Ada's Rules (25 page)

“And let those biddies wonder what you got to smile about.”

“Is there a fake-it-till-you-make-it body remedy?”

“Sho 'nuff.”

“What?”

“Rebecka Vaughan.”

“Who's that?”

“It's an old-fashioned foundation shop. Go in there and get you a modern girdle, and a body suit, and some Spanx, and a brassiere that gets the boobs high and separated and sucks in the waist. And buy you some black tights with a panty girdle built in to put on top of that girdle, and you can be two sizes smaller by dinner tonight.

“Fake it till you make it.”

“Why?”

“Honey, it's women who don't know nothing about men think it's the clothes you wear that makes them want you. Any man over fourteen years old or who ever been to one whorehouse knows, it's not how you look in clothes, it's how they feel when the clothes come off and the light go out, and the only way to know anything about that is looking at a woman's smile and her underwear. She can be big as three houses but got her on a pretty purple silk panties and bra, and he's probably in for a good time; and she can be skinny as a rabbit, if she's got on some skanky frayed panties that don't look like nothing and no bra, all that skinny bitch is probably gonna do is give him disease. And if she's wearing grandma panties and some big ole mummy-bag slings, you know she ain't about to give up anything with anything except you be her grandbaby looking for love and a sugar tit.”

“I wear this one-piece black stretching thing with underwire that's like a swimsuit. It's like I'm always covered.”

“It's like you a modern nun. You can't even pull 'em down to pee, let alone have sex. Have mercy, that's just a frigidity protector. What does it have, four hooks and eyes right at your twat? Get you some pants to pull down. Get you a bra. Get you a short little slip if you just need to be covered. Your mama was a stone fox. You should know some of this. What is wrong with you, heifer?”

“Missing me some you.”

“You got me … I get my two-year chip this week. And I'm staying in town for a while. I'm going to take some of my money
and make me a new album. I'm gonna sing some of that Memphis Minnie shit nobody even knows about anymore. And you gonna sing backup.”

“You get you another show in Nashville, and me and the girls be right up on the stage with you.”

“Your girls ain't getting anywhere near my stage. They too young and too pretty.”

Ada looked at Delila, looked at her hard, like she was accessing new possibilities. Delila smiled back and said, “I love your China chop. You keep rocking that, babygirl.”

“I will. Just for you,” Ada said, then she kissed Delila on the cheek.

Delila was skinny and brown with big huge eyes and long hair that was almost all gray. There was a lot of Indian in her African, Ada guessed.

Ada wondered where Delila's mother was. Somewhere out west, she had heard. Married some Indian man who had some casino money. He was her seventh and, she said, final husband. Delila's daddy had died when she was just three or four. Ada's mama always said that Delila had more or less raised herself.

Just seeing Delila be so bold and so wonderful after being orphaned took some of the pressure off Ada about her being a good mother and about her worrying about her babies' mothers. Delila had turned out great with hardly any mother at all.

But that wasn't the best part of Delila for Ada. The best part was, Delila got happy just looking at Ada. It was good to still have that power—except she wanted to be looking across a pillow at someone and feeling it.

Not this day. Today she was keeping a move on. Today she
was getting her nontrifling ass to Rebecka Vaughan and seeing if she couldn't find a trifle that might fit.

She was putting a big smile on her face, and she was buying herself some new underwear. She was going to undress like a woman, not like some ancient baby.

Underwire or no underwire, she was over the stretchy black middle-aged-woman onesie they called a lingerie bodysuit. It wasn't a shape maker, it was a no-one-will-feel-your-shape maker.

For three years she had pulled the between-the-legs part over to pee and had had to shit only before it was put on. She had made a lot of accommodations to wear what was a fundamentally inconvenient garment, a garment that only made sense if you wanted to see as little of your private parts, as seldom as possible.

That night Ada threw every one of the strange pieces of underwear away.

