Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  Ada liked Willie Angel enough to want to lose weight and be the proof that one of Willie Angel’s patients did what couldn’t be done.

  Willie Angel wanted to be part of Ada’s solution. She pulled out her prescription pad. She wanted to give Ada something. She wrote down, “Angel’s Rule of Eight—for only the best and biggest patients”:

  Get eight hours sleep every night.

  Drink eight glasses of water a day.

  Walk eight miles each week.

  Ada took the prescription and sucked her teeth. “You slick, Willie Angel. Very slick.” She stood up and hugged the doctor. The doctor hugged her back.

  “And count your blessing your husband likes women with a little meat on their bones.”

  “Don’t tell me you know that from firsthand experience.”

  “I wish.”

  They shared another big-bellied laugh. Willie was larger and better dressed, Ada was smaller and frumpier, but someone passing the examining room would have thought they were sisters.

  9

  DO THE DNA TEST

  COMING OUT OF the doctor’s office, Ada bumped into the president of the Altar Guild and member of the vestry, Inez Whitfield, going in. Inez was another Link sister, and another one of Preach’s congregants.

  “Hope you’re not sick and canceling,” Inez greeted Ada.

  “Routine stuff. … I’m on my way to the grocery, now, hope you’re not sick and missing.”

  “Just picking up a sample of a new med James is trying. I’ll be at Altar Guild and may see you at the grocery store.”

  “You bringing your poached pears?”

  “If I get to the store. They got to take my pressure and get me a flu shot too.”

  Inez buzzed off. In her short black-and-white houndstooth jacket and black pants, with her hair all over her head and wearing big bold black glasses, Inez Whitfield was a decidedly stylish and quirky woman. She was Ada’s favorite member of the Altar Guild, and the one person Ada thought she might be able to talk to about marriage and Preach.

  The Altar Guild came for lunch the fourth Saturday of the month. Many of the ladies were eighty or almost eighty. These women had stomped wide paths where before them there had been no paths at all. They didn’t just make a way for those who came after; when they could, they made an easy way.

  Many of the ladies of the Altar Guild were clubwomen by nature. They liked administration and process; they were Deltas and AKAs and Links and Circle-ets, as well as members of the Altar Guild and sometimes Junior League Sustainers. Some were different. Ada was one of the ones who never saw a meeting or a ledger she didn’t have to talk herself into tolerating. A sweet irony of the Altar Guild was that there were a lot of nonclubwomen in the club.

  Ada’s oldest friend, a singer, Delila Lee was one of the nonclubwomen in the group, and there were two writers; a female farmer, who ran one of Tennessee’s last tobacco farms; a retired cateress; a lady who owned a T-shirt and convenience store down on Jefferson Street; and, Nashville being a university town and the home of Meharry Medical College, several college professors and leading doctors.

  Inez Whitfield was one of the teaching doctors who was a clubwoman. A retired dermatologist, she still taught at Meharry, lecturing on medical ethics. Inez had a creative streak and a practical streak. She had come from a town in Texas where her family had owned everything: the café, the hairdresser, and the funeral parlor. Now all of that was gone, and they got a gas royalty. Inez was the richest person Ada knew personally, and the largest private donor to KidPlay.

  It was the consensus of the club that Inez Whitfield was a woman who had seen more good and bad, more prosperity and more trauma, than a woman should know. She had been at a medical convention in California when her husband had taken her children on a balloon ride. They never came back.

  Inez retired. Inez even remarried. Proposing with the words, “No one should carry this much pain alone,” she married a man, James Madison Whitfield, who had lost his wife to cancer. Inez doted on his grandchildren and her garden. She worked hard not to think every hour of every day about the children her children would never have. She got down to imagining who they might be only when she encountered something one of her children adored, or excelled at, or hated. She moved out of the house she had lived in with her children. She turned her front and back lawns into a vegetable garden. Her purple hull peas were coveted. Her poached pears, usually served with goat cheese and local honey, were legendary.

  Ada was still thinking about Inez as she walked into the grocery store. Five feet away from a tower of sponge cakes, a lady in an apron was offering samples of sausages she was cooking in an electric skillet. The sight and smell of food had Ada crazy hungry.

  She grabbed a giant grocery cart, then rolled it back and grabbed a medium cart. If she couldn’t be immediately smaller, her grocery cart could be smaller. She could have a skinny woman’s cart. It was a small satisfaction. It was not enough satisfaction to distract her from immediate hunger.

  She needed something quick to eat that wasn’t fattening. No, that wasn’t the right idea; she needed something that was useful to her body.

  She nibbled on one of her cuticles. Then silently quipped, Starvation. Quipping to yourself was something a minister’s wife had to do. She couldn’t risk being snide with anyone else—except the hubby and the girls, and they weren’t around. You’re it, she said to herself. When am I going to stop thinking about this as an exercise in deprivation, and start thinking about it as an exercise in filling myself up with what is good for me and what I like?

