Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  The kit was boxed to look like a portfolio. You flipped open the cover, and simple step-by-step instructions were emblazoned on the inside sleeve.

  Only the steps were not as easy as she thought they would be. You needed to send them a sample of your bodily tissue, scraped from the inside of your mouth. And you could only take the scrape—they called it a swab—after not eating or drinking anything for two hours. She had a quick cup of coffee, then set a timer for six. She thought of waiting to sample in the morning. She could get up, brush her teeth, drink a bit of coffee, and wait two hours—but there was a seven o’clock pickup at the neighborhood post office, and she wanted to know. Soon. Now.

  The first half hour she spent waiting to scrape her inner cheek, she spent getting dinner in the oven. When it was in the oven, she spent an hour cleaning.

  Ada was a fast cleaner. She got the upstairs and downstairs toilets and the kitchen floor mopped and the front hall stairs swept in just under an hour. That left her half an hour to begin an experiment.

  Create emergency kits. Plural. She wanted an “I’m Scared” emergency kit and an “I’m Bored” emergency kit.

  She wanted two playlists and a bunch of pictures. She wanted sounds and images she could put in her purse and take with her into battle. She was thinking about flagging will.

  First, she needed a playlist of songs that picked her up and made her think about things she liked to think about, especially things she liked to think about, but might have forgotten about. The number-one song she put on her new iPod playlist was Ray Charles, “I Got a Woman.” The second song going on the list was Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” The third song making the cut was James Brown—“I Feel Good.” And just thinking about those first songs had got her feeling good. She wondered how many she should have, and she decided on a baker’s dozen, thirteen—there was an amusing transgression in having thirteen songs instead of thirteen doughnuts, which nobody in the world would allow themselves to eat, or thirteen cookies, which only a crazy person would eat, or thirteen corn chips, which she ate every time they went out for Mexican, but couldn’t anymore. Thirteen songs that could break through her boredom, thirteen songs she could indulge in anytime she wanted. That was a tonic. And she could change them. Or add another.

  That first playlist would be for pulling her up, and then she needed another that would wrap her in bunting and make her feel safe, sheltered. She needed the aural equivalent of fat. She needed a cashmere baby blanket that was always clean and always with her. She needed Billie Holiday.

  Ada loved Billie. With all that Billie went through, it was like Ada got the cool of the heroin without the hook when she listened to songs like “Violets for Your Furs.” When she listened to Lady Day, it wasn’t all going to be all right, it was all right now. She would download the entire Lady in Satin album, the one with Billie surrounded by all that string music. Aretha would have to be on this list too. She would put “Respect” and she would put “Stand by Me” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” the Harry Belafonte version.

  Both of her new playlists—the pick-me-up and the wrap-me-around—Ada would think of as healthing playlists. They would travel with her everywhere.

  Sound was essential, but not enough. Shape-shifting was too much about sight for sound to be enough. Ada needed some eye candy. She would put some beauty in her pocket. Art. Her first choice was easy. Five Rothko postcards. She had seen those Rothkos in college on a visit to the Guggenheim, and she had never forgotten them. Looking at those pictures helped Ada feel nineteen again.

  Her spirit had been lifted by those great big gorgeous canvases. When she first saw them, it was just the colors. Instant inebriation. As she had gotten larger, they had been her proof that big is more. Now she needed proof of the opposite. She needed something that would lift her spirit and give her the confidence to struggle with her body. She found a picture of Josephine Baker. Too intimidating. Ditto Lena Horne. She closed her eyes. What do I want to see when I see me? Van Der Zee. All the way. Those jazzy beautiful black folk. She would get herself some Van Der Zee postcards.

  She had calm and confident covered in the emergency kits. But what to put to motivate? Matt Mason, of course. Matt Mason, gorgeous. Unfortunately, the only pictures she had of him were twenty years old. And she wouldn’t go poking around on the Internet for pictures of him out of fear he would go poking around for pictures of her. When she thought of Matt Mason, she thought a little like a baby, believing if she couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see her. The belief gave her comfort.

  She wasn’t sure comfort was what she needed. She was almost sure it was exactly what she didn’t need. The second thing she thought about putting in her emergency kit was a picture of herself now, a naked picture of herself, to remind herself that she was in a state of emergency.

  Twenty minutes after the thought crossed her mind, she was naked in front of her MacBook, adjusting the screen to take a picture. First she caught herself front on. Then back on. Then one side and then the other—neither seemed to want to be left out. To soften the effect, she turned the shots to sepia. She wished she knew how to cartoon the drawings, but she didn’t. Her daughters could help her, but she didn’t want to bother them. She printed up what she had in the privacy of her bedroom.

  In bright color the photos had seemed mean and rude. In sepia they offended her less profoundly, but still they offended her. She wondered if her husband liked what he saw when he looked at her. She believed he did, believed it so confidently it surprised her and raised another question. She wondered what her husband saw when he looked at her, and she knew that, whatever it was, what it wasn’t was, as she said aloud, “Me, now.”

