Playing Hard To Get Page 26

  “You cannot hide from the truth. You know this, child,” he said in his way. “Just the same as the clouds know they belong in the sky and the birds know they belong in the trees, you know your heart belongs to—”

  “Me,” Tamia said. “My heart belongs to me.”

  “That is the lonely way.”

  “Well, until I can find someone who respects me and respects my heart, it will be the only way.”

  “You are very wise,” Baba said, waving at a baby who had seen his long beard and smiled. “It is in your eyes. One day you will lead a man to enlightenment.”

  “Thank you, Baba,” Tamia said. She hadn’t heard him say that to anyone else.

  “But until you can help them, you’ve got to accept your own enlightenment.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What is the symbol of return? Of knowing your past? Your essence?”

  “The bird,” Tamia answered. “Sankofa.”

  “Is that the only symbol? The only one?”

  “I—”

  “The other is what Europeans call the symbol of the heart,” Baba revealed. “The Adinkra. The heart and the bird. Child, you must know that your past, who you are inside, is love. There is no past without love. And without the past, there is no—”

  “Me,” Tamia confirmed.

  “Wise,” Baba said. “Without love, the Afrikaan is a bird without wings, the cloud with no sky. There is no reason.”

  “But, Baba,” Tamia said respectfully, “please forgive me for asking, but please explain what love has to do with Malik and I?”

  “In your past, you became upset when you saw something?” he asked, but it was more of a statement for Tamia to confirm.

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you be upset, child, if you are not in love? Why would you care?”

  “I…wasn’t…”

  “That is not for me to hear. It is for you to understand.”

  Baba stood up and began to walk away. Tamia turned to see where he was going.

  “Baba?” she called but when she turned Malik was standing there. “Oh, no.” She turned back around.

  “Just listen to me,” he pleaded, trying to sit beside her on the bench, but Tamia stood up.

  “Listen to what? Why?” Tamia asked.

  “I can explain what you saw. Why she was there.”

  “I’m an adult, Malik. I know why she was there. I’m not blind.”

  “I was confused,” Malik said. “Things were the way they’d been between Ayo and I for so long that I was confused. I thought I was supposed to be with her, but when I saw you, I knew it wasn’t true. I knew what I was feeling was more than just play. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “Hurt me?” Tamia laughed. “Hurt me? You can’t hurt me. We’re just friends, right? Sister and brother? No…we’re actually attorney and client.”

  “If that’s all I can get, I accept it. Just talk to me,” he said.

  “You want me to talk? Fine. What I have to say to you is that you’d better get yourself together. Next week is your hearing and we’re going to court. You need to clean yourself up—”

  “You mean put on a monkey suit? You know I’m not—”

  “You asked me to talk,” she shouted. “Clean up. I don’t care what you do but I know why you need to do it. If you don’t get it tight and come into that courtroom looking like the leader everyone knows you to be, you can forget about the Freedom Project. If you go in there talking about how you’re guilty and fuck the system and police and whoever, the DA is going to bury you and then the Freedom Project will be shut down. So, before you go and make any more of your empty, stupid statements, you think about that. You think about what’s important to you. Your ego. Or your freedom.”

  Tamia picked up the bag of tulips she was carrying to plant in Kali’s garden and left.

  

  While Sister Myrtle Glover was the first woman of First Baptist Troy ever met, prune pie–making Mother Wildren was the first woman of First Baptist she’d ever met and hated. Back then, when Troy walked into an after-church dinner, Mother Wildren was still Sister Wildren and she had refused to put more than three string beans on Troy’s barren dinner plate. The feisty senior promised Troy that it would be her first and last visit as Pastor Hall’s special guest, explained that one of her offspring was to marry the church’s single leader, and admonished Troy for wearing such a short skirt and sitting on the first pew of the balcony.

  This whole bad beginning added up to Troy raising an invisible middle finger whenever Mother Wildren was in her path. She needed allies but didn’t care to make Mother Wildren one of them. The old woman had made her position clear and hadn’t even propped a pillow in the presence of the First Lady to prove otherwise since she had been given the invisible crown.

  Saddled with the baggage of Myrtle’s promised house call, which was less than five hours away, and the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing she could do to get the money to save herself, Kyle’s good name, and maybe First Baptist altogether, Troy found herself in the church, trying to pray again. For no reason other than the fact that she’d seen people do it on television growing up, Troy was wearing all black and sitting in the first seat of a pew in the middle of the empty church. While First Baptist wasn’t a Catholic church, she had a rosary set she’d purchased at Betsey Johnson stashed into a Bible—and she would’ve had a Koran if she’d seen that on television too. Her eyes were closed tight, but then she heard a door open and turned to see Mother Wildren wobbling down the aisle with her cane clacking against the ground.

  Troy nodded pleasantly, hoping the old woman would keep moving—she was probably a part of Sister Glover’s little scheme. Heck, she’d probably given her the idea. But after the woman stopped and sat in the pew behind her, she knew she’d have to turn around and chat.

  “You know ain’t nobody supposed to be in the sanctuary,” Mother Wildren said, her voice wobbly with age, but still direct and demanding. “Pastor say ain’t nobody supposed to be in here unless he knows it.”

