Ada was in, and Dorian would be locked in—it was all settled before they got to the last verse of “I’m So Glad Jesus Lifted Me.”
Standing before Ada in black leggings, flip-flops, and one of Preach’s old shirts, Loretha barely looked the twenty-nine years that she was. Baby Jarius on her hip looked to be her son.
Ada felt sorry for Loretha. She didn’t usually let herself feel sorry for Preach’s congregants or KidPlay parents and grandparents. Usually she focused on the person and the problem at hand and the future. Usually she refused to think about their past, but this moment she did, and she felt sorry, almost “tore down,” for Loretha.
Loretha had worked for Opryland since she was sixteen, since a year after Dorian, her only child, was born. Loretha had always kept a job and an apartment, and she didn’t do drugs. Dorian liked watching cooking shows. Loretha had begun imagining Dorian as a famous chef. She had imagined Dorian getting to be eighteen and getting into the culinary arts training program at the hotel. Then Dorian got pregnant and wanted to drop out of junior high school. Loretha stopped imagining. She circled back to caring for a baby on a dime. She circled into drinking. She circled into fear that she would not have a life, and her daughter would not have a life.
As she stood on Ada’s porch with Jarius on her hip, there was fear for Dorian in Loretha’s eyes.
For baby Jarius, Loretha had hope. Baby Jarius was a boy. An impossibly long infant with beautiful hands. He was going to be a basketball star. Loretha knew this for sure. She kissed Jarius’s fingers. Kissed her grandson’s long baby legs, kissed his baby feet.
“He gonna buy me a house. He gonna go straight to the NBA. ’Fore he turn twenty years old he gonna be a millionaire. His daddy gonna wish he been good to this baby. That other grandmamma gonna wish she bought him some diapers. He gonna buy me a house and send his mama to cooking school, and he gonna get the Preach something for the church.”
Ada reached out to take Jarius from Loretha. The boy didn’t cry; he knew Ada too well. A moment later Preach was standing with them on the doorstep. A moment after that, Preach walked Loretha to his car, a shiny but conservative and powerful Chrysler 300. They all hoped Preach taking Loretha would mean better treatment at the jail.
The car that had scared Ada when purchased might be a part of Loretha’s good luck. It is a rare ill wind that blows no one good.
Walking back into the house with Jarius in her arms, Ada realized he was soaked. She improvised a changing table on the floor with towels, then realized, too late, that she didn’t quite have the right size diapers, or at least not the ones big enough to easily wrangle Jarius into and get the sticky tabs stuck tight. Jarius giggled and wriggled. As Ada tried to secure the right side of his diaper, the left side popped open and off. Before she she could duck and cover, Jarius was peeing straight up and into her face. Ada laughed so hard Baby Jarius started laughing too.
“I think you going to be a preacher like Preach. You already baptizing me. Preach used to baptize the puppies in his neighborhood with Kool-Aid.”
Diaper secure, Ada wanted to kiss Jarius on the head but was worried about “potty mouth.” She was just wondering what she should do with Jarius while she cleaned up when she heard him exploding a giant poop.
Holding Jarius straight out in front of her, Ada mounted the steps to her bedroom with its big shower. Jarius was too big and in too high spirits to change a messy number-two diaper without an extra set of hands. She, and other volunteers at Kidplay, had learned that the hard way.
The shower made up for the extra set of hands. Diaper off. Wipes wiped and flushed. He fussed through all of that, but when Ada turned on the shower and poured bubble bath on his feet and let the bubbles rise around his toes, Jarius was mesmerized. He plopped down in the suds. They made soap sculptures. He put suds on her nose. She little-piggied his toes. Then she rinsed him off again and plopped him in the playpen she had set up in her bedroom with three of his favorite books. Jarius alternated howling for her attention and turning the pages of The Little Caterpillar while Ada washed her face and got on some dry clothes. It wasn’t until she started singing “Rise and shine and give God your glory, glory,” that Jarius started laughing again. Clearly at Ada.
