Chins—double, triple, and scalpel-tightened—lifted a little higher. Ada, the singer’s daughter, had finally arrived: respectable in her own right, not despite of her father, or because of her husband.
As appetizers were served and some lettuce was doused with sweet and fatty dressings and some lettuce was eaten naked, the Lunch Bunch settled into a raucous and significant chat about black green, about the niceties that served, and the niceties that prevented blacks from thriving. The ladies came to a few conclusions: A blues aesthetic of raw truth and lyricism was beautiful; blues economics of starve and steal were not. And blues health is plain illin’—and not in a good way.
Money and Food and Material Mess were the Achilles’ heels of modern African American culture, according to the ladies of the Lunch Bunch. What, the ladies wanted to know, do we do about a culture, our culture, us, in which the phrase “She’s a mess” is a term of endearment? It all came back to the stuff Ada was calling blutter. She shared the word with the group. Somebody said, “Suffocates me every day.” Somebody else joked, “Blutter the dry drown of black folk.”
They had brought it back to brass tacks. To the small things that hold the floor of our world down.
Now that Ada was doing a little something-something about blutter in her body, she realize she had long been wishing Preach would do a little something-something about blutter in their bankbooks. It seemed an easy thing to ask him for, until she realized he might be hiding some woman in the economic record mess. Blutter obliterated, she might see something she wasn’t ready to see. Yet.
Ada let her mind drift back to the conversation at the table. The ladies were talking about the same thing she was thinking about.
“The politics of beauty lash black women harder, the politics of economics lash black men harder.”
“Our women make green bank, and our men make white women.”
“Lord, have mercy today.”
By the time it was over, half the women were drinking the governor’s water, tap water. When the waiter brought the bill, two thirds of everybody present vowed next time their bill would be the lowest.
In the midst of juggling twenty-eight separate checks, the waiter with the inky black eyelashes leaned over to Ada and said, “I’m going on your diet.”
Ada gave him a great big tip. She tipped on the amount she would have eaten in her old days. It’s one thing to be thrifty, and another to be mean.
24
MANAGE PORTION SIZES
IT WAS THE day to embrace Gargantua, lunch at the Cheesecake Factory followed by dinner at Maggiano’s, the day after Lunch Bunch. Gluttony was walking with the devil, and all Ada could try to do was grab one by the tail and beat the other.
Ada hated what she called “Our Holidays,” the season that stretched from Thanksgiving through Valentine’s Day that seemed to be full of nothing but overeating.
She took the first snatch at gluttony’s tail by walking to Queenie’s instead of driving.
It took Ada a lot longer than the twelve to fifteen minutes the twins had separately assured her was all it was going to take. And the hill up Blair, which didn’t look like a hill in her car, felt like a mountain in her pink-and-black Nikes and a thick enough sweatshirt to keep her from freezing.
The only good thing about the walk was, she crossed paths with the redheaded boy who rode the crazy bike. As he zipped by Ada, he shouted, “We’re getting it!” This remark pleased Ada.
Most acquaintances who passed didn’t recognize athletic Ada—naked of makeup, hair tied back in an improvised dorag, hands out front pumping to burn more calories—as Ada. She waved at a few folk she knew, passing in cars, who didn’t wave back. She enjoyed being this flavor of incognegro.
What she didn’t enjoy was being two blocks from the house and needing a toilet. Bad. The coffee and the exercise hit at just the same time. To hold it, she had to walk with the peculiar wriggling gait she saw daily on the playground, when she told kids to “hold it” and wait their turn for the toilet. It was a gait she knew to be completely undignified.
She had forgotten how hard “holding it” could be. Something about the absurdity of a fifty-year-old woman being in a five-year-old situation tickled Ada. If laughing hadn’t been likely to cause her to soil herself, she would have laughed.
Shuffling down the street, squeezing little muscles for all they were worth, she gave herself some harsh reprimands. Accept the realities of the body. Let children pee when they need to. And finally, don’t be embarrassed to desecrate your mother-in-law’s perfect powder room!
Ada, who had called Queenie to tell her to have the front door open, rushed in without stopping to kiss or be kissed by Queenie.
