Tina Mcelroy Ansa (47 page)

He could do the same thing at her hair.

Herman would take a fistful of her thick brown braids in his hand and inhale so deeply that Lena would think, He needs that scent to live, just like I need air.

“I need all of you to live, baby,” Herman said one time in response to her thoughts. And then he regretted it. He noticed that if he didn’t say anything to remind her, Lena forgot from time to time that he could read her mind. It was one of the few things that he did that made her angry.

“Damn, Herman, if your thoughts aren’t private and personal and protected, then what part of you is?”

Stung at the suggestion that he was in any way invading her life or her privacy, Herman told her, “Well, shoot, baby, you just there, hanging out fo’ the whole world to see. You ain’t got to be no spirit with special powers to invade
yo’
life. Look at all the folks in Mulberry. And you got the nerve to be mad wid me ’cause I don’t pretend not to know yo’ thoughts sometimes.”

Lena was stunned at his bluntness with her.

“Herman!” she said.

“Aw, Lena, baby, you don’t razz me!” he said, coming over to give her a kiss.

“You old-timey Negro! What that mean?” she asked, laughing in spite of her hurt feelings.

“Oh, yeah, I’m old-timey when you don’t know what ‘razz’ mean. But you expect
me
to know what yo’ matchbox is!!” Herman was in rare form, indeed. And his joke and kiss smoothed over her hurt feelings and their little rough patch like his hands smoothing over her hair.

Herman loved Lena’s hair. The hair on her body, the hair under her arms, the hair on her arms, the hair on her legs, the hair on her pussy and the hair on her head.

“Why you shave yo’ legs and up under yo’ arms?” Herman asked early on as she stepped out of the shower. “I don’t think I ever heard of a ’oman shavin’ her body atall.”

“You don’t like it?” Lena wanted to know as she raised both her arms in the bathroom mirror to get a better view of her armpits.

“Oh, it’s okay,” Herman said easily.

Lena vowed right then not to shave again, just as she decided to stop using deodorant because Herman liked to lick under her arms. But these were the least of the changes in her toilette.

With Herman, Lena did something she had never done in her life. She went two, three and sometimes four days without showering or bathing. At first, she was just too busy playing with Herman to keep up with her usual hour-long toilette. She tried to squeeze her toilette in sometime during their days or nights. Then, when she didn’t feel like making time for it, she just stopped trying.

Riding her horses with Herman, working in the garden, she would stop, bend her head down and sniff up under her raised arm. “Now, I know I ought to by rights smell a lot worse than I do. I ought to be smelling like a Montana mule, as Mama would say, ’round about now. But I don’t.”

Lena didn’t fool herself into thinking that she smelled like the fall-blooming jasmine twining with the wisteria around the sycamore tree. She didn’t smell that sweet. No one would confuse her scent with that of honeysuckle.

She smelled like earth. Like dirt. Like Herman. Like the rich black loam she brushed from under her nails each night. Like the dusty red roads out on her property when the rain showered down on their hard-packed surfaces and sent the scent of Georgia earth throughout the air.

She smelled like the earth the way Rachel, her ghost at the beach, had smelled like the ocean.

As the weather had warmed in the summer months, Lena and Herman had not bathed more than for their own entertainment. They almost hated to see cool weather come because in the steamy days of July, August and September, Lena and Herman regularly had washed each other’s hair outdoors with big buckets of Cleer Flo’ water from the streams that were now flowing copiously through her property. It was a ritual they reveled in.

They enjoyed hauling the water from the nearest stream, a good two hundred yards off from the stables.

“I even like totin’ this water wid you, Lena,” Herman told her with a wide proud smile one day as they hauled two buckets each, Lena’s smaller than Herman’s, from the stream to the barn. That’s where they liked to perform the hair-washing ritual.

It made them feel good.

Just messing in Herman’s great Samson-like mane made Lena feel good. Herman knew it.

“Hey, Lena,” he’d say to her, coming up to her seated at her desk with a big red bush comb and brush in one hand. He’d gently push her legs apart. “Scratch out my head some fo’ me, hear, baby?”

He would never wait for an answer. He knew what it would be. He’d fall to the floor at her feet and turn to settle his broad shoulders in the lacuna between her knees. He fell to the floor like a young boy. And Lena had to chuckle at how agile her “pig meat” was.

Lena would always smile when she’d feel the muscles of her inner thighs strain and ache sweetly at the pressure of him between her big legs. His first weeks in her home, in her bed, inside her, she couldn’t believe how sore her entire body was from making love regularly to a husky man. Not just the insides of her thighs, but muscles and sinew and sections of her whole body ached from rolling around with Herman on the decks off her house and over the river, on and off the padded throws onto the wet soil, rubbing against each other in a corner of the sauna until they were faint from the heat, lying with their heads between each other’s legs on her mama’s long shiny shellacked
breakfast table in the sunny corner or the kitchen overlooking the exercise grounds of the stable.

At first, the outside of her hips ached, the muscles under her behind ached, her pectoral muscles ached, the arches of her feet ached, the small of her back ached, her titties ached.

The women at Candace got sick of seeing that little wince, then that little smile on Lena’s face every time she moved. Once, Precious even heard Lena go, “Ooo,” when she stooped down to pick up the reading glasses she had dropped.

“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.

L
ena 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.