Ada's Rules (8 page)

That would have left them too lonely, and that would have left her running down the road too often.

Temple and Bird had begun taking lodgers one cold year when the heating bills were high and their friends started losing their houses. They enjoyed helping, and they enjoyed getting a little help. They charged ten dollars a day, and that included all
the Frosted Flakes and milk and coffee and sugar and split pea soup you could down.

The lodgers provided their own liquor, but Bird and Temple always kept an extra bottle of Jack Daniel's they were willing to share. And the lodgers provided the marijuana.

Once Temple had a son-in-law who was a preacher, he didn't feel right about buying weed out on the street. He was not a man to disgrace a daughter or a son-in-law. Temple liked the way Preach took care of Ada.

And that made Temple look to others to score for him, which wasn't exactly a godly thing either, but Temple didn't let that one bother him.

The house had become a place where black musicians who had no family, no hits, no membership in the musicians' union, could live large one last time before they died. Some folks stayed a month or two. Some stayed years. When you couldn't walk or change your own adult diapers, you had to leave—unless you had a friend living at the house who could do that for you. Some months there were just three or four lodgers, sometimes the house was overfull.

The men peed in the woods to save the plumbing. Sometimes on a Sunday or a Monday night they would sit around an old phonograph and listen to their dead friends play. Sometimes they would roll the piano out of Bird's bedroom and get up a little acoustic set.

Whether they died in the house or moved on just before death, most of the lodgers left their earthly effects to Bird and to Temple. In that sense almost all the tenancies became permanent.

When somebody passed, Temple would create a monument.
Usually he would sort through the stuff and find someplace to send something to someone. If the person came from a certain town, and that town had a blues museum or a black museum, he might send a photograph or a single. If the person had gone to high school or college, he would find something—a shirt or sweater or tie in the school colors—and send it back to the band office or the school library. Sometimes he remembered something the deceased liked to eat and wrote the recipe into his road cookbook. Whatever he did, he did it grateful Ada had married a man with salary, insurance, and retirement, a man whose job came with a pretty house, a man whose church would bury his daughter when the time came.

Ada and Preach were not rich, but to Temple they were something better than rich; they were secure.

Temple and Bird had been every kind of wild. When they first moved into their lake house, they had been wildflowers blooming by the water.

Temple and Bird had loved this. They loved it so much Temple retired from performing out on the road. Ada, then eight, was the only child who ever lived full-time at the house. Glo, and Mag, and Evie were already on their own. For Temple and Bird, it was like they were eating and sleeping and shitting right in the woods. In a house with few doors, so little stood between them, and they were always on top of each other.

When Ada went off to school, the house became a passion pit. With nothing to do weekdays, they organized their lives around their lovemaking. Bird woke early and got the girl off to school. Then she got back into bed. Eventually Temple awoke and made the coffee and cornbread while Bird showered and brushed her
teeth. She drank her coffee in bed while he had a shower. Then he came back to bed, and they rolled around the mattress. This had been their youth, and it was the first of their retirement once the gigs got slow.

They had not expected middle age to be an erotic territory of such flower and flavor. They were surprised to discover that the removed bits, the breast, the prostate, the hip, served to enhance their appreciation of what remained, the inside of the elbow, the back of the knee, the skin just beyond the margins of their most effacing scars.

They kissed, and licked, and bit what remained, but best, they tongue-kissed, and he poked deep into the insides of her lady parts with the same sweet power and fingers with which he thumped the piano keys.

They found pleasure in its hiding places; they invented new pleasures; they applauded themselves with laughter.

Then the daughters died. Glo, Mag, and Evie were wide-hipped good mamas who perfectly performed a hip rock that could calm any fretting child. It was a move they had inherited from their mother, as Bird had in herited it from her mother, MaDear. When that precious part of Bird's legacy vanished with her older daughters into the grave, it took some of Bird's sex with it. Bird had long been the kind of woman who rocked a man like her back had no bone. Then she wasn't.