Queenie was standing at the stove when Ada got out of the bathroom.
“Now, come give me some sugar, baby.”
Queenie met her halfway cross the room, walking with three hundred pounds of grace that made Michael Jackson’s moonwalk look like a stutterstep. Queenie pulled her daughter-in-law close in, like she was trying to smell her.
“You not abusing laxatives, are you?”
“No!”
“The way you just rushed into the bathroom—”
“No. How do you know about laxative abuse, anyway?”
“I saw it on Oprah.”
“Oprah’s off the air.”
“I didn’t say I saw it yesterday.” Ada settled in a seat beside Queenie. Queenie had some playing cards on the table in front of her. “You want to play a quick hand of bid whist?”
“A quick one.”
Queenie shuffled and talked and dealt and talked.
“You know, Preach doesn’t like skinny legs. On girls or chickens.”
“Everything isn’t about Preach.”
“Don’t tell him that.”
“You should have told him.”
Queenie waved her arms to create a swirl that included four or five dozen pictures of Lucius—baby, toddler, boy, and young man—crisscrossing the American South, standing at, on, or beneath various tourist attractions from the arch in St. Louis to the Everglades in Florida.
“We moved so much. Every two, three years, sometimes eighteen months. Preach got too good at making people like him right off the bat. And he was good-looking, and smart girls just told him what they thought he wanted to hear. Then you showed up, talking about what you wanted to talk about, and he started paying attention to somebody beside himself who wasn’t standing over him with a strap.”
“You make him sound selfish.”
“He was till he met you. Then he decided you was his gift from God, and he loved God real good. And he decided he needed to be the kind of man you would want to marry.”
“When I married Preach, I thought we might get to move, that the church might move us, but that didn’t work out.”
“You wanted to marry a military man.”
Ada tapped the brag book lying on the fake butler’s table that sat beside the sofa on Ada’s end. “I’ve been on my fair share of tours of the Holy Land.”
“Yeah, but you had to put up with all the church ladies to see it.”
“Preach does have his devoted ladies, but that doesn’t bother me none.”
“It would bother me.”
“Shoot. My high school girlfriends used to have crushes on my daddy. He’d get up on that stage and start singing, and they be unbuttoning their blouses when they came to our house for dinner and putting on lipstick. My mama always said a man another woman can steal from you ain’t your man no way.”
The last card fell. Ada won. Pondering the everyday miracle and everyday misery of marriage, Ada walked back home.
An hour later Ada was at KidPlay, seated at her desk writing a subsitute teacher schedule and worried about lunch. Once a year, with board members acting as substitute teachers, all the KidPlay teachers treated themselves to lunch to celebrate recertification. At first there was a big debate about where to go. Then there was a place that pleased everybody. This year tha
t place did not please Ada. She stopped and doodled a note to herself on a Post-it: “Embrace Gargantua without being gargantuan.” Ada was headed toward perilous temptation: the Cheesecake Factory.
The ladies carpooled from KidPlay to the mall. In her head Ada heard the Jaws theme music. As she walked across the parking lot toward the Cheesecake Factory, the restaurant looked like a Disneyland version of the Taj Mahal, or perhaps something from a dream of the Arabian Nights—if the Arabian Nights moved to a suburban southern shopping center. Ada sensed danger.
The menu was exhaustive, pages upon pages, a food wish book of sorts, a cruel dictionary, or encyclopedia, not of flavor, but of food wishes. One of the older teachers said it reminded her of the old Sears, Roebuck catalog.
Ada got it. The old Sears, Roebuck catalog was a way to get shoes and gravel and underpants and washers, but it was also a way to learn how to live a middle-class life, a tip sheet of desire. This little spiral-bound book, the Cheesecake Factory menu, was, by Ada’s lights, a cheat sheet of desire.
And it was a few other things as well—a food orgy, a diet disaster, and a kind of printed-language MSG. All the words and all the pictures dulled the palate before the food came out. When the food came out, everything tasted brighter—because the palate had been dulled.
