Tina Mcelroy Ansa

by The Hand I Fan With

  Their private demons from the past bounced up from the dead whenever Lena gave them the day off for their birthdays, sent get-well cards to their grandmothers, paid for retreats to mountain resorts and seaside spas for them all. Whenever she did anything nice and unexpected for them, they remembered their unkindness to her, their meanness, their un-Christian behavior as girls. They felt they had to take her forgiveness, her kindness for granted or they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves.

  Lena could hardly be blamed herself for wanting to forget what it was like to be hated. It was hard enough to live with herself and all her own ghostly baggage as it was without the memory of their hatefulness, too.

  It had started at about age thirteen and went right on through adulthood until Lena returned from college. Of course, Sister had lightened the hateful load somewhat by bullying the girls at Xavier into at least pretending not to be so hostile. The force of Sister’s personality made them give in and soften toward Lena.

  Then, when she returned to Mulberry from college and claimed what everyone in town knew to be her birthright, things seemed to change. Even though she attended parochial school all her life, former public school children who had been lukewarm toward Lena now remembered her as a star and model pupil and their best little playmate. True former classmates, like Wanda and Brenda, who had systematically disdained and ignored Lena all through their teens, girls who had refused to speak her name as they sat in the same classroom at Martin de Porres, implored her to be the godmother to their babies.

  Marilyn, one of Lena’s main pubescent torturers and now one of Lena’s highest-earning Realtors, a member of the Millionaire Club every year since 1988, bragged one afternoon to her motherin-law, “You know, Lena was one of my best childhood friends.” Lena had come by to drop off a mohair baby’s blanket for Marilyn’s newest arrival. Marilyn couldn’t seem to stop gently patting the fluffy white yarn of the blanket against her throat and then rubbing the downy material against her baby girl’s fat smooth cheek. In between, the new mother would smile up at “Auntie Lena” as if she had actually loved and cherished her all her life, since they were “childhood friends.”

  “Lena, I’m surprised you still speaking to those you-know-whats,” Sister said when Lena passed along news of her colleagues and their families.

  “Shoot,” Lena would say with a shrug, sounding for all the world like one of her old lady friends, “life is too short, Sister, for that shit. It’s a vapor, girl, gone just that quickly, that easily. And all that stuff you hold on to just weighs you down in this world. In the next one, too, I guess.”

  Lena never could hold a grudge. She had so much. And so many of the women had worked a long time with hardly any material reward. Lena believed in being supportive.

  She even drove forty miles outside of Mulberry just to see her gynecologist, Dr. Sharon, because they were in college together. Dr. Sharon, like all her friends and colleagues now, had warm memories of their salad days.

  Some of the women Lena befriended were divorced or widowed. Some were single like herself. Most had left Mulberry about the time Lena came back. But over the next twenty years or so, most of them had come straggling back home.

  “Yeah, ain’t no place like Mulberry,” she had heard her father’s and her own customers declare for no particular reason but the joy of home.

  Carroll was the last of Lena’s former classmates to return to Mulberry.

  “Girl,” Wanda had told her over the Candace WATS line, “I don’t know why you’re still out there in L.A. scuffling and working and living from cutoff notice to cutoff notice when you could be home with a good life working with us and Lena. Shit, girl, what you trying to prove? You ain’t got nothing holding you out there, do you?”

  Carroll had been thinking about home for nearly twenty years. She thought about it one more night, then called Wanda back with one last doubt. Carroll just couldn’t believe that Lena was really hiring her former tormentors.

  “Don’t be no fool, girl, come on home. You know Lena McPherson ain’t holding no grudge. Shit, what she got to be mad about? Hell, she got everything.”

  “Yeah,” Carroll said suspiciously. “And she willing to share it with us?”

  So Carroll came on home, too, with lovely tales of how she and Lena had spent hours on the phone during their years in high school at Blessed Martin de Porres. She came home, also, to a position at Candace Realty, Motto: “We got on different colors, but we all look good.”

