Tina Mcelroy Ansa

by The Hand I Fan With

  Frank Petersen had made sure before she noticed the deterioration in his health that she would be the executrix of his estate, such as it was. He had just wanted her to know his life.

  When Frank Petersen’s health began to fail seriously, she had tried to hire one of the women she had known for years down at The Place to take over his duties. But the business relationship, begun in friendship and cordiality, always ended in hurt feelings and animosity. Lena just wanted her house cleaned, her windows scrubbed, her bathroom smelling like eucalyptus oil, the fruit and vegetable drawer in her refrigerator clean enough to eat out of because late at night when she came home tired and weary, she sometimes did. And she was happy to pay more than most schoolteachers made. But try as she did, over and over, she couldn’t find a black female housekeeper who gave her any respect in her own house. She tried to hire customers from The Place. It didn’t work. She tried to hire daughters and cousins and nieces and daughters-in-law of her patrons and friends. It didn’t work. She even tried to hire anonymous women from employment services. And that didn’t work either.

  They left trash, big actual chunks of trash—bottle caps and the dead leaves of plants and dust bunnies—in the corners of her house. They cleaned the bathroom and left fingerprints on the mirror and globs of toothpaste dried to the sink basin and hair in the tub. They let mildew grow in the grout of her steam room even after she impressed upon them how special the room was to her. The final straw was a short dark woman, the niece of a trusted customer, who left a sopping-wet cleaning rag draped across the keys of her computer, the computer that held every bit of business she conducted.

  The wet towel on her computer was like a sharp pair of scissors left in a child’s crib. Lena couldn’t even bear to think about it and its implications.

  Even black women who loved Lena couldn’t bring themselves to clean her house. Even the cleaning crew who kept her offices spotless swore they just didn’t know how to clean her house.

  “Lord have mercy,” Sister said from her spotless home in a suburb east of New Orleans. “Grown black women claiming they don’t know how to clean a house. Shit, you could get Diahann Carroll to come in there with her heels and diamonds and flawless complexion and perfectly coiffed hair and she’d know enough not to sweep dirt in corners.”

  It was Frank Petersen who finally called an end to the foolishness. Lena didn’t know when he did it or where he got the strength to pick up the phone and call his brother, but he did. He called James Petersen and said, “Brother, it’s time you came this way.”

  James packed up his few clothes, his favorite books and a couple of unopened jigsaw puzzles in his cousin’s large suitcase and a dusty old steamer trunk he found back in a closet and left Arkansas that very day.

  The sucking sound Cliona from Yamacraw was making with her drink brought Lena back to her big sitting room.

  Finally, Cliona drained her glass and rattled the ice cubes a bit. Lena stopped herself just in time from saying, “Can I get you another, Miss Cliona?” There seemed nothing left for Cliona from Yamacraw to do but finally complete her mission.

  “Now, I heard ’bout your little accident,” the old woman said.

  Lena thought, Good God, if this ain’t the smallest town when it comes to news. I don’t know why we bother with radio and TV.

  “Oh, Miss Cliona, I’m okay. I didn’t have any accident.”

  “Yeah?” Cliona replied. “That ain’t what I heard. I heard you took a pretty bad lick to the head.”

  “Oh, that was Mr. Jackson’s talk, you know the contractor doing the work down at The Place,” Lena said easily. “I just tripped and fell. He was just being overly cautious.”

  “Um-huh,” Cliona said suspiciously. Then she caught herself and said, “Oh, Lena, baby, I didn’t mean no harm.” And she smiled, her false teeth—teeth Lena had paid for—big in her mouth. The last thing she wanted to do was call Lena, whom she had always thought of as her special little girl, a liar. Lena leaned forward a little toward the old woman and smiled back. So Cliona from Yamacraw just kept going.

  “Well, I brought you some of this fresh Cleer Flo’ water. Collected it late last night right when it started. Powerful. Now, you take this water and …”

  Cliona stopped and, covering her mouth with her wrinkled hand, began to laugh.

