Tina Mcelroy Ansa (30 page)

“Shoot, Lena, old thick-skinned lemons. I hate ’em. We need some a’ those good old ones we used to pluck from the trees down home in Flor’da. Lena, they was so juicy all you had to do to get the juice was to prick ’em. Didn’t even have to cut ’em. The juice would come skeetin’ out! That’s what we need fo’ this lemonade.”

He’d continue with the task because Lena would have mentioned wanting some ice-cold lemonade to take down to the river with them. When she protested that the tart-sweet drink was fine, he just frowned his doubt and shook his head slowly. Herman wouldn’t be satisfied until they drove around and found a farmer’s stand where the vendor had procured some real Florida lemons.

“I want it to be just right fo’ you, baby.”

And he meant it. He was pleased to please Lena so much and so naturally that she didn’t even notice how much he was for
her
, how much she enjoyed the loving attention, how much she had wanted just that kind of open, joyous, generous loving in her life.

Herman seemed finally to be the only one who didn’t constantly
want
something from her.

“Don’t you ever want anything, Herman?” Lena would ask. “Besides me, that is.” And she’d smile, bite her bottom lip with her top front teeth and giggle a deep sexy giggle that rubbed up against the side of Herman’s penis.

Herman would wait awhile, long enough for Lena to giggle again so he could feel it, then he’d shrug his heavy shoulders and say, “All I want is to make you happy, sugar. That makes me happy. As far as I’m concerned it makes the whole world happy.”

Lena was his whole world. That said of anyone else would have made him sound obsessive or smothering. But Herman was none of that. Lena was the focus of his revived life force, she was the only reason he was still hanging around Mulberry and life, and that was just fine with him. Lena thought he must have left his ego somewhere between this world and the next as he floated around for a hundred years.

She told herself she was just lucky. But Lena had lived her life in an efficiently schizophrenic way, using and enjoying the gifts of the caul, on the one hand, and pretending that there was no such thing on the other. It was why she was able to make love to Herman at night, have coffee with him the next morning, then go off to work as if she had not just kissed a ghost goodbye.

While they read or watched a movie or sat staring into the fire or the night, Herman would reach down and pull Lena’s feet onto his lap for a long slow massage for no reason other than he loved her. Lena would just sigh and let Herman do his handwork.

All the while he rubbed, kneaded, caressed and stroked her feet, he cursed and cussed the rows of beautiful high-heeled shoes that Lena couldn’t bear to part with.

“Damned high-heeled shoes,” he’d mutter once in a while as he massaged in earnest. “Those old pointed-toe high-heel mules you like so much is what did this,” he’d say with emphasis as he gently pulled on her toes. “They may make yo’ legs look pretty, but I hate them mules, Lena.”

He caressed her feet until the beginnings of hammer toes on her right foot had straightened out. With the creamy callused palms of his hands he planed along the inside of her feet above the instep to prevent bunions from forming.

“I ain’t gon’ have my baby’s feets hav’ta go under the knife,” he’d mutter to himself.

Sometimes, he would slide the flat of his big hand on up her leg from her instep, over her ankle, past her knee and up the inside of her thigh.

Then, he would touch her all up inside herself.

His touch was one of the first things Lena noticed about Herman. From the first time back in April when they formally met, Lena felt that he wasn’t touching her to get her attention or to punctuate a point or for any reason other than to make contact, to feel his skin on her skin. He touched her on her bare shoulder for no reason, just to touch her.

The skin that touched didn’t matter as long as it was his skin and hers. He told her, “Lena, I was always able to brush yo’ spirit once in a while. Now I’m happy to brush yo’ body, too. It’s a pure-T pleasure.”

It was a pure-T pleasure for her, too.

When Herman came, the whole world seemed to shiver and shift.

Sometimes, just to make her laugh, he would make the earth beneath them move when they came together.

And she
would laugh
and say in answer to his unspoken question, “Yeah, Herman, the earth
did move
for me.”

Oh, she loved him so much.

She began to take note of everything he enjoyed.

