Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  And you don’t poison or desecrate, because it would confirm negative expectations.

  A black woman organized enough to get up every morning to take care of her family, who also manages to take care of some other women’s families, is not interested in confirming negative expectations. “That Stockett lady lied on us,” said Ada, right out loud, shaking her head.

  Twenty circles of bread cut later, Ada was sad her emergency kit to ward off boredom could no longer be a sack full of caramel cake slices and pepper jelly sandwiches.

  Night was falling as Preach walked into the dining room. He had come to inspect the table. It was just a door on sawhorses, but he had sanded it down good and stained it prettily, and he had made the sawhorses himself twenty years before. It was a solid, sturdy, level table. Like the chairs around it, which he had also made in his basement carpentry shop, the table had given many good years of service and could give many more.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t sure how many more vestry dinners the table would be called upon to serve.

  His congregants had changed over the years. Some of the vestry lived in big houses with fancy antiques and ten-thousand-dollar rugs. Many no longer fit, or believed they fit, in his handmade, hand-painted chairs.

  Preach folded all six foot five, and at least forty more pounds than when he first made the chairs, into the chair at the head of the table. The room looked good in the candlelight. Still. In the dim guests couldn’t see the dirt in the creases of the floorboards, the streaks on the now mottled finish of the table, the little chips in the gilt of the good china, or the cobwebs and dust in the corners.

  Ada padded into the room and sidled up beside him. He stayed seated but reached around her wide hip to fondle a bit of her belly. She patted his hand until it stopped fondling. Her hand lay flat atop his.

  “You right about dinner at six thirty, not five,” said Preach.

  “You like the flowers, or you think they strange?”

  She had filled the girls’ old fishbowls with blue colored water and floated the head of a big sunflower, harvested from a neighbor’s garden, atop each one.

  “I forgot to bring home the roses from the discount place.”

  “It’s good for the vestry to see we broke,” said Ada, patting his hand. He took this as permission to fondle a bit more of her belly. When she didn’t step away, he took the next second as an opportunity to try to pull her into his lap. Her feet stayed planted. He kissed her arm. She smiled, but she pulled away.

  “Considering the topic of the meeting is my raise?”

  “’Xactly.”

  “Then let’s say I forgot the roses on purpose.”

  “Let’s say that.”

  “I love the sunflowers. They big and bold.”

  She wanted to drop into his lap when he said this, but before she could, he had stood. He had kissed her on top of the head and hoped that she would turn his face toward her like he was the sun and she was a sunflower, but she didn’t. She went into the kitchen to finish getting the dinner ready.

  Alone in the candlelight, annoyed by the withheld kiss and anxious about the impending discussion of his salary, Preach began moving the place cards, situating the women with whom he would enjoy flirting, who would lighten the work of the evening, on either side of him, and the two men who would be the hardest to persuade so that they were flanking Ada. Then he changed the cards back. Ada knew best. And the table was small. Everyone would be talking to everyone. Soon enough.

  Annoyances flashed then vanished at Ada’s dinner table. When the little group—Dr. Willie Angel and her husband, Joel Angel, Esquire; Dr. Inez Whitfield and her husband, James Madison Whitfield; Portia Pierce; and the young attorneys Milton and Susan Hill—got to talking and eating, joy filled the room. Some of it was Ada’s fried chicken. Some of it was the sweet tea spiked with bourbon. Some of it was the shared pride in the growth of the church, two jam-packed services on Sundays. Adults and children packed, scrambling for seats, in the Bible study classes. A paid-for church building, a paid-for parsonage, a popular preacher. Vestry dinners, initiated as a time of brainstorming during a difficult transition when the preacher before Preach had to be ousted and Preach, who had come as an assistant, was raised to be the main and only minister, had become a mutual admiration society.

  When Preach tapped on his glass with his spoon, just as the fried chicken platter was being passed for the second time, everyone but Ada thought Preach was about to make a toast. Ada thought Preach was about to ask about a raise. He surprised everybody. Possibly even himself.

