Ada's Rules (6 page)

Back in her bedroom, scratching the mosquito bite, for one of the first times in her life she talked to herself, right out loud. “When God invented exercise, he wasn't thinking about me,” she said. She was worried that Preach had heard and would think she was crazy. She didn't need to worry. She found a note on her pillow, telling her he had an early meeting and had walked across the yard to the church.

It was still early. Ada made a shopping list:

Running shoes

Sports bra

Running shorts

Running socks

Treadmill

She wondered how much a treadmill would cost. She stopped and grabbed another Post-it—she had a new rule. Budget! Figure out what you will need and how you will pay for it. She needed to distinguish between what she needed and what she wanted, and she didn't think cheap was the way to go. Chafed nipples, chafed thighs, and messed-up feet were not in her plan.

She frowned. She was too poor to get skinny. Or not. She was not too poor if she begged, borrowed, or stole a guitar, or two, from her father. Puzzling over the possibilities, she got in the shower. Three minutes later she was under the spray, doing the Pony, singing loud, in her best imitation of Nancy Sinatra, “Ready steady boots, stay walking.”

THE DOCTOR WAS pleased to see Ada. And Ada was pleased to see the doctor. Willie Angel was a friend, a peer, a Link sister, and, as she was wont to put it with her preferred patients, a “luxuriously large” woman herself. She was also one of the best internists in Nashville.

Willie Angel was pleased with Ada's blood pressure management, and with her last metabolic blood panels. It wasn't that the numbers were perfect, it was that the numbers were not yet too dangerous. Willie Angel was a pragmatist. She wasn't counting on getting Ada off blood pressure medicines, she was counting on keeping the pressure under control and managing the diabetes when it came.

She didn't think there was much to do about Ada's weight except have the surgery or wait for new drugs to be approved. She thought there were two in the pipeline that might really help with weight loss.

Her only other real suggestion was that Ada buy a desk with a built-in treadmill. Ada found that suggestion silly and expensive. Willie knew how much Preach earned. Her husband was
on the vestry, and the vestry set Preach's salary. He could not afford to buy his wife a thousand-dollar desk. Besides, Ada didn't work at a desk. She worked on a dingy alphabet carpet. She worked sweeping floors.

Still, she found her doctor's approach reassuring. Dr. Angel reassured Ada with her presence and with her words. And she took the time to say she didn't think Ada should blame herself for her weight.

“It's genes and stress and corn syrup in everything. And food pornography, everywhere we look, creating appetite. Man wasn't built for this much prosperity.”

Willie Angel's finger-pointing at everything but Ada gave her patient a measure of relief. Stripped of shame, Ada was better able to carry her part of the blame. And she was able to feel, for once, finally, in a way that motivated her to make a change, her own despair.

“Stick a fork in me, I'm done,” Ada said to her doctor. The doctor heard the alarm beneath the humor.

“There's an antidepressant associated with weight loss. Maybe you should talk to a psychiatrist about prescribing it. I could make a referral.”

“If I go see a psychiatrist, it'll be to talk. I like my brain chemistry. It's my body that's the problem. I read somewhere fat black women are among the least likely people to kill themselves.”

“Are you thinking of killing yourself?”

“I'm thinking of getting fine and fit to go with fifty.”

“You're cleared for whatever you want to try. Any normal diet, any normal exercise. And be glad you're not even a little prediabetic.”

“It's my big butt and all the coffee I drink.”

“That's as good an explanation as any.”

“What about you?” Ada asked her doctor who was her friend.

“I'm prediabetic,” Willie Angel replied softly.

“One day my butt fat may save an entire Chinese village of diabetes. But you'll get yours first.”

“If the diet starts going really well, you might want to lipo some off and freeze it for the advancement of science. There are those mouse studies that say injections of butt fat can prevent the development of type-two.”

“You know I haven't had that much luck with frozen body parts,” said Ada.

“Fat's different from eggs,” said Willie Angel.

“I thought eggs were fat,” said Ada.

