Tina Mcelroy Ansa (11 page)

But what really lifted her heart was the sight of a little dark brown girl with braids and beads in her hair playing under the huge mansion of the chinaberry tree next to her new house in Lena’s project. The little girl, Teesha, was in college in Atlanta now, but she was still one of the children Lena thought about when she honked her horn each time she drove by the houses.

As the motorcade of Mr. Jackson’s truck and her little car following passed a low open field of sprouting Indian paintbrush and rud-beckia, she was gladdened again to be nearing her own home. The contractor’s man stayed outside with her car, but Mr. Jackson insisted on escorting her in.

The last thing Mr. Jackson said as he reluctantly rose from his comfortable seat in the Georgia pine-walled Great Jonah Room was, “Now, you promise to lie down and call down to the gatehouse or call me if you don’t feel so good. Now, you promise?”

Lena nodded her head solemnly with as sincere a look as she could fake on her face.

“I
am
a little tired, Mr. Jackson. I think I’ll just wait ’til tomorrow to handle anything. I’m just going to stretch out and go to sleep. The doctor gave me some medication. I’ll take it and go to sleep.”

“Okay,” Mr. Jackson agreed as he headed down the hall next to the wall of bricks of colored glass she had salvaged from one of the nightclubs her father had secretly owned in the fifties and eventually torn down for the property. Lena could tell the contractor was slowing down and reconsidering his exit when he reached the end of the hall. But she patted him on his broad back and ushered him on out the side door leading to the side driveway and walked him to his truck.

Lena remembered to say, “You’ll have to bring your grandson out to ride again sometime soon,” as Mr. Jackson and his man pulled away around the stables and on out the road back to Mulberry.

Lena almost wiped her forehead and went, “Whew!” as she watched Mr. Jackson’s truck’s rear lights disappear down the dirt
driveway that was more like a rutted country road with tufts of grass growing merrily down the center. The night was cool but not chilly; and the full moon flooded the land with golden-orange light right down to the river.

Lena was exhausted, but she could not resist walking along the fence by the road a bit where wild honeysuckle and Carolina jasmine tumbled along the fence posts. The evening breeze blew a bit, bringing the scent of the wisteria growing on the side of the barn along with the sweaty scent of her horses—all bedded down for the night—with it. She was relieved at first when the wind ruffling her skirt and zipping through the braids of her hair just felt like the evening breeze. Then, as she leaned her back among the pink and white and purple trumpets of blossoms in the fence, she wrinkled her nose prettily in disappointment the way her mother had when she realized that the night air held no scent of a man, just that of honeysuckle and the nearby river’s waters.

She found herself wistful, missing something she felt she had never fully grasped, as if it were vapor in her hands. When she spied first one, then three and then five or six lightning bugs in deep woods across the road, she had to smile in childhood memory of collecting the bugs at dusk, of putting them onto her ears for earrings that glowed in the dark.

But her tranquillity was short-lived. By the time she had gone back inside and just thought about turning off the outside lights and locking up, she saw a new set of headlights heading down her road.

She knew it had to be a stranger because everyone who had made the trip before knew enough to slow down when they turned onto her bumpy little road.

One of the main reasons she found any peace and solitude in her home space was its distance from town. She got some satisfaction from knowing what folks in Mulberry said about her house and property.

“Uhhh, Lord ham mercy, Lena live
waaaayyyyy
out there by the river, don’t ya, Lena?”

“Oh, don’t go visiting
her
anytime near sunset ’cause you sho’ gon’
get caught out there where there ain’t even no streetlights or street signs atall! Shoot, ain’t no streets!”

“Let me tell you, Lena McPherson live in the country! She sho’ nuff live in the country!”

The drive did indeed discourage some folks. But not all.

“Now, how Cliona from Yamacraw get a ride all the way out here at night?” Lena wondered aloud as she looked out the long wall of wavy glass that exposed the back of the house to sunlight. Cliona stood at Lena’s door under a yellowish floodlight trying to sneak a peek inside the house. She was dressed fairly sanely this evening, not like “a patient from the crazy house at Milledgeville,” as Grandmama would say. Someone had even thrown an old heavy tweed coat around her bent shoulders against the dampness of the night air.

