Ada's Rules (29 page)

“‘Bar trick.'

“‘I was impressed.'

“‘When was the last time you slept with your wife?'

“‘I'm not going to answer that question.'

“‘Why?'

“‘It's the wrong question.'

“‘What's the right question?'

“‘When's the last time I wanted to?'

“‘When's the last time you wanted to?'

“‘Right now.'

“‘You looking at me, looking like this, and you want that fat woman?'

“‘That fine fat woman got something make a man crawl over glass and fire to get to again after he get to it once. A whole lot of that is a good thing. And she bought the shoes you're standing in. Put your dress back on.'

“‘You're not getting any.'

“‘I can wait.'

“‘It's that good when you get it?'

“‘It's that good when I get it.'”

Thea shivered as she came to the end of her tale. It was a shiver of relief. It felt good to confess, so she plowed forward.

“I kept a crush on Preach. I've got a boyfriend, but I've kept a crush on Preach. He didn't take it, but the way he pushed it away, I felt special for just being a woman. Wouldn't mind having what it takes to make a man feel the way Preach feel about you.”

“Why did you act like you were sleeping with him?”

“I don't know.”

And she didn't. She only knew she was sorry. And she was. Ada refused to judge Thea for the betrayal. The child, and she was a child, had been through too much. She was thinking she would go strangle that stepfather, except he was already dead, and if she ever saw that mother again—well, she hoped she didn't.

Ada walked out of the Starbucks door thinking about the magic box she had made of cards a very long time before. And she was thinking that girl's whatnot was not the first one Preach had seen grown and bald. Ada had waxed for a first and near only time, back when waxing was very, very new, back before she got pregnant and dropped out of graduate school. She wanted to prove to Preach divinity school students could be very wholesome and very sexy. She remembered he laughed and told her it looked “too young to fuck.” She had slapped him and bitten him for saying “fuck,” and then they had made love. So long ago.

The second address was on West End Avenue. On the way Ada pulled into a drugstore where she bought, then guzzled, sixteen ounces of water. Portia, the other preacher's wife, scared Ada. Somewhere between a size 6 and a size 8, she was small but not too small. At five foot eight, she was tall but not too tall. In every way she was what the old folks called one of God's best days of work. Portia was an intimidatingly perfect woman.

And she was the woman Ada had wanted to poison.

Where Ada's house was always clean, fairly neat, and antiquey, Portia's house was immaculately clean, perfectly neat, and modern. Her aesthetic was stark and glossy. Her children, five
boys, were tall and lean and usually gone. They did however, show up for all the appropriate holidays: Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and Easter, and birthdays, bringing presents and pictures and clippings of accomplishments. Each was married, and each had a single boy. When the grandsons got together, it was like Portia was a young mother again, except her husband was gone. Everybody thought she would go to pieces when her husband died, but she didn't. After a while it was hard not to notice that widowhood seemed to become the woman.

Portia, once the queen of the frozen chosen, had periods of thaw. Unfortunately, the sun that seemed to be melting her was Ada's very own Preach.

At the beginning, it was just leaving both of them baskets of vegetables on their back porch. That became baskets of the preserves that he loved and the pie that he loved. Eventually a dinner, once a week, appeared as well. When Ada settled deep into her diet and said something about the pies and fried chicken that Portia dropped off being too tempting, Portia used that as an excuse to stop bringing “the family” dinner on Tuesday. She started bringing the preacher lunch on Thursday. And strangest of all, at least to Ada, was when she started baking the communion bread.

Ada hated that. She hated not having thought of it first. She hated not having done it for Preach herself. Portia made Ada feel all kinds of ways inadequate.

Once when she had been invited to Portia's house for a Link meeting, Ada did something awful. She peeked into some of Portia's drawers. Perfect rows of perfectly folded silk cappuccinocolored
panties, and perfectly matching C-cup brassieres, one cup spooning the other, filled the top drawer of her lingerie chest. In the next drawer were lace nightgown sets, all in a champagne or light coffee color. Folded in one of the nightgowns was a handkerchief monogrammed with Preach's initials. She prayed Portia was a thief.

