Tina Mcelroy Ansa (43 page)

Herman, Lena discovered, was tied not only to their own cultivation. He would eat out the woods in a minute if what he wanted was not being grown in the garden. One day he stopped during their walk and looked over in the direction of a dark damp cluster of poplar trees nearby. Taking her hand in his, he led her to the trees and stooped down at their trunks by a stand of dark brown mushrooms.

“Those toadstools, Herman?” Lena asked as he picked one, turned it to the light and smelled it.

He just smiled and popped it in his mouth.

Lena held her breath and waited for some kind of ghostly allergic reaction, but none came, and she, satisfied of their safety, started selecting the safe mushrooms Herman pointed out from the poisonous varieties.

Herman never said it in so many words, but Lena knew she was being drawn closer and closer to the earth. And she knew that it was somehow Herman’s doing. The further she pulled herself away from the things of the world—her possessions, her businesses, her shoes, her dependents, her visits, even her gifts and acts of kindness—the nearer she drew to the peaceful, serene spirit of the world itself.

“You need to be mo’ like Mary and less like Martha,” Herman would tell her gently when she still went off to take care of somebody. “Choose the better part, baby.”

When Lena didn’t come to church four or five Sundays in a row, folks there began to sound the alarm. Church folks were the first to notice that Lena McPherson was slacking off!

Lena would have been stunned if she had known people in Mulberry were saying that. That she was slacking off. She felt just the opposite.

“You want to come join me for Holy Communion, Herman?” Lena asked him one morning as she was heading to Mary and
Martha’s grotto down by the river with a bottle of champagne, half a biscuit Herman had made that morning, a few tiny Sweet 100s tomatoes from the kitchen garden and a little honey from the field hive.

“It’s
all
communion, baby,” Herman had called back to her as he headed for the barn with brush and pail in hand. “It’s all good.”

W
hen Gloria came up on Lena sneaking out of the grill side of The Place at five in the morning, Lena jumped as if a strange ghost had brushed up against her.

“Um, um, um,” Gloria said. “Poor thing. Now they got her sneaking around her own place.” Lena was so surprised, she nearly dropped the bulky cardboard box she was carrying on her hip like a country woman toting a baby. She laughed as if she had been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

“I’m just trying to get a few things out of here before everybody gets in and catches me,” Lena explained sheepishly. Her box was filled with a bottle of old brandy, some papers she needed and her father’s small adding machine for Herman.

“Um, um, um,” Gloria said. “Got the nerve to be trying to have a life of her own. Lena, girl, you
know
you ’un tore your drawers with this town now,” Gloria laughed in her slow Mulberry drawl as she helped Lena lift the box onto the bar.

It was something Lena had often heard the still-sexy manager say when she felt somebody was in serious trouble.

“Lena, this town just now beginning to see that you feeding them out of
a long-handle spoon!
And, girl, they don’t like it one bit. A few folks ain’t even noticed yet ’cause you done took such good care of them before. It ain’t hit ’em all yet. But enough of them talking.”

Lena smiled at Gloria, whose Maybelline mole had disappeared years ago in the bustle of running the business, and said slyly, “I have a friend who says, ’Our folks are smart people. They’ll get the message.’”

“Well, you know what your mama always used to say,” Gloria replied.

Both women chimed in together, “ ’You can show a Negro quicker than you can tell ’em.’”

Then, they laughed good and loud at the memory of Nellie McPherson.

“Come on, girl, sit for a while,” Gloria said. She took a pack of Tareyton cigarettes from her purse as she and Lena settled in on a couple of The Place’s vinyl barstools.

Lena watched Gloria lean on the counter and light a cigarette. Oh, that’s the way a whore smokes a cigarette, she thought. Lena couldn’t help it.

It had always been difficult for her to get an image out of her head once it was there. That was what had made her attempts to exorcise the memories of her childhood demons and ghosts so hard. And that was how it was with an image of Gloria stamped in Lena’s memory from forty years before.

Lena had been playing among the cases of liquor on the floor of The Place one Saturday when she heard her mother chuckle to herself: “Humph, only a whore blows her smoke out like that.”

