Ada's Rules (16 page)

She knew that too.

THE GIRLS' RESULTS were in. God loved her and wanted her to be faithful. The family needed her attention. The girl's results were in, and Preach's too, and at once the family was more complicated.

As quickly as she was making new rules, old rules were getting shattered: A family sitting down to eat together should largely be eating the same food. Wrong!

Ada had ordered kits for both daughters and her husband. Naomi and Ruth were not identical twins, but they looked a lot alike, and yet she suspected they would not have the same profile. She wondered if one would be more like her and one would be more like Preach. She truly suspected that Naomi would be more like her and Ruth more like Preach, but she didn't know—and there could be three types between them, not two.

The girls got their test results the very same day, and each immediately called their mother. Naomi was balanced carbs and fat. Ruth was a fat restrictor. A day later they found out Preach was a fat restrictor.

No wonder the whole family was out of shape.

They all needed something different. Preach and Ruth needed big bowls of oatmeal and egg white omelets and lots of fruit and even orange juice. All they had to think about was fat. Naomi needed egg white omelets with spinach and feta but could have strawberries on the side but probably not the orange juice—and she had to watch the calories. Ada needed omelets with the whole egg and turkey bacon and no toast and no tomato and absolutely no oatmeal. She had to watch the carbs.

Ada imagined a breakfast platter she would make for the family. Everyone could have scrambled egg whites with spinach, and she imagined making a big amount of that, and off to one side having grilled tomatoes for Naomi and fruit for Preach and Ruth and turkey bacon for herself. She and Naomi would have coffee; Ruth and Preach would have orange juice.

She tried to think of a perfect snack for all of them and immediately came up with sliced cucumbers—low-carb, low-fat, low-calorie. Cucumbers were the perfect food.

At the other end of the spectrum was the French fry or potato chip—high-fat, high-carb, balanced-nothing. The only one in the family who could possibly touch one was Naomi—if you were balanced carbs and balanced fats, a few wouldn't harm you.

When it came to fruit, Ada realized a peach might be right for Preach and Ruth, an apple for Naomi, and an avocado for Ada.

On the other hand, air-puffed popcorn was perfect for her fat restrictor, and far less perfect for her balanced-diet dieter, and absolutely forbidden for Ada, who in fact could do better eating a chocolate-covered almond than air-puffed popcorn.

Ada wanted to weep for the times she had announced, “I am not a short-order cook,” and enticed them all to eat the same breakfast of homemade waffles and bacon. Now she knew she was the only one who should be eating the bacon, and she should have eaten only the bacon; and the waffles needed to be made with fat-free everything for her beloved husband and slightly older daughter.

Ada was no scientist, but she was on fire with scientific questions. Were black people more likely to be fat because our families are more likely to have people who need to eat different food in them? Most black folk Ada knew had a racially mixed background. Black folks come in a lot of colors, even in the same family. That was part of the inheritance of slavery everybody was used to and talked about. Was there something we didn't talk about keeping us fat? Was a black nuclear family in Minneapolis more likely to have members whose dietary needs were different, compared with a white Scandinavian family living in a Swedish community in rural Minnesota? Families who tend to be fit are often families with a positive food culture and a tradition of exercising. Is it also true familes who tend to be fit are families that are lucky enough that their family members need to eat the same things? Have the same, or more similar, weight-related DNA?

Based on what she was seeing in her own family, Ada thought every baby should be tested within the first week of his life, and certainly before he or she got off the breast!

She wanted to give the different types different names—the no-fats would be the oaties, the balanced carbs and fats would be the fruits, and the no-carbs would be the bacons.

Her little family had two oaties, a fruit, and a bacon. She thought lovingly of the poached pears Inez had made for her family and how she loved to serve them with a bit of goat cheese drizzled with honey on the side. Now she knew, the pear was perfect for her oaties, a small amount of both was perfect for her fruit, and she, the bacon, should only be eating the goat cheese. New rule: Don't clean your plate. Eat what's right for you on it.

Ada didn't know if “Don't clean your plate” should be a rule or a principle. Good Link that she was, she was thinking of principles as umbrella concepts—and that she might should have some.

If “Don't clean your plate” was an umbrella principle, under it would be the following rules so far: portion size, the one-bite rule, and “Do the DNA test. “Eat with refinement” was another umbrella principle: “Eat slowly” and “Eat sitting down” were under that. “Eat to be epicurious”—with all the adventuring in it—was an emerging umbrella principle she didn't yet have enough rules for. Her favorite umbrella principle was the one that was making the whole thing work—“Eat abundantly.”

Abundantly was the opposite of gluttony.

ADA WAS ON the treadmill at the Dayani Center, struggling. Not really seeing enough progress had been hard; seeing progress was harder.

Seeing herself, truly seeing herself, for the first time, in the mirror at the Dayani Center and realizing that she had not seen herself before, when she was young and ripe, and firm and tight, was very hard.

It knocked her to her knees to know this—that she had never really seen and would not see her body beautiful and young, because when she had been beautiful and young she had been effectively blind.

What was harder still was knowing it was Bird's beauty, so bright, and Mag's and Glo's and Evie's, brighter still, that had blinded her to her own. Ada, a pretty girl in a house of beauties, had been blinded by their brighter lights to the charms she had been given. She was so mad that she had been given less than her sisters and less than her mother, she confused pretty with ugly.
Lawd! Have mercy, today!

Minute eleven on the treadmill, Ada's cell phone rang. It
was the older of her twins, Ruth, calling looking for a quick lift. This day Ada had no quick lift to offer.