If sex was death's overture, Bird wanted nothing of it. And she wouldn't acknowledge the fourth child, Ada, as hers. That would mean she had another daughter who could die, and that possibility was too much. Bird drank to drown and kill it. When
she wasn't drunk, she thought of jumping into her front-yard lake, the lake she could see from her bedroom window.

Temple went to Preach's church. He sat in the back. He crouched in his pew, head in hands. He prayed for relief. When Bird's fast-descending Alzheimer's arrived, he accepted it as the answer to his prayer. It was not the relief he had wanted, but it was too much relief for him to turn it away.

He prayed more. She forgot more. The house got cluttered. Things were better. She couldn't see the lake from her bedroom. Old friends moved in with them. Things were as good as they were going to be.

When Temple saw Ada sad that her mother did not know her, Temple chastised his last daughter. He said, “Baby, she cain't know you and not know losing them. Ain't no choice. You grown now. You don't need her as much as she needs to not know you. She don't even wanna know me. We got walls inside of walls everywhere in this house.”

The piles got higher and more. Eventually Temple and Bird could be in the same room and not see each other. This was a comfort to Bird. When it was not enough comfort, she found her way back to the center of one of her rooms.

Usually she was out in the piles checking the whereabouts of a scrap. She wanted to know where, exactly where, every bit of flotsam and jetsam—which could not get sick, get amputated, get infected, get diabetic retinopathy, go blind, leave behind wailing children that scattered out to California and Oregon—was.

Anything with a ruffle, anything soft as the silk of their hands,
any curler or hot iron or little jar of blue grease, any half-used jar of Vaseline or raggedy washcloth she had wiped their noses or butts with, Bird kept and tried to keep track of. Except soon she had too many things to know where anything was. In her drunk fog, she hoped somewhere lost in all the mess her daughters were hiding alive.

Bird listened as Ada cooked. Ada was making the spinach and chicken and noodle casserole. Bird could hear her sautéing the chicken, smell the olive oil and onion. Bird could hear Ada rinse the noodles. Bird knew Ada would mix them with cream cheese. There would be an assembly line on the counter. There would be casseroles in the oven. And in the freezer. There was another good one with wild rice and more chicken. When Ada had the time and everybody was awake, particularly on a Friday, she would fry pork chops or steaks, or fish. Mainly she made casseroles and cleaned the toilets and kept a path clear into each room. She set the mousetraps and collected the dead mice. She was a good daughter. Better than Bird deserved.

Bird wanted to tell Ada that. But they were in the middle of the game where Bird acted like she thought Ada was the maid Ada sent to clean for her. It was easier that way. She didn't want her daughter washing her toilets and picking up dead mice. The mice should be Temple's job, and Bird knew she should be washing the toilets, but after the girls died she couldn't do a single useful thing. Bird left the kitchen, left Ada with the casseroles she was cooking, and made her way to Glo's old room, where Maceo was staying.

“I am tired,” Bird said to Maceo.

“Mama love her some Maceo,” Temple said all the time,
without jealousy. Maceo had one true woman he loved, and it was Bird. Maceo was dying from lung cancer. He held Bird's hand and coughed.

Bird said, “I want to be a vampire and suck some life out of something or fuck some life into something, I want to be full of life at least for a little, once more, but I ain't. I look like I'm alive, but I ain't. I'm a zombie who needs a face-lift.”

Maceo laughed so hard he started coughing. “I'm so way past fucking life into somebody,” Maceo said, “or having somebody fuck life into me, but honey I sure would like to suck some life out of somebody one last time. Bring your neck over here, honey.”

Bird leaned in close, and she kissed Maceo's cheek and he kissed her neck, then he gummed it. He didn't bother to put his teeth in anymore.

“I'm gonna miss you, Maceo.”

“I'm gonna be rolling in Buddy Bolden's arms.”

“You crazy, Maceo.”

“Crazy as a fox.”

“When I get to heaven, I'm gonna see my daughters.”

“See Ada this afternoon.”

“I ain't seen Ada since her sister's funeral. Ada don't come 'round here. She married a preacher.”

“Bird, when I'm gone. You need to do sumpin' fo' me.”

