Read Ada's Rules Online

Authors: Alice Randall

Ada's Rules (7 page)

BOOK: Ada's Rules
4.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“You could do a lot worse. I don't know why you young people insist on thinking of fried chicken and Kool-Aid and God knows what else as soul food. Soul food may be chicken once a month when the preacher comes, but it ain't fried chicken every day. And it's not anything made with corn syrup or white flour. And it ain't butter neither. Soul food is corn on the cob and peanuts and fish your daddy caught from the pond, or the lake, or the stream. It's simple.”

“Amen.”

“And you need to get your DNA tested.”

“How's that? You see something in my eyes?”

“I think you need more information. Inherent Health dot com. Check it out.”

“Inherent Health dot com?”

“They've got a test will tell you what you should be eating and how you should be exercising—according to your genes.”

“According to my genes?”

“According to your genes.”

For the next three days Ada subsisted on a diet of baked sweet potatoes and peanut butter spoons, and she lost three pounds. That night after the Altar Guild meeting, she scribbled into her journal a new idea that was too funny to be a rule but too useful not to write out in full: Eat like the skinny old folks eat.

10
BUDGET: PLAN TO AFFORD THE FEEDING, EXERCISING, AND DRESSING OF YOU

THE VERY NEXT morning, en route to KidPlay, Ada was back to thinking about stealing guitars, which she knew to be a strange thing for a minister's wife to be thinking about.

Except push had come to shove. Earn and spend, Preach was plain awful with money. He spent too much on his parishioners and would, if he could, let them pay him in homemade cake and great big hugs. This forced Ada to do two things: earn a little money, and get really good at being the frugal housewife. For years now her favorite column in the
Tennessean
newspaper had been the Ms. Cheap column. Doing good while being broke was hard work.

When they first married, Preach had headed up a “regular” church, and Ada had anticipated he would be a well-paid preacher and they would bounce around the country as he advanced. But then the placement came, and it was Iowa. Then they offered Oregon. Preach took the job as the assistant at Full Love.

Stopped at a red light, Ada allowed herself to imagine Preach as a modern-day Sweet Daddy Grace or Father Divine. She saw Preach in front of his independent mega-church. She saw herself
driving away from in a white Mercedes-Benz to her giant house way across town where she lay beside her kidney-shaped pool wearing a knit suit with bright brass buttons. The light turned green just as Ada began to wonder if she was going crazy.

She decided to stop at the little black Episcopal church that had been an armory during the Civil War, Holy Trinity. And pray herself back to peace.

Bathed in the light coming through Holy Trinity's stained glass, she tried to clear her mind. Worrying about money was the one thing that really panicked Ada. Growing up in a family that had no salary, that lived by its wits and its instruments, had given Ada a permanent precarious feeling when she had to figure out how to pull together economic ends that wouldn't meet. She hoped the calm of the little church would help.

She wanted a treadmill. She wanted a trainer. She wanted a week at a spa. None of that was happening. Ada knew that.

But she also knew a diet was a war, and a war required a war chest. She would need time and money. She was scared she didn't have the time or the money to make the change she needed.

The real problem with bariatric surgery (aside from Ada being wary of needles and having some superstition that she was more likely to have complications than most people) was that it was just too expensive.

Ada didn't have extra time or money. Ada didn't have great insurance. And she didn't have a heart for any more administrative duties.

Ugh. She hated to write down what checks she wrote out, and never balanced her checking account. That's why she loved debit cards and online banking. And Preach was worse than
she was when it came to their personal funds. He carried their tax files to the accountant in ziplock bags and a grocery sack.

She added another item to her shopping list. Buy a Dave Ramsey book. She liked listening to Ramsey, a sort of crazy conservative personal finance guru, on the radio. He talked radical change but made common sense.

Ada wanted to be the Dave Ramsey of weight loss. Somebody who got it all wrong, then got it right and shared the info about The Way. Except she wouldn't charge.

Ada had an idea about what was keeping her—and a lot of folk—from the success they wanted. Ada had her own idea about what was hobbling America by hobbling black America.

