Read Ada's Rules Online

Authors: Alice Randall

Ada's Rules (3 page)

BOOK: Ada's Rules
9.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
3
WEIGH YOURSELF DAILY

THERE WAS A scale in her bathroom. As she awoke Ada thought about that. She had never stepped on it. She defended herself, to herself, by remembering it was a fairly new scale. Maybe just over a year old.

Her husband got on it every day. He watched his weight. And the congregants watched his muscular body, some of them with tongues hanging out. Just out of his wife's earshot, the congregants called Lucius, Luscious.

Even before she started gaining weight, Ada had cringed when she heard them call him that. Preach tried to get them to call him Lucky instead of Luscious, but Ada suspected he secretly lapped up the praise.

Preach said weighing every day, not once a week or never, was the key to losing weight. He never said it to her—he never talked about weight with Ada or the girls—but she had heard him saying it to male congregants battling midlife bulge. Up to this moment Ada had disbelieved him. It was against the common diet wisdom. Slowly, this day, Ada reluctantly acknowledged the obvious: the common approach wasn't working for
the common woman. As her husband's approach was working for him, and clearly whatever she was doing wasn't working for her, she decided to put Rule 1 into practice and change things up.

She laughed out loud. Maybe, she thought, I can just do the opposite of everything I have been doing and lose weight. She liked that idea.

She also liked the idea of following a leader. She would steal a few plays from her husband's book, starting with weighing herself every day and ending with straying. Or not. She pulled a Post-it block off her nightstand and wrote, “Rule 3: Weigh yourself daily.”

It was easy to write the rule down. It was hard to even want to get up and walk over to the scale. Easier to whisper the lie that her body screamed how big it was, what she needed to do. She didn't need to see a number.

Right now her bones were telling her—particularly the little ones in her feet and the round ones in her knees and whatever ones there were that made up the small of her back—that she was carrying too much weight. The question was, how much?

It was enough so that she was starting to feel like she had heartburn when she was lying down. Enough so her bra straps were starting to dig into her shoulders, leaving ridges. Enough so she feared getting on a plane because she was worried the belt would not easily get around her. She knew it would, eventually, but the thought of having to tug it and fiddle with it in public kept her grounded.

She wanted to fly up to see her daughter in New Hampshire. She wanted to fit easily behind the steering wheel on the drive
to Mississippi. Naomi was in Exeter, New Hampshire, teaching high school; Ruth was near Clarksdale, Mississippi, teaching kindergarten.

Naomi's challenges were dealing with very spoiled, high-strung kids who were overmedicated and self-critical.

Ruth's challenges were dealing with kids who were underdiagnosed, often not given the medicine prescribed, and who best knew how to behave if they were threatened by a beating with a board called a paddle—which Ruth didn't use.

They both wanted their mama to “Come see my class!”

She got out of bed and walked toward the scale. It was on the floor under a towel cabinet. She walked right up to the cabinet and pulled the scale out from under it with her toes. She thought about stepping on it—then she thought of a better idea. She moved toward the toilet.

She emptied herself of all that she could empty herself of in the toilet, then went to the sink and washed her hands. She put on her contact lenses. As she did, she wondered how much her glasses weighed. She went back to the toilet. Remembering something she had once read about high school wrestlers preparing to make weight, she went back to the toilet and spat a few times. It seemed likely every time she spat, she was throwing off at least an ounce. She wasn't sure but she was hopeful. If she had been wearing any jewelry, she would have taken that off. She wasn't, so she didn't. And she was too early-morning tired to shave her legs or armpits, and she didn't think that could make much difference anyway.

All there remained for her to do was pull the white nightgown off from over her head and make herself a promise.

She promised: I'm going to step on this scale every day until I see a number I like. If I ever want to be not stepping on this scale every day, I'm going to have to get down to it. She pulled off her nightgown.

Ada stepped on the scale. It took a moment for the number to show, then it was there: 220. Two hundred and twenty pounds, and she was five foot two. She had a hundred pounds to lose.

At 220 pounds and fifty years old, the future was not a long road. No, sir. If she didn't do something, she would be dead, and not a pretty corpse.

