Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  A hundred times a day she told herself, My babies are going to make it. Two hundred times a day the kids did something that told her for sure she was right: drew a picture, said three new words, counted to ten, counted to one hundred.

  The parents made it harder to hope. Too many just out of jail. Too many too young to be pregnant again. Too many gang tattoos. She wanted to be late to work this day. She wasn’t ready to see any of the big folk with their big mistakes the same day she saw 220, her big mistake. Expecting drop-off to be over as she pulled her giant old Tahoe into the KidPlay parking lot, she was disappointed.

  Most of the day at KidPlay, the full-grown women were outnumbered by small fry. But twice a day, at drop-off and pickup, mothers, grandmothers, aunties, and female neighbors (paid or persuaded) swarmed the school. Twice a day the building with tiny chairs and tiny desks and low shelves and tiny toilets with pull-up steps turned into an Amazonia.

  The profusion of large bodies—some fat, some just tall, some “grea’big,” tall and fat—made all the tiny hands look tinier than they looked during the other hours of the day. There were some skinny and some tiny grown women who came to the school—but they were a distinct minority.

  Most days the women who showed up were so large, Ada seemed a woman of less-than-average size. Twice a day Ada got a fix of the lie: I am not so large. I am a smaller-than-normal large black lady.

  Today she didn’t want a fix of that lie. She got it anyway.

  Bunny (one of her two favorite my babies; the other was an actual infant, Jarius) arrived late and immaculately clean—new shoes, hair parted and greased and beaded and perfectly braided—except for the crumbs of Egg McMuffin on her face and an Egg McMuffin in her hand.

  Bunny’s mother pushed in the door with her behind; her hands were overfilled with a cardboard box top full of cup-cakes. Four inches of stiff chocolate frosting was piled tall on each one. Atop the frosting gleamed a cherry.

  Ada smiled. Bunny smiled back, proud. Her mother, in pastel green size-4X scrubs, smiled prouder. Usually Bunny’s mother’s face was wired and smileless at drop-off.

  “Looks like it’s somebody’s birthday,” said Ada.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” said Bunny.

  “You’re gonna eat those all by yourself?” asked Ada.

  “Three or four. Maybe F-I-V-E!” said Bunny.

  A wave of nausea struck Ada. Years of close and unpredictable encounters with farts and beating welts had given her a quick-descending, cheerful-yet-serious blank stare. It descended. She put her hand to her face. She held it together.

  “Happy Birthday, Bunny. You get to pick the story for naptime today.”

  Bunny knew what she wanted. She and her mama had spent Saturday morning at the library.

  “Amazing Grace.”

  The choice put a crook in Ada’s smile. Grace was athletic. Her mama called Bunny “Miss Priss.”

  “Have you read Amazing Grace?” asked Ada.

  “Saved it for my birthday!” said Bunny.

  “I told her about the hymn. My baby loves to hear me sing, how sweet the sound,” said Bunny’s mother.

  “Excellent choice,” said Ada.

  Bunny’s mother, who obviously hadn’t actually read the book, looked relieved. She raised her eyebrows and poked the box top of cupcakes toward Ada. Ada nodded, stretched out her hand, and unburdened the woman. Bunny’s mother kissed Bunny on the head, then on the cheek.

  “I’m gonna be late for work, Miss Priss.”

  “’Bye, Mama.”

  Bunny put the McMuffin in her mouth and pulled her Barbie out of a pocket. She held the doll up to her mother for a kiss. The mother kissed Barbie and headed out the door.

  Ada eyed the Barbie suspiciously. After years of working at KidPlay, she had come to blame Barbie for some of the black obesity epidemic. Barbie, born in 1959, was a year older than Ada. Double-dutch, tag, freeze tag, and dodgeball—even picking cotton—all burned off a lot more calories than playing Barbie.

  Ada frowned. Fit feels too close to the fields. My babies, she thought, poor as they are, suffer from a strange strain of affluenza. She let go of the thought; the child was speaking.

  “Am I like Amazing Grace?” asked Bunny.

  “A lot like Grace,” said Ada. She said it like she felt—like she wanted it to be true. She wanted this real girl, Bunny, to follow in the fictive Grace’s muscularly leaping brown footsteps.