  “I think we need to consider hiring a junior minister.”

  An awkward silence fell on the group as folk searched each other’s eyes and chin sets and mouths for opinions.

  Softly and slowly the talk began again. By the time they got to Ada’s caramel cake, it was clear Preach had the three of five votes he needed to move the plan from the executive committee of the vestry to the larger body. It was also clear that if he pressed the vote, the two voting against him, Joel Angel, his vestry president, and Milton Hill, the wealthiest black lawyer in town, were going to be truly perturbed.

  Preach was not only used to being popular with the vestry; he liked being popular with the vestry. He began backing off the proposal and signaling Portia Pierce, the widowed preacher’s wife, who had quickly gotten very passionate about the matter, to back off as well. He took another tack. He brought up the issue of a raise. When Joel Angel responded to this second matter, Ada got her second surprise of the evening.

  “Preach, we allocated money for your raise, but you insisted we put that money into our elder-care day program.”

  “That was only supposed to be for this year and last year.”

  “Folk are joining our church to become eligible for our elder care. You won’t let us put in a one-year wait for eligibility. You need to dust off a tithing sermon.”

  “I don’t think he has one,” said Milton Hill.

  Laughter erupted at the table. Lack of interest in raising money for the church was considered Preach’s great and only fault by the vestry. The joke in the neighborhood was that they were the only black church in America that didn’t have a building fund. They forgave the fault because he balanced the budget by working so cheap, and without an assistant.

  “And I don’t think Preach really wants an assistant—then you’d have to share your harem,” Portia said, fingering her own snakeskin belt. The bourbon had melted the frost from her.

  The table erupted into more laughter. As Ada served coffee, assisted by Susan Hill, Portia intercepted a cup Susan was taking to Preach and handed it to him herself. Preach’s fingertips grazed Portia’s knuckles in a gesture of thanks before he took the cup. Portia smiled huge and exclaimed, “You so welcome.” Susan and Ada caught each other’s eyes in a “Did you see that?” moment. Ada smiled bigger and broader, as if she hadn’t noticed. Portia, determined to keep Preach’s attention, plowed on, looking pointedly from Susan to Milton Hill as she spoke.

  “I would like to see some of these young two-career fancy families do a little more,” said Portia.

  “Give me some time, and I’m going to make that happen. But we want them to be comfortable in the church first.”

  “Sustained growth, that’s the ticket.”

  “Sustained growth, and we’ve got that.”

  “And a paid mortgage …”

  The talk had returned to the genial babble of a happy church vestry. As Ada cleared away the coffee, she was thinking, No raise, no assistant, no change. She was noting that Milton Hill, the president-elect of the vestry, was inviting Ada and Preach to stay with them in their house down in Seaside, and Preach was saying they would be delighted to join them, as if Ada was going to get anywhere near a beach. As if Ada owned a bathing suit. Willie Angel’s husband, munificent after Preach had backed down so graciously from his play for an assistant, was inviting Preach to come golf with him. They were all so thrilled with their preacher, who always pu
t the church first.

  Ada wanted to kill Preach dead, raise him up, and kill him again. Preferably by strangling him with Portia’s purple snakeskin belt.

  Instead she stood on the porch and waved as the last car, Preach’s, drove off. Then she washed dishes and Swiffered floors, preparing the house for morning, wondering just how hard it would be to tell the twins she was going to divorce their daddy.

  17

  DRINK EIGHT GLASSES OF WATER DAILY

  ADA FOUND MATT Mason on Facebook.

  He was handsome, and he appeared to be divorced. God loved her and was probably Episcopal. She had found Mason on Facebook the very first Sunday she had attended the 7:00 A.M. service at St. Bart’s, over a month after the vestry dinner, the day she hit 199 pounds. Twenty-one pounds down.

