Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  She didn’t think she could bear to know the precise number.

  Like she couldn’t bear to know if Preach was cheating, or with whom. There was some funny—or not-so-funny—stuff going on. He’d bought a new car. He’d lost weight. He had a new haircut. He was gone all the time. He never wanted to have sex. And now he wanted to put a shower in his office, and he wanted the congregation to pay for it. He had to be cheating. And he had to have lost his mind. But she didn’t have proof. She had suspicions.

  For years he had adored her, and she had adored him. And then they hadn’t. She tried to remember the last time she and her husband had had sex. It would have been a holiday. One of the birthdays. Valentine’s Day. Their anniversary. There were years they only had sex six times.

  And there were years they’d had sex six days a week, sometimes two or three times a day. Twenty-five years of feast and famine.

  And every day of them faithful. At least on her part. Always. Good marriages are not open. Good women do not cheat. Ada was a good woman. And she was allowing herself to be inspired, uplifted, pulled forward, by the possibility of flirting with, then doing more than flirting with, Matt Mason.

  She wished her sisters were still alive. Glo, and Mag, and Evie weren’t with her anymore. If they were, they would be near to seventy. Glo and Mag barely saw fifty-five; Evie, twenty years older than Ada, just made sixty. Her mama said, “Evie went to take care of the babies.”

  Ada wondered how many lovers, if any at all, her sisters had had. Big and born to boss, Evie had been a man magnet. But not one of her sisters had ever said anything to Ada about tiptoeing into cheating situations, or if they had even known anything about it.

  Ada wanted to know something about it. She shocked herself by smiling as she contemplated the fringes of the possibilities.

  Ada had never been with another man. It was now or never—this one or no one.

  She already had a dispensation—of sorts—for Matt Mason. Preach thought she had slept with Mason before she and Preach had met, and had already “forgiven her for it.” Except she hadn’t actually slept with Matt Mason. Matt Mason was unfinished business.

  Unfortunately, Matt Mason liked the kind of woman she used to be, small with big breasts and a big, but not too big, booty. Truth be told, that was Ada’s favorite shape too. Or had been. Till she married Preach and started liking great-big.

  Preach thought big was sexy. His for-real drill sergeant daddy was forty the day his only son was born to a country girl who had a little bit of meat on her bones and hailed from a corner of Arkansas time forgot. Even though Preach was born in 1960, just in time to be Queenie’s first-anniversary present to Sarge, Preach was old-school.

  Matt Mason was something else. He was western. He was international. He was a black man not rooted to the South, not dripping in blues, or blues transported and transformed in the North into sweet soul music. Matt Mason was jazz and funk and hip-hop. He was spare and spacious and modern. He was Miles Davis in Paris, he was Serena Williams at Wimbledon.

  Matt Mason was raised in Colorado by his born-Negro parents, black professors, who sent him to nearly lily-white public schools. He took naps beneath a quilt lovingly made from old protest T-shirts featuring Che Guevara and Stokely Carmichael and a raised fist. Matt Mason rocked the New Black Aesthetic. After graduating, with Ada and Preach, from Hampton University, he went to UC Berkeley for graduate school. Having lived most of his adult life in Seattle teaching at one U, he now lived in Los Angeles teaching at another. He practiced capoeira, a Brazilian fighting art developed by slaves, almost like a religion. He liked skinny women.

  Preach dismissed Mason as a “colored internet-ual” or a “wonky black nerd.” Ada didn’t dismiss Matt Mason. She needed him.

  Ada was scared. And Ada was woman enough to know that the only thing that always conquers fear is real good loving.

  For years Ada had feared four things: blindness, death, leg loss, and clutter. Mag and Evie and Glo—Ada had lost them all to “the sugar.”

  “One out of four black women over forty-five has diabetes.” Some white woman had spat that statistic at Ada at a cocktail party, and it had terrified her.

  Ada didn’t want to be one of the afflicted women. And yet somehow she was small the day she buried her first sister, and she was large by the time she buried her third.