  It seemed unlikely. Bunny prided herself on being prissy. Bunny was four years old, but she already knew how to say, “No! Cain’t swet my hair” and “No! Cain’t break ma nail” when asked to take part in outdoor play.

  Bunny preferred, and let everybody at the school know that she preferred, fueled by her mama and aunt and grandmother’s pride in her being prissy, to sit in a corner with her dolls, with a little posse of black Barbies. Which she would never grow up to look anything like if she kept eating cupcakes with four inches of frosting and playing Barbies instead of jumping double-dutch.

  Bunny was in a dangerous pudge situation. My babies are in a pudge predicament.

  Nobody needed to tell Ada there was a health-care crisis in America. She saw it every day.

  Looking at Bunny, Ada got it. America can’t buy her way out of the health-care crisis, and she can’t legislate her way out.

  As best as Ada could figure it, too many Democrats believed in throwing money at problems, doing things like making sure people with diabetes get the funds for dialysis, but not doing much about keeping them off dialysis, or realizing that spending on dialysis made many good folk want to spend less money on education. A lot of Republicans wanted to change the laws mandating coverage of treatments they deemed unnecessary like screening mammograms, or home dialysis, or home care for kids with certain ailments, and some proven lifesaving drugs they legislatively defined unnecessary.

  Double bullshit. Dem-shit and Repub-shit. Man-shit. Ada was through with all of it.

  Looking at Grace hanging from a bar, doing an athletic imitation of an Anasazi spider in the pages of Bunny’s picture book, Ada saw a solution: healthing. Start living so we get less sick in the first place. Keep everybody’s body out of the hands of Democrats and Republicans.

  As Ada had not been healthing and wanted to make radical changes in her eating and exercise habits, when she was back in her office (rocking gorgeous baby Jarius while she waited for his twenty-nine-year-old grandma to “rush come get” the fevered infant), Ada phoned for an appointment with her internist. When Jarius’s grandma arrived, Ada got back to Bunny’s room and on plan.

  After announcing to the class that the United States of America needed their help, Ada, huffing and puffing, took fourteen of her babies on a short walk through the neighborhood, their little wrists tied to a clothesline for safety.

  In honor of her birthday, Bunny led the row.

  5

  DON’T ATTACK YOUR OWN TEAM; DON’T LET ANYONE ON YOUR TEAM ATTACK YOU

  WHEN ADA LEFT KidPlay, her working day was not over. Twice a week, usually Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings, depending on when the ever-changing roster of school volunteers scheduled to show up showed up, Ada drove from Nashville, forty minutes on the interstate, to her parents’ house out on the lake in Hermitage, Tennessee, to cook and to clean.

  The house was a maze. There were piles in every room. Some of the piles were taller than Temple, Ada’s father; most of the piles were taller than Bird, Ada’s mother. To disappear, all one had to do was dive into the center of any one of the rooms.

  The clutter had begun on the perimeters, on the floor near the wall, with stacks of records and boxes of reel-to-reel tapes. When the clutter had wrapped around the walls once, providing a layer of insulation, Bird, who fluttered between the piles in old World War II and Korean War kimonos, had allowed a second wall of “stuff” to arise, three feet in front of the first, then a third.

  As floor space vanished, tabletops sprouted piles. When the tables got littered high—with old stage
clothes, boxes of dishes, instrument cases, and boxes of unknown contents taped shut and labeled mysteriously with the word “den” or “bedroom” or some last name that was not Bird’s or Temple’s—the maze was fully formed.

  At the center of each room was hospitable space. In the living room the center was a large sectional couch, upholstered in purple velvet. The pieces could be moved to form an L shape or a square or broken apart to form chairs. Usually Bird had them broken apart and arranged in a little circle, but for reasons only she understood, she moved the furniture about regularly. Whatever shape the sofa took, there would be near it an old acoustic guitar case piled atop another that served as what Bird called her coffee table. Ada called the thing “Mama’s medicine chest.” The guitar cases were littered with aspirin and Benadryl and Alka-Seltzer and Tums and boxes of Afrin and Astelin, a little bottle of cod liver oil, and a silver spoon that always looked like it needed washing.

