Hanging on a String Read online

  The Wills family was large, loud, and West Indian. Dahlia had four brothers and three sisters, and all the children still came home for Mrs. Wills’s famous Sunday dinners. I envied Dahlia those Sunday dinners—complete with curried chicken, rice and peas, political arguments, and family gossip, with Dahlia’s nieces and nephews running around wild and free. Our family dinners were usually spent with my mother telling me what she thought I could improve. My mother and I loved each other, but we knew how to get on each other’s nerves. I’m sure there were times my mother wondered if we were related.

  “I called Trevor,” I told her.

  “What?” Dahlia’s voice cracked through the receiver. “No. Tell me you didn’t just say what I thought you did.”

  Chester’s death was apparently forgotten for the moment. I didn’t answer.

  “Why?” Dahlia asked.

  I sighed. “I just wanted to talk.”

  “You could have called me,” Dahlia replied. “You could have called your sister. You could have called your dry cleaners. Anybody. Jasmine, honey, you’ve got to let go. It’s been like, what, three years since the divorce.”

  “Four,” I said miserably. “It’s been four years.”

  “Damn. Has it been that long?”

  “Yes. Four years, three months, and fifteen days, but who’s counting?” I joked.

  “Well, what did he have to say? I can’t imagine that he had anything supportive to say about the death of your ex-boyfriend. He never had much love for Chester, not even before you all started doing the horizontal tango,” Dahlia said.

  Oh God. A vivid flashback of an X-rated nature, starring Chester and me, flashed in my mind. It had been a while since I’d thought of anything involving getting intimate with him. Betrayal tends to do that.

  “I hung up before I had a chance to really get into it,” I replied.

  “Well, it’s good to hear your common sense kicked in,” said Dahlia. “Jasmine, you divorced Trevor. He’s not a part of your life anymore. You need to move on. He has.”

  That hurt. But she was right. Trevor had moved on. I couldn’t just pick up the phone and get his support. Even though I didn’t want the marriage, I didn’t want to let go of Trevor completely. I missed his friendship. We should have remained friends and skipped the whole marriage thing.

  “Are you in the store?” I asked her. Dahlia was the proud owner of Dream Weaver, a bookstore/tea shop in Brooklyn.

  “Where else would I be on a Tuesday afternoon?” Dahlia asked, with a chuckle.

  “I’ll be over in about half an hour,” I said.

  I took the Number 2 train to Brooklyn. Dahlia lived in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, a few train stops away from her family. After college she had gone to work in an advertising agency. Five years later, she took a buyout and used the money to subsidize her dream of becoming a business owner. Her bookstore, Dream Weavers, had recently been featured in Black Enterprise, Essence, and New York Magazine. Dahlia was on her way.

  Dahlia’s bookstore was in the business artery of Park Slope, a neighborhood that was fast losing the fight against becoming trendy. Antique stores and real estate offices vied for space with Korean delis, Haitian dry cleaners, and African street vendors. The tree-lined streets, with their majestic turn-of-the-century brownstones, gave the place an air of prosperity, with a little sprinkle of funky thrown in.

  The first floor of Dahlia’s brownstone contained her bookstore/tea shop. She lived on the second floor, and Joel, Dahlia’s med school boyfriend, lived on the third floor. Joel wanted to live with Dahlia, and although she was way past in love with him, Dahlia had proclaimed her need for space. Despite her parents’ entreaties to legalize the union, Dahlia refused to alter her weird separate /together arrangement with Joel. It worked for them, and although I thought it was strange, I didn’t knock it. After all, they had been in a relationship now for over six years. My one and only serious relationship had ended up in a divorce court. Who was I to judge?

