Ada's Rules (10 page)

Ada's favorite breakfast was French toast and pig candy. Pig candy is bacon microwaved with brown sugar and pepper, and absolutely delicious. None of the diet books she already owned seemed to set out a plan that would allow anything like a full serving of pig candy. That seemed like a principle to follow: Only eat foods that at least three books advise you to eat.

Given pig candy was her favorite breakfast, eating breakfast was probably a bad idea. Unless she changed up her favorite.

She plunged into her newly purchased diet texts, searching for her new favorite breakfast. She settled on a cup of Greek yogurt with six almonds doctored up with cinnamon and nutmeg and clove. A bit of protein, a bit of fat. Some spices to rev up her metabolism and to make the breakfast taste a lot like French
toast. Presto, a breakfast all her books and Weight Watchers Online could endorse. Ada endorsed it too. The almonds made the breakfast crunchy. She liked crunchy.

And she liked that it was a little bit of a healing meditation to eat this breakfast. Traditional Chinese medicine favors the cinnamon stick, and new research highlighted the effect of cinnamon on insulin and on inflammation. Whatever the research came to prove for Ada, this day, the spices were a silent prayer for health. And they tasted good, and it was a breakfast she could make fresh in less than a minute if she mixed the spices together beforehand. And she liked praying silently and deliciously by eating.

She would call her new breakfast “sexy woman candy.” She liked that. She really liked it. She went down to get herself a bowlful, singing her new favorite hymn, “Get on the Good Foot.”

BETWEEN QUEENIE'S AND KidPlay, Ada got a call and then a text. It was a good thing she had planned to be at work early. Baby Jarius was home, sick with another cold. The call was a plea from his grandma, Loretha, for Ada to pick up a prescription that had been phoned in. The text was a request from his mama, Dorian, for Ada to call her work and vouch for the legitimacy of her absence later that afternoon. Before Ada walked into the front door of KidPlay, she had done a lot of juggling and was nibbling on a chocolate bar she had hidden in her desk.

After work Ada sped out to the lake and did a quick clean and medicine check with all the doors wide open. She couldn't afford the munchies that came with even a teeny-tiny contact high. Then she came straight home. The package she was hoping for was in the mail. Her DNA test kit.

Ada felt in her bones DNA was the way to go. She knew the jury was out in the medical community about DNA-based diets. From what she could read, many doctors who thought DNA might one day help didn't think that day had come. But
Ada had a lucky feeling about testing her DNA. She had noticed that different diets seemed to work for different people. She had noticed she seemed to get fatter eating things that were not supposed to be fattening, like carrots and corn with no butter on it. After Inez told her about the DNA testing for weight loss, Ada looked it up on the Web. Researchers at Stanford said the DNA testing worked. Or at least they said that when they put people on the diet chosen by the DNA test she was going to take, they were more likely to lose weight and lost more weight than those randomly assigned to diets. Kathie Lee on the
Today
show said the DNA testing could help you find the right diet. The Inherent Health Web site stated something that spoke deeply to Ada: “Don't waste time on the wrong diet.” Then it said, “People on the ‘right' diet for their genes lost more weight than people on the ‘wrong' diet for their genes.” It couldn't hurt, it might help, and it was something she had never done, so it was very much following Rule 1. Ada was ready to give DNA testing a try.

The kit was boxed to look like a portfolio. You flipped open the cover, and simple step-by-step instructions were emblazoned on the inside sleeve.

Only the steps were not as easy as she thought they would be. You needed to send them a sample of your bodily tissue, scraped from the inside of your mouth. And you could only take the scrape—they called it a swab—after not eating or drinking anything for two hours. She had a quick cup of coffee, then set a timer for six. She thought of waiting to sample in the morning. She could get up, brush her teeth, drink a bit of coffee, and wait two hours—but there was a seven o'clock
pickup at the neighborhood post office, and she wanted to
know
. Soon. Now.

