“Been working out, Miss Mac?” Precious asked, reaching out a fleshy arm to help Lena up.
Lena had just smiled a big old wide grin and said, “You could say that.” And Precious was sure for a moment that she heard lovely music playing over the office sound system.
In the still-warm days of autumn, when Lena had to go into town to check on a business transaction or to purchase something for Herman, she slipped on some of her beautiful soft underwear that smelled of the herbs and potpourri James Petersen strewed in her dresser drawers, put on one of her mother’s sleeveless linen shifts that just skimmed her body and threw a cardigan sweater around her shoulders against a sudden chill. The outfit looked right with the flats and sandals and low-heeled boots she only wore now.
Herman loved these dresses of Nellie’s from the summers of the sixties. “You look like you naked under those shifts,” he told her appreciatively, even though he knew full well what she had on underneath.
Most likely, he had picked out her lingerie.
Herman appreciated all of Lena’s clothes—underwear and outerwear. He appreciated the material, the feel, the workmanship, the stitching, the decoration of the clothes on Lena, but he especially enjoyed taking the items of clothing off her. He kept his nails short, clipped and clean with his buck knife just so he would not accidentally scratch or injure her. He favored unhooking, unfastening, unbuttoning, unzipping, unlacing, unscrewing, unsheathing. He loved unbuckling her hose from their garters and slowly rolling them down her thighs, over her knees to her ankles without one single snag.
He reveled in undoing the hooks of her satin bra, holding the ends together with one hand while he used the other to dip her breast out in one handful into his mouth.
Lena had clothes that gave Herman an erection when he saw them just lying on a chair or on the floor or hanging on a padded satin hanger in her long walk-in closet. She had a pair of thigh-high, glove-soft doeskin slate-colored boots that he said he didn’t even allow himself to touch when Lena wasn’t around.
Just weeks before she and Herman met, Lena had purchased a red and orange and teal-blue satin Chinese robe. The first time she wore the kimono, she had let the wrap slide off her naked shoulders, her arms, her back and down her hips in one fluid motion, landing in a vermilion pool at her bare feet. “Lena, baby, I can’t get that picture a’ you out my mind,” he told her.
When Lena did think to bathe or shower after that, she never did it alone. If she even thought about taking her clothes off to take a steamy shower or if she decided to take a real long soaking bath in a tub of hot soapy water, Herman would magically appear right there next to the tub.
Look at him standing there with that eager grin on his face, Lena would think as she checked out Herman leaning against the doorjamb of the bathroom waiting expectantly and unapologetically for the floor show to start.
“Herman, you aren’t even ashamed!” Lena would chide him regularly. “You act like you paid for that box seat and you ready for the ten P.M. show.”
He’d just throw his head back and laugh. Then, right before Lena’s eyes, Herman would become water, warm soapy water, and splash into the marble tub, raising the level of the water in the tub to near overflowing.
Once a part of the water, he submerged and enveloped Lena, swirling around every part of her body like a gentle whirlpool.
When Herman heard Lena moan, “Umm,” he heated up his molecules right there in the tub and reactivated the almond-paste bath emollient floating on the surface, suddenly filling the tub with bubbles.
Herman’s appreciation of Lena was so natural, so open, so guileless, that Lena never felt turned into an object by his watching and his presence. He watched because he liked to watch her. She liked it, too.
Any number of times during the day, Lena would stop and just laugh at how much she loved this smart, kind, extraordinary man. Throughout the day and night, she would say prayers of thanksgiving to God for Herman. It was amazing to Lena to note the blessings she gave thanks for now compared to months before. Then, it was thank you, Father, Mother, Yemaya, Oshun, for the roofs over people’s heads in Mulberry. Thank you for the last business deal. Thank you for the new flooring at The Place being done so quickly.
Now, it was thank you for the way Herman smells in the morning. She gave thanks that the collard greens that day tasted sweet. She thanked the universe for the rain that their gardens needed. She thanked her maker for the time to sit and read and for the blooming of the moonflower.
