Ada's Rules (28 page)

This was easy to do when the meal was a buffet and the food so-so. It was harder when the food was good.

It was hardest if the dinner was seated and the food was amazing. And there was a lot of that. Black folk love a delicious wedding. When the food was amazing, she would remind herself that this was not the last great dinner she would sit down to. And amazing as the meal was, it was not as amazing as the bride, or the love in the room.

Before she went out that night, she ate a special frozen Kashi meal, Chicken Florentine, because it reminded her a bit of Romeo and Juliet and a little of hotel wedding banquet food. She planned to feast at the wedding reception on the sights and sounds and touch and love in the room.

Until she got to the museum where the tenth reception of her wedding season was being held, and read the seating chart, she didn't know how very fine a feast it could be.

Matt Mason was on the seating chart. Matt Mason had come to the wedding. He was a distant cousin of the groom's. He had RSVP'd at the last moment.

When the mother of the bride told her all that, Ada hoped the problem would be magically solved by the fact she had lost another twenty-something pounds, and he was a fatty-chaser.

It wasn't. He saw her across the aisle and the pews at the wedding before she had seen him, and he thought, She is the best of both worlds. When he smiled at her across the tables at the reception, it was a smile of unveiled invitation.

Seeing Mason, she knew that if things hadn't played out
exactly
as they had, if Preach hadn't been
afflicted
, if Winky wasn't on the blink, she would have wanted her one dalliance. She would have felt some kind of human right to be free in the place she was sexual. It was disturbing to discover that the sexual reawakening of midlife was as hungry and reckless, was as itchy, as the sexual awakening of adolescence, when the itch must be scratched. She had gone fully latent, fully underground, like a flower bulb in winter. Preach, she sensed, had stayed at a slow burn, his fire never fully extinguished. And he had not come to her for anything this last year, or slightly more. Was it two? Had he gone elsewhere for something? That niggling question did not stand alone. It braided into two other hot topics. What does it mean when the mother is the least sexually experienced person in her family? And, Is it easier to forgive a cheater if you've cheated yourself? Taken together, these three questions had Ada bothered by Mason's presence.

If she knew for sure Preach had cheated, Ada might have lured Mason into a coat closet and made love to him.

But she didn't know, so she took him out onto the dance floor. She thought it the safest place in the room. She was wrong. Matt Mason started singing one of her father's original songs, a song her daddy had sung to her over and over in her babyhood, into her ear, while the band played a long instrumental in the middle of “My Cherie Amour.”

Then the band played “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” and they didn't talk at all. They danced, and he danced different than Preach. It wasn't better, it wasn't worse, it was different and somehow interesting, particularly because his dancing different caused her to dance different. Delila, dancing with Joel Angel on the other side of the dance floor, smiled at Ada's new “get down” moves. Ada held tighter to Mason. She thought: This man is a bomb I can use to blow up my life—or blow me out of it.

He was talking about a lecture he was giving at the B. B. King Museum in Mississippi. He was joking about getting B.B. to play at one of the girls' weddings. He was teasing her about running away with him to Los Angeles.

These were missteps. She didn't want any old man but Preach at her daughters' weddings. She thought of all the parties her father had played for so many years, all the times he had sung covers instead of originals, and she knew her daddy's blood, sweat, and tears were in the Southland. She would not leave the South. Preach had known that about her before she had known it about herself. Matt Mason was saying there were worlds of good she could do in South Central L.A. And worlds of good she could do with a black educational television show. He said all of this like he was talking as her friend, as a consultant, but
he also seemed to say it in a way that was meant to imply she could be more to him. She couldn't be.

“I'm a Dixie girl.”

“That's what I love about you.”

“I'd wither far from home.”

“It could work.”

“No.”

“Did you ever read about Garrison Keillor and how he left his wife and married his high school sweetheart and took the wife's name out of all his books?”

“Do you mean the Lake Wobegon man?”

“Yeah.”

