Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  Her body had changed. The body she had now, he had never seen fully naked in the daytime. And he had never been inside it. He wanted that privilege, to get inside the soft abundance, and he wanted it more now that she put the soft abundance on the inside, where only he could get to it, than he had wanted it when it hung on the outside like globs of fatty love for the kids and every comer to grab.

  He wished it wasn’t that way, but it was. He looked at her now and wanted her in old ways. I want to get inside Eden. Eden was his name for her most precious lady part. Eden.

  He wanted to say so many things that seemed too late to say, so he simply noticed she had not gotten down to make her breakfast, noticed she had not been to the Dayani Center in three days, so he made breakfast for her and put it in her hand. She had kissed him. He prayed that the body she was working toward, he would be invited into. He prayed he would be able to enter it.

  She felt that prayer. He was her husband by more than law. Silently she said amen with him.

  Then she prayed for herself. “Please God let me know why I am doing what I am doing. Am I walking back to my old body, or walking toward a new body, or stepping toward a future love I have not met, or stepping toward my husband, or am I doing all those things at once?”

  One more thing that needed to be done that she didn’t have time or money to do—see a therapist to sort this part out. The only way she could think to afford that was to steal a guitar from her father. Except she wanted him to give her one. She didn’t want to steal a guitar from her father.

  She did the next best thing. She would drink eight glasses of water today and sleep eight hours and walk on the treadmill for thirty minutes. She would act like a sane person until she was one. She would act like someone who loved her body and was settled enough in her marriage to get her sexy back and still act sensible.

  One day at a time.

  35

  GET THERAPY

  NOT LONG ENOUGH after their close encounter with West Nile, Preach was out golfing with his friends when somebody got struck by lightning on the same course.

  Ada started to think exercising was dangerous. Refusing to count Mason as a “bad thing,” she wanted to know when the next bad thing would happen.

  “Bad things come in threes,” Ada said.

  Preach contradicted her.

  “In the Christian tradition, good things come in threes. Jesus. Mary. Joseph. Father. Son. Holy Ghost.”

  “Something’s comin’.”

  It wasn’t lightning that struck. It was a parked car wielded by a sixteen-year-old girl.

  Ada had continued to encounter the redheaded boy on the strange bike on her walks through the neighborhood. After months of his calling out to her, “I’m getting mine, you getting yours,” Ada had hollered back a question.

  “Exercise?”

  “Our pretty-pretty back.”

  Ada had nodded her assent. The boy was fitter than he had been at the beginning, when he seemed a huge bronze bear on a bike too frail for his weight. Now the bike seemed too big. She hoped he saw she was fitter too.

  The week after Preach was on the golf course that got zapped by lightning, Ada was looking at the boy, noticing that he had metamorphosed into a handsome young man, when she saw him lift his cap. Ada called out, “Looking good,” just as she noticed a blonde girl sitting in a Prius. She could have been the encouraging biker’s skinny sister. The girl opened her car door, a car door that the young biker didn’t anticipate. How it was the girl in the Prius didn’t see the formerly fat redheaded boy on the tiny and tall bike, Ada couldn’t imagine. Later she was told that the girl was texting as she parked. But that seemed an inadequate explanation. Ada would have thought the girl should have been able to feel, not just see, the passing extravagance.

  There was no small warning for any of them. Ada was walking, the boy was pedaling, the girl was texting, then the door opened and the boy was still pedaling, and Ada stopped walking.

  She saw the once chubby redheaded cyclist fly through the air, smiling. It appeared he was certain he would land, that he was enjoying the sail over the handlebars into the air. Then he landed in just the wrong way, on his shoulder, then on his head—and matter from his head that Ada prayed was just blood stained the street, in a flashing, head-bouncing second. The girl who had opened the car door was screaming as Ada spoke with a quiet and steady voice to the 911 operator. She wanted help to arrive as soon as possible. She knelt beside the boy. He said, “I’m fucked.” Then he laughed, squeezed Ada’s hand, and died with a smile on his face.

  And so the young man—the obituary would say he was a busboy, but he was in Nashville writing songs—was dead before his first song had been recorded.

  Later Preach said, “Bad things don’t come in threes; these bad things came in three.”

  That night in bed Preach held Ada as she cried. She wanted him to make love to her but couldn’t find the strength to kiss his neck and let him know. He wanted to make love to her but wasn’t sure he should even try, that it wouldn’t be all wrong.

  Ada went to the funeral. As a preacher’s wife she had been to many funerals of people she didn’t know. This one was different. She sat off to the side, and she cried hard for this boy who had been a fellow traveler. She prayed he knew he was beautiful, but she didn’t think he knew. She prayed he knew his encouragement had meant much to her. She hoped her hollers back had meant something to him.

  Healthing was dangerous. Ada had suspected this; now she knew it for a fact. Three very strange things had happened that wouldn’t have happened if the family hadn’t been exercising more. She didn’t want to stop, but she was stopped, by the Prius car door. She didn’t walk in the immediate days after the funeral. Every day she ate an ice cream cone with hot fudge and nuts because she was going to die and she didn’t know when. Young people don’t believe death is coming. Old people beckon it near. Middle age gets scared.

  On day four Inez Whitfield, summoned by Preach, came for a visit. The women sat in the living room. Ada brought them both a bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with warm homemade fudge.

  “You haven’t just fallen off the wagon, you’ve gotten yourself run over by the wheels.”

  “Run over by the wheels.”

  “What you gonna do about it?”

  “What should I do?”