  Dahlia was waiting for me by the front window of her bookstore. She gave me a hug as I walked into the spiced vanilla–scented bookstore, dodging the few customers milling around the store.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “You look like hell.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at her. Dahlia did not believe in holding her tongue to spare feelings. She was a prime candidate of keeping it real. She wasn’t malicious, but she did believe in honesty. There had been a lot of people in school who’d kept their distance from Dahlia. She didn’t suffer fools lightly. She told people exactly what she thought about them and their actions, and her blunt nature could be disconcerting to some. I found her honesty refreshing. I was taught to hold my tongue, to be diplomatic, to be careful about whom I offended. Dahlia, on the other hand, was the kind of friend who didn’t tell you what you wanted to hear. She told you what you needed to hear.

  “Addie, can you cover the register for me?” Dahlia called out to a small older woman fixing books over in the erotica section.

  Addie was one of Dahlia’s many West Indian cousins. She was pushing seventy and had recently immigrated to New York from Jamaica. She had a thick Jamaican accent, and she loved looking at books with pictures of naked people.

  “I got it, gal!” Addie called out.

  Dahlia shook her head. “I swear Addie is always trying to get her freak on or something. Why is she reading those books? She must have a man on the side.”

  We walked through the bookstore to the tearoom in the back. We sat, my best friend and I, facing each other across a table covered with a kente tablecloth. The table in the back was my favorite as it looked out over a garden planted with a profusion of flowers, all of the tropical variety. No roses or carnations here. Bird-of-paradise, hibiscus, and other brightly colored flowers, whose names I either did not know or could not pronounce, spilled over in Dahlia’s garden. How she got these flowers to flourish in the middle of Brooklyn was a mystery to me.

  Dahlia’s dreadlocks were pulled away from her face and tied with a bright red, black, and green scarf to reveal a face with flawless brown skin without a stitch of make-up. Her features were all from the motherland. She looked like an African princess, complete with long, regal neck; high cheekbones; and large dark eyes, which seemed to swallow her whole face. Dahlia was one of those women who could wear anything and still be beautiful. Even this getup she now wore, a large, shapeless brown dress that looked as if it was made from a potato sack, did nothing to hide her beauty or her curves.

  “I can’t believe Chester is dead,” I said, repeating the words that had been playing over and over in my head.

  “Jasmine, what did I tell you about bad karma? I hate to talk ill of the recently deceased ... but Chester was heading for a fall. I just didn’t think it would be this kind of fall.”

  I remained silent. What she said was true. The list of people whom Chester had caused pain or bad feeling was long and didn’t start with me. Still, I felt bad he had come to a hard ending. In the back of my mind somewhere, I must have hoped he would have an epiphany or find Jesus, or both, and realize that stepping all over folks was just not good for the well-being of his soul.

  “You know,” said Dahlia, “I talked a lot about Chester. Said a lot of bad things about him. Didn’t like him. Especially after what he did to you. I may have even wished ill on him. But I never wanted anything like this to happen to him, and I know you didn’t, either. But, whatever anger you had toward Chester was justified. So you don’t go feeling guilty, girlfriend. He was not a nice person. But you didn’t cause this. Your wishes didn’t cause this, any more than my wishes caused it, or any of the countless other people that Chester backstabbed.” After she finished speaking, she muttered under her breath, “I’m sure the list is long.”

  “We should never have dated,” I said. “We should have just stayed friends. All the bad stuff happened between us when we started dating.”

  “Chester didn’t know the meaning of friendship,” sai
d Dahlia. “You were a friend to him. He didn’t know anything about being a friend to you. Look at how he treated Wallace Barker.”

  I wiped at my eyes as I thought about hapless Wallace. Wallace had been Chester’s roommate at Yale. He’d gotten Chester to join his firm, and according to Wallace, Chester stole his clients and also became a named respondent in Wallace’s divorce papers. Chester’s story was somewhat different. Wallace’s clients, said Chester, came without any urging on Chester’s part, and Wallace’s wife, well, that was just a figment of Wallace’s overactive imagination.

