Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  “Honey my child, that is black and happy.”

  “No, Mama, that’s black and transcendent.”

  “You try my quick fix, I’ll try yours, both yours.”

  “Me too.”

  “Me three.”

  “All I know for sure, you girls got your mama through fifty fast minutes on the treadmill.”

  22

  ADD A ZEN EXERCISE: HOOPING, WATER JOGGING, WATSU, AND YOGA

  LATER, NOT THAT day but the next week, Ada popped into a salon called Escape. The twins had told her about it, and she listened to her daughters. A nail tech named Nikki put Lincoln Park After Dark on her hands, then changed it to You Don’t Know Jacques. Ada left Escape energized.

  She had needed it. Ada was exhausted with healthing. She had more to do and less time to do it in. Thinner didn’t offset all the hard of that. Some, but not all. What offset a little more was the quick lift of the polish change.

  Maybe she was going to like the primping part of healthing. She was staring down at You Don’t Know Jacques when she resolved to make healthing more playful, less like a job.

  The treadmill and swimming laps couldn’t be her only exercise. She headed back to the pool. Something about water jogging appealed.

  She had heard somewhere that racehorses with injured legs run in the water, and it made sense to her that something that would be good for a one-ton animal with fragile legs would be good for her. She liked the fact the water took all the weight and stress from her knees and her ankles. She liked doing the same thing over and over again—but she didn’t like getting wet. And wearing a swim cap was breaking off her hair. And the chlorine dulled her polish, and she hated strangers seeing any of her body in a bathing suit—even if she had found a perfect little swimming tent dress, black piped with white.

  You had to get out of the thing in public or drive home soaking your car seat or remember to put a big black trash bag on the car seat and drive home sitting on it, feeling a little too much like trash.

  She was thinking of all of this as she pedaled in the pool. In the middle of Ada’s workout a lithe young thing with a black pixie cut and green eyes slipped into the pool and started swimming laps. She had seen the girl before. The girl went fast. Faster than anyone else Ada had seen swim in the Dayani pool. Ada thought once she had probably been on a swim team. She wondered if she had webbed toes like Michael Phelps.

  Thirty more minutes passed. The girl was still swimming, but slower, and Ada was jogging faster. One of the things she liked about water jogging was, she could do a lot of it fairly easy. She was worried about the fairly easy part. The nymph was now sitting on the side of the pool, hitting one side then the other of her head, shaking the water out of her ears.

  Ada wondered how she looked to the girl. In the middle of the pool, water jogging, she expected she looked like she was stranded and treading water, like she had fallen overboard from some large vessel and was waiting to be rescued. Or that’s how she would look if she looked like how she felt, with the green-eyed fit girl staring at her.

  Don’t be paranoid, Ada said to herself. The green-eyed girl isn’t staring at you. But she was.

  “You’re the twins’ mother?”

  “Yes.” Ada was remembering that she had met the girl. Somewhere, Ada had heard her voice before.

  “Ever give lessons?” Ada asked.

  “All the time.”

  “Ever give them to out-of-shape elderly people?”

  “Tuesdays and Thursdays at four. But if they stay in my class, they aren’t out of shape long.”

  “Maybe I should try it.”

  “We’re strictly a sixty-five-and-up class. You’ve got to be old enough to have a grandchild my age, even if you don’t have one. I love playing granddaughter. I kick out the young-old. They scare me.”

  “Scare you?”

  “People new to being old are a pill.”

  “People new to being old?”

  “Folks in their fifties, early sixties, they’re sad about not being beautiful and scared of being sick and scared of running out of money before dying. Oldie goldies are smug. They beat everybody else out. I like that. They feel lucky, and a lot of them want their luck to rub off on you.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “I’ve got a mother and three aunts.”

  “And no grandparents.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “You idealize old folks.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Could you teach me to swim laps?”

  “No.”

  “Because I’m fifty?”

  “Because I think you would like hooping.”

  “Hooping?”

  “Like hula-hooping, but with special weighted exercise hoops.”