  But she kept asking her friend Wanda, “Didn’t Lena used to be lighter-complected than she is now?”

  Lena seldom remembered much of the pain and cruelty inflicted on her by the girls she grew up with in Mulberry. Sister, however, knew Lena had been scarred by the girls’ rejection of her. Sister continued to marvel at the fact that Lena seemed so free of venom and fantasies of revenge, but she knew that her friend had put a great deal out of her mind just to be able to function normally in the world.

  Lena forgave her newly discovered “childhood friends.” She prayed for them and did her best to help them.

  Even though she had scores of women who counted themselves her best friend, she really didn’t have a friend in town among her contemporaries whom she could call with a little quick girlfriend talk.

  “Hey, girl, I know you cooking dinner, but let me tell you this right quick.”

  She had not had time to foster those kinds of relationships with anyone other than Sister and her one true childhood friend, Gwen. And Gwen had disappeared years before into a commune in Northern California to write a book. Lena had found so little time for long chatty lunches and dinners over outrageously fattening food and too much champagne or Saturday afternoon shopping sprees through the Mulberry Mall.

  Yet Lena never did feel she was totally alone. Her grandmother’s ghost had promised her that much when the old lady came back to Lena the night of her funeral.

  “You ain’t never alone, baby,” Grandmama had said, giving Lena the mantra that carried her through college, soured relationships, the deaths of her mother and father, her brothers and Frank Petersen. “You ain’t never alone, baby.”

  And she wasn’t. Even in her dreams, she was reassured that there were loving spirits all around her. Her favorite dream was a recurring one in which she felt enveloped in the love of the spirits she called her “Grandies.”

  The women were dressed in beautiful gauze, chiffon-like gowns of every color imaginable from the palest mint-green pastel to deepest, richest maroon. In her dream, Lena recalled thinking: Each one of these women is my Grandy. Each one is for me. Each one loves me. The women in Lena’s dream—some live, some dead—were her maternal grandmother, Lena Marie, whom she had never met; her grandmama; her kindergarten teacher, Miss Russell; Miss Zimmie; the slave ghost Rachel. There, too, were the other women around Mulberry whom she had loved and cherished, Miss Onnie, Miss Annie Mae, Miss Eula, Miss Joanne, Miss Pansy. Then, there were the faces of women she did not recognize even though she saw the love they held for her.

  The dream women, her Grandies, would pass her around from one pair of soft sweet-smelling arms to another as if she were still a baby. They would kiss and coo over her, nuzzle her and whisper soft wordless sounds of safety and love. One of them, either Grandmama or some famous woman like Zora Neale Hurston, would take Lena in her hands and ever so gently place her at their feet to sleep snuggly in the sea of their beautiful ethereal skirt tails. Then, they would all lean back, her grandmama at the head of the sorority, and smile.

  In life, Lena’s grandmama didn’t have enough friends her own age around to have a proper quilting circle, but Grandmama had exchanged scraps of material with her younger friend Miss Zimmie, who had especially deft hands. With both Grandmama and Nellie sewing so much for themselves and Lena, there were always piles of beautiful material—maroon and black and royal-blue velveteen from Lena’s Sunday dresses, cotton and wool plaids in bright primary colors from her play dresses and pastel linen from her parade
of Easter outfits—neatly folded and stored in Davison’s department store bags in the sewing room closet downstairs. Grandmama would give the material to anyone who asked. But she kept a special dress box on the overhead shelf with the very best swatches of material for Miss Zimmie.

  Now, when Lena went to visit Miss Zimmie—the closest thing she had to a grandmother of her own—she always worked her way back to the old woman’s bedroom to see the quilts she had hanging over a frame with pieces of Lena’s past expertly stitched in.

  A swatch of green embroidered peau de soie from her first dance dress, a strip of velvet from a Christmas program dress, a piece of black silk from her first evening dress, a square of electric-blue mohair fabric from a Sunday suit.

