Tina Mcelroy Ansa

by The Hand I Fan With

  She had grabbed up her clothes and purse and shoes so many times and rushed for the nearest exit while her date lay on the sofa or the floor or the bed of his place and wonder what the hell just happened. The same scene had happened so often in her twenties and even into her thirties that she had just finally given up on getting past some kissing and fondling and stroking. It was finally too frustrating for her.

  When a man told her, “Well, Lena, I don’t know what I did wrong, but give me another chance,” she wanted to yell at him, “Go! You got diamonds in your back. You look better going than coming to me!” the way Frank Petersen had said under his breath when Lena’s grandmama had flounced out of the house on Forest Avenue when Lena was little because Grandmama claimed she could smell “that stinking wino’s nasty cigarette smoke.”

  Even Frank Petersen finally had stopped making fun of Lena’s gentlemen callers because he came to fear that he was somehow impeding her progress as wife and mother.

  “Good God from Gulfport, Lena, that Negro sho’ got a big head. If his head was a hog’s head, I’d work a whole year for it!” Frank Petersen would say as he came into the house after passing one of Lena’s friends on the way out. But a few years before he died, he started keeping his opinions and critiques to himself. Then he progressed to, “Well, Lena, that one wasn’t so bad, was he?”

  If Frank Petersen hadn’t died of liver failure when he did, Lena was sure he would have eventually started placing ads in the personals for her:

  “Rich, good-looking, healthy woman looking for a man!”

  If Sister’s ceremony to conjure her up a man worked, she wouldn’t need an ad.

  “When was the last time we did this?” Sister asked as she proudly unwrapped a dried two-prong root and propped it up against the red plaid cloth it had come in.

  “Not since college,” Lena answered. And then spying the root. “Ooo, Adam and Eve root?”

  “Uh-huh,” Sister said casually. “I even got an Adam and Eve and the Children root at home. But I figured we’d just work on you and him for now.”

  “You sound so sure of yourself, Sister,” Lena said.

  “Well, girlfriend, I feel that way. I brought all this medicine with me, and I haven’t talked to you about anything like this having to do with you in twenty years. And here you are agreeing to do the ceremony. It feels right.

  “All you need is to just have your cat scratched,” her friend continued. She said it matter-of-factly, not as a joke or anything light-hearted, just as one solution to the problem. Lena noted it was the solution of a woman who had been married to the same virile man for twenty-something years.

  But Lena took her friend’s comment seriously anyway.

  She watched Sister continue to take items out of her croaker sack. They were things that Sister had from a ceremony she had attended at the International Yoruba Festival the year before in Cuba. Sister was so pleased she had had the presence of mind while there to go to some highly recommended botanicals to purchase herbs and roots and seeds for ritual and for planting. It felt good helping Lena. Sister knew how many folks Lena helped, herself included.

  On Lena’s land, the gardener had planted a number of herbs—skullcap and tilo and valerian. Other than the mild teas Lena sometimes prepared for her older friends who had problems with their nerves or slices of valerian root she dried for them to place in their pillows, she used most of the plants in flower arrangements.

  “Umm,” Sister had said, picking up her ancient-looking canvas bag and searching through it again. “I thought I had a picture of Mary Magdalene in here. She’d help us with the love thing. You do want love, too, don’t you?” Sister asked Lena as if she were her hairdresser asking if she wanted her ends clipped with that shampoo.

  Lena had chuckled a little grunt and said, “Sure.”

  “Yeah,” Sister agreed, going back to her bag one more time to look for the saint’s picture, “that’s what you really need, yeah?”

  “Uh-huh,” Lena said vaguely. She was trying to remember where she had recently seen a picture of Mary Magdalene in her house. But after the rum and a couple of tokes on the joint Sister had rolled, Lena was having difficulty recalling anything.

  “Bring a Bible while you in there, Lena,” Sister had called.

  “Okay. You need any more candles?” Lena had replied.

  “Nope, we got enough,” Sister had called back.

  Lena walked unsteadily back inside to the wall of recessed bookcases in the great room and pulled down a volume, then she paused a moment at the rows of candles—votive, tapers, tall fat scented ones—she kept on the table and sideboard and in the rolltop desk and all around her house that she was always too tired to light at night.

  Seeing the candles again now as she walked back into the house through the white French doors of the pool room and continued undressing, she wondered what she could have been thinking, lighting candles and praying out on the deck with Sister.

  She and Sister had completed the ceremony that night a week before, but much of the rest of the evening was a blur.

  “Calling me up a man, indeed!” she said aloud, and sucked her teeth.

  Her temples still throbbed, and she knew a swim would help to clear her head.

  Wiggling out of her short champagne silk slip and tap panties and popping open her satin bra, she headed for the deep end of the pool. She had left the doors to the deck open and was surprised that the scent of the jasmine permeated all the way to the far wall, where it even overwhelmed the fresh clean smell of eucalyptus oil coming from the cedar-lined sauna. Dropping the underwear on a long white and blue linen chaise longue, Lena stood naked in her beautiful sprawling house next to Rachel’s Waters and listened to the silence of her life.