  Some of it was that her mama went chasing her father down Whisky Road after burying her third daughter, and started pretending she wasn’t Ada’s mother. Her mother was still alive, but Ada was an orphan.

  Ada didn’t blame her mother. Ada put on a bit more fat, like she was putting on big-girl clothes, or pulling up her socks, and got on with it. Soon enough, Ada was proud of being one of the large ladies.

  Large ladies ran the church. Large ladies ran the neighborhoods. She knew down in her bones part of the reason she was as big as she came to be was that she wanted to be. She admired great big women. When she was small, she had coveted their authority, their beauty, and their significance. Then she got some for her own damn self.

  Now large worried her—two ways to Sunday, twinned ways to Sunday. If she stayed large, her daughters were more likely to get large. And scared as she was of diabetes, she was six times more scared of her daughters getting diabetes.

  For reasons bigger than getting back at your husband, or being afraid of blindness, Ada needed to want a man who liked skinny women.

  So she did. She invited herself to want Matt Mason. At fifty, Ada had thirty years behind her of only giving her body to one man, and one man only. Now she had too few or too many, but certainly not the right number, of years of giving her body to that same one man ahead of her. She wanted to stray. Once. At least.

  She didn’t want to go to her grave not knowing the difference between her man and men. She didn’t want to lead her daughters to Sugarland, or Strokeland, or even just Babyand-NoManland.

  She would shift herself into a more helpful shape. She had shifted shape before. She was not a complete diet virgin. In the past, she had tried to use her willpower. Ada had a lot of will-power. She would pick a diet, almost at random, and she would stick to it almost perfectly, for a week or maybe two. When it didn’t work, she would stop abruptly, eat something to comfort herself in defeat, think about big Botero sculpture-women and Hawaiian princesses, and wonder if society wasn’t just conditioning her into thinking she should be smaller when she was meant to be large.

  Except she wasn’t sure she was meant to be large. And she knew she wasn’t meant to be suspicious. But she was both.

  She wrote down four names. She knew her husband, and she knew their world. One of the names made her sick. One of the names made her want to jump off the roof. One of the names made her want to cry. And one made her scratch her head and shrug. She inked over the names.

  She would use what she had to get what she wanted. She would look like the kind of woman who could find out her husband was cheating and not have half the world believe, even if it wasn’t true, that her body was the reason. She’d be somebody the prospect of having to go on a date wouldn’t devastate. Be a body less likely to go blind or lose a leg. Be a body that was less likely to orphan or burden her daughters. Capture Matt Mason. Sin. Confess—to God, not her husband. Return to her marriage recommitted.

  Ada had a plan. She didn’t know the details yet, but she had an intended destination, Fitland, and some good reasons to get there, Naomi and Ruth; and as far as she was concerned, that was a plan.

  Having a plan, even a crazy, not fully formed plan, let Ada breathe deeper if not easier.

  Reality had Ada flummoxed. Reality had her scared. Reality had her boxed in. She had never had another lover, and she was afraid Preach was cheating. Her girls were getting plump, and she was getting fatter. Her long gaze into the bathroom mirror had revealed a pretty brown and beached whale.

  3

  WEIGH YOURSELF DAILY

  THERE WAS A scale in her bathroom. As she awoke Ada thought about th
at. She had never stepped on it. She defended herself, to herself, by remembering it was a fairly new scale. Maybe just over a year old.

  Her husband got on it every day. He watched his weight. And the congregants watched his muscular body, some of them with tongues hanging out. Just out of his wife’s earshot, the congregants called Lucius, Luscious.

  Even before she started gaining weight, Ada had cringed when she heard them call him that. Preach tried to get them to call him Lucky instead of Luscious, but Ada suspected he secretly lapped up the praise.

