Tina Mcelroy Ansa (12 page)

The women were dressed in beautiful gauze, chiffon-like gowns of every color imaginable from the palest mint-green pastel to deepest, richest maroon. In her dream, Lena recalled thinking: Each one of these women is my Grandy. Each one is for me. Each one loves me. The women in Lena’s dream—some live, some dead—were her maternal
grandmother, Lena Marie, whom she had never met; her grandmama; her kindergarten teacher, Miss Russell; Miss Zimmie; the slave ghost Rachel. There, too, were the other women around Mulberry whom she had loved and cherished, Miss Onnie, Miss Annie Mae, Miss Eula, Miss Joanne, Miss Pansy. Then, there were the faces of women she did not recognize even though she saw the love they held for her.

The dream women, her Grandies, would pass her around from one pair of soft sweet-smelling arms to another as if she were still a baby. They would kiss and coo over her, nuzzle her and whisper soft wordless sounds of safety and love. One of them, either Grandmama or some famous woman like Zora Neale Hurston, would take Lena in her hands and ever so gently place her at their feet to sleep snuggly in the sea of their beautiful ethereal skirt tails. Then, they would all lean back, her grandmama at the head of the sorority, and smile.

In life, Lena’s grandmama didn’t have enough friends her own age around to have a proper quilting circle, but Grandmama had exchanged scraps of material with her younger friend Miss Zimmie, who had especially deft hands. With both Grandmama and Nellie sewing so much for themselves and Lena, there were always piles of beautiful material—maroon and black and royal-blue velveteen from Lena’s Sunday dresses, cotton and wool plaids in bright primary colors from her play dresses and pastel linen from her parade of Easter outfits—neatly folded and stored in Davison’s department store bags in the sewing room closet downstairs. Grandmama would give the material to anyone who asked. But she kept a special dress box on the overhead shelf with the very best swatches of material for Miss Zimmie.

Now, when Lena went to visit Miss Zimmie—the closest thing she had to a grandmother of her own—she always worked her way back to the old woman’s bedroom to see the quilts she had hanging over a frame with pieces of Lena’s past expertly stitched in.

A swatch of green embroidered
peau de soie
from her first dance dress, a strip of velvet from a Christmas program dress, a piece of black
silk from her first evening dress, a square of electric-blue mohair fabric from a Sunday suit.

Lena tried to visit Miss Zimmie’s when she thought she might catch the beautiful old woman, her dark gray-streaked hair up in a soft pompadour, at her machine or tatting her ever-present lap sewing. Even though she liked to say, “The old gray mare …,” Miss Zimmie still had good vision, and it allowed her to read and sew well into her eighty-ninth year of life. She had even needlepointed pillows for Lena and herself that proclaimed, “I EARNED IT.”

“No, no, thank you. I can make it by myself. I’m an independent old lady,” she would declare in a firm pleasant voice as Lena and anybody else in the trim spotless house raced to move chairs and boxes and flowerpots and door edges and anything else out of the independent old lady’s way.

Miss Zimmie had flowers in her garden even in the dead of winter. If she had a winter yen for the summer yellow of sunflowers, she’d just go right out and purchase the tall showy flowers in plastic and stick them in her yard. She didn’t have a yard full of plastic. Miss Zimmie was too organic for that. But she told Lena she had lived too long to deny herself the pleasure of a sunflower or a rose just because they weren’t currently blooming.

Lena went to her grandmother’s friend for wisdom as well as succor.

“I don’t worry about what I can’t remember anymore,” Miss Zimmie had told Lena on her eighty-fifth birthday. “ ’Cause some things I don’t want to remember. Truly. I thought about it and realized there were all kinds of things that I have no desire whatsoever to ever recall again. Some things, Lena, you supposed to forget.”

It was advice Lena took to heart in dealing with her childhood friends.

She forgot their past nastiness, and she prayed for them and their families.

It wasn’t difficult for Lena to do. She and her former classmates
from Martin de Porres did share certain experiences and passages in their lives whether they were speaking to each other at the time or not. They
had
all been together when the unthinkable happened. As hard as it was for her non-Catholic friends to believe and even more difficult for her Catholic friends to fathom, Lena and her old friends had witnessed their classmate Jessie Mae slap a nun.

