Miles Davis, trying not to think of anything at all. To help her with that she counted to one thousand.

For her afternoon walk she took herself to Cheekwood Botanical Gardens. She dawdled through the Japanese garden and the rose garden, and around the swan lawn, then out to the
gazebo, where she had read books to the girls when they were young. She had spent a lot of time in these tame gardens. And just for the moment, tame was what she needed.

She came home, cut open a lemon, stuck one elbow in one half and one elbow in the other to bleach away the rough brown points on her. It didn't sting, so she figured she hadn't pumiced too much off. She showered again. This time, when she showered, she shaved.

Then she soaked in the bathtub again. This time, as she soaked, she read
Coming Through Slaughter
from beginning to end.

An Episcopal priest friend of Preach's had suggested the novel to her years before. She had avoided it because she had found the priest, Virgil, an infuriatingly vanilla brown man. Reading the book, she realized she didn't know Virgil as well as she thought she did. She liked the book.

Out of the bath, she brushed and flossed her teeth. She lotioned her legs and breasts and hands. She took all the polish off her nails and gave them a quick emery boarding.

It was time to take herself to the pool. She didn't swim laps. She floated. She cherished her remaining lush fat buoyancy.

Much to her surprise, a day that had been about giving herself escape had become a day to become recommitted.

“Let the weddings begin,” she said before submerging herself beneath the Dayani Center's chlorinated waters.

ADA'S HAIR LOOKED hinky the morning after her spa day's dip-without-swim-cap. She headed straight to Big Sheba's Little House of Beauty, calling from her cell phone en route. Sheba bounced a med student from her chair. Sheba's daughter attended KidPlay; Sheba attended Preach's church. She gave her First Lady preferential treatment. Ada settled into the salon chair with a smile and an announcement.

“I need new hair.”

“You need to leave your hair alone.”

“Because?”

“Because you got too much change going on. You going through the change, and you making a lot of change, and that's too much change. Something gonna get dropped. If everything ain't where it supposed to be and where you used to it being, things happen.”

“What's not where it's supposed to be?”

“To start with, your titties.”

“Where are my breasts supposed to be?”

“Somewhere up closer to yo' shoulders.”

“You are lucky they're not dragging to my knees or out to next door.”

“You fifty years old. Get 'em up high and squished in, so they look all round and pretty—”

“And that wouldn't be change?”

“Preach loves your crazy hair.”

“I want new hair, and I'm getting me some new very hardworking underwear, and I'll be ready for wedding season.”

“You get you some new hair to go with that underwear and you most likely to get yourself in trouble, or get Preach worried. He's gonna start asking questions.”

“Questions like what?”

“Like who you doing all this for?”

“You don't even have to ask, don't pretend you need to ask, you know I'm doing it for Preach,” Ada lied.

Opal Herbert, Sheba's most in-demand stylist, who had walked in halfway through the conversation, decided to open what everybody on Jefferson Street called “the mouth of the South.”

“Lord, child, you got your eyes more open than I thought you did. Fight the good fight. There bad women on every corner looking for somebody's husband, and there's always a few who think they gonna get to heaven by kissing one of God's true angels. Jezebels in every congregation.”

“What you talking about, Opal?” asked the med student, who Opal was staring right at as she spat “Jezebels.” Sheba wasn't studying on the med student's guilt or innocence. She was worried about Ada.

“Opal ain't talking about nothing, at least nothing but her
paranoia. She think everybody after yo' husband because she want to drag her tired old half-yellow black ass after him. Everybody with sense know the preacher don't have eyes for anybody but his First Lady,” said Sheba.

“It's a good thing I started going to church with the Episcopals,” said Ada.

“I ain't so sure 'bout that. I say the cat's away, the mice will play. I say get your butt back home and into the front pew e-v-ry service, and not just Sunday,” said Opal. Sheba was shaking her head in reluctant agreement.

“How can I pray, thinking about everything but God, thinking about who's looking at my husband, and who's voting for his raise, and what does he think about what I'm wearing, and what some Little Miss Jezebel is wearing. And I would not say a word of this past this beauty shop, but this is a sacred place for me, sacred as the sanctuary, with sisters more darling to me than my Altar Guild ladies. So let me be clear. I have one, and only one, thing on my mind now. I
need
you to hook up my hair and get me out the door with not one more worry than I came in with. Trust me. I hear one more piece of bad news, I'm going to snatch myself baldhead. I don't want to know nothing more bad.”

“Let's get this head together.”

“Give her something classy.”

“China chop!”

“China chop?”

“Straight bangs across, straight sides.”

“Cut it up just above her shoulders.”

“That keep it fresh.”

“My grandmother wore that hair back in the twenties.”

“It's back.”

“Put you a real pretty real diamond clip in it.”

“I've got one of those.”

“I know. I remember when your daddy bought it for your mother before you were born.”

