Tina Mcelroy Ansa (3 page)

She looked in the rearview mirror and saw that her big brown eyes were even wider than usual staring back at her. She truly looked like the “old pop-eyed fool” that her younger brother, Edward, had always claimed she was. Lena didn’t wear much makeup, just a good rich moisturizer, some color on her cheeks, and some dark brown liner above the lashes on her bottom eyelids. Other than her favorite copper or wine-colored lipsticks, that was all she had ever used unless it was a formal occasion. But now it seemed all the color, including the earthy red highlights she had applied that morning along her cheekbones, had been drained from her face.

“Good God, I need some of that heavy full-stage makeup that Yvette used to wear,” Lena said, speaking of the muscular transvestite from her childhood who frequented her father’s bar. As she examined her face in the mirror, she brushed her thick eyebrows up with her fingers, dabbing her brow and slender throat with a white Kleenex from the hidden compartment next to the driver’s seat. The cleft at the base of her throat was glistening with sweat, like the pearls of her necklace.

She kicked off her new beige and white gingham linen mules and curled and uncurled her toes inside her fresh pair of gartered stockings and that made her feel a bit better after a while. She had gone barefoot a great deal as a child. Taking off her shoes always made her feel better.

She looked at herself in the mirror again and blinked because for a second she thought she was seeing double. When she opened her eyes and looked again she saw only one image in the mirror. She could have sworn she saw another face, wide, open, almost familiar and
unthreatening, beside hers in the reflection. But no matter how friendly it appeared, it still was an image that had no business next to hers in the mirror.

Right then she willed herself to look away, to breathe a little more comfortably and to forget the extra face in the mirror. She knew of bright ambitious black women in their thirties who had died slumped across their desks, their terminals or personal computer keyboards, dead of heart attacks, from work and stress. Her two brothers, Raymond and Edward, the only brothers she had in the world, had died before their fortieth birthdays of heart attacks.

At forty-five, Lena did not want to become a statistic or the main character of a cautionary tale told at professional meetings and family reunions:

“Uh-huh, she just worked and worried herself to death!”

“I just need to slow down here, that’s all,” Lena reassured herself out loud to steady her nerves. “I just need to slow down.”

She blew one more time and reached over to pick up her thin, long, quilted Bottega purse from where it had tumbled onto the floor next to the cellular car phone, carefully avoiding her own gaze in the mirror. The small gold snap had opened and spilled her sterling-silver lipstick case, one of her mother’s ribbed Cartier fountain pens and her tiny cassette recorder. She retrieved everything and opened the silver tube of lipstick. Lena tried to outline her full lips without a mirror, but her hand still quivered a bit, so she stopped.

Don’t want to end up looking like a clown, she said to herself with a dry laugh as she leaned forward bravely toward the mirror.

An approaching car honked a friendly greeting to her and although she couldn’t begin to figure out who it was, she honked back to let him or her know she was okay.

“Lord knows, I don’t feel like dealing with a bunch of people stopping by the side of the road to worry about me,” she said aloud.

But the contact with another living person—even just the honk of a horn—did help to ground her. She took a deep breath, and looking around, noticed that she was near the home of a little girl who
was her classmate in grammar school Or rather, she was near the site where the house once stood. The Big Flood of ’94 that had swept through the center of the state and swelled the Ocawatchee River over its bank the previous spring had washed away the frail-looking house.

Lena had heard Mrs. Hartwick, the first-grade teacher who took over when Sister Ann suddenly disappeared from the school, call the child “Little Lost World” under her breath one day. And the image had stuck with Lena.

The memory of Little Lost World, the little golden-brown girl with the sad face and the nearly sandy hair, made Lena feel the burden of sadness in that child’s face. Lena promptly blessed the child and her long-gone home.

“Poor Little Lost World’s house, I hope she made it,” Lena sighed.

Lena could not remember when she had first started blessing people’s houses, imparting brief benediction or healing or praise or tears on the inhabitants—past and current—of each domicile. A stranger’s house got the same quick intense blessing that her grandmother’s best friend Miss Zimmie’s house got.