  “Well, it might be my last time, so I don’t think he’ll mind,” Troy rattled off what first came to mind without turning around.

  “I guess that’s supposed to make me feel some kind of way,” Mother Wildren said. “I’m supposed to ask you why you said it and care….” Now both Mother Wildren and First Lady Hall’s eyes were rolling. There was silence. “I’m too old and too busy to care about what’s wrong with you. I’ve got a husband, three kids, five grands, and seven great-grands. All of them are living. You know what that means?” Troy was quiet, but she still didn’t turn around. “I’ve got sixteen children and ten things to care about for each and every day until I die or one of them goes first.”

  Troy wanted to laugh and she was sure later she would but her nerves were too tight.

  She turned to Mother Wildren.

  “Why are you here, child?” Mother Wildren said and just then, being called “child”—even by Mother Wildren—was the most comforting thing Troy had ever heard. It felt like a blue blanket over her chest as she napped, a can of chicken noodle soup in her stomach, her mother’s hand around her shoulders. Troy started to cry. And in ten minutes Mother Wildren knew everything about the money, Troy’s shopping, her failing to get saved, that she was afraid to have sex with Kyle, and Myrtle’s plan of divide and conquer. While the outrageous outpouring might have worn someone else out, the woman with so many children and so much experience, who’d only walked into the church to tell Troy the sanctuary needed to be empty, just sat back and frowned.

  “Sounds like a great big old circus to me,” Mother Wildren said and Troy nodded. “But”—Mother Wildren looked through Troy’s show of helplessness and right into her—“the good news about it all is that you’re a woman.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the circus isn’t complete with a ringmaster. You’re busy in here being a part of the show, when you should be running it.”

&n
bsp; “But I am in the house of the Lord,” Troy explained. “I am trying to pray. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”

  “You ain’t praying, child,” Mother Wildren said. “You’re putting on a show. Playing with God.” She took the rosary and Bible.

  “What are you doing?”

  “My mama, a backwoods Mississippi girl, who picked cotton her whole life, raised fifteen children, and buried two husbands, prayed more than any person I’ve ever known,” Mother Wildren said. “And you know what? For all of her praying, I never once saw her on her knees. See, when you have fifteen children and a field of cotton so big you can’t see your way to the road, you don’t have time for rosary beads and Bibles and rules about how you can and should praise your God. For my mama, prayer came in the kitchen when she was cooking. Prayer came in the fields when she was picking. Prayer came at the living room table when she was teaching each one of her kids how to read because she knew we’d never get out of there if we didn’t. If we read a line from the Bible, she praised God right there. Jump and say hallelujah.” Mother Wildren looked at Troy sitting in front of her. “That’s how she prayed. That’s how she got saved and that’s how I got saved. And the only way you’re going to get there, the only way you’re going to hear the word the Lord has for you is to stop worrying about what other folks have to say about your relationship with your God and go to him alone. The veil is broken, child. You go alone and you lay your burdens down.”

  Troy turned and looked at the altar.

  “Just talk,” Mother Wildren urged her softly.

  Troy sat back and breathed out, her chest easing into the back of the pew. She kept telling herself to relax and clear her mind but the more she thought this, the more she thought.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder.

  “Talk,” Mother Wildren repeated.

  And aloud right there, in the church for only two people and one God to hear, Troy prayed for her marriage, for her husband, for herself. She prayed for a clean heart. For clarity. For vision. For truth. For the courage to love even those who didn’t love her and worked against her. And she didn’t even know she was thinking that. It just came out. Just lifted itself out of her and then her eyes closed and without her noticing, Mother Wildren’s hand was gone. Tears fell from Troy’s eyes. She prayed for safety. For her church. For her family. For sins. For her past. For her future.

  And then she was on her feet. Rocking in space. Her hands were above her head. Her eyes were closed as she stared into a blanket of blackness that erased her worry and eased her pain.

  When Troy said all she could say and she was just standing there, wrapped up in her own arms, she opened her eyes and exhaled from the bottom of her gut. She wasn’t changed. She was changing. She was open.

  “Amen,” she said. And she heard, not in a whisper, not in a thin or faint voice, as clear as if someone was standing right beside her, “I love you.”

  “What?” Troy said, turning to Mother Wildren. “What did you say?”

  Mother Wildren was sitting where Troy had left her, her mouth closed, holding a slip of paper in her hand.

  “I didn’t say anything, child,” she said.

  Troy didn’t look around the room again. She just knew then where the voice had come from. And while, just ten minutes earlier, the Troy who was holding the rosary and Bible might have felt tingles of fear up her spine at this idea, this changing Troy said again, “Amen.”

  “Here,” Mother Wildren said, handing to Troy the paper she was holding. It was a check for $5.

  “What’s this for?”

  “So you can start paying back the church,” Mother Wildren said. “Now you’re five dollars closer.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “I didn’t ask you what I had to do. I just did it,” she added. “When you were praying, I was writing. God put that on my heart.”

  “Thank you,” Troy said, hugging her old foe.

