Playing Hard To Get (27 page)

4. Take care of you: Continue to focus on your needs and ensure that while you’re dating, that’s NOT ALL you’re doing. Don’t put all of your stock into getting a man and getting married and getting a house, and then a baby, and then a dog. Other areas of your life need attention, and focusing on them will make you more attractive because you won’t be sitting by the phone or always available. You’ll be too busy being busy. Focus on your mind, body, and soul. Build relationships with friends and family. Reconnect with your children. Reconnect with yourself. And your God.

5. Let it go or take the leap: If you realize that he’s not taking charge or he’s just not that excited about you, let it go and move on. Don’t ask questions or try to figure it out. Don’t accept excuses for missed calls or dates. Don’t sleep with him, thinking things will change. Just move on. The diet worked and you figured out that he’s not that interested. But if he is, you can—take the leap into love…sweet love. You’ve found a man worth your time and saw that he kind of liked you too. But instead of jumping all in and giving him “the best that you’ve got,” you took your time and eased up on him! You’ve been taking care of yourself. You’ve been making it clear that you have standards and set limitations as to how far he could get with you without actually getting with you. And guess what—he liked it. And, therefore, he now likes you….

Floors are hard. Not just a little hard. Really hard. Especially after three hours of sitting in silence, your bottom so confused by your position it gives in and moves over to your hips, leaving nothing but posterior bone and floorboards connected.

Tamia hadn’t felt this kind of pain in her bottom since she’d pledged her sorority over ten years ago. But even then, sitting on the floor for so long wasn’t as bad, as her bottom was much more firm and unable to wiggle off to the side.

It was meditation time again.

Only now Baba wasn’t wearing his white cloth and there was no gong. Just three women, Baba, and his books sat in the middle of the floor at the Freedom Project breathing each other’s air as they “began this long journey together,” which was what Baba said. “The journey begins with a single step,” Baba said in the middle of a list of proverbs. “And this one we take together—one with the other. We must hear each other’s hearts beating.”

Fatimah and Tanya were the women flanking her sides. Over the days they’d been spending together, preparing for their journey with Baba, Tamia had learned that Fatimah was a school-teacher from Brooklyn. She’d started taking Swahili at the center a few weeks earlier and just like Tamia, she met Baba and her life was forever changed. While doing community service in an elder’s organic garden, they laughed about how Baba spoke in constant riddles and that most of the time they were so busy trying to understand his new point, they were forgetting his last point. Tanya was the daughter of one of the men who rented the building to Malik. One day when she was collecting rent, she’d decided to sit in on one of Baba’s classes. She was back the next day, and the day after that. It was like she had to have something in the building. And she was trying to figure out what it was.

While they were just beginning what Baba called their transcendence to a higher self, none of the women had eaten solid food in seven days. Baba was a strict vegan who ate a diet of only raw food. The women, or “sister circle,” as the people at the project called them, were surviving on a diet of distilled water, lemons, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. Explaining the fasting process would help them connect with their physical strength, he told them that if they passed through the initial days of hunger, by day five, they’d have clearer skin, actually feel nausea around the food they once enjoyed, and begin to see most of the things in their lives more clearly.

While Tamia could confirm that this information was correct, Baba’s idea of being able to work through bodily pain during meditation was proving wrong. The longer she sat, the longer she hurt and the longer she hurt, the longer she wondered when Baba was going to call off the meditation.

By hour five, when Tamia could take no more, she realized something—in all of her anger, she’d been so busy being angry at Baba for making her sit for so long, she’d forgotten that her bottom was hurting. In fact, she couldn’t feel it anymore. She couldn’t feel anything. It was like her mind was just hovering. It was being held in her body, but for the first time she realized that it wasn’t attached to anything at all.



“You be careful with Baba,” Malik said, walking out of the project with Tamia. They were headed to a live foods bar that served a peppermint tea Baba would allow on Tamia’s diet. “I once saw him convince a dog to run out in traffic.”

