Tina Mcelroy Ansa (6 page)

“Aw, Negro, that ain’t your song. ’Lonely Teardrops’ is yo’ song, fool!”

“Well, maybe I changed my song.”

“You can’t just up and do that whenever you feel like it. Then it don’t make no difference.”

“Well, Lena do it all the time.”

“We ain’t talking ’bout Lena McPherson, we talking ’bout yo’ black ass!”

When Lena stooped down and pushed the plug into the socket in the wall, the red and blue lights blinked on, the two separate stacks of records and CDs swiveled around and the music began to play.

The crimson and blue and pink lights from the machine played in dark corners of The Place and danced with the dust beams floating in the growing morning sun. It began to really look like a party in there.

Lena prided herself on having one of the best jukebox selections in Middle Georgia. She had even tracked down “Hotter than That” by Louis Armstrong, “Match Box Blues” by “Blind” Lemon Jefferson and some classic excerpts from Moms Mabley party albums on there, too, that made folks say, “Sh, sh, sh, quiet. Listen to this. Listen to this.”

The last laughter from a Redd Foxx album was winding down and then “Bring It on Home to Me” began to play, filling the large
L-shaped room and the liquor store next door with the sweet familiar sounds of Sam Cooke.

“Um, what do you know?” Lena said. “My song.”

The familiar music made The Place feel a bit more like its old self.

Lena smiled and began to sway by herself, doing the Stroll, to the thirty-year-old music right there on The Place’s postage-stamp-sized dance floor.

It was her song!

Feeling bold, she spun around smartly as if to face her partner. Ever since the near collision that morning, she had felt a little tipsy, a tad reckless, as if she had a buzz on. She wasn’t a good dancer. Never had been. Her lack of coordination had been a curse from the age of thirteen. Whenever she had passed the wide floor-length mirror in the upstairs hall at her parents’ home, she could see the reflection of her teenaged self and her Blessed Martin de Porres eighth-grade friends Gwen, Brenda, Marilyn, Carroll, Dorothy and Wanda before all of them except Gwen ceased speaking to her—trying again and again to teach her the latest dance steps before the next party.

“Lena, on your right foot, on your right foot!”

The thought of her teenaged friends evoked the scent of Noxema and Gwen’s White Gardenia perfume, and Lena thought she smelled it there in The Place until she realized it wasn’t a sweet scent she smelled at all. It was something else. This morning there was something more than the usual smell of old beer and cigarettes in the air.

Damn, Lena said to herself, this day is turning out to be just full of surprises, twists and turns. Even though the unexpected had caused such havoc in her life, she couldn’t help feeling a little thrill at the prospect of something new.

This spring morning there was a human scent mingled among the regular juke-joint odor, musky and strong but not unpleasant, like a sweaty man or an animal passing through the woods. She stopped dancing in her high-heeled mule tracks and stood dead still for a few seconds. She lifted her face and sniffed the air a couple of times like the deer that forded the river and came crashing through the woods that surrounded her house.

Lena sniffed again. It smelled like a man. A man who had been doing heavy work. Well, at least that proves they been doing work in here, Lena thought.

Then she went back to her dancing. It never crossed her mind how strange she might look dancing with herself at daybreak on the darkened, cluttered floor of The Place. She had done and seen and heard and said strange things all her life. Folks in Mulberry had always let her get away with strangeness.

As she swayed to the music, her eyes closed, her head thrown to the side the way dancers at The Place had held their heads for decades, she caught herself smiling. The new scent put her in the mind of the breeze on her neck. And she finally admitted to herself that the whiff of wind playing at her neck made her feel coquettish and whorish.

The feeling reminded her of Gloria back when she was a young barmaid. She’d tell Lena, home from college, “I’m a little piece of
leather, but I’m well put together.” Gloria always smelled of perspiration and perfume with a mole courtesy of Mabelline to the right of her nose.

