Ada's Rules

by Alice Randall

  Unfortunately she decided to try the outdoor walk close to dusk, and the mosquitoes thought she was a banquet just for them.

  Three days later she was in the hospital with West Nile virus.

  Ada wondered if it wasn’t a sign from God that she shouldn’t be exercising. Preach said it was a sign from God she was supposed to be wearing mosquito repellent.

  Mason called from Greenwood. He was staying at the Alluvian Hotel. Ada, just out of the hospital, full over her West Nile and emboldened by brushes with her mortality, allowed herself to enjoy the call, as recompense for recent suffering—and by telling herself, silently: I will talk. I will not cheat.

  She would not cheat. But she might move on. On the phone with Mason, she let herself know this.

  For a long time she had been less than content with the hiatus she and Preach had stumbled into, less than sanguine that he had become more her preacher than her man, that she no longer called him by his first name, that she would not be pleased if her daughters at their half century had what she had.

  As Ada listened to Mason tell her all about Club Ebony, about the folks that remembered her father and her mother, as she heard him saying that he had kept the record collection she had left at the apartment all those years ago, that he was wanting to either give them back to her or give them to the B. B. King Museum, she didn’t know how she would bring herself to hang up the phone.

  It almost made her cry to hear Mason say that he might give the records to the museum, because it was like he was saying, Neither of us knew how valuable what we had was when we had it. And it was like he was saying, I figured it out first, and I can give it back to you, or I can give it away if you still haven’t figured it out.

  She tried to imagine herself starting a KidPlay in Los Angeles. She suspected funding would be easier to find out there, that some of the great big stars might help out. Perhaps Mason would get her invited, in person, to the NAACP Image Awards she had watched on television, and maybe she would meet Queen Latifah and Latifah would fund her and work with her and she would create a black Sesame Street and it would be aired on BET.

  She already knew what he didn’t know, or didn’t care about: that Mason’s friends in Los Angeles would find it easier for her to be smaller, that black Hollywood might even want her to be tinier, if she was spending time in the undressed West, in La-La Land.

  She didn’t think Mason would want her to be smaller. She wasn’t even sure he would care that it made her life harder if she wasn’t. She hoped it was what it was unlikely to be—that he was attracted to her exactly as she was, not that he too was besotted with the iconography of bigness.

  Ada was hungry for a romantic adventure. Some days it seemed she was really close to finding a new man at home inside her old man. Some days it seemed like her own bed was the last place in the world she would find her next passionate kiss. She kept zigging and zagging between getting tickled by the possibility of an affair and being horrified she could even imagine one.

  Still, she wouldn’t cheat … unless she had proof Preach was cheating. If she had proof Preach was cheating, Ada would step out with what Memphis Minnie would have called her back burner boy. For the very first time in her life Ada hoped Preach was cheating.

  Zigzagging again, clearing away blutter each step of the way.

  28

  FIND AND CREATE DNA-BASED GO-TO MEALS

  THE THOUGHT DIDN’T stick at the front of her mind.

  What came to the front of her mind was: home cooking. If you don’t want the home cooking, maybe it’s what you’re cooking at home.

  Medifast and baby food had her brain a little fuzzy, but not so fuzzy that she didn’t recognize that one of the reasons baby food and its adult equivalent had been so attractive was that feeding herself was too much work on top of too much work. Ada decided she needed a go-to frozen meal that worked with her DNA. She needed a go-to specialty of the house that was E-A-S-Y.

  She had never served herself or her family a commercially made frozen dinner—but she was about to start. And she would have a signature dish she was proud to serve every day of the week, instead of priding herself on never repeating the same meal in a single week and usually not in the same month. She was going high and going low—she was getting out of the fattening middle.

  After scouring the grocery aisles, the Weight Watchers site, and a bunch of food review message boards, she decided to try Kashi Southwest Style Chicken. It had 15 grams of protein, less salt than a lot of the Kashi meals, and it was supposed to taste good.

