Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  As she approached, he opened his arms wide. She stopped walking. He gave her a “what’s this?” shrug, then opened his arms wide again. She didn’t run to him, but she got to him quick. He wrapped her in his arms and squeezed. Then he dropped his arms and stepped back so he could stroke her chin with his index finger, just like he had done when they were young and in love and in public. She blushed, and she knew it. This heat on her face was not a flush or a flash.

  He took her by the hand, then he kissed that hand. She found herself standing on her tiptoes and giving him a peck on the lips to stop him from kissing the other hand.

  “Woman! It is good to see you!”

  “It is?”

  “For sure!”

  “I didn’t think you’d recognize—”

  “I would forget my name before I forgot your face.”

  “You promised me that once.”

  “And I keep my promises.”

  Ada took a half step back from Mason. He immediately closed the distance with a step toward her. They were closer than they had been. She could smell him. He smelled like Lifebuoy soap, and Altoids and smoke, like her college days.

  “I didn’t think you’d be a promise-keeping man.”

  “You didn’t give me a chance to find out.”

  “I didn’t give you a lot of things.”

  “Virginity at the top of the list.” Ada blushed and hot-flashed at the same moment. She felt a thousand degrees. Mason grinned. “I guess people don’t use those kind of words when they talk to the preacher’s wife.”

  He leaned in and kissed her on the cheekbone. He pulled out her chair; she sat down and he sat down. She smiled tentatively. She was trembling.

  “It’s nice someone can forget I’m ‘the preacher’s wife.’”

  “As long as you don’t forget.”

  “No worry there.”

  He reached for her hands across the table. She gave them to him for half a second, then squeezed his hands and dropped hers safely into her lap. She told herself he was under a delusion she and Preach had some money to contribute to the alumni fund. She told herself not to believe what she was seeing—that Mason was seeing Ada with old eyes.

  “You always be my Baby Boo.”

  “Boo grown old.”

  “Boo grown lush.”

  “I thought you liked skinny little girls.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Your wife is tiny.”

  “Ex-wife. She got me over itty-bitty women.”

  “I heard you divorced, I’m so sorry.” Ada said this sincerely, said it in her preacher’s wife voice.

  “Don’t be. She turned into one mean skinny hungry heifer.”

  “I’m still sorry.”

  “How’s Lucius?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Great.”

  “You had kids.”

  “And you didn’t.”

  The dangerous moment had passed. It was just behind them. But it was there, a shared giddiness neither had anticipated. The funny way they were wearing the same coat and the same shoes had sparked it. The way he recognized her perfume kept the fire going.

  “You know, I’ve bought so much of that perfume trying to get other ladies to smell like you.”

  They both ordered lettuce wraps and eggplant and chicken and green peach tea and white rice and a plate of orange slices to be served early. When he opened his chopsticks, she remembered him teaching her how to use chopsticks. That was another dangerous moment. When Ada had mastered the sticks, Mason let her eat rice with chopsticks off his belly.

  They had done many kinds of “everything but”—and food had been at the center of the best part. They had played with body paints and bubbles, but they liked the food—from a plastic honey bear, to warm doughnuts, to popsicles, to the rice and chopsticks—best.

  Until the moment Mason kissed her cheekbone, Ada had put these memories away. Or rather Preach had pushed them away. After marriage, after feeling Preach push into the center of her, after feeling an orgasm that began in her cervix, a yielding that was not begun on the surface of her—on the tip of her tongue or the pink curve of her most sensitive lady parts—but in her soul, she dismissed all the sex play of earlier days, all sex play begun on her surface, as babyish.

  Watching Mason deftly pick up a section of orange with his chopsticks, she was no longer sure. She and Matt Mason had bathed each other, and painted on each other, and licked and bit and wrestled, had cuddled and rocked and dreamed in each other’s arms, and they had woken up to kiss for hours. Twenty-five years later she believed she wanted his penis but had been afraid to have it. Even way back then, she knew he’d be a hard dog to keep under the porch.

  Now she knew all men were.

  Mason was starting to talk about the research he was planning to do in Indianola when the food arrived. Between bites of their shared lettuce wraps she told him that one of her daughters was living down in Cleveland, Mississippi. He said he had a house in Greenville.

  “That explains it.”

  “What?”

  “How you got so … southern.”

  “What was I before?”

  “Something different.”

  “I started listening to the blues after you broke my heart.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “It’s the truth. All you left me was a stack of records and a record player you didn’t want, and I started listening and pretending you were in the next room.”

  “Western, you were western.”

  “I’m still western. You are a blues royalty. Your grandfather’s people lived on the Dockery Plantation.”

  “Yep.”

  “And you were born in a cotton field near Mound Bayou?”

  “Yep.”

  “How did I let you get away?”

  “Back then it didn’t matter I was blues royalty.”

  “And …”

  “You were too aggressive.”

  “Is that a way of saying too wild?”

  “It’s a way of saying too sumthin’.”

