Tina Mcelroy Ansa (7 page)

She blinked a couple of times to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her. Lena had thought there was only a crawl space with room for storage behind that back wall. But she could see she had been mistaken.

Right there beyond the broken plaster and board wall, near where the extra ice machine usually stood, was a room she had never seen before, furnished with a wooden table, chair and footstool.

“So this is where the smells were coming from,” Lena said aloud to herself. “But where did this secret
room
come from?” she wondered as she stepped over the threshold and into what felt like the looking glass.

L
ena stood perfectly still for a few moments, letting the secret space surround her. It seemed almost to embrace her.

Actually, the room really didn’t look secret. It didn’t look as if it had a thing to hide. The light and air made it seem open and accessible. As Lena stepped entirely into the room, she could almost hear it speak. It had a deep friendly voice.

“I been here all the time. Where you been?”

It had an almost teasing, laughing tone. “Huh, where you been?”

No, Lena said to herself as she turned around slowly, taking in the brick and wooden walls, this place doesn’t feel secret, just undiscovered and private. Even Lena, who prided herself on her inquisitiveness and who was acknowledged by all in the small town as one of the most inquisitive women anyone knew, even Lena hesitated a moment, then decided out of respect not to read when she noticed the elegant cursive marks on the yellowed sheet of crisp-looking onionskin paper lying catercorner to the edge on the sturdy wooden table.

“This is private,” she said out loud, sounding like her grandmother,
as she patted the fragile paper gently with the flat of her hand and left it alone. But she could not resist picking up the feather quill pen lying next to a clear blue bottle of blue-black ink and examining it before putting it back exactly as she had found it.

Strong morning light was coming in from somewhere. Lena tilted her head back and studied the ceiling, but she couldn’t find the direct source of light. It seemed to bounce back and forth off one wall then the other, practically flooding the high narrow space with sunlight.

On the far wall of the room was rough exposed brick, but built into the structure was a clever lever and a cantilever supporting a window that opened and shut automatically, allowing fresh air into the room at regular intervals. It was almost like a fan set on low. After just a few minutes of examination, Lena had to smile at the ingenious design.

“Well, Lord,” Lena said in admiration. “Would you look at that?”

The first time Lena, still a little thing, had exclaimed, “Well, Lord,” her mother had looked as if she had just seen a ghost. She brought her pretty manicured hand spread out against her décolletage and sucked in her breath sharply. Nellie had not heard the exclamation since her father-in-law had died some ten years before.

Looking at her strange little daughter, Nellie recalled how the older man always began each task—whether helping a friend to change a tire or dressing for a friend’s funeral, whether standing to wash his hands for dinner or going to the state offices in Atlanta about his taxes—with the call, as if he were setting out on an adventure. “Well, Lord” was a prayer of resignation and supplication, an incantation spoken to ask for strength.

“Well, Lord.” The old man had always said it with feeling and irony and resignation.

Lena’s grandfather had died the year before Lena was born, and when “Well, Lord” came out of Lena’s face, Nellie felt a chill in her bones and rubbed her hands over her arms to smooth away the chill bumps.

“Lena, where you get that expression from?” Nellie had asked, not
sure she really wanted to know. She had meant to keep her voice casual as she asked, but she couldn’t pull it off. It came out sounding like the most important question she had asked since her second son’s birth and she had asked, “Is the baby all right?”

“From Granddaddy Walter,” Lena said, before she could pull the words back in her mouth. She was always answering questions honestly before she realized her answer had unsettled some adult.

So Lena didn’t use the expression as freely as her father’s father had. She reserved it for truly special, wondrous, momentous situations.

Gazing up in the newly discovered room behind the wall of The Place, she said it again.

“Well, Lord?” This time with a bit of a question in her voice.

First, she stood in the path of the fresh air drifting down from above. She stepped a few feet to the side like a girl dancing in a recital—”Step together and you lean to the side”—and could still feel the air. Then suddenly she again smelled the familiar aroma of man like a breath of fresh air.