  10

  MAGIC

  Lena didn’t like for it to be too quiet out at her house. When it got too quiet, especially in the pool room, she heard things.

  Quite often, while she was swimming, what she heard were voices. If she didn’t have her music blaring all over the house as she swam her laps alone late at night or very early in the morning, she often could hear the muted sounds of conversation. Most times she could just make out the sounds and the rhythms of dialogue, but not the exact words. Sometimes she could hear what sounded like crowds of people conversing, shouting, arguing, murmuring. Other times she could distinguish only two voices speaking, clearly conversing with one another. Sometimes there was even laughter.

  The sounds unnerved her yet helped her fight loneliness in the big house by herself.

  She preferred swimming at night, with all the aqua lights in the pool extinguished and the water temperature on the cool side. Then, with the glass ceiling overhead and the tall cathedral windows looking out on the forest and river, Lena felt as if she were truly swimming outside under the stars, but in comfort and safety.

  Lena did not think that much about her personal safety. She did not seem to have to. She tried not to do anything truly foolish like make her own night deposits or carry a lot of cash or credit cards around with her or carry a gun the way her father had. And she let it be known that she didn’t.

  Folks would just suck their teeth at her in real frustration when she didn’t ever have more than three or four dollars in her fine leather purse to purchase a case of Girl Scout cookies from somebody’s cute little industrious granddaughter who had set up her sales operation at a busy bus stop at the end of the day.

  “Got all the money in the world and ain’t even got twenty dollars in her pocketbook!” even children would say under their breath. “Grandmama say she ought to have enough money on her to choke a horse!”

  They would whisper. But Lena could always hear them. And she just laughed.

  She usually didn’t need any money inside the Mulberry city limits. Lena had accounts all over town, just like her daddy. She had heard him use his accounts all her life.

  “Yeah, man, put that on my account.”

  “Just put that aside for me. I’l
l pay for it later.”

  “Woman, I ain’t got no money on me. Just put it on my account.”

  If anyone demurred, Lena remembered, her father would reply, really puzzled, astonished.

  “Well, then open me up one. Open me up an account! God knows I’m good for it.”

  Jonah prided himself on having accounts with everybody: merchants, friends, customers, clients, poker buddies, debtors. Long after the time when any business establishment other than a bar would let customers keep a running tab, Jonah had them running all over town.

  He enjoyed the idea that his word was worth money all on its own. Lena had inherited the practice from her father the same way she had inherited The Place, not only by legal means but also by proclamation.

  “Who else they gon’ leave The Place to except Lena?” Gloria had told the staff there. One or two of them tried to pull the loyal manager into gossip about Lena and her holdings.

  “Shoot, she ain’t just the only surviving heir. She the best businesswoman or businessman in this town. I know lots a’ folks who wish they could leave their family businesses in Lena McPherson’s hands,” Gloria said, ending the loose talk. “Shit, she the hand all us fan with! She deserve everything she got!”

  And Lena did have a lot.

  At the end of each day, when James Petersen finished his housekeeping duties at Lena’s house and headed down the road to his own, he went through his checklist before leaving.

  Outside lights on

  Bedroom, kitchen lights on

  Jacuzzi temperature set at 108F

  Pool temperature set at 70F

  Food in refrigerator, microwavable dishes on counter

  Music playing

  Alarm system charged and on

  So everything was all set for Lena when she had walked in.

  She hardly got any exercise anymore. She just didn’t have time anymore for the things she loved to do. She rarely had time to put on her tight brown riding pants with the suede inseam and her shiny chocolate riding boots and head off on Baby or Goldie through the bridle paths that wove over her property. She stopped once in a while on her way in or out to give Mr. Renfroe or one of his assistants a hand in the garden. Then, she would look at her watch and have to move on.

  Swimming twenty laps every other night or so was the only physical activity she clung to in the midst of her buying and selling and renting and investing and making money and doing for others.

  Some nights when she couldn’t sleep, she’d get up, feeling alone and lonely, and swim until she was worn out, then try again to go to sleep. She was a good strong swimmer. She had learned at college. Pulling her thick long bushy hair back in a fat, barely controlled ponytail for an entire school year, she had become one of the strongest swimmers in her P.E. class. She had wanted to learn to swim ever since seeing Rachel, the kindly ghost of a slave on the Georgia beach who had chosen drowning over bondage. She prayed for the repose of Rachel’s soul along with her parents’ and brothers’ every night. But Lena did not think of Rachel’s act as a damning one of despair. Rather one of belief.

  As a girl, Lena could not learn to swim at home. The idea of Lena getting her thick, nappy, barely controllable hair wet every day of the summer at the public pool for black folks had been beyond the comprehension of her family and the endurance of her mother, who had the actual combing job. So Lena just bided her time and waited until she was away from Nellie and home. She had learned to swim, named her pool in honor of Rachel, and some nights, felt it had been her salvation.