Lena was truly thankful for the way Herman smelled: the way The Place had smelled the morning she had danced through the renovated juke joint, like a man’s underarms, like the musk of activity, like the scent of outdoors.
Lena loved to lay her cheek on his thigh and bury her face in the thicket between his thighs. He had a pungent odor there that Lena never tired of smelling.
He faced each new day renewed, refreshed. Like a new man. You would have thought that he had gotten a full eight hours of shut-eye. But Herman had no need for sleep. He had so wanted to be with Lena, he had so wanted to be alive again just for Lena, that she would forget from time to time that he was a spirit, with no need for anything, it seemed, but her.
Herman said, “I’m glad I got a body, not just fo’ us, baby, but so I can feel thangs, appreciate thangs again.” He stopped to touch Lena’s stationery, her flowered hand-painted cards, her Japanese paper in cream and red, her mother’s collection of old fountain pens. “You forget how good life is.”
Lena loved to watch him move and touch things and stretch his new body.
In the days after he first appeared, his stretching was a part of his becoming real, becoming whole. As he threw his generous-sized head back and extended his palms toward the sky, arching his elegant back with his expansive chest thrust forward, his pants and shirt pulling at the seams, Lena could see and sense the muscle and sinew pulling and appearing, becoming stronger and leaner and more real with each “Ummm” Herman uttered.
“Feel good to stretch,” Herman would say.
When Lena dropped hints about her forty-sixth birthday coming up in a month, Herman couldn’t stop shaking his head in amazement.
“Lena, baby, you don’t look like no ’oman in her middle forties to me. Shoot, in my time, you’d be a grandmother many times over and ready fo’ yo’ grave. God, Lena, when my own mother was that age, she was a tired ’oman even though she had enjoyed her life in the settlement. Life was just harder then, especially for womens. And look at you with yo’ Victory Secrets underwear and yo’ fast car and all yo’ property …”
“Um, Herman, you almost sound like you resent I got the kind of life I got.” Lena was a little hurt by the tone in Herman’s voice and didn’t try too hard to hide it.
“Oh, no, baby,” Herman said seriously. “It’s just so amazin’t’ me that thangs coulda changed so much in less than a hundred years.”
Lena chuckled.
“I know you think that’s a eternity—a hundred years—but it ain’t hardly a tick on the clock or a cycle a’ the moon.
“In just a hundred years, a black ’oman like yo’se’f in her mid-forties is in her prime. And you damn sho’ in yo’ prime, baby. All in just the tick a’ the clock, Lena.”
Lena smiled looking at Herman because he, too, despite being into his second century, was also sure in his prime.
29
REAL
Lena thought Herman had a beautiful dick.
The first time she saw Herman’s semen on the tip of his penis, she was awestruck. She reached out and took a drop on her finger to examine it more closely. She brought it to her nose and smelled it, rubbing the silky liquid between her thumb and forefinger.
“Herman is real!” she said softly to herself in wonder. Not that Lena had actually doubted Herman’s existence there in Middle Georgia. He had been with her seven months and was now such a complete part of her life that there was no doubt in her mind that he was no dream.
Jus
t looking at the seed on his penis, Lena knew that Herman was no incubus. He was real and he was good.
Herman’s uncircumcised penis was a new one for Lena, who had never been a real dick woman anyway. She hadn’t seen that many, but she didn’t think she needed to have seen a lot to appreciate Herman’s penis in the same way she appreciated him.
Lena had as much interest in tongues and fingers and ears and minds as in penises, and all things considered, she had seen her share.
But next to Herman, all those men she knew before—the passionless ones with cushy jobs, the ones who were wastes of time with good bodies, the ones who continued to look at a football game while you talked—seemed lifeless, dead, empty as an ancient robbed tomb. Herman was boyish without being puerile, fun-loving without being silly, manly without being overbearing, foolish without being a fool.
Herman prided himself on seldom having to rely on his ghostly power to impress, please or take care of Lena. Even as an ordinary man, Lena knew he wasn’t any ordinary man.