Because of what she and Sister called her “curse,” it had been a long time since Lena had smelled a man so intimately. Her curse was not her monthly menses. At forty-five, Lena knew she would soon be seeing her periods wane, then disappear altogether. Lena’s curse was being able to gaze into another’s soul.

From the first time she ever tried to make love when she was a senior at Xavier University with a grad student friend of Sister’s, she had been cursed with a vision of her lover’s past. Just when they got past the kissing stage and had moved to the caressing stage, even before they got completely undressed, Lena would have to call a halt and stop the graphic pictures in her head. It was never anything like murder or assault on another human being, although she did see one man go into her purse when she was in the bathroom. But the pictures she saw were enough to cause coitus interruptus.

“Who wants to screw someone who kicked his dog that morning?” Lena asked Sister on the phone after another failed attempt.

No matter who her man of the moment was, just at the point of
sexual play and intimacy in their relationship, the powers of her birth caul would kick in and she could suddenly
see.
She could see in the way old folks meant when one would look at her as a child, point a bony finger and say, “Listen, this child can see a heap a’ things.”

Surrounded by shafts of sunlight and the masculine odors in the secret room, Lena smiled and almost felt herself settle into the feeling of safety and repose that suffused the area. When she heard the board creak behind her, she didn’t even jump. She just put the quill she had found on the table down and turned to greet Mr. Jackson with questions about the newly discovered space. But instead of the countenance of the grizzled construction boss behind her, Lena saw stars.

She should have been forewarned. But Lena had put so much out of her mind about how things were when ghosts and demons and voices and visions visited her whenever they pleased that she hadn’t seen the warning signs.

Over the years, she had taught herself to ignore the signs of ghosts as well as the actual apparitions. She had just made herself go headlong on into any situation, knowing that she would be safe.

The one time that her grandmother’s ghost had come back to her—on the night of the old lady’s funeral—she had assured Lena it was going to be okay. Lena still thanked God—particularly in her prayers at night and in the morning—for having the mother wit to cling to her grandmama’s promise of safety when that poor old Nurse Bloom had sent her on such a chase of spirits and chants and witch-hunts in the middle of the night.

“Bless their hearts,” Lena prayed softly to herself every night on her knees by the side of her bed for Nurse Bloom and her grandmother—the senile old woman who had tried to protect her at birth and the sharp old woman who had tried to protect her all her life.

Signs of the spirit world were not on Lena’s mind this morning.

Later, when she tried to recall what had occurred with her in the secret room, it seemed she had seen the odd-looking stick of wood when she entered the place. As she had all morning, Lena felt more than she saw. She
had
noticed the board barely hanging by one nail
from a low beam—rough and unpainted—out of the corner of her eye just as she entered the room, but it hadn’t appeared menacing. It was just a plank of wood.

She didn’t know if she had been whacked in the head with the two-by-four or if she had turned and foolishly walked into the beam and whacked herself in the left temple. She didn’t plan to tell anybody, but the blow felt more like a metaphysical blow than a physical one. Lena could not tell if she had been really hit or not.

The force of the strike was so sharp and personal that, even though she could sense the pain in her head, Lena felt her spirit had been assaulted more than her body. It made Lena feel that she had been slapped in the face. Not that Lena knew firsthand what it felt like to be smacked in the face with the open palm of someone’s hand. But she did know the cumulative effect of a slap.

For decades, it seemed, Lena had seen the women with their maid’s uniforms on or their red McDonald’s uniforms or their pinstriped business suits purchased at Rubinstein’s out at the mall standing on corners waiting for rides or slipping into the seats of their own cars parked outside garden apartments. Women with black eyes and swollen faces still having to get up and go to work in the morning. Some tried to hide their injuries when they spied her looking at them. Others stood stolidly and returned the gaze. Lena blessed each one she saw.

“Um, um, um,” she’d intone to the interior of her snazzy little car as she drove through the streets of Mulberry scouting property and business opportunities, “having to go to work with a black eye.”

