Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  She was the first to pull into the KidPlay parking lot. She liked that. She wanted to talk to the irate mama before anyone else arrived. She would wait for her in the parking lot. Walk her into the building. Close the door of her office. Then they would talk.

  Unfortunately the next car to arrive was Loretha’s. Loretha angled herself into a space that provided a bit of shade. In her rearview mirror Ada could see baby Jarius as he lay curled at Dorian’s breast, sucking on a bottle, wide-eyed.

  Ada did not remember sucking closed-eyed at Bird’s breast, though she had seen pictures of it. Seeing pictures of it and watching her own daughters latch on to her tit with their little plum-flower mouths, she came to imagine that she remembered. What Ada did keenly remember was watching Ruth and Naomi at her own breast, oblivious to everything but Mama’s sweet milk.

  Ada couldn’t help but be a little sad baby Jarius was robbed of that. There was nothing to do about it. She would have been sadder for Jarius and for his teenage mama if she had dropped out of school to breast-feed him. No fifteen-year-old girl in America was going to pump.

  She had just come to the conclusion that wide-eyed could be good when the irate mama pulled in beside her. Ada hustled out of her car and the mama into the building just as the janitor and the lady who helped with the breakfasts arrived.

  “What she mean, Keshawn can’t have no ice cream fo’ his birthday? You need to fire that new teacher. He always has ice cream for his birthday,” said Keshawn’s mother. The woman had three children under four and no job but collecting welfare, but she kept her kids clean and her apartment up and was trying to work on her GED. Keshawn’s mama was a tiny size 4, and Ada wondered if she might not do a midge better if she didn’t subsist on Diet Coke and potato chips and keep the babies quiet by feeding them ice cream three meals a day.

  “I can’t fire a volunteer.”

  “Keshawn wants peanutbuttychoco—”

  “Keshawn is four years old. He hasn’t always been doing anything.”

  “He did it last year.”

  “And he doesn’t know what he wants. He knows what he think he wants! You the mama. You teach him what he wants. That’s yo’ job. This year he’s going to have—”

  “She said fruit. What I’m supposed to do? Make some strawberry shortcake? I don’t have time to be thawing out Cool Whip and baking no biscuits! He want ice cream. I want him to want ice cream. It’s easy. Grab a box. And it good.”

  “He can bring plain vanilla. What he can’t bring is fake chocolate and nuts and chopped up candy-bar things with five hundred calories and half a dozen chemicals, like he brought last time.”

  “That’s what he likes.”

  “That’s what he knows. How ’bout some little Dixie cups with blueberries in them?”

  “Dixie cups with blueberries in ’em. You trippin, Miz Preach.”

  “Keshawn likes blueberry. He always asking for blueberry Kool-Aid.”

  “That ain’t the same.”

  “I don’t have time to keep talking about this. And you don’t have time to keep messin’ with that baby’s health. These little black boys, they look like they doin’ better than our girls, but when they get grown they get sick quicker and sicker—they the ones go from needing dialysis to needing a transplant. You want one of your itty-bitties to grow up and have to loan this one a kidney and walk through life with a scar on her belly, or you gonna start feeding this one right, here and now?”

  “I liked you better when you were eating candy bars. Then all you talked about was getting them to read. Getting them to count. Me getting my GED. Now it’s all that, and you up in the food too.”

  “Children are a lot of work.”

  “They don’t even sell blueberries in the store round here.”

  “Pretend like they a dress you want and get yo’self a ride down to the farmer’s market and buy your baby some blueberries and some oranges while you there and tell him that’s what big boys eat.”

  “Is you having ice cream at yo’ birthday?”

  “We not talkin’ ’bout my birthday! My birthday ain’t for months. Keshawn’s birthday is tomorrow. You got to get off my last nerve. And I got to get to work. I got three begging calls to make this morning. And I got to get to my mama’s.”

  “And I got to go get some blueberries and Dixie cups,” said Keshawn’s mama. Her nineteen-year-old sassiness had been replaced with a hum of frightened resignation. Ada had managed to put the fear of kidney transplant in her. Thinking about kidney transplants had made Ada think softly of Bird. Bird had given Mag a kidney. It was in Mag when she died.

