Ada's Rules (12 page)

I tell this to darling, and he says I'm beautiful. I hope he actually believes that. I half do. If I'm talking about it in a Hawaiian princess way. Or maybe in a Botero sculpture way. Or getting down to the real nitty-gritty, in a my-grandmother-was-big-as-two-houses-and-she-was-the-most-beautiful-woman-in-my-world way. But MaDear dropped dead a long time ago, and the world has changed.

It's funny how all those naked Rubens women don't look anything but fat anymore. Those hanging bellies scare the bejesus out of me. Bosoms are something else. I love my big pillow breasts. One of the hardest things about losing weight is deflating those giant man and baby cushions. When I look down, I see my big cloud immensities, tipped in chocolate like a present, better than a bow. When I lose more weight,
those are going to turn into flat pancakes I need to shove in a bottom-padded push-up bra. But that's okay. When I lose weight, I can find a bra that fits at Victoria's Secret.

MaDear's been shouting out loud to me today. Be careful what you wish for. I always wanted to be a fat old black lady in a flowered dress on a porch, feeding my grandbabies chocolate. But not too soon. And maybe not ever, now.

Me and my body got to find a new way to rolI. My new body dance is going to be a three-beat waltz. Sizing, sexing, primping. Oompapa. Can't do the long march stagger another mile. It's oompapa—primping; sexing; sizing. Sizing is eating and exercising and binding it in. Sexing is feeling all the pleasure the body can bring. Primping is decorating and celebrating the body. It's putting the shine on healthing, and that makes the pretty. I can't do all of that—primping, sexing, sizing—every day. For me it seems the deal is, if one of them is not going well, get the other two to kick in. On great days you should work on all three. On bad days one. On no days none, and most days two.

If you can't polish your fingernails, give yourself an orgasm. If you can't do any of that, schedule a mammogram. One of the bad things about getting older is, you can burn a whole lot of time setting up appointments and going to appointments. I have friends who make almost being sick, or checking out that they are not sick, almost a full-time job. I'm not doing that. That's the medicine polka, and it's too herky-jerky for me. I'm sizing, sexing, primping. Oompapa.

One of the things I like about being big is, it makes me feel like I'm not about to die. Too many times that even trumps
what I want to do and be for Naomi and Ruth. I need reasons beyond Matt Mason to lose. Or maybe I need a Preach-related non-Preach reason. Maybe I want a pulpit of my own. Or maybe 'cause Preach don't even seem to want me great big, I might as well get smaller.

Hunger's got my mind messed up.

Writing about it helped.

HER TEST RESULTS arrived via e-mail on the KidPlay desktop computer. She was a carb restrictor who needed intense exercise three times a week. She loved carbs and liked to exercise moderately daily. No wonder her body was a mess.

There were pages and pages in the report after the summary, but after diligently going through them, she soon concluded all she needed to concern herself with was the first page.

She would be a carb restrictor. And she would up her good fat intake. According to Inherent Health, her meals should be 30 percent fat. That seemed like a lot, but she was going after it. Eating fat to let go of fat. She imagined a little river of fat running through her and out of her, collecting the fat from her blood cells and from her body, a little river of olive oil flowing to and through her, washing everything that did not belong away. These were good thoughts, hippie-dippy, spacey thoughts for sure, but good. And they balanced off the idea that she was about to turn into some kind of cavewoman committed to a diet of meat and veg. She wondered if her ancestors had been Masai warriors, drinking blood from live animals to survive.

Then she wondered if anyone actually did that, or whether it was simply a myth about Africa perpetuated to make black people seem crude and cruel.

Then she stopped wondering. She didn't have time. She had the vestry dinner. She needed to check in with Preach. Get the last tally on who was coming. Remind him to pick up the flowers. Tell him about her results.

Walking across her lawn and through the basketball court, Ada headed to Preach's office. She hoped he would be in, but she also hoped, just a little bit, he wouldn't be. It was a day for new information. Sitting in his desk chair, looking at what he looked at, poking in their files, might give her a little more new information. She walked up the stairs to his office thinking, Bring it on. Whatever it was.