The first half hour she spent waiting to scrape her inner cheek, she spent getting dinner in the oven. When it was in the oven, she spent an hour cleaning.

Ada was a fast cleaner. She got the upstairs and downstairs toilets and the kitchen floor mopped and the front hall stairs swept in just under an hour. That left her half an hour to begin an experiment.

Create emergency kits. Plural. She wanted an “I'm Scared” emergency kit and an “I'm Bored” emergency kit.

She wanted two playlists and a bunch of pictures. She wanted sounds and images she could put in her purse and take with her into battle. She was thinking about flagging will.

First, she needed a playlist of songs that picked her up and made her think about things she liked to think about, especially things she liked to think about, but might have forgotten about. The number-one song she put on her new iPod playlist was Ray Charles, “I Got a Woman.” The second song going on the list was Van Morrison's “Brown Eyed Girl.” The third song making the cut was James Brown—“I Feel Good.” And just thinking about those first songs had got her feeling good. She wondered how many she should have, and she decided on a baker's dozen, thirteen—there was an amusing transgression in having thirteen songs instead of thirteen doughnuts, which nobody in the world would allow themselves to eat, or thirteen cookies, which only a crazy person would eat, or thirteen corn chips, which she ate every time they went out for
Mexican, but couldn't anymore. Thirteen songs that could break through her boredom, thirteen songs she could indulge in anytime she wanted. That was a tonic. And she could change them. Or add another.

That first playlist would be for pulling her up, and then she needed another that would wrap her in bunting and make her feel safe, sheltered. She needed the aural equivalent of fat. She needed a cashmere baby blanket that was always clean and always with her. She needed Billie Holiday.

Ada loved Billie. With all that Billie went through, it was like Ada got the cool of the heroin without the hook when she listened to songs like “Violets for Your Furs.” When she listened to Lady Day, it wasn't all going to be all right, it was all right now. She would download the entire
Lady in Satin
album, the one with Billie surrounded by all that string music. Aretha would have to be on this list too. She would put “Respect” and she would put “Stand by Me” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” the Harry Belafonte version.

Both of her new playlists—the pick-me-up and the wrap-me-around—Ada would think of as healthing playlists. They would travel with her everywhere.

Sound was essential, but not enough. Shape-shifting was too much about sight for sound to be enough. Ada needed some eye candy. She would put some beauty in her pocket. Art. Her first choice was easy. Five Rothko postcards. She had seen those Rothkos in college on a visit to the Guggenheim, and she had never forgotten them. Looking at those pictures helped Ada feel nineteen again.

Her spirit had been lifted by those great big gorgeous
canvases. When she first saw them, it was just the colors. Instant inebriation. As she had gotten larger, they had been her proof that big is more. Now she needed proof of the opposite. She needed something that would lift her spirit and give her the confidence to struggle with her body. She found a picture of Josephine Baker. Too intimidating. Ditto Lena Horne. She closed her eyes. What do I want to see when I see me? Van Der Zee. All the way. Those jazzy beautiful black folk. She would get herself some Van Der Zee postcards.

She had calm and confident covered in the emergency kits. But what to put to motivate? Matt Mason, of course. Matt Mason, gorgeous. Unfortunately, the only pictures she had of him were twenty years old. And she wouldn't go poking around on the Internet for pictures of him out of fear he would go poking around for pictures of her. When she thought of Matt Mason, she thought a little like a baby, believing if she couldn't see him, he couldn't see her. The belief gave her comfort.

She wasn't sure comfort was what she needed. She was almost sure it was exactly what she didn't need. The second thing she thought about putting in her emergency kit was a picture of herself now, a naked picture of herself, to remind herself that she was in a state of emergency.

Twenty minutes after the thought crossed her mind, she was naked in front of her MacBook, adjusting the screen to take a picture. First she caught herself front on. Then back on. Then one side and then the other—neither seemed to want to be left out. To soften the effect, she turned the shots to sepia. She wished she knew how to cartoon the drawings, but she didn't. Her
daughters could help her, but she didn't want to bother them. She printed up what she had in the privacy of her bedroom.