Ada looked at the pristine bed with monogrammed linens, and she wondered what sex had been like in it for Portia when her husband was alive. Ada could only imagine it had been efficient. As far as she knew, neither of them liked mess of any kind. But they had had five children, so surely they had had sex. Ada shuddered as she walked out of the room.

Standing on Portia's doorstep, uninvited, ringing the bell, listing to Portia's bell echo through Portia's house, watching her open the door, surprised, Ada was wondering if Preach had ever rolled in Portia's monogrammed linens.

Portia opened the door. Even with a blue bandanna tied round her head, wearing jeans and a denim shirt, Portia looked every inch a frozen mochaccino husband stealer.

“May I come in?”

“Of course.”

Portia led Ada through the front hall back to the kitchen—a room Ada had never sat down in, had barely passed through. The kitchen could have been a surgery. Everything was bright and white. There was even a little bowl of eggs on the counter. A Swiffer mop leaning against the refrigerator and a box of Swiffer pads out by the sink, together with the jeans outfit, told Ada Portia had just finished cleaning house. Portia moved the
mop and pads and washed her hands before opening the refrigerator and pulling out two green bottles of Perrier. She offered one to Ada, and they both took a seat at her kitchen table.

“Are you in love with my husband?”

“A little.”

“Is my husband in love with you?”

“Not even a little.”

“Have you had sex?”

“No.”

“Thank God.”

“Thank your husband.”

“Did you try?”

“Just after Justin died.”

“What happened?”

“I asked him to comfort me. And when I was in his arms, I asked him if, when he died, he would want you to be comforted as intimately as possible.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he would want you to have anything you needed.”

“And then?”

“I said I needed him. And he said, ‘Anything Ada might want, I got to save for Ada.' I told him Justin only wanted me starched and pressed and dry, still and quiet. I said, God would understand. And he said it had nothing to do with God or vows or propriety, just love. He loved you and he couldn't do anything about it. He said he wanted to be my brother.

“I told him it gave me hope to know a man could love a woman like that.

“He said, once he woke up and there was a feather on you, a
pillow had broke, and he thought for a second he had died and gone to heaven and you were an angel he had made love with. He saw a feather on you and thought you were an angel.”

Ada remembered the time the pillow had broken. She had seen the feathers too; she had thought, for a moment, almost the very same thing.

“He'd be too messy and stinky and loud for you,” said Ada.

“If I had a man thought I was an angel loving him in heaven, I would set up house in a tent above a pigsty.”

Portia rose. She was finished. Ada took in the full measure of her beauty. Ada had thought Preach might be curious to slip between perfectly ironed sheets, or far more sadly, between her perfectly proportioned and thin tapered thighs. She had been mistaken.

Everything about Portia's body was too neat for Preach. When the children had been young and they had all gone to the one or two black homes with swimming pools on Sunday afternoons in the summer, Ada would be in a muumuu and Portia would be in a bikini. You could count her ribs. She remembered telling Portia years before, “You have an amazing body.”

Portia had replied, “I have a boy's body, and we grafted some big breasts onto it a thousand years ago. It photographs well.”

That summer day, long past, almost forgotten, Ada knew the other preacher's wife was profoundly lonely. She was telling Ada what she should have been telling a best friend. And she told me because I idealized her, she thought. Me, not Preach.

Ada pointed her car toward Sylvan Park. When she arrived at her destination, she reached into her glove box and pulled out
a jar of sugar-free peanut butter and a plastic spoon. It was snack time. She didn't want it to be C.J. C.J. was her friend.

C.J. was the fifty-something blonde woman who the kids at Preach's church affectionately dubbed Granola Girl. She had first showed up at Full Love Gospel Tabernacle when she was thirty-two, with two small kids and husband.