  She wrote those words on the back of the picture she printed up, very small, wallet size, and she tucked it in her wallet behind a picture of her as a young mother with baby twins on her lap. She liked wearing her children. She liked the way they cover you up in a picture. It was one of the very few times she had ever used her children as window dressing. She put them in front of her to make prettier pictures of herself than they might have been without them.

  People often confuse self-control and self-terror. If I don’t do this, that horrible thing will happen. If I am not that, I will hate myself. There were problems with that plan. Threatened people, shamed people, scared people, rarely do their best work. A person could scare herself too bad, too hard, too crazy, if she looked at this new photograph the wrong way. What she wanted to see, and could see if she squinted, was, “This is an emergency and I am a beauty and that is not a contradiction in terms.” Since she couldn’t see it except when squinting, she squinted.

  She couldn’t decide if her body looked prettier or just more socially acceptable through squinting eyes. It did look better—less like a body and more like a mural or a map. More like an object she could change, or critique, or embrace without changing or critiquing or even embracing herself.

  Something Preach wanted. That was the best part of what Ada saw. But she saw something else too.

  She saw a map that could lead her home.

  When the timer went off at six, she was startled. She sat down to her dining table and did step one. She registered the test online. That was just a matter of typing in her name, a number on the box, her address, and a few tiny bits of information. Next she filled out a permission form to perform the test. When the paperwork was done, she got herself a bottle of water and went to the sink.

  She sipped a bit, swished the water around in her mouth. A doctor friend had suggested that she be pretty vigorous about the swishing and pretty generous with the water, so she went through the whole bottle, working her mouth and cheek muscles hard. She was practically sweating. When the water bottle was empty, she sat down again at the table.

  The directions mentioned a drying stand. It took her a moment to realize that the drying stand was two holes on the top of the folio that contained the info. She took out the narrow envelope that contained the brushes. She tore open the
top. Being careful not to touch the bristly end, she put the brush in her mouth and began to scrape twenty times against the side of her cheek, moving the brush just a little to make sure it wasn’t scraping over and over again in the exact same place. When she got to twenty, she did ten more. She wasn’t sure if one scrape down and one scrape up should be counted as one or two scrapes. She put the first brush in the drying stand.

  Then she did the other cheek. Thirty brushes. When she put it in the drying stand, she turned on a timer and set it for ten minutes. The first brush would have a little extra drying time.

  When the timer went off, she put the brushes in the envelope that they were supposed to go back to the lab in. That envelope sealed, she placed it in the larger envelope provided, along with the paperwork. Finally she sealed that securely. All she had to do was drop that envelope off at the mailbox. That’s all she had to do, but it wasn’t all she was doing. She was worrying about what other use might be being made of her DNA information. She was worrying about finding out now, or later, that the genes associated with whatever diet destiny or metabolic identity this test revealed would later be associated with some horrible disease. She was parsing a question she had never parsed before: How much medical info is too much medical info? On the way to the mailbox she stopped worrying about all that. She even stopped wondering if Preach was cheating and what her daughters were doing at the exact moment. When she dropped the envelope in the mailbox, all she was thinking was, Please let that be a valid sample. Please let me know what I need to do to be the body I want to be. It was a big enough wish to eclipse other wishes.

  Until she knew what she was really supposed to be eating, she would stay on Weight Watchers. She wasn’t looking for excuses to fail. And she had already lost more than a few pounds.

  14

  CONSIDER SURGERY

  THE TWINS’ BIRTHDAY was on a Saturday, and the girls flew in to celebrate. It was their tradition to eat Mexican food for dinner to mark the occasion, because Ada and Preach had eaten Mexican just before the babies came.

  Ada decided to take the girls on a walk around Radnor Lake as part of the festivities. This was not part of the tradition. They wanted to go to the Loveless Café and eat biscuits and bacon and jam and drink Bloody Marys and coffee. Ada offered to feed them sweet potatoes baked in their jackets. The girls agreed—if they could have their birthday presents early, and mani-pedis instead of the walk.

  Over breakfast Ada gave each daughter a gym membership for her respective town, tucked into a birthday card.

  Ruth and Naomi looked at Ada like she was crazy. Then she handed each a giant dress box wrapped in newspaper and a great big bow. When they opened the boxes, each daughter had a long black party dress. The girls fell out laughing. Ada had recycled their debutante gowns—dyed the white dresses black!

  The girls stripped in the kitchen. After tugging, and squeezing, and pulling up of zippers, the dresses were on, and the girls looked fabulous—but they did not look fit.

  Seeing them a little too plump but oh so beautiful, watching them let themselves go just a little too much, was hard. Watching them erode some of their beauty, as she had eroded so much of her own, with negligence, with focusing on things that were seemingly more important, was plain painful. It was their birthday. She tried not to let the pain show.

  The ache had started at the dry cleaners. There had been the unfortunate incident provoked by her tiny bladder. While Ada was at the cleaners, she got stricken by a need to go, and knowing that the cleaners kept an immaculately clean toilet, she decided to use it.

  While she was in the toilet, two old biddies, Melvin and Alfred, arrived to pick up some ties they had dropped off for cleaning. They were taking a very close look at the newly black dresses.

