Tina Mcelroy Ansa (16 page)

“Who else they gon’ leave The Place to except Lena?” Gloria had told the staff there. One or two of them tried to pull the loyal manager into gossip about Lena and her holdings.

“Shoot, she ain’t just the only surviving heir. She the best businesswoman or businessman in this town. I know lots a’ folks who wish they
could leave
their family businesses in Lena McPherson’s hands,” Gloria said, ending the loose talk. “Shit, she the hand
all us
fan with! She deserve everything she got!”

And Lena did have a lot.

At the end of each day, when James Petersen finished his housekeeping duties at Lena’s house and headed down the road to his own, he went through his checklist before leaving.

1. Outside lights on
   

2. Bedroom, kitchen lights on
   

3. Jacuzzi temperature set at 108F
   

4. Pool temperature set at 70F
   

5. Food in refrigerator, microwavable dishes on counter
   

6. Music playing
   

7. Alarm system charged and on
   

So everything was all set for Lena when she had walked in.

She hardly got
any
exercise anymore. She just didn’t have time anymore for the things she loved to do. She rarely had time to put on her tight brown riding pants with the suede inseam and her shiny chocolate riding boots and head off on Baby or Goldie through the bridle paths that wove over her property. She stopped once in a while on her way in or out to give Mr. Renfroe or one of his assistants a hand in the garden. Then, she would look at her watch and have to move on.

Swimming twenty laps every other night or so was the only physical activity she clung to in the midst of her buying and selling and renting and investing and making money and doing for others.

Some nights when she couldn’t sleep, she’d get up, feeling alone and lonely, and swim until she was worn out, then try again to go to sleep. She was a good strong swimmer. She had learned at college. Pulling her thick long bushy hair back in a fat, barely controlled ponytail for an entire school year, she had become one of the strongest swimmers in her P.E. class. She had wanted to learn to swim ever since seeing Rachel, the kindly ghost of a slave on the Georgia beach who had chosen drowning over bondage. She prayed for the repose of Rachel’s soul along with her parents’ and brothers’ every night. But Lena did not think of Rachel’s act as a damning one of despair. Rather one of belief.

As a girl, Lena could not learn to swim at home. The idea of Lena getting her thick, nappy, barely controllable hair wet every day of the summer at the public pool for black folks had been beyond the comprehension of her family and the endurance of her mother, who had the actual combing job. So Lena just bided her time and waited until she was away from Nellie and home. She had learned to swim, named her pool in honor of Rachel, and some nights, felt it had been
her
salvation.

This night she dove into the water at the deep end of the Olympic-sized pool without making a splash. Splitting the dark water with her scythe of a body felt almost as good as the cool river water of Cleer Flo’ she had just splashed on her forehead. But as soon as she cut through the surface, she let out a cry that sent a stream of bubbles floating to the surface from her mouth. She dove into the pool expecting the usual brisk cool water but instead the water was warm, soothing, not steamy, but hotter than body temperature. The warm water was a surprise, but a pleasant one: comforting and inviting like the waters of a womb. Lena barely kept the pool heated. She liked the stimulation of swimming in the cool water, then stepping over into the heated bubbling waters of the Jacuzzi.

It took a while for Lena to collect her wits about her in the unusually warm water.

“I can’t believe James Petersen didn’t check the water before he
left,” Lena said out loud to the empty room. “I guess the thermostat is broken. Come to think of it, he didn’t leave any music playing, either.”

She could hear the faint cooing of the mourning doves that often roosted in the eaves of the glass roof. It called attention to the room’s silence. She swam along the edge of the pool until she came to a small table jutting out over the water. There were two lounge chairs set up nearby. One thick fluffy white terry towel was thrown over the back of one chair and another towel was folded at the end of the table. A blue-and-white-striped terry-cloth robe was draped across the arm of the other chair.