Lena had clambered up on the counter, using the shelf underneath for a stepladder. She made it to the top just in time to see Gloria take another drag of the cigarette, hold it in a while, then blow
it out with her bottom lip, directing the smoke in a wide stream toward her flared nostrils.

“Oh,
that’s
how a whore blows her smoke out,” little Lena said softly to herself, her tongue playing lightly in the corner of her mouth trying to imitate Gloria’s. She had already disturbed the whole car one Sunday morning as the family drove to Mass by asking exactly what a whore was. So, she didn’t dare say the word out real loud. But she stored away that bit of information with the certainty that she would find it useful one day. Even now, forty years later, she could not break herself of the habit of thinking, Oh,
that’s
how a whore blows her smoke out, whenever she saw a woman exhale that way.

For years, that’s what people at The Place had thought Gloria was—just a whore with a steady job. Even Jonah, who had relied on Gloria so much, had treated her as if it were her ass that made her valuable. After Nellie just had finally, quietly, flatly refused to keep running The Place for Jonah’s convenience, it was Gloria who kept his business running smoothly—opening up in the morning so he could stay out late and gamble and carouse; staying later and later in the evening while he went about his other business and businesses. Yet, Jonah continued to have talks with Gloria about what was proper juke-joint employee attire, what she should and shouldn’t wear to work, how she should conduct herself with customers, how not to lean too far over the customers’ plates and drinks.

“Gloria? Shoot, she giving it away out of both drawers legs,” folks would say, summing her up.

But one of the first things Lena did when she inherited The Place at the deaths of her parents was to make Gloria the manager. “One of the smartest things I ever did,” Lena said to herself whenever her mind turned to the business.

When Lena came back from her last year of college, it had amazed her how much Gloria seemed to have changed. Even though she had encouraged and even bullied and embarrassed her father into giving the barmaid more responsibility and an appropriate pay raise, Lena
was herself surprised at how quickly and easily Gloria had handled the duties. Gloria even initiated changes and plans she had obviously had in mind for quite some time. And they worked.

It was Gloria who centralized the ordering for both the liquor store and the bar and grill side. It was Gloria who finally and successfully set up a real work schedule that included regular employees, gofers and roustabouts. It was Gloria who reorchestrated the deliveries of beer and wine and sodas and snacks and linens and liquor from the hodgepodge Jonah and his managers had made of it when Nellie had thrown her hands up in surrender.

But even before Gloria proved herself an astute businesswoman, Lena had respected her on many other levels.

Gloria was only eighteen years older than Lena, but the younger woman thought Gloria was as old as the ages. Certainly not because she
looked
old. But because Lena thought she had lived, really lived, forever.

Nellie had always prefaced just about everything she said about Gloria with the phrase “Considering how long she been out there …”

“Considering how long she been out there, she look good.”

“Considering how long she been out there, it’s a wonder she can get up in the morning and come to work.”

“Considering how long she been out there, it’s a wonder she ain’t got a houseful of children.”

Lena had once seen Gloria push an ardent but unwanted suitor out of her face with a firm friendly shove. Her admirer, a nice-looking young man wearing a freshly pressed short-sleeved white shirt, just stroked his thin mustache, sort of laughed and sat down at the end of the counter. He ordered an orange Nehi, biding his time until his next chance with her came around.

Gloria had looked at a teenaged Lena and confided wearily, “Girl, it’s so old it’s new.”

Lena thought Gloria wasn’t as young as she looked but that she just looked good for her age, as everybody, including her mother, said.

A straying boyfriend of Gloria’s stood at the end of the counter at The Place one night, dap-daddy hat now crushed by his own hand, his chin on his chest, his shoulders slumped. Lena heard Gloria tell him: “You play with fire you get burned. You play with pussy you get fucked.”

The soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend hadn’t looked burned anywhere that Lena could see, so she assumed from what Gloria said, he must have been fucked. Ever since then, when Lena saw someone looking like Gloria’s dap-daddy friend, she’d say to herself, “Um, um, um, bless his heart. He’s fucked.”

