Ada's Rules (11 page)

Ada decided to take the girls on a walk around Radnor Lake as part of the festivities. This was not part of the tradition. They wanted to go to the Loveless Café and eat biscuits and bacon and jam and drink Bloody Marys and coffee. Ada offered to feed them sweet potatoes baked in their jackets. The girls agreed—if they could have their birthday presents early, and mani-pedis instead of the walk.

Over breakfast Ada gave each daughter a gym membership for her respective town, tucked into a birthday card.

Ruth and Naomi looked at Ada like she was crazy. Then she handed each a giant dress box wrapped in newspaper and a great big bow. When they opened the boxes, each daughter had a long black party dress. The girls fell out laughing. Ada had recycled their debutante gowns—dyed the white dresses black!

The girls stripped in the kitchen. After tugging, and squeezing, and pulling up of zippers, the dresses were on, and the girls looked fabulous—but they did not look fit.

Seeing them a little too plump but oh so beautiful, watching them let themselves go just a little too much, was hard. Watching them erode some of their beauty, as she had eroded so much of her own, with negligence, with focusing on things that were seemingly more important, was plain painful. It was their birthday. She tried not to let the pain show.

The ache had started at the dry cleaners. There had been the unfortunate incident provoked by her tiny bladder. While Ada was at the cleaners, she got stricken by a need to go, and knowing that the cleaners kept an immaculately clean toilet, she decided to use it.

While she was in the toilet, two old biddies, Melvin and Alfred, arrived to pick up some ties they had dropped off for cleaning. They were taking a very close look at the newly black dresses.

“Girls used to get married in their debutante gowns, not dye them black!”

“Anyone thinking about marrying one of those girls will take one look at the mother and flee.”

“Maybe dying them black is right. Those girls won't be getting married and need a second gown.”

“Big girls don't.”

“Not usually.”

“Black girls don't.”

“Not much anymore.”

“And big black girls with smarts—”

“Never!”

“Back in the forties, I went to a wedding every Saturday in June, sometimes two in a day.”

“One weekend in June of 1953 I went to a noon wedding and a six o'clock wedding, then turned around and went to a four o'clock on Sunday wedding. Every one of those girls Phi Beta Kappa, big and brown and brilliant.”

“Sure enough.”

“This is the era of the skinnywhitedumbgirl.”

“Paris Hilton.”

“Jessica Simpson.”

“Is Nicole Richie black?”

“I don't know.”

“Hard to tell.”

Just then Ada emerged from the toilet. She had on her blank preacher's-wife smile.

“Melvin, Alfred.”

“Ada, your girls were just precious, just precious.”

“And those gowns. Exquisite.”

“Cut out the picture from the paper. Preach in tails, daughter on each arm. Beautiful.”

Ada stared back hard. Her blank KidPlay stare.

“Darling, we didn't know you was in there.”

“Of course we did, we just said those things to tease you. You know we know Naomi and Ruth's wedding will be a blowout to end blowouts: Your daddy will get up a band and you'll do the cooking, and everybody will come just to see if Preach walks 'em down the aisle, gives the vows, or both.”

“They take after their daddy's side. They're shaped just like
his grandmother was shaped at their age. And she was a size eight at eighty-plus.”

“Ada, they take after you.”

“And you do not need to be as big as you are. Take it from an old queen, as long as you don't end up in jail, pretty makes life easier.”

“Let me get these dresses and get home. You a mess. Both of you. And let me see you in church on Sunday and shut your mouths about my girls, unless you want me to snatch you baldhead—oh, you already are.”

“Listen at you.”

“What.”

“Lord have mercy today.”

“And—”

“The Lord done done all he can for them gals, the best he can. He gave 'em you. You the best. But you ain't be the best. You is but ain't. But you could be.”

“Why you so mean?”

“You were such a pretty bride.”

“And?”

“I want you to be pretty again.”

“I didn't know I wasn't pretty now.”

“You didn't know you were pretty then. First thing you need, child, is an eye for beauty. Till you get you one, let me, or let Melvin, he'p you out.”

