Tina Mcelroy Ansa (29 page)

Lena’s credo was her mama’s:

“Mama used to say, ’You can’t put a thing in a clinched fist.’” Lena would tell her friend about the philosophy of her own generosity.

But Lena did not give to get. She gave because she saw the need. Talking with Sister over the phone of her futile efforts to get Miss Estelle off the streets of Mulberry with her shopping basket of belongings, Lena would sum it up.

“Life is real and life is earnest, girl.”

And for such a spoiled little pretty lucky rich baby girl, Sister would think with a smile, Lena actually understood what she preached.

Lena was just as happy discovering the distributor of some obscure curative lotion that Miss Zimmie swore by as she was when she closed her first million-dollar deal. But doing both for her entire adult life had left her weary.

Although demons and spirits did not still haunt her dreams, other specters did. Sometimes, Lena felt she had just exchanged one type of haunting for another.

Demons of one sort or another came to haunt and worry and plague and menace her. The images of money and responsibility and her people flew and danced and spun around her head into the wee hours. Solving problems in her head, taking care of people before the
need arose, paying taxes on time, reminding other people to pay
their
taxes on time, helping to find jobs for folks, matching homes to people, buying and selling property.

Until Herman showed up, Lena had just about accepted that the demons would be there to haunt her forever.

H
erman first showed his face in April. By late May, when they could clearly see the Sea Serpent and the Crab in the night sky, he had come up with a hundred ways to call Lena “baby.”

Sometimes, he sounded avuncular, like her father’s protective old friends and card-playing buddies. Sometimes, he said it like other sexy old men in town who said “baby” like they didn’t know they were old. To Lena, the South seemed full of sexy old men, men who reminded her of Ray Charles or Mr. Jerome. Mr. Jerome was a man in his eighties both of whose legs had been amputated twenty years before, and he still made the nurse’s aides at the Mulberry Arms Retirement Village giggle whenever they came in and announced “Whirlpool!”

Sometimes, Herman said “baby” briskly, almost business-like. “Hey, baby, hand me that wrench.”

Usually, Herman said it as if it were part of her name, “Lena, baby.” He said “Lenababy,” as if it were one word.

Other times he crooned it, “Le-na, baby.” Like a four-word song.

And other times it was hardly a word. Rather, a groan. “Oh bbbbbbaaabbbbbbbbby.”

As far as Lena was concerned, he couldn’t say it enough.

It was easier than anyone would have thought for Lena to fall into a relationship with Herman.

They were comfortable with each other from the first night they ate and danced and loved together. She treasured the camaraderie she and Herman shared, their walks and tromps through the woods around her house that evoked childhood and represented the banishment of woodland demons. She felt heart-bursting pride at his mechanical and engineering acumen, as much as he seemed to feel over her special skills. She loved to awake with a wisp of his scent still lingering on the sheet next to her, enough for her to roll over and snuggle into for a few minutes before rising. She loved to do for him and make over him. But the one thing she treasured above all else was their lovemaking.

Lena and Herman fucked until her toes tingled.

Herman discovered that what he couldn’t even buy in Middle Georgia in his time, Lena was happy to give and receive. The first time they made love and he kissed and licked her vagina, he just knew he had gone too far. When she returned the favor, he felt he had truly finally died and gone to heaven. Lena learned over and over that this spirit, this ghost, this specter was no ordinary man.

Why, Herman made Lena’s pussy
sing!!

Lena had heard women down at The Place use that expression.

“Girl, I ain’t letting that man go
nowhere!
He made my pussy
sing
last night!”

Lena hadn’t had all that much experience with sex, but she thought she knew what they meant. After Herman, however, she realized she had not had a clue.

Herman really did make her “stuff’—as he called it—sing. At first, she thought it was Herman down there between her legs singing to himself in exhilaration and ecstasy as he kissed and sucked and tickled and licked and bit and nipped her. She just knew it had to be
Herman down there humming against her clitoris, giving her what he called a “buzz.” Then, she realized it wasn’t Herman’s voice she heard, but one that sounded like her own if she had been able to carry a tune.