  “Get back on.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  Her friend handed her the name and phone number of a psychiatrist. He specialized in issues related to death and dying. He was in semiretirement, but he agreed to see Ada, for Inez and Preach’s sake.

  They figured out what was bothering her in a single session. The boy had had no tomorrows. He would have been better off enjoying getting fat or even getting fatter.

  The shrink only had one question for her. “Do you expect to live for a thousand more tomorrows?”

  “A thousand tomorrows?”

  “Three years.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then.”

  The day after the visit to the psychiatrist’s office, Ada got back on the treadmill at the Dayani Center. She ate her yogurt for breakfast, a Kashi meal for lunch, and chicken and broccoli for dinner.

  That night she wrote a new rule—Get therapy—in her body journal, then she rewrote a previous rule for new emphasis: When you fall off the wagon—and you will fall off the wagon—get back on.

  Even if a mule kicks you off. Even if that mule is God.

  36

  CREATE YOUR OWN SPA DAY

  THE FIRST SWALLOWS of the long June that would be wedding season were the invitations. The first one to arrive carried a stamp Ada hadn’t noticed before—a tiny man carrying a great big heart.

  By the time all the invitations had arrived and wedding season had actually begun, engraved, e-mailed, handwritten, xeroxed, and calligraphed invitations were all waiting to be hung up on a special board Ada made each year with ribbon and cloth. This year, as in earlier years, the day Ada hung the boar
d was the day she considered wedding season officially begun.

  The first decade of her marriage, she had loved this time in the church year. Every wedding she attended was a chance to renew her vows. In comparison to the young brides, she felt wise—she was proud to be a young matron. She liked the display of everyone knowing that she was having virtuous sex, the kind that produced the laughing babies who attended the wedding with her, or who toddled down the aisles as flower girls, then as junior bridesmaids; living proof of her beauty and her and her husband’s passion.

  Over the years, all that had changed. She and the girls got to be too old to be in the bridal party. Then the girls were off at college, now off at work, and she had to attend weddings sitting alone in the pew. Preach was still at the center of each wedding event. Preach was still in the wedding party. Ada was not.

  She had accepted that. Then the girls started to be asked to be bridesmaids, and Ada was alone in the pews. Or they were just away at work. Either way, this was a new hard. And a new old.

  Weddings were so much about the babies that would come. They made she-who-had-no-babies-to-come feel painfully irrelevant. She tried to think of weddings more politically, as strategic alliances. She tried to think of weddings more psychologically, as frames for growth. She couldn’t. She knew what marriage was for—consecrating sex play and making babies.

  With her husband maybe out hound-dogging and her daughters all grown up and no prospect of grandchildren on the horizon, Ada would almost rather be anywhere than at a wedding.

  She had to do something about that. Diligence has its limits, and she had arrived at one. Diligence wouldn’t get her through wedding season with a smile on her face.

  Using wedding season as an excuse to go on a beauty hunt just might. Ada was going on a beauty hunt. The First Lady was supposed to look good at weddings. In recent years Ada looked like a cold mess. Wedding season was the perfect excuse. She needed a lift. She needed encouragement. She needed a break. She needed a time out. A Sabbath. Vaycay. She needed a spa day.

  And she needed one cheap. She fantasized about checking into a day spa at Escape, where she had had her nails done, but even a half day in a day spa was something like four hundred dollars, and she didn’t want to blow the last of her spoon money in one place. Besides, she wanted more than four or five hours of spa. She wanted about twenty. And she wanted it soon. Tomorrow. My baby loves to jump! My baby loves to jump. My baby loves to jump, now!

  She pounded through an hour on the treadmill at Dayani brainstorming. Eight of the twenty-four hours would be spent sleeping. To prepare, tonight after dinner, she would do a deep clean of her bedroom, dust everything from baseboards to the highly carved mirror, which she would dust using Q-tip swabs. She would change the sheets. She would pick out a book of poetry to be her day’s meditation, probably something by Lucille Clifton or the poets the twins had given her, Pablo Neruda and Yehuda Amichai. Clifton, Neruda, Amichai. These were the poets she would use to romance her body. She wanted an affair with herself. She wished that she had kept the vibrator Delila had given her as a fortieth-birthday present. No worries, she would make a little bouquet of flowers that had a scent, and she would place it by her bath and by her bed. She would buy herself a new squishy pillow. She would lay herself down.

  She was walking faster and easier, well into a second hour. Planning a day of body self-indulgence got her adrenaline going. She wanted a theme. She quickly narrowed the choices to Native American and roses, then chose roses. Roses were old and fresh. And roses were weddingy. Roses it was.

  But roses meant she had to go to the mall on her way to the gym.

  Upon waking up on spa day, she would take a shower, and she would spa-a-fy the shower by choosing a rose soap at Crabtree and Evelyn. Or, if she was really indulgent, she might even buy herself something from L’Occitane en Provence, a fancy body shop in the mall that had to this day intimidated Ada. So far the spa shopping list was rose soap, squishy pillow, lotion. She added pumice stone, dental floss, and emery boards.

  Then she called in sick. For the first time ever. Asked one of the board members to fill in for her for the day. She didn’t even think she was lying. She thought—I am sick. I need this mental health day if I am to make it through these weddings. I need to air out my brain.

  She went to the mall. She cleaned her room. She cooked the meals she would eat the next day. She warned Preach to get out of her way. She went to bed exhausted.

  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 da
y to become recommitted.

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

  37

  GET BETTER HAIR

  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?”