  “Probably the day I start losing weight.” This last, she said out loud. That was a problem. She was hearing voices and starting to talk too loud out loud, and she looked like a beached brown whale. She needed to hold on to the husband she had and put up with his mess and stop even thinking about running after Matt Mason—except that putting up with the husband she had is what got her to be “the hot mess she was.” She prayed she hadn’t said this last out loud. It was crazy thinking. This was starvation talking. She pointed her cart at the snack aisle.

  She was standing with a bag of Veggie Loot in her hand, munching straight from the bag, when Inez bumped into Ada’s butt, gently, with her cart.

  Inez sneered at the Veggie Loot. “That’s nothing but green Cheezos, cheese puffs, whatever you want to call it.”

  “One hundred and thirty calories. Low-carb. This is good for you.”

  “Green air.”

  “It keeps me from getting too hungry.”

  “You hungry right now. Unnatural hungry.”

  “Unnatural hungry?”

  “You were not born wanting to eat puffy green air. Puffy green air is not helping you. It’s making you hungry. Chewing without filling you up, flavor but not enough flavor. Makes you want to eat. These food companies work together to keep you hungry, and probably they’re in it together with the health companies trying to keep us all sick. Fortunes are made on sick folk. I prefer to grow my own vegetables and pay as little money as possible to the drug companies.”

  “Inez, you are one paranoid woman.”

  “I am an old rich Negro. I got that way by being cautious. And being curious. I got that way by not doing what everybody else was doing—if I saw everybody else was not doing so good. I see all you young things—and yes, fifty is young, even if you don’t know it—drinking Diet Coke and eating Veggie Loot, big as three houses, so I wouldn’t be doing none of that now.”

  “What should I be eating, for a snack?”

  “Soul food.”

  “Fried chicken and monkey bread and collard greens?”

  “I mean baked sweet potatoes naked in their jackets, and I mean peanut butter spoons.”

  “Peanut butter spoons?”

  “You get you some organic sugar-free peanut butter and you dip one of your grandma’s silver spoons in it and you call that breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, whatever you want. It got protein and fat, and you won’t be hungry an ho
ur after you eat that.”

  “Sweet potatoes and peanut butter. You want me on the George Washington Carver diet.”

  “Child, I been on that all my life, and I have never had any problem with my pressure, with my cholesterol, with my knees or with my hip, with my weight or with my sex life. And from what I read in the old folks’ magazines and the style magazines, the other oldies like me are having a lot of trouble with their knees, hips, and weight, and the young ones like you are having all kinds of trouble with your sex and your weight and your skin. When I grew up, black girls didn’t have bumps all on their faces.”

  “Next time you hit me with your grocery cart, mine will be piled high with jars of peanut butter and big sweet potatoes.”

  “Good. Get back to your food roots. Peanuts and sweet potatoes are the mama and daddy of soul food. I love sweet potatoes. You can just throw one in the microwave or the oven.”

  “Next time the girls come home, I may just serve the entire family peanut butter spoons for breakfast and get myself some rest.”

  “You could do a lot worse. I don’t know why you young people insist on thinking of fried chicken and Kool-Aid and God knows what else as soul food. Soul food may be chicken once a month when the preacher comes, but it ain’t fried chicken every day. And it’s not anything made with corn syrup or white flour. And it ain’t butter neither. Soul food is corn on the cob and peanuts and fish your daddy caught from the pond, or the lake, or the stream. It’s simple.”

  “Amen.”

  “And you need to get your DNA tested.”

  “How’s that? You see something in my eyes?”

  “I think you need more information. Inherent Health dot com. Check it out.”

  “Inherent Health dot com?”

  “They’ve got a test will tell you what you should be eating and how you should be exercising—according to your genes.”

  “According to my genes?”

  “According to your genes.”

  For the next three days Ada subsisted on a diet of baked sweet potatoes and peanut butter spoons, and she lost three pounds. That night after the Altar Guild meeting, she scribbled into her journal a new idea that was too funny to be a rule but too useful not to write out in full: Eat like the skinny old folks eat.

  10

  BUDGET: PLAN TO AFFORD THE FEEDING, EXERCISING, AND DRESSING OF YOU

  THE VERY NEXT morning, en route to KidPlay, Ada was back to thinking about stealing guitars, which she knew to be a strange thing for a minister’s wife to be thinking about.

  Except push had come to shove. Earn and spend, Preach was plain awful with money. He spent too much on his parishioners and would, if he could, let them pay him in homemade cake and great big hugs. This forced Ada to do two things: earn a little money, and get really good at being the frugal housewife. For years now her favorite column in the Tennessean newspaper had been the Ms. Cheap column. Doing good while being broke was hard work.

  When they first married, Preach had headed up a “regular” church, and Ada had anticipated he would be a well-paid preacher and they would bounce around the country as he advanced. But then the placement came, and it was Iowa. Then they offered Oregon. Preach took the job as the assistant at Full Love.

  Stopped at a red light, Ada allowed herself to imagine Preach as a modern-day Sweet Daddy Grace or Father Divine. She saw Preach in front of his independent mega-church. She saw herself driving away from in a white Mercedes-Benz to her giant house way across town where she lay beside her kidney-shaped pool wearing a knit suit with bright brass buttons. The light turned green just as Ada began to wonder if she was going crazy.