  “If you were sumthin’ too, we could ride down to Moorhead, wait for darkness, and do what we didn’t do way back when, on the crossroads.”

  “Now you sound straight Delta crazy.”

  “Naw, for real, all I’m saying, Lucius is a lucky man.”

  “You tell him that.”

  They smiled and got back to eating and smaller talk. He kept her cup full of green peach tea. They picked at the eggplant and the chicken. They were too busy smiling at each other to eat. They were taking the meal real slow. Ada had read that eating slowly helped you lose weight. She had never tried it before. Now she knew. Slow is a good way to eat.

  Eventually the waitress brought the check, Mason grabbed it, and the conversation turned back to Memphis Minnie and Mississippi John Hurt and Little Milton and where to find the best tamales in the Delta.

  When he finally checked his watch, when she told him there was no time to bop on down to her parents’, that he should hit the road, an electric conversation came to an end. He said maybe he’d catch her on the flip-flop when he passed back through Nashville to fly back to Los Angeles.

  “Absolutely,” Ada lied.

  She closed the car door after she hugged Mason good-bye, excited by lying—and taking a new pleasure in her pounds.

  The years had not been kind to her, but her almost lover’s eyes had been kind. He saw her through the eyes of their history. A female wanting to be coaxed across a line. He saw her as she had been to him at their very beginning. And he let her see that he saw all that. Silently she thanked him for noting she wanted something.

  The world might think him a professor, an expert on blues ethnomusicality. She knew he was a frontiersman. She saw him. And he liked what she saw. And now, with more than half a century on her, and her days of passionate gifting rapidly passing, she liked seeing herself in his eyes.

  But
Ada wished he had not come just then. She had liked sitting with Mason over a Chinese meal wearing the same perfume he had bought her thirty years before too much. She wanted it still ahead of her.

  After tugging on her seat belt, she touched both the places he had kissed on her cheek. She let herself feel the echoing tingle at her waist, the place where his fingertips had caught hold of her sweet brown belly, as she wondered how seeing him again, when she had lost the next twenty-five pounds, could possibly get any better.

  Then she knew. As she pulled out of the P.F. Chang’s parking lot, she imagined Mason gazing at her naked large body and smiling. She imagined him entering it. On her way to KidPlay she stopped at Burger-Up and ate an Olive and Sinclair brownie with homemade ice cream and hot fudge sauce. She would be a blimp before she was a slut.

  She knew that too.

  20

  FIND A SNACK YOU LIKE THAT LIKES YOU

  THE GIRLS’ RESULTS were in. God loved her and wanted her to be faithful. The family needed her attention. The girl’s results were in, and Preach’s too, and at once the family was more complicated.

  As quickly as she was making new rules, old rules were getting shattered: A family sitting down to eat together should largely be eating the same food. Wrong!

  Ada had ordered kits for both daughters and her husband. Naomi and Ruth were not identical twins, but they looked a lot alike, and yet she suspected they would not have the same profile. She wondered if one would be more like her and one would be more like Preach. She truly suspected that Naomi would be more like her and Ruth more like Preach, but she didn’t know—and there could be three types between them, not two.

  The girls got their test results the very same day, and each immediately called their mother. Naomi was balanced carbs and fat. Ruth was a fat restrictor. A day later they found out Preach was a fat restrictor.

  No wonder the whole family was out of shape.

  They all needed something different. Preach and Ruth needed big bowls of oatmeal and egg white omelets and lots of fruit and even orange juice. All they had to think about was fat. Naomi needed egg white omelets with spinach and feta but could have strawberries on the side but probably not the orange juice—and she had to watch the calories. Ada needed omelets with the whole egg and turkey bacon and no toast and no tomato and absolutely no oatmeal. She had to watch the carbs.

  Ada imagined a breakfast platter she would make for the family. Everyone could have scrambled egg whites with spinach, and she imagined making a big amount of that, and off to one side having grilled tomatoes for Naomi and fruit for Preach and Ruth and turkey bacon for herself. She and Naomi would have coffee; Ruth and Preach would have orange juice.

  She tried to think of a perfect snack for all of them and immediately came up with sliced cucumbers—low-carb, low-fat, low-calorie. Cucumbers were the perfect food.

  At the other end of the spectrum was the French fry or potato chip—high-fat, high-carb, balanced-nothing. The only one in the family who could possibly touch one was Naomi—if you were balanced carbs and balanced fats, a few wouldn’t harm you.

  When it came to fruit, Ada realized a peach might be right for Preach and Ruth, an apple for Naomi, and an avocado for Ada.

  On the other hand, air-puffed popcorn was perfect for her fat restrictor, and far less perfect for her balanced-diet dieter, and absolutely forbidden for Ada, who in fact could do better eating a chocolate-covered almond than air-puffed popcorn.

  Ada wanted to weep for the times she had announced, “I am not a short-order cook,” and enticed them all to eat the same breakfast of homemade waffles and bacon. Now she knew she was the only one who should be eating the bacon, and she should have eaten only the bacon; and the waffles needed to be made with fat-free everything for her beloved husband and slightly older daughter.