“You don’t think I can sing. I can sing, now.”
Baby Jarius screamed louder, even though Ada wasn’t singing.
“It’s not my singing. You hungry!”
Baby Jarius liked to eat every three hours, on the hour. Let his meal be late, and he would howl loud enough to wake the dead. But if you fed him right on time, he was pretty perfect.
Ada had to poke at his mouth to get him to take the bottle, but after she poked two or three times gently, he latched on and sucked vigorously.
Watching his contentment with his simple feast of milk and suck and repeat, Ada wondered if she wouldn’t enjoy, at least for a little while, being on a liquid diet.
Wanting to be a happy baby herself and wanting to get past the plateau she was on, Ada decided to go online and order a month’s supply of Medifast and think of it as adult baby formula.
Rocking Jarius to sleep, a latex nipple in his mouth, a cotton blanket across his back, it came to Ada’s mind that she might even drink some of it, her adult milkshake, out of a baby bottle. The idea made her laugh, and the dreaming baby burped in her arms. She smiled, kissed him on the head, and tucked him into a huge Moses cradle she had placed at the bottom of her front hall stairs.
What she could do for herself at this moment was walk. So she did it. Up and down her house stairs, while the baby slept. For the first time in months, she was not walking to Matt Mason.
Knowing that she and Preach were a part of Jarius’s best chance made it hard to step toward Matt Mason, hard to step toward any man but Preach, but not impossible. She had come too far to stop walking, so she kept stepping. For the moment, Ada was walking to Ada.
26
SAVOR HOT AND COLD, THE POWER OF HERBAL TEAS AND FLAVORED ICE CUBES
ADA STEPPED ON the scale: six pounds down! Medifast was the bomb. The diet bomb. Instrument of rapid change. Except she was bored.
Boredom was a treacherous territory. She jumped on the treadmill at the Dayani and started walking, not exactly to herself but past boredom. The first song she played shouted, “If you’re going through hell, keep on walking, you might get out before the devil even knows you’re there.”
The devil got her thinking about fire and ice. Lines she had memorized in the seventh grade popped to the top of her mind. As she punched the numbers up to 2.7, then up to 3, then up to 3.2, then down to 3 and 2.7 and 2.5 and 2.4, before making her way up to 3.2 again, she amused herself by constructing a little parody of the long-lost Frost … Some say my skinny life begins with fire, some say with ice, from what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those that favor fire … for reconstruction, ice is also nice and will suffice.
Fire and ice. She needed more of both in her life without adding calories. What would it take to get back into Lucius’s arms? Getting beyond wanting a baby bottle might be a start.
Still, she was rocking the Medifast, at least for a few days longer. And on the treadmill she figured out that she would make herself a feast of fire and ice by making a tea drawer for herself—that would be the fire, the boiling water—and then by making herself wonderful ice cubes.
One of her Link sisters had given her a gift of some tea from Mariage Frères, and someone had given her some Fauchon. She had been saving these treats for a special occasion. There was one called something like Evening in Paris, and one called something like Afternoon in France, or was it the other way around? She was breaking out that fancy tea. When she went to look for the tea, it was gone. Snagged by the daughters, no doubt. She called Naomi: “You were just saving it!” She couldn’t be mad. Naomi was right—and there was tea to be had, walking distance from her house. Ada never treated herself to it, but she had seen it on the shelves, and dismissed it as a foolish luxury. She set out on a
tea safari in her neighborhood.
She walked north from her house, the seven funky up-and-down blocks that dropped her into the commercial district closest to home.
Her first stop was Davis Cookware. She sniffed a variety of black tea sacks, eventually settling on some lapsang souchong that was scooped into a ziplock. She went into Fido, the local coffee shop, and picked up some special pretty, flowery teas in sachets. Then she crossed back across the street and bopped into the French bakery, Provence, where she picked up some local fair-trade tea from Partners Tea Company. On her way home she stopped at Harris Teeter to get her oldie-goldie favorites from her college days, Twinings Earl Gray and Irish Breakfast.
