Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  “Lucius Howard, blutter obliterator.”

  “Have Quicken, will conquer.”

  Ada kissed Preach again. She was stunned by the miracle of records that worked. He was high on pride; she was high on relief. Only the sound of the morning “guys” coming for their coffee had kept her from stepping toward him to explore these emotions carnally.

  Ada sped by Queenie’s on the way to KidPlay. Queenie had a surprise for Ada as well.

  “I got some hard-boiled eggs in there. And I picked up some celery Friday.”

  “Thank you, Queenie.”

  “Don’t thank me. Less cooking means more time to play cards and some money to spend on clothes.”

  “And I just may take you shopping.”

  “Now that we not eating so much and cooking so much, I got some extra time.”

  “Imagine that.”

  Ada hugged Queenie and was out the door, rushing to KidPlay. Keshawn’s mama was waiting for her.

  “I found an old Popsicle cart, the kind you pedal. And I remember I’ve got an auntie lives in the country, she got a greenhouse. Tomatoes and greens all year round, and cucumbers. She gonna give me the vegetables, and I’m going to sell ’em, and we gonna split what we get. I was thinking I could sell them here when school gets out.”

  “KidPlay would be honored.”

  “Strictly cash and carry.”

  “Strictly cash and carry and receipts.”

  “No food tax on farm food.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Miz Inez.”

  “Then it’s probably right, but see lawyer Angel.”

  “I’m a food island. I call my truck Keshawn’s Island. He’s my firstborn. Every truck I get, I’m gonna name for one of my babies.”

  Ada, who never cried at school, let tears fill her eyes. Keshawn’s Island tickled her sweet potato orange.

  Ada had been putting off something. She read and reread her body journal, but she hadn’t paid that much attention to her food diary since it told her to eat sitting down. Seeing Preach’s ledgers prodded her to review her own. Even if her diary was going to give her another hard rule.

  Rereading her food diary, one thing became perfectly clear. She needed to drink more cautiously.

  Too much salty bubbly water, too many chai tea treats, and too much red wine. At the beginning it had only been a glass a day, then eventually two, and now it was too often three and occasionally even half a bottle.

  Reading the food journal, Ada decided she would drink very cautiously: no bubbles; no juice; no soft drinks; no food coloring; no corn syrup; no fake sugar; no more than two glasses of wine most days, and never more than three—and as much coffee as she could drink and still go to sleep at night. The food journal made one bend in the road obvious; her road to health and beauty included more caffeine and less alcohol.

  After all the highs of the day, less alcohol was hardly a hardship.

  32

  BATHE TO CALM OR BATHE TO EXCITE: RECIPES FOR BATHS

  WEDDING SEASON WOULD be there before she knew it. Thirty-two weeks into her healthing campaign, nothing Ada had worn in recent wedding seasons, except her beads, bangles, and shoes, fit. And the shoes barely fit. Ada stood naked before her bathroom mirror. The image reflected appeared alien. As she gazed at this picture of her new self, she was overwhelmed by a sense of loss.

  Her body didn’t look like it had looked when she was young, plump and brown, with a tidy triangle of jet-black love fur; it didn’t even look as it had before the diet, immense, imposing, and just extraordinary in that Hawaiian princess, earth mama, sugar mama, blues empress way she had been proud to be.

  This day she looked wriggly and wrinkling, like empty bags. This was not the new she wanted. This was an inferior old.

  According to the Internet, hot baths and cocoa butter would help. Building muscle would help. And she was glad that she loved a man who cared more about the firmness of her opinions than the firmness of her abdominal wall.

  Her ass was still fine and firm and high. Some things simply do not change. When they are the right things, this is very good.

  Baths as a sanity preserver were another of the things that had not changed. A thing she had come this day, this hour, to lean hard into.

  She missed cooking. Or more specifically, as she still cooked, she missed concocting without limits, and passing her concoctions along.