  Ada was no scientist, but she was on fire with scientific questions. Were black people more likely to be fat because our families are more likely to have people who need to eat different food in them? Most black folk Ada knew had a racially mixed background. Black folks come in a lot of colors, even in the same family. That was part of the inheritance of slavery everybody was used to and talked about. Was there something we didn’t talk about keeping us fat? Was a black nuclear family in Minneapolis more likely to have members whose dietary needs were different, compared with a white Scandinavian family living in a Swedish community in rural Minnesota? Families who tend to be fit are often families with a positive food culture and a tradition of exercising. Is it also true familes who tend to be fit are families that are lucky enough that their family members need to eat the same things? Have the same, or more similar, weight-related DNA?

  Based on what she was seeing in her own family, Ada thought every baby should be tested within the first week of his life, and certainly before he or she got off the breast!

  She wanted to give the different types different names—the no-fats would be the oaties, the balanced carbs and fats would be the fruits, and the no-carbs would be the bacons.

  Her little family had two oaties, a fruit, and a bacon. She thought lovingly of the poached pears Inez had made for her family and how she loved to serve them with a bit of goat cheese drizzled with honey on the side. Now she knew, the pear was perfect for her oaties, a small amount of both was perfect for her fruit, and she, the bacon, should only be eating the goat cheese. New rule: Don’t clean your plate. Eat what’s right for you on it.

  Ada didn’t know if “Don’t clean your plate” should be a rule or a principle. Good Link that she was, she was thinking of principles as umbrella concepts—and that she might should have some.

  If “Don’t clean your plate” was an umbrella principle, under it would be the following rules so far: portion size, the one-bite rule, and “Do the DNA test. “Eat with refinement” was another umbrella principle: “Eat slowly” and “Eat sitting down” were under that. “Eat to be epicurious”—with all the adventuring in it—was an emerging umbrella principle she didn’t yet have enough rules for. Her favorite umbrella principle was the one that was making the whole thing work—“Eat abundantly.”

  Abundantly was the opposite of gluttony.

  21

  ACCESS THE POWER OF QUICK FIXES: POEMS, FINGERNAIL POLISH, AND WAXING

  ADA WAS ON the treadmill at the Dayani Center, struggling. Not really seeing enough progress had been hard; seeing progress was harder.

  Seeing herself, truly seeing herself, for the first time, in the mirror at the Dayani Center and realizing that she had not seen herself before, when she was young and ripe, and firm and tight, was very hard.

  It knocked her to her knees to know this—that she had never really seen and would not see her body beautiful and young, because when she had been beautiful and young she had been effectively blind.

  What was harder still was knowing it was Bird’s beauty, so bright, and Mag’s and Glo’s and Evie’s, brighter still, that had blinded her to her own. Ada, a pretty girl in a house of beauties, had been blinded by their brighter lights to the charms she had been given. She was so mad that she had been given less than her sisters and less than her mother, she confused pretty with ugly. Lawd! Have mercy, today!

  Minute eleven on the treadmill, Ada’s cell phone rang. It was the older of her twins, Ruth, calling looking for a quick lift. This day Ada had no quick lift to offer.

  Fortunately, the younger twin beeped in. Naomi had had a great day before on her diet, an early walk, not a gram of fat all day, and best, she wasn’t hungry. Naomi loved her oatmeal. And she had a suggestion for her sister and her mother.

  “Fingernail polish.”

  “Fingernail polish?”

  “Instead of eating something delicious like a napoleon, or bruschetta or a fabulous cheese plate with almonds and honey, or—”

  “We get the idea!” mother and sister screamed into the phone at the same moment.

  “I’m not talking a forty-dollar mani-pedi, I’m talking seven-dollar polish change.”r />
  “Polish change?”

  “Quick fix.”

  “Quick fix?”

  “Instant high. Legal.”

  “Mine’s getting waxed—what’s yours, Mom?”

  “Poems. My instant fix is poems.”

  “You need a fluffing instant fix.”

  “I heart-fluff. Poems fluff my heart. Keep me keeping on.”

  “Pamplona Purple keeps me keeping on.”

  “Waxing, sugaring, and threading do it for me.”

  “How often can you wax?”

  “Between all the places I have waxed, I can get it done every week if I divide it up. One week eyebrows, one week lip, one week bikini.”

  “Bikini?”

  “Don’t ask, Mom.”

  “Prescribe me a poem, Mama.”

  “What hurts?”

  “My kids. Me. Failing them. Trying not to fail them. Watching Christmas come and knowing what they want and what they’re going to get.”

  “Invictus.”

  Invictus

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

  Under the bludgeoning of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll.

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

  “That’s the poem from that movie about Nelson Mandela.”

  “Black people in America have been loving that poem since way before Nelson Mandela, but we happy he had it too.”

  “Did a black man write that?”

  “A white man who lost a foot to tuberculosis.”

  “You see why I prefer Samoan Sand, Mama. That’s too black and tragic.”