In the morning, I slept in. Around nine, Ada entered with a tray of breakfast. She opened the curtains and set the tray on my bed. “I know heartbreak feels like the end of the world, but you need to eat and keep going.”
Heartbreak. That word jarred me. Was my heart broken?
And I surprised myself by realizing the answer.
“My heart’s not broken,” I said, sitting up.
She raised her eyebrows. “No?”
“No. I’m angry. And I’m hurt. And embarrassed. And I’m worried about”—I made a gesture circling my nightgown-clad stomach—“that. But . . .” I shook my head. “He wanted to marry me. I said no.”
Ada tilted her head but said nothing.
“I hardly knew him—and it turned out I knew him less than I thought. And he didn’t know me. He didn’t care what I wanted. He just assumed I’d be lucky to have him.” I thought for a moment. “I told him I didn’t want to marry anyone yet, which is true, but . . .”
“But?”
I shook my head again. “I don’t know.”
“When it’s right, you will.”
“No. It’s never going to be ‘right.’ I see that now. It’s me. I don’t want to be someone’s wife. I want to be myself.”
Ada had the first pitying look in her eye that I had ever seen. “When it’s right, you’ll find you can be both.”
I started to ask her how she knew that, having never been married. But she rose, finished with the conversation. “I’m canceling all my clients for Monday. News is going to be all over town about the Goldman boy, and I don’t want anyone suspecting. Instead, you have influenza. You should be recovered by Tuesday or Wednesday.”
I was too drained to argue and resigned myself to being contained in the house for the next three days like a cat in heat.
When she returned midafternoon, I was still in bed. “This won’t do. Get up.”
“Let me wallow,” I moaned, my face in the pillow.
“Now, if your heart were broken, we could have a day of wallowing, but it’s not. So you’ll dress. It’ll make you feel better.”
“Nothing will make me feel better.”
Ada took a moment to reply. “I’d say work on your novel, but I have a feeling that roman à clef hits a bit too close to home now.”
I winced. “It’s not a roman à clef.”
“Please. An upper-crust New York girl and a boy from a horrendous family meet and marry?”
“Well, that certainly didn’t happen.”
“And aren’t you glad now that it didn’t? What if this girl had shown up with a child six months into your marriage? Then you’d really be stuck.” She thought for a minute. “Actually, that would make quite the book.”
“No.”
“Well, find something to entertain yourself. The more you sit around and worry about your cycle, the longer it’s going to take to arrive.”
I turned my head so I could see her with one eye, the other still buried in my pillow. “Is that true?”
“In my experience it is.”
In her experience—I sat up. “That’s a story I want to hear.”
She pointed to the typewriter. “Write one of your own, and I’ll think about telling you mine. But take a shower first. Just because some writers choose to be bohemians doesn’t mean I’ll tolerate that kind of behavior in my house.”
For three days, Ada kept me entertained. We watched television and played card games and swapped books. And when I could, I tried to write. But the words weren’t coming.
“Don’t write your own story,” Ada said. “You haven’t lived enough for that. But use what you’ve learned.”
“What have I learned? Other than that I should listen to you?”
Ada smiled. “What a lovely start.”
I kept expecting her to light into me about breaking the rules. About ignoring her advice and dating Freddy anyway. But she never did. In some ways, I would have preferred if she did—it would have alleviated some of the feeling of dread that I hoped was all that was wrong with my stomach. I had some cramping, but Ada warned that could go either way.
“How do you know so much about this?”
“You don’t get to my age without learning a few things.”
I looked at her. It was obvious she had been extremely beautiful when she was young—she was still handsome now. “Why didn’t you ever get married? The real reason.”
She sighed. “I was engaged once. But he died.”
“How old were you?”
“Your age.”
I did the math. It would have been 1905. She must have been very in love with him to never marry after losing him so young. “How did he die?”
“It was a fire. They think his father fell asleep while smoking a cigar. None of the family got out.”
Whether it was hormones or the excitement of the past few days, I felt tears springing to my eyes. I couldn’t imagine being so in love and then having to live the rest of my life—
“Don’t look at me like that,” Ada said, interrupting my thoughts. “I said I was engaged. I never said I was in love with him.”
I blinked rapidly. “Excuse me?”
“We were friends, yes. And I suppose I loved him. But it wasn’t passion and fireworks—it was a shidduch.”
“A what?”
“‘A what?’” Ada mimicked. “A match.”
I stared at her. “Your parents hired a matchmaker for you?”
She shook her head. “No. It was informal. Our parents agreed on it and told us we were getting married. I was happy, as things went. They could have picked someone far worse for me. Plenty of my friends wound up with much older widowers who could provide for them.”
She plucked at the blanket on the back of the sofa. “When Abner died—well, I told my parents I wanted more time. And that more time kept growing until suddenly I was an old maid. And according to my father, too ornery to make a good wife.”
I made a sour face at the idea of her father saying that. Although it was something my father would say as well.
“Wrinkles,” Ada said, tapping my forehead. “He didn’t mean it like that. He was fine with my choice as long as I was happy. And he helped me train to be a nurse. I cried far more when he died than when Abner did, I’ll tell you that much. Papa was—Papa was born out of time, I think. He would have been down South fighting for civil rights if he were alive now.” She looked at me. “He’d have loved you.”
I knew almost nothing about my great-grandparents, but there was something comforting in knowing he would have approved of me. Especially now.
“You said you’d been in love though—if not with Abner, then with who?”
“That’s enough for today.” She opened her book to end the conversation.
I shook my head, picking up my own book, pretending to read while actually studying her, spinning a tale about her tragic past in my head. “Are you going to read that book or not?” she asked. I never understood how she could know what I was doing without looking at me, but she always did.