Fortunately, the younger twin beeped in. Naomi had had a great day before on her diet, an early walk, not a gram of fat all day, and best, she wasn't hungry. Naomi loved her oatmeal. And she had a suggestion for her sister and her mother.

“Fingernail polish.”

“Fingernail polish?”

“Instead of eating something delicious like a napoleon, or bruschetta or a fabulous cheese plate with almonds and honey, or—”

“We get the idea!” mother and sister screamed into the phone at the same moment.

“I'm not talking a forty-dollar mani-pedi, I'm talking seven-dollar polish change.”

“Polish change?”

“Quick fix.”

“Quick fix?”

“Instant high. Legal.”

“Mine's getting waxed—what's yours, Mom?”

“Poems. My instant fix is poems.”

“You need a fluffing instant fix.”

“I heart-fluff. Poems fluff my heart. Keep me keeping on.”

“Pamplona Purple keeps me keeping on.”

“Waxing, sugaring, and threading do it for me.”

“How often can you wax?”

“Between all the places I have waxed, I can get it done every week if I divide it up. One week eyebrows, one week lip, one week bikini.”

“Bikini?”

“Don't ask, Mom.”

“Prescribe me a poem, Mama.”

“What hurts?”

“My kids. Me. Failing them. Trying not to fail them. Watching Christmas come and knowing what they want and what they're going to get.”

“Invictus.”

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

“That's the poem from that movie about Nelson Mandela.”

“Black people in America have been loving that poem since way before Nelson Mandela, but we happy he had it too.”

“Did a black man write that?”

“A white man who lost a foot to tuberculosis.”

“You see why I prefer Samoan Sand, Mama. That's too black and tragic.”

“Honey my child, that is black and happy.”

“No, Mama, that's black and transcendent.”

“You try my quick fix, I'll try yours, both yours.”

“Me too.”

“Me three.”

“All I know for sure, you girls got your mama through fifty fast minutes on the treadmill.”

LATER, NOT THAT day but the next week, Ada popped into a salon called Escape. The twins had told her about it, and she listened to her daughters. A nail tech named Nikki put Lincoln Park After Dark on her hands, then changed it to You Don't Know Jacques. Ada left Escape energized.

She had needed it. Ada was exhausted with healthing. She had more to do and less time to do it in. Thinner didn't offset all the hard of that. Some, but not all. What offset a little more was the quick lift of the polish change.

Maybe she was going to like the primping part of healthing. She was staring down at You Don't Know Jacques when she resolved to make healthing more playful, less like a job.

The treadmill and swimming laps couldn't be her only exercise. She headed back to the pool. Something about water jogging appealed.

She had heard somewhere that racehorses with injured legs run in the water, and it made sense to her that something that would be good for a one-ton animal with fragile legs would be good for her. She liked the fact the water took all the weight
and stress from her knees and her ankles. She liked doing the same thing over and over again—but she didn't like getting wet. And wearing a swim cap was breaking off her hair. And the chlorine dulled her polish, and she hated strangers seeing any of her body in a bathing suit—even if she had found a perfect little swimming tent dress, black piped with white.

You had to get out of the thing in public or drive home soaking your car seat or remember to put a big black trash bag on the car seat and drive home sitting on it, feeling a little too much like trash.

She was thinking of all of this as she pedaled in the pool. In the middle of Ada's workout a lithe young thing with a black pixie cut and green eyes slipped into the pool and started swimming laps. She had seen the girl before. The girl went fast. Faster than anyone else Ada had seen swim in the Dayani pool. Ada thought once she had probably been on a swim team. She wondered if she had webbed toes like Michael Phelps.

Thirty more minutes passed. The girl was still swimming, but slower, and Ada was jogging faster. One of the things she liked about water jogging was, she could do a lot of it fairly easy. She was worried about the fairly easy part. The nymph was now sitting on the side of the pool, hitting one side then the other of her head, shaking the water out of her ears.

Ada wondered how she looked to the girl. In the middle of the pool, water jogging, she expected she looked like she was stranded and treading water, like she had fallen overboard from some large vessel and was waiting to be rescued. Or that's how she would look if she looked like how she felt, with the green-eyed fit girl staring at her.

Don't be paranoid, Ada said to herself. The green-eyed girl isn't staring at you. But she was.

“You're the twins' mother?”

“Yes.” Ada was remembering that she had met the girl. Somewhere, Ada had heard her voice before.

“Ever give lessons?” Ada asked.

“All the time.”

“Ever give them to out-of-shape elderly people?”

“Tuesdays and Thursdays at four. But if they stay in my class, they aren't out of shape long.”

“Maybe I should try it.”

“We're strictly a sixty-five-and-up class. You've got to be old enough to have a grandchild my age, even if you don't have one. I love playing granddaughter. I kick out the young-old. They scare me.”

“Scare you?”

“People new to being old are a pill.”

“People new to being old?”

“Folks in their fifties, early sixties, they're sad about not being beautiful and scared of being sick and scared of running out of money before dying. Oldie goldies are smug. They beat everybody else out. I like that. They feel lucky, and a lot of them want their luck to rub off on you.”

“How do you know so much?”

“I've got a mother and three aunts.”

“And no grandparents.”

“How did you know that?”

“You idealize old folks.”

“Maybe.”

“Could you teach me to swim laps?”

“No.”

“Because I'm fifty?”

“Because I think you would like hooping.”

“Hooping?”

“Like hula-hooping, but with special weighted exercise hoops.”

“I've never heard of that.”

“A bunch of girls did the whole marathon hooping.”