Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  I will lose fifty pounds in the next year, or I will have the surgery.

  I will model the health I want my daughters to possess—or I will die trying. Looking at her girls looking at her, and seeing that they believed their mama was beautiful, was complicated.

  She wanted her daughters to see her beauty—but she also wanted her daughters to see her differently, to see the limits of her kind of beauty. She wanted them to see her differently because she wanted them to see themselves differently.

  Preach was oblivious.

  When the birthday flans were served, a lit sparkler atop each, Naomi and Ruth’s faces shone brightly in the sputtering light.

  Later, when Preach said simply, “Thank you,” she knew he was talking about the view from his side of the table, his sight of their daughters. Preach was grateful for the reality of soft round beauty, bronze and cherubic glory. This would make getting the twins skinny harder. But not impossible. Her daughters would follow her anywhere—and she was on her road to fitland.

  15

  KEEP A FOOD DIARY AND A BODY JOURNAL

  TEMPLE WAS LAID out with a cold. Ada hoped she hadn’t brought baby Jarius’s bug out to him. As soon as Ada had gotten the toilets cleaned and the soup on the stove, she rubbed her daddy down with a lemon cut in half, then lowered him (wearing purple tighty whities) into a hot bath she had spiked with red pepper flakes and Tabasco. When Temple was up to his shoulders in the water, Ada gave him a shot of whisky.

  Then she sat on the toilet and looked out the window into the woods while he soaked. He was too frail to be in the tub alone.

  She was having a little tiny period. Being with the girls, who were cycling, had probably brought it on. The flow was so light she barely needed a pad. For the very first time, she hoped this one was the last one. She was ready.

  When her father got out of the water, she averted her eyes as he rubbed himself down with a towel. Then she helped slip him into a robe and old silk pajamas. He rested heavily on her as she walked him through the maze to the bed in the center of his bedroom.

  “You getting smaller, gal,” Temple said.

  Ada smiled. “A little. Maybe.”

  “It’s more than a little.”

  “What you wanna eat, Daddy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I got some soup on the stove.”

  “I wanna see the lake.”

  “It’s too much stuff to move just now, Daddy.”

  “Squeeze in and tell me how it look.”

  Ada sucked in her breath and edged herself in sideways.

  “It’s just the way it always is, Daddy. Pretty. Three ducks out on the water. There’s a speedboat with some folk drinking … sky is blue-gray, and the water is green-gray, and there’s a farm across the way that looks like a storybook. I see a silo.”

  “Pretty, pretty. I love looking at pretty. Seeing you today reminded me of that. Move some of that shit, gal, I gots to see the lake.”

  “I’ll need a wheelbarrow.”

  “Get one.”

  “I like that.”

  “What you gonna do with what you tote outa here?”

  “Pitch it in the lake.”

  “Unh-unh.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Leave it, then.”

  “I’ll wheel it out to the shed.”

  “Come here so I can get a good look at you.”

  “Till you can see the lake?”

  “You prettier than the lake.”

  “Daddy, I’m a old woman.”

  “You just getting grown, gal, just now getting grown. Two best kinds of women, eighteen years old and fifty. I had ’em both, and I know.”

  “You ever have an outside woman, Daddy?”

  “No.”

  “You never cheated?”

  “They never outside. Always inside. They ain’t no outside women. I put a lot of backstreet and backdoor in this house.”

  “You told Mama?”

  “She tasted ’em on me.”

  “That’s disgusting, Daddy.”

  “When yo’ mama kissed me, anything I knew, she knew. Woman could taste how much money I lost on a bet.”

  “That didn’t make you do right?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Eventually?”

  “After twenty-three slips, I stopped slipping.”

  “Or you stopped counting.”

  On the highway home Ada was hungry for soul food. And she didn’t mean collard greens and sweet potatoes and fried catfish. She meant church. She made up her mind to try the white Episcopals.

  She needed a place to pray about her body that she didn’t have to worry if it was full of people coveting her husband’s body. A place where she wasn’t the First Lady, a place she could just be a congregant.