God, I hope that old lady ain’t out trying to drive again, Lena thought as she unlatched the door and, fixing a smile on her face, ushered Cliona from Yamacraw into the hallway.

“Miss Cliona, I can’t believe you found time to come way out here to visit me this late. Come on in. You by yourself?”

Lena didn’t make any comment on it, but she noticed that the old lady was clutching a small Listerine bottle full of clear greenish water in her wrinkled hand like an old girlfriend as if Lena didn’t have the whole Ocawatchee River of Cleer Flo’ rushing by her house right outside.

I
t seemed sometimes that Lena had a glut of girlfriends. Everyone in Mulberry claimed to be Lena’s friend. She was godmother to so many children that at some point she finally had to call a moratorium. The christening, birthday and graduation presents were no problem. It was the drain of remembering all those events and dispensing all that love as her godmother, Miss Rita, had done for her.

Lena had cosigned so many business loans for women around Mulberry to start their own enterprises—catering, sewing Afrocentric clothes for children, designing greeting cards, baking and selling real tea cakes and opening day-care and geriatric centers—that she had her own loan officer at the bank who dropped whatever she was doing whenever Lena walked in the door of the beautiful old bank building. The vast majority of the businesses had done very well.

Over the years, she had employed and mentored a dozen or so of the same women who as eighth-grade girls had refused to speak a word to her for nearly five years of school. Now each one swore that she had been a closer friend and classmate to Lena than the next. Sometimes
they even believed themselves that they had always loved Lena, and she had always loved them. That they had always been her friend, and she had always been theirs. That they had always been close. As Lois now said, “Since we were schoolgirls, we’ve always just
clung
to one another.”

Sometimes Lena had to laugh right in their faces. The women didn’t even care. They were just glad that Lena’s good nature had enabled her to laugh about it.

Lena knew as well as they did that the women, now in their forties, some of them grandmothers, remembered all too well their treatment of her in school when they found her just too strange, too much for them. They remembered one day when they all decided to stop speaking to her for the next five years at Martin de Porres School. In fact, each one of Lena’s “friends” had a special, particular memory of that cold ostracism that would come flooding back to her every once in a while. Lena got sick of seeing the look in their eyes as these same wicked scenarios played in their minds. So, she tried to treat them all with the love and sweetness of a truly dear old friend to help them all forget.

Their private demons from the past bounced up from the dead whenever Lena gave them the day off for their birthdays, sent get-well cards to their grandmothers, paid for retreats to mountain resorts and seaside spas for them all. Whenever she did anything nice and unexpected for them, they remembered their unkindness to her, their meanness, their un-Christian behavior as girls. They felt they had to take her forgiveness, her kindness for granted or they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves.

Lena could hardly be blamed herself for wanting to forget what it was like to be hated. It was hard enough to live with herself and all her own ghostly baggage as it was without the memory of their hatefulness, too.

It had started at about age thirteen and went right on through adulthood until Lena returned from college. Of course, Sister had lightened the hateful load somewhat by bullying the girls at Xavier
into at least pretending not to be so hostile. The force of Sister’s personality made them give in and soften toward Lena.

Then, when she returned to Mulberry from college and claimed what everyone in town knew to be her birthright, things seemed to change. Even though she attended parochial school all her life, former public school children who had been lukewarm toward Lena now remembered her as a star and model pupil and their best little playmate. True former classmates, like Wanda and Brenda, who had systematically disdained and ignored Lena all through their teens, girls who had refused to speak her name as they sat in the same classroom at Martin de Porres, implored her to be the godmother to their babies.