  And she missed dessert, the sweet and froufrou end of a meal that said night had come and night was sweet. She missed giant slices of tall and quivering lemon meringue pie, and she missed wet-with-chocolate, almost pudding-like brownies made with East Nashville chocolate.

  She would find a way to eat these things in community, on occasion, but she needed a bow to tie on the end of her evening.

  Contemplating her wishes: She wanted to play with recipes—freely. She wanted dessert. It came to Ada, like a strike of lightning, that she could create a dessert that she got into, instead of a dessert that got into her. If she could not have Preach or pie, she could create bath recipes—her own bath recipes.

  The first bath she created was nostalgic. She called it “Over and Out.” Its ingredients:

  1 boom box

  1 Purple Rain CD

  1 bundle of fresh rosemary

  1 copy of Cane by Jean Toomer

  I cup forget-me-not flower tea

  A square of dark chocolate

  The second bath she created was “Get Up and Go”:

  1 boom box

  1 Al Green CD

  1 fresh lemon

  1 bunch cinnamon basil

  1 copy of Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis Jr.

  1 piece crystallized ginger

  1 cup ginger tea

  The third bath she created was called “Dove”:

  1 boom box

  1 Bach’s Art of Fugue CD

  Crabtree and Evelyn rose bath and shower gel

  Dried rose petals

  1 volume Emily Dickinson poetry

  The fourth bath she created, she called “Home Truths”:

  1 boom box

  1 CD Aretha Franklin’s Greatest Hits

  1 copy Their Eyes Were Watching God

  1 tall metal “glass” of homemade Lipton iced tea

  1 carton Epsom salts

  The fifth bath she created, she called “Smoke”:

  1 boom box

  1 Jimi Hendrix CD

  Sage to purify the air

  1 cup lapsang souchong Tea

  1 oz smoked salmon, cut into little pieces

  3 cinnamon sticks to throw into the bathwater

  A candle

  A cloth to cover the eyes

  Very hot water

  After five days of hot baths—feeding her nose, feeding her ears, and feeding her skin—Ada realized she had found the best way to feed her Joy wolf. She had only lost 1.7 pounds that week—but it was a particularly tranquil 1.7 pounds. She had been on a five-day spa adventure, and it hadn’t even cost her fifty dollars.

  And she was feeling pretty firm.

  33

  INVENT DNA-BASED CARE PACKAGES THAT WORK FOR YOU AND YOURS

  KNOWING THAT HER father, Temple, was planning a special treat for her, and feeling guilty for all the brownies and caramel cakes that she had sent to Washington, D.C., when the twins had been enrolled at Georgetown University, Ada packed up the ingredients to all the baths (except the boom boxes, which she ordered on Amazon) and sent one box to each daughter.

  The girls would raise their eyebrows at the boom boxes. Ada didn’t mind. IPods get ruined in the bathtub. The girls had killed three with water—all different ways. And boom boxes were cheap. Less than fifteen dollars. Let them raise their eyebrows.

  Thinking about her daughters kept Ada motivated. And it didn’t encourage selfishness, like always thinking about her own health, or nastiness, like thinking about Matt Mason. She thought about her daughters.

  A box to Mississippi, a box to New Hampshire … it had surpr
ised Ada when the girls had decided they wanted to land in very different parts of the country after graduation. It didn’t surprise her when they announced they would pursue the same profession.

  Naomi had wanted to taste a bit more of the Northeast, wanted a closer glimpse of northeastern boarding-school glamour. The only students she had envied at Georgetown had had that particular polish on them. Naomi coveted that shine.

  For Ruth, the icy gloss of the boarding-school kids never intrigued. She wanted the deep and sunny South, the place where her grandpa’s music was born. She wanted to be what her mother was, some kid’s very good chance.

  New Hampshire and Mississippi were the ends of Ada’s earth. One daughter was in a place that was very international, with kids from every state and from every continent. The other was in a county many people living in had never been out of.