  “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “A bunch of girls did the whole marathon hooping.”

  “And you think I would like it?”

  “I’ve got this big, heavy, slow hoop called the White Cadillac. You would love it.”

  “No one’s ever suggested that exercise to me before.”

  “I saw you at church, in the baby care. The way you had that baby on your hip, rocking it, I said to myself, She is a born hooper.”

  “You saw me at church?”

  “Yeah, C.J. brought me.”

  “Sweet C.J.! Where would I get a weighted hoop?”

  “There’s a place in East Nashville called Hoop-a-Rama—they can set you up with a custom hoop and with lessons, and you can do it in your own clothes.”

  “I am loving this water, but the water isn’t loving me. It’s hard on my hair, my skin, and my cottage-cheese thighs.”

  “You were born to hoop, Mamacita.”

  “Hoop-a-Rama?”

  “Find an exercise that makes your soul feel playful.”

  “What brought you to the church?”

  “I’m making a documentary on your husband.”

  “What brought you to Dayani?”

  “Stalking you a little. Can’t understand a man without understanding his woman.”

  All of a sudden Ada was all over goose bumps. This could be her. This sweet girl with firm thighs and green eyes. This adoring thing. But then the girl stood to grab her towel, and Ada saw just how flat her ass was, and she couldn’t help but think, Preach would never pick that. And, This child is too sweet to be talking to me if she’s sleeping with my husband. Then she thought, I haven’t seen my goddaughter, Thea, in a good little while. And except for the accidental meeting at Radnor, I haven’t seen C.J. lately. She thought all that and decided to get out of the water.

  23

  DON’T BE AFRAID TO LOOK CHEAP—IN RESTAURANTS

  THE LUNCH BUNCH met on the last Friday of the month. Ada hadn’t planned to go, but her encounter earlier in the week with her green-eyed stalker had left her needing a fix of her favorite older women—and they were always good for a few Black History Month ideas.

  Black History Month was always a joy and frequently a trial at KidPlay. How to tell the story of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to three-, four-, and five-year-olds without telling the story of slave ships and beatings or, at the other extreme, making slavery seem like fun in the sun?

  Usually Ada settled on talking about Africa before the slave trade, or modern Africa, and talking about African Americans, not Afro-America, focusing not on the civil rights workers and abolitionists who she deeply admired but on artists and athletes. She had created a little series of paired biographies the five-year-olds adored: Before there was, there was. Like, before there was Michael Jordan, there was Earl the Pearl. Or before there was Venus Williams, there was Althea Gibson. Or before there was Barack Obama, there was Adam Clayton Powell.

  With the twos and threes, Ada focused on old playground chants and hand-clapping games and spirituals, “Miss Mary Mack” and “Down Down Baby” and “Wade in the Water” and “This Little Light of Mine”—parts of black history being lost to basketball court reshuffles of
the latest hip-hop into jump-rope and hand-clap chants. Ada worked hard, making sure all her my babies had a songbook full of tradition each February.

  Just now, outside her window, she could hear Bunny screeching loud enough to be heard through the glass, a gleeful, “I am the sugar in the plum!”

  It made Ada happy to hear that. Early in the week Bunny had told Ada, “I ain’t pretty.” Ada had tried to distract Bunny with a mini grammar lesson, “You ain’t ugly or oogly, either. You are pretty. Say it loud, ‘I am pretty.’”

  Bunny just smirked and said, “I am Bunny,” leaving Ada to be pricked for the thousandth time by the reality that vision is an assaulted sense for American girls in general and African American girls in big-time particular.

  It shamed Ada to recall how ashamed she had been, somehow, every time she looked at angular Marcia Brady from The Brady Bunch, with her straight blonde hair.

  “I’m not Buffy, from Family Affair or The Vampire Slayer. I’m not Clarice. I’m not Madonna. I’m not Elly May Clampett. And Bird’s not Grace Kelly or Jackie Kennedy. We better,” Ada whispered to herself, but it stuck in her throat like a lie.