  “Listen to me,” the old woman chuckled. “ ’Bout to go and tell you, a child born with a veil over her face, what to do with this Cleer Flo’.”

  Lena just smiled politely.

  “Thank you, Miss Cliona,” Lena said as she stood, took the bottle from the woman and reached down to hug her neck. Cliona from Yamacraw smelled faintly of the sweet scent of Dixie peach snuff.

  The scent made Lena even more gentle in helping Cliona from Yamacraw on with her coat and ushering her out the door to the late-model van where a young cousin of the old woman’s waited with the motor running and the radio blasting. He turned the radio down and reached over to open the car door for his elderly cousin.

  It was only after Lena had settled Cliona from Yamacraw in the front passenger’s seat that she remembered why people said Cliona was a hard person to take leave of.

  “Okay, now, Lena, baby, bye, now, sugar. See you later, sugar pie. Bye, now, baby. See you later, Lena, baby. Ha! See you later, tell you straighter, you know that one, Lena? Huh, Lena? Baby, you know that one? Well, I guess we going now, see you later, now, Lena, baby, sugar dumpling pie. Bye, baby. Bye, Lena. Bye, sugar. Bye, baby. Bye, Lena. Bye.”

  Lena could hear her all the way down the road throwing adieus out the window as they drove off. She stood under the two-hundred-year-old pecan trees by the side of the driveway and chuckled at the goodbyes in the night. Then she wearily headed for her house.

  9

  RITES

  I’m gonna have to get something nice for Miss Cliona, Lena thought as she locked up the back door and began unbuttoning the tiny pearl buttons down the back of her creamy sweater. The gesture of putting her hands down her back reminded her of the little incident in her car that morning, but she just closed her eyes briefly and shook her braids around her neck to clear her head of the memory and the questions. The tips of her braids slipped down her sweater and brushed across the tender spot on her back and sent a shiver down her spine.

  “Oh, quit!” she said in exasperation as she headed back down what she called “the Glass Hall.” Practically everything in Lena’s house had a name. Lena pretended she had forgotten all about the ghosts and such in her early life, but she had created reminders all over her house.

  When folks teased her about the practice, Lena just laughed her rich throaty chuckle and said, “I name it and I claim it.” And she’d throw her head over her left shoulder the way her father did and laugh again.

  That attitude was the reason she named the portentous overbearing overwhelming main room in her house “the Great Jonah Room” after her father. The sewing room was Grandmama’s. The big sunny kitchen was Nellie’s. Sometimes, she could hardly bear to go in there and warm up her food, it recalled such poignant memories of her mother. Her swimming pool was Rachel’s Waters. The stable and other outdoor buildings were named for her wild brothers, Raymond and Edward, because they had as boys loved so to rip and run and explore outside. And although he had died a teetotaler the year before she was born, Lena named the wine cellar after Granddaddy Walter.

  All named for dead people and ghosts. Her family and loved ones were only alive in names of rooms and swimming pools and barns on her property.

  She came back into the Great Jonah Room and went right to where she and Cliona had sat. Lena agreed with her mother’s assessment of Cliona from Yamacraw’s general sanity. But she picked up the bottle of river water in the Listerine mouthwash bottle, opened the black plastic cap and poured a few drops into the cup of her hand. Then, she held her head back, dipping her braids to the middle of her back, and splashed the cool clear water on her forehead like a rite of baptism.

  Her head
had stopped hurting, but talking with Mr. Jackson and Cliona from Yamacraw for the previous three hours had blown her pleasant woozy high from the shot in the hospital. Lena found her purse on the floor by the sofa and, with some ginger ale she poured over ice at the rolltop desk she used as a bar, took two of the yellow and orange capsules the young doctor at the hospital had given her in case she had any pain or trouble sleeping.

  As she continued undressing, she sighed heavily, happy to be home. She kicked off her mules under the low table sculptured from a huge slab of live oak tree trunk in front of one of the aqua leather sofas. Her feet still ached a bit even out of her high-heeled shoes. Some nights, when she took her shoes off, she felt like Pearl Bailey and wanted to exclaim, “Lord, these mules of mine are killing me! My feet! My feet!”