  “Now, let me tell you how to handle Ms. Myrtle,” Mother Wildren said. “You go and you talk to your husband. You take this to him and you have the first and last word where that’s concerned. That man loves you. There ain’t many men out there that are willing to put their wives first, above all others, and he did that for you. Didn’t matter what we said. And, you know, I think that’s why we respect him. Now, you go and put him first and that’ll put Myrtle in her place. Never let another woman tell your husband anything about you.”

  “Will do,” Troy agreed.

  “And as far as the bedroom is concerned—”

  “No, you don’t have to. I—”

  “No, First Lady,” Mother Wildren said, “I might be old, but I’m not broken yet.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, you stop letting these old ideas run your bedroom. If your man wants to get freaky and he’s acting right, get freaky. Get your freak on!”

  “Mother Wildren!” Troy blushed, holding her hand over her heart.

  “The Lord wants you to be fruitful and he wants you to be happy,” she said. “What you and your husband do in the bedroom is between you two. Now, I want you to go downtown to West Fourth Street and see a man named Xavier. He works at the Pink—”

  “Whoa, Mother Wildren, I can’t!” Troy stopped her.

  “Oh, you’ve been there?”

  “Yes, ma’am…”

  “Okay, well, I have too. How do you think I’ve been married for so long?”

  The women laughed and Mother Wildren grabbed Troy’s hand.

  “Now, let’s get out of here. Pastor don’t want nobody in the church and I—”

  “I know…I know.”

  

  The trouble with planting flowers in someone else’s garden is that you tend to forget about your own. Tamia would find this out when she walked, using her own two feet, from the Columbus Circle subway station to her front door at Trump Towers.

  Full of so much pride she was able to push her trouble over Malik out of her mind for a few minutes, she reveled in the power of her new freedom, of her acceptance of the world and the way things were—the way they really were, not how she’d wanted them to be—that she was nearly singing when she walked into the door.

  Bancroft looked past her, out into the drive for a car to connect her to, but there was none.

  “Finally all the way off her bloody rocker,” Bancroft thought, watching the spectacle Tamia now seemed to cause every day when she walked into the building with her bald head and sari. “Walking today, madame?” Bancroft said understatedly as Tamia walked past him.

  “Hopefully from now on,” Tamia said, smiling. “Living things need to spend more time in the sun. Don’t you think?”

  “Certainly. Maybe not all of us. Those with Nordic blood…burn.”

  Tamia nodded.

  “Good point.” She handed Bancroft a package of incense she’d made at Kali’s after planting the tulips.

  “Why, thank you.” Bancroft took the sticks and peered at them strangely.

  “Just burn them,” Tamia instructed him. “You’ll love it.”

  “Yes, of course.” From behind his back, Bancroft produced a thick envelope bearing Tamia’s name. “And for you. It came today by certified mail.”

  “What is it?” Tamia asked, taking the envelope.

  Though she read the contents of the letter sent from her bank on the elevator, Tamia wasn’t able to respond to its declaration until she was upstairs and hidden in the confines of her residence.

  This moment had been sixty days in the making. Tracings of its possibilities had been mounting in her life for days. Standing in the foyer, draped in a sari and as bald as the day she was born, Tamia remembered the one thing she was trying to forget—Charleston.

  “Sixty days late?” Tamia said. “He stopped paying the mortgage?”

  In seconds the sad twist of fate actualized itself in Tamia’s mind. There was no need to consider how she could pay back the bank’s missing $20,000, late fees, and taxes. She just couldn’t.
Instead, her mind bathed itself in a river of memory—how this moment had come to her. In flashes, she saw Charleston and then Malik and wondered how this all began. When she walked into the office that day after seeing Maria in the bathroom and then the women looking on in the hallway—was it his face, his voice, or his scent that she’d encountered first? And how had it pulled her so far and so fast away from the person she was once so confident she was?

  

  Venus Jenkins-Hottentoten-Hoverslagen-Jackson was waiting in a chair at the back of a dark restaurant, on a questionable side of town, wearing big black glasses and a white and gold fleur-delis-print scarf wrapped around her head.

  “Memorial Day passed without me knowing?” was all Tasha said when she took a seat before Venus at the table. “I know I’ve been busy, but I thought it was a week or so away.”

  “What are you talking about?” Venus whispered, taking the glasses off and looking around the room all suspicious.

  “The white scarf…you look like the Flying Nun or something. What’s up with the whole getup? And why did you ask me to meet you here? Why did you ask me to meet you, period?” Tasha looked around for any bugs she could find on the ground. Her get-up-and-go30 account was far from running low and she wasn’t even considering subjecting herself to this low level of culinary cracker barrel.

  “Well, I guess you want to get right to it,” Venus said as a waitress with three teeth and a Bon Jovi bandanna over her greasy and no doubt dirty hair placed a menu on the table before Tasha.

  “You can keep the menu.” Tasha handed the menu back. “And don’t bother to bring water.” She looked back at Venus. “Of course I want you to get to the point so I can get up out of here. God forbid someone sees me here or takes a picture. People will think Lionel lost his contract.”