“You comparing me to the
Prairie Home Companion
guy?”

“I'm saying it happens.”

“I'm saying, if you see a clock going backward, it's broke.”

“That's your daddy talking.”

“Naw.”

“What is it?”

“That's the Deep South talking.”

“That's Preach's wife talking.”

“Yes, it is.”

“What's he got?”

“You see me. We be we.”

“That's silly.”

“It isn't.”

“What is it?”

“A language I don't have time to teach you.”

“Preach is a lucky man.”

“You'll get lucky.”

The band laid into “Baby Love,” and they were back at Hampton, doing the Bop in a dorm room on a Sunday afternoon. They were as close as they were ever going to come to sex, and so far away from it. He left the reception early. Early to bed, he hit the highway first light.

She woke up Sunday morning two pounds lighter than she had been the Sunday before.

In the excitement of her upcoming reunion, these two pounds seemed a paltry thing. And the text from Mason, saying he had met Ruth and some of her friends while touring the Dockery Plantation, seemed absolutely inconsequential.

MONDAY MORNING ADA was back at KidPlay, subbing with the five-year-olds, showing them a globe and an atlas of the world. She was pointing out Nashville and North America and the Atlantic and Africa. Somewhere between their questions, and the beginning of their drawing outline maps of Africa, Ada knew she wanted to draw a map of her body.

During her lunch break she closed her office door, took out a sheet of paper, snatched up a few crayons, grabbed a pocket mirror from her purse, and started to draw. She had no skill, but she wasn't trying for something artistic. She achieved the shape of a pear with big watermelon breasts.

Then she started adding details. She began with the toes and went all the way up to her original curly head. On her map she did not wear a China chop. She drew some of the stretch marks. She nodded to the fact that no bones had been broken. She drew on the belly button.

The belly button seemed important. And blighted. When she had had her own daughters, so efficiently, two girls, one pregnancy, her belly had become marbled with the light marks.
It had broken her heart. Later, after the girls had been born, she had gotten back most of the flatness of her belly.

Thinking of that, she drew a cesarean scar on the map, and she put a date. She drew her hymen and put the date it got broken through. She drew the skin tags on her neck and put a date. She drew the lines in her forehead and her knees, and the scar on her knee. In the margins she wrote the details that seemed important. The day her ears were pierced, the year her wisdom teeth were removed. She drew the inner body parts that she could remember and thought important: her heart and kidneys and ovaries and bladder and uterus; and because all of this was somehow related to being under Preach and taking him into her body through the slit between her legs, she drew that.

It was a work in progress. And it was a new rule: Draw a map of your body. If she was leaving something, or some part of herself, behind, she wanted to know what it was.

So she drew a map of Lucius Howard. It was a silhouette of a man with a giant question mark inside it.

SHE TOLD PREACH she was running down the road to see Ruth. It was the first outright lie she had ever told him. She had four names on a list, and none crossed out. Beside the names were four addresses. Ada was on a truth hunt. It was an overnight trip.

Naptime had done it. She had been sitting in the playground with baby Jarius on her lap, chanting a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem, “Little Brown Baby,” when two girls sitting nearby started playing an old tickle game, the one where you pinch and squeeze and grab after you finger-walk and blow air: “We're going on a treasure hunt, X marks the spot, three big dots and a question mark! A pinch, a squeeze, a tropical breeze, blood running down your back got you!”

It was time. The little brown angels were telling her so. She had gone on her first honeymoon innocent. She needed to go on her second honeymoon wise. Armed with celery sticks and turkey jerky, 149 pounds of Ada hit the road.

“Are you sleeping with my husband?”