  A few weeks ago, I’d seen Wallace in the firm’s reception area. He told me he’d come to visit with Chester. In light of his history with Chester, I’d been surprised, but I kept my thoughts to myself. Perhaps Wallace had decided to forgive and move on. I hear it’s good for the soul. I know that my habit of keeping a grudge past the time that I knew what the grudge was originally about bordered on the excessive.

  “I saw Wallace at the office about two weeks ago. He was there to visit Chester. I assumed they’d kissed and made up,” I told Dahlia.

  “Perhaps.” Dahlia was not forthcoming. There was something else behind her bland response, but I was going to have to wait until she decided to share with me whatever was clouding her eyes.

  The sound of wind chimes signaled the arrival of another customer in the bookstore. Addie came over to where we were sitting and said, “I need some help, Dahlia. The cash register won’t open.”

  “I’ll be right back, “ Dahlia said as she and Addie went to deal with the recalcitrant register.

  I turned my thoughts back to Wallace. When I saw him in the office, I’d been taken aback. He had, however, remained uncharacteristically cool, as if there was nothing at all strange about him breaking bread with the man he credited with ruining his marriage and his career. I simply figured he’d forgiven Chester. Still, I’d thought it was odd, as I remembered the bitterness that engulfed Chester when he left Wallace’s firm. Wallace’s wife, Laura, had gone to school with me and Dahlia at Wellesley. She came from money, and we knew some of the same people. But while I was staging sit-ins on the main steps of the administration building against various societal injustices, Wallace’s wife was hitting the party circuit, looking for someone with a big bank account to marry. Our paths hardly crossed, and when they did, she was polite but distant. She was attractive, but I always wondered what Wallace saw in a woman who was so openly mercenary.

  Dahlia came back in the tea shop and sat down at the table.

  “Everything okay with the register?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t the register,” she replied. “It’s Addie and her crazy self. Guess what she was reading up there at the register?”

  “I’d rather not,” I laughed.

  “Some book called Buck Wild: How To Please Your Man And Make Him Cry For More. Addie just turned seventy. Who the hell is she trying to please?”

  “Girl, you and your crazy relatives,” I laughed. “I’m not mad at her. At least her juices are still flowing. I think mine have just dried up.”

  “Someday your prince will come.” Dahlia smiled. “But until then, I’m sure Addie can give you some tips with her nasty self!”

  Dahlia was constantly finding jobs for her relatives, or sending them to me for free legal advice.

  Just as suddenly as my laughter came, it faded. I’d forgotten Chester’s death for a brief moment ... but reality soon intruded. I thought about Chester and all the people he had hurt. People like Wallace.

  “How’s Wallace?” I asked.

  “I think he’s getting it all back together,” replied Dahlia in a tone of voice that I knew meant more hope than substance. “He told me that he and Chester had a good, long conversation. I thought perhaps they’d bury the hatchet.”

  When Chester had sent his good-bye fax to me, I’d wanted to kill him, or at least give him a good maiming. I wondered if Wallace had had any of those same urges.

  “Do you think Wallace could have had anything to do with Chester’s murder?” I asked.

  “Jasmine, Chester is dead,” Dahlia replied. “Let the police worry about who killed him. It isn’t your affair. And, no, Wallace may have his issues, but he’s no murderer.”

  “What issues?” I asked. I’d heard that Wallace had hit the bottle pretty hard after his divorce, and there were rumors of cocaine use. I wondered if this was what Dahlia was talking about.

  “Stay out of it, girlfriend,” said Dahlia. She had an annoying habit of reading my mind.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I replied. “This is one situation that I do not intend to become involved in.”

  Dahlia did not look convinced.