With a straight face, he would come up to her as she ground strong coffee for him in their kitchen, kiss her on the neck and say, “Lena. Let me take care a’ that thang fo’ you.” Then, forgetting the coffee altogether, he would proceed to “take care a’ that thang” for her right there on the kitchen counter.

Herman had to have his coffee in the morning. Lena thought at first it was the caffeine he was craving. But as she watched him watching her each morning measuring the gourmet coffee she had bought especially for him, putting the beans in the small handheld Braun coffee grinder some other man had given her, grinding the dark aromatic beans fine, fine, fine to nearly a powder, she realized he liked the ritual of his woman making him coffee every morning as much as he enjoyed the black strong brew.

What Herman especially liked was watching her. Lena noticed he always appeared when she was washing herself. As she squatted over the bidet, she would feel him materialize on the other side of the white swinging wooden door. She couldn’t see him, but she knew he could see her through the door. And she began to like the idea of being watched as much as he enjoyed watching her.

She would see him reach forward and pull open the door with a smile of lust and expectation and excitement playing around under his mustache.

Lena found herself as excited by this turn of events as Herman obviously was. His dick was packing the front of his old-fashioned work pants to bursting.

“Damn, baby,” he told her often, “if you don’t stop going ’round here so cute, I ain’t gonna have no pants left.”

Lena would grunt like an old woman surprised at her own still-vibrant sexuality when he talked that way. She reveled in the idea that she was the cause of all his dick-split pants.

Herman loved to watch her slather on the thick white creamy rich lotion she bought from one of her catalog companies. He had even entered one of the bottles of lotion after deciphering the ingredients from the side of the bottle and allowed himself to be rubbed into and absorbed by Lena’s skin.

When Lena realized she was slathering Herman all over her still-damp and warm body, she dropped the glass bottle to the floor in ecstasy.

What truly amazed and delighted Lena was Herman seemed to get as much pleasure watching her fully clothed. He would appear in the kitchen and find her standing over the sink eating a piece of juicy melon. When Herman would catch sight of her with the ruby-red juice dribbling out the sides of her mouth and down her lovely planed cheeks, his mind went immediately to the Polaroid camera in the next room. Even with his ghost’s mind, Herman could not preserve the essence of what Lena looked like as she leaned over that sink, her breasts resting insouciantly on the soapstone rim of the basin.

It would make him so hot he would come up behind her and ask her to “Please, ma’am” drop her pants. When Lena obliged, dropping the slice of watermelon into the sink at the same time, Herman would drop his own brand new Levi 501s and deftly slip his dick into Lena, who would lean over the rough sink’s edge a little bit to make sure she had all of him.

Herman reveled in being a part of Lena’s life.

“Who braid yo’ hair, Lena?” he asked one day when he saw her examining her hair where new growth had left her braids wobbly at the roots.

“Sister used to. That would be our excuse to get her away from all those men in her life. She would tell Douglas and the boys, ‘Lena need her hair done. You know I’m the only one who can do it.’ Jesus, before
you came, Herman, she was the only family I had. Then, she’d hop on a plane.”

But with Sister out of the country and since Herman had appeared, Lena hadn’t even given her thick burnished hair a thought. When she was ripping and running with Herman outside—digging and planting in the yard, grooming or feeding the horses, jumping in the Cleer Flo’ pond with all her clothes on—Lena just pulled her braids back in a barely controlled ponytail in a gold elastic band. Herman liked her braids like that. He’d walk by her as she studied monthly business records on the computer or as she stood at the sink stringing pole beans the way her father and Herman liked them and pull her hair as he passed.

“Shoot, Lena, this ain’t no
ponytail.
This a hoss’s tail.” And he would give her hair another sweet soft yank.

He came over and examined the roots of her hair along with her.

“I guess it does need braiding again,” Lena said wistfully. She missed Sister and didn’t look forward to finding a beautician to do it in Mulberry. “Maybe I’ll get Chiquita or one of my other children to do it. Young girls with young, nimble fingers are good at braiding.”

“Well, my fingers may not be young,” he replied, “but
I’ll
braid yo’ hair fo’ ya, Lena. I’d be happy to.”

“Herman,” she said, surprised and proud. “You know how to braid hair?”

And Herman just nodded his head.