She strode through the young men loitering in Preach's outer office. Preach kept a pot of coffee waiting on a hot plate especially made for the young men of the congregation who had no job or school to go to. He made a pot for them every morning and refreshed it at noon. The morning pot got his posse dressed, out the house, and looking for work. The afternoon pot diluted frustration. Preach, she was quickly informed, wasn't in. Ada kept stepping, making use of First Lady privilege.

Once inside Preach's office, she closed and locked the door. She sat down at his desk. She loved looking at the little gallery of photographs he kept in popsicle-stick frames, made by the girls, on his desktop. There was a picture of Ada on her wedding day. She barely recognized herself. And there were pictures of the girls at all different ages. And there was a picture of
Queenie holding infant Lucius. These pictures made Ada breathe deep and quiet.

The pictures on the wall, ripped out of magazines, then stuck up with tape or pinned with thumbtacks, made Ada uneasy. On the wall Preach mixed portraits of his heroes with his rogues' gallery. A photograph of Sweet Daddy Grace in Washington, D.C., was next to a photograph of Martin Luther King. On the other side of King was a picture of Prophet Jones in Detroit. On the other side of Prophet, who was wearing his full-length mink coat paid for by congregants, was Malcolm X. Just below Malcolm was Father Divine, somewhere in New York. Beside Father Divine was Jesse Jackson. Interspersed throughout were pictures of Preach's father. Ada's favorite was a picture of Sarge in his uniform, near the time of his retirement.

The pictures had puzzled Ada when Preach first put them up. When she asked Preach about it, he said that he had pulled together photographs that would remind himself he would never be as bad as the bad preachers, and never be as big, or good, as the big good preachers. His father had believed preachers picked poor people's pockets. His mother had believed preachers saved them. Preach had put up the most extreme examples he knew of each of their beliefs, to help remind himself to cut his own path. And he had. At his worst he was a low-paid always friend for every member of his congregation; at best he was God's messenger on earth. The photographs reminded Ada of a thing she had begun to take for granted about Preach; he was never boring.

She stood up and looked into one of his file cabinets. She
wanted a peek at their banking account and tax files. She shuddered. Everything was there. Every receipt, every bill, every note about them, so much of everything you couldn't put your hands on anything. A quick glance through two or three drawers of files found six marked “This year's taxes,” and they each seemed to contain information on at least three different years. There were eight different files on the girls at Georgetown; loan applications, not in numerical order, mixed in with transcripts; directions on ordering graduation pictures; course catalogs; and bills for presciptions of antibiotics (Naomi) and antidepressants (Ruth, briefly). There were even Ada files. One seemed to be inexpensive gifts he was thinking of buying her. She knew this because he had bought some of them: a flight of wildflower honey, a silk headband, a copy of Paul Laurence Dunbar poems with pretty drawings of brown babies. She closed his files, their files. They were too depressing and too many.

She stared back at his desk. Something was out of place. And most things were not. She touched, for luck, his childhood Bible with his scrawly child handwriting and his crayoned illustrations of his favorite Bible stories. She touched his notes for the next week's sermon. Everything on the desk seemed familiar—except the phone.

She looked at the phone. It looked something like Preach's phone, like the phone Ada knew Preach had, but it wasn't the phone that had sat all the last night on his nightstand. And it wasn't new.

She looked at the speed dial. Ada. Ruth. Naomi. Except he had never called her from this number. He looked at the numbers the phone had called. None were familiar to her, except
Delila's. She put the phone down. She shivered. She wondered if it was his death penalty phone. Some preachers had a special phone for that. Not just for the men on death row, for their families. This could be that.

It was hard being a preacher's wife. You didn't know when you shouldn't be asking questions because you wouldn't want to know the answers and the answers had nothing to do with you and would only invade someone's deserved privacy and perhaps shock you about man's capacity to be inhuman to man. And you didn't know when you should be asking questions, even though you didn't want to know the answer, because the answer had everything to do with your most private life. It was a dilemma.