“Did he die? Did the dog get hit?” Tamia cried. For some reason she’d been pretty sensitive lately. Beneath the African dress she was wearing, she had on a red, black, and green tank top. Though she thought it was odd that not one of the colors in the outfit matched, Tanya had put the outfit together for her and she was proud that her sister would do such a thing. She also allowed her to put wooden beads in her ears and a medallion bearing an ankh around her neck.

“No. But he was pretty messed up. I never saw him go back into traffic again.”

“Maybe that was the point,” Tamia concluded and with that Malik saw that she was learning one of the first rules of the circle—always protect the father.

He wanted to laugh. To smile. To sing. It was funny. Amazing. Perplexing that someone like Tamia, like who he’d thought Tamia was, had been changing so much, so fast. While he hadn’t told anyone of his doubts, when Tamia said she wanted to join one of Baba’s enlightenment circles, he’d thought maybe she was just another bougie sister having a bad day. She wanted a walk on the wild side. To connect with the people. Within forty-eight hours, she’d be back on her grind. Back in the city. That was what he’d thought. But that wasn’t what was happening.

Tamia stopped walking when the two of them made it to the curb in front of the project.

“Why are you stopping?” Malik asked. “The subway is around the corner.”

“That subway?” Tamia repeated in a way that clarified for both of them that she had no intention of riding the underground locomotive.

“You don’t ride the subway, do you?” Malik asked, ready to take back everything he was just thinking about Tamia.

“I have…once before.”



Tamia wasn’t exactly open about how long it had been since she had been on a subway, but when she and Malik were standing on the platform, she actually considered that maybe she should have said something. Baba was correct; because she wasn’t eating, her body became nauseous at the idea of stuffing her mouth, but what he hadn’t told her was that her senses overall would become more sensitive as the days went by. Unfortunately, she was realizing this in the subway. As trains whizzed by, so did scents. Old, new, dead, and alive and drenched in sweat. She smelled it all and by the time the train came to gather her and Malik to take them to their next stop, she couldn’t imagine drinking tea, much less watching him eat anything.

“You okay?” Malik asked, looking at her as if he was wanting to protect her in some way.

“I’ll be okay.”

He put his arm around Tamia to keep her steady as they walked onto the crowded train. She felt she would fall right into him—and it wasn’t because of the smells. It was his body.

“I can’t believe you don’t ride the subway. This place is the underworld of the center of the world. The blood of Gotham,” Malik said.

“Gotham? Did you just say Gotham?” She looked up at him and prayed he wouldn’t see her sudden alertness as a reason to move his arm.

“Yes. I was a big Batman fan growing up. Had the PJs. The mask,” he said, laughing as the train wiggled through a tight tunnel. “My dad even bought me one of those Batman lights one year. I shined it out onto the street until it went out one night.”

“Really?” Tamia laughed too. “I didn’t peg you for a Batman fan.” Tamia paused. “I hadn’t pegged you for more than a man who loved the Freedom Project.”

“Sad news alert!” he started. “I grew up like most people. My dad was a private investigator. My mom was a bread maker.”

“You said was. Did they both pass away?”

“Yeah,” Malik revealed. “My dad worked a lot. My mom didn’t. She started seeing some man who lived around the corner behind Pop’s back. The man shot drugs. He died of HIV. A year later my mother died. Two years after that my dad died. A whole circle of black folks wiped out because one brother was trying to feed his family—put his son through college.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Tamia said.

“Don’t be. It saved my life. It helped me save lives.” He snatched a seat when two men dressed completely alike got up and exited the train. He didn’t sit down, though. He simply stood before the seat so Tamia could have it.

“So, that’s how you came to start the Freedom Project?” Tamia asked.

“Yes. After my father got really sick and he had to stop working—his last contract was with your firm—he asked me if I wanted to do something crazy,” Malik said. “I was fresh out of college, bored, and angry. I said yes.”

“What did he do?”

“He sold everything we owned on eBay and we started putting the plans together for the Freedom Project,” he said. “At first it was supposed to be a place where brothers could come and find work. But then some sister said they wanted to get help too. Then Baba turned up one day. Then I started teaching a history class. Then my father died.”