Ada exited the cleaners carrying a weight heavier than two used debutante gowns: her worry that black marriage was in danger of becoming extinct.

After the dry cleaners incident she had had a nightmare in
which Matt Mason had declared to one of his sons, “Not marrying that woman who turned into a fat pig was dodging a bullet. Avoid those twins like the plague!”

She didn't want to be a giant billboard screaming FAT, OBESE, TOO LARGE, DON'T MARRY THEM. She didn't want Matt Mason to see her too large, because he had the sons and the nephews and she didn't want Matt Mason, or any black man with eligible sons and nephews, or any good man with eligible sons or nephews, to think, This can turn into that, and shudder.

Matt Mason had a son, and he had nephews. It wasn't only that Ada wanted Matt Mason to want her, it was that she didn't want him to regret having once wanted her. She needed Matt Mason to remember wanting her without shame. She had daughters. She needed Matt Mason to be one of the strong black men putting the loud word out: Black women are as good as it gets. Whoever gets one of Ada's girls is getting extraordinary good fortune.

Remembering all of that, as she helped the girls wiggle out of their repurposed finery, Ada reneged on the mani-pedi-instead-of-hike deal. She insisted on the hike. Delighted by their gowns, the girls agreed.

The walk got off to a scandalous start. As they set off on the path, they saw from a distance a friend of Preach's, a woman Ada called Granola Girl, walking the path, flirtatiously bumping into a man who was not her husband. The bumping stopped when Granola Girl, who taught prenatal classes in the church basement, noticed Ada and the twins. The girls and Ada silently lifted their eyebrows and kept stepping after their paths crossed and waves were exchanged. When they got farther
away, the girls started laughing. Ada stifled their hilarity by suggesting they tackle Ganier Ridge. The girls grimaced, but when they got to the place where the trail forked, they chose the tough one.

Walking around Radnor Lake with her girls was more fun than she had imagined, even Ganier Ridge—which she usually hated. The girls got behind her and pushed her up the steepest yards of their walk.

Eventually they staggered into the parking lot hand in hand, the mama in the middle. They had walked slowly and laughed, telling stories all the way, but they made it around the lake for the very first time together.

That night at Los Palmas, somewhere between the guacamole (which they ate with cucumber slices brought from home) and her chicken and shrimp fajitas (eaten without the tortillas), the girls told Ada how beautiful she looked. And they meant it. Because they meant it, Ada made herself a promise.

I will lose fifty pounds in the next year, or I will have the surgery.

I will model the health I want my daughters to possess—or I will die trying. Looking at her girls looking at her, and seeing that they believed their mama was beautiful, was complicated.

She wanted her daughters to see her beauty—but she also wanted her daughters to see her differently, to see the limits of her kind of beauty. She wanted them to see her differently because she wanted them to see themselves differently.

Preach was oblivious.

When the birthday flans were served, a lit sparkler atop each, Naomi and Ruth's faces shone brightly in the sputtering light.

Later, when Preach said simply, “Thank you,” she knew he was talking about the view from his side of the table, his sight of their daughters. Preach was grateful for the reality of soft round beauty, bronze and cherubic glory. This would make getting the twins skinny harder. But not impossible. Her daughters would follow her anywhere—and she was on her road to fitland.

TEMPLE WAS LAID out with a cold. Ada hoped she hadn't brought baby Jarius's bug out to him. As soon as Ada had gotten the toilets cleaned and the soup on the stove, she rubbed her daddy down with a lemon cut in half, then lowered him (wearing purple tighty whities) into a hot bath she had spiked with red pepper flakes and Tabasco. When Temple was up to his shoulders in the water, Ada gave him a shot of whisky.

Then she sat on the toilet and looked out the window into the woods while he soaked. He was too frail to be in the tub alone.

She was having a little tiny period. Being with the girls, who were cycling, had probably brought it on. The flow was so light she barely needed a pad. For the very first time, she hoped this one was the last one. She was ready.