  It came in a little plastic black container with cling wrap on top. To Ada’s eyes it looked half cool, half pathetic. She vented it by slicing into the plastic film, then microwaved it for about four minutes, stirred, then microwaved it for four more minutes. After that, Ada served it to herself in a bowl. She took a bite.

  Cheap. Fast. Healthy. Pretty tasty. Good to look at. She wished she had discovered Kashi when it first came out. The daughters laughed hard at her when she called to tell them she had discovered and succumbed to store-bought ready-made entrées. The twins already knew all about them.

  Daughter Naomi allowed how she preferred Lean Cuisine. Ruth preferred a fat-free minestrone soup as her go-to fast food.

  When she told them she was creating a specialty of the house, they both said, at the same moment, “Roast chicken with lemon and garlic.” The very first dish both of the girls had learned to cook agreed with everybody’s DNA. There was a God. And she probably had given Ada the recipe in her sleep.

  You take a whole chicken, rinse it off, and pat it dry. You lay the chicken on its back, breast up. You slip a knife between the chicken skin and the breast meat, being careful not to tear the skin. Into that space you place sprigs of rosemary and cloves of garlic sliced in half. Inside the cavity of the chicken Ada put a whole onion studded with clove. She rubbed the chicken skin down with olive oil, then she put slices of onion atop the olive oil and slices of lemon atop the onion, course-ground a bit of pepper over the whole, then roasted the bird for about an hour at 375.

  One chicken, two onions, a lemon, a few cloves of garlic, rosemary, a grating of pepper, a bit of olive oil. A dish you can get into the oven in fifteen minutes.

  Her go-to side dish was what the family called Link green salad: sliced cucumbers, fresh basil, and green beans, with a few tiny dried peas thrown in as garnish instead of croutons to give the thing some crunch. The salad didn’t need to be dressed; instead she just salted and peppered it and tossed it with olive oil over which she dashed a tiny amount of white wine vinegar.

  Dessert would be fresh strawberries and Jack Daniel’s for the no-fat folks; goat cheese and dark chocolate shavings for the no-carb folks; and a bit of goat cheese with a few plain strawberries for the balanced-carb-and-fat folks.

  Keeping all these plates spinning was getting easier by the day, particularly when she had some basics like chicken and green salad to fall back on that worked for everybody.

  Everybody. She didn’t have everybody to cook for very often anymore. It made her sad. But the truth was the truth. She didn’t. And she didn’t have time to be slicing cucumbers and snapping and blanching green beans or spending the money for dried peas if the girls were not coming home. She grimaced.

  It might be a little boring, but the go-to dinner was going to be roast chicken with plain broccoli roasted and just drizzled with olive oil, or spinach the cleanest way possible: rinsed, thrown in a pan with a tight-fitting lid, covered, set on low to cook until completely soft, then sprinkled with nutmeg.

  And if she was too busy to do that, there was always peanut butter on a spoon and a plain baked sweet potato roasted in the oven.

  29

  USE CONSULTANTS: TRAINERS, MASSEUSES, NUTRITIONISTS, AND PRIESTS

  ADA WAS FIFTY-FIVE pounds down. Ada was fifty-five pounds down. Ada was fifty-three pounds down. The number on the scale had finally changed. She had gained two pounds.

  She was doing what she had been
doing, and one thing more each week—and it had stopped working. Ada was verklempt.

  When her body wasn’t doing what she wanted it to do—shrink into a small, dark, and lovely queen—it was hard for her to have faith in her body.

  Standing in the shower, letting the hot water pour down onto her, Ada tried to count her body blessings. She was glad that she even had something she wanted her body to do, shrink, so that was blessing one. She was glad she had a word—“shrink”—that made sense to her. She had felt swollen, inflamed, too stretched. She was glad to be past swollen, inflamed, and stretched.

  Still, shrinking was a diminishment. She grimaced at the present difficulty: how to be big enough, grand enough, to be willing to be small.