“Sorry to be so late, sugar,” she would say hurriedly to Lena and The Place in general as she tied a big stiff white butcher’s apron over her purple minidress. “But I couldn’t find no clean panties this morning. Spent too much time looking for some ’cause I just knew I had to have a clean pair somewhere. But I couldn’t even find no emergency ones with holes in ’em or nothing. So I came on out without wearing none.”

She would pause to slip a sliver of Juicy Fruit between her painted purple-red lips and walk up to the counter and her day’s first customer. Reaching for the order pad she had hung on her apron sash, she would look over her bare shoulder at Lena and confide: “Been feeling right whorish all morning.”

Lena had on a pair of silk tap panties trimmed in ecru lace but that’s how the scent in the juke joint this morning made her feel … “right whorish.”

Too bad I don’t feel this way more often, she noted, and chuckling at the thought, spun herself lightly on the tiny uncluttered dance floor.

Lena felt at home there in what had once been the center of her family’s universe in the small town of Mulberry. For nearly half a century, someone named McPherson had gotten up with all the other early-rising working people in Mulberry and come downtown to open up The Place. For the majority of those years, it had been Lena’s mother, Nellie, who had arisen, prepared breakfast with Grandmama, gotten her children off to school and opened up each morning. Now, Lena didn’t have a family to care for, but with all of her other businesses and holdings, she rarely showed up at the juke joint and liquor store more than two or three times a week.

There didn’t seem to be enough hours in her lifetime—let alone in a day—to accomplish what was set before her.

She had been an early riser since she was in high school. Then it was ghosts and nightmares and witches riding her that kept her from sleeping soundly through the night. Now she got to bed late, too, so she had taught herself how to
use
her time. For more than two decades, she had been getting up before dawn to walk around her house and get started on her day. Lena had responsibilities.

There were things to do: Make phone calls to older folks who didn’t sleep much either. Send flowers or fruit or money for a sick customer or celebrating child or an ambitious elementary school teacher. In addition to advice and succor, she gave tangible gifts to those she loved and felt responsible for—a box of steaks, a set of tires, rent money.

Lena often saw trouble coming on the horizon and just knew that in a few days she would probably be faced with a “regular” in dire need of immediate healing or help. And she knew that when it came, the problem would arise at the worst possible time. So she had gotten in the habit of warding off those offenses with some preemptive strike that settled things down for a while: an unexpected Honey Baked ham, or a gift certificate from a store out at the Mulberry Mall, or a check to someone’s grandchild, or a new book of fiction for a discouraged young writer. Nothing big or flashy or spectacular.

Old women all over Mulberry bragged about the seventy-fifth birthday or the golden anniversary (even though their spouses were long dead) remembrance and call they had gotten from Lena McPherson.

“And it wasn’t no
dry card, neither,”
the old folks would say as they waved the accompanying check or gift certificate around under the noses of their neighbors.

Sister was the first one to call the practice “hush mouth.” But Lena had taken the expression on as her own. Several times a month, about once a week, she would sit down to her desk at her own house and do her hush-mouth duties. Ordering items on the phone from catalogs, writing what she considered little pieces of checks that she
knew might save someone’s life, calling florists and tracking down economy sizes of obscure curative lotions, ointments and plasters that her older friends and customers swore by.

Whenever Sister was running around her home in New Orleans doing a million things at once, taking care of this son or that son while functioning as the sole caregiver to her aging motherin-law even though her husband had brothers and sisters right in the city, making sure her entire household ran smoothly while preparing for her thrice-weekly lectures as well as the anthropology majors’ trip, she would compare herself to her busy, joy-giving, gift-giving friend.

“Girl, I’m so tired. I had to ’pull a Lena’ yesterday,” she’d tell her secretary as she dragged into her office just before an early morning class.

Even on nights—and there were plenty of them—when Lena was too tired to even plunge into the invigorating cool waves of her indoor swimming pool, or too behind in her paperwork to sit in her sauna and relax, she always found the energy and the time to go through her phone messages and see if anyone really needed her that night.