When her father got out of the water, she averted her eyes as he rubbed himself down with a towel. Then she helped slip him into a robe and old silk pajamas. He rested heavily on her
as she walked him through the maze to the bed in the center of his bedroom.

“You getting smaller, gal,” Temple said.

Ada smiled. “A little. Maybe.”

“It's more than a little.”

“What you wanna eat, Daddy?”

“Nothing.”

“I got some soup on the stove.”

“I wanna see the lake.”

“It's too much stuff to move just now, Daddy.”

“Squeeze in and tell me how it look.”

Ada sucked in her breath and edged herself in sideways.

“It's just the way it always is, Daddy. Pretty. Three ducks out on the water. There's a speedboat with some folk drinking … sky is blue-gray, and the water is green-gray, and there's a farm across the way that looks like a storybook. I see a silo.”

“Pretty, pretty. I love looking at pretty. Seeing you today reminded me of that. Move some of that shit, gal, I gots to see the lake.”

“I'll need a wheelbarrow.”

“Get one.”

“I like that.”

“What you gonna do with what you tote outa here?”

“Pitch it in the lake.”

“Unh-unh.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Leave it, then.”

“I'll wheel it out to the shed.”

“Come here so I can get a good look at you.”

“Till you can see the lake?”

“You prettier than the lake.”

“Daddy, I'm a old woman.”

“You just getting grown, gal, just now getting grown. Two best kinds of women, eighteen years old and fifty. I had 'em both, and I know.”

“You ever have an outside woman, Daddy?”

“No.”

“You never cheated?”

“They never outside. Always inside. They ain't no outside women. I put a lot of backstreet and backdoor in this house.”

“You told Mama?”

“She tasted 'em on me.”

“That's disgusting, Daddy.”

“When yo' mama kissed me, anything I knew, she knew. Woman could taste how much money I lost on a bet.”

“That didn't make you do right?”

“Eventually.”

“Eventually?”

“After twenty-three slips, I stopped slipping.”

“Or you stopped counting.”

On the highway home Ada was hungry for soul food. And she didn't mean collard greens and sweet potatoes and fried catfish. She meant church. She made up her mind to try the white Episcopals.

She needed a place to pray about her body that she didn't
have to worry if it was full of people coveting her husband's body. A place where she wasn't the First Lady, a place she could just be a congregant.

She would go to eleven o'clock at her and her husband's church, and she would go to Wednesday night at her and her husband's church—but she would get up in the morning and go to 7:00 A.M. with the Episcopals after a 5:00 A.M. walk.

It would seem utterly strange to some, but going to St. Bartholomew's would be perfect. She would get a break from congregants wanting to befriend her—most would be too snobby to want her as a friend. And she might learn something; rich white southern women make champion fit freaks.

And Ada had just heard an Episcopal joke that she loved. The one about the middle-aged Episcopal lady who had a heart attack and got rushed to the hospital. On the operating table she had a near-death experience. She saw God, and he told her she had another thirty to forty years to live. Upon recovery she decided to have a face-lift, liposuction, breast augmentation, and a tummy tuck. When she was recovered from all of that, she signed up for a day spa. For twelve weeks she worked out hard. The twelfth week she treated herself to a new haircut and color and a full wax down there. Standing outside the spa, she couldn't wait to get home. She got hit by an ambulance speeding toward the hospital. When she found herself in front of God, she was furious. She told him that he had promised her thirty or forty years. She hadn't even gotten thirty months! To which God replied, “I didn't recognize you.”

Ada wanted that kind of change for Ada. She was worshipping
with the Episcopals. Surrounded by skinny ladies, she would not forget she was fat.

And she was dividing her diet book into two separate parts: the front would be “The Rules,” and a food diary in which she would keep track of every morsel she put in her mouth—even though she also did it on Weight Watchers. And the back half would be a body journal where she vented, and wished, and described, and self-portrayed.

The first time she sat down to write in the back of her journal, she filled pages:

His love of bigness allows me the luxury of laziness. I don't have to do something about this. And even more than that, his beauty testifies that once I was beautiful.