  3

  I spent the rest of the day with Dahlia, and by the time I left, I felt better. She fed me, played Billie Holiday and Sade tapes, and listened to me talk about Chester. I wasn’t trying to be maudlin, and I wasn’t trying to rewrite history. I am not one of those folk who give dead people greater credit than I gave them when they were living. I just wanted to remember something good about him. Dahlia helped me go down memory lane, acknowledging but not dwelling on the bad, and accentuating the good times, which, looking back, weren’t that numerous. I remembered the times when Chester let his guard down, particularly the times when his rich, baritone laugh would fill the air, or his eyes would look straight at you as if there was no one else in the world except you and him. He could be charming when he wanted to be, and even though we ended badly, there were some times that we’d had big fun.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Dahlia asked as she walked me to the subway station.

  I would be, I assured my best friend.

  The ride from Dahlia’s neighborhood in Brooklyn to uptown can take anywhere from forty minutes to over an hour—depending on several factors, including luck and the rush hour. By the time I rode home, luck was on my side, and the rush hour had come and gone. Fifty minutes after I said good-bye to Dahlia, I was walking on my beloved block, heading home. I live on a street that is about fifteen blocks from where I grew up, where my parents still live. I live in Harlem and so do my parents—only they live on Riverside Drive, in a decidedly more upscale neighborhood.

  My parents lived next to Riverside Park, a beautiful piece of land that overlooks the Hudson. Morningside Park, the park near my home was not as nice as Riverside. When I was a child, Morningside Park was frequented by folks my mother would refer to as “unsavory.” It was not a safe place to enjoy nature. Times have changed and the park has been cleaned up—still, a little bit of it’s past reputation clings to it. I live one block from Morningside Park, in a brownstone on Manhattan Avenue. The brownstone was renovated and divided into three apartments. Three families live there—the owner, Mrs. Tucker, a nurse who has worked in St. Luke’s Hospital since I was a little girl, Zachary Hightower, a jazz musician who was famous back in the Fifties and who still plays jazz clubs in Harlem when the spirit takes him (which isn’t too often) and me.

  Mrs. Tucker lives with her teenage son, Sharif, in the first-floor apartment. Zachary lives in the top-floor apartment, and I live in the basement—otherwise known as the garden apartment. I have lived in this apartment since my divorce. Before the divorce I lived two blocks over in my very own brownstone, with my husband. After our marriage disintegrated, it hurt too much to live in a place that was filled with broken dreams and disappointment. I liked the neighborhood and had come to know Mrs. Tucker. She went to the same church that I went to, Hope Baptist. A friendship had developed between us. She’d offered me a place to stay until I found a new apartment. That was four years ago.

  The small apartment, which, to my mother in particular, represents diminished circumstances, suits me just fine. It is a one bedroom, with hardwood floors, a working fireplace, a small kitchen suitable for someone like me who rarely uses a stove, a bathroom that still has it’s original tile floors, and a living room that leads out to the small backyard garden, which I share with my upstairs neigh
bors. I feel safe there, and I am not moving anywhere. No, indeed. Especially not for the pleasure of having to say I live in an apartment and pay more than three times my current rent.

  Mrs. Tucker’s son goes by Sharif X. His slave name, as he refers to the name on his birth certificate, is Ernest Tucker. As I walked home, I could see him sitting on the stoop, bobbing his head to something coming out of his iPod. Sharif was a sixteen-year-old who was grappling with the influx of hormones. I got love letters from Sharif shoved under my apartment door at least once a week. I tried to reason with him, but he had convinced himself he was in love with me and one day I would be his. If only there were men in New York about fifteen years older who felt the same way about me.

  “Hey,” he said as I walked toward him. “You look like butter.”

  I never quite caught up with the latest Sharif lingo, but from the open admiration on his face, I gathered that this was a compliment.

  “Thank you, I think.”

  He stood up and moved to the side as I walked by him. “Jasmine, when are you going to give a brother a chance?”

  I laughed. Trust Sharif to bring me a little bit of cheer on a rough day. “Sharif, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. I’m going to tell your momma.”

  “My mom knows I knows I got mad love for you.”

  “Lord help you,” I replied.

  “One day, Jasmine, it’s gonna be you and me.”