  Lena tried to visit Miss Zimmie’s when she thought she might catch the beautiful old woman, her dark gray-streaked hair up in a soft pompadour, at her machine or tatting her ever-present lap sewing. Even though she liked to say, “The old gray mare …,” Miss Zimmie still had good vision, and it allowed her to read and sew well into her eighty-ninth year of life. She had even needlepointed pillows for Lena and herself that proclaimed, “I EARNED IT.”

  “No, no, thank you. I can make it by myself. I’m an independent old lady,” she would declare in a firm pleasant voice as Lena and anybody else in the trim spotless house raced to move chairs and boxes and flowerpots and door edges and anything else out of the independent old lady’s way.

  Miss Zimmie had flowers in her garden even in the dead of winter. If she had a winter yen for the summer yellow of sunflowers, she’d just go right out and purchase the tall showy flowers in plastic and stick them in her yard. She didn’t have a yard full of plastic. Miss Zimmie was too organic for that. But she told Lena she had lived too long to deny herself the pleasure of a sunflower or a rose just because they weren’t currently blooming.

  Lena went to her grandmother’s friend for wisdom as well as succor.

  “I don’t worry about what I can’t remember anymore,” Miss Zimmie had told Lena on her eighty-fifth birthday. “ ’Cause some things I don’t want to remember. Truly. I thought about it and realized there were all kinds of things that I have no desire whatsoever to ever recall again. Some things, Lena, you supposed to forget.”

  It was advice Lena took to heart in dealing with her childhood friends.

  She forgot their past nastiness, and she prayed for them and their families.

  It wasn’t difficult for Lena to do. She and her former classmates from Martin de Porres did share certain experiences and passages in their lives whether they were speaking to each other at the time or not. They had all been together when the unthinkable happened. As hard as it was for her non-Catholic friends to believe and even more difficult for her Catholic friends to fathom, Lena and her old friends had witnessed their classmate Jessie Mae slap a nun.

  Lena was in the eighth grade, one day in late April just before the first procession of the year honoring the Blessed Virgin, when her teacher, Sister Gem of the Sea, went too far. Looking right at Jessie Mae, the sister said, “I want you girls to bring in your white dresses for the procession this week for me to see. Everyone’s mother can’t be counted on to dress you all like virgins in Mary-like dresses.”

  Jessie Mae, a big girl for her age—almost as tall as the teacher—had had all the insults she and her family could take. She leapt up in the woman’s face and cursed Sister Gem of the Sea out for everything she could think of. In her mother’s name, Jessie Mae called the holy woman everything but a child of God.

  Then, frustrated by the nun’s response of a cold, placid blue-eyed stare, Jessie Mae did the unthinkable.

  “You old dried-up heifer,” the girl shouted, and slapped the nun full in the face.

  The other eighth graders let out a collective gasp.

  The solid flat sound of the lick rang out as clearly as the principal’s school bell on the top floors of the school building alerting everyone on the second and third levels that something momentous was in progress.

  The nun was stunned for only a moment. With the imprint of Jessie Mae’s hand on her face as clear as if it were painted there with Mercurochrome, she lost her cold facade. Drawing back her arm past her shoulder, Sister Gem of the Sea brought her opened hand around in a smooth perfect arc and returned the slap. It nearly knocked the big teenager off her feet.

  Then it was as if someone had announced, “Come out fighting at the sound of the bell!” Jessie Mae pounced for the nun’s stiff white wimpled throat with both hands outstretched. The nun jumped alert, put her hands up and bent her knees slightly in a pugnacious pose. They collided amid a swarm of slaps, punches and clenches.

  “Nun fight! Nun fight!” the incredulous students in the room shouted, jumping from their seats and surging forward. Some of them hopped up on desk seats and desk tops—a transgression against the cardinal rule: “Treat everything in this school as if it were your own”—for a better view. It was better than a Saturday afternoon matinee at the Burghart Theatre.