  Before the house became a maze it had been a modest haven, a four-bedroom, five-bath ranch house with sliding glass doors and picture windows. Every room had a view of the lake or the woods.

  Ada had her own key. When she opened the door, she faced a wall of mess that made her blink. Then she closed her eyes and took a breath. Ganja.

  The muffled sound of talk and coughs passed through the piles to greet her. She called out, “Hey everybody.” No one answered. Everybody living in the house was hard of hearing. Years of too loud too good music had damaged her parents’ eardrums. She slammed the door hard so they could feel her arrival. She didn’t want to scare anybody. After two deep breaths and a prayer she didn’t get too strong a contact high, she turned sideways and did her best to squeeze her way into the center of the room without bumping into a pile that might tumble down on her head and knock her out.

  When she got to the center, her parents were both on one chair. Bird was on Temple’s lap, full-drunk, and he was a little drunk, telling her a story.

  The good days were the days they got drunk together. Her father looked up as Ada picked up the dirty spoon, the overfull ashtray. Bird’s hand brushed the velour of Ada’s sweatpants. This made Ada shiver. Her mother hadn’t exactly touched her, but she had almost touched her. It could have been an accident, but it could have been on purpose. It was as good as it got for Bird and Ada in the twenty-first century.

  When Temple first came into possession of the house, he had been proud of the fact that it looked out on the same lake and the same kind of trees Johnny Cash’s house looked out on. When he saw Cash’s big shiny bus parked out on his lawn, he was proud of his own ramshackle bus parked out back.

  Temple had bought the house cheap at a foreclosure sale. Dug the cash he had saved (playing country-club dances and betting the occasional number) out of his yard. Because some minor star had shot himself in it, no one else even bid. Temple got it cheap.

  When they first moved into the house, Temple and Bird’s big girls would tote their laundry in from town to use the new avocado green washer and dryer in the fresh-painted pink garage turned laundry room. But anything red you threw in the wash, no matter how many times you had washed it before, ran onto anything white. And if you tried to get radio reception, the channel would skip itself. And stuff, particularly white towels, seemed to go missing. Mag, Evie, and Glo said the garage was haunted. None of them would go into it. Temple had to move the washer and dryer out of the garage and into the kitchen.

  That old washer and that old dryer still stood in the kitchen. There were mink stoles and an old fox coat in the dryer, and mohair and angora sweaters in the washer.

  Bird couldn’t use the washer and dryer because they reminded her of the daughters she had lost. And she couldn’t get rid of the washer and dryer because they reminded her of the daughters she had lost. Bird didn’t do wash. Everything, even underwear, went to the dry cleaner—or Ada washed it by hand and hung it on a line to dry. “Waste not, want not,” Bird said when she turned appliances into cabinets. When Bird explained this, cheerfully and clearly, it almost made sense.

  Bird was still a house-proud woman, though only her husband and her surviving daughter could see it once clutter took hold of the lake house. What remained clear was that Bird was a welcoming woman. There were places to sit and places to rest a glass in each room. If Bird didn’t cook much anymore, what she did cook—a platter of fried chicken, a pot of greens, a crown of monkey bread, a skillet of cornbread, a bowl of pasta puttanesca—she cooked well and clean.

  Mainly Bird served the casseroles Ada cooked. Ada usually made a dozen at a time, leaving one in the refrigerator and storing eleven in the freezer. Every few months she would spend a whole day at the house just cooking and freezing soups and casseroles. You never knew how many people might want to eat at Bird and Temple’s.

  Usually Bird was asleep when Ada arrived. Bird kept what she had taught Ada to call “vampire hours.” She went down when the sun came up and got out of bed when the sun went down. Usually, Ada found her father alone in the center of the living room when she arrived, or with some of the boarders. When he was alone, she would kiss him on his rough mahogany brown cheek speckled with moles, and he would always say the same thing first: “What you know good, girl, what you know good?”

  And while she wondered how he could imagine she could know anything good in this place, she would say, “My mama’s rich and my daddy’s good-looking,” and he would laugh at her joke.