Blutter.
Black clutter. Blutter was destroying black America—blutter in the bankbooks, blutter in the body, and blutter in the basements and attics. Disorganized finances, disordered eating and exercise, and disorganized homes.

Blutter.
There. She had given it a name, and it was still driving her crazy.

She forced herself to keep good books at home. She did manage to look at the numbers, and every so often she would catch a mistake. Usually it was something she had returned that didn't get charged back. She was going to figure out how much money she needed, and she was going to figure out where she could get that money from in her budget.

She was going to spend wisely and exuberantly, as if she was buying a pair of shoes, or a vacation. Well, not like that, because she didn't really spend money on fancy shoes or vacations. Like a new roof for the Manse. No way a house of her own was on the horizon.

The night before she had looked her budget up and down and could hardly get anywhere with it. She ran a fairly tight ship on the domestic financial front, so there wasn't a lot of room for belt tightening.

The care, feeding, exercising, and dressing of her half-century self was an expensive proposition for someone who lived on a combination of a minister's and a day-care director's salaries, especially if the only way you could balance the day-care center's books was to pay yourself eight dollars an hour—less than you paid the man who mopped the floor.

Sometimes all that kept her going on the economic-hope front was her secret project. She was writing a book.
Home Training.
Right now it was just a loose-leaf notebook with forty or so pages. One day her manners guide for urban children whose parents can't be bothered to teach them how to act might land her in
O
magazine and on
The View
and on
Tavis
—and her book on the bestseller list.
Home Training
was Ada's lottery ticket.

If her number got called, she knew exactly what she would do. After she finished buying the rest of what the little school needed (more books and a playground were at the top of her list) and finished funding a few more scholarships, she hoped there would be enough left over to hire an entourage that would starve her and chase her with a stick, or at least someone to cook and shop for healthy foods for her. But the chances of that happening were Slim and None, and Slim had gone to town.

And Ada was tired of waiting. She waited for Preach to get his money up and his expenditures down. She waited for herself to finish writing
Home Training
. No more. Ada was ready to
get the first lick in fast in her anti-blutter budget battle. She would get her arms around a more rather than less accurate prediction of her new expenses. Now.

She had doctor's bills, copays, and lab results. She needed walking shoes. She needed biker pants. She needed spongy socks. That she could remember off the top of her head. She would need to sit down with her checkbook, her bag of receipts, and her journal and try to predict the rest.

The diet books, Weight Watchers Online. That was already spent. A gym membership, exercise classes: All that had to be anticipated, along with exercise equipment for home. She probably wasn't going to have a treadmill in her kitchen, but she needed little dumbbells. She needed a yoga mat. She needed to realize this journey was not just a weight-loss attempt. This journey was something bigger than that. She smiled to know sometimes the biggest thing was the best, even as she planned to shrink, even as she dieted, praying and hoping—not to get thin, but to get to a size that wouldn't hurt so much when she got down on her knees to pray.

She imagined herself back at her home office desk, surrounded by all the tools of administration, ledgers and pencils, and computations that told her she was broke and getting broker by contemplating this war. In the sanctuary of the church she imagined herself staring at her laptop screen with her bank account information pulled up, trying to make the numbers work. Then she stopped imagining and quietly recited Psalm 127.
Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it
… When she came to the last words—
they shall not be ashamed
—Ada still hated administration, but thinking about it in the
shelter of the Episcopal church had empowered her. If the Episcopal church was good at one thing, it was managing money.

She didn't want to lose the battle before it began. She feared a death by a thousand little cuts. Each of the nitpicky and not so nitpicky administrative details of the school and the house and her own life were thin slices into her spirit. And now she was telling herself to take on more bureaucracy in the pursuit of beauty in the act of healthing.

God was punishing her. Just like he punished the woman standing on her roof during Katrina, in the joke she couldn't get out of her mind. The woman was praying for God to come save her. Somebody in a rowboat offered to pick her up. She said, “No, thank you, God's coming for me.” Then somebody showed up in a motorboat. Again, she said, “No, thank you. God's coming.” Finally a helicopter flew over and dropped down a rope. Again, “No, thank you. God's coming.” The helicopter flew off, and the woman drowned. When she got to heaven, the lady chastised God: “Why did you let me drown?” God said, “I sent you a rowboat, and a motorboat, and a helicopter!” With that God threw the lady out of purgatory and into hell.