  Dropping her sweater on the back of a high-back cane rocker, she walked to the oversized French doors overlooking the deck, her yard beyond and the river beyond that and threw them open. Many nights she slept with the alarm system off so she could leave the French doors on that side of the house open and feel the night air and the breeze from the river.

  The railings around the edges of the sprawling winding cypress deck that wrapped around the house and a huge nearby oak tree were a mass of tiny white flowers and dark shiny cupped leaves that exuded a heavy exotically sweet smell all the way over to where Lena stood inside the door. The scent of the jasmine drew her to the door and outside.

  She was surprised at the changes out there. It seemed that in the week since Sister had come through on her way to a year’s sabbatical in Sierra Leone and they had been out on the deck, vines and trees and plants on her property had exploded with color, scent and life. Azalea bushes that were mere shrubbery the week before were now mountains of white and pink and red blossoms. The weeping willows and weeping mulberry trees had been mere reeds blowing in the March wind. Now they were all—fifteen of them along the riverbanks—shimmering with the verdant haze of new growth.

  Among the willows and mulberry and the azaleas and tangles of wisteria, a powwow of lightning bugs seemed to be assembling. Lena didn’t know when she had seen so many among her woods.

  “It’s so early in the year, not even early summer, for them to be around,” she said as she stood there watching the fairy show the insects were putting on in the woods.

  She had to chuckle as her gaze landed on the remnants of the ceremony she and Sister had performed out on the deck—”It’s best if it takes place outside,” Sister had said—in the light of the new moon.

  “Lena, you are a little foolish fool,” she said to herself gently.

  It had been a ceremony to summon up a man for Lena, a wonderful man, a sexy man, a wise man, a generous-spirited man, a smart man, a funny man, a loyal man, her man.

  All week, she had felt a little silly telling James Petersen not to disturb the site, but Sister had warned her not to move any of the elements of the ceremony (“Even if it rains”) or the rites would be void or the results turned inside out. James had silently shook his head, chuckled and said, “Okay.”

  The half-burned candles; the silver and black snakeskin that was a twenty-five-year-old gift from her brother Edward, who was obsessed with reptiles; the vial of salt; the pictures of saints; the water from Florida. All the elements were still there.

  They had both been a bit tipsy from the home brew Sister had smuggled in from her last trip to Guadeloupe. “Girl, as long as I have a piece of your hair or one of your fingernail clippings and your picture with me in the bag,” she would tell Lena all the time after some trip in which she had safely and easily brought back contraband, “I can get anything I want through any customs in the world. They just wave me on through.”

  She had warned Lena, “This stuff is strong, yeah. This stuff don’t play,” when she set the tall recycled rum bottle on the deep long picnic table that had once sat in Lena’s family’s breakfast room. But they poured themselves a couple of fingers of the smooth strong brew into two crystal goblets. And while they stood and sampled from the pots of delicious food on the stove, they kept sipping.

  “Shoot, Lena, I remember the kind of stuff you used to do down home at school and the dreams and night visions you told me about before we went to see Aunt Delphie in Vieux Carré,” Sister had said as she drew bottles rolled in brown paper with red twine twisted around them from a croaker sack in her carry-on bag she had placed on the breakfast room table. Then she brought out different-colored candles—white for peace, pink for love, red for winning. “And I know the rituals and stuff. So I don’t see any reason why the two of us together can’t call up just about anything we want.”

  Thinking back on that strange night, Lena muttered to herself, “And we were just high and tipsy and silly enough to think we could do it, too.”

  They had even smoked a couple of joints Sister had been reckless enough to bring back from Jamaica or some island the month before.

  As they moved around Lena’s house and deck, giggling and bumping into each other and giggling some more, Lena heard Sister muttering and chanting all kinds of things in preparation for the ritual.

  “Shoot,” Sister said under her breath, “I just can’t go out the country and leave my girl with nobody to watch over and protect her. Lord, I hope this does some good. Oshun, Our Mother, help us.”