  There was gray in Matt Mason’s hair, and he had put on a few pounds, but they had filled him out and made him look prosperous. His fat had not erased anything. Her fat was different.

  Her fat is always different. It was an easy decision not to send him a friend request. It was a hard decision to exit his page.

  Looking at his face, she remembered her own innocence, her first love, the spirit in which she had given her first passionate kisses to his mouth and his cheeks and his closed eyelids. Then Matt Mason had ridiculed her South with some joke about her daddy’s band’s suits and their synchronized dancing, and she had fallen out of love with him as quickly as she had fallen in. A few months later she and Preach were arguing about Their Eyes Were Watching God in an English seminar, and Matt Mason, who was still trying to beg back, was kicked to the curb as trash.

  She wanted her trash back.

  Except Ada couldn’t imagine herself beneath her old beau big, and she was every day imagining herself beneath her old lover, as she was every day imagining her husband ducking around corners with members of the choir, or the vestry, or the community at large.

  She had read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. The twins had given it to her. In it a black woman was married to a white man who wanted her to lose weight. Zadie never seemed to get how delicious big is to the black American woman, pure “d” delicious, not a second best, an exquisite thing.

  Now Ada wanted to side with Zadie. Now Ada believed Zadie was onto something after all. Jealousy was rising in Ada’s heart, and it was jealousy for smaller women like Portia and even Delila. The jealousy was all mixed up in her heart with love and frustration, desire. This strange cocktail of emotion seemed a useful potion in her search for the pounds below 200.

  She had a lot of frustration to work with. Preach’s almost-getting-a-raise and almost-getting-an-assistant. Almost getting to a place where they could thrive, not just survive. Preach almost being at home in bed with her, except he had yet another congregant sick in the hospital to visit. All that almost-getting left her alone and lonely, trying to calm herself with her emergency kits.

  With her iPhone and her iPod, she was ready to take on the world. She wanted a late-night snack. She wanted the comfort of a bowl of ice cream and the excitement of some hot chocolate and crunchy almonds. Instead she put in her earphones, cranked up her diet-comfort playlist, and fell asleep to dream of violets and furs and Billie crooning about cain’t nobody say what love is, ’fore they see and taste the blues.

  Instead of dreaming of violets and furs and Billie Holiday, Ada dreamed of schoolbuses breaking down in the Mississippi Delta and black kids, little black kids and big black kids, almost getting killed—except they didn’t get killed, they got rescued by Ruth, who then drove off laughing in a black Mustang convertible singing loud and off-key a song by the Allman Brothers that had been popular in her high school days, “Ramblin’ Man,” until they drove off the road toward a gigantic magnolia tree. She woke up before they hit—or avoided—the tree.

  She woke up and knew her girls were fine, because she knew if they were not fine, she would feel it in her bones.

  Anything big happened to them, she felt it in her body. That’s how she knew they were virtuous girls, even if they were not celibates. She suspected Naomi and Ruth already each knew more than one man. As ardently as she hoped they never knew four, she hoped they each knew two or maybe even three. Three or four seemed the right lifetime number.

  Five seemed slutty unless you were widowed.

  Slut.

  She could not decide to what degree her choice to put on pounds had been a choice to put herself beyond sex, or rather beyond sex with anyone other than her husband; had been a choice she made because she was afraid of being a slut.

  Had she made use of the fact that he liked largeness to create a chastity belt to which only he had the key? Or was it a movement to accelerate into the future, the wish to be a gunnysack grandma with a lap big enough to ensconce immense broods, which simply arrived too soon in reality?

  When she imagined skinny grandmothers, she didn’t imagine happy grandbabies. She would try to imagine that. Without a picture of that, she didn’t think she would ever make it to skinny.

  When she awoke in the morning, she realized she had been dreaming of skinny grandmothers, and she realized her mother was a skinny grandmother, and that Jarius’s grandmother was another. She also realized she wanted more than the sound of the water putting her to sleep. She wanted the feel of water waking her up.