The image of her great big self squeezed into an itty-bitty, ladylike casket made her cackle. She finally understood why her sisters had insisted on being cremated. She had thought it was because they didn't want to waste money. Now, imagining herself squeezed into a black dress and squeezed into a regular coffin, she got it: they were too proud to be squeezed into a regular or lolling about in an extra-wide coffin.

She stepped off the scale and put her nightgown back over her head. Then she took it back off. It was time for her shower. For a moment she thought of taking it with her gown on. A moment later the gown was back off. Then on.

She wondered if this was the beginning of crazy or senility or just another strange day in perimenopause land.

Then she figured out what was wrong. Two hundred and twenty was an unblinding bright light of reality. Everything looked different. She turned off the shower light. Without the electric light her shower was dim even in the daytime. Dim didn't help quite enough. Two-twenty had not just enhanced her vision, it had enhanced all of her perceptions. What she couldn't
see, she could feel: she was no longer the firm-feeling woman she had once been.

Ada winced. “Could have been” were the words that killed men. “Used to be” were the words that killed women. I used to be young. I used to be beautiful. I used to be wanted. Soaping her flab, Ada was thinking, I used to be a firm-feeling woman.

Then she stopped thinking about her body and started thinking about
my babies.

My babies
. Not her twins,
my babies
. She had forty-three of them—all the little people enrolled in KidPlay, day care.
My babies.
Some of their mamas were Ada's
my babies
, too. “What will it mean for them if I lose this weight?” Ada wondered out loud as the water whushed down on her round brown bigness.

Most of her my babies called her Ms. Preach. But some of them called her Bigmamada. Wasn't a week went by at KidPlay some child didn't crawl into her lap and make her breasts the crying pillow they could rise from, smiling. Her fat might be missed at KidPlay.

She would prepare the kids to miss her fat. Her fat was going.

Turning off the water and wrapping herself in a towel that didn't quite get all the way round her, Ada wondered who was going to start preparing Preach. Then she got out of the shower and went down in search of her husband before heading out to KidPlay.

4
BE A ROLE MODEL

THE CHURCH WITH its steeple and cross was next door to Ada's house. Separating the buildings were a small basketball court and what had once been a vegetable garden but was now overgrown with an assortment of perennial flowers planted by various Sunday school classes over the years. Immediately surrounding Ada's house—called “the Preacher's House” by most, called the Manse by the oldest members of the church—was a weedy green lawn with an aging play fort and swing set.

Where the grounds of the Preacher's House ended and the grounds of the church began was unclear. On bad days Ada said it was at the paint on the walls of her bedroom. Everything after that belonged to the church. On real bad days Ada said she lived, and loved best she could, in the church. On those days it troubled Ada that she and Preach didn't own even a little tiny home of their own.

Preach's office was on the top floor of the church, above a meeting hall adjacent to the sanctuary. It was originally designed
to be a large, open reception area that accommodated three desks, file cabinets, and storage, with a door to an inner, more private office for the minister.

Preach had different ideas. As pastoral counseling was at the center of his ministry and Preach liked to spread out, he replaced two of the three desks with sofas and added a few more soft chairs. He put in a kitchenette, a small refrigerator with freezer, two hot plates, a microwave, and a coffee machine. He used the outer office for meeting with his congregants, and his vestry, and the various groups from the community who were working with the church—from the Boy Scouts to the Nashville Business Alliance.

Preach wrote his sermons on the big desk in the big room. He used the inner office for his most private files, praying, and worrying. Nobody but Ada was allowed in the inner office.

And it was here that Ada expected to find Preach, to start talking a little about the upcoming vestry dinner, to see if he knew if his mother Queenie needed anything special, and to grab a kiss before she set off for work just a little late. Except he wasn't there. It didn't matter anyway. In one corner of the inner office was a door to a small bathroom equipped with sink and toilet. This presumably was where Preach wanted to add the shower. Seeing that door killed the desire for the kiss. Especially after seeing the scale read 220.

She scribbled a tentative menu, a grocery list, and a honey-do list for Preach before remembering she had to pick up Queenie's dry cleaning on her way into KidPlay. She left the honey-do list on his desk, then jumped in the Tahoe.

All the way into work she was biting her bottom lip, thinking about the kiss she didn't want. That and the fact she had picked the perfect day to be late.