Home again, she organized a tea drawer. She loved looking at the combination of shiny gold tins and paper pyramids and just plain boxes and plastic bags marked with black marker. Loved it so much she couldn’t bring herself to use any. She’d put her nose in there and smell. For three days she savored just opening up the drawer and sniffing and looking at the teas. I am Bird’s daughter.
On the fourth day she took out six cups and made herself six different cups of tea. She sugared none. She milked none. She sipped from one cup, then another. She sipped in the order that seemed to mean something to her, like she was picking out notes of a melody, one note at a time. Three sips of Cinnamon Apple Spice followed by a small sip of Lemon Zinger followed by a long sip of Soir de Paris filled her with all the solace of a fireplace and all the promise of sparklers. Then she sipped a bit of chamomile and a bit of the spiced chai and a bit of the Safari Rooibos, and it was like she was sliding up a musical scale, into a hit of clean serene. I am Temple’s daughter, too.
Sip by sip she finished a third of three of the cups and half of three. It was a calorie-free feast that she would not soon forget. A feast just for herself, and it was good for her, an innocent first. A young-old woman’s first innocent first. I’m me.
She didn’t make six cups again, but daily she would make herself a cup or two or three, sometimes as an hour’s entertainment, sometimes as an antidote to boredom, sometimes as reassurance. The cups became places to hide as her body dissolved. One day she looked into the cup and saw a fragment of her body floating in the cup; then the light shifted, and the reflection vanished.
Watching herself reflected, then vanished, she started thinking of the ice she had thought she would make but hadn’t got to yet.
In her childhood her mother’s mother, MaDear, had frequently frozen fruit into the ice cubes she made: maraschino cherries, slices of fresh peaches, pears from cans, it all depended on what MaDear had on hand. Ada loved the way her grandmother’s ice looked in jelly jar glasses that frosted over.
Thinking of these ice cubes, Ada decided to make ice cubes out of her tea. When her ice was frozen, Ada made herself a tall glass of water filled with the new cubes and slices of fresh cucumber and mint leaves and slices of lemon. This was dessert, this was delicious, this was change, and it was frozen. The next week she went back into the kitchen to whip up another batch of ice cubes, this time orange peel and rosemary. The very next morning she served herself orange and rosemary ice cubes topped with Fiji water splashed with a drop of rose essence in the water. She served this with a little bread plate of herbs: a sprig of tarragon, a few chives, a bit of mint. She nibbled and sipped for a delighted quarter hour.
She was celebrating getting to 168.
27
DON’T INITIATE CHANGE YOU CAN’T STICK WITH FOR FIVE YEARS
SHE WAS SICK of Medifast. It wasn’t that it tasted bad. It tasted fine enough for the good it did. But all the deprivation, despite the little treats of ice cubes and tea, was setting her up to gorge, and she knew it.
Before she knew it, she had snuck off to Burger-Up, her favorite neighborhood restaurant, and eaten an order and a half of crispy-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside sweet potato fries and a chocolate brownie made with local Tennessee chocolate—along with a most excellent chicken sandwich with a more-than-tummy-yumming sauce. Dinner was water and boiled egg whites.
She had a new rule: Don’t do anything you can’t do for a lifetime. It takes too long to get used to new stuff, and she didn’t want to make the effort to get used to anything that was going to help for just a little while. She was saving her remaining powder for the last big long bang.
Nobody half a century old was meant to be drinking milkshakes three times a day and trying not to move too much or do too much exercise because you might pass out because you were taking in too few calories.
On the other hand, she had to admit that during her four weeks on Medifast she had lost sixteen pounds, and a sixteen-pound weight loss in a single month was hard to come by, mid-diet. She said one last “Praise the Lord for Medifast.” Then chanted aloud the way forward: “Eight hours sleep every night. Eight glasses of water every day. Walk for thirty minutes every day. Eat protein and salad. Drink only red wine and tequila. When in doubt, eat chicken and broccoli for dinner. Snack on unlimited amounts of sliced cucumbers. Eat something every three hours from eight to ten, then nothing from ten to eight.” Even better, Willie Angel had told her when she called to check in and get a blood pressure medicine refill: Don’t eat from eight to eight. Simple rules. Every day, every day, healthing everafter.