“It took you long enough to ask,” the girl said flatly. As if she was almost bored. She was a pretty girl, the color of coffee with a splash of cream. She wore her hair in a little halo of braids. She was wearing a backless dress that made it obvious she wasn't wearing a bra. Her unharnessed breasts were small and round, perfect apples. Her legs were hard biker's legs, and she had a yoga ass. There was one tattoo visible on her ankle and another on the inside of a forearm. On the arm that wasn't tattooed was a silver chain with a heart from Tiffany. It had been a sixteenth-birthday present from Ada and Preach. At the time it seemed the perfect gift; at least, it was the standard present they gave goddaughters on the sixteenth birthday. The heart dangling from the chain on this girl's wrist terrified Ada. She didn't want that heart to be her husband's heart. And if it was her husband's heart, the idea that she had pinned the medal on the child made her want to vomit.

The girl—her name was Thea, and she was twenty-two now—saw the wave of nausea cross Ada's face. Thea didn't know what she was seeing. She let it be what she wanted it to be, her mother's remorse that she had let her stepfather fuck her every day for a week after the year she turned sixteen. Then Thea had stopped it. Blackmailed him. Moved across the country with the money.

“Am I fucking the preacher?” The girl asked her question with the smile she smiled to mask confusion, a smile that looked dumb and smug and pretty. A smile that vexed other girls because it was a smile boys wanted to put themselves inside.

Ada slapped the girl. Slapped the smile right off her. Ada's
hand flew up before she could stop it. Her hand was on the girl's face. All at once she felt the hot, hard contact of her flesh against the child's soft skin. She had done something she hadn't meant to do. Her hand just flew up before she could stop it. She just touched the girl before she knew what she was doing. And she wondered if this was exactly how it had been for her husband. His penis got hard before he could stop it. The child said something vulgar and unexpected, and before he knew it, he was touching her face. Ada didn't mean to do it, she just did it. Maybe it had been that way for Preach too.

The absurdity of the entire situation got Ada laughing. Much to her surprise, the girl, Thea, started laughing as well. The slap had brought her to her senses.

“You a mess,” the girl told the woman. It was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but Ada didn't think it wise to point that out. She had slapped a young woman she had known from infancy because she might have been Preach's lover. Only she couldn't believe that. Standing in front of the girl, even with the nasty words said, even with all the girl had implied, it was impossible to believe Preach would steal an inch of innocence.

On the other hand, touching this girl might not be a matter of stealing innocence but rather a matter of swimming in sin. The girl's eyes were older than Ada's own. Her eyes were like the old folks say, older than salt, old as pepper.

“I go to work in an hour. I'm not inviting you into my house. Meet me around the corner at Starbucks.”

It was a long twenty minutes. Eventually Thea showed up. Eventually Ada and Thea were seated at a small round table sucking down tall chais.

Ada felt like she had felt sitting in the doctor's office waiting for mammogram results, waiting to find out if her life had turned to shit while she wasn't looking.

“I tried.”

“You tried?”

“There were two summers I saw Preach a lot. The first was the summer we got rid of my stepmonster-rapist, and the second was my first summer after college. I had tried to kill myself that first year away. I told him, and he kept me under him the rest of the summer. I ran the paint table at vacation Bible school. He was good to me. He even got me a shelter puppy. I named him Chaos. He was a little dustball. He slept with me in the bed. I carried him to camp in my purse. One day Preach said, looking at me painting Chaos's toenails, “I would like to be Chaos,” and it got me to thinking. When we were alone in the art room, later that day, he turned to do something. When he turned back, I was standing there naked except for my sandals and my bracelets and my jewelry. I had pulled the dress up over my head and dropped it on the floor. I didn't wear panties. I still don't wear a bra. So I was just like Eve. He just stared at me. I knew I was good to look at, so that didn't surprise me. I thought he would stare for a moment, then he would come jump on me. I even knew how I wanted to do it. But he didn't move, and I thought he needed some encouragement, so I asked him a question. I asked, ‘You ever seen one all grown up and bald? You ever see one pierced?'

“‘Lord, child.'

“‘I'm nineteen, I'm not a child.'

“‘Our second date, my Ada made a box out of playing cards that blew smoke rings.'