They laughed till tears were running down both their brown faces. They were crying for their bigness and crying for the third and fourth baby Ada never got to have and crying over the irony of being a physician and a walking advertisement for the problems obesity causes and crying for the joy of fighting the good fight.

Ada liked Willie Angel enough to want to lose weight and be the proof that one of Willie Angel's patients did what couldn't be done.

Willie Angel wanted to be part of Ada's solution. She pulled out her prescription pad. She wanted to give Ada something. She wrote down, “Angel's Rule of Eight—for only the best and biggest patients”:

Get eight hours sleep every night.
Drink eight glasses of water a day.
Walk eight miles each week.

Ada took the prescription and sucked her teeth. “You slick, Willie Angel. Very slick.” She stood up and hugged the doctor. The doctor hugged her back.

“And count your blessing your husband likes women with a little meat on their bones.”

“Don't tell me you know that from firsthand experience.”

“I wish.”

They shared another big-bellied laugh. Willie was larger and better dressed, Ada was smaller and frumpier, but someone passing the examining room would have thought they were sisters.

COMING OUT OF the doctor's office, Ada bumped into the president of the Altar Guild and member of the vestry, Inez Whitfield, going in. Inez was another Link sister, and another one of Preach's congregants.

“Hope you're not sick and canceling,” Inez greeted Ada.

“Routine stuff. … I'm on my way to the grocery, now, hope you're not sick and missing.”

“Just picking up a sample of a new med James is trying. I'll be at Altar Guild and may see you at the grocery store.”

“You bringing your poached pears?”

“If I get to the store. They got to take my pressure and get me a flu shot too.”

Inez buzzed off. In her short black-and-white houndstooth jacket and black pants, with her hair all over her head and wearing big bold black glasses, Inez Whitfield was a decidedly stylish and quirky woman. She was Ada's favorite member of the Altar Guild, and the one person Ada thought she might be able to talk to about marriage and Preach.

The Altar Guild came for lunch the fourth Saturday of the
month. Many of the ladies were eighty or almost eighty. These women had stomped wide paths where before them there had been no paths at all. They didn't just make a way for those who came after; when they could, they made an easy way.

Many of the ladies of the Altar Guild were clubwomen by nature. They liked administration and process; they were Deltas and AKAs and Links and Circle-ets, as well as members of the Altar Guild and sometimes Junior League Sustainers. Some were different. Ada was one of the ones who never saw a meeting or a ledger she didn't have to talk herself into tolerating. A sweet irony of the Altar Guild was that there were a lot of nonclubwomen in the club.

Ada's oldest friend, a singer, Delila Lee was one of the nonclubwomen in the group, and there were two writers; a female farmer, who ran one of Tennessee's last tobacco farms; a retired cateress; a lady who owned a T-shirt and convenience store down on Jefferson Street; and, Nashville being a university town and the home of Meharry Medical College, several college professors and leading doctors.

Inez Whitfield was one of the teaching doctors who was a clubwoman. A retired dermatologist, she still taught at Meharry, lecturing on medical ethics. Inez had a creative streak and a practical streak. She had come from a town in Texas where her family had owned everything: the café, the hairdresser, and the funeral parlor. Now all of that was gone, and they got a gas royalty. Inez was the richest person Ada knew personally, and the largest private donor to KidPlay.

It was the consensus of the club that Inez Whitfield was a woman who had seen more good and bad, more prosperity and
more trauma, than a woman should know. She had been at a medical convention in California when her husband had taken her children on a balloon ride. They never came back.

Inez retired. Inez even remarried. Proposing with the words, “No one should carry this much pain alone,” she married a man, James Madison Whitfield, who had lost his wife to cancer. Inez doted on his grandchildren and her garden. She worked hard not to think every hour of every day about the children her children would never have. She got down to imagining who they might be only when she encountered something one of her children adored, or excelled at, or hated. She moved out of the house she had lived in with her children. She turned her front and back lawns into a vegetable garden. Her purple hull peas were coveted. Her poached pears, usually served with goat cheese and local honey, were legendary.