  Ada wondered if having a bit of herself buried was part of what made her mama so sad.

  Keshawn’s mama stopped at the door.

  “I read sumthin’ ’bout food deserts.”

  “Black women been finding water in the desert since Moses tasted salt. Food desert or no food desert, find a way to feed that child right. Or you be snatchin’ a kidney out one and begging some doctor to put it in the other one.”

  Bird was going through a pile of old stage clothes, chiffony dresses with rhinestones. She was squeezing the heavily padded bosoms of the dresses and balling up the dresses, running her hand round the rim of the hems. Every so often she would go at a dress with a scissor.

  “I meant to turn these dresses into quilts.”

  “You starting now?”

  “Not now.”

  “If you give me the dresses, I could start making quilts.”

  “That’s not what I’m giving you.”

  “Fine, Mama.”

  “You broke, ain’t you?”

  “Broke? Not broke, just tired and crazy.”

  “I mean, you need money.”

  “That kind of broke?”

  “You always wear the same clothes.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No, you ain’t. But under all that fat and wrinkles, you do favor Ada.”

  “I am Ada.”

  “I want you to have something for yourself.” Her mother ripped open a seam, and she pulled out a heavy chain of gold. She ripped open another seam, and there were what appeared to be rhinestone or diamond ear bobs.

  “This belonged to your great-great grandmother. A woman she worked for gave them to her—in exchange for an abortion. She never wore them or let me wear them. She said the safest thing a black woman could be was ugly. They will bring Ada a pretty penny. Take ’em to her.”

  “I’m Ada, Mama.”

  “You don’t look like Ada.”

  “Mama, what else you have buried in here?”

  “That’s family business.”

  “Now you’re breaking me, Mama.”

  “But you ain’t broke. You go to one of those fancy white lady spas.”

  “You know I’m Ada.”

  “I know you take good care of me and Temple.”

  It was impossible to know what her mother did and didn’t know. Ada looked at the shiny things. She wondered if they were real. If they were real, she was going to a spa, she was buying a treadmill, she was building a real playground for the kids at KidPlay.

  The jewels were not real. Ada wondered if the old lady had switched them. Or maybe her father had switched them. Somehow what mattered most was, her mother wanted her to have a break, even if she didn’t know her name.

  Later that week, when Ada went to clean, her mother dropped her old diary in her purse. Reading her birth story made Ada feel spunky. She had forgotten her parents had met the great and great-big civil rights worker Fannie Lou Hamer. She had forgotten the band bus got as far as Mound Bayou, Mississippi, before she plopped out in the parking lot of the Mississippi Delta’s only black hospital, Taborian. She had forgotten Maceo pulled a gun when the doctor said they didn’t accept dirty babies. She had forget that Delila’s mother had delivered her. She had forgotten a lot.

  Reading her old diary gave her a thought of rereading her new food diary. Reading over all her pages, it was easy to see exactly where
and when the extra calories were coming in—on the run.

  The extra almonds she ate going out the back door; the bread she ate running up the stairs; the chai she drank walking down the street on errands.

  No more. She had a simple new rule: Eat sitting down.

  The very next week she stepped on the scale and was one and three-quarter pounds less round.

  This would have been the highlight of the month, except that later that month, Ada got a text from the Hampton alumni office—Matt Mason was passing through town, and wanted to take her to lunch the very next day.

  19

  EAT SLOWLY

  WELL AWARE, FROM years of teaching Sunday school, that a lie of omission is a lie nonetheless, Ada managed to mention, as she headed out her bedroom door toward her morning ramble, that Matt Mason was passing through town on his way to the Mississippi Delta, where he was doing research about bluesmen associated with the Dockery Plantation. Then she started talking about how different the neighborhood looks on foot. That the same redheaded boy on the crazy bike had passed her twice earlier in the week, and the last time he had shouted out, “I’m getting mine, you getting yours.” She wondered aloud what he might have meant. She added so many clauses and interesting additional bits of information, she would be able to tell Preach that Matt Mason was passing through town without Preach hearing it. As Preach appeared not to be paying any attention, Ada ventured, “He wants to go out to Mama and Daddy’s to interview Maceo. I might ride out there with him.”