  She was at fifty-five pounds down, she was at fifty-five pounds down, she was at fifty-three pounds down; she had put on a brake.

  She was a new kind of scared. She had reached the pinnacles she had reached large. Faithful wife of twenty-five years. Grown children well raised. College graduates. The kind of women the baker lets touch the bread.

  It was hard to let go of the pounds that remained. They were an anchor to her good life. They were protective padding for the battle of life. They were an old, old beauty ornament.

  Because she treasured the beautiful brown largeness of black women, it felt a little like she was robbing herself. Or it felt like she was denouncing herself.

  She believed the truth of a radically different black beauty aesthetic. It complimented our kink and our curl, our big butts and flat round noses and the shape of our beautiful heads. It celebrated all the volumes, all the proportions, all the bronze difference. In the swirl of change, she feared losing all that. She feared breaking with black beauty.

  It seemed that 165 pounds was almost too small for five-foot-two Ada.

  And so all change had stopped. Every ounce of her knew—and in this moment she was thrilled there were so many ounces of her—every ounce of her knew she could not afford to lose her faith in black beauty, or her faith in her right and ability to change and still be a black beauty. She was the mother of beautiful brown twins.

  She wouldn’t move back, and she couldn’t move forward. She was the kind of stuck that can only be resolved by faith and prayer and a willingness to throw out the pattern book and blaze a new silhouette.

  It was time to call in the consultants. She would find somebody who still believed. First stop was Jenny Craig. She bought a week’s worth of food and got a spiel on “goal attainment” from an hourly wage worker and true believer. She paid eight dollars for a drop-in yoga class on Twelfth Avenue and got a quiet talk on how drinking just a bit more water and taking yoga lessons would change her life and change her body. She went down to some funny house near the Baptist Hospital and had her tarot cards read in relation to the question “Will I be successful on my health hunt?” And she thanked God, her Judeo-Christian God, that the cards said yes. Then she went down to see a very old friend, someone she knew before she dropped out of divinity school, the Reverend Becca Stevens.

  Ada called Becca the sexy brilliant priest. She was blonde, married to a handsome songwriter, a Phi Beta Kappa math major, and the mother of three boys. She was a radical progressive, always working from a hyperearnest heart, and a crazy house not far from Ada’s.

  Their paths crossed not often, but always with sparks.

  Becca did not let her down. An hour after she called, they were sitting on Becca’s upstairs balcony with bread and wine before them.

  Becca gave Ada communion. She said, “Take this bread, it is my body, take it and eat, do this in remembrance of me.” She said that, and she said the rest of the words.

  But because there were only the two of them at the table, after they had taken the bread and the wine, Becca held Ada’s hands and looked directly into her eyes. Ada looked directly and deeply back into Becca’s eyes.

  “What does it mean, God puts Jesus in our mouths and in our bellies to know he is in the world in our lives? What can it mean but your body is beautiful? Do this in remembrance of me. We remember with our mouths and bellies. We build with our mouths and bellies. I have faith in your body. It is a gift from God. See yourself and serve yourself with the truth of what I have put in your belly. Be any kind of black you want to be. Show me how to be any kind of blonde I want to be.”

  Becca’s words scared Ada. She would not be as she had been. Becca wiped the tear from Ada’s face with the fringe of her blonde hair.

  “Jesus wept too,” said Becca.

  Eventually, Becca waved Ada off from the balcony. Just before Ada slammed her car door, Becca hollered, “Massage your own feet.”

  “What?” Ada hollered back.

  “Reflexology. Google it,” Becca hollered.

  “Massage my own feet,” Ada said, finally getting it.

  On borrowed faith and consultants’ wings Ada floated down four more pounds in a single boxed-food-, prayer-, and yoga-filled week.

  Ada was 163 pounds.

  30

  MASSAGE YOUR OWN FEET

  MASSAGE YOUR OWN FEET.