Lena remembered one Saturday when she was home from college and somebody in The Place was talking about some woman who had come in the night before with a big knot on the side of her head, right above the bone over her eyebrow. Another customer sat there with a big eggplant-purple bruise down the side of
her
face, running along the length of her right arm and leg and, everyone assumed, along her body, too, under her clothes. To the folks there, it looked as if she had been slammed against a wall, hard. She sat there and talked about the
woman from the night before as if no one could see her own battle scars and as if she didn’t see them either.

Lena noticed everyone looking at the bruised, scarred woman sideways out of the corners of their eyes, embarrassed for her. Finally, Gloria couldn’t stand it any longer.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Gloria had said from where she was leaning against the edge of the counter dressed in her traditional summer uniform of panties, a purple elastic bandeau-type bra and her white starched apron. “A slap
will
clear your damn head.

“You know, at first, it really hurts, stings, you know, but after a second or so, you begin to realize that the actual strike cleared your head. And you find yourself thinking clearer than you ever thought before.

“Now, the next slap let you know you truly getting your ass beat.”

Gloria stopped talking for a bit and went over to one of the sinks under the counter at the front of the establishment.

She stood there awhile, everyone in the place hanging onto her every word. The small trim woman with the curves of a beauty queen always had been able to command attention. It was one of the things that attracted Lena to her as a manager. Gloria had said many times, “Lena, all you got to do is put one powerful black woman in a room, a room full of anything—white women, white men, black and white women, black and white men, even Indians, I guess—and before you know it, she’ll be at the center of things. She’ll be running the whole shebang. That’s one reason they don’t like us.”

Gloria continued after a while as she stood there dipping a big terry-cloth rag in and out of the hot sudsy water. “Yeah, that second lick is what should let you know what’s what. But if you can get out of there before that second one, if you act before it’s that third and fourth and fifth one, you’ll see that that first one cleared your head right up so you can see to take care a’ yourself.

“Yeah,” she said as she came back with the steaming soapy white towel and wiped the space in front of the bruised, battered woman, “a slap in the face will clear your damn head if you pay attention to it.”

Gloria’s talk had worked as well as a slap for these women. Before anyone knew it, Gloria and a few of the regulars and then even more women began meeting between 6:30 and 7:00
A.M.
weekdays for coffee and talk. The talk ranged from how it used to be back in the country, to their children, to what kind of birth control most of them used, to serious emergency help for someone’s friend who had run from her house the night before with just her underwear on her back.

Whenever Lena ran into the group in the morning, she always remembered what had started it all.

“A slap will clear your damn head!”

“Damn, that slap didn’t just clear my head. That coulda killed me,” she said aloud to the new secret room just before she lost consciousness and fell to the floor, raising dust all around her in a shaft of morning sunlight.

A
though he was driving the lead vehicle taking Lena home, Mr. Jackson was not pleased at all with the way things had gone.

First, Lena wouldn’t let him call the paramedics to come to The Place and take a look at her. “That bump on the head or whatever you got deserves to be looked at properly, Lena,” he had told her.

“I’m really okay, Mr. Jackson,” Lena said over and over as the distressed man—still robust in his seventies—lifted her effortlessly from the dusty floor of the room and set her gently on the lone straight-back wooden chair. But he wasn’t listening to her.

“Oh, my God, I done messed around and let this girl get beat up and mugged in her own place. They gonna have my hide for this! Now, why I have her come down here by herself in the dark?” he berated himself as he brushed her off and delicately rearranged her disheveled burnished braids with two fingers.

Her head did ache a bit, but Lena kept insisting she was all right, showing him her unopened purse he had picked up off the floor on the
other side of the wall, opening it and pulling out her brown leather wallet, her small collapsible phone and key ring; stretching her arms out to show him there was no evidence of bodily harm—no cuts, bruises or abrasions—pushing her braids out of her face, lifting them from her neck to prove there was no blood, reassuring him of her safety and health.