  So many icons of femininity that burned Ada’s eyes like lye soap, washing out all appreciation of Ada’s beauty and much appreciation of her mother’s bronze, well-curved and deeply waved presence.

  She had gone over the territory in so many adult Sunday-school classes, in so many book groups, at too many barbecues and fish fries to count. We are taught to think ourselves ugly. Eyes are an assaulted sense. We are taught to behave by spankings and whippings. Touch is an assaulted sense. We are taught we should not smell, or we smell wrong. Smell is an assaulted sense. We listen to songs that call us bitches and ’hos and tell us how to give blow jobs. Hearing is an assaulted sense.

  Taste, not so much. This was an Ada idea, and so far she hadn’t dared tell it. As far as Ada could figure, taste was the main unassaulted sense. Assaults against the tongue may have been attempted. When you give a family pig intestine to eat, there’s a chance you want them to eat shit. When you give a family a pig foot to eat, anybody whose seen a stinky pigpen knows there’s a chance you want the family to eat shit. As a woman Ada didn’t eat chitterlings and pig feet often, but as a child Ada had loved her some chitterlings and pig feet. Remnant food. And she hadn’t eaten shit. Brown ladies know how to clean the intestines and the feet carefully, how to get rid of the shit and turn the offal into a delicacy. Taste is good.

  “I am the sugar in the plum!” Bunny called out loud again. Ada stuck her head out the window and yelled, “You go girl.” All the other little girls nodded in assent.

  The Lunch Bunch could not get over Ada. Watching her week by week, at first, they hadn’t noticed the slight changes, but this day, their first lunch at an eco-friendly restaurant on West End Avenue, they noticed.

  When they got to the table, they would not let her sit down. Inez made her turn around slowly while they watched.

  “What have you been doing?”

  “I’m on the Jack Sprat diet.”

  “The Jack Sprat Diet?”

  “Jack Sprat could eat no fat and his wife could eat no lean. Between the two they licked the platter clean. What if both Jack Sprat and his wife were skinny—because each was eating what was right for them? We see the illustrations in children’s book of the skinny Jack Sprat and his fat wife. What if they both were skinny? The DNA diet is about figuring out if you’re supposed to eat like Jack Sprat or Mrs. Jack Sprat or Goldilocks.”

  “Goldilocks?”

  “Typical European American girl who needs balanced carbs and fats—i.e., plain low calories.”

  The thinnest woman at the table piped up. “I think the trick is to eat slowly. You young people gobble. You eat so fast, your stomach doesn’t have time to tell your mind it isn’t hungry. Back in the old days, back in the country, we stretched the meal out, first, seconds, thirds, we didn’t pile up plates, we didn’t put anything on the plate we didn’t know we wanted to eat. The goal was to get everybody full, but just full, and the way to do it was to stretch out the meals, in time, so the stomach could tell the brain when to stop. When my grandmother had big hungry men to feed, and not much to feed them, first she would pass around a plate of biscuits. Then she would wait thirty minutes before she passed anything else, then she would pass some hot soup, maybe chicken and dumplings, and wait thirty more minutes to pass a little ham. All the time we would be laughing and talking and filling up on catching up. By the time she gave us dessert, all we needed was what she had—a loving spoonful.”

  Being that it was a skinny old-folk rule, Ada adopted it immediately.

  “They used to tell us to chew every bite twenty-three times. I could barely get a single bologna sandwich down in a thirty-minute lunch hour, chewing that slow.”

  “But that bitty sandwich filled you up, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, indeed, yes indeed.”

  Ada started to laugh. She really was going a little crazy.

  “Do you mean I’ve got to chew like a cow not to look like a cow?”

  “You must chew like a cow to look like a heifer, just so.”

  The body was full of little ironies that Ada was starting to love a little. She loved them particularly well in the company of such a diverse group of black female bodies.

  Ada had only been a member since her twins left for college, but she truly believed membership in the informal club of about thirty rather interesting and down-to-earth black women, most of whom did not attend her husband’s church, whose children were not friends with her children, was a soul-sustaining association.