Visiting Preach once a week in his office was another simple habit Ada wanted to get back to. Not visiting Preach was a thing she couldn’t keep up. Wanting more than a wifely peck on the cheek, she headed to church.
The preacher was surprised by his wife’s visit. He was sitting at his desk contemplating stealing from Peter to pay Paul when his wife walked in. On the desk were three ice-cube trays.
“Watching ice melt?”
“Trying to decide which of these credit card companies is most likely to cut me some slack.”
“Credit card companies?”
“I’ve got credit cards frozen into the ice.”
“Gimme some scissors.”
“You don’t need to hack ’em out; hot water works fine.”
“I need to cut them up!”
“Ada …”
“You’ve loaned another one of your congregants our money—without asking me. Again?”
“The bail money for Jarius’s grandma.”
“And what’s this you about to thaw a card out for?”
“Jesper Phillips.”
“Jesper Phillips?”
“Blood thinner. The insurance company will only pay for Coumadin, but there’s an injectable that’s better. Just till I sort it out with them.”
“How much are we spending in meds every month that we don’t have?”
“I haven’t added up the numbers. I don’t want to know. If I know, I won’t be able to get up tomorrow and do what I got to do.”
“And if we don’t know, I can’t get up in the morning and do what I got to do, make the ends meet.”
“We always manage.”
“Managing is managing me into a stroke. Not living in a house we own. Not knowing where I will be living when I get old if your mama doesn’t die and leave us her house—because my daddy is leaving his to our daughters—because I might give it to the church. And I’m the fool who loves you so much, I might give it to the church. Yep, we managing me into a stroke!”
“I’m gonna buy you a house, Ada.”
“How many years you promise that?”
“Too many.”
“If you lucky, I’ll probably just drop dead in ten more years and you won’t have to worry about retirement, just go move in half the year with Naomi and half the year with Ruth.”
“I’m gonna buy you a house.”
“Don’t say it. It’s a lie.”
“It’s a promise. If I have to smother my mama, I’m getting you a house.”
“You could stand up to the vestry.”
“If I knew how to do that, you already have a house.”
“You should probably use the MasterCard—Temple paid a little something on it last month.”
“You know about my little accounts?”
“Yes. And there’s something else I know.”
“What, baby?”
“I’m going to get my body together, and you gonna get our bankbook together! I’m not leaving any of this blutter for our girls to drown in! Blutter is a river too deep to dredge—no telling how many is lost in it never to be found. Our future son-in-laws, maybe. I’m over blutter! All of it! Everywhere.”
“Just don’t be over me.”
“You’re not blutter, you butter.”
“I like that.”
“I want you to like it.”
Preach kissed Ada on the lips. Hard. She opened her mouth. He squeezed her hands, then dropped them like he had something important to say.
“Every which way you ever looked, or could look, did look, do look, or will look, I love to look at you.”
“Listening to talk like that is how I got hooked up with a blutter-loving man with credit cards frozen into ice blocks and body blutter hanging off me. I ain’t listening, and I’m late for work. And late for your mama’s, and before the day’s out I’m gonna be late for my mama too, then come home to a home I don’t own! All listening to you.”
Ada put her hands over her ears and marched out of the office. She was thinking, If I don’t get that fine man back into my bed, I sure as shit need to find a way to get him out of my head! Then she thought a little something worse: He put the words on me, but he didn’t put the moves.
Sometimes the rule she liked best was her very first rule: Change it up. Crossing “Change it up” with “Walk every thirty minutes,” she decided to get off the Dayani Center treadmill and start walking the path around Radnor Lake in addition to walking the neighborhood.
Ada's Rules Page 15