Her pussy let out such a beautiful, lilting happy song with no real words that Lena and Herman had to stop what they were doing and just lie back and listen for a while. Lena stretched her arms above her head toward the headboard of the bentwood bed, and Herman just laid his head on Lena’s stomach, his thick mat of hair tickling her belly button, and brushed his lips across her pubic hair.

Lena herself couldn’t sing a note on command, couldn’t carry a tune in a brass bucket. That’s what her grandmama would say when she heard the girl trying to sing “Love Child” or some other current hit to herself around the house. She’d say, “Good thing Lena pretty and smart, Nellie. ’Cause she shore couldn’t sing for her supper. The girl can’t carry a tune in a brass bucket!” Now, that same Lena had a pussy that sang in perfect pitch.

Although the song seemed to float on the air, happy feathery notes that together made a new tune each time her vagina sang, it was not a high-pitched tone. Rather, Lena thought, it sounded low and sexy, like an alto.

Herman just thought it sounded like his woman, Lena. He knew he was the cause of the dulcet tones and was so proud he looked up at Lena and just grinned.

Reaching for each other, Lena and Herman exchanged a hard, deep, urgent, hungry kiss. And their love set “Lil Sis”—as Herman also called it—off again.

Some days the song sounded more like a musical instrument than a voice. Those days it reminded Lena of the sound of a cello. But it was still a voice from deep within her that indeed had been unleashed by Herman.

He didn’t even have to be there cheering her on to orgasm for it to happen. All she had to do was think about him to set Lil Sis to singing. And the more she thought of him, the louder and sweeter the music became.

When she went shopping or was standing in an elevator, other people, men especially, surprised her by sidling up and asking, “What’s that lovely song you’re humming?”

The first time it happened in public, Lena just covered her lips with two fingers and turned red in the face as she thought of Herman and the way he played her like a Stradivarius. She felt that way in his hands, like a masterpiece, a one-of-a-kind treasure that was being cherished.

Lena noticed other folks in the Piggly Wiggly looking around and staring at her with their heads cocked to the side. An old man appeared at her shoulder, his head cocked to the side. “Now, don’t tell me. I ain’t heard that song you humming in a long time, but I know I know it. Don’t tell me. Is it …?” And the old fellow tried and tried to remember, sighed, drawing a blank, and looked to Lena for help.

But the only help she could give the old man trying to name that tune was to hold her knees together and try not to burst into laughter right there in his face. She finally had to leave her half-full shopping basket by the fresh-seafood counter and run out of the supermarket with the music and her laughter trailing behind her.

Until she got the voice under some kind of control where it only sang when she and Herman were alone, she just resigned herself to being embarrassed by the siren’s song, even during Mass when her stuff sang along with the choir.

Herman sometimes called her vagina her “box,” shortening the McPherson family name “matchbox.” He also called the plain brown acoustic guitar that he played in the evenings his “box.” She knew the difference, but she pretended she didn’t. Both boxes made beautiful music.

“Hey, Lena, baby, hand me ma box,” he’d say out on the deck stretched out on a chaise longue by the fireplace. She would get up, ignoring the guitar propped up against her chair, and walk straight over to him.

“Okay,” she’d say, “here it is.” And she’d stand with her stuff in his face. Boldly.

He would look up and grin, and pulling her down into his lap like his guitar, reach between her legs and strum her instead of his guitar strings.

“Uh, uh, uh, Lena, baby, you gettin’ so ’omanish,” Herman would say with a deep laugh as her pussy began to fill the outdoors with song.

Lil Sis didn’t have a Jessye Norman or Chaka Khan voice. But she could still sound good.

Her matchbox sang all kinds of beautiful love songs. Songs that sounded like Ellington classics, like R&B standards, like Southern Baptist camp-meeting hymns, like Gregorian chant. But as Herman told her one morning when they woke to her music, “Yo’ pussy don’t sing no blues, do it, Lena, baby?”

Sometimes in her sleep with Herman riding through her dreams, Lil Sis would sing. And often both Lena and Herman would awake in the middle of the night to the music of her vagina just humming away.

