Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  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.

  “Come give me some sugar, baby.”

  “Hey, Queenie.”

  Ada plopped a big kiss on Queenie’s cheek. Her mother-in-law smacked her one right on the lips.

  “Come on in here, chile, I got some charlotte russe in the refrigerator, and some stuffed crabs in the oven, and baby I got some gumbo on the stove. Fix yo’self a plate.”

  “Queenie, I’m starting a diet.”

  “What fo’?”

  “Look at me!”

  “I am looking at you. Straight at you. You looking good, chile.”

  “I weigh over two hundred pounds.”

  “Chile, I weighed two-eighty-five last time I got on a scale. Probably over three hundred now. Don’t have diabetes. Don’t have but a touch of pressure, and what I got is under control.”

  “How would you know? You don’t go to the doctor.”

  “’Cause I don’t need to go.”

  “Queenie, you lucky. I don’t want to count on luck.”

  “What we gonna do if we can’t eat when you visit?”

  “I guess we gonna have to figure that out.”

  After gossiping more than they had ever gossiped, Ada was out the door with a pot of gumbo in her hands.

  Ada was home. Finally. She got on her new biker shorts and one of Preach’s T-shirts, but under the T-shirt was a comfortable exercise bra, and on her feet were spongy socks and good, if stiff, shoes. She had made a few extra stops after Queenie’s. She had sold the iced-tea spoons to a local fine silver dealer. The dealer had looked a little sad. Ada had made him smile.

  “I’m trading the past for the future. That’s always a good trade.”

  And it was. Her first good trade in a long while. Ada knew too much about hard trades.

  Sleep for Work was the deal that made her life possible; and Sleep for Work was the deal wrecking her body.

  Googling over and over again the words diet and weight loss, in her nonexistent free time, had left Ada with the distinct impression that one of the reasons she was so fat was she didn’t get enough sleep.

  The possibility that she could eat what she had been eating and excercise as she had been exercising and lose weight by changing her sleep habits was very attractive. The sleep-more, weigh-less diet sounded downright delightful.

  And frustrating. She slept five hours a night, as far as she knew, not because she had trouble falling asleep or trouble staying asleep but because she had nineteen hours of things to do each day.

  She usually put in forty hours at the nursery school, at least twenty-one hours a week doing church work, and lately four hours a week sitting with Preach’s mother. Another twenty-one hours a week was spent cooking and cleaning, and she wasn’t doing enough cooking and cleaning. Half an hour to shower and dress each day and seven hours talking with the girls on the phone, seven hours dining with Preach, twenty-one hours visiting with congregants, and ten hours volunteering—all that added up to too much work to do and not enough hours in a 168-hour week. Schedules were hard.

  She multitasked as much as she could. On occasion she was able to convince Queenie they should visit at the Manse while Ada cleaned and cooked. Usually she talked to the girls while she was driving to work. And she would cut back on some of her volunteer hours, but she couldn’t cut back too much.

  Time was a hurdle. She needed to sleep fifty-six hours a week, eight hours a night, and she needed to spend at least thirty minutes on the treadmill a day. She needed three and a half more hours a day than she had. Add getting in and out of exercise clothes, redoing her hair after she exercised, going to the doctors, doing all the research she needed to be doing, journaling, and her time deficit went from big to huge.

  One of the very first changes she was going to have to make was balancing her time budget. She needed to free up some minutes to work on her body.

  She couldn’t stop visiting Preach’s mama. And she didn’t want to give up dinner with Preach. Maybe she should cut back on cooking and cleaning and hire someone for out at the lake. If she hired someone, it would be another significant body expense, but it would also be the time she needed for sleep.

  She would start looking. It would be easy to find someone who wanted a decently paid part-time job. She could probably get someone to start next week. But she wouldn’t. It would be too hard to come up with the money and she couldn’t abandon her mother. She had to find the time somewhere else.

  She made a little chart.