  Preach said weighing every day, not once a week or never, was the key to losing weight. He never said it to her—he never talked about weight with Ada or the girls—but she had heard him saying it to male congregants battling midlife bulge. Up to this moment Ada had disbelieved him. It was against the common diet wisdom. Slowly, this day, Ada reluctantly acknowledged the obvious: the common approach wasn’t working for the common woman. As her husband’s approach was working for him, and clearly whatever she was doing wasn’t working for her, she decided to put Rule 1 into practice and change things up.

  She laughed out loud. Maybe, she thought, I can just do the opposite of everything I have been doing and lose weight. She liked that idea.

  She also liked the idea of following a leader. She would steal a few plays from her husband’s book, starting with weighing herself every day and ending with straying. Or not. She pulled a Post-it block off her nightstand and wrote, “Rule 3: Weigh yourself daily.”

  It was easy to write the rule down. It was hard to even want to get up and walk over to the scale. Easier to whisper the lie that her body screamed how big it was, what she needed to do. She didn’t need to see a number.

  Right now her bones were telling her—particularly the little ones in her feet and the round ones in her knees and whatever ones there were that made up the small of her back—that she was carrying too much weight. The question was, how much?

  It was enough so that she was starting to feel like she had heartburn when she was lying down. Enough so her bra straps were starting to dig into her shoulders, leaving ridges. Enough so she feared getting on a plane because she was worried the belt would not easily get around her. She knew it would, eventually, but the thought of having to tug it and fiddle with it in public kept her grounded.

  She wanted to fly up to see her daughter in New Hampshire. She wanted to fit easily behind the steering wheel on the drive to Mississippi. Naomi was in Exeter, New Hampshire, teaching high school; Ruth was near Clarksdale, Mississippi, teaching kindergarten.

  Naomi’s challenges were dealing with very spoiled, high-strung kids who were overmedicated and self-critical.

  Ruth’s challenges were dealing with kids who were underdiagnosed, often not given the medicine prescribed, and who best knew how to behave if they were threatened by a beating with a board called a paddle—which Ruth didn’t use.

  They both wanted their mama to “Come see my class!”

  She got out of bed and walked toward the scale. It was on the floor under a towel cabinet. She walked right up to the cabinet and pulled the scale out from under it with her toes. She thought about stepping on it—then she thought of a better idea. She moved toward the toilet.

  She emptied herself of all that she could empty herself of in the toilet, then went to the sink and washed her hands. She put on her contact lenses. As she did, she wondered how much her glasses weighed. She went back to the toilet. Remembering something she had once read about high school wrestlers preparing to make weight, she went back to the toilet and spat a few times. It seemed likely every time she spat, she was throwing off at least an ounce. She wasn’t sure but she was hopeful. If she had been wearing any jewelry, she would have taken that off. She wasn’t, so she didn’t. And she was too early-morning tired to shave her legs or armpits, and she didn’t think that could make much difference anyway.

  All there remained for her to do was pull the white nightgown off from over her head and make herself a promise.

  She promised: I’m going to step on this scale every day until I see a number I like. If I ever want to be not stepping on this scale every day, I’m going to have to get down to it. She pulled off her nightgown.

  Ada stepped on the scale. It took a moment for the number to show, then it was there: 220. Two hundred and twenty pounds, and she was five foot two. She had a hundred pounds to lose.

  At 220 pounds and fifty years old, the future was not a long road. No, sir. If she didn’t do something, she would be dead, and not a pretty corpse.

  The image of her great big self squeezed into an itty-bitty, ladylike casket made her cackle. She finally understood why her sisters had insisted on being cremated. She had thought it was because they didn’t want to waste money. Now, imagining herself squeezed into a black dress and squeezed into a regular coffin, she got it: they were too proud to be squeezed into a regular or lolling about in an extra-wide coffin.

  She stepped off the scale and put her nightgown back over her head. Then she took it back off. It was time for her shower. For a moment she thought of taking it with her gown on. A moment later the gown was back off. Then on.

  She wondered if this was the beginning of crazy or senility or just another strange day in perimenopause land.