  She headed to the pool. The Dayani Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center was only blocks from Ada’s house. She only made it to the Dayani treadmill.

  Standing between Ada and the pool was a swimsuit she didn’t own. Ada hit Vell’s during her lunch hour to conquer the obstacle. The obstacle got larger as Ada was approached by a woman who was very, very skinny and blonde and blue-eyed. The woman smiled pleasantly. Ada smiled back.

  “Delta Burke.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Delta Burke, that’s the line you need. She knows how to wrap a curve.”

  The ice-blonde reached in and pulled out a black swimsuit sharply piped in white. Then she grabbed a perfect little swim skirt, also black piped in white.

  “Get the boobs up high and cover the thighs.”

  Ada laughed. “Is that the secret?”

  “Only way to go, to the pool, when you’re a big girl.”

  “Is your mama big?”

  “Was. And my grandma. I’ve been a big girl most of my life.”

  “Did you do the surgery?”

  “Bad hepatitis.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Enjoy the pounds while you got ’em. I used to hate mine.”

  As the woman talked, she started looking through the racks like she was looking for something in particular.

  “I got hep, hating my body. If you ever wanna get skinny, get skinny the right way. I shot heroin to help me not eat. Wanted to be a singer. Thought I had to be really skinny with big fake boobs and fake hair. Now I’m too skinny to swim, I just sink like a stone. This would look good on you, too.”

  “I love the first one.”

  “You want to try it on?”

  “Not really.”

  “It’s gonna work. You try it on at home with your underpants on, and if you don’t like it, bring it back.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Ada pulled out her credit card. She paid the lady and raced back late to KidPlay. Afterward she went straight to the pool.

  In the locker room she pulled off the tags, tugged the suit on, and got in the shower. Slipping tentatively into the water, she swam 1-2-3 laps, doing Ada’s version of an Australian crawl, which centered around trying not to get her hair wet. No luck. Her choppy flails had her hair dripping and her arms tired. She considered floating on her back. Her hair would get completely wet, but she would have a little rest. The idea seemed pleasant. She flipped over. Staring at the high, vaulted ceiling, she worried about all the articles she had read that said that somehow swimming caused people to gain weight, not lose. When Ada caught sight of her reflection in the mirror in the dressing room, she wished she hadn’t looked. Final
ly, she paddled back and forth in the pool for an hour. It felt like the sweetest play. It felt like a massage, it felt like being back in the womb. It did not feel like exercise. It felt better than church.

  She remembered reading, a thousand years ago, Wally Lamb’s hilarious novel about the woman losing weight who swam with her therapist. She remembered that woman losing weight effortlessly, eventually. Ada wanted to get to effortlessly.

  She got out of the pool and sat on the side, her legs dangling down. Hair flowed from her shoulders like brown seaweed. In her swim skirt she felt a new kind of appropriate safe, like she was in a little black tennis dress. She liked how the water felt, evaporating on her skin. A younger woman came in from the dressing room and sat a little too near.

  “Are you trying to lose weight?”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s obvious.”

  “Me too.”

  “You don’t look like you need to.”

  “Warm water’s good for swimming in when you need to lose weight.”

  “Good to know.”

  “But what’s really important is drinking eight glasses of water a day. I’ve lost forty pounds drinking water.”

  Ada wanted to say thank you, but the girl shot into the water and started her laps. Ada was thinking about eight glasses of water and how important it was to cover the basics. And she was thinking there were coaches on every corner.

  Looked like God was busy on her behalf, now that she had started looking for healthing miracles.

  18

  EAT SITTING DOWN

  THE SCALE SAID 196. One pound up. There was a problem. Ada didn’t have time to worry about it. She had a before-school parent meeting. A volunteer teacher was threatening to quit because one of her parents was threatening to get her fired. She ate her yogurt with almonds and spices and got a move on—but it was a disappointed move on.