  This would have been a triumph. Safely hidden in her wordcloud, the facts of her day were both told and obscured. She thought. She thought wrong. Preach put his razor down. He had heard something in the tone of Ada’s voice that alarmed him.

  “Maceo not taking a turn, is he?”

  “Won’t die today.”

  “How you know that?”

  “Maceo loves,” Ada said, dropping into Maceo’s voice to quote him, “‘settin’ the press straight.’”

  “He won’t croak right before a last bit of spotlight?” said Preach, picking up his razor.

  “Exactly.”

  “Ride out there with Mason. Be good for you.”

  Ada didn’t like getting this permission. It spoiled things. It meant she would have to go a step further to transgress. And she didn’t want to go too far. But she did want to transgress. Once. A little. Still. She wanted to poke her toes in the waters of naughtiness without dipping her hips in the waters of nastiness. If she could pull it off, it would be a slick trick. Her one slick trick. And she wanted it. Bad. She was sick of being the virtuous woman, a creature with no mysteries. Just this once she wanted a secret desire. Unvoiced, the wish put a new and faraway smile on Ada’s lips.

  Startled by the fast-descending distance, Preach blew Ada a soaped-up kiss, a bit of his shaving foam. Ada reached out to catch it with her fingers. They hadn’t done that in a long time. Another man’s presence, even just on the horizon, was changing things. Walking out the door, Ada was flushing or blushing, she couldn’t tell which.

  Standing before the steamed-up mirror, Preach was thinking he had a long day and a long week ahead. He was glad for Ada to have a bit of a diversion. He was glad for Ada to have somebody to go out to the lake house with that wasn’t him. He knew Mason wouldn’t take a second look at Ada great big, because that wasn’t his thing. Except Ada wasn’t quite as gorgeously great big as she had been. Every way he looked, sweet stuff was shrinking. Lawd, have mercy today, he murmured to himself. I’m starting to sound like my mama. On the last glide of his razor, he nicked himself.

  Back from her walk, Preach gone, Ada hit the shower, and then a final reckoning with what she would wear. She wanted to rush to the mall and buy new clothes. But that would be too crazy, and she already acted crazy enough after getting the text. The day before, she had done something she had never once done in her married life. She had spent time and money on ablutions: she had had her eyebrows waxed, and her lip waxed, and her chin waxed; had her fingernails polished and her roots dyed; and she had bought, on her first trip ever to Sephora, a new foundation, a new mascara, her first nude lipstick, and an old perfume. She hadn’t sold the car, and she was dipping to near the bottom of her spoon money. She rushed around and did all this after she got the text, saying HE was passing through.

  Over her almonds and yogurt she asked herself, Why? Going to see Mason didn’t make sense. She wasn’t ready yet. She had lost thirty-four pounds, not seventy, not a hundred. She didn’t want him to see her midstream at 186. She had wanted an “aha moment” when he could look at her and say, “Umph, the years have been good to you, girl!” Except he would never say that.

  Mason was a black man who had lived all his life among white people and plastic surgery and diets and prosperity—he would expect her to look good at fifty. And now he lived in Tinseltown, La-La Land, Hollyweird. Every little bit she had fallen away from good would be a disappointment.

  The pounds she had lost wouldn’t change that. Wouldn’t change the tags on her neck, the lines on her forehead; wouldn’t vanish the age and time freckles on her cheeks or banish the bags under her eyes. I am going because I don’t like pipe dreams, she thought. I am going because there is a possibility he will want me as I am now. And the only way I would have him is if he wanted me now—but it is not a large possibility. There is a large possibility he won’t recognize me.