Ada had been surprised by the family the first time they showed up at a Sunday service. At the time, they lived just a few doors down from the church. Over doughnuts and coffee in the fellowship hall after the first service, it came out that Granola Girl had lived for a decade on the Farm, the hippie commune where Ada had spent a few weekends growing up. They knew some of the same people; friends had sent them. The slumming hippies were welcomed with open arms.

It was one of the things that was eccentrically endearing about Nashville: It is ringed by utopian communities. The Farm and Rugby, the best known, were polar opposites. The Farm was a haven for a multicultural group of hippies. Rugby was founded by the second sons of British lords.

Granola Girl had roots in both communities. She had grown up going to Rugby on weekends, traveling from a tiny house in Belle Meade, Nashville's most posh neighborhood. One Wednesday night, in the seventies, Granola Girl had gone to a show at the Exit/In where she had met a steel guitar player who called himself Twang, renamed herself Star, and played in a psychedelic country band called Spur.

When she turned eighteen, Twang and Star lit off, not for the territories, like Huckleberry Finn, but for the Farm.

Twang, who didn't like farm work but liked bars and sorority girls more than he had let on, did not last long. Star, who took to midwifery and other people's baby-tending, settled in for a long stay.

Eventually, a decade of babies and bickering and working every day left Star played out.

She asked her parents if she could move back home. First thing when she hit town, she ran straight to Ivan, the hairstylist her friends from growing up said was the miracle worker who could transform her brownish hippie frizz to Belle Meade blonde.

Ivan worked his magic. Granola Girl took possession of the house, repossession of her life, and started calling herself C.J.

She enrolled in TSU, very, very quietly, because the historically black university gave scholarships to white kids. She got a nursing degree and a husband, who wanted to be in a band, but was a lawyer in a Music Row law firm. She had a boy and then a girl. Eventually she started getting bored. Then she started volunteering with the Baptists, after meeting Preach at his church.

For a decade, C.J. had led a neonatal prep class out of the Full Love Gospel Tabernacle basement. She had helped many, many babies come into the world healthy; she had helped many mamas deliver unafraid.

Granola Girl was days away from her fiftieth birthday when she opened the door for Ada. She was excited to see Ada on her doorstep. The church usually gave her a birthday present, and Ada usually delivered it. Granola Girl showed Ada into her living room, a mixture of Indian rugs, family antiques, flea-market
pieces that had been smartly refinished, and DIY extravaganzas, thinking she knew the purpose of the visit.

Ada nestled onto a sofa bed made of wooden packing pallets and blankets. Granola Girl settled into a painted director's chair across from her. An easel obscured Ada's view of Granola Girl. The oil-in-progress on the easel depicted the library in Rugby.

On a table near the easel was a pot of tea, two cups, and local honey. Ada had called to announce she was on her way. Granola Girl poured Ada a cup. Ada squeezed in a bit of honey, then took a sip.

“I hope you like sassafras.”

“I thought it was illegal now?”

Granola Girl shrugged. “The law is not in this room.”

“Happy birthday.” Ada pulled a small suede bag from her purse. She handed it to Granola Girl, who opened the package. It was a pouch full of beautiful one-of-a-kind beads.

“Nice. Very, very nice. I can use some of these in my half-century necklace.”

Granola Girl got out of her chair and walked over to a desk on which there were many, many tiny drawers. Opening one, she took out an intricate piece and fastened it about her neck. It almost looked Egyptian. Granola Girl sat back down in the chair and began fingering the beads as she talked. She was rubbing what appeared to be a black pearl.

“It's a reckoning. A reckoning for my birthday. The numbers of babies delivered. This”—she now pointed to the black pearl—“was the first black baby I delivered. Years lived. Concerts attended. Men kissed. Lovers had—”

“Lovers—you cheat?”

“I don't do everything. I do what wives don't like to do and hippie chicks …”

“And that would be?”

“BJs.”

“Blow jobs?”

“Exactly.”

“God!”

“They can be very reviving. BJs are not really cheating.”

“You are using Clinton/Lewinsky logic?”

“I didn't do it in the wife's house, or with anyone working under me.”