Lena was in the eighth grade, one day in late April just before the first procession of the year honoring the Blessed Virgin, when her teacher, Sister Gem of the Sea, went too far. Looking right at Jessie Mae, the sister said, “I want you girls to bring in your white dresses for the procession this week for me to see. Everyone’s mother can’t be counted on to dress you all like virgins in Mary-like dresses.”

Jessie Mae, a big girl for her age—almost as tall as the teacher—had had all the insults she and her family could take. She leapt up in the woman’s face and cursed Sister Gem of the Sea out for everything she could think of. In her mother’s name, Jessie Mae called the holy woman everything but a child of God.

Then, frustrated by the nun’s response of a cold, placid blue-eyed stare, Jessie Mae did the unthinkable.

“You old dried-up heifer,” the girl shouted, and slapped the nun full in the face.

The other eighth graders let out a collective gasp.

The solid flat sound of the lick rang out as clearly as the principal’s school bell on the top floors of the school building alerting everyone on the second and third levels that something momentous was in progress.

The nun was stunned for only a moment. With the imprint of Jessie Mae’s hand on her face as clear as if it were painted there with Mercurochrome, she lost her cold facade. Drawing back her arm past her shoulder, Sister Gem of the Sea brought her opened hand around in a smooth perfect arc and returned the slap. It nearly knocked the big teenager off her feet.

Then it was as if someone had announced, “Come out fighting at
the sound of the bell!” Jessie Mae pounced for the nun’s stiff white wimpled throat with both hands outstretched. The nun jumped alert, put her hands up and bent her knees slightly in a pugnacious pose. They collided amid a swarm of slaps, punches and clenches.

“Nun fight! Nun fight!” the incredulous students in the room shouted, jumping from their seats and surging forward. Some of them hopped up on desk seats and desk tops—a transgression against the cardinal rule: “Treat everything in this school as if it were your own”—for a better view. It was better than a Saturday afternoon matinee at the Burghart Theatre.

The eighth graders cheered and whooped as the nun and the girl fell to the floor in the front of the classroom and rolled around on the cool tile, scratching and clawing and digging and biting at each other. The students’ screams rose to a higher pitch.

And when the two women—for that is what the fight had made of them: equals, both women now—were pulled apart, the nun’s veil was on the rough wooden school floor, exposing the woman’s closely cropped reddish gray hair, and Jessie Mae was on her way out the school door.

It always made Lena chuckle to think that her best friend in the world was a woman whom she called “Sister.” Just calling her name made Lena think of the nuns, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, who had taught her.

Lena sometimes felt like a nun herself. Going around doing good works, not having sex regularly, living alone. The only difference was she didn’t live in a stark cell with only a cot and a kneeler in it. Her comfort and clothes were the only things that set her apart from the white women in black who had taught her.

Sister had thought the same thing many times. Lena was like the novices who took on the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

“The only vow my girl doesn’t adhere to
is poverty!”

Hell, I might as well be a nun, Lena would say to herself. Then, she’d get a little frightened. Even at her age, she didn’t want to tempt
God at all into giving her a vocation to the convent. She had read of women in their later years joining some cloistered order, living in quiet serenity in some mountain convent like St. Theresa.

At eleven, twelve and thirteen, she had knelt in the pews of Blessed Martin de Porres Catholic Church and prayed that she would not be found worthy to be called to the convent. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament had told them all that a vocation, a calling to the priesthood or religious order, was so strong, so Godsent, so nerve-rattling, that it could not be ignored or denied.

Then, they pulled out the story of St. Augustine, with Monica, his mother, praying for his conversion night and day. They pointed to Mary Magdalene as another example of God not letting up ’til He got what He wanted.

“The Hound of Heaven will hunt you down until you are His!!!” Sister Louis Marie would boom until Lena wanted to squeeze her developing preteen body under her desk.

