Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  Ada, who never cried, cried all the way back to Nashville.

  6

  IDENTIFY AND LEARN FROM ICONIC DIET BOOKS

  AFTER SHE GOT back home, after she washed her hands and face in the kitchen sink, after she opened her invites, after she came down from her contact high, after she got the text saying Preach wouldn’t be home for dinner, Ada self-medicated with Amazon.

  Ada liked to shop online. She particularly liked Amazon. Nobody could see her, but she could see so much. She liked to peek inside dozens of books within the privacy of her room.

  She had learned a lot from books. Manners. Cooking. Child rearing. Sex.

  Sticking with the principle of using what you have to get what you want, she needed some diet books.

  Tucked up in her quilts with her laptop on an online shopping spree, the first one that caught her eye was The Shangri-La Diet. The Shangri-La Diet was written by a psychologist. It promised radical change without radical change. Smart people endorsed it. Smart people renounced it. The Shangri-La Diet was deliciously controversial. Ada had a secret taste for controversy. She had a not-so-simple taste for plain simplicity. Reading the user reviews, she felt this diet would satisfy both. All she had to do was eat two tablespoons of a certain kind of olive oil a day, or two tablespoons of sugar water a day, and somehow this would help her regulate her appetite. In theory she could eat what she wanted, but she wouldn’t want. After putting The Shangri-La Diet in her cart, she mentally checked off “fun crazy diet” and veered toward the normal diets. Eventually she put Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook, The South Beach Diet, and Atkins for Life into the cart. She still wasn’t ready to check out. She wanted something new. She put Skinny Bitch and The Flexitarian Diet in the cart. Remembering a few oldie goldies and a few articles that had intrigued her, she searched for a few more diet books and eventually added The Mediterranean Diet, The Sonoma Diet, The Big Breakfast Diet, and The Mayo Clinic Diet to the cart.

  Ada gorged on purchase till she was sated. Then she checked out with one click and had all the books sent the slowest way possible. She didn’t want to change too quickly. She winced when she saw what it added up to, but didn’t alter the order. She was half high on consuming.

  She took a deep breath. It was strange to be overconsuming to learn how not to overconsume. She exhaled forcefully, blowing out the buyer’s remorse. Head clear, she decided in a flash to contribute the books to the church library after she read them. Now the purchase made sense.

  And she had a new rule: Identify and learn from iconic diet texts. At the very least, by suggesting how she should eat, each of the books would keep her mindful about eating. She didn’t have to follow the plan, but by noting how much she was on or off someone else’s plan, she might find her own. And when she didn’t have a plan of her own, she could borrow one of someone else’s.

  Until she could find out what diet worked for her, Ada decided to go on a diet that had worked for multitudes: Weight Watchers Online. The twins had been after her about it for months. She had refused because she thought they were wanting her to go to meetings. Getting together with strangers to chat about intimate things worked for a lot of alcoholics and fatties, but she had suspected it wouldn’t work for her. It had been reading Amazing Grace to Bunny that had made up her mind to look into it.

  She liked what she found. She didn’t have to go to meetings, and they were running a special. She signed up. She chose “shrinkingprincess” as her user name. She had a new principle: Do something to further the diet cause every day—even if it’s a small thing.

  Ada was assigned 22 points for the day, and 35 bonus points she could use over the course of the week. The big problem was, she had no idea in the world how many points there were in anything.

  By midnight that was no longer true. By midnight there were things she loved that she would never eat again, and things she would not eat for years. Margaritas, she would never drink again. California rolls, she would not eat for a year. All salads in any chain restaurant she would eye with profound suspicion. Baja Fresh Mexican Grill fajitas carnitas were 25 points more than a day’s allotment—never to be eaten. On the other hand, four pieces of red snapper sushi were only 2 points.

  Ada needed a drink to process the new information. Except drinks cost points. Lots of points.