  She would go to eleven o’clock at her and her husband’s church, and she would go to Wednesday night at her and her husband’s church—but she would get up in the morning and go to 7:00 A.M. with the Episcopals after a 5:00 A.M. walk.

  It would seem utterly strange to some, but going to St. Bartholomew’s would be perfect. She would get a break from congregants wanting to befriend her—most would be too snobby to want her as a friend. And she might learn something; rich white southern women make champion fit freaks.

  And Ada had just heard an Episcopal joke that she loved. The one about the middle-aged Episcopal lady who had a heart attack and got rushed to the hospital. On the operating table she had a near-death experience. She saw God, and he told her she had another thirty to forty years to live. Upon recovery she decided to have a face-lift, liposuction, breast augmentation, and a tummy tuck. When she was recovered from all of that, she signed up for a day spa. For twelve weeks she worked out hard. The twelfth week she treated herself to a new haircut and color and a full wax down there. Standing outside the spa, she couldn’t wait to get home. She got hit by an ambulance speeding toward the hospital. When she found herself in front of God, she was furious. She told him that he had promised her thirty or forty years. She hadn’t even gotten thirty months! To which God replied, “I didn’t recognize you.”

  Ada wanted that kind of change for Ada. She was worshipping with the Episcopals. Surrounded by skinny ladies, she would not forget she was fat.

  And she was dividing her diet book into two separate parts: the front would be “The Rules,” and a food diary in which she would keep track of every morsel she put in her mouth—even though she also did it on Weight Watchers. And the back half would be a body journal where she vented, and wished, and described, and self-portrayed.

  The first time she sat down to write in the back of her journal, she filled pages:

  His love of bigness allows me the luxury of laziness. I don’t have to do something about this. And even more than that, his beauty testifies that once I was beautiful.

  I tell this to darling, and he says I’m beautiful. I hope he actually believes that. I half do. If I’m talking about it in a Hawaiian princess way. Or maybe in a Botero sculpture way. Or getting down to the real nitty-gritty, in a my-grandmother-was-big-as-two-houses-and-she-was-the-most-beautiful-woman-in-my-world way. But MaDear dropped dead a long time ago, and the world has changed.

  It’s funny how all those naked Rubens women don’t look anything but fat anymore. Those hanging bellies scare the bejesus out of me. Bosoms are something else. I love my big pillow breasts. One of the hardest things about losing weight is deflating those giant man and baby cushions. When I look down, I see my big cloud immensities, tipped in chocolate like a present, better than a bow. When I lose more weight, those are going to turn into flat pancakes I need to shove in a bottom-padded push-up bra. But that’s okay. When I lose weight, I can find a bra that fits at Victoria’s Secret.

  MaDear’s been shouting out loud to me today. Be careful what you wish for. I always wanted to be a fat old black lady in a flowered dress on a porch, feeding my grandbabies chocolate. But not too soon. And maybe not ever, now.

  Me and my bo
dy got to find a new way to rolI. My new body dance is going to be a three-beat waltz. Sizing, sexing, primping. Oompapa. Can’t do the long march stagger another mile. It’s oompapa—primping; sexing; sizing. Sizing is eating and exercising and binding it in. Sexing is feeling all the pleasure the body can bring. Primping is decorating and celebrating the body. It’s putting the shine on healthing, and that makes the pretty. I can’t do all of that—primping, sexing, sizing—every day. For me it seems the deal is, if one of them is not going well, get the other two to kick in. On great days you should work on all three. On bad days one. On no days none, and most days two.

  If you can’t polish your fingernails, give yourself an orgasm. If you can’t do any of that, schedule a mammogram. One of the bad things about getting older is, you can burn a whole lot of time setting up appointments and going to appointments. I have friends who make almost being sick, or checking out that they are not sick, almost a full-time job. I’m not doing that. That’s the medicine polka, and it’s too herky-jerky for me. I’m sizing, sexing, primping. Oompapa.

