Ada's Rules (20 page)

She didn't make six cups again, but daily she would make herself a cup or two or three, sometimes as an hour's entertainment, sometimes as an antidote to boredom, sometimes as reassurance. The cups became places to hide as her body dissolved. One day she looked into the cup and saw a fragment of her body floating in the cup; then the light shifted, and the reflection vanished.

Watching herself reflected, then vanished, she started thinking of the ice she had thought she would make but hadn't got to yet.

In her childhood her mother's mother, MaDear, had frequently frozen fruit into the ice cubes she made: maraschino cherries, slices of fresh peaches, pears from cans, it all depended on what MaDear had on hand. Ada loved the way her grandmother's ice looked in jelly jar glasses that frosted over.

Thinking of these ice cubes, Ada decided to make ice cubes out of her tea. When her ice was frozen, Ada made herself a tall glass of water filled with the new cubes and slices of fresh cucumber and mint leaves and slices of lemon. This was dessert, this was delicious, this was change, and it was frozen. The next week she went back into the kitchen to whip up another batch of ice cubes, this time orange peel and rosemary. The very next morning she served herself orange and rosemary ice cubes topped with Fiji water splashed with a drop of rose essence in the water. She served this with a little bread plate of herbs: a sprig of tarragon, a few chives, a bit of mint. She nibbled and sipped for a delighted quarter hour.

She was celebrating getting to 168.

SHE WAS SICK of Medifast. It wasn't that it tasted bad. It tasted fine enough for the good it did. But all the deprivation, despite the little treats of ice cubes and tea, was setting her up to gorge, and she knew it.

Before she knew it, she had snuck off to Burger-Up, her favorite neighborhood restaurant, and eaten an order and a half of crispy-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside sweet potato fries and a chocolate brownie made with local Tennessee chocolate—along with a most excellent chicken sandwich with a more-than-tummy-yumming sauce. Dinner was water and boiled egg whites.

She had a new rule: Don't do anything you can't do for a lifetime. It takes too long to get used to new stuff, and she didn't want to make the effort to get used to anything that was going to help for just a little while. She was saving her remaining powder for the last big long bang.

Nobody half a century old was meant to be drinking milkshakes three times a day and trying not to move too much or
do too much exercise because you might pass out because you were taking in too few calories.

On the other hand, she had to admit that during her four weeks on Medifast she had lost sixteen pounds, and a sixteen-pound weight loss in a single month was hard to come by, mid-diet. She said one last “Praise the Lord for Medifast.” Then chanted aloud the way forward: “Eight hours sleep every night. Eight glasses of water every day. Walk for thirty minutes every day. Eat protein and salad. Drink only red wine and tequila. When in doubt, eat chicken and broccoli for dinner. Snack on unlimited amounts of sliced cucumbers. Eat something every three hours from eight to ten, then nothing from ten to eight.” Even better, Willie Angel had told her when she called to check in and get a blood pressure medicine refill: Don't eat from eight to eight. Simple rules. Every day, every day, healthing everafter.

Visiting Preach once a week in his office was another simple habit Ada wanted to get back to. Not visiting Preach was a thing she couldn't keep up. Wanting more than a wifely peck on the cheek, she headed to church.

The preacher was surprised by his wife's visit. He was sitting at his desk contemplating stealing from Peter to pay Paul when his wife walked in. On the desk were three ice-cube trays.

“Watching ice melt?”

“Trying to decide which of these credit card companies is most likely to cut me some slack.”

“Credit card companies?”

“I've got credit cards frozen into the ice.”

“Gimme some scissors.”

“You don't need to hack 'em out; hot water works fine.”

“I need to cut them up!”

“Ada …”

“You've loaned another one of your congregants our money—without asking me. Again?”

“The bail money for Jarius's grandma.”

“And what's this you about to thaw a card out for?”

“Jesper Phillips.”

“Jesper Phillips?”