  On her morning walk she had concluded she would wear the same ole, same ole: Juicy sweats and Burberry raincoat. In honor of the occasion she would lace on her lucky shoes, her high-top Converse All-Stars. And she would break out the unworn underwear the girls had bought their mama for her last birthday. At long last, she would squeeze into the brown-and-black tiger-striped panties and bra. The point wasn’t that Matt Mason would see her tiger stripes. He wouldn’t. But he might see the oomph they gave Ada. And she would wear the same perfume she had worn when she had dated Matt Mason, Opium.

  Wearing the underwear her daughters had bought her with the perfume Matt Mason had long ago picked out for her seemed just a tad disloyal to Preach. Ada liked that. She hoped it would be significant enough transgression to get transgression out of her system.

  Their first and only Valentine’s Day together Matt Mason had bought Opium perfume for her and taken her to eat Chinese food. She would wear Opium and they would go to P.F. Chang’s and eat a ridiculously high-calorie, high-carb lunch, and he would see she had turned into an old cow, and this whole thing would be over.

  Right. She was ready for over. She was tired of everything. Tired of going out to the lake to see her parents, who didn’t see her. Tired of staying married to Preach and not asking the hard questions about what he was doing elsewhere that he wasn’t doing at home. Tired of the fantasizing to get through reality. Tired of the diet. Tired of the exercising. Tired of the worrying about the girls. Tired of living in a house they did not own. She was tired of all that, and she wasn’t afraid of dying. She wanted to climb up to the top of her green metal roof and jump off—except that would be too exhibitionistic. She wondered if cuddling into a curvy road on a wet night and a tree was not a more dignified way of dealing with exhaustion and unexpressed mourning than feigning amnesia. Whatever. She simply was not pretty enough to see her old beau yet. And the man who thought she was pretty enough, Preach, she was about to wrong. It was all messed up. But there was not a power on earth that would have stopped her from meeting Matt Mason at the P.F. Chang’s at eleven o’clock.

  For once she was letting herself be impatient. She had to know now. Her beauty clock was ticking down.

  She had wanted to get to the restaurant first. She wanted the table to hide some of her blutter. If he didn’t see her standing until he had fallen under the spell of nostalgia, she might pull him into her rebound infatuation. Unfortunately, he had arrived before her. She was early. He was earlier. Perhaps he too was eager.

  She recognized him, at once, from across the room. She told the hostess she was with a party
already seated. The hostess had said she didn’t have one. What she meant was, she didn’t have one she thought Ada belonged to. Ada silently said, That fixes you fine for thinking about cheating. Out loud she said, “I’ll just dash into the bathroom while I’m waiting.” Her plan was to veer near Mason’s table and get a closer look. If he didn’t recognize her, she was leaving. After she was safely in her car, and safely out of the parking lot, and safely back into the center of her boring life, she could call Mason from her cell phone and chirp, “Church emergency, I’m so sorry.”

  She started her slow walk toward him. He was seated as she had planned to be seated, on the banquette side looking out. His coat, also a Burberry, was neatly folded beside him as she had planned to fold hers. And he was wearing Converse All-Stars, just like hers. She tried to remember if he wore them back then. She didn’t think so.

  Matt Mason sat at a table with a smile so bright white it had to have been created by a cosmetic dentist. He looked like a cross between a professor and a cowboy, like someone Ada watched on late-night talk television waiting for Preach to come home.

  He wore jeans and a blue blazer and a white shirt. His unlined face was tanned a browner shade of chestnut than Ada remembered. She imagined the burnished skin came from the years of practicing his capoeira ginga and leg sweeps and knee strikes in public parks beneath the western sun. He looked almost alarmingly young and fit. He didn’t seem to recognize her. Proof. Finally she had proof. The years had been too unkind. She decided to risk getting close enough to get a good long gaze at him and perhaps a whiff of his cologne. Then she would walk on. Or maybe her perfume, the old perfume he had bought her years before, would tremble a memory.

  It didn’t. He was alternating texting and gazing about, but he took no notice of Ada. She had veered away from his table and was almost to the toilets when he called out her name and stood. She had to walk twenty feet with Mason smiling right at every pound of her.