  One of the things I like about being big is, it makes me feel like I’m not about to die. Too many times that even trumps what I want to do and be for Naomi and Ruth. I need reasons beyond Matt Mason to lose. Or maybe I need a Preach-related non-Preach reason. Maybe I want a pulpit of my own. Or maybe ’cause Preach don’t even seem to want me great big, I might as well get smaller.

  Hunger’s got my mind messed up.

  Writing about it helped.

  16

  ADD A SECOND EXERCISE THREE TIMES A WEEK

  HER TEST RESULTS arrived via e-mail on the KidPlay desktop computer. She was a carb restrictor who needed intense exercise three times a week. She loved carbs and liked to exercise moderately daily. No wonder her body was a mess.

  There were pages and pages in the report after the summary, but after diligently going through them, she soon concluded all she needed to concern herself with was the first page.

  She would be a carb restrictor. And she would up her good fat intake. According to Inherent Health, her meals should be 30 percent fat. That seemed like a lot, but she was going after it. Eating fat to let go of fat. She imagined a little river of fat running through her and out of her, collecting the fat from her blood cells and from her body, a little river of olive oil flowing to and through her, washing everything that did not belong away. These were good thoughts, hippie-dippy, spacey thoughts for sure, but good. And they balanced off the idea that she was about to turn into some kind of cavewoman committed to a diet of meat and veg. She wondered if her ancestors had been Masai warriors, drinking blood from live animals to survive.

  Then she wondered if anyone actually did that, or whether it was simply a myth about Africa perpetuated to make black people seem crude and cruel.

  Then she stopped wondering. She didn’t have time. She had the vestry dinner. She needed to check in with Preach. Get the last tally on who was coming. Remind him to pick up the flowers. Tell him about her results.

  Walking across her lawn and through the basketball court, Ada headed to Preach’s office. She hoped he would be in, but she also hoped, just a little bit, he wouldn’t be. It was a day for new information. Sitting in his desk chair, looking at what he looked at, poking in their files, might give her a little more new information. She walked up the stairs to his office thinking, Bring it on. Whatever it was.

  She strode through the young men loitering in Preach’s outer office. Preach kept a pot of coffee waiting on a hot plate especially made for the young men of the congregation who had no job or school to go to. He made a pot for them every morning and refreshed it at noon. The morning pot got his posse dressed, out the house, and looking for work. The afternoon pot diluted frustration. Preach, she was quickly informed, wasn’t in. Ada kept stepping, making use of First Lady privilege.

  Once inside Preach’s office, she closed and locked the door. She sat down at his desk. She loved looking at the little gallery of photographs he kept in popsicle-stick frames, made by the girls, on his desktop. There was a picture of Ada on her wedding day. She barely recognized herself. And there were pictures of the girls at all different ages. And there was a picture of Queenie holding infant Lucius. These pictures made Ada breathe deep and quiet.

  The pictures on the wall, ripped out of magazines, then stuck up with tape or pinned with thumbtacks, made Ada uneasy. On the wall Preach mixed portraits of his heroes with his rogues’ gallery. A photograph of Sweet Daddy Grace in Washington, D.C., was next to a photograph of Martin Luther King. On the other side of King was a picture of Prophet Jones in Detroit. On the other side of Prophet, who was wearing his full-length mink coat paid for by congregants, was Malcolm X. Just below Malcolm was Father Divine, somewhere in New York. Beside Father Divine was Jesse Jackson. Interspersed throughout were pictures of Preach’s father. Ada’s favorite was a picture of Sarge in his uniform, near the time of his retirement.

  The pictures had puzzled Ada when Preach first put them up. When she asked Preach about it, he said that he had pulled together photographs that would remind himself he would never be as bad as the bad preachers, and never be as big, or good, as the big good preachers. His father had believed preachers picked poor people’s pockets. His mother had believed preachers saved them. Preach had put up the most extreme examples he knew of each of their beliefs, to help remind himself to cut his own path. And he had. At his worst he was a low-paid always friend for every member of his congregation; at best he was God’s messenger on earth. The photographs reminded Ada of a thing she had begun to take for granted about Preach; he was never boring.