  Each of her girls was getting worn down in a different way. Naomi had no privacy. She lived on campus. She got up and had breakfast with her students and ate her other meals with them as well. In the late afternoon she did sports with them before teaching her last class in the dark in the winter and returning to eat with them. Again.

  Ruth had hard days but came home to a sweet apartment, a lovely place on a lovely street, and she was always home before dark.

  Thinking of her girls struggling, Ada wanted to feed them. And she wanted to feed them right. In addition to the bath care package, she would send food—but not the same food, and not the old food.

  To Naomi, who was a serious fat restrictor, she sent a great big box of apples straight from Washington State. To Ruth, down in the Delta, who needed balanced carbs and fats, she sent peanut butter. Ada ground the peanuts herself at the local Wild Oats.

  One got Johnny Appleseed. One got George Washington Carver. Both got a little bit of their mama’s love in the thought. And a bath box.

  Temple had his boat back in the water. He wanted to take Ada on the first spin of the year around the lake. Walking down the pier, Ada put her foot through a rotten wooden plank. Ada and Temple both laughed.

  It was a good laugh. It was good they could laugh, good they could know the problem was the plank, the pier, the rot, the weather. The problem wasn’t Ada was too big. A year before, they wouldn’t have laughed. This day she pulled her foot out of the hole and kept stepping, leaving her daddy to be embarrassed by his slipshod maintenance of the property.

  “Your gals will inherit all this.”

  “You’re sure? Not me?”

  “You might give it to the church.”

  “I might give it to the church.”

  He stepped from the pier to the boat deck first. After he got his footing, he offered her a hand and she was aboard. They didn’t talk as he got the engine started and the anchor up. They tied on life preservers. Temple stood at the wheel and steered them out of the cove. Ada lay on her back, looking up at the sky with the water below her. Soon the house had vanished.

  “When I bought the house, I thought every day would be like this. Turned out your mother didn’t like wide-open spaces.”

  “She liked them better when I was little.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “You ain’t enough to get her over Mag and Glo and Evie.”

  “Don’t be sorry for that.”

  “I’m sorry for that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You whittled down pretty.”

  “I couldn’t get rid of the clutter in the house, so I got rid of my blutter.”

  “Blutter?”

  “Black clutter.”

  “Get the blutter out of the place before you let your little gals see it.”

  “I’m not ashamed to let them see it now.”

  “I am.”

  “I love blutter.”

  “I know. And you gave it up. You a good mama.”

  “I learned from a good mama.”

  “Thank you for saying that.”

  Temple kissed Ada on the top of the head. She stood on tiptoes and kissed his cheek. They zoomed around the lake until the sun began to fall from the sky. It was a good grown-daddy-grown-daughter day.

  Temple had arrived at a place he could tell Ada he was sorry. It had taken him almost too long to get there, but Ada had the patience that allowed him to be just on time.

  Love, Ada thought out on the lake that first spring afternoon, is largely a matter of paying attention and good timing. Like her daddy had said long ago, when a dangerous storm was whipping up the lake and it was hard to get to the pier with the waves pushing the boat away, “It’s an easy jump if you know when to do it.”

  That afternoon Temple tapped the rhythm on Ada’s shoulder, and he sang it out loud, “My gal love to jump, my gal love to jump, my gal jump, NOW.” And Ada jumped, right on time, to the safety of the pier.

  She had been a fortunate girl. It is easy to coordinate time with a loud-singing man.

  They were anchored and shivering and he was playing a harmonica when the first star of the night showed itself. It winked, and Ada did what Ada had long done when she saw the first star of the night on the lake—made a wish.

  She wished it wouldn’t always be her father who made time for her girls on the lake, and that instead her mother would make space for them in the house. She wished she would keep on keeping on letting go of her own clutter, the pounds she had hoarded, to compensate for losing her mother, to shield herself from Preach’s withdrawal, and to simply enlarge the external space she possessed as the internal space she possessed became smaller and smaller. She wished she wouldn’t always have to compensate, shield, and enlarge to find something about herself she loved.