Big Sheba's Little House of Beauty returned to the usual hubbub of morning chaos. If Ada had been thinking about anything but her hair, she would have noticed what wasn't being said. It was written all over the faces of the silent. Sheba and Opal were both thinking the exact same thing. Ada's request for a new haircut was an open confession that she knew Preach was cheating. That she knew all about it. But they kept on smiling and kept on acting like all she wanted was Better Hair.

Whatever was coming, Better Hair would help. That hippiecurly mess she had all over her head was
tired.
Everyone in the shop knew it. Everyone in the shop agreed on that. What they differed on was what was coming.

Whatever it was, Ada would greet it with her chin up and a China chop.

DELILA LEE WAS back in town. If Delila Lee had not been Ada's oldest friend, and Delila Lee's mama had not delivered Ada in the back of a band bus, Delila Lee would probably have been way too wild for Preach's congregation to tolerate as the First Lady's bestie.

But Delila Lee had been there from the get-go, and she was the First Lady's bestie, so Delila Lee got into a lot of clubs: the Lunch Bunch because she was wickedly funny, and the Altar Guild because she had the deep purse to buy the expensive flowers for Christmas and Easter, to name her favorites. Because she would never on God's green earth get into any Links chapter in America, there was no chance in hell for Delila Lee to take over. And she was fun. Eventually the congregation didn't just accept Delila Lee as Ada's bestie, it embraced her—whenever she was around, which wasn't often.

Delila Lee liked to run up and down the road. Ada's best friend was usually gone, particularly these last two years. Ada remembered how that seemed to come to be: There had been a few parties where Delila got too drunk, then she put herself
in treatment, then she hit the road, playing more and more out-of-town dates.

Ada hated that.

Strangely enough, Delila Lee (she had christened herself Delila early, as soon as she knew she would be wanting and needing a stage name) was a year younger than Ada, but she looked ten years older, only foxy.

Delila had bumped around clubs in New Orleans, and Memphis, and Austin before landing in Nashville with two obscure CDs to her credit and a convertible that she claimed Isaac Hayes had given her. Delila Lee's Isaac Hayes was a white “farmer,” an old blue-blood aristocrat, pink and skinny, who once had been in cotton and now grew corn. Cottonball white, with a black interior, Delila's car was the one thing she possessed she would not sell or rent.

Delila never slept with men for money or serviced men for money, but she would shack up with an adoring patron of the arts who enjoyed a private blues concert once or twice a month.

Her lovers were all white, and she was always convinced they loved her voice—if they didn't love her. Delila Lee didn't love anybody but Ada.

Her very last lover had been a very old man whose name was not Isaac Hayes. He had tried to get her to go with him to AA meetings, but she never did. One fall day he went out dove hunting and got tangled up with a fence, his rifle, and his head. In his will he left a house to Delila Lee, who he described as his housekeeper. He also left her a little income of $40,000 a year, and health insurance to be paid from an ongoing trust account for as long as Ms. Lee was alive, with the wish that she
get sober, and the promise she would be taken care of dry or wet. The adult children complained that they didn't have a housekeeper. Their mother told them to shut up.

The wife of record insisted on meeting Delila to give her the deed to the house and the once-a-year check for $40,000. On every such occasion, she said the same thing: “Better you than me.” Delila Lee just said, “My pleasure.”

Ada shook her head, thinking about Delila Lee. Strange things were always happening to her. Strange good things and strange bad. It came from Delila Lee always chasing after the juice in any moment. When they were children, Delila had confessed to Ada, “The one thing I'm true scared of is being bored.” She had been talking about having to go spend a summer with her father's grandmother in Chicago in a perfectly clean house where all she had to do all day was sit on a proper couch reading books. “I may drown myself in her perfectly clean toilet.”

After a flurry of missed calls and text messages, they met at the Pancake Pantry in Hillsboro Village. Delila liked it because it was around the corner from a noon meeting she liked at the church in the village.

Ada told Delila Lee about Matt Mason. Delila Lee near peed her pants. Ada told Delila Lee not to get too excited, she probably wasn't going to do it. Then she added, not as a tease but as the truth, “But I just might!” Then Ada changed the subject.

Something bigger was bothering her. One of the weddings this wedding season was an interracial wedding. The girl was marrying a boy from Belle Meade, in a two-minister ceremony. The other minister's wife was skinny and blonde and looked
like she could have been a pageant girl in an earlier life. The grandmothers on both sides, black and white, looked great. Ada had to represent. Ada didn't want to let the side down. She could pull off her own brand of power black frump—she'd been pulling it off for years—but she didn't think it translated to the white world.

“And I do not want to embarrass the church.”

“Honey, you looking good, better than you've looked in years.”

“My old clothes are too big, and my titties are trying to hang down to my knees.”

“Fake it till you make it.”

“Fake it till you make it?”

“A big smile works more wonders than a face lift. Put a great big smile on your face, and people will start smiling at you, and then you be happy for real. The fake turns real.”

“Fake it till you make it?”