She would pause to slip a sliver of Juicy Fruit between her painted purple-red lips and walk up to the counter and her day’s first customer. Reaching for the order pad she had hung on her apron sash, she would look over her bare shoulder at Lena and confide: “Been feeling right whorish all morning.”
Lena had on a pair of silk tap panties trimmed in ecru lace but that’s how the scent in the juke joint this morning made her feel … “right whorish.”
Too bad I don’t feel this way more often, she noted, and chuckling at the thought, spun herself lightly on the tiny uncluttered dance floor.
Lena felt at home there in what had once been the center of her family’s universe in the small town of Mulberry. For nearly half a century, someone named McPherson had gotten up with all the other early-rising working people in Mulberry and come downtown to open up The Place. For the majority of those years, it had been Lena’s mother, Nellie, who had arisen, prepared breakfast with Grandmama, gotten her children off to school and opened up each morning. Now, Lena didn’t have a family to care for, but with all of her other businesses and holdings, she rarely showed up at the juke joint and liquor store more than two or three times a week.
There didn’t seem to be enough hours in her lifetime—let alone in a day—to accomplish what was set before her.
She had been an early riser since she was in high school. Then it was ghosts and nightmares and witches riding her that kept her from sleeping soundly through the night. Now she got to bed late, too, so she had taught herself how to use her time. For more than two decades, she had been getting up before dawn to walk around her house and get started on her day. Lena had responsibilities.
There were things to do: Make phone calls to older folks who didn’t sleep much either. Send flowers or fruit or money for a sick customer or celebrating child or an ambitious elementary school teacher. In addition to advice and succor, she gave tangible gifts to those she loved and felt responsible for—a box of steaks, a set of tires, rent money.
Lena often saw trouble coming on the horizon and just knew that in a few days she would probably be faced with a “regular” in dire need of immediate healing or help. And she knew that when it came, the problem would arise at the worst possible time. So she had gotten in the habit of warding off those offenses with some preemptive strike that settled things down for a while: an unexpected Honey Baked ham, or a gift certificate from a store out at the Mulberry Mall, or a check to someone’s grandchild, or a new book of fiction for a discouraged young writer. Nothing big or flashy or spectacular.
Old women all over Mulberry bragged about the seventy-fifth birthday or the golden anniversary (even though their spouses were long dead) remembrance and call they had gotten from Lena McPherson.
“And it wasn’t no dry card, neither,” the old folks would say as they waved the accompanying check or gift certificate around under the noses of their neighbors.
Sister was the first one to call the practice “hush mouth.” But Lena had taken the expression on as her own. Several times a month, about once a week, she would sit down to her desk at her own house and do her hush-mouth duties. Ordering items on the phone from catalogs, writing what she considered little pieces of checks that she knew might save someone’s life, calling florists and tracking down economy sizes of obscure curative lotions, ointments and plasters that her older friends and customers swore by.
Whenever Sister was running around her home in New Orleans doing a million things at once, taking care of this son or that son while functioning as the sole caregiver to her aging motherin-law even though her husband had brothers and sisters right in the city, making sure her entire household ran smoothly while preparing for her thrice-weekly lectures as well as the anthropology majors’ trip, she would compare herself to her busy, joy-giving, gift-giving friend.
“Girl, I’m so tired. I had to ’pull a Lena’ yesterday,” she’d tell her secretary as she dragged into her office just before an early morning class.
Even on nights—and there were plenty of them—when Lena was too tired to even plunge into the invigorating cool waves of her indoor swimming pool, or too behind in her paperwork to sit in her sauna and relax, she always found the energy and the time to go through her phone messages and see if anyone really needed her that night.
Most of the folks calling were people she had known all her life. There were no other folks on earth—now that her family was gone—that she cared more about.
“Lena McPherson? Shoot, I couldn’a made it lots of times if it hadn’a been for her.”
“Hell, me and my family wouldn’t have no roof over our heads if it wasn’t for Lena McPherson.”
“Lord, I couldn’a got my mama buried proper if it wasn’t for Lena.”
“Shoot, Lena McPherson the hand I fan with.”
She was beginning to feel about the same way her ousted customers did. She was missing the familiar smells, the sweet sweet sweet sexiness of an old R&B tune like “At Last” sung by Etta James on the jukebox, the loud sudden raucousness of a tipsy couple’s laughter.
Lena had no sooner thought of the song than the jukebox made a whirring noise and Etta James began singing.
At last, my love has come along
My lonely days are over
And life is like a song …
Umm, Lena said to herself, now, that’s my song for real!
Dancing by herself through the makeshift aisles of the deserted Place reminded her of all that—the music, the laughter, the flirting and fighting, the love, the comfort, the sanctuary—all that The Place offered. And she determined again to tell Mr. Jackson that very morning that he and his crew needed to get cracking on this job and get out of there so she and Gloria could get The Place back open.
As she danced her way along the grill’s bar through the stacks of lumber and copper wiring, on to and through the piles of dusty, moldy Sheetrock, Lena tried to ignore the increasingly strong musky odor and the breeze on her neck inside the building where there was no source for a breeze.