  “Girls used to get married in their debutante gowns, not dye them black!”

  “Anyone thinking about marrying one of those girls will take one look at the mother and flee.”

  “Maybe dying them black is right. Those girls won’t be getting married and need a second gown.”

  “Big girls don’t.”

  “Not usually.”

  “Black girls don’t.”

  “Not much anymore.”

  “And big black girls with smarts—”

  “Never!”

  “Back in the forties, I went to a wedding every Saturday in June, sometimes two in a day.”

  “One weekend in June of 1953 I went to a noon wedding and a six o’clock wedding, then turned around and went to a four o’clock on Sunday wedding. Every one of those girls Phi Beta Kappa, big and brown and brilliant.”

  “Sure enough.”

  “This is the era of the skinnywhitedumbgirl.”

  “Paris Hilton.”

  “Jessica Simpson.”

  “Is Nicole Richie black?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hard to tell.”

  Just then Ada emerged from the toilet. She had on her blank preacher’s-wife smile.

  “Melvin, Alfred.”

  “Ada, your girls were just precious, just precious.”

  “And those gowns. Exquisite.”

  “Cut out the picture from the paper. Preach in tails, daughter on each arm. Beautiful.”

  Ada stared back hard. Her blank KidPlay stare.

  “Darling, we didn’t know you was in there.”

  “Of course we did, we just said those things to tease you. You know we know Naomi and Ruth’s wedding will be a blowout to end blowouts: Your daddy will get up a band and you’ll do the cooking, and everybody will come just to see if Preach walks ’em down the aisle, gives the vows, or both.”

  “They take after their daddy’s side. They’re shaped just like his grandmother was shaped at their age. And she was a size eight at eighty-plus.”

  “Ada, they take after you.”

  “And you do not need to be as big as you are. Take it from an old queen, as long as you don’t end up in jail, pretty makes life easier.”

  “Let me get these dresses and get home. You a mess. Both of you. And let me see you in church on Sunday and shut your mouths about my girls, unless you want me to snatch you baldhead—oh, you already are.”

  “Listen at you.”

  “What.”

  “Lord have mercy today.”

  “And—”

  “The Lord done done all he can for them gals, the best he can. He gave ’em you. You the best. But you ain’t be the best. You is but ain’t. But you could be.”

  “Why you so mean?”

  “You were such a pretty bride.”

  “And?”

  “I want you to be pretty again.”

  “I didn’t know I wasn’t pretty now.”

  “You didn’t know you were pretty then. First thing you need, child, is an eye for beauty. Till you get you one, let me, or let Melvin, he’p you out.”

  Ada exited the cleaners carrying a weight heavier than two used debutante gowns: her worry that black marriage was in danger of becoming extinct.

  After the dry cleaners incident she had had a nightmare in which Matt Mason had declared to one of his sons, “Not marrying that woman who turned into a fat pig was dodging a bullet. Avoid those twins like the plague!”

  She didn’t want to be a giant billboard screaming FAT, OBESE, TOO LARGE, DON’T MARRY THEM. She didn’t want Matt Mason to see her too large, because he had the sons and the nephews and she didn’t want Matt Mason, or any black man with eligible sons and nephews, or any good man with eligible sons or nephews, to think, This can turn into that, and shudder.

  Matt Mason had a son, and he had nephews. It wasn’t only that Ada wanted Matt Mason to want her, it was that she didn’t want him to regret having once wanted her. She needed Matt Mason to remember wanting her without shame. She had daughters. She needed Matt Mason to be one of the strong black men putting the loud word out: Black women are as good as it gets. Whoever gets one of Ada’s girls is getting extraordinary good fortune.

  Rememberi
ng all of that, as she helped the girls wiggle out of their repurposed finery, Ada reneged on the mani-pedi-instead-of-hike deal. She insisted on the hike. Delighted by their gowns, the girls agreed.

  The walk got off to a scandalous start. As they set off on the path, they saw from a distance a friend of Preach’s, a woman Ada called Granola Girl, walking the path, flirtatiously bumping into a man who was not her husband. The bumping stopped when Granola Girl, who taught prenatal classes in the church basement, noticed Ada and the twins. The girls and Ada silently lifted their eyebrows and kept stepping after their paths crossed and waves were exchanged. When they got farther away, the girls started laughing. Ada stifled their hilarity by suggesting they tackle Ganier Ridge. The girls grimaced, but when they got to the place where the trail forked, they chose the tough one.

  Walking around Radnor Lake with her girls was more fun than she had imagined, even Ganier Ridge—which she usually hated. The girls got behind her and pushed her up the steepest yards of their walk.

  Eventually they staggered into the parking lot hand in hand, the mama in the middle. They had walked slowly and laughed, telling stories all the way, but they made it around the lake for the very first time together.

  That night at Los Palmas, somewhere between the guacamole (which they ate with cucumber slices brought from home) and her chicken and shrimp fajitas (eaten without the tortillas), the girls told Ada how beautiful she looked. And they meant it. Because they meant it, Ada made herself a promise.