Most of the folks calling were people she had known all her life. There were no other folks on earth—now that her family was gone—that she cared more about.

“Lena McPherson? Shoot, I couldn’a made it lots of times if it hadn’a been for her.”

“Hell, me and my family wouldn’t have no roof over our heads if it wasn’t for Lena McPherson.”

“Lord, I couldn’a got my mama buried proper if it wasn’t for Lena.”

“Shoot, Lena McPherson the hand I fan with.”

She was beginning to feel about the same way her ousted customers did. She was missing the familiar smells, the sweet sweet sweet sexiness of an old R&B tune like “At Last” sung by Etta James on the jukebox, the loud sudden raucousness of a tipsy couple’s laughter.

Lena had no sooner thought of the song than the jukebox made a whirring noise and Etta James began singing.

Umm, Lena said to herself, now,
that’s
my song for real!

Dancing by herself through the makeshift aisles of the deserted Place reminded her of all that—the music, the laughter, the flirting and fighting, the love, the comfort, the sanctuary—all that The Place offered. And she determined again to tell Mr. Jackson that very morning that he and his crew needed to get cracking on this job and get out of there so she and Gloria could get The Place back open.

As she danced her way along the grill’s bar through the stacks of lumber and copper wiring, on to and through the piles of dusty, moldy Sheetrock, Lena tried to ignore the increasingly strong musky odor and the breeze on her neck inside the building where there was no source for a breeze.

This was shaping up to be the best time and the most relaxation she had had in a long time. Lena found so few places and opportunities to enjoy herself.

First thing that morning, she had seen a cat’s eye in the drain of her big shower wink, wink, winking at her, and had wondered just what the upcoming day held. This kind of thing happened all the time to Lena. An image—like the blinking cat’s eye—that wouldn’t go away, a flash of a memory, a lingering question from a dream, the image of a face in a cloud that looked familiar. Over the years, she had learned to control these images that had once controlled her by just rubbing her hand over her face and her braids and brushing it all away. Or at least most of it. But she couldn’t do that this morning.

As she continued to dance herself around the uncluttered spot in the middle of the bar, she felt almost caught up in a whirlwind. As she
continued to spin, she felt herself growing dizzy. Not from the twirling of her lone slow dance, but from the musky scent in the air.

As she danced, dipping and swaying to the words, “For you are mine, at last,” on the nickelodeon, the scent grew stronger and stronger and more distinctive.

“That smells like a man’s underarms,” Lena said dreamily to herself.

Then she laughed to herself.

“Now, that smells like a man’s crotch,” she said as she took another step and dip in her dance and another deep breath of the scent.

“That’s how he would smell behind his ears,” she concluded after stopping in midstep to sniff the air again.

Now the scent seemed to be wafting from a definite direction. Lena barely opened her dreamy eyes as she danced, gently, sensuously swaying her hips and shoulders to the music, down a path through tables, chairs, the mess of construction, smelling her way as she nearly sashayed toward the back wall.

She could barely make it out, but there seemed to be a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth stretched across a section of the wall. She danced toward it.

Still swaying to the music—“At Last” playing again because she wanted it to—she pulled the cloth down, stirring up clouds of dust and wood shavings, and exposed a huge gaping hole in the wall. She was so content at that moment, enjoying her dance so much, that at first she wasn’t really disturbed by the unexpected excavation Mr. Jackson and his crew seemed to be doing. But as soon as she saw what was behind the makeshift curtain and the wide jagged opening, about five by five feet, in the back wall of her establishment, a building she felt she knew inside out, she understood perfectly why Mr. Jackson had summoned her downtown at practically dawn and why his voice on her answering machine had had an eerie edge to it. The music was still playing on the nickelodeon, but she stopped dancing. Her purse slipped from her shoulder and landed on the floor with a tiny dusty
thump.
She just let it lie there in the dust.