  The eighth graders cheered and whooped as the nun and the girl fell to the floor in the front of the classroom and rolled around on the cool tile, scratching and clawing and digging and biting at each other. The students’ screams rose to a higher pitch.

  And when the two women—for that is what the fight had made of them: equals, both women now—were pulled apart, the nun’s veil was on the rough wooden school floor, exposing the woman’s closely cropped reddish gray hair, and Jessie Mae was on her way out the school door.

  It always made Lena chuckle to think that her best friend in the world was a woman whom she called “Sister.” Just calling her name made Lena think of the nuns, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, who had taught her.

  Lena sometimes felt like a nun herself. Going around doing good works, not having sex regularly, living alone. The only difference was she didn’t live in a stark cell with only a cot and a kneeler in it. Her comfort and clothes were the only things that set her apart from the white women in black who had taught her.

  Sister had thought the same thing many times. Lena was like the novices who took on the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

  “The only vow my girl doesn’t adhere to is poverty!”

  Hell, I might as well be a nun, Lena would say to herself. Then, she’d get a little frightened. Even at her age, she didn’t want to tempt God at all into giving her a vocation to the convent. She had read of women in their later years joining some cloistered order, living in quiet serenity in some mountain convent like St. Theresa.

  At eleven, twelve and thirteen, she had knelt in the pews of Blessed Martin de Porres Catholic Church and prayed that she would not be found worthy to be called to the convent. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament had told them all that a vocation, a calling to the priesthood or religious order, was so strong, so Godsent, so nerve-rattling, that it could not be ignored or denied.

  Then, they pulled out the story of St. Augustine, with Monica, his mother, praying for his conversion night and day. They pointed to Mary Magdalene as another example of God not letting up ’til He got what He wanted.

  “The Hound of Heaven will hunt you down until you are His!!!” Sister Louis Marie would boom until Lena wanted to squeeze her developing preteen body under her desk.

  The nuns were bound and determined to get somebody from the parish to take on the habit, say the vows, make the commitment, tote one up for their team. But they had yet to make a score. It had gotten to the point that the nuns scolded the girls in eighth grade and higher when they talked of college plans or marriage. “And no one wants to become a bride of Christ? Girls, show a little parish spirit!!” the sisters would say as if they were world-weary mothers saying to their unmarried daughters, “Just show a little ankle!”

  But Lena felt a nun was just a woman with more restrictions.

  She liked the idea of a sisterhood, of a woman’s world. She just didn’t like the restraints. And without thinking about the mechanics of her
plan, she had, over nearly three decades, done something about it.

  Lena’s sphere now was a world in which the women still did the majority of the work, but there was a major difference. Unlike the world Lena saw around her when she was growing up—a world in which her grandmother sewed nearly all her clothes as a matter of fact and a matter of love, where Nellie rose early to open her husband’s business because he had been out carousing all night, where nuns ran the parish school, convent, church and rectory as well as outreach programs under the direction of the priest—hers was a world in which the women received credit and payment for their work. Lena saw to that.

  It was what made Cliona from Yamacraw feel perfectly comfortable arriving unannounced at Lena’s front door out by the river after dark like one of her girlfriends.

  8

  DUTIES

  Lena didn’t think Cliona from Yamacraw would ever leave. Cliona kept looking at the big pendulum clock on the sideboard that Lena had taken from the dining room mantelpiece in the house on Forest Avenue and saying, “Lord, Lena, let me get on out of here tonight and let you get some rest. An old lady like me don’t need much sleep. But you practically still growing. You need your rest.” But she didn’t budge from her soft leather perch on one of the turquoise love seats by the window overlooking the deck, and the Ocawatchee beyond. The small Listerine bottle of Clear Flow sat self-importantly on the table in front of her.

  Lena had made the mistake of offering the old woman a cold Coca-Cola when she first came in.

  “I’ll take a caffeine-free Coke, if you got one,” Cliona had said as she dropped her tweed wrap from her shoulders and got comfortable while Lena headed for the kitchen. “You know caffeine messes with my medication.”