Over the summer, Lena got her vagina’s voice under control a little bit. She had to. The sound of it singing through the inseam of her cream-colored jodhpurs spooked Baby and Goldie as she and Herman rode the trails and paths of her grounds.

There was something about Lena and Herman getting together that brought out the music in them both.

Herman sometimes called her vagina his “Mulberry bush” and sang to her when they made love.

“Here we go ’round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Here we go ’round the mulberry bush so early in the mornin’.”

Lena couldn’t help but laugh at the childish words in Herman’s very grown-up deep voice.

“Here we go ’round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Here we go ’round the mulberry bush so early in the mornin’.” All she had to do was hear the tune in her head to start grinning.

Lena laughed all the time now, her brown eyes twinkling at Herman’s black sparkling ones from across a room. She didn’t have to give
a thought to keeping a pleasant look on her face at all times and at all costs the way her father had insisted his entire family do when she and her brothers were growing up. At the family dining room table in the middle of a meal, Jonah would feel called to teach his children important lessons of life.

He taught them that the art of making conversation at the dinner table and the skill of keeping a pleasant look on your face were the most crucial lessons in life you could learn. Besides knowing to keep your elbows off the table.

“Mabel, Mabel, big and able, keep your elbows off the table,” Jonah or Nellie or somebody enjoying the meal would intone at least once a day. Lena was happiest when she was the one who caught her brothers breaking the rule. She would chant it over and over, dancing and squirming in her chair, getting louder and louder, until her grandmama would lean across the big wide table in her direction as if to pat her on the cheek and say softly, “That’s enough, baby. That’s getting on Grandmama’s nerves.”

Lena had always heard from Gloria down at The Place that you were to keep other things off the table, too.

“Don’t fuck on the same table you eat off of.”

But with Herman, she threw caution to the wind. They made love on the shiny long picnic table in the breakfast room. They merged and loved on the big oval dining room table with the intricately carved base. They enjoyed each other aslant on the shaky drafting table in Lena’s workroom. They screwed on the small round kitchen table near the sunny window overlooking the stables and the side garden. They even made love on the redwood picnic table near the deck down by the river. It
was
at night, but Lena did feel risqué making love buck naked in the open since more people than a little used the river during Cleer Flo’, boating, even water-skiing some weekends as if it were a northern lake resort.

In the first days after they met, as they drifted on the surface of the swimming pool, Herman pointed to the wooden door with a single window in it and asked her, “What’s that?” Lena just smiled and led
Herman to the cedar-lined sauna tucked into the corner of the pool room where they made love until they nearly passed out, surrounded by billows of hot eucalyptus-scented steam, lightly tinted the same green as the woods near the riverbank after a soaking overnight rain. Lena assumed that was Herman’s doing. It looked as if he had taken a sharp Crayola forest-green crayon and traced the edges of every object in the sauna.

Lena almost had to give up meetings altogether after Herman learned she was ticklish and that he could become a true spirit and really sneak up on her without her realizing it. “Damn, Lena, you don’t use hardly none a’ yo’ powers.”

She feigned mild indignation, but she actually loved feeling the tip of his finger brush across the tip of her nipple as she spoke with some banker about extending a customer’s credit. Sometimes he would just slip into her as she told Miss Julia Mae what ingredients to put in a poultice for her frail sunken chest. Suddenly, Lena would feel the tip of his tongue brush the tip of her clitoris and barely be able to keep from shrieking. Lena would come to herself sitting in Miss Julia Mae’s chilly dark living room panting and gasping and glowing while the wiry old lady scrambled about trying to fan her and get her a glass of water from the kitchen at the same time.

Lena tried to be stern and irritated, but the sound of Herman’s laughter—”Haw, haw, haw”—in her ear made her throw her head back—her cheeks all flushed; her eyes all bright and sparkling—right there in Miss Julia Mae’s living room and laugh, too, at her joy.

Herman acted like it was his job to make Lena happy.

He was happy or at peace almost all of the time. It made Lena giggle to see the things that irritated him. He’d cut into a big juicy-looking lemon and discover little pulp inside.