  Then she figured out what was wrong. Two hundred and twenty was an unblinding bright light of reality. Everything looked different. She turned off the shower light. Without the electric light her shower was dim even in the daytime. Dim didn’t help quite enough. Two-twenty had not just enhanced her vision, it had enhanced all of her perceptions. What she couldn’t see, she could feel: she was no longer the firm-feeling woman she had once been.

  Ada winced. “Could have been” were the words that killed men. “Used to be” were the words that killed women. I used to be young. I used to be beautiful. I used to be wanted. Soaping her flab, Ada was thinking, I used to be a firm-feeling woman.

  Then she stopped thinking about her body and started thinking about my babies.

  My babies. Not her twins, my babies. She had forty-three of them—all the little people enrolled in KidPlay, day care. My babies. Some of their mamas were Ada’s my babies, too. “What will it mean for them if I lose this weight?” Ada wondered out loud as the water whushed down on her round brown bigness.

  Most of her my babies called her Ms. Preach. But some of them called her Bigmamada. Wasn’t a week went by at KidPlay some child didn’t crawl into her lap and make her breasts the crying pillow they could rise from, smiling. Her fat might be missed at KidPlay.

  She would prepare the kids to miss her fat. Her fat was going.

  Turning off the water and wrapping herself in a towel that didn’t quite get all the way round her, Ada wondered who was going to start preparing Preach. Then she got out of the shower and went down in search of her husband before heading out to KidPlay.

  4

  BE A ROLE MODEL

  THE CHURCH WITH its steeple and cross was next door to Ada’s house. Separating the buildings were a small basketball court and what had once been a vegetable garden but was now overgrown with an assortment of perennial flowers planted by various Sunday school classes over the years. Immediately surrounding Ada’s house—called “the Preacher’s House” by most, called the Manse by the oldest members of the church—was a weedy green lawn with an aging play fort and swing set.

  Where the grounds of the Preacher’s House ended and the grounds of the church began was unclear. On bad days Ada said it was at the paint on the walls of her bedroom. Everything after that belonged to the church. On real bad days Ada said she lived, and loved best she could, in the church. On those days it troubled Ada that she and Preach didn’t own even a little tiny home of their own.

  Preach’s office was on the top floor of the church, above a meeting hall adjacent to the sanctuary. It was originally designed to be a large, open reception area that accommodated three desks, file cabinets, and storage, with a door to an inner, more private of
fice for the minister.

  Preach had different ideas. As pastoral counseling was at the center of his ministry and Preach liked to spread out, he replaced two of the three desks with sofas and added a few more soft chairs. He put in a kitchenette, a small refrigerator with freezer, two hot plates, a microwave, and a coffee machine. He used the outer office for meeting with his congregants, and his vestry, and the various groups from the community who were working with the church—from the Boy Scouts to the Nashville Business Alliance.

  Preach wrote his sermons on the big desk in the big room. He used the inner office for his most private files, praying, and worrying. Nobody but Ada was allowed in the inner office.

  And it was here that Ada expected to find Preach, to start talking a little about the upcoming vestry dinner, to see if he knew if his mother Queenie needed anything special, and to grab a kiss before she set off for work just a little late. Except he wasn’t there. It didn’t matter anyway. In one corner of the inner office was a door to a small bathroom equipped with sink and toilet. This presumably was where Preach wanted to add the shower. Seeing that door killed the desire for the kiss. Especially after seeing the scale read 220.

  She scribbled a tentative menu, a grocery list, and a honey-do list for Preach before remembering she had to pick up Queenie’s dry cleaning on her way into KidPlay. She left the honey-do list on his desk, then jumped in the Tahoe.

  All the way into work she was biting her bottom lip, thinking about the kiss she didn’t want. That and the fact she had picked the perfect day to be late.

  Ada practiced a kind of tough love in her home. At KidPlay she practiced soft care as she rotated through the classrooms, subbing for teachers taking a planning hour or out sick for the day in between raising the funds that kept the lights on and filling out the forms that kept the day care accredited. Between increasing demands for service and decreasing federal funding, she could afford to pay herself precious little.