  Even as tipsy as they both were, Lena knew that the ritual she recalled hadn’t been completely authentic, couldn’t have been. Halfway through the ceremony, Sister admitted she had forgotten the exact words to say and could not read her own writing, so she winged it. Lena remembered seeing her hesitate over whether to light the pink candle or the white candle first.

  Then, she sucked her teeth and pulled a crystal vial from her bag. She uncorked the top and stuck her index finger in.

  “Stick out your tongue,” Sister had instructed Lena, and placed a dab of salt on the tip. She dipped the same finger in the small crystal box and placed a dot of the salt on her own tongue and swallowed.

  “That’s so we speak the truth in what we ask for and in what we truly want,” she explained as she recorked the vial and placed it on the altar they had constructed there on the deck.

  “You know, Lena, you need some more lights leading to your altars outside. With all these trees growing like something in a myth, it seems to be getting darker and darker out here.”

  Then Sister struck a big wooden kitchen match from the matchbox Lena handed her and lit another pink candle.

  “I don’t know why we never did this before,” Lena said as she walked around the large guest room on the west side of her house where Sister was staying. The furniture in the room was Nellie’s original angular blond guest-bedroom furniture that was all the vogue in the fifties. It had been in the attic on Forest Avenue for two decades when Nellie had given it to Lena for her guest room. And now it was back in style.

  Sister had just chuckled when she saw Lena’s room in its original state. “Miss Nellie was nothing if not current.” She remembered the stylish woman she had first seen standing on the railroad station platform in Mulberry at Easter break her freshman year at Xavier. Lena’s mother had looked fresh from the streets of New York or Paris in her cool, stylish, sleeveless seersucker dress in green and white puckered stripes and her high-heeled leather mules and a straw bag. Sister had always wanted a mother like Nellie. Her own mother, a stolid Louisiana bayou woman with all kinds of people in her background, was more a country woman, good, loving, true. But not a modern, slim, beautiful woman who was comfortable on the streets of the city. Sister’s mother didn’t even like to come to New Orleans, practically a stone’s throw across the river from her country home, because its pace was too fast, its sights too varied.

  Even now, with Nellie dead and her own mother still living three doors down from her to be a doting, comfortable grandmother to her own three boys, Sister felt a twinge of guilt over her secret wish to have a mother like Lena’s.

  But then, Sister had a number of secret wishe
s.

  “Shoot, Lena, even though I really want to call you up a man, I have to keep myself from being so jealous of my students and single folks and you sometimes when I think you can go out and date …”

  “Date?” Lena asked slyly.

  “Or whatever it is you young single people call it now,” Sister answered with a smile. “Whoever you want. It’s not that I want anyone else. Douglas is a good man and God knows we’ve been through things together, weathered so much. But sometimes I would gladly give over my eldest child just to be able to smell another man.

  “Sometimes I catch a ride with one of my single students just so I can sit in his car a few minutes and smell his smell, a new one, a different one, one that I don’t know inside and out. Shoot, I can tell you right now what Douglas smell like at any given time. Ask me!!”

  “Well,” Lena said, “I have smelled my share and I guess yours, too, and knowing, being able to recall one man’s scent sounds pretty good to me.”

  Lena had dated and smelled her share of men. But it never went anywhere. For her, it was difficult getting past the first-time attempt at lovemaking.

  As long as the relationship remained this side of intimacy, everything was fine. Lena would sense a stray thought sometimes or an embarrassing moment, but rarely would she feel some man’s ugly secret until they were nearly in the throes of passion. It was only when they touched each other intimately or kissed deeply that the man’s thoughts and past came seeping out for Lena to hear and see right there as he inched his hand up the darker skin of her inner thigh. She would steel her hand right on the buckle of his pants or the flap of his zipper, trying to forge on, to concentrate on the act.

  It got to the point that before each date or setup Lena had she would first pray, “Dear Lord, don’t let me see so early.” But it was always the same. She would see early enough to stop herself from being able to have a fulfilling sexual encounter.