Ada practiced a kind of tough love in her home. At KidPlay she practiced soft care as she rotated through the classrooms, subbing for teachers taking a planning hour or out sick for the day in between raising the funds that kept the lights on and filling out the forms that kept the day care accredited. Between increasing demands for service and decreasing federal funding, she could afford to pay herself precious little.

A hundred times a day she told herself, My babies are going to make it. Two hundred times a day the kids did something that told her for sure she was right: drew a picture, said three new words, counted to ten, counted to one hundred.

The parents made it harder to hope. Too many just out of jail. Too many too young to be pregnant again. Too many gang tattoos. She wanted to be late to work this day. She wasn't ready to see any of the big folk with their big mistakes the same day she saw 220, her big mistake. Expecting drop-off to be over as she pulled her giant old Tahoe into the KidPlay parking lot, she was disappointed.

Most of the day at KidPlay, the full-grown women were outnumbered by small fry. But twice a day, at drop-off and pickup, mothers, grandmothers, aunties, and female neighbors (paid or persuaded) swarmed the school. Twice a day the building with tiny chairs and tiny desks and low shelves and tiny toilets with pull-up steps turned into an Amazonia.

The profusion of large bodies—some fat, some just tall,
some “grea'big,” tall and fat—made all the tiny hands look tinier than they looked during the other hours of the day. There were some skinny and some tiny grown women who came to the school—but they were a distinct minority.

Most days the women who showed up were so large, Ada seemed a woman of less-than-average size. Twice a day Ada got a fix of the lie: I am not so large. I am a smaller-than-normal large black lady.

Today she didn't want a fix of that lie. She got it anyway.

Bunny (one of her two favorite my babies; the other was an actual infant, Jarius) arrived late and immaculately clean—new shoes, hair parted and greased and beaded and perfectly braided—except for the crumbs of Egg McMuffin on her face and an Egg McMuffin in her hand.

Bunny's mother pushed in the door with her behind; her hands were overfilled with a cardboard box top full of cup-cakes. Four inches of stiff chocolate frosting was piled tall on each one. Atop the frosting gleamed a cherry.

Ada smiled. Bunny smiled back, proud. Her mother, in pastel green size-4X scrubs, smiled prouder. Usually Bunny's mother's face was wired and smileless at drop-off.

“Looks like it's somebody's birthday,” said Ada.

“Yes, Ma'am,” said Bunny.

“You're gonna eat those all by yourself?” asked Ada.

“Three or four. Maybe F-I-V-E!” said Bunny.

A wave of nausea struck Ada. Years of close and unpredictable encounters with farts and beating welts had given her a quick-descending, cheerful-yet-serious blank stare. It descended. She put her hand to her face. She held it together.

“Happy Birthday, Bunny. You get to pick the story for naptime today.”

Bunny knew what she wanted. She and her mama had spent Saturday morning at the library.


Amazing Grace.

The choice put a crook in Ada's smile. Grace was athletic. Her mama called Bunny “Miss Priss.”

“Have you read
Amazing Grace
?” asked Ada.

“Saved it for my birthday!” said Bunny.

“I told her about the hymn. My baby loves to hear me sing, how sweet the sound,” said Bunny's mother.

“Excellent choice,” said Ada.

Bunny's mother, who obviously hadn't actually read the book, looked relieved. She raised her eyebrows and poked the box top of cupcakes toward Ada. Ada nodded, stretched out her hand, and unburdened the woman. Bunny's mother kissed Bunny on the head, then on the cheek.

“I'm gonna be late for work, Miss Priss.”

“'Bye, Mama.”

Bunny put the McMuffin in her mouth and pulled her Barbie out of a pocket. She held the doll up to her mother for a kiss. The mother kissed Barbie and headed out the door.

BOOK: Ada's Rules
9.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Admissions by Meg Mitchell Moore
Rock and Hard Places by Andrew Mueller
Demons of the Dancing Gods by Jack L. Chalker
The Great Agnostic by Susan Jacoby, Susan Jacoby
Ghosts of Manila by James Hamilton-Paterson
Her Reaper's Arms by Charlotte Boyett-Compo
Liv's Journey by Patricia Green
Persistence of Vision by John Varley