  35 spent sleeping

  35 church work

  40 nursery school

  7 talking to the girls on the phone

  14 sitting with Preach’s mother

  21 cooking and cleaning

  7 hours a day dining with Preach

  21 visiting with congregants

  10 volunteering

  Then she wrote down the things she wanted time for and how much time she wanted:

  21 more hours of sleep

  3½ hours for walking

  There was an activity she didn’t write down. Sex. Making love. What number to write down? Maybe they didn’t have sex because they didn’t have time to have sex. Then she noticed that she had written “7 hours a day dining with Preach,” instead of “7 hours a week.” It made her smile. She did want, though she had forgotten she wanted, seven hours a day with Preach. If they had that kind of long day and long conversation, those unbroken hours, Ada felt certain they would find their way back into bed.

  Unfortunately, sorting all that out was just another thing for which Ada didn’t have time. She made an executive decision. She called Preach and informed him. She was going to be in bed by ten, and she wanted Preach in bed by the time she was going to bed.

  Preach surprised her by saying yes, without argument. Then later that night she surprised herself by learning that she did in fact have trouble falling asleep. She lay in bed feeling achy and awkward and twisting every which way and worrying till near 2:00 A.M., while Preach snored louder than loud. An advantage of falling asleep before Preach was that she didn’t hear him snore.

  When she finally fell asleep, she had a nightmare.

  It was her first pearly gate bad dream ever. She woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Even awake, she could still see God shaking a bony ebony finger at her before hurrying Ada and Preach toward purgatory. Over and over God said, in a voice that sounded strangely like Dave Chappelle’s, “I sent you one God-fearing, family-loving young man, Lucius Howard, finely made, honest, ’umble, ambitious, smart! You done spoiled him rotten! Made that Negro think his shit didn’t stink! His mama started it, but that ain’t a sin when a mama do it. I made mamas that way. A wife s’posed to keep it real. That’s why I gave you all the goodies—two big breasts, a booty, and everything in between. What you think you supposed to do with all that? But you don’t even tell that Negro you tired. You don’t tell him nothing but how sweet he is, and how pretty he is, and how much you love him, except that’s starting to be a lie, ’cause he ain’t doing enough for you to love him. He’s doing it all for his flock. It ain’t his flock, it’s my flock. And some of them is confused too. Some of them coming to my church to flirt with Preach, not to worship me. Y’all are near to ruining one of my best days of work. He need to wean himself off praise if that Negro is gonna grow up! Y’all ain�
��t ever gonna stop giving it to him. Where y’all spoil him rotten, that’s where Lucifer gonna sink his teeth in! Even if he is busy doing my work all day, some of it he’s doing for the wrong reasons.”

  “But it gets done. He is busy doing your work.”

  “See! Getting turned out of Heaven’s Door, and you still defending the so-and-so. I made his goodies too good!”

  “But I haven’t had any lately.”

  “You in purgatory, chile. You can look. He can look. But you always gonna be too busy to get together. And all I got to do to turn that into hell is leave you stuck in it forever. You got to woman-up, chile.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “I can’t tell you dat! You in purgatory!”

  Ada was up at five. Sharing the sink with Preach, as they both tried to wake up by brushing their teeth, was not an unpleasant experience. They could still spit in the same sink at the same time and not be disgusted. This gave her hope for other domestic miracles. Ada asked, gently, if they could try again for an early night. Preached pushed back. He had work to do on the week’s sermon. He had family visits to make. Ada pushed back against him. She let the snappishness she felt enter into her voice. “I need more sleep. I need to go to sleep earlier, and”—she stopped and changed her tone, put some sugar on the medicine—“we need to go to sleep together.” He stopped buttoning his shirt buttons. Brushed his hand across her bosom by accident. She blushed. Fearing a misunderstanding of what was on offer, she clarified.

  “I mean sleep, sleep.”

  Preach almost looked relieved. Ada shuddered. His expression changed to a clear look of affectionate concern. They parted with a peck.