Tamia and Malik would never make it to the live food bar and they would never discuss a thing about his case that day. While days of interviews and information gathering the next week would provide Tamia with more than enough information she’d need to handle any surprises at Malik’s hearing, where she was still trying to convince him to plead not guilty, on that unseasonably hot Harlem afternoon, the attorney and the client decided to stay in the coolness underground and just ride the subway all day. They were talking, building, vibing, and just stealing glimpses at each other as the world seemed to stand still for a second.

“Yo, let’s get off here,” Malik insisted, holding the train door open at one of the stops. “My man Badu sells incense down here. I could get some stacks for the store.”

Following behind Malik as he searched the station for his friend, Tamia chuckled at the idea of Malik’s knowing someone named Badu who sold incense. Tasha was a mess, but the woman was dead-on about this one.

“Brother Badu! What up, fam?” Malik hugged a man wearing a long white robe. He was carrying a crate of every kind of incense Tamia had ever seen. All colors and sizes and lengths.

“Blessings from Jah,” Badu said, bowing to Malik.

“Ashay. Ashay,” Malik said, bowing in return. “Brother Badu, this is Tamia.”

“Greetings, sister,” Badu said, bowing again, but this time his eyes were focused on something behind Malik and Tamia.

“Greetings.”

Tamia turned to see an overweight Asian woman with pigtails, dancing with a hula hoop. No music, no crowd, no reason. Dressed in a blue and white sundress that made her look like Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz,
she was dancing and hopping in and out of the hula hoop.

Tamia smiled at the odd scene, half listening to Malik and Badu talk about a conscious-living Web site.

“Who is she?” Tamia asked without turning around.

“They call her Ms. Lolly,” Badu explained, his energy turning to agitation.

“She’s funny,” Tamia said.

“Yeah, and she’s ruining my action,” Badu said. “I just wish she’d move somewhere else. Find another station.”

“She looks harmless.”

The woman removed the hula hoop from her waist and started jumping through it like a jumprope. The pigtail wig she was wearing almost fell off. It was New York culture at its most real and Tamia could not look away.

“She rakes up on the weekend,” Badu complained. “She doesn’t even have music. What’s the point? Man, people in New York will look at anything.”

Tamia nodded. He was right.



While Tamia was wrapping her mind around an ancient rite, Tasha was trying to wrap her body in an ancient girdle. The rumors were all true: Dr. Miller had the hands of perfection. And just two weeks after her surgery, Tasha could see little swelling. In fact she was already two sizes smaller than she’d been when she’d gotten on that table. Her stomach was almost caved in and she could actually see through the middle of her legs when she looked in the mirror. It was a pure miracle and she was still achy in some places and bruised in others. Tasha’s only regret was that she hadn’t gotten her ankles and cheeks done.

The downside of the deal was that to keep the swelling to a minimum, she had to wear a special full-body girdle Dr. Miller ordered from Brazil. The stretched-out rubber band was like a Slinky around her body; it formed her shape into the perfect hourglass, but there was a lot of heavy lifting involved and each time Tasha struggled to get in and out of the thing, she considered leaving it on for the rest of her life.

Wrestling to get the girdle back up over her newly flat belly in the bathroom stall in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, she resigned that she would have to cut a hole in the crotch when she got home. Then she could use the bathroom and not have to take the thing off. Next, she’d figure out how to take a shower.

“Everything okay in there?” Lynn asked when Tasha finally walked out of the bathroom, scratching at the tips of the girdle.

“Of course,” Tasha answered. “I just needed to fix my eye concealer.”

“Eye concealer?” Lynn looked amazed. “What would you need any of that for? You’re beautiful. Your eyes are so sexy.” She winked at Tasha playfully.

“Thank you,” Tasha said, nearly purring at the string of kind words. She’d heard so many compliments from Lynn over the weeks they’d been drinking and eating and shopping in the city, she was really growing to like the girl. And not just in a casual gassociates
²⁷
way. Tasha thought maybe she was really making a new friend.