  She stood up and looked into one of his file cabinets. She wanted a peek at their banking account and tax files. She shuddered. Everything was there. Every receipt, every bill, every note about them, so much of everything you couldn’t put your hands on anything. A quick glance through two or three drawers of files found six marked “This year’s taxes,” and they each seemed to contain information on at least three different years. There were eight different files on the girls at Georgetown; loan applications, not in numerical order, mixed in with transcripts; directions on ordering graduation pictures; course catalogs; and bills for presciptions of antibiotics (Naomi) and antidepressants (Ruth, briefly). There were even Ada files. One seemed to be inexpensive gifts he was thinking of buying her. She knew this because he had bought some of them: a flight of wildflower honey, a silk headband, a copy of Paul Laurence Dunbar poems with pretty drawings of brown babies. She closed his files, their files. They were too depressing and too many.

  She stared back at his desk. Something was out of place. And most things were not. She touched, for luck, his childhood Bible with his scrawly child handwriting and his crayoned illustrations of his favorite Bible stories. She touched his notes for the next week’s sermon. Everything on the desk seemed familiar—except the phone.

  She looked at the phone. It looked something like Preach’s phone, like the phone Ada knew Preach had, but it wasn’t the phone that had sat all the last night on his nightstand. And it wasn’t new.

  She looked at the speed dial. Ada. Ruth. Naomi. Except he had never called her from this number. He looked at the numbers the phone had called. None were familiar to her, except Delila’s. She put the phone down. She shivered. She wondered if it was his death penalty phone. Some preachers had a special phone for that. Not just for the men on death row, for their families. This could be that.

  It was hard being a preacher’s wife. You didn’t know when you shouldn’t be asking questions because you wouldn’t want to know the answers and the answers had nothing to do with you and would only invade someone’s deserved privacy and perhaps shock you about man’s capacity to be inhuman to man. And you didn’t know when you should be asking questions, even though you didn’t want to know the answer, because the answer had everything to do with your most private life. It was a dilemma.

  When it was your husband’s job to keep some stuff from you, it
was hard to do your wife’s job of making sure your husband didn’t keep too much stuff from you.

  Somewhere along the way Preach and Ada had gotten this all wrong. He told her very little, and she asked him even less. They were both too busy taking care of folk to do any better.

  If the truth be told, Ada was too scared of finding out that Preach was too much like Temple to find out who her husband was. And Preach was too scared of being a preacher with his hand out to be the man his wife needed. But there was nobody to tell that truth.

  So Ada and Preach both suspected the obvious explanation for why there was less joy in their world—that the one they loved didn’t love them, and probably had good reason not to.

  As finding out for sure that Preach didn’t love her would mean no joy at all, Ada kept on keeping on exactly as before, and so did Preach. Particularly the day the vestry was coming for dinner. But they each did it with rapidly increasing frustration and slowly increasing anger.

  Back at the Manse, in her bright kitchen, Ada made soup and baked a caramel cake and spooned pepper jelly onto bread rounds, wondering if there was a way to poison just the portions that would be eaten by the woman she suspected of having an affair with her husband. The other preacher’s wife. The one whose husband had died.

  Except she couldn’t do that. Black women were and will always be spectacularly clean in the kitchen—especially when cooking for somebody who is not family. Black ladies don’t play in the kitchen with food. As a people we have been too proud and too poor to do that.

  As Ada thought about poisoning her possible rival, she shook her head at the book The Help. There is not a self-respecting black woman in the world who would put any part of herself into the food, unless she was doing something hoodoo or voodoo or sacred. We, Ada said silently to herself, don’t throw away or give away parts of ourself—even hair or nail clippings—casually. We don’t throw parts of ourselves at our enemies. Putting potty stuff in a pie? Never! Anybody hoodoo who has worked one day as a maid knows—a lock of discarded hair, a scrape off a dirty toilet, a drop of blood by a sink, can be used to destroy the one it came from. A certain kind of black woman knows that the detritus of life is powerful.