  Today Temple was telling Bird about playing Idlewild, reliving seeing “all the rich niggers from ’Cago and Dee-troit sitting at the tables clapping as we looked down from the stage.” He was remembering a moment so different from gazing out and trying not to see the rich white folks they saw down in the Delta country clubs.

  Days like this, Ada wondered if she couldn’t get their house straight again. Days like this, when they could stand to be so close to each other, it seemed they didn’t need their house all junked up, that they didn’t need the stuff, just needed the memories and the talk, and maybe some of the pictures. Didn’t need a thousand boxes to keep them from seeing each other or from forgetting who they were. Days like this, she cleaned their toilets and mopped the kitchen floor and changed the linen on Bird’s bed and the linen on Temple’s bed and picked up the linen in the boarders’ rooms and put fresh towels and sheets on the foot of their beds and washed up the pans on the stove and took out the trash and scrubbed down the refrigerator without interruption. She wondered how it came to be she was this glamorous yellow couple’s fat black maid but felt grateful to be near them.

  It was getting to be time for Ada to leave, and she still hadn’t done everything she needed to do. Bird was sitting at her kitchen window, looking out at the lake. Temple was out fishing.

  “What’s your name, girl?”

  “Ada, Mama, Ada.”

  “You a big fat girl, you not my daughter. I got four skinny gals.”

  “I mean, Ada sent me.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do Ada have the sugar?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “My first three girls died of the sugar.”

  “Ada’s fine.”

  “They up and go.”

  “Who?”

  “Daughters.”

  “Ada doesn’t have the sugar.”

  “You look a lot like her, if she was big and fat.”

  “I take that as a compliment.”

  “When you coming back?”

  “Next week.”

  “Good. Ada keep sending you. I ain’t finna be nobody’s mama no more.”

  “Don’t say that, Mama.”

  “Don’t you call me Mama, gal. What’s your name?”

  Ada walked out without saying anything. Bird wouldn’t remember her rudeness. Or she would, and it would fix her right.

  Ada feared Bird’s alleged short-term amnesia was a put-on to allow her to say whatever crossed her mind. She feared worse that her mother really didn’t know who she was.
For months she had told herself she would rather have a mean mama than no mama at all. Today she was tired of mean Mama.

  She walked out into the garage. She sat on the floor near to where the ghost stayed. She wondered if her father had really dug up the money for the house from their old yard. And if he had, had he really made it all singing and writing songs he just got paid for and no credit? Maybe it was like that. That’s the way her father had told it to her.

  Except her father didn’t always tell her the truth. Her father lied and ran round with women. Way back when, he gambled. He had gotten away with a lot of stuff—and now it was like all that stuff had come back and got piled up in the house and she was supposed to take care of it while her parents ducked and dodged each other. And some days they found each other and forgot all the ducking and the dodging and the infidelities and the bad Pap smears and the missing breast and missing prostate and just told a story and loved up on each other.

  By the time Ada was finished with her work, her parents were sleeping in their separate bedrooms. The door of her mother’s room was ajar. She was sleeping in a tailored dress. The old piano lived in Bird’s room. The kimono she had been wearing was stretched across the keys. Her dead daughters’ clothes were piled high on the piano bench. A bottle of Nyquil was by the bed, along with a joint.

  The boarders were out, probably on a road trip to a local farm to score marijuana. It took one to drive, one to navigate, and one to do the talking. They had gotten that decrepit. They paid the rent in pot. Pot and Ecstasy. If someone started dying, or leaving town to live with relatives forever, they would all get together and swallow Ecstasy. Every day of the week they smoked weed.

  Ada couldn’t tell Preach any of this. Ada couldn’t do anything but clean everything up and pray they didn’t get busted. It made her sad to realize she was praying as much to the ghost in the garage as she was to the Lord Jesus. She rationalized the choice by reminding herself that if there was a ghost in the garage, God had created it—and she wouldn’t turn her nose up at anything but evil. What made her sadder was having seen some of her baby clothes on the pile with the dead daughters’ stuff. It was the first time she had seen that in the decade she had been cleaning her mother’s house.