When it was your husband's job to keep some stuff from you, it was hard to do your wife's job of making sure your husband didn't keep too much stuff from you.

Somewhere along the way Preach and Ada had gotten this all wrong. He told her very little, and she asked him even less. They were both too busy taking care of folk to do any better.

If the truth be told, Ada was too scared of finding out that Preach was too much like Temple to find out who her husband was. And Preach was too scared of being a preacher with his hand out to be the man his wife needed. But there was nobody to tell that truth.

So Ada and Preach both suspected the obvious explanation for why there was less joy in their world—that the one they loved didn't love them, and probably had good reason not to.

As finding out for sure that Preach didn't love her would mean no joy at all, Ada kept on keeping on exactly as before,
and so did Preach. Particularly the day the vestry was coming for dinner. But they each did it with rapidly increasing frustration and slowly increasing anger.

Back at the Manse, in her bright kitchen, Ada made soup and baked a caramel cake and spooned pepper jelly onto bread rounds, wondering if there was a way to poison just the portions that would be eaten by the woman she suspected of having an affair with her husband. The other preacher's wife. The one whose husband had died.

Except she couldn't do that. Black women were and will always be spectacularly clean in the kitchen—especially when cooking for somebody who is not family. Black ladies don't play in the kitchen with food. As a people we have been too proud and too poor to do that.

As Ada thought about poisoning her possible rival, she shook her head at the book
The Help
. There is not a self-respecting black woman in the world who would put any part of herself into the food, unless she was doing something hoodoo or voodoo or sacred. We, Ada said silently to herself, don't throw away or give away parts of ourself—even hair or nail clippings—casually. We don't throw parts of ourselves at our enemies. Putting potty stuff in a pie? Never! Anybody hoodoo who has worked one day as a maid knows—a lock of discarded hair, a scrape off a dirty toilet, a drop of blood by a sink, can be used to destroy the one it came from. A certain kind of black woman knows that the detritus of life is powerful.

And you don't poison or desecrate, because it would confirm negative expectations.

A black woman organized enough to get up every morning to take care of her family, who also manages to take care of some other women's families, is not interested in confirming negative expectations. “That Stockett lady lied on us,” said Ada, right out loud, shaking her head.

Twenty circles of bread cut later, Ada was sad her emergency kit to ward off boredom could no longer be a sack full of caramel cake slices and pepper jelly sandwiches.

Night was falling as Preach walked into the dining room. He had come to inspect the table. It was just a door on sawhorses, but he had sanded it down good and stained it prettily, and he had made the sawhorses himself twenty years before. It was a solid, sturdy, level table. Like the chairs around it, which he had also made in his basement carpentry shop, the table had given many good years of service and could give many more.

Unfortunately, he wasn't sure how many more vestry dinners the table would be called upon to serve.

His congregants had changed over the years. Some of the vestry lived in big houses with fancy antiques and ten-thousand-dollar rugs. Many no longer fit, or believed they fit, in his handmade, hand-painted chairs.

Preach folded all six foot five, and at least forty more pounds than when he first made the chairs, into the chair at the head of the table. The room looked good in the candlelight. Still. In the dim guests couldn't see the dirt in the creases of the floorboards, the streaks on the now mottled finish of the table, the little chips in the gilt of the good china, or the cobwebs and dust in the corners.

Ada padded into the room and sidled up beside him. He stayed seated but reached around her wide hip to fondle a bit of her belly. She patted his hand until it stopped fondling. Her hand lay flat atop his.

“You right about dinner at six thirty, not five,” said Preach.

“You like the flowers, or you think they strange?”

She had filled the girls' old fishbowls with blue colored water and floated the head of a big sunflower, harvested from a neighbor's garden, atop each one.

“I forgot to bring home the roses from the discount place.”

“It's good for the vestry to see we broke,” said Ada, patting his hand. He took this as permission to fondle a bit more of her belly. When she didn't step away, he took the next second as an opportunity to try to pull her into his lap. Her feet stayed planted. He kissed her arm. She smiled, but she pulled away.