In their place she folded black cotton panties and bras that looked like the woman who wore them liked sex, and herself, and style, and the environment. Ada prayed they looked just a little like she should be wearing them.

LEAVING THE PANCAKE Pantry, Ada had called Naomi in New Hampshire. It was easy to catch her; she had a cell phone and could use it between classes. Ruth in Mississippi never got breaks. They could only talk at six fifteen in the morning and after four in the afternoon. The last few days, she wasn't even reaching her then.

Ada was calling Naomi to find out if she knew why. She didn't, except she thought Ruth was starting to explore the Blues Trail. Ada got on with her other business. She was thinking about updating her makeup in time for the big luncheon and in time for her upcoming birthday.

“Mama, you do an allover face. Nobody does that anymore. Do lips
or
eyes.”

“Lips or eyes?”

“Either do bright lips and barely anything around your eyes, just maybe eyebrow pencil in your eyebrow, not even mascara—or go the other way and do nude lips, or near nude neutral lips, and go wild on your eyes: liner, mascara, shadow, or two shadows.”

“Lips or eyes. What about base?”

“Go back to Sephora. They have every base in the world. Don't just take the first salesperson. Find someone good at matching colors, our skin colors, and see what they come up with. I'm betting Smashbox or maybe Stila, but Stila's probably too young.”

“I want Chanel.”

“Maybe Chanel, if you try one of those new Perfection Lumière shades. Do a virtual makeover. They have a thing to do it at Essence dot com and there's one at Seventeen. They're free. I like the Seventeen one. It will let you see if you prefer lips or eyes … you'll have to upload a picture of yourself, but after that it'll let you try on different shades, and different colors, even different hairstyles, and you're in the privacy of your own room … I think you would like it big time.”

“You know your mama.”

“I know my mama.”

“How's your diet going?”

“Going. I wish I had the same type you have, or that Ruth and I had the same type. I'm not loving being in Daddy's type, and Daddy can eat three times as much as I can—and it feels too boy to be Daddy's type.”

“You are not too boy.”

“I can't get a date here. I shouldn't have taken this job.”

“You should get into Boston more.”

“I should.”

“But—”

“You know your daughter.”

“So the but is—”

“Now that I'm making all this change, I don't want to meet anyone new until I finish making the change. I don't have a lot of first impressions left in me.”

“You have thousands. You are twenty-three, not eighty-three.”

“Have you read that most black woman graduating from college this year will never get married?”

“That won't be you.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because if we have to rope in some one-eyed old man who has somewhere deep in his history great genes, I going to rope you into marrying him and him into marrying you, at least long enough for you to get some great babies.”

“Before I did that, I'd just do it with one of my gay friends.”

“Families start a lot of different ways.”

“But—”

“But I'm hoping for true love, a big ring, a big wedding, and a big family you raise with the person with whom you made the babies. All that, I want for you.”

“And what do you want for my sister?”

“I'll discuss that with your sister.”

“I want us to marry two brothers, not twins but brothers. I want the older one.”

“Sweetie, that's strange.”

“What's up for you the rest of the day, aside from your thirty minutes on the treadmill?”

“Updating my beauty rituals.”

“I haven't had any long enough that they need updating.”

“I was once that young. But when I was that young I didn't have beauty rituals.”

“Because you were a blippie?”

“A blippie?”

“A black hippie.”

“I was bit of a blippie, back in the day. The hippies were just a little bit ahead of me, but Nashville is a little bit behind in the world, so I guess I was a blippie. I guess that's why my beauty roll never got started right. Instead of wanting to be like my mama, who was glamorous, I wanted to be like those women out on the Farm, except that was the place for straight brown hair and skinny thighs and no-butted beauties.”

“Sounds like Exeter now. How did you let me come out of the South? I never knew I wasn't beautiful till I came to New Hampshire.”

“You had to find out sometime.”

“That I wasn't beautiful?”

“That everyone doesn't know it.”