  At first she just did it. Sitting on her bed, she grabbed one of those ugly tired things and started making little circles with her fingers. That was good. But what was really good was when she pressed down hard beneath the pad below her big toe. Pressing with her fingernail just below that bone, she felt something release—like a snap of tension, then a wave of electric calm. She had hit a pressure point.

  The old zing took her back to her teenage days when Temple and Bird made friends with some hippies who lived on the Farm, the commune a few hours outside of Nashville. Back at the Farm, folk had rubbed her feet, and she had liked it; then she had forgotten about it, after Bird had said she thought it was “nasty.”

  Bird was referring to hygiene. This time Ada was worried whatever she was doing could be a different kind of “nasty,” worried that reflexology sounded cultish, and wasn’t something a good Christian preacher’s wife should get involved in. A quick Wikipedia search assured her that reflexology was solidly in the world of traditional or alternative medicine, not a New Age religion.

  The first time she did it, she did it dry. It amazed her how much benefit she got just from rhythmically squeezing each little toe. This little piggy went to nirvana. Walking her first two fingers around the perimeter of the sole of her foot. It only got better when she added lotions and oils.

  She had had some of this same feeling when she had gone for a pedicure gifted to her by her daughters. Except pedicures gave her the heebie-jeebies. She didn’t like being approached with sharp instruments held by strangers.

  Reflexology was noninvasive. And it was storied. Some say it is practiced on four continents. Some say the Cherokee practice a form of it. Ada found that on Google. She liked the idea.

  Looking for some more information on the Cherokee form of reflexology, which she couldn’t find, Ada found instead a story called the Cherokee Legend.

  A grandfather was teaching his grandson about life. He said, “A fight is going on inside of me.” The grandson looked afraid when his grandfather said this, but the grandfather kept speaking. He said, “The fight is a vicious fight between two wolves. One is an evil wolf. He is everything bad: anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, resentment, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other wolf is good. He is joy, peace, love, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, creativity, generosity, compassion, and faith. The same fight going on in me is going on in you.”

  Now the boy looked even more afraid.

  “Which one will win?” asked the grandson.

  “The one you feed,” replied the grandfather.

  Rubbing her own feet was a way to feed the good wolf. When Preach came to bed that night, she tried to introduce him to the practice. He made a face.

  “Don’t be going Wiccan-woman on me now. You are the preacher’s wife.”

  Ada paid Preach no never-mind. She called Delila, off playing at a club
in New Orleans. Delila didn’t pick up. Ada left her a text.

  Next morning she called Willie Angel. Caught her on her cell phone as she was out of the office for a week, probably on vacation. But Ada wanted to know, and the office said she was taking patient calls.

  Willie Angel wasn’t too hot on reflexology for weight loss. “Reflexology? If that does anything, it’s just a placebo effect.”

  “Shoot!” Ada said, and kept rubbing and pressing her feet, looking for the deep zings and finding them. Much as she loved Willie Angel, Ada ignored her. She made a new rule: Massage your own feet at least once a week.

  Even if it was a placebo effect, Ada would welcome any good effect.

  31

  DRINK CAUTIOUSLY: NO JUICE, NO SOFT DRINKS, NO FOOD COLORING, NO CORN SYRUP, NO FAKE SUGAR; EXAMINE ALCOHOL AND CAFFEINE INTAKE

  PREACH HAD A surprise for Ada. He invited her over to the inner sanctum of his office to show it to her. She took a seat. He asked her to close her eyes and hold out her hands. When her eyes were closed and her palms were outstretched, he placed a file and a ledger in her hands.

  He had the taxes ready for the accountant. He had bought a shredder and two boxes of file folders. He had taken an online Quicken class. And best of all, he had one quarter—January, February, and March—of perfect records of income and expense. Those records were printed out and pasted into the ledger he had put in Ada’s hands. The tax return was in the folder. The backup documents were scanned and on a Zip drive.

  Ada was so excited she stood up and kissed Preach twice, very solemnly, on the lips.

  “You’re not the only one who can obliterate a little blutter.”