Lena dried her hands and picked up the remote control on the table extending over the pool. In the lonely tired state she was in, she knew what she wanted to hear. She didn’t hesitate but pressed the remote control for the compact disc turntable in the wall of the pool room and then hit the advance button.

Carla Thomas began singing she was so lonesome she could cry. And Lena sang along with her. But then Carla moved on to sing about a diamond ring, and Lena lost interest. Marriage was not her desire, love was.

Lena swam twenty-five laps in the warm water, then floated on the surface of the water, looking up at the moon and stars through the glass ceiling.

Um, she thought, looking at the clear view she had of the stars in the heavens, I need to buy me a telescope.

The exercise had worked her body and left her feeling good and tired. She always tried to find time for her swim, but even with her own pool in her own house, she often couldn’t fit it into her hectic schedule. Lena so often felt that putting her foot out of bed in the morning was the first and last conscious decision she made every day. After that act, caught up in her duties, she felt as if she were being carried like a leaf on the surface of the rushing Ocawatchee River.

Sighing, she lay back against the side of the pool and listened to the music.

After a while, Lena began to sing in sync with Dinah Washington:

“God, I wish I
had
somebody,” she said out loud to the empty pool room. Her words, spoken softly, echoed in the cavernous room.

It was only lately that she had begun to believe that she had made a major mistake by not gritting her teeth, ignoring the pictures in her mind and getting pregnant by one of the best of the lot of men she had been attracted to over the years. She didn’t know where the years had gone.

How could she be forty-five, she thought, and not have accumulated more in the way of family—real family—blood family? No mother, no father, no brothers, no sisters, no babies. Lena was so tired of loneliness.

She felt like a statistic, Category: African American woman, fortyish without a man, a child or hope. She knew that somewhere there was a printed form that offered that choice with a neat box next to it to check off.

She was so deeply lonely, she thought again, this time more than a prayer, more than a plaint, it was a surrender.

“God, I wish I
had
somebody,” she said again.

Suddenly, she felt something brush against her thigh. It felt like a large fish swimming around her legs.

She had never truly
felt
anything like this in her pool before.

Lena had all kinds of inflatable animals and toys floating in her pool for company that brushed up against her all the time as she swam. Some were the size of a bed pillow. Others were almost as big as she. She was used to the feel of plastic or vinyl things touching her thighs as she cut through the water or as she floated on the usually cool surface.

She had, in fact, sensed another presence in the pool with her on a number of occasions. It had not happened often, but she remembered each instance as if it were a family reunion. A few times she was sure her grandmother was swimming past her in the cool water, brushing
past her favorite granddaughter, leaving her spirit in the wake she made. At those few times, Lena was overwhelmed by the sense of peace she felt throughout the water.

Then, one time, she just knew that it was her father Jonah, an excellent swimmer, who was swimming in the waters of her pool with her. She never sensed her mother or brothers as she swam there. Nellie had always feared water. She never went wading in any pool or ocean or river or stream. When Lena as a child fell into the creek behind their house, her mother had screamed of having to “rescue my child” from the tiny rivulets of the gentle stream. She raged if anyone turned the hose on her.

“You little foolish fools,” she’d scream in her special “I’m completely sick of you children” voice as she covered her head and ran for cover.

Lena didn’t think the spirits of her brothers—strong swimmers, too—had ever shown up in the waters of her pool. She figured their ghosts would probably be swimming around at their favorite swimming hole, Pate’s Rock, in the woods behind her childhood home.

So, this time, she stopped, took a breath and controlled her urge to jump out of the pool in one leap. But she swam rapidly over to the light controls at the edge of the pool and turned on the switch that flooded the aqua bottom of the pool with light.

Lena looked around her nude body in the blue water searching for what she had felt brushing against her legs. But all she saw were some familiar toys floating on the surface. And the spot that had been touched on her body was still tingling.

“Good God,” Lena said aloud. This encounter in the pool, she knew instinctively, was different. This thing that had brushed against her leg had the feel of life, of skin, almost of blood coursing through veins. Almost.