He didn’t seem to have time for what she and Sister called “man-shit, one word.” The name encompassed all the strange, foreign, foolish, unrealistic, annoying, spirit-crushing things men, all men, did naturally, it seemed, without a thought. Things that regularly drove women crazy. “Man-shit” included everything from leaving the toilet seat up to not stopping to ask for directions.
“Lena, baby, I got a powerful pocketful a’ tenderness stored up in me from the last hundred years,” he told her. He showed it to her every chance he got.
Then, he punctuated his statement with a deep, long, lush kiss.
When Herman kissed Lena, deeply, tenderly, gently, insistently, urgently, she often thought of Moms Mabley and the comedy routine of the hysterically funny toothless genius Lena had heard as a child.
“And that man kissed me!” Moms had explained about an amorous encounter with a prized younger man. “My toes curled up just like that!!”
That’s what Herman’s kisses did for Lena.
They made her toes curl up just like that.
And although he was technically nearly a hundred years older than she, Lena realized when he sprinted out to the shed and back before she could finish peeing, when he grabbed a bale of hay with the huge iron tongs and slung it on his back, when he sat in a chair sometimes with one of his legs thrown over the arm like a teenager, that Herman was indeed her younger man, her pig meat.
“Look at that old lightbulb,” Lena’s mother would say about some aging Romeo, especially ones who had been lovers in their day, the ones who were really old. “Old men when I was a child still out there trying to be sweethearting like they certifiable pig meat—young and tender,” she’d say. Nellie called them “flambeaux.”
I wonder what Mama would call Herman, Lena thought with a smile. She said a quick prayer for the repose of Moms’ and her own mother’s souls whenever Herman kissed her like that.
Herman kissed like Tommy Davis, the first boy Lena knew who really could kiss. Lena remembered sitting in the parking lot of M’Lady Cleaners after the James Brown and the Famous Flames Show and Revue at the Mulberry County Auditorium. Tommy was all gangling arms and legs and pretty, smooth brown skin—just fifteen himself then, like Lena. But Tommy had not kissed like a fifteen-year-old boy. He kissed, Lena thought, like a man. He kissed with passion.
Before Herman came and put his magic on her, Lena had a powerful amount of compassion. What she didn’t have was passion. Her wild, raging passion had been depleted by all her duties, her responsibilities, her gifts, her wealth, her business dealings, her property, her life.
She still had to struggle to keep Herman from becoming her god. Seeing him jealous made him more human, more real to Lena. One day in mid-October, she got her chance.
Herman eyed the young man coming up the driveway by the river in his old beat-up electric-blue truck for a good long time. Longer than he usually took to look at someone, Lena noticed.
“This boy, what he atta?” Herman wanted to know.
Lena, headed to the back door, stopped in her tracks and turned to look at her man. She laughed.
“Herman, he’s not after anything! He’s just someone’s son come to pick up some papers for their farm.”
Herman didn’t seem totally convinced. Lena had to smile.
“With so many people taking care of their own business now, folks need their papers. It’s hard to believe I had that many deeds and wills and stuff in the safe.”
Herman disappeared into the bedroom without another word, but Lena could tell he was not convinced.
She couldn’t believe she had to reassure Herman, her man, that she had no interest whatsoever in this other pig meat who was indeed trying to flirt with her. The young man—she thought he must have been about twenty-seven or twenty-eight—craned his head around her a couple of times as they stood in the Great Jonah Room to see if there was anyone else in the house before he spoke.
“So, eh, Miss McPherson, Lena. I can call you ‘Lena,’ can’t I?” the young man had asked, eyeing this woman who looked like the title character in Carmen Jones he had seen on cable the night before. He had sat through the credits just to learn that Dorothy Dandridge was the name of the beautiful actress.
One of Lena’s undershirt straps had even slid off her shoulder like one of those Carmen Jones blouses. And, the “boy” noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra. He could see the outline of her nipples under her shirt.