  Hours later, returning home from KidPlay, Ada thought of calling Dr. Willie Angel and asking her for a prescription for Lunesta or one of the drugs she had heard advertised on the television when she was up so late. She hated the idea of being drugged.

  The idea she liked was falling asleep to the sound of a storm at the ocean. She didn’t punch Willie Angel’s seven digits. Instead she told the idea about the water sounds to Preach over dinner, like she was telling him she wanted the moon, like she was confessing she wanted something he would never be able to give her.

  He smiled. She thought that was mean. But she knew he wasn’t mean, so she wondered what he was thinking about that wasn’t her. To stop worrying about that she got up and started clearing the plates. He took the plates from her hands.

  “Let me do that. You go take a bath.”

  By the time she got out of the bathtub, he was already asleep on his side of the bed, snoring loud. On her side of the bed was an old-fashioned boom box. On the top was a Post-it that read “push play.” She did, and the sounds of the rain and the storm began. Preach turned over toward her, rousing himself just enough to say, “Sleep is hard.”

  Ada pressed repeat, slid beneath the sheets, then turned off the television that usually played all night or until one of them remembered to put it on a timer, or woke up enough to turn it off. Then she stretched to reach the light. She fell asleep to sounds of thunder and waves, to fierceness without anger, to God’s own intensity.

  She woke up eight hours later, half a pound lighter than she had been the day before.

  12

  EAT BREAKFAST

  ONLY SHE DIDN’T know it yet. She hadn’t stood on the scale. That would come later. What came the moment she awoke was a desire to roll over and kiss Preach. She rolled over. He was already gone.

  He was usually “already gone” when she awoke, so this should not have come as a surprise. But it did. And it pained her. She was almost as surprised by the pang of pain in response to his absence as she was surprised to roll over and want him. Going to sleep together had moved Ada into an emotional neighborhood just next door to optimism. She was no longer living in numb. Optimistic, she wanted to kiss, even before she brushed her teeth. This made her glad Preach was gone. Middle-aged women do not kiss before they brush teeth, at least not lips, or faces. Ada smiled to know that she knew what they could kiss: elbows, knees, bellies, etc.—even if her knowledge was antique.

  She got out of bed with a bit of bounce in her step. After her usual pre-scale ablutions, she stepped on the evil measuring square and got the good news. Half a pound down. Her knees bent and her hands went up in the air; her belly shook and her breasts waved; she cried out, loud and proud, “Thank you Jesus.” Then she jumped up in the air, landing on the scale with a thunk drowned out by the clap of hands still held high above her head. She grabbed still jiggling breasts with glee. Surprises could still be good. Making changes makes change.

  Ada sat her sweet fat ass on the side of her pretty tub. Rested, desirous, she was just starting to wonder what else exhaustion had stripped from her, when some of it started to come back. She thought of her father urging, “Take care of the pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves.”

  As she had felt her aged parents emotionally distancing themselves, Ada had moved closer to them, but in the only ways that they, in their grief, would allow: as caretaker, maid, cook, and old-folk tender. She had stopped listening for their advice or remembering the advice they had given. She didn’t want to be sorry there was no more of it. Today, “on surprise,” as one of her my babies would say, she remembered some advice her father had given her long before.

  “Eat breakfast because you don’t know if dinner is coming, and we will probably be working through it anyway.” He also said, “Eat breakfast like you James Brown, dinner like you Otis Redding, and supper like you me.”

  By that he meant: eat like a superstar at breakfast, great big, all you want; eat like a just-making-it star at lunch, something medium-size, maybe a sandwich packed by a mama or a girlfriend; and eat an itty-bitty dinner like a road musician would eat, maybe a few sardines and a cracker.

  It made her feel like a girl, even thinking about paying heed to her daddy’s old saying about food. Made her feel like his girl to know that he called lunch “dinner” and dinner “supper.” She would heed her father. Finally. Ada’s one concession to wanting to be not-so-big was not eating breakfast. She was going to change it up.