That’s what Ada noticed most, settling into her seat: everywhere, sensory overload. The colors were bright. The sounds were loud. The upholstery was slick. Sensory overload. Except smell. So few smells for so much food.
But paging through the book/menu, Ada had to acknowledge that there was something for everyone on offer. The seduction had begun. Against her will, the abundance pleased her; she became glad they had come.
She told herself it was a black thing. She told herself black folk, after all the starving they’ve done, deserve to be fat. She told herself it reminded her of Diddy Wah Diddy. She told herself it was good to remember Diddy Wah Diddy. Whatever.
There was American and Chinese and Mexican and Tex-Mex and Polynesian and things that were hard to describe, like the bikini martini, and there was Greek and southern. There was French and Japanese, and there was Thai, and that was just appetizers. Moving to main courses, there were burgers and calamari and even English fish and chips. There was old-school Chicken Marsala, and Chicken Piccata, and there was Ahi Tartare. And there was Jambalaya Pasta—the Cheesecake Factory’s most popular pasta, and a dish that would perplex most Cajuns and all Romans. But maybe they would understand the Jamaican Black Pepper Shrimp or recognize the Mahi-Mahi Mediterranean, except Mahi-Mahi are not found in the Mediterranean. They are found in Hawaii and in the Caribbean Sea and off the Atlantic coast of Florida, and sometimes in Southeast Asia. Her head was spinning. There were even dishes alleged to be for managing weight: an Asian dish, a Mexican dish, and what was a kind of French dish if you consider pear and endive French. And she didn’t know if a Cuban sandwich should be considered Cuban or Floridian, but she knew it should be considered. And then there were all the cheesecakes, including two low-carbohydrate versions.
She was salivating in anticipation of ordering the jambalaya when a family entered the restaurant, parents and a son, not one of them less than two hundred pounds. Her blood was in the water, and the shark was circling. Ada asked for grilled salmon and asparagus and asked that they both be cooked with as little oil as possible and no sugar. She told them to hold the potatoes. In her head she saw herself shooting the big white shark with her bigger black shark gun. When the plate of salmon came, she held her hand over the top of it, figured out how much would fit in the palm of her hand, and started cutting away at the rest, which she passed on her bread plate as tastes, leaving just a piece about the size of a deck of cards on her plate to eat. That was the depth charge. Blew the crazy hunger shark right out of the water. The Jaws music stopped playing in her head. She was victorious.
The asparagus were good, hot and crispy and a little salty. She savored that. And she savored being beneath light fixtures that reminded her of what she thought the roofs of Saint Petersburg, Russia, or some casbah in Morocco might look like, gorgeous bulbs of color, or what they had looked like in a Turner Classic movie or two, and a Bollywood extravaganza or three. Looking at the lights made the asparagus taste as good as the jambalaya she had wanted to eat.
In thanks for the extravagant surroundings and not wanting to be thought cheap she ordered Fiji artesian water and eventually a double espresso.
Most of the other teachers and all the aides ordered Caramel Royal Macchiatos, and she did her best to remember, from earlier visits, what she was missing.
When it came to dessert time, she ordered the original cheesecake but only ate one naked forkful. The 770-calorie, God-knows-how-many-carbs dessert was suddenly a shape-shifting low-carb boon. And by not adding hot fudge when it was passed around the table, she saved three hundred calories. By only eating a bite, she saved six hundred calories—and so it was that in the land of excess Ada found success.
Portion control and indulgence in dollar-expensive but calorie-free drinks (artesian water and espresso) allowed Ada to focus on what she was really paying for—an elaborate fantasy of abundance in an over-the-top exotic setting—and stop focusing on the so-so food. She had never enjoyed the Cheesecake Factory more.
She enjoyed it so much that for a moment it flashed through her head that she should found a string of restaurants called Diddy Wah Diddy, after the mythical land of food for black people, where the chicken run around cooked with a knife and fork in them. It would be an all-you-can-eat buffet, but everything would be healthy, and there would be amazing distractions that kept you from wanting to eat—too much. Diddy Wah Diddy—a place where we feed our health and our beauty.