  This night she dove into the water at the deep end of the Olympic-sized pool without making a splash. Splitting the dark water with her scythe of a body felt almost as good as the cool river water of Cleer Flo’ she had just splashed on her forehead. But as soon as she cut through the surface, she let out a cry that sent a stream of bubbles floating to the surface from her mouth. She dove into the pool expecting the usual brisk cool water but instead the water was warm, soothing, not steamy, but hotter than body temperature. The warm water was a surprise, but a pleasant one: comforting and inviting like the waters of a womb. Lena barely kept the pool heated. She liked the stimulation of swimming in the cool water, then stepping over into the heated bubbling waters of the Jacuzzi.

  It took a while for Lena to collect her wits about her in the unusually warm water.

  “I can’t believe James Petersen didn’t check the water before he left,” Lena said out loud to the empty room. “I guess the thermostat is broken. Come to think of it, he didn’t leave any music playing, either.”

  She could hear the faint cooing of the mourning doves that often roosted in the eaves of the glass roof. It called attention to the room’s silence. She swam along the edge of the pool until she came to a small table jutting out over the water. There were two lounge chairs set up nearby. One thick fluffy white terry towel was thrown over the back of one chair and another towel was folded at the end of the table. A blue-and-white-striped terry-cloth robe was draped across the arm of the other chair.

  Lena dried her hands and picked up the remote control on the table extending over the pool. In the lonely tired state she was in, she knew what she wanted to hear. She didn’t hesitate but pressed the remote control for the compact disc turntable in the wall of the pool room and then hit the advance button.

  Carla Thomas began singing she was so lonesome she could cry. And Lena sang along with her. But then Carla moved on to sing about a diamond ring, and Lena lost interest. Marriage was not her desire, love was.

  Lena swam twenty-five laps in the warm water, then floated on the surface of the water, looking up at the moon and stars through the glass ceiling.

  Um, she thought, looking at the clear view she had of the stars in the heavens, I need to buy me a telescope.

  The exercise had worked her body and left her feeling good and tired. She always tried to find time for her swim, but even with her own pool in her own house, she often couldn’t fit it into her hectic schedule. Lena so often felt that putting her foot out of bed in the morning was the first and last conscious decision she made every day. After that act, caught up in her duties, she felt as if she were being carried like a leaf on the surface of the rushing Ocawatchee River.

  Sighing, she lay back against the side of the pool and listened to the music.

  After a while, Lena began to sing in sync with Dinah Washington:

  “And if it’s not asking too much

  Please, send me someone to love.”

  “God, I wish I had somebody,” she said out loud to the empty pool room. Her words, spoken softly, echoed in the cavernous room.

  It was only lately that she had begun to believe that she had made a major mistake by not gritting her teeth, ignoring the pictures in her mind and getting pregnant by one of the best of the lot of men she had been attracted to over the years. She didn’t know where the years had gone.

  How could she be forty-five, she thought, and not have accumulated more in the way of family—real family—blood family? No mother, no father, no brothers, no sisters, no babies. Lena was so tired of loneliness.

  She felt like a statistic, Category: African American woman, fortyish without a man, a child or hope. She knew that somewhere there was a printed form that offered that choice with a neat box next to it to check off.

  She was so deeply lonely, she thought again, this time more than a prayer, more than a plaint, it was a surrender.

  “God, I wish I had somebody,” she said again.

  Suddenly, she felt something brush against her thigh. It felt like a large fish swimming around her legs.

  She had never truly felt anything like this in her pool before.

  Lena had all kinds of inflatable animals and toys floating in her pool for company that brushed up against her all the time as she swam. Some were the size of a bed pillow. Others were almost as big as she. She was used to the feel of plastic or vinyl things touching her thighs as she cut through the water or as she floated on the usually cool s
urface.

  She had, in fact, sensed another presence in the pool with her on a number of occasions. It had not happened often, but she remembered each instance as if it were a family reunion. A few times she was sure her grandmother was swimming past her in the cool water, brushing past her favorite granddaughter, leaving her spirit in the wake she made. At those few times, Lena was overwhelmed by the sense of peace she felt throughout the water.

  Then, one time, she just knew that it was her father Jonah, an excellent swimmer, who was swimming in the waters of her pool with her. She never sensed her mother or brothers as she swam there. Nellie had always feared water. She never went wading in any pool or ocean or river or stream. When Lena as a child fell into the creek behind their house, her mother had screamed of having to “rescue my child” from the tiny rivulets of the gentle stream. She raged if anyone turned the hose on her.

  “You little foolish fools,” she’d scream in her special “I’m completely sick of you children” voice as she covered her head and ran for cover.

  Lena didn’t think the spirits of her brothers—strong swimmers, too—had ever shown up in the waters of her pool. She figured their ghosts would probably be swimming around at their favorite swimming hole, Pate’s Rock, in the woods behind her childhood home.

  So, this time, she stopped, took a breath and controlled her urge to jump out of the pool in one leap. But she swam rapidly over to the light controls at the edge of the pool and turned on the switch that flooded the aqua bottom of the pool with light.

  Lena looked around her nude body in the blue water searching for what she had felt brushing against her legs. But all she saw were some familiar toys floating on the surface. And the spot that had been touched on her body was still tingling.

  “Good God,” Lena said aloud. This encounter in the pool, she knew instinctively, was different. This thing that had brushed against her leg had the feel of life, of skin, almost of blood coursing through veins. Almost.