  She would stop defying her daddy and start complying with the diet books that had arrived. A precious few rules seemed to be in most of the books and in her family culture. “Eat breakfast” was one. There was even a book called The Big Breakfast Diet, which she hadn’t ordered but was thinking about ordering, that said breakfast was the key and you could eat almost anything before nine. Then she thought about the kind of breakfast she wanted to eat and the amount of Weight Watchers points she wanted to spend on breakfast. It didn’t take a hot second for her to decide she didn’t need to send for the Big Breakfast Diet book.

  Ada’s favorite breakfast was French toast and pig candy. Pig candy is bacon microwaved with brown sugar and pepper, and absolutely delicious. None of the diet books she already owned seemed to set out a plan that would allow anything like a full serving of pig candy. That seemed like a principle to follow: Only eat foods that at least three books advise you to eat.

  Given pig candy was her favorite breakfast, eating breakfast was probably a bad idea. Unless she changed up her favorite.

  She plunged into her newly purchased diet texts, searching for her new favorite breakfast. She settled on a cup of Greek yogurt with six almonds doctored up with cinnamon and nutmeg and clove. A bit of protein, a bit of fat. Some spices to rev up her metabolism and to make the breakfast taste a lot like French toast. Presto, a breakfast all her books and Weight Watchers Online could endorse. Ada endorsed it too. The almonds made the breakfast crunchy. She liked crunchy.

  And she liked that it was a little bit of a healing meditation to eat this breakfast. Traditional Chinese medicine favors the cinnamon stick, and new research highlighted the effect of cinnamon on insulin and on inflammation. Whatever the research came to prove for Ada, this day, the spices were a silent prayer for health. And they tasted good, and it was a breakfast she could make
fresh in less than a minute if she mixed the spices together beforehand. And she liked praying silently and deliciously by eating.

  She would call her new breakfast “sexy woman candy.” She liked that. She really liked it. She went down to get herself a bowlful, singing her new favorite hymn, “Get on the Good Foot.”

  13

  SELF-MEDICATE WITH ART: QUASH BOREDOM AND ANXIETY

  BETWEEN QUEENIE’S AND KidPlay, Ada got a call and then a text. It was a good thing she had planned to be at work early. Baby Jarius was home, sick with another cold. The call was a plea from his grandma, Loretha, for Ada to pick up a prescription that had been phoned in. The text was a request from his mama, Dorian, for Ada to call her work and vouch for the legitimacy of her absence later that afternoon. Before Ada walked into the front door of KidPlay, she had done a lot of juggling and was nibbling on a chocolate bar she had hidden in her desk.

  After work Ada sped out to the lake and did a quick clean and medicine check with all the doors wide open. She couldn’t afford the munchies that came with even a teeny-tiny contact high. Then she came straight home. The package she was hoping for was in the mail. Her DNA test kit.

  Ada felt in her bones DNA was the way to go. She knew the jury was out in the medical community about DNA-based diets. From what she could read, many doctors who thought DNA might one day help didn’t think that day had come. But Ada had a lucky feeling about testing her DNA. She had noticed that different diets seemed to work for different people. She had noticed she seemed to get fatter eating things that were not supposed to be fattening, like carrots and corn with no butter on it. After Inez told her about the DNA testing for weight loss, Ada looked it up on the Web. Researchers at Stanford said the DNA testing worked. Or at least they said that when they put people on the diet chosen by the DNA test she was going to take, they were more likely to lose weight and lost more weight than those randomly assigned to diets. Kathie Lee on the Today show said the DNA testing could help you find the right diet. The Inherent Health Web site stated something that spoke deeply to Ada: “Don’t waste time on the wrong diet.” Then it said, “People on the ‘right’ diet for their genes lost more weight than people on the ‘wrong’ diet for their genes.” It couldn’t hurt, it might help, and it was something she had never done, so it was very much following Rule 1. Ada was ready to give DNA testing a try.