She let herself be happy enough, knowing she had gotten out of the Cheesecake Factory under a thousand calories, with no carb damage. She was saving the carb damage for Maggiano’s.
When the KidPlay birthday lunch and the annual Interdenominational Leadership dinner fell on the same day, it was easy to believe that God did not want Ada to get fit. The only way to keep her winning streak alive and get out of Maggiano’s without gaining weight, she figured, was to study the calorie and carb counts before she got there. With the afternoon free, she locked her office door. It took a lot of poking around and Googling, but finally on Photobucket she found the Maggiano’s nutrition info. Maybe God did love her.
The only thing remotely good for Ada’s diet was the minestrone soup. Half an herb-roasted chicken was 1890 calories and 108 carbs. She wished she ate steak. She didn’t, even if filet mignon was 800 calories and 13 carbs. Ada liked cows.
Looking for the lowest-carb chicken dish, she settled on Chicken Marsala at 970 calories, 25 carbs, and 1190 milligrams of sodium. If she focused on the Pellegrino water and the wine and just ate a bit of her chicken and a bite or two of the greener vegetables, she would be part of the feast but not part of the fat.
Ada was back to thinking about starting a restaurant chain. There was a carnival atmosphere to both of these restaurants that appealed. Something about eating at the Cheesecake Factory and Maggiano’s on the same day was provocative. They appealed as a place to arrive hungry and be filled; they appealed as a place where hunger was historical.
But the commonness of hunger collects us too. Ada wasn’t certain she would banish hunger completely, if she could. Much as she preferred the welcome of feasts, she understood there was radical union in hunger.
Squatting on the toilet in Maggiano’s, peeing off a bit of the wine and the coffee, Ada understood a few new things about the shitty realities of abundance. That a purpose of largeness is to make us understand what it is to be small. That a purpose of the body is to be a clock, ever reminding us not just that time passes but that time runs out, just like shit. And sitting on the toilet, she knew this too, as she knew we deal so differently with our children’s diapers and our spouses’ diapers and our parents’ diapers. Our children tell us we will die; our lovers promise a taste of in
finity before we do.
Realizing she would not know this if she had not tasted infinity on Preach’s tongue, once, some time ago, and that she did not know if she would ever taste it again, Ada let tears run down her face.
Back at the table, the bill arrived. It was larger than anyone expected, besotted as they had been by all the mundane abundance. Preach, who owed less than many, was the first to say, “Let’s split it equally.” Ada had to smile. Some of Preach’s generosity was pure, “Lets keep everybody happy,” not “Let’s have everybody love me.” Some of it was even, “Let’s not forget what it is to be hungry and poor and the honor to be found in carrying each other.” Generosity was something she liked about her husband, and it was something she hated; and generosity was something she liked and hated about herself. Like it or hate it, it was going to be with them awhile. They, Preach and Ada, would usually do their part to make that moment the bill came, that moment Preach had taught her had a name, la quart d’heure de Rabelais, the quarter hour of Rabelais, less chilling.
Having danced and intending to dance again, Ada was scraping together pennies and pounds for the piper.
25
EAT EVERY THREE HOURS
JARIUS’S GRANDMOTHER LORETHA was about to spend the weekend in jail, paying off a DUI. Loretha had been ashamed to ask for help till the last minute of the eleven o’clock Wednesday-night service, but she had sidled up to Ada during the last hymn and spilled the beans.
Loretha’s breathalyzer had been over the maximum allowed, but not by much. She had been to a party with her friends after a long week of work, cleaning rooms at the Opryland hotel. It was Friday, one of the friends was getting married the next Saturday, and they took her out, put a fake tiara on her head and a fake veil, and started drinking sweet drinks that turned out to be stronger than the ladies thought they were. At the end of the evening, the bride-to-be, watching her weight, was the least drunk of everybody, so she volunteered to drive. And they got pulled over. Loretha switched places with the bride-to-be, who had had a DUI before. And so she had to serve forty-eight hours. At fifteen, Dorian was too young to stay with her baby by herself overnight. Besides, Dorian wanted to go to the church-sponsored lock-in.
Ada's Rules Page 14