The nuns were bound and determined to get somebody from the parish to take on the habit, say the vows, make the commitment, tote one up for their team. But they had yet to make a score. It had gotten to the point that the nuns scolded the girls in eighth grade and higher when they talked of college plans or marriage. “And no one wants to become a bride of Christ? Girls, show a little parish spirit!!” the sisters would say as if they were world-weary mothers saying to their unmarried daughters, “Just show a little ankle!”

But Lena felt a nun was just a woman with more restrictions.

She liked the idea of a sisterhood, of a woman’s world. She just didn’t like the restraints. And without thinking about the mechanics of her plan, she had, over nearly three decades, done something about it.

Lena’s sphere now was a world in which the women still did the majority of the work, but there was a major difference. Unlike the world Lena saw around her when she was growing up—a world in which her grandmother sewed nearly all her clothes as a matter of fact and a matter of love, where Nellie rose early to open her husband’s
business because he had been out carousing all night, where nuns ran the parish school, convent, church and rectory as well as outreach programs under the direction of the priest—hers was a world in which the women received credit and payment for their work. Lena saw to that.

It was what made Cliona from Yamacraw feel perfectly comfortable arriving unannounced at Lena’s front door out by the river after dark like one of her girlfriends.

L
ena didn’t think Cliona from Yamacraw would ever leave. Cliona kept looking at the big pendulum clock on the sideboard that Lena had taken from the dining room mantelpiece in the house on Forest Avenue and saying, “Lord, Lena, let me get on out of here tonight and let you get some rest. An old lady like me don’t need much sleep. But you practically still growing. You need your rest.” But she didn’t budge from her soft leather perch on one of the turquoise love seats by the window overlooking the deck, and the Ocawatchee beyond. The small Listerine bottle of Clear Flow sat self-importantly on the table in front of her.

Lena had made the mistake of offering the old woman a cold Coca-Cola when she first came in.

“I’ll take a caffeine-free Coke, if you got one,” Cliona had said as she dropped her tweed wrap from her shoulders and got comfortable while Lena headed for the kitchen. “You know caffeine messes with my medication.”

Then, Cliona from Yamacraw sat there, and she nursed that Coca-Cola and she nursed that Coca-Cola until Lena thought she would just stand up in her own living room and scream. As she sat there serenely smiling at the older woman, it seemed that a million ideas, projects, errands and duties raced through her mind. God, the whole day in the hospital put me so behind, she thought. Just how am I going to catch up with today’s business and be ready to start again tomorrow morning?

There was the closing on two houses that she had missed. She knew the families—both first-time buyers—had been disappointed that she had not been there personally to witness the signing of the papers with them. I’ll send them both a nice small fruit tree—maybe peach or pomegranate—to go in their new yards, she thought, making a note to Renfroe on the scratch pad in her head. There was the industrial property she needed to take a look at in the next county before it went to another buyer.

There was a farm in Macon County Lena had heard was just about to be bought out from under some people who knew some people who had relatives who still came into The Place from the country every other Saturday. They had told her about it. So I need to get on down there, she thought, grateful that Precious called her appointments each morning to confirm or cancel.

And now that she thought about it, no one ever told her what “thang” Mr. Pete’s son had wanted from her. Maybe, Precious took care of that, Lena thought. Mr. Pete had been such a good friend and poker buddy of her father’s that she did not feel right saying no to his son.

She felt the same way about Cliona from Yamacraw. Lena knew the old woman had some kind of reason for being out and about after dark and the last thing she wanted to do was offend an old customer. Even one whom her mother had always referred to as “that crazy woman from Yamacraw.”

“Yeah,” Cliona was saying when Lena drifted back into the conversation,
“me and your mama was real tight. I thought highly of Nellie, and I know she thought the same of me.”

“Um,” Lena said with a nostalgic little smile. But she thought, If this woman doesn’t get out of here soon, I’m gon’ be the crazy woman from Mulberry.

All Lena wanted to do was strip out of her dusty-feeling, slightly soiled clothes—clothes that had been in a near collision, a mugging of sorts, a stay at the county hospital, and now a visit from Cliona from Yamacraw. She wanted to pull off her hose and underwear and dive naked into her deep blue indoor pool.