“That’s Gloria’s first husband’s mother’s house. Wonder if she’s still alive and doing well?”

“Randy’s wife’s new family got a nice deal on that three-bedroom ranch house. Hope they can keep up the payments.”

“Miss Roberta’s children certainly are keeping their mother’s house up nicely.”

“That little rickety house over there by the box factory sure looks cold, I hope the folks inside aren’t freezing.”

Most folks would have said, “Good God, what an exhausting thing to do, blessing this one, blessing that one.” But actually, it was just the opposite. Lena felt rejuvenated by the holy habit. As she sensed the blessing go out of her body, she felt the power of the blessing reenter it. If she started out from her house out by the river in a bad mood, sleepy, dispirited or weary, overcome by her duties, by the time she reached her destination, she was the Lena that everyone
knew, loved and counted on. She knew none of her people liked to see her with even a pensive look on her face.

“Lena, what you got to be all frowned up about?” they’d want to know. “Shoot, if I had
yo’
hand, I’d throw mine in!”

So the blessings turned out to be blessings for everyone. Lena was like that, had always been. The blessings just flowed out from her. She was a blessing to her family, to her friends, to Mulberry.

But for a number of years now, Lena had begun to feel an anger at her blessedness. Once when she was complaining to her best friend, Sister, about all the things she had to accomplish before the end of the year, Sister had said serenely, in that oracle-from-the-mount voice, “Oh, Lena, your only problem is you just have an abundance of blessings.”

It had made Lena mad as hell. She imagined Sister sitting there with her legs crossed, dressed in some ritualistic robe, dispensing what she thought was her very own bayou brand of wisdom.

Lena had to keep herself from going right through those telephone wires and confronting her dear friend full flush in her face with the strength of her anger. But as soon as she took a second or two to think about what Sister had said, she realized that maybe it was true. Maybe she did just have an abundance of blessings.

It was only later that night, as she lay alone naked in her bed, that she had begun to muse on her condition and get mad all over again.

Just walking through her house in the morning reminded her of how blessed she should feel, how blessed everyone told her she was, how much of a blessing she was to everyone. But lately, she found that she needed daily reminding that she was.

It was a shock to think that now—in her mid-forties—she questioned what she had been told and believed, what had given her her identity, her entire life: that as the baby of her family, she was a lucky little girl.

This morning, after the strange shiver down her back and her near brush with death, she felt guilty that she had almost forgotten Little Lost World and her little former house. So she blessed it again quickly,
turned on the ignition with a roar, and pulling out into the deserted highway, whizzed on along the Ocawatchee River toward downtown, picking up speed as she went.

She touched a button on the dash, and the window silently dropped. With a more familiar breeze blowing on her face and through her braids, she realized how much better she felt. The blood no longer raging through her veins, throbbing in her temples; “You stupid fucking bitch” no longer ringing in her head, making her feel bad and unloved. After realizing that, she couldn’t stop herself from “blessing” everything she came across.

She cut through Pleasant Hill for a while, drove past her parents’ house—closed up, deserted and, the neighborhood children said, haunted—and her first housing project across the street, then pointed the low sleek nose of her Mercedes up Forest Avenue. Even at this early hour, it seemed that the few people out and about seemed to know Lena and her car.

If it had been a couple of hours later, children heading to school would have waved and hollered, “Hey, Miss McPherson! Hey, Lena! Hey, Lena! Hey, Miss Mac! Look, there’s Lena, hey, Lena!”

Those who had been warned to be respectful of adults yelled, “Hey, Miss Lena!” But they all knew her and screamed the same thing.

“Hey, Miss Lena, give us a ride in that car they only got one of! Yeah, give us a ride! Give us a ride.”

But Lena would just smile, wave and honk her horn two times to let them know she saw them. “Bless their hearts,” she’d say softly. She knew better than to stop and try to pile two or three of the children into her snug car because immediately twenty or thirty of their pals would magically appear for their rides, too. And Lena just didn’t have that kind of time.

The children had gotten their attraction to and love for Lena honestly. Their mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, play mamas and grandparents, felt the same way about her.

