Ada's Rules by Alice Randall

Author:Alice Randall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2012-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

24

MANAGE PORTION SIZES

IT WAS THE day to embrace Gargantua, lunch at the Cheesecake Factory followed by dinner at Maggiano’s, the day after Lunch Bunch. Gluttony was walking with the devil, and all Ada could try to do was grab one by the tail and beat the other.

Ada hated what she called “Our Holidays,” the season that stretched from Thanksgiving through Valentine’s Day that seemed to be full of nothing but overeating.

She took the first snatch at gluttony’s tail by walking to Queenie’s instead of driving.

It took Ada a lot longer than the twelve to fifteen minutes the twins had separately assured her was all it was going to take. And the hill up Blair, which didn’t look like a hill in her car, felt like a mountain in her pink-and-black Nikes and a thick enough sweatshirt to keep her from freezing.

The only good thing about the walk was, she crossed paths with the redheaded boy who rode the crazy bike. As he zipped by Ada, he shouted, “We’re getting it!” This remark pleased Ada.

Most acquaintances who passed didn’t recognize athletic Ada—naked of makeup, hair tied back in an improvised dorag, hands out front pumping to burn more calories—as Ada. She waved at a few folk she knew, passing in cars, who didn’t wave back. She enjoyed being this flavor of incognegro.

What she didn’t enjoy was being two blocks from the house and needing a toilet. Bad. The coffee and the exercise hit at just the same time. To hold it, she had to walk with the peculiar wriggling gait she saw daily on the playground, when she told kids to “hold it” and wait their turn for the toilet. It was a gait she knew to be completely undignified.

She had forgotten how hard “holding it” could be. Something about the absurdity of a fifty-year-old woman being in a five-year-old situation tickled Ada. If laughing hadn’t been likely to cause her to soil herself, she would have laughed.

Shuffling down the street, squeezing little muscles for all they were worth, she gave herself some harsh reprimands. Accept the realities of the body. Let children pee when they need to. And finally, don’t be embarrassed to desecrate your mother-in-law’s perfect powder room!

Ada, who had called Queenie to tell her to have the front door open, rushed in without stopping to kiss or be kissed by Queenie.

Queenie was standing at the stove when Ada got out of the bathroom.

“Now, come give me some sugar, baby.”

Queenie met her halfway cross the room, walking with three hundred pounds of grace that made Michael Jackson’s moonwalk look like a stutterstep. Queenie pulled her daughter-in-law close in, like she was trying to smell her.

“You not abusing laxatives, are you?”

“No!”

“The way you just rushed into the bathroom—”

“No. How do you know about laxative abuse, anyway?”

“I saw it on Oprah.”

“Oprah’s off the air.”

“I didn’t say I saw it yesterday.” Ada settled in a seat beside Queenie. Queenie had some playing cards on the table in front of her. “You want to play a quick hand of bid whist?”

“A quick one.

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