  Her favorite part of the Web page was 0- to 1-point-value foods. If she wanted to be able to eat three meals and two snacks a day and to have a glass or two or three of wine, she would have to consider sourdough crisp bread an entrée. She decided to tally the points of what it was she had eaten today. The total came to a whopping 36.

  She took the 22 points for the day, then borrowed 14 from the 35 bonus points for the week. Which left her with 21, until she realized she had enough points to have a brownie and a glass of red wine. Thinking about starvation was making her hungry.

  Or maybe it wasn’t thinking about starvation. Or at least maybe it wasn’t thinking about food starvation. Yes, Ada was hungry. And not just for fajitas carnitas.

  Ada was sex-starved.

  Her husband had had a late meeting with the vestry, and then he had to make a late visit to a parishioner in home hospice care who wasn’t expected to last the week. She believed that was why he still wasn’t home—but she suspected something else. In her wilder imaginings she tortured herself with the thought that after he had done his preacherly duty and satisfied the needs of his congregants’ souls, he had satisfied the carnal needs of someone else somewhere else.

  Those four little names again. This time she didn’t cross them out. She wrote question marks beside them.

  Three of the names were members of Preach’s church. She rebuked herself for imagining that he was stepping out with one of his flock, but he never saw anyone else but his flock long enough to fall into love, lust, or infatuation.

  She liked the word infatuation. Particularly right now, because it had the word fat in it. Infatuation was a wise word, a word you had to have passed through to understand. If you had, you’d know that it wasn’t love, but love’s cousin. But infatuation had its glories. It was the desire, the aroma of goodwill, that comes from being soaked in the presence of someone you enjoy until you are plumped up to bursting with a kind of confidence that comes from knowing your presence is appreciated. Infatuation is a response to charm, yours and your sweetheart’s. It says nothing about honor or perseverance or transcendence or anything high and mighty. Infatuation is sucking the sweet out of the moment and being the sugar tit and thinking for a moment you can be a baby and a grown folk. Once a long time ago she had been that kind of drunk on Preach. Now she wasn’t, but she suspected someone else was.

  Ada wanted to be infatuated. Again. With Preach. But she wasn’t. She was inFATuated. Stuck in a fat situation, and she didn’t mean phat, didn’t mean good.

  She hoped the light she saw in Preach’s eyes, which she had not put in his eyes and God had not put in his eyes, came from knowing he was newly adored, not from tasting the adoring one.

  She could and would forgive imagining the joys of someone else, but she wouldn’t forgive him tasting them. She stopped to take note of this and to remind herself she would be anathema to herself if she did in fact cheat. To remind herself it was fine to play with the idea, to inspire herself to lose weight, but she couldn’t really indulge in eating the prey she chased. But she could actually chase. At least today.

  She wanted to pray again. Truly pray. Down on her brown Episcopal knees, the way Bird and Temple had raised her. She hadn’t prayed that way in a very long time. It would have been the last time she went to an Episcopal wedding or funeral. She wasn’t even sure she believed in God. That was a break between them—not her uncertainty, but her fear of sharing her uncertainty. If she had told Preach, he would have told her that he had his hours and days of doubt. But she didn’t tell him, so he didn’t tell her.

  She was his wife and his congregant, and though he knew the duty of husband was a profoundly higher stan
dard, he acknowledged his duty as pastor was not to let his doubt become contagious.

  If she had told him, she doubted he would have told her, “I plowed that doubt in you, Ada, thrust and kiss.” He would have told her, “I am more sure of you than I am of God.”

  Except year after year, with all the not-telling, it stopped being so.

  Ada wanted to create a feast that would bring her husband back to the table of her body. And she wanted to create a feast that would bring herself back to the table of her husband’s body. She felt very far from that. And it would be too many Weight Watchers points, anyway.

  She giggled, imagining a principle that would be a bald-faced lie: Food eaten in bed during sex is not to be counted as food.

  She was happy a kiss had zero points. She wondered if a day would come when the snack she craved was Preach’s kisses. Then she started thinking about other ways of eating Preach and stopped herself. She was the preacher’s wife.