This was shaping up to be the best time and the most relaxation she had had in a long time. Lena found so few places and opportunities to enjoy herself.
First thing that morning, she had seen a cat’s eye in the drain of her big shower wink, wink, winking at her, and had wondered just what the upcoming day held. This kind of thing happened all the time to Lena. An image—like the blinking cat’s eye—that wouldn’t go away, a flash of a memory, a lingering question from a dream, the image of a face in a cloud that looked familiar. Over the years, she had learned to control these images that had once controlled her by just rubbing her hand over her face and her braids and brushing it all away. Or at least most of it. But she couldn’t do that this morning.
As she continued to dance herself around the uncluttered spot in the middle of the bar, she felt almost caught up in a whirlwind. As she continued to spin, she felt herself growing dizzy. Not from the twirling of her lone slow dance, but from the musky scent in the air.
As she danced, dipping and swaying to the words, “For you are mine, at last,” on the nickelodeon, the scent grew stronger and stronger and more distinctive.
“That smells like a man’s underarms,” Lena said dreamily to herself.
Then she laughed to herself.
“Now, that smells like a man’s crotch,” she said as she took another step and dip in her dance and another deep breath of the scent.
“That’s how he would smell behind his ears,” she concluded after stopping in midstep to sniff the air again.
Now the scent seemed to be wafting from a definite direction. Lena barely opened her dreamy eyes as she danced, gently, sensuously swaying her hips and shoulders to the music, down a path through tables, chairs, the mess of construction, smelling her way as she nearly sashayed toward the back wall.
She could barely make it out, but there seemed to be a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth stretched across a section of the wall. She danced toward it.
/> Still swaying to the music—“At Last” playing again because she wanted it to—she pulled the cloth down, stirring up clouds of dust and wood shavings, and exposed a huge gaping hole in the wall. She was so content at that moment, enjoying her dance so much, that at first she wasn’t really disturbed by the unexpected excavation Mr. Jackson and his crew seemed to be doing. But as soon as she saw what was behind the makeshift curtain and the wide jagged opening, about five by five feet, in the back wall of her establishment, a building she felt she knew inside out, she understood perfectly why Mr. Jackson had summoned her downtown at practically dawn and why his voice on her answering machine had had an eerie edge to it. The music was still playing on the nickelodeon, but she stopped dancing. Her purse slipped from her shoulder and landed on the floor with a tiny dusty thump. She just let it lie there in the dust.
She blinked a couple of times to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her. Lena had thought there was only a crawl space with room for storage behind that back wall. But she could see she had been mistaken.
Right there beyond the broken plaster and board wall, near where the extra ice machine usually stood, was a room she had never seen before, furnished with a wooden table, chair and footstool.
“So this is where the smells were coming from,” Lena said aloud to herself. “But where did this secret room come from?” she wondered as she stepped over the threshold and into what felt like the looking glass.
4
SECRET
Lena stood perfectly still for a few moments, letting the secret space surround her. It seemed almost to embrace her.
Actually, the room really didn’t look secret. It didn’t look as if it had a thing to hide. The light and air made it seem open and accessible. As Lena stepped entirely into the room, she could almost hear it speak. It had a deep friendly voice.
“I been here all the time. Where you been?”
It had an almost teasing, laughing tone. “Huh, where you been?”
No, Lena said to herself as she turned around slowly, taking in the brick and wooden walls, this place doesn’t feel secret, just undiscovered and private. Even Lena, who prided herself on her inquisitiveness and who was acknowledged by all in the small town as one of the most inquisitive women anyone knew, even Lena hesitated a moment, then decided out of respect not to read when she noticed the elegant cursive marks on the yellowed sheet of crisp-looking onionskin paper lying catercorner to the edge on the sturdy wooden table.
“This is private,” she said out loud, sounding like her grandmother, as she patted the fragile paper gently with the flat of her hand and left it alone. But she could not resist picking up the feather quill pen lying next to a clear blue bottle of blue-black ink and examining it before putting it back exactly as she had found it.
Strong morning light was coming in from somewhere. Lena tilted her head back and studied the ceiling, but she couldn’t find the direct source of light. It seemed to bounce back and forth off one wall then the other, practically flooding the high narrow space with sunlight.
On the far wall of the room was rough exposed brick, but built into the structure was a clever lever and a cantilever supporting a window that opened and shut automatically, allowing fresh air into the room at regular intervals. It was almost like a fan set on low. After just a few minutes of examination, Lena had to smile at the ingenious design.
“Well, Lord,” Lena said in admiration. “Would you look at that?”
The first time Lena, still a little thing, had exclaimed, “Well, Lord,” her mother had looked as if she had just seen a ghost. She brought her pretty manicured hand spread out against her décolletage and sucked in her breath sharply. Nellie had not heard the exclamation since her father-in-law had died some ten years before.
Looking at her strange little daughter, Nellie recalled how the older man always began each task—whether helping a friend to change a tire or dressing for a friend’s funeral, whether standing to wash his hands for dinner or going to the state offices in Atlanta about his taxes—with the call, as if he were setting out on an adventure. “Well, Lord” was a prayer of resignation and supplication, an incantation spoken to ask for strength.
