Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  “You don’t even have to ask, don’t pretend you need to ask, you know I’m doing it for Preach,” Ada lied.

  Opal Herbert, Sheba’s most in-demand stylist, who had walked in halfway through the conversation, decided to open what everybody on Jefferson Street called “the mouth of the South.”

  “Lord, child, you got your eyes more open than I thought you did. Fight the good fight. There bad women on every corner looking for somebody’s husband, and there’s always a few who think they gonna get to heaven by kissing one of God’s true angels. Jezebels in every congregation.”

  “What you talking about, Opal?” asked the med student, who Opal was staring right at as she spat “Jezebels.” Sheba wasn’t studying on the med student’s guilt or innocence. She was worried about Ada.

  “Opal ain’t talking about nothing, at least nothing but her paranoia. She think everybody after yo’ husband because she want to drag her tired old half-yellow black ass after him. Everybody with sense know the preacher don’t have eyes for anybody but his First Lady,” said Sheba.

  “It’s a good thing I started going to church with the Episcopals,” said Ada.

  “I ain’t so sure ’bout that. I say the cat’s away, the mice will play. I say get your butt back home and into the front pew e-v-ry service, and not just Sunday,” said Opal. Sheba was shaking her head in reluctant agreement.

  “How can I pray, thinking about everything but God, thinking about who’s looking at my husband, and who’s voting for his raise, and what does he think about what I’m wearing, and what some Little Miss Jezebel is wearing. And I would not say a word of this past this beauty shop, but this is a sacred place for me, sacred as the sanctuary, with sisters more darling to me than my Altar Guild ladies. So let me be clear. I have one, and only one, thing on my mind now. I need you to hook up my hair and get me out the door with not one more worry than I came in with. Trust me. I hear one more piece of bad news, I’m going to snatch myself baldhead. I don’t want to know nothing more bad.”

  “Let’s get this head together.”

  “Give her something classy.”

  “China chop!”

  “China chop?”

  “Straight bangs across, straight sides.”

  “Cut it up just above her shoulders.”

  “That keep it fresh.”

  “My grandmother wore that hair back in the twenties.”

  “It’s back.”

  “Put you a real pretty real diamond clip in it.”

  “I’ve got one of those.”

  “I know. I remember when your daddy bought it for your mother before you were born.”

  Big Sheba’s Little House of Beauty returned to the usual hubbub of morning chaos. If Ada had been thinking about anything but her hair, she would have noticed what wasn’t being said. It was written all over the faces of the silent. Sheba and Opal were both thinking the exact same thing. Ada’s request for a new haircut was an open confession that she knew Preach was cheating. That she knew all about it. But they kept on smiling and kept on acting like all she wanted was Better Hair.

  Whatever was coming, Better Hair would help. That hippiecurly mess she had all over her head was tired. Everyone in the shop knew it. Everyone in the shop agreed on that. What they differed on was what was coming.

  Whatever it was, Ada would greet it with her chin up and a China chop.

  38

  FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT: FINE FOUNDATIONS AND WIDE SMILES

  DELILA LEE WAS back in town. If Delila Lee had not been Ada’s oldest friend, and Delila Lee’s mama had not delivered Ada in the back of a band bus, Delila Lee would probably have been way too wild for Preach’s congregation to tolerate as the First Lady’s bestie.

  But Delila Lee had been there from the get-go, and she was the First Lady’s bestie, so Delila Lee got into a lot of clubs: the Lunch Bunch because she was wickedly funny, and the Altar Guild because she had the deep purse to buy the expensive flowers for Christmas and Easter, to name her favorites. Because she would never on God’s green earth get into any Links chapter in America, there was no chance in hell for Delila Lee to take over. And she was fun. Eventually the congregation didn’t just accept Delila Lee as Ada’s bestie, it embraced her—whenever she was around, which wasn’t often.

  Delila Lee liked to run up and down the road. Ada’s best friend was usually gone, particularly these last two years. Ada remembered how that seemed to come to be: There had been a few parties where Delila got too drunk, then she put herself in treatment, then she hit the road, playing more and more out-of-town dates.

  Ada hated that.

  Strangely enough, Delila Lee (she had christened herself Delila early, as soon as she knew she would be wanting and needing a stage name) was a year younger than Ada, but she looked ten years older, only foxy.

  Delila had bumped around clubs in New Orleans, and Memphis, and Austin before landing in Nashville with two obscure CDs to her credit and a convertible that she claimed Isaac Hayes had given her. Delila Lee’s Isaac Hayes was a white “farmer,” an old blue-blood aristocrat, pink and skinny, who once had been in cotton and now grew corn. Cottonball white, with a black interior, Delila’s car was the one thing she possessed she would not sell or rent.

  Delila never slept with men for money or serviced men for money, but she would shack up with an adoring patron of the arts who enjoyed a private blues concert once or twice a month.

  Her lovers were all white, and she was always convinced they loved her voice—if they didn’t love her. Delila Lee didn’t love anybody but Ada.

  Her very last lover had been a very old man whose name was not Isaac Hayes. He had tried to get her to go with him to AA meetings, but she never did. One fall day he went out dove hunting and got tangled up with a fence, his rifle, and his head. In his will he left a house to Delila Lee, who he described as his housekeeper. He also left her a little income of $40,000 a year, and health insurance to be paid from an ongoing trust account for as long as Ms. Lee was alive, with the wish that she get sober, and the promise she would be taken care of dry or wet. The adult children complained that they didn’t have a housekeeper. Their mother told them to shut up.

  The wife of record insisted on meeting Delila to give her the deed to the house and the once-a-year check for $40,000. On every such occasion, she said the same thing: “Better you than me.” Delila Lee just said, “My pleasure.”

  Ada shook her head, thinking about Delila Lee. Strange things were always happening to her. Strange good things and strange bad. It came from Delila Lee always chasing after the juice in any moment. When they were children, Delila had confessed to Ada, “The one thing I’m true scared of is being bored.” She had been talking about having to go spend a summer with her father’s grandmother in Chicago in a perfectly clean house where all she had to do all day was sit on a proper couch reading books. “I may drown myself in her perfectly clean toilet.”

  After a flurry of missed calls and text messages, they met at the Pancake Pantry in Hillsboro Village. Delila liked it because it was around the corner from a noon meeting she liked at the church in the village.

  Ada told Delila Lee about Matt Mason. Delila Lee near peed her pants. Ada told Delila Lee not to get too excited, she probably wasn’t going to do it. Then she added, not as a tease but as the truth, “But I just might!” Then Ada changed the subject.

  Something bigger was bothering her. One of the weddings this wedding season was an interracial wedding. The girl was marrying a boy from Belle Meade, in a two-minister ceremony. The other minister’s wife was skinny and blonde and looked like she could have been a pageant girl in an earlier life. The grandmothers on both sides, black and white, looked great. Ada had to represent. Ada didn’t want to let the side down. She could pull off her own brand of power black frump—she’d been pulling it off for years—but she didn’t think it translated to the white world.

  “And I do not want to embarrass the church.”

  “Honey, you looking g
ood, better than you’ve looked in years.”

  “My old clothes are too big, and my titties are trying to hang down to my knees.”

  “Fake it till you make it.”

  “Fake it till you make it?”

  “A big smile works more wonders than a face lift. Put a great big smile on your face, and people will start smiling at you, and then you be happy for real. The fake turns real.”

  “Fake it till you make it?”

  “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.

  39

  UPDATE BEAUTY RITUALS AND TOOLS

  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.