Marilyn, one of Lena’s main pubescent torturers and now one of Lena’s highest-earning Realtors, a member of the Millionaire Club every year since 1988, bragged one afternoon to her motherin-law, “You know, Lena was one of my
best
childhood friends.” Lena had come by to drop off a mohair baby’s blanket for Marilyn’s newest arrival. Marilyn couldn’t seem to stop gently patting the fluffy white yarn of the blanket against her throat and then rubbing the downy material against her baby girl’s fat smooth cheek. In between, the new mother would smile up at “Auntie Lena” as if she
had
actually loved and cherished her all her life, since they were “childhood friends.”

“Lena, I’m surprised you still speaking to those you-know-whats,” Sister said when Lena passed along news of her colleagues and their families.

“Shoot,” Lena would say with a shrug, sounding for all the world like one of her old lady friends, “life is too short, Sister, for that shit. It’s a vapor, girl, gone just that quickly, that easily. And all that stuff you hold on to just weighs you down in this world. In the next one, too, I guess.”

Lena never could hold a grudge. She had so much. And so many of the women had worked a long time with hardly any material reward. Lena believed in being supportive.

She even drove forty miles outside of Mulberry just to see her gynecologist, Dr. Sharon, because they were in college together. Dr. Sharon,
like all her friends and colleagues now, had
warm memories
of their salad days.

Some of the women Lena befriended were divorced or widowed. Some were single like herself. Most had left Mulberry about the time Lena came back. But over the next twenty years or so, most of them had come straggling back home.

“Yeah, ain’t no place like Mulberry,” she had heard her father’s and her own customers declare for no particular reason but the joy of home.

Carroll was the last of Lena’s former classmates to return to Mulberry.

“Girl,” Wanda had told her over the Candace WATS line, “I don’t know why you’re still out there in L.A. scuffling and working and living from cutoff notice to cutoff notice when you could be home with a
good life
working with us and Lena. Shit, girl, what you trying to prove? You ain’t got nothing holding you out there, do you?”

Carroll had been thinking about home for nearly twenty years. She thought about it one more night, then called Wanda back with one last doubt. Carroll just couldn’t believe that Lena was really hiring her former tormentors.

“Don’t be no fool, girl, come on home. You know Lena McPherson ain’t holding no grudge. Shit, what she got to be mad about? Hell, she
got everything.”

“Yeah,” Carroll said suspiciously. “And she willing to share it with
us?
”

So Carroll came on home, too, with lovely tales of how she and Lena had spent
hours
on the phone during their years in high school at Blessed Martin de Porres. She came home, also, to a position at Candace Realty, Motto: “We got on different colors, but we all look good.”

But she kept asking her friend Wanda, “Didn’t Lena used to be lighter-complected than she is now?”

Lena seldom remembered much of the pain and cruelty inflicted on her by the girls she grew up with in Mulberry. Sister, however,
knew Lena had been scarred by the girls’ rejection of her. Sister continued to marvel at the fact that Lena seemed so free of venom and fantasies of revenge, but she knew that her friend had put a great deal out of her mind just to be able to function normally in the world.

Lena forgave her newly discovered “childhood friends.” She prayed for them and did her best to help them.

Even though she had scores of women who counted themselves her
best
friend, she really didn’t have a friend in town among her contemporaries whom she could call with a little quick girlfriend talk.

“Hey, girl, I know you cooking dinner, but let me tell you this right quick.”

She had not had time to foster those kinds of relationships with anyone other than Sister and her one true childhood friend, Gwen. And Gwen had disappeared years before into a commune in Northern California to write a book. Lena had found so little time for long chatty lunches and dinners over outrageously fattening food and too much champagne or Saturday afternoon shopping sprees through the Mulberry Mall.

Yet Lena never did feel she was totally alone. Her grandmother’s ghost had promised her that much when the old lady came back to Lena the night of her funeral.

“You ain’t never alone, baby,” Grandmama had said, giving Lena the mantra that carried her through college, soured relationships, the deaths of her mother and father, her brothers and Frank Petersen. “You ain’t never alone, baby.”

And she wasn’t. Even in her dreams, she was reassured that there were loving spirits all around her. Her favorite dream was a recurring one in which she felt enveloped in the love of the spirits she called her “Grandies.”