“Damn, Herman, it is the truth, you can do just about
anything!!”

He smiled and kind of shrugged his strong shoulders as if it were nothing.

“I’ll do it fo’ you now if you want me to.”

Lena hardly let him finish his sentence. She jumped up and headed toward her bedroom in search of the big red comb she used to scratch out Herman’s thick head of hair, stopping to lean down to give him a quick kiss on the lips just for being so damn wonderful.

He combed and plaited her hair as if he knew she was tender-headed.
But as much pleasure as Herman seemed to take in her long thick braids, Lena knew that the sensation could not possibly compare with the joy and erotic pleasure she got from burying her face in
his
mat of hair. Each time he passed a mirror, he would grab at his hair and say loudly, “I sho’ do need a haircut.”

The first couple of times he said it, Lena jumped to protest.

“Herman, don’t you dare think about cutting your hair! I love the way your hair feels just like it is!”

“Well, if you feels that way,” Herman said slowly as he inspected himself in the mirror, playing with her, “I guess I’ll just leave it alone.”

“I don’t know how you could even think of cutting off that old thick motherland hair. Shoot, look at it.” Lena would pretend to still be a bit miffed with him for considering such a thing.

“Good thang you stopped me, Lena, baby,” he’d continue to tease. “I was ’bout to cut it off right now.”

Herman was like that. He wanted to be right now there in Mulberry in 1995 tramping all over her property by the river, discovering all the magic that Lena had made and never known about. This was what was important to him, and he felt himself disappear a bit each time she asked him what was going to become of them.

“Lena, baby,” he would say, “ ’round the times that the floods come th’ough here last year, I didn’t have no idea I would ever have you in this life or the next. I know you only been ’live forty-som’um years, but it feel like I been lovin’ ya fo’ a hundred. And now I
got
ya. I don’t care how many mo’ eternities or moments I keep goin’. All I got is right now, sugar. All you got is right now, too. And that’s enough fo’ me.”

Then, he would kiss her or touch her or blow her a kiss that actually landed on her cheek with a SMAK sound.

Lena would lie against this large, hard, husky man—her back to his shoulder and side—and feel him breathe as if she were lying against a large animal like an elephant or a rhino. Lena just knew at
those times, feeling the strength of his breathing—something he probably just did to make himself comfortable and human-like to her—feeling the strength of his bulk, that Herman could move the world with his shoulders if he cared to.

They tried to act as if they were not already so intimate with each other, but it was useless. Herman already knew Lena much too well to play like he didn’t. And Lena, freed from seeing scenes of Herman’s life, his good moments and his bad, was making love for the first time in her life with pure abandon. There was no room for pretense in her love for Herman.

When they made love, “merged,” Herman called it, he was able to go into her mind in a way he was never able to achieve when they were just talking or holding hands. But the extraordinary thing was that Lena could do the same with Herman. She, too, entered his ghost’s mind when he drifted into her subconscious.

It was why every gesture Herman made toward Lena struck her as so intimate, meant just for the two of them.

Looking up at the May night sky full of twinkling stars, Herman would grunt, “Umph.”

“What, Herman?” Lena asked, lying beside him in the darkness on the deck outside her bedroom. For weeks after he came, he had gone about the house cutting off lights all the time, muttering, “Lena leave lights burnin’
everywhere!!”

It wasn’t just the waste of electricity and the earth’s resources that bothered him. It was the glare in his face at night when he wasn’t reading or doing some intricate work. And for the most part, he kept that detailed work for daylight hours.

It was the unnaturalness of all those floodlights outside and all those fluorescent lights and shaded lamps and track lighting. Too much for him. That’s what he would say.

“Lena, baby, all this light too much fo’ me. Why don’t we just let it get dark sometime.”

And they did. Lying quietly by an oak fire that Herman had rustled
up and Lena had lit when a little cool snap came through in late May or sitting in the comfortable shellacked cypress Adirondack chairs on the deck watching the sun go down and darkness fall.

In midsummer, Lena and Herman would sit under the dark sky night after night down on the pier on the river, or on the deck outside the pool room, or in the covered swing on the rise of the bluff counting the shooting stars that arched over Mulberry for more than a week in July.