Ada's Rules (19 page)

The only thing remotely good for Ada's diet was the minestrone soup. Half an herb-roasted chicken was 1890 calories and 108 carbs. She wished she ate steak. She didn't, even if filet mignon was 800 calories and 13 carbs. Ada liked cows.

Looking for the lowest-carb chicken dish, she settled on Chicken Marsala at 970 calories, 25 carbs, and 1190 milligrams of sodium. If she focused on the Pellegrino water and the wine and just ate a bit of her chicken and a bite or two of the greener vegetables, she would be part of the feast but not part of the fat.

Ada was back to thinking about starting a restaurant chain. There was a carnival atmosphere to both of these restaurants that appealed. Something about eating at the Cheesecake Factory and Maggiano's on the same day was provocative. They appealed as a place to arrive hungry and be filled; they appealed as a place where hunger was historical.

But the commonness of hunger collects us too. Ada wasn't certain she would banish hunger completely, if she could. Much as she preferred the welcome of feasts, she understood there was radical union in hunger.

Squatting on the toilet in Maggiano's, peeing off a bit of the wine and the coffee, Ada understood a few new things about the shitty realities of abundance. That a purpose of largeness is to make us understand what it is to be small. That a purpose of the body is to be a clock, ever reminding us not just that time passes but that time runs out, just like shit. And sitting on the toilet, she knew this too, as she knew we deal so differently with
our children's diapers and our spouses' diapers and our parents' diapers. Our children tell us we will die; our lovers promise a taste of infinity before we do.

Realizing she would not know this if she had not tasted infinity on Preach's tongue, once, some time ago, and that she did not know if she would ever taste it again, Ada let tears run down her face.

Back at the table, the bill arrived. It was larger than anyone expected, besotted as they had been by all the mundane abundance. Preach, who owed less than many, was the first to say, “Let's split it equally.” Ada had to smile. Some of Preach's generosity was pure, “Lets keep everybody happy,” not “Let's have everybody love me.” Some of it was even, “Let's not forget what it is to be hungry and poor and the honor to be found in carrying each other.” Generosity was something she liked about her husband, and it was something she hated; and generosity was something she liked and hated about herself. Like it or hate it, it was going to be with them awhile. They, Preach and Ada, would usually do their part to make that moment the bill came, that moment Preach had taught her had a name,
la quart d'heure de Rabelais
, the quarter hour of Rabelais, less chilling.

Having danced and intending to dance again, Ada was scraping together pennies and pounds for the piper.

JARIUS'S GRANDMOTHER LORETHA was about to spend the weekend in jail, paying off a DUI. Loretha had been ashamed to ask for help till the last minute of the eleven o'clock Wednesday-night service, but she had sidled up to Ada during the last hymn and spilled the beans.

Loretha's breathalyzer had been over the maximum allowed, but not by much. She had been to a party with her friends after a long week of work, cleaning rooms at the Opryland hotel. It was Friday, one of the friends was getting married the next Saturday, and they took her out, put a fake tiara on her head and a fake veil, and started drinking sweet drinks that turned out to be stronger than the ladies thought they were. At the end of the evening, the bride-to-be, watching her weight, was the least drunk of everybody, so she volunteered to drive. And they got pulled over. Loretha switched places with the bride-to-be, who had had a DUI before. And so she had to serve forty-eight hours. At fifteen, Dorian was too young to stay with her baby by herself overnight. Besides, Dorian wanted to go to the church-sponsored lock-in.

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.

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.