Gloria and Lena sat in the dark by the big plate-glass window at the front counter of the L-shaped bar and grill for a while in comfortable silence. The orange glow of Gloria’s cigarette and the weak light from the corner streetlight were the only lumination there. Gloria put out her butt in a tin ashtray on the bar and got up and flipped on a small light over the front door.

“Lena,” she asked suddenly, “you want to split a beer?”

Lena smiled at the thought of sharing a beer with Gloria at five in the morning. “Sure,” she said.

Gloria took a good look at Lena in the dim light. “You know, Lena, you look so good.” On her way back from the cooler, she stopped and looked Lena right in the face again. “I don’t think I seen you this happy since you was a girl. You smile all up in your eyes now, girl. I was telling Eva just that the other night.”

Gloria was pretty happy herself these days, Lena noticed. She and Eva and Eva’s two children from her first marriage were living happily in that beautiful two-story house Lena had found for them out in what everybody called “Bird City.”

Folks wanted to be as blind about Gloria’s true sexuality as they were about her business acumen, Lena thought as she watched Gloria make her way to the cooler in the back of The Place in that slow, easy, hip-swaying walk. Lena and everybody else downtown had admired her gait since Gloria first started walking Broadway, strolling up and down the street from bar to bar, from shop to shop, accepting
a drink from this one and that one, going home with
somebody.

Now, no one believed that Gloria was a lesbian.

“She sho’ ain’t gay. Miss Thing is serving
pussy!”
folks quite confidently declared out loud when Gloria walked by.

“Shoot, she ’un lay down with just ’bout every man in Mulberry. She was even married for, uh, ten years or so, wa’n’t she?”

“Yeah, she sho’ was. Hell, I had her myself years ago. Let me tell you, she ain’t no bull dyker!”

“It’s a feeling and a lifestyle choice, Miss Lena,” Gloria had told her. “I love women. I don’t love men. So, what was I supposed to do?”

Gloria had said it nonchalantly, as if it were the kind of thing said all the time in Mulberry, Georgia. With all the complexities of a woman who had seemed to fuck everything in pants all her life being a lesbian, choosing to live that way, to love women exclusively.

“Shoot, Lena, I don’t care what folks think ’bout me. Hell, that would be like jumping from the frying pan into the fire for real. I didn’t care when I was married to Harry. And I don’t give a damn now that I’m with Eva.”

Gloria hadn’t been married in over fifteen years, but folks with hope in their voices continued to explain, “Gloria and Harry ain’t together no mo’. They estrangled.”

When Gloria overheard this, she would laugh and say out the side of her mouth to Lena, “Damn, were they there for the last fight?”

“But that’s what I like ’bout living in a little town,” Gloria had told Lena. “Once people get over the initial shock, they kind of accept all kinds a’ things. Now, they may go on talking ’bout it for the rest of their natural-born days, but they do seem to go on and accept it. That’s what I’ve found.”

And folks did talk.

“Naw, she sho’ ain’t no lesbian. Miss Thing is serving much pussy!”

“She may be. But she sho’ ain’t serving it to you boys,” one of
Gloria’s friends would offer to the group. And even the men would have to join in the laughter that gently put them down.

“I guess you are right ’bout that,” Alfred or Peanut or one of them would say, shaking his head in amazement. “ ’Cause we ain’t had none in years!!”

Over the years, she and Gloria had shared all kinds of talk: business conferences to circumvent Jonah’s biases; girl talk about men and women; family chats about emergencies and achievements. But this early conversation now was feeling better than anytime they had talked.

Gloria split the tall can of Colt .45 between the two frosty mugs from the cooler, and they sat at the bar sipping their beer as Gloria lit up another Tareyton, blowing the smoke out of her mouth like a whore.

Then, reaching in her jacket pocket, Gloria pulled out two quarters and spun on the stool, hopped off and went over to the jukebox.

“Shoot, I don’t ever get to hear
my
song!” she complained lightly, and punched two buttons. “I started coming down here early to open up, but now I come down early just to get a little quiet time to be by myself and get myself together.”

“Humph,” Lena said. “I used to do that.”

Lena was talking to herself, but Gloria heard her.

“I know, Lena, I seen how you changed your life, baby. Ain’t no need for me to go down that same road.