Lena went about her business quickly and professionally, but she saw him watching her and looking for an opening. She smiled at the flirting, but she didn’t give him a chance.
When the young man left, frustrated at having made no headway with Lena, Herman appeared, really miffed, walking around the house with a heavier-than-usual footfall.
“You don’t see me being jealous of your otherworld friends, do you?” Lena said.
When she didn’t get a rise from him, she continued, digging deeper.
“You don’t see me being jealous of Anna Belle, do you?”
Lena suddenly shivered as if someone had just danced over her grave. She knew she had hit her target.
She had not really wanted to bring up the spirit of the woman who was out to get her, but she just had to ask. Herman had not mentioned Anna Belle in the month since Lena had found the dents in the door down at The Place.
Actually, now that Anna Belle’s name was out in the open, Lena felt better. There had not been one sign of Anna Belle in more than a month. Lena needed to know what had happened.
Herman was silent so long, Lena thought, Oh, shit, I done gone too far with this man. Why the hell did I have to mention that woman’s name?
However, when he turned to her, he didn’t look a bit bothered.
“I was wonderin’ if you was gonna mention her again,” he said.
Lena shrugged her shoulders, pretending to be unconcerned.
“Lena, baby, right after you saw those marks on the do’ downtown, I did just like I said. I took care a’ that thang. I wouldn’t no mo’ have you—of all people—walkin’ ’round here scared a’ some ’oman I done brought in yo’ life for nothin’ in the world, this one or the next.”
Lena knew he was serious.
“So I had me a talk wid Anna Belle.”
Lena sat there in the heavy silence waiting for Herman to continue. When he didn’t, she asked exactly what she wanted to know.
“You saw Anna Belle? You met with her?”
“I don’t know if you would call it a ’meetin’,’ ’xactly, Lena baby. I just went out in the yard and called her. The wind stirred up a bit in a familiar way, and I started talkin’.”
Lena leaned forward waiting for the details.
Herman chuckled at his woman and her curiosity.
“All I said was you was the only ’oman fo’ me, you the ’oman, now and fo’ever. And nothin’ was gon’ change that, ever.”
Lena just smiled. Then, she asked, “And that was it?”
�
��What somebody gon’ say to that?” Herman wanted to know, coming over to Lena to close the space between them. They kissed, dismissing Anna Belle and the “boy” who had been trying to flirt with Lena.
Before Herman came, Lena had gotten off on flirting. She did it with just about everybody. It was an inherited natural gift. Jonah, when he really put his mind to it, could charm the sweetness out of syrup. And Nellie could get anything she wanted by opening up her face and smiling. Lena could, too.
But Lena didn’t need that kind of fake passion anymore, flirting with a bag boy, a liquor salesman, a fellow passenger on a quick flight out of Mulberry.
Herman rekindled her passion, unstopped its rush and gave it a number of new directions in which to flow.
He did it with love. He did it with concern. He did it with wisdom. He did it with laughter. He did it with sex. And he did it with surprises.
Herman loved to surprise Lena.
He would walk up to Lena while she curried and cooed to Keba, who, halfway through her term, seemed to be getting big with her foal so quickly. Herman would have his hands behind him and say, “Baby, close yo’ eyes and stick out yo’ hand.”
Sometimes she’d squeal as she shimmied her shoulders, dropped the currying brush and pulled off her short leather work gloves and, with her eyes shut tightly, offered her palms to Herman.
There was no telling what he’d drop in her hands. A juicy piece of fruit, a small wiggling salamander that immediately turned the color of her palms, a velvety Mirandy rose that he had stripped clean of thorns with his new buck knife.
Herman was thrilled with himself for being able to surprise Lena—”Surprising a child like you, born wid a veil and all,” Herman would say, pretending to be incredulous. But actually, he was proud that Lena wasn’t surprised by nearly as much as she had six months earlier when she truly did not have a clue.
Now, when he came up behind her suddenly, she knew he was there. He had seen her do the same thing lately with people who came by for a rare visit to her house.
Tina Mcelroy Ansa Page 37