She felt for a moment as she had as a child when she had “put the magic” on something. It was a family joke that was taken seriously. Her mother, her father, her brothers, her grandmother had all seen it with their own eyes. Lena had been able to “put the magic” on things.
She could fix a broken milk shake blender or get the family car to start in the morning when Nellie would be rushing to drop her children off at school before heading downtown to open up The Place or even take the lines out of the television screen when the family was trying to get a channel from Atlanta. She could do it just by touching the thing.

Lena felt as if she had just put the magic on something in the warm water enveloping her in the pool. Had charged something. Had fixed something. Had invited something. Had healed something. And as she treaded water naked beside the bank of lighting and security controls, she wondered what that something was.

She was trying to decide whether or not to convince herself it was nothing when she felt the touch again, this time down the front of her body and between her legs.

For a second, she thought she saw a quick flash of light like a spark on one of the flat Ocawatchee River rocks embedded around the sides of her pool. Then she felt it again, this soft seductive swirl around her legs like a waterspout, and she was reminded of the wind on her neck.

This sensation was a great deal more insistent than the breeze that had been teasing her all week. It was a lot more determined than even the breeze down her back that morning on the highway. This thing in the pool with her was not playing! She felt herself pressed to the side of the pool with
something
beginning to separate the folds of her vagina.

“Stop!! Stop!!” Lena heard herself saying, flailing her arms in the warm water. “Just what the hell is going on? No! Stop!”

This time she
did
jump out of the pool, her heart beating fast. And just as suddenly, the feeling was gone, leaving her chilly, breathless, excited and naked by the side of her heated pool.

T
he last time Lena had had such a vivid experience with visions and spirits and feelings and voices, she was still in college.

For Lena, college was to be liberation. By the time she was a senior in high school, she just knew that all her daily terrors—the sleepwalking, the childhood memories of ghosts, her skewered premonitions, the hatred the girls at school still harbored toward her, the fear that just about anybody could be a ghost—were connected with the town of Mulberry and her close familiar home and community.

Her Grandmama’s ghost had told Lena to find out something about herself and the caul and her powers before it was too late.

But she hadn’t.

She procrastinated and vacillated and waited to get in touch with Nurse Bloom, who had witnessed her birth and knew all about what she called “special little baby girls born with a caul.” She kept right on avoiding any contact with St. Luke’s Hospital and the possibility of running into the old nurse right through her teens.

She had never felt so torn. She kept putting off and putting off going to the old nurse the way her grandmother’s ghost had instructed her in order to gain some bit of insight into her specialness. It frightened her more than the visions she saw, more than the voices she heard, to even think about discovering more about herself.

And by the time she got up the nerve, when she was seventeen, to go seek out the old nurse and midwife who had assisted at her birth and tried to protect her, it was too late. Nurse Bloom, suffering from early senility, just smiled when Lena came into her room. The old woman did not even know who she was.

If I can just get away from this town, she had thought over and over, as she set the table in the dining room for herself and her parents, as she sat in Mother Josepha’s homeroom class at Martin de Porres, as she talked on the phone with her one remaining true loyal friend, Gwen.

Lena figured her best route of exit was going away to college. Early in her senior year in high school after she had accepted the fact that Nurse Bloom couldn’t help her, she sent for brochures for Howard University in Washington, D.C. The brochures had pictures of intelligent-looking, happy black students dressed in plaid Villager skirts and chinos walking the campus with armloads of books and pads. She brought home pamphlets for large universities in western states like California and New Mexico filled with pictures of white students and an occasional Spanish-looking person that her parents hardly scanned. Lena even sent away for information on Columbia University in New York City. But when Lena asked Nellie to read the slick folder with the photograph of its urban campus on the cover, her mother just looked at her as if she had suggested something as ridiculous as bringing home some boy and losing her virginity on the living room sofa. It was a struggle to get her parents even to listen to the idea of Lena leaving the state, let alone the region, for college.