“Anything.”

“See Ada when she comes.”

“I rather be a blind gal than see you walk 'way from me …”

“Miss Etta James.”

“Used to be I sang it better.”

“You sing it better.”

Soon Maceo was asleep, and Bird wandered through the maze to the center of the living room and took a Benadryl. She was dozing off when she heard the woman Ada sent to cook and clean arguing with Temple about money. About how she was thinking of selling her car or maybe the silver she had inherited from her sisters. How she needed one of the guitars. The woman's voice sounded so much just like her Ada's, Bird wanted to tell her the records were worth money, and she had some jewelry. But she didn't think she could bear to part with any of it, so she didn't say anything. She wanted to tell Temple that they needed to sell the house with the view and let someone tear it down and they needed to be in a small apartment with help and stop making the gal Ada sent cook and clean.

She tried to remember the day Ada was born. She couldn't. She went into Ada's room to find something to help her remember. Sammy Heart was playing cards with Sonny Dee, sitting on Ada's old coverlet that Bird had sewn herself. Sammy and Sonny paid Bird no mind, and she paid them no mind. She looked through her bookshelves, and she found Ada's diaries. It took her just a few minutes to find the one she was looking for, the one that was pink cloth with flowers. She turned to an entry dated May 10, 1977. Ada talking about the day Ada was born. At her high school graduation lunch, Maceo had told her the whole story, and Ada had written it down that very afternoon.

Holding the diary made Bird know she was right to never let anything go. You never knew what you might forget that a thing might help you remember.

Ada had become some of what she was born to be. According
to Bird's reckoning, a preacher's wife was not a complete coming off the stage, wasn't exactly the opposite of being the lead singer's wife, but it was a move in the right direction. It was a far walk from the cotton fields where Ada was born the last weekend Bird ever sang at a Mississippi Delta country club. “Used to be I was Ada's mama,” Bird said out loud to herself.

She could smell the aroma of greens boiling on the stove, and she hoped the cleaning lady had put in some side meat.

Next week she might put that diary in the cleaning lady's purse. As Bird went to put the book back where she had hid it, she began to sing, just above a whisper.
This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine … Won't hide it under no bushel now! I'm gonna let it shine … All the time all the time.
Even tired and stoned, Bird knew that she and Preach were bushels, and Ada was a little light. “This Little Light of Mine.” It was the very first song she had taught Ada, and it stayed her baby girl's favorite song for a long, long time. And Bird knew she had to take just a little bit more Benadryl, and she wouldn't know it again.

Sonny looked up from his cards, “Come over here, Miss Lady, and take a hit off this, get your mind back quiet.” Bird floated over to the bed.

“Deal me in.”

After the lake Ada headed to KidPlay. After KidPlay she headed home. Almost home, she made a quick stop. Queenie's.

Preach's mama, Queenie, lived just the other side of Belmont Boulevard from Ada and Preach, in a spotless old house she rarely left.

After she retired from daywork, the week she turned sixty-two
and could apply for Social Security, Queenie was home if she could be home. A lifetime of following her enlisted-man husband from army base to army base and supplementing the family income by cleaning the homes of officers left her rooted to her own couch in her own home.

She didn't even go to church on Sunday. When asked about that, Queenie would laugh and say, “I share my son with Ada and the twins—I ain't sharing him with them other women.” Not going to church on Sunday was about the only thing the preacher's mama had in common with the preacher's mama-in-law.

If Queenie was sorry Sarge had died before they got to live in a house they owned, not a house assigned to them by the army, or the cheap apartment they rented while getting their down payment together, she didn't say.

Queenie moved on. She'd done it for decades with Sarge, then she did it for decades without him. After moving to Nashville, she did it leaning on Ada and Preach as her sturdy stick.

Soon as Queenie heard Ada's car pull into the drive, she would start making her way to the front door. She tried to be a convenient woman. Queenie would be holding the door wide open by the time Ada was halfway up her front walk. They would start talking before Ada got to the steps. Ada was always rushing, and Queenie knew it.