God talked to Ada through cheesy jokes. Ada didn't want to be thrown into hell. But she just didn't see the rowboat, or the motorboat, or the helicopter. Where was she blind to God's helping hand? She had a real sick feeling that beauty, the beauty of her young body and the beauty of her voice, had been her rowboat and her motorboat.

Ada had squandered her prettiness.

She was pretty the day she graduated college. Pretty the day
she married. But twenty-five years later, the “stone fox” on a good day was an everyday frump.

She hadn't taken care of her prettiness. Little things like no sunblock. Big things like no exercise. They added up to the erosion and explosion of God-given pretty.

She was by some lights beautiful—truth and passion were carved all over her face and body—but pretty was gone. And maybe gone forever; or maybe she could track down and reclaim at least some of what had been gifted to her by God, and what somehow she had broken into small pieces and thrown away.

She opened her eyes and looked at the altar and the cross above it. She stared at how the priest held the host at the communion table, and she knew that some fragment of that was how she should treasure the living body of herself, but never had, shunning beauty—which was no more or less awful than shunning the helicopter, and the rowboat, and the motorboat and ending up dead, then thrown down to hell.

Ada made a mental note to add money for plain beauty stuff, makeup and clothes and more regular trips to Big Sheba's House of Beauty, to her healthing budget sheet. She didn't know what kind of figure that would be, so she gave herself permission to just put in question marks, but some of the stuff women used to create the illusion of youth and prettiness, the stuff Bird called “powder and smoke,” would be a line item. Eventually.

If the church could use “smells and bells,” incense and music, to get people into the mood to see God's power and beauty, then Ada shouldn't be above dabbing on some perfume or some makeup base—but she didn't want to bankrupt herself doing it,
like some churches bankrupted themselves paying for organs. She would budget, not bankrupt, for beauty.

God was merciful. When she had stopped treasuring her own beauty, he had given her beauty to treasure—the twins.

She chuckled again over the Katrina joke. The twins' young adult beauty was her helicopter and her rope. Ada would climb up and be saved. She saw beauty when she saw her twins. The twins showed her. Beauty is important. Beauty is good. Beauty is not a trivial and vain habit. Beauty is a worthy discipline.

She would embrace ledgers and rouge. She would be Mary and Martha. As she wondered how to balance the books, she realized she had to sell something that didn't involve begging or theft. Iced-tea spoons. She had inherited twelve from each sister, and they had been fortunate; the pattern had been discontinued and had become highly collectible. Forty would fetch a pretty penny. But probably not enough. To buy the time she needed as well as the things, she would sell her car, the great big Tahoe she had kept in perfect condition so she could drive the KidPlay kids, and buy a Mini Cooper. She would have smaller hips and leave a smaller environmental impact.

Or she could find a few dollars out at the lake.
Tell me which, Lord. Amen.

11
GET EIGHT HOURS OF SLEEP NIGHTLY

ADA CROSSED HERSELF, rushed past the priest, who looked like he wanted to speak but was mercifully tied up with another congregant, and gave four updates on her daughters between the nave door and her car door. All that was easy. All the eyebrows raised silently, asking, Why are you here? was hard.

Deciding next time she needed a shot of smells and bells she would try the white Episcopals, where few if any would recognize her, she got the Tahoe onto the highway, thanking God for three last things: that she had remembered to put the frozen vegetables in a cooler with ice packs; that her mother-in-law lived right around the corner; and that her parents were not out at the lake all by themselves.

BOOK: Ada's Rules
4.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Watch the Lady by Elizabeth Fremantle
Killer Among Us by Adriana Hunter, Carmen Cross
Return to Sender by Fern Michaels
Golden Daughter by Anne Elisabeth Stengl
A Slip of the Keyboard by Terry Pratchett
The Preachers Son by Carl Weber
The First Betrayal by A. M. Clarke
Lonestar Angel by Colleen Coble
Self Destruct by K. D. Carrillo