“Blood thinner. The insurance company will only pay for Coumadin, but there's an injectable that's better. Just till I sort it out with them.”

“How much are we spending in meds every month that we don't have?”

“I haven't added up the numbers. I don't want to know. If I know, I won't be able to get up tomorrow and do what I got to do.”

“And if we don't know, I can't get up in the morning and do what I got to do, make the ends meet.”

“We always manage.”

“Managing is managing me into a stroke. Not living in a house we own. Not knowing where I will be living when I get old if your mama doesn't die and leave us her house—because my daddy is leaving his to our daughters—because I might give it to the church. And I'm the fool who loves you so much, I might give it to the church. Yep, we managing me into a stroke!”

“I'm gonna buy you a house, Ada.”

“How many years you promise that?”

“Too many.”

“If you lucky, I'll probably just drop dead in ten more years and you won't have to worry about retirement, just go move in half the year with Naomi and half the year with Ruth.”

“I'm gonna buy you a house.”

“Don't say it. It's a lie.”

“It's a promise. If I have to smother my mama, I'm getting you a house.”

“You could stand up to the vestry.”

“If I knew how to do that, you already have a house.”

“You should probably use the MasterCard—Temple paid a little something on it last month.”

“You know about my little accounts?”

“Yes. And there's something else I know.”

“What, baby?”

“I'm going to get my body together, and you gonna get our bankbook together! I'm not leaving any of this blutter for our girls to drown in! Blutter is a river too deep to dredge—no telling how many is lost in it never to be found. Our future son-in-laws, maybe. I'm over blutter! All of it! Everywhere.”

“Just don't be over me.”

“You're not blutter, you butter.”

“I like that.”

“I want you to like it.”

Preach kissed Ada on the lips. Hard. She opened her mouth. He squeezed her hands, then dropped them like he had something important to say.

“Every which way you ever looked, or could look, did look, do look, or will look, I love to look at you.”

“Listening to talk like that is how I got hooked up with a blutter-loving man with credit cards frozen into ice blocks and body blutter hanging off me. I ain't listening, and I'm late for work. And late for your mama's, and before the day's out I'm gonna be late for my mama too, then come home to a home I don't own! All listening to you.”

Ada put her hands over her ears and marched out of the office. She was thinking, If I don't get that fine man back into my bed, I sure as shit need to find a way to get him out of my head! Then she thought a little something worse: He put the words on me, but he didn't put the moves.

Sometimes the rule she liked best was her very first rule: Change it up. Crossing “Change it up” with “Walk every thirty minutes,” she decided to get off the Dayani Center treadmill and start walking the path around Radnor Lake in addition to walking the neighborhood.

Unfortunately she decided to try the outdoor walk close to dusk, and the mosquitoes thought she was a banquet just for them.

Three days later she was in the hospital with West Nile virus.

Ada wondered if it wasn't a sign from God that she shouldn't be exercising. Preach said it was a sign from God she was supposed to be wearing mosquito repellent.

Mason called from Greenwood. He was staying at the Alluvian Hotel. Ada, just out of the hospital, full over her West Nile and
emboldened by brushes with her mortality, allowed herself to enjoy the call, as recompense for recent suffering—and by telling herself, silently: I will talk. I will not cheat.

She would not cheat. But she might move on. On the phone with Mason, she let herself know this.

For a long time she had been less than content with the hiatus she and Preach had stumbled into, less than sanguine that he had become more her preacher than her man, that she no longer called him by his first name, that she would not be pleased if her daughters at their half century had what she had.

As Ada listened to Mason tell her all about Club Ebony, about the folks that remembered her father and her mother, as she heard him saying that he had kept the record collection she had left at the apartment all those years ago, that he was wanting to either give them back to her or give them to the B. B. King Museum, she didn't know how she would bring herself to hang up the phone.