Ada was still thinking about Inez as she walked into the grocery store. Five feet away from a tower of sponge cakes, a lady in an apron was offering samples of sausages she was cooking in an electric skillet. The sight and smell of food had Ada crazy hungry.

She grabbed a giant grocery cart, then rolled it back and grabbed a medium cart. If she couldn't be immediately smaller, her grocery cart could be smaller. She could have a skinny woman's cart. It was a small satisfaction. It was not enough satisfaction to distract her from immediate hunger.

She needed something quick to eat that wasn't fattening. No, that wasn't the right idea; she needed something that was useful to her body.

She nibbled on one of her cuticles. Then silently quipped,
Starvation. Quipping to yourself was something a minister's wife had to do. She couldn't risk being snide with anyone else—except the hubby and the girls, and they weren't around. You're it, she said to herself. When am I going to stop thinking about this as an exercise in deprivation, and start thinking about it as an exercise in filling myself up with what is good for me and what I like?

“Probably the day I start losing weight.” This last, she said out loud. That was a problem. She was hearing voices and starting to talk too loud out loud, and she looked like a beached brown whale. She needed to hold on to the husband she had and put up with his mess and stop even thinking about running after Matt Mason—except that putting up with the husband she had is what got her to be “the hot mess she was.” She prayed she hadn't said this last out loud. It was crazy thinking. This was starvation talking. She pointed her cart at the snack aisle.

She was standing with a bag of Veggie Loot in her hand, munching straight from the bag, when Inez bumped into Ada's butt, gently, with her cart.

Inez sneered at the Veggie Loot. “That's nothing but green Cheezos, cheese puffs, whatever you want to call it.”

“One hundred and thirty calories. Low-carb. This is good for you.”

“Green air.”

“It keeps me from getting too hungry.”

“You hungry right now. Unnatural hungry.”

“Unnatural hungry?”

“You were not born wanting to eat puffy green air. Puffy green air is not helping you. It's making you hungry. Chewing
without filling you up, flavor but not enough flavor. Makes you want to eat. These food companies work together to keep you hungry, and probably they're in it together with the health companies trying to keep us all sick. Fortunes are made on sick folk. I prefer to grow my own vegetables and pay as little money as possible to the drug companies.”

“Inez, you are one paranoid woman.”

“I am an old rich Negro. I got that way by being cautious. And being curious. I got that way by not doing what everybody else was doing—if I saw everybody else was not doing so good. I see all you young things—and yes, fifty is young, even if you don't know it—drinking Diet Coke and eating Veggie Loot, big as three houses, so I wouldn't be doing none of that now.”

“What should I be eating, for a snack?”

“Soul food.”

“Fried chicken and monkey bread and collard greens?”

“I mean baked sweet potatoes naked in their jackets, and I mean peanut butter spoons.”

“Peanut butter spoons?”

“You get you some organic sugar-free peanut butter and you dip one of your grandma's silver spoons in it and you call that breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, whatever you want. It got protein and fat, and you won't be hungry an hour after you eat that.”

“Sweet potatoes and peanut butter. You want me on the George Washington Carver diet.”

“Child, I been on that all my life, and I have never had any problem with my pressure, with my cholesterol, with my knees or with my hip, with my weight or with my sex life. And from
what I read in the old folks' magazines and the style magazines, the other oldies like me are having a lot of trouble with their knees, hips, and weight, and the young ones like you are having all kinds of trouble with your sex and your weight and your skin. When I grew up, black girls didn't have bumps all on their faces.”

“Next time you hit me with your grocery cart, mine will be piled high with jars of peanut butter and big sweet potatoes.”

“Good. Get back to your food roots. Peanuts and sweet potatoes are the mama and daddy of soul food. I love sweet potatoes. You can just throw one in the microwave or the oven.”

“Next time the girls come home, I may just serve the entire family peanut butter spoons for breakfast and get myself some rest.”