In bright color the photos had seemed mean and rude. In sepia they offended her less profoundly, but still they offended her. She wondered if her husband liked what he saw when he looked at her. She believed he did, believed it so confidently it surprised her and raised another question. She wondered what her husband saw when he looked at her, and she knew that, whatever it was, what it wasn't was, as she said aloud, “Me, now.”

She wrote those words on the back of the picture she printed up, very small, wallet size, and she tucked it in her wallet behind a picture of her as a young mother with baby twins on her lap. She liked wearing her children. She liked the way they cover you up in a picture. It was one of the very few times she had ever used her children as window dressing. She put them in front of her to make prettier pictures of herself than they might have been without them.

People often confuse self-control and self-terror. If I don't do this, that horrible thing will happen. If I am not that, I will hate myself. There were problems with that plan. Threatened people, shamed people, scared people, rarely do their best work. A person could scare herself too bad, too hard, too crazy, if she looked at this new photograph the wrong way. What she wanted to see, and could see if she squinted, was, “This is an emergency and I am a beauty and that is not a contradiction in terms.” Since she couldn't see it except when squinting, she squinted.

She couldn't decide if her body looked prettier or just more socially acceptable through squinting eyes. It did look
better—less like a body and more like a mural or a map. More like an object she could change, or critique, or embrace without changing or critiquing or even embracing herself.

Something Preach wanted. That was the best part of what Ada saw. But she saw something else too.

She saw a map that could lead her home.

When the timer went off at six, she was startled. She sat down to her dining table and did step one. She registered the test online. That was just a matter of typing in her name, a number on the box, her address, and a few tiny bits of information. Next she filled out a permission form to perform the test. When the paperwork was done, she got herself a bottle of water and went to the sink.

She sipped a bit, swished the water around in her mouth. A doctor friend had suggested that she be pretty vigorous about the swishing and pretty generous with the water, so she went through the whole bottle, working her mouth and cheek muscles hard. She was practically sweating. When the water bottle was empty, she sat down again at the table.

The directions mentioned a drying stand. It took her a moment to realize that the drying stand was two holes on the top of the folio that contained the info. She took out the narrow envelope that contained the brushes. She tore open the top. Being careful not to touch the bristly end, she put the brush in her mouth and began to scrape twenty times against the side of her cheek, moving the brush just a little to make sure it wasn't scraping over and over again in the exact same place. When she got to twenty, she did ten more. She wasn't sure if one scrape
down and one scrape up should be counted as one or two scrapes. She put the first brush in the drying stand.

Then she did the other cheek. Thirty brushes. When she put it in the drying stand, she turned on a timer and set it for ten minutes. The first brush would have a little extra drying time.

When the timer went off, she put the brushes in the envelope that they were supposed to go back to the lab in. That envelope sealed, she placed it in the larger envelope provided, along with the paperwork. Finally she sealed that securely. All she had to do was drop that envelope off at the mailbox. That's all she had to do, but it wasn't all she was doing. She was worrying about what other use might be being made of her DNA information. She was worrying about finding out now, or later, that the genes associated with whatever diet destiny or metabolic identity this test revealed would later be associated with some horrible disease. She was parsing a question she had never parsed before: How much medical info is too much medical info? On the way to the mailbox she stopped worrying about all that. She even stopped wondering if Preach was cheating and what her daughters were doing at the exact moment. When she dropped the envelope in the mailbox, all she was thinking was, Please let that be a valid sample. Please let me know what I need to do to be the body I want to be. It was a big enough wish to eclipse other wishes.

Until she knew what she was really supposed to be eating, she would stay on Weight Watchers. She wasn't looking for excuses to fail. And she had already lost more than a few pounds.

THE TWINS' BIRTHDAY was on a Saturday, and the girls flew in to celebrate. It was their tradition to eat Mexican food for dinner to mark the occasion, because Ada and Preach had eaten Mexican just before the babies came.