It almost made her cry to hear Mason say that he might give the records to the museum, because it was like he was saying, Neither of us knew how valuable what we had was when we had it. And it was like he was saying, I figured it out first, and I can give it back to you, or I can give it away if you still haven't figured it out.

She tried to imagine herself starting a KidPlay in Los Angeles. She suspected funding would be easier to find out there, that some of the great big stars might help out. Perhaps Mason would get her invited, in person, to the NAACP Image Awards she had watched on television, and maybe she would meet Queen Latifah and Latifah would fund her and work with her
and she would create a black
Sesame Street
and it would be aired on BET.

She already knew what he didn't know, or didn't care about: that Mason's friends in Los Angeles would find it easier for her to be smaller, that black Hollywood might even want her to be tinier, if she was spending time in the undressed West, in La-La Land.

She didn't think Mason would want her to be smaller. She wasn't even sure he would care that it made her life harder if she wasn't. She hoped it was what it was unlikely to be—that he was attracted to her exactly as she was, not that he too was besotted with the iconography of bigness.

Ada was hungry for a romantic adventure. Some days it seemed she was really close to finding a new man at home inside her old man. Some days it seemed like her own bed was the last place in the world she would find her next passionate kiss. She kept zigging and zagging between getting tickled by the possibility of an affair and being horrified she could even imagine one.

Still, she wouldn't cheat … unless she had proof Preach was cheating. If she had proof Preach was cheating, Ada would step out with what Memphis Minnie would have called her back burner boy. For the very first time in her life Ada hoped Preach was cheating.

Zigzagging again, clearing away blutter each step of the way.

THE THOUGHT DIDN'T stick at the front of her mind.

What came to the front of her mind was: home cooking. If you don't want the home cooking, maybe it's what you're cooking at home.

Medifast and baby food had her brain a little fuzzy, but not so fuzzy that she didn't recognize that one of the reasons baby food and its adult equivalent had been so attractive was that feeding herself was too much work on top of too much work. Ada decided she needed a go-to frozen meal that worked with her DNA. She needed a go-to specialty of the house that was E-A-S-Y.

She had never served herself or her family a commercially made frozen dinner—but she was about to start. And she would have a signature dish she was proud to serve every day of the week, instead of priding herself on never repeating the same meal in a single week and usually not in the same month. She was going high and going low—she was getting out of the fattening middle.

After scouring the grocery aisles, the Weight Watchers site,
and a bunch of food review message boards, she decided to try Kashi Southwest Style Chicken. It had 15 grams of protein, less salt than a lot of the Kashi meals, and it was supposed to taste good.

It came in a little plastic black container with cling wrap on top. To Ada's eyes it looked half cool, half pathetic. She vented it by slicing into the plastic film, then microwaved it for about four minutes, stirred, then microwaved it for four more minutes. After that, Ada served it to herself in a bowl. She took a bite.

Cheap. Fast. Healthy. Pretty tasty. Good to look at. She wished she had discovered Kashi when it first came out. The daughters laughed hard at her when she called to tell them she had discovered and succumbed to store-bought ready-made entrées. The twins already knew all about them.

Daughter Naomi allowed how she preferred Lean Cuisine. Ruth preferred a fat-free minestrone soup as her go-to fast food.

When she told them she was creating a specialty of the house, they both said, at the same moment, “Roast chicken with lemon and garlic.” The very first dish both of the girls had learned to cook agreed with everybody's DNA. There was a God. And she probably had given Ada the recipe in her sleep.

You take a whole chicken, rinse it off, and pat it dry. You lay the chicken on its back, breast up. You slip a knife between the chicken skin and the breast meat, being careful not to tear the skin. Into that space you place sprigs of rosemary and cloves of garlic sliced in half. Inside the cavity of the chicken Ada put a whole onion studded with clove. She rubbed the chicken skin down with olive oil, then she put slices of onion atop the olive
oil and slices of lemon atop the onion, course-ground a bit of pepper over the whole, then roasted the bird for about an hour at 375.