  Her mind looped back to less tantalizing Eros. She imagined nibbling on Preach’s ear or brown belly instead of on yellow chips and red salsa. With no Preach and no zero-point Wasa bread in the house, she walked down into her kitchen and got herself a brownie and poured herself a glass of wine.

  It was oddly like communion. When she had eaten and remembered and prayed, she took herself back to bed. As she drifted off, she heard Preach’s key in the front door lock.

  7

  WALK THIRTY MINUTES A DAY—EVERY DAY

  ADA WOKE UP peculiarly early. She knew it was peculiarly early even before she opened her eyes because Preach was still sleeping beside her.

  He was a large man, mahogany colored. Time had been kind. To him. His legs were thin, he had a little belly, and his arms and shoulders were massive. He was bald on the top of his head, but the rest of his body was covered in what she had once called man-fur. He had beautiful hands and beautiful feet.

  She wanted to lie atop him, rug and baby. They had played that game Sunday mornings the first years they were married, until they had had the babies. After she began putting the babies on his chest, the space above her husband’s waist and below his chin belonged to their daughters. Now that the daughters were ladies, this territory of her husband’s body was hers again, but she didn’t know how to claim it except by the old game—and she was too big for that. The thought that she would feel like a boulder, not a baby or a lover, lying on her husband’s belly got Ada up and looking for walking clothes and walking shoes. Ten thousand steps. She had read and been told ten thousand steps a day was the magic bullet. She had time to take a walk before she went to work. She would do new things. Jump right in it.

  Except she couldn’t find what she wanted to wear. She didn’t know if the items were lost, misplaced, or never existed. It was too early to think, and she hadn’t had coffee. She knew she wanted to do something different. She used what she had.

  The elastic had come out of an old purple lace bra, giving it a looseness she thought might be comfortable for walking, and it surely was no good anymore for hiking up her bosoms. She cut the underwire out to make sure it was comfortable. She found her old exercise shoes, but not the socks. She decided to go sockless, then thought better of it and put on some black-and-white polka-dotted dress socks. She had some old Umbro shorts, black and white and large, so she put those on. She had a drawer full of big T-shirts to sleep in. She grabbed a clean one and put it on.

  She was almost completely sedentary. The walk she had taken the KidPlay kids on was an anomaly. She would start walking a mile a day, a slow mile a day. Even if it took her forty-five minutes. She hoped it would take thirty minutes, feared it would take an hour. Whatever it took, she was doing it.

  Sixty minutes later, her feet were roughed up on the top of her toes, her inner thighs were chafed by the seams in the shorts, and her nipples were scratched by the bra.

  But she had made a new friend. She had been passed by a very polite plump cyclist, a pretty boy with red hair and what looked like light eyes from the distance and through his helmet. His bike was one of those strange bikes that had been extravagantly customized by local kids that formed a kind of East Nashville gang. She had been surprised to see the east-side bike in her eclectic west-side neighborhood of bungalows and infill and oddities, including her Queen Anne Victorian farmhouse. But the boy doffed his cap to her, and Ada nodded back. When he replaced his cap atop his helmet, she knew her new effort had been saluted.

  Then a mosquito bit her. She had forgotten that mosquitoes were out in the early morning. Ignoring the chafing, she double-timed her homeward-bound pace. It was surprising to come upon her house, a cream clapboard farmhouse with wraparound porch and thin spindle columns, not a fancy place but a pretty place, when you came to the break in the shrubs that allowed you to see it from the street of brick rentals and brightly painted cottages. She sighed at the prettiness.

  Back in her bedroom, scratching the mosquito bite, for one of the first times in her life she talked to herself, right out loud. “When God invented exercise, he wasn’t thinking about me,” she said. She was worried that Preach had heard and would think she was crazy. She didn’t need to worry. She found a note on her pillow, telling her he had an early meeting and had walked across the yard to the church.