  She needed those. She loved the Links and the Altar Guild, but she grooved on the Lunch Bunch. The Lunch Bunch was a Joan Elliot (Nashville’s straight black Gertrude Stein) legacy, and it was a segregation legacy. When restaurants really became desegregated in Nashville in the 1970s, the Lunch Bunch was, in part, a way to buffer the fear of checking out restaurants where, as any of the members would have put it, “We didn’t know if we were welcome.”

  The format was simple. The hostess picked a venue and issued an invitation. Everyone paid for themselves.

  And there lay a problem. Ada did not want to appear cheap, but she wanted to portion control. She wanted, for the sake of diet, to order an appetizer for her main course, and she wanted to drink plain tap water because it had less salt. And she didn’t want an appetizer or a dessert. And she knew if she ordered like that, everyone would think she was broke. That it was in bad taste. That she was acting like some black person who did not know how to act when she went out.

  The Lunch Bunch ordered three courses. And drinks. The Lunch Bunch was sharp, was bon vivant, was anything but frugal. The bold Creole cry, Laissez les bons temps rouler—Let the good times roll—was the Lunch Bunch motto.

  The Lunch Bunch went to new restaurants, or to old restaurants offering something new. This day they chose a new eco-friendly place. The tables were made out of bamboo. All the fish was fresh catch. As much as possible, things were literally and figuratively green. Ada was impressed and distracted.

  As the waiter went around the table, taking orders, Ada listened as women ordered appetizers and main courses and drinks, even though most were staying away from the very tasty bread basket.

  When she had eaten with a group of white women at the same table, once pleading the cause of KidPlay and another time against food deserts, many had asked for sauces on the side and dressings on the side; many had split plates, proudly, or without thinking; many had ordered just one course, all in maintenance of great figures and great checkbooks.

  When the waiter approached, she had made her decision: an appetizer portion of scallops as her main course, and a small salad without dressing before.

  “Will that be all?”

  “Yes.”

  “When would you like me to serve the scallops?”

  “With the main courses.”

  “Certainly.”

  Just before t
urning to the next customer, the waiter winked at her. Ada didn’t think it could be so, but it seemed his pale face and dark lashes winked and flashed a smile—and if she read it right, it was a smile of encouragement.

  One of the older ladies near her sucked her teeth and glared, implying that while Ada might have had some home training, she did not have the sense God gave her to know how to go out into the luxury world as a black woman wanting respect.

  Ada lifted her chin higher and pretended she was talking to Joan Elliot. “I see no reason in the world I need to order food I can’t afford to eat, from a caloric perspective, to prove to white people I don’t know that I can afford to order anything I want, from an economic perspective. If rich white women can come here and order green salad without dressing and the governor’s water, I can too. We can too. I just did it. And some of you look like you need to be doing it with me. Being afraid to look cheap in restaurants is making us fat, and I don’t want to be fat. Anymore. I don’t want to pay for food I’m not going to eat, or eat food just because I paid for it.” Then she silenced herself by sipping water.

  It was a vast improvement over silencing herself with a buttered roll.

  The woman who had glared at Ada looked shocked. Ada herself looked shocked. If she had been nibbling on one of the excellent flatbread sticks or sipping on the herbal tea, she might have swallowed back down all these truths more politely. It occurred to her that eating and drinking was a soft muzzle.

  The dowager dragon who served as club president had put the glass of sweet tea she had held to her lips during Ada’s outburst back down on the table. The table went silent.

  “I’ve been waiting ten years for you to say something that wasn’t what the preacher’s wife, what the First Lady, was s’posed to say. Next meetin’ sit by me,” said Madame President.

  “She’s going to keep sitting by me!” said Inez.

  “Another polite black woman found her voice,” said the vice president, seconding the emotion.

  “We’ve spent a quarter century celebrating that we could spend money in white restaurants; let’s spend the next twenty-five years saving money in black banks and investing money in black businesses. How ’bout that?” chimed another member.