Even at this hour, early-rising folks like herself—bus drivers,
workers at the box factory, maids, grandmothers and people out scouting from bed to bed—coming out their front doors, sweeping off their front walks, getting in cars for work, opening up corner stores and beauty shops, hurrying to the corner bus stop, all called to her, too, as she passed through.

“Hey, Lena, give me a call.” “Hey, Miss McPherson, my cousin need a house.” “Hey, Lena, I need you to take care a’ that
thang
for me!”

She honked back at them, sending out blessings, and cut back to the highway by the river. As she relaxed a bit, feeling the real power of her blessings, she began handling the chic little car as if it were an extension of her own shapely body.

She thought briefly of swinging back toward the top of Pleasant Hill by jumping on a little-used leg of the expressway and going by St. Martin de Porres, her parish school and church, for early morning Mass and communion with some of the nuns and old-time Catholics. But she caught a glance at the digital clock on the dashboard and saw it was too early for 7:30 Mass.

“I guess the church and I are both blessed enough,” she said out loud. She shook her braids—trying to ignore the still-tingling feeling down her back and in her crotch—straightened her shoulders, and continued on downtown just as the sun was peeking over the town’s horizon.

B
y the time Lena backed her trim little car into the space marked
BLUE BIRD CAFE AND GRILL—OWNER
in the lot behind the corner of Broadway and Cherry, the sun was beginning to flood the cloudless sky with shafts of color, and she was finally breathing normally. She had just about convinced herself that nothing had really happened earlier that morning back on U.S. 90 along the river other than some careless driving.

“I just gotta watch myself,” Lena said softly as she swung her big shapely legs out of the car and stood straightening the narrow tan leather belt on the waistband of her short skirt. She settled the belt on her long waist just above her hipbones and adjusted her sweater on her gently sloping shoulders.

Standing next to her car, Lena looked like an unlikely survivor of what her family had called “the War of Destruction of Downtown Mulberry.” The phrase had been repeated so many times around her parents’ house and downtown at The Place that her father had established fifty years before that now Lena could almost see those words
written as clearly as if they had been printed in her junior high school history book.

The corner building that housed the family’s juke joint and liquor store looked like a lonely survivor itself. It was the only structure left standing in the entire square block.

At the intersection of Broadway and Cherry Street, the old downtown district Lena McPherson once knew looked as if it had taken a direct hit from a passing tornado. A few business establishments, including Lena’s bank and a government office building, still survived and functioned on the periphery of the old section. But few structures were left standing in the area that had once been the bustling center of Mulberry, Georgia, and the very heart of black folks’ community in the small town since its establishment two hundred years before.

One block over, the town’s original shopping district was just a square block of gutted pathetic-looking department, specialty and notions stores with boarded-up display windows and broken windows on the top floors.

The old Woolworth’s was probably the saddest sight for Lena. Some of the red in the original sign had been eaten away with time, pollution, rain, wind and an occasional hailstorm. But mostly, the paint had fallen away from neglect. The building that had housed what Lena thought was the most important store downtown was now just an empty rattrap with rough wooden floors. Where else could you purchase a bobbin for a Singer sewing machine, a pair of lace-trimmed white cotton anklets, one goldfish and a slice of homemade coconut layer cake all in the same spot?

But long before the store closed for good, Lena had watched the quality just go downhill through economic, cultural and societal shifts. During the 1960s when separate eating sections for white and black were outlawed, the store tore down the little counter with twelve stools in back, put in a new toy section in its place, and enlarged the white section with more booths and counter space.

The food in the integrated lunch bar never did taste as good as the turkey and dressing and the ham-salad club sandwiches and the four
layer chocolate cake and the special cake made with alternating tiers of yellow cake, lemon-cheese icing and fluffy egg white frosting—just like her mama made—served in the colored section. Even the potato chips didn’t seem as greasy and crunchy in the new black and white section. The eight and sixteen-ounce glasses stacked in simple pyramids at the end of the counter didn’t sparkle the same. The baked hen and corn bread dressing was never as moist. And the integrated counter’s coconut layer cake had a funny little undertaste.