  It was still early. Ada made a shopping list:

  Running shoes

  Sports bra

  Running shorts

  Running socks

  Treadmill

  She wondered how much a treadmill would cost. She stopped and grabbed another Post-it—she had a new rule. Budget! Figure out what you will need and how you will pay for it. She needed to distinguish between what she needed and what she wanted, and she didn’t think cheap was the way to go. Chafed nipples, chafed thighs, and messed-up feet were not in her plan.

  She frowned. She was too poor to get skinny. Or not. She was not too poor if she begged, borrowed, or stole a guitar, or two, from her father. Puzzling over the possibilities, she got in the shower. Three minutes later she was under the spray, doing the Pony, singing loud, in her best imitation of Nancy Sinatra, “Ready steady boots, stay walking.”

  8

  SEE YOUR DOCTOR

  THE DOCTOR WAS pleased to see Ada. And Ada was pleased to see the doctor. Willie Angel was a friend, a peer, a Link sister, and, as she was wont to put it with her preferred patients, a “luxuriously large” woman herself. She was also one of the best internists in Nashville.

  Willie Angel was pleased with Ada’s blood pressure management, and with her last metabolic blood panels. It wasn’t that the numbers were perfect, it was that the numbers were not yet too dangerous. Willie Angel was a pragmatist. She wasn’t counting on getting Ada off blood pressure medicines, she was counting on keeping the pressure under control and managing the diabetes when it came.

  She didn’t think there was much to do about Ada’s weight except have the surgery or wait for new drugs to be approved. She thought there were two in the pipeline that might really help with weight loss.

  Her only other real suggestion was that Ada buy a desk with a built-in treadmill. Ada found that suggestion silly and expensive. Willie knew how much Preach earned. Her husband was on the vestry, and the vestry set Preach’s salary. He could not afford to buy his wife a thousand-dollar desk. Besides, Ada didn’t work at a desk. She worked on a dingy alphabet carpet. She worked sweeping floors.

  Still, she found her doctor’s approach reassuring. Dr. Angel reassured Ada with her presence and with her words. And she took the time to say she didn’t think Ada should blame herself for her weight.

  “It’s genes and stress and corn syrup in everything. And food pornography, everywhere we look, creating appetite. Man wasn’t built for this much prosperity.”

  Willie Angel’s finger-pointing at everything but Ada gave her patient a measure of relief. Stripped of shame, Ada was better able to carry her part of the blame. And she was able to feel, for once, finally, in a way that motivated her to make a change, he
r own despair.

  “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” Ada said to her doctor. The doctor heard the alarm beneath the humor.

  “There’s an antidepressant associated with weight loss. Maybe you should talk to a psychiatrist about prescribing it. I could make a referral.”

  “If I go see a psychiatrist, it’ll be to talk. I like my brain chemistry. It’s my body that’s the problem. I read somewhere fat black women are among the least likely people to kill themselves.”

  “Are you thinking of killing yourself?”

  “I’m thinking of getting fine and fit to go with fifty.”

  “You’re cleared for whatever you want to try. Any normal diet, any normal exercise. And be glad you’re not even a little prediabetic.”

  “It’s my big butt and all the coffee I drink.”

  “That’s as good an explanation as any.”

  “What about you?” Ada asked her doctor who was her friend.

  “I’m prediabetic,” Willie Angel replied softly.

  “One day my butt fat may save an entire Chinese village of diabetes. But you’ll get yours first.”

  “If the diet starts going really well, you might want to lipo some off and freeze it for the advancement of science. There are those mouse studies that say injections of butt fat can prevent the development of type-two.”

  “You know I haven’t had that much luck with frozen body parts,” said Ada.

  “Fat’s different from eggs,” said Willie Angel.

  “I thought eggs were fat,” said Ada.

  They laughed till tears were running down both their brown faces. They were crying for their bigness and crying for the third and fourth baby Ada never got to have and crying over the irony of being a physician and a walking advertisement for the problems obesity causes and crying for the joy of fighting the good fight.