  All the pounds she had held on to had not been hoarding. Some had been out of pure love of a black beauty aesthetic that reveled in bigness. And some of it was the reality that fat makes a mighty fine veil. She hoped she would find a way of retaining a measure of privacy even with the shed pounds. She prayed the loss of her big curves didn’t mean the loss of a certain kind of seclusion.

  Ada had treasured the seclusion fat afforded. And Ada had enjoyed using her body as a hard-to-read symbol. Ada was ready to be done with all that. Her body was not a metaphor or an aide-memoire. It was her body.

  Out on the lake with her daddy, Ada was beyond everything that went into making her brown father’s eyes green, without being beyond his green eyes.

  “Do you still carry two harmonicas in your pocket?”

  “Always when I’m going on a walk with you.”

  They walked up the pier, trading riffs. When she went back into the house to say good-bye to her mother, Bird was in the shower, having just woken up from her long night’s day.

  Temple walked his daughter to the car. When she was behind the wheel, he leaned in for a last hug and a question.

  “How you and Lucius doin’?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You better find out.”

  If Temple was worried, there was reason to worry. Ada was scared.

  34

  DON’T STAY OFF THE WAGON WHEN YOU FALL OFF THE WAGON—AND YOU WILL FALL OFF THE WAGON

  DRIVING BACK TO Nashville, Ada had a sullen mantra. Get on the treadmill, get on the treadmill. But she didn’t. She preferred to think about sailing on the lake and to not think about Preach. For three days Ada didn’t step near the Dayani treadmill, the path around Radnor, or the blocks around her house. Distracted by a strep running through KidPlay, Preach’s mama having a fall, and Dorian getting diagnosed with HPV and ADHD in the same seventy-two-hour period, Ada was falling into old habits: stay up late working, get up early and continue working, work through lunch, then grab whatever was floating around KidPlay for lunch, never stop to drink a single glass of water.

  To top it off, both of her girls were up to their eyeballs in trouble. Naomi in boy trouble in New Hampshire; Ruth with no boy trouble in the Delta. That was part of the trouble of the treadmill. She needed to think and listen, and she did that better
sitting down in a chair close to the phone that still had a cord.

  There was a part of her imagination that was very literal. Talking to her girls at home in a chair or on her bed, connected by a cord, she felt more connected.

  Walking fast on the treadmill, or walking Radnor Lake, or walking the neighborhood, walking and talking on the cell phone, Ada talked more, interrupted more, heard less. Preferring to be a good mother to being a skinny woman and angry at herself for turning that into an either/or proposition, again, she stopped getting on the treadmill.

  She had eaten breakfast. That was a step in the right direction, if not a step on the treadmill. She had eaten breakfast in the car, as she was headed to the nursery school.

  Preach had put a cup of yogurt with almonds and spices in her hand. She didn’t know he could do that. Cook anything that wasn’t barbecue or a fish fry. The surprise excited her. She had stood up on her tiptoes and kissed Preach. That surprise had excited him.

  He had put his arms around her and had kissed her again in response. With his arms wrapped round her, he felt there was distinctly less of her. He felt it, and she felt him feel it. She felt: and still too much. He felt: and when I close my eyes, I miss the curves that don’t pillow me—like something dear snatched away.

  He said to himself, I must get inside her snatch to snatch it back. This startled him. That he would say in his head “snatch,” that he would give her sweet woman parts a name other than the gentle and black “jellyroll” or their private “Eden,” startled and thrilled him.

  He hadn’t known the thrill was gone until it started to come back. Until he told himself what he felt: How hard it is to let her go out the door to help and teach those babies, when I would like to sit down in the nearest kitchen chair, take off her panties, and have her jump on top of me. As he handed her a paper cup of yogurt and got an open-mouth kiss in return, he hoped she could read his mind. Until he was startled by the smallness of her into acknowledging what he had seen in other minutes in other places—times she was headed out the door to walk around the block, on the treadmill—not just that she was losing weight but that he might be losing her. Not for certain, but might be.