“Well, Lord.” The old man had always said it with feeling and irony and resignation.
Lena’s grandfather had died the year before Lena was born, and when “Well, Lord” came out of Lena’s face, Nellie felt a chill in her bones and rubbed her hands over her arms to smooth away the chill bumps.
“Lena, where you get that expression from?” Nellie had asked, not sure she really wanted to know. She had meant to keep her voice casual as she asked, but she couldn’t pull it off. It came out sounding like the most important question she had asked since her second son’s birth and she had asked, “Is the baby all right?”
“From Granddaddy Walter,” Lena said, before she could pull the words back in her mouth. She was always answering questions honestly before she realized her answer had unsettled some adult.
So Lena didn’t use the expression as freely as her father’s father had. She reserved it for truly special, wondrous, momentous situations.
Gazing up in the newly discovered room behind the wall of The Place, she said it again.
“Well, Lord?” This time with a bit of a question in her voice.
First, she stood in the path of the fresh air drifting down from above. She stepped a few feet to the side like a girl dancing in a recital—”Step together and you lean to the side”—and could still feel the air. Then suddenly she again smelled the familiar aroma of man like a breath of fresh air.
Because of what she and Sister called her “curse,” it had been a long time since Lena had smelled a man so intimately. Her curse was not her monthly menses. At forty-five, Lena knew she would soon be seeing her periods wane, then disappear altogether. Lena’s curse was being able to gaze into another’s soul.
From the first time she ever tried to make love when she was a senior at Xavier University with a grad student friend of Sister’s, she had been cursed with a vision of her lover’s past. Just when they got past the kissing stage and had moved to the caressing stage, even before they got completely undressed, Lena would have to call a halt and stop the graphic pictures in her head. It was never anything like murder or assault on another human being, although she did see one man go into her purse when she was in the bathroom. But the pictures she saw were enough to cause coitus interruptus.
“Who wants to screw someone who kicked his dog that morning?” Lena asked Sister on the phone after another failed attempt.
No matter who her man of the moment was, just at the point of sexual play and intimacy in their relationship, the powers of her birth caul would kick in and she could suddenly see. She could see in the way old folks meant when one would look at her as a child, point a bony finger and say, “Listen, this child can see a heap a’ things.”
Surrounded by shafts of sunlight and the masculine odors in the secret room, Lena smiled and almost felt herself settle into the feeling of safety and repose that suffused the area. When she heard the board creak behind her, she didn’t even jump. She just put the quill she had found on the table down and turned to greet Mr. Jackson with questions about the newly discovered space. But instead of the countenance of the grizzled construction boss behind her, Lena saw stars.
She should have been forewarned. But Lena had put so much out of her mind about how things were when ghosts and demons and voices and visions visited her whenever they pleased that she hadn’t seen the warning signs.
Over the years, she had taught herself to ignore the signs of ghosts as well as the actual apparitions. She had just made herself go headlong on into any situation, knowing that she would be safe.
The one time that her grandmother’s ghost had come back to her—on the night of the old lady’s funeral—she had assured Lena it was going to be okay. Lena still thanked God—particularly in her prayers at night and in the morning—for having the mother wit to
cling to her grandmama’s promise of safety when that poor old Nurse Bloom had sent her on such a chase of spirits and chants and witch-hunts in the middle of the night.
“Bless their hearts,” Lena prayed softly to herself every night on her knees by the side of her bed for Nurse Bloom and her grandmother—the senile old woman who had tried to protect her at birth and the sharp old woman who had tried to protect her all her life.
Signs of the spirit world were not on Lena’s mind this morning.
Later, when she tried to recall what had occurred with her in the secret room, it seemed she had seen the odd-looking stick of wood when she entered the place. As she had all morning, Lena felt more than she saw. She had noticed the board barely hanging by one nail from a low beam—rough and unpainted—out of the corner of her eye just as she entered the room, but it hadn’t appeared menacing. It was just a plank of wood.
She didn’t know if she had been whacked in the head with the two-by-four or if she had turned and foolishly walked into the beam and whacked herself in the left temple. She didn’t plan to tell anybody, but the blow felt more like a metaphysical blow than a physical one. Lena could not tell if she had been really hit or not.
The force of the strike was so sharp and personal that, even though she could sense the pain in her head, Lena felt her spirit had been assaulted more than her body. It made Lena feel that she had been slapped in the face. Not that Lena knew firsthand what it felt like to be smacked in the face with the open palm of someone’s hand. But she did know the cumulative effect of a slap.
For decades, it seemed, Lena had seen the women with their maid’s uniforms on or their red McDonald’s uniforms or their pinstriped business suits purchased at Rubinstein’s out at the mall standing on corners waiting for rides or slipping into the seats of their own cars parked outside garden apartments. Women with black eyes and swollen faces still having to get up and go to work in the morning. Some tried to hide their injuries when they spied her looking at them. Others stood stolidly and returned the gaze. Lena blessed each one she saw.
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