  She decided to stop at the little black Episcopal church that had been an armory during the Civil War, Holy Trinity. And pray herself back to peace.

  Bathed in the light coming through Holy Trinity’s stained glass, she tried to clear her mind. Worrying about money was the one thing that really panicked Ada. Growing up in a family that had no salary, that lived by its wits and its instruments, had given Ada a permanent precarious feeling when she had to figure out how to pull together economic ends that wouldn’t meet. She hoped the calm of the little church would help.

  She wanted a treadmill. She wanted a trainer. She wanted a week at a spa. None of that was happening. Ada knew that.

  But she also knew a diet was a war, and a war required a war chest. She would need time and money. She was scared she didn’t have the time or the money to make the change she needed.

  The real problem with bariatric surgery (aside from Ada being wary of needles and having some superstition that she was more likely to have complications than most people) was that it was just too expensive.

  Ada didn’t have extra time or money. Ada didn’t have great insurance. And she didn’t have a heart for any more administrative duties.

  Ugh. She hated to write down what checks she wrote out, and never balanced her checking account. That’s why she loved debit cards and online banking. And Preach was worse than she was when it came to their personal funds. He carried their tax files to the accountant in ziplock bags and a grocery sack.

  She added another item to her shopping list. Buy a Dave Ramsey book. She liked listening to Ramsey, a sort of crazy conservative personal finance guru, on the radio. He talked radical change but made common sense.

  Ada wanted to be the Dave Ramsey of weight loss. Somebody who got it all wrong, then got it right and shared the info about The Way. Except she wouldn’t charge.

  Ada had an idea about what was keeping her—and a lot of folk—from the success they wanted. Ada had her own idea about what was hobbling America by hobbling black America.

  Blutter. Black clutter. Blutter was destroying black America—blutter in the bankbooks, blutter in the body, and blutter in the basements and attics. Disorganized finances, disordered eating and exercise, and disorganized homes.

  Blutter. There. She had given it a name, and it was still driving her crazy.

  She forced herself to keep good books at home. She did manage to look at the numbers, and every so often she would catch a mistake. Usually it was something she had returned that didn’t get charged back. She was going to figure out how much money she needed, and she was going to figure out where she could get that money from in her budget.

  She was going to spend wisely and exuberantly, as if she was buying a pair of shoes, or a vacation. Well, not like that, because she didn’t really spend money on fancy shoes or vacations. Like a new roof for the Manse. No way a house of her own was on the horizon.

  The night before she had looked her budget up and down and could hardly get anywhere with it. She ran a fairly tight ship on the domestic financial front, so there wasn’t a lot of room for belt tightening.

  The care, feeding, exercising, and dressing of her half-century self was an expensive proposition for someone who lived on a combination of a minister’s and a day-care director’s salaries, especially if the only way you could balance the day-care center’s books was to pay yourself eight dollars an hour—less than you paid the man who mopped the floor.

  Sometimes all that kept her going on the economic-hope front was her secret project. She was writing a book. Home Training. Right now it was just a loose-leaf notebook with forty or so pages. One day her manners guide for urban children whose parents can’t be bothered to teach them how to act might land her in O magazine and on The View and on Tavis—and her book on the bestseller list. Home Training was Ada’s lottery ticket.

  If her number got called, she knew exactly what she would do. After she finished buying the rest of what the little school needed (more books and a playground were at the top of her list) and finished funding a few more scholarships, she hoped there would be enough left over to hire an entourage that would starve her and chase her with a stick, or at least someone to cook and shop for healthy foods for her. But the chances of that happening were Slim and None, and Slim had gone to town.

  And Ada was tired of waiting. She waited for Pr
each to get his money up and his expenditures down. She waited for herself to finish writing Home Training. No more. Ada was ready to get the first lick in fast in her anti-blutter budget battle. She would get her arms around a more rather than less accurate prediction of her new expenses. Now.

  She had doctor’s bills, copays, and lab results. She needed walking shoes. She needed biker pants. She needed spongy socks. That she could remember off the top of her head. She would need to sit down with her checkbook, her bag of receipts, and her journal and try to predict the rest.

  The diet books, Weight Watchers Online. That was already spent. A gym membership, exercise classes: All that had to be anticipated, along with exercise equipment for home. She probably wasn’t going to have a treadmill in her kitchen, but she needed little dumbbells. She needed a yoga mat. She needed to realize this journey was not just a weight-loss attempt. This journey was something bigger than that. She smiled to know sometimes the biggest thing was the best, even as she planned to shrink, even as she dieted, praying and hoping—not to get thin, but to get to a size that wouldn’t hurt so much when she got down on her knees to pray.

  She imagined herself back at her home office desk, surrounded by all the tools of administration, ledgers and pencils, and computations that told her she was broke and getting broker by contemplating this war. In the sanctuary of the church she imagined herself staring at her laptop screen with her bank account information pulled up, trying to make the numbers work. Then she stopped imagining and quietly recited Psalm 127. Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it … When she came to the last words—they shall not be ashamed—Ada still hated administration, but thinking about it in the shelter of the Episcopal church had empowered her. If the Episcopal church was good at one thing, it was managing money.