A bell rang. Naomi had to get to class. She wasn't ready to get off the phone. She was uncharacteristically willing to be late.

“I miss seeing myself in your eyes. I remember sitting in your lap touching your breast and seeing myself reflected in your eyes and knowing I was the luckiest girl in the world and one day I would be a mama and my daughter would sit on my lap and know she was the luckiest girl too. What if that doesn't happen for me?”

“It will, darling.”

Ada was walking toward that truth, wherever the walk took her.

EVERY YEAR IN January, Bird and Temple would choose the days they would celebrate family birthdays and Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter. Once the dates were picked, they were sacred and didn't get changed. Originally the dates were picked according to Temple's band's schedule.

The day had come they had chosen to celebrate Ada's birthday out at the lake.

The party started in the living room. For the occasion, Bird had arranged the sofa in a rectangle. And she placed a birthday cake she had made by molding store-bought ice cream into a Bundt pan on a plate atop a guitar case right in front of the couch. Next to it was a giant bowl of pasta puttanesca. So Ada didn't have to do the cleaning up, Temple had bought paper plates and plastic forks.

Every year Ada's birthday celebration conversation started off the same way.

“Ada Howard, all y'all a lot of work, but you the little bit of fluff we picked up from the summer fields.”

“That's what you said, and that's when that crazy bass player said, ‘Let's call her Cotton,' and it stuck for a hot minute.”

“Half a hot minute.”

“Then it changed up to Honey.”

“I had to buzz around a pretty flower to get you.”

“You buzzed around a lot of pretty flowers to get Honey. Had to make her mama hot jealous. Not easy to get that woman to uncross her legs,” said Maceo.

“That's right. I had to buzz around a lot of pretty flowers to get you,” said her daddy.

Her mama was busy sipping and eating and thinking about something, trying to remember something, then forgetting that she was trying to remember. Maybe it was that little tiny strokes kept her mind jumping the track, but for the time being, she skidded back onto the track almost as fast as she skidded off. Bird squeezed Ada's hand. It was a birthday. She was making a special effort.

“You my velvet-chain baby.”

Ada didn't know if that was a skid on, or off, the track. “What's that, Mama?”

If the mother had wanted to answer, she would have had to shout down the daddy.

“Your mama tried to name you Velvet,” said her daddy, like it explained something.

Her mother laughed, spewing soup. She patted her brown face with a starched and scorched white cotton napkin. She was wearing a holiday bright red kimono.

“Your daddy was a hard dog to keep under the porch—till I 'tached him to it with a velvet chain. You my velvet chain.”

“Porchlight babies, we used to call 'em, they lead a man home,” said Maceo, who was tapping the browned top of a square of macaroni and cheese tentatively, with his fork, like he wanted it to be a snare drum.

“When did we start eating macaroni and cheese?” asked Temple.

“The sixties,” said a new tenant, one of three brothers who called themselves the Chesterfields. This emboldened the two other new tenants, his brothers, to join in the conversation, but first Maceo joined in.

“I don't remember macaroni and cheese way back. I don't 'member it before Pyrex casseroles. And I don't know when the white folks up North got 'em, but white folks down South didn't get Pyrex and CorningWare till after the war, and we didn't get it till the sixties. Macaroni and cheese came in just about the same time as Jimi Hendrix. Caught on fast when it came. I like the way it looked cut out in a square, all brown and orange on top,” said Maceo.

“About the time everybody said, Say cheese, when they stopped to take your photograph. Remember those old instant photographs you had to rub with a wax crayon stick?”

“Kitchens don't look the way they used to. Bedrooms look just the same.”

“That's something to think about.”

“I'm still thinking about Velvet. I forgot we called Honey that for a hot minute. There was that new TV show and the girl looked just like Elizabeth Taylor, and I always thought Elizabeth Taylor looked just a little colored, and her name in that movie was Velvet Brown. Velvet Brown could be colored.”