Two #2
An editor at Out Wonder wrote to say he liked my Copenhagen piece and wanted to see a revised version with a little more moxie.
A real editor, not a one-person outfit working from a home office in Auckland.
Out Wonder, a magazine with an editorial board, that paid in money, not in copies.
I closed my eyes and saw the table of contents, real writers’ names spread across a page, and somewhere among them, my own name, me.
Naturally, one published piece should open doors to more, and to commissions, and to book publishers in search of fresh faces.
This might be my book’s origin story: it began with an article about Copenhagen.
A novel was above me but this travel book I could do, a collection of light-footed essays, the title already secured in my mind: The Non-Adventurous Adventures of One African Woman.
I would become the real deal.
My mother finally a believer, holding my book and flipping through, sending copies to all her traducers, both real and imagined.
I reread the Copenhagen piece as though I hadn’t written it, to tease out the magic of Out Wonder ’s interest.
An elegant woman on a bicycle nearly ran me over this morning because I was staring distractedly across the road at some elegant women cycling to work.
In nice shoes, too, not sneakers.
Do they not sweat? And why was everyone in my hotel speaking English, while I wanted to hear Danish? Was my boutique hotel making some kind of patriotic statement with that extraordinary range of licorice in my minibar? Such were the questions I grappled with.
I had hunger pangs at night and really wanted candy, sweet candy, not little things in different colors, each tasting more medicinal than the last .
I didn’t know what having more moxie meant, but I would go back to Copenhagen and find that moxie, and rewrite the article there. In my excitement, I was buoyed and I bounced. I told Omelogor and Zikora about Out Wonder, but I didn’t tell Darnell, because I was afraid of his indifference and how it would maim my spirits. Still, I wanted him to travel with me, as I wanted him to do everything with me.
“Did you know that Denmark traded in African slaves?”
I asked him.
“Of course,”
he said, archly, as if everybody knew but me.
“I’m just reading about the Danish slave fort in Ghana,”
I said. I wasn’t interested in Denmark’s slave-trade but I wanted him to think I was; it was a somber subject, and weighty enough. “I’m thinking of doing Denmark again. Copenhagen and Aarhus. Will you come? Your classes don’t start for another two weeks.”
“Man, I don’t know about this ‘kept boy’ thing. Thinking about what you paid for the Mauritius trip still makes me sweat.”
“I have awards tickets this time, so it’s technically free,”
I said, which was untrue.
“I don’t know,”
he said doubtfully, but I knew he would come. He just needed, first, to perform his ritual of reluctance. He always said no when I paid for things, although I knew he wanted me to pay. Sometimes he delayed in bringing out his wallet, even for the smallest of things, like a late-night pack of beer at Walgreens. On his birthday, he tore apart the bronze-toned paper in which I had wrapped a MacBook and an iPhone and said, “Thanks, babe, but come on, it’s too much, it’s almost vulgar.”
“Your phone is cracked and you keep saying your laptop is so slow.”
“Yes, but still. You could have picked one,”
he said. Yet he kept them both. And when I sheepishly slipped a first-class ticket between the pages of a book he was reading, he said, “Hey. You trying to buy me?”
I laughed. But I was, in a way. I paid for bottles of good wine, massages, restaurant meals, a cleaner for his apartment: life changes he mocked himself for liking, experiences he would have only if he stayed with me. It was a kind of buying. He was moody throughout that birthday trip, as though resentful of what he had accepted, and I was watchful and tentative, eggshell-careful not to offend. “Jesus fucking Christ. An actual opulent spa shower inside an airport,”
he said, in the first-class lounge, and I almost said, “I’m sorry.”
In Mauritius, everything irritated him, nothing was deserving of praise. He wanted to cancel the boat ride; he didn’t care to see the waterfall; he had so much student work to catch up on anyway. Maybe his crabbiness was an act of atonement: it was problematic to like luxurious trips and now the least he could do was not enjoy it. Mo, the shriveled Indian-looking man driving us around on winding roads, pointed animatedly as he drove. The mother of my wife lives here. This place before was all wild trees.
I talked to Mo and wished Darnell would talk to him too, but Darnell stared out of the window and spoke only to say he had an itchy bug bite on his neck. Mo kept looking at Darnell in the rearview mirror, hoping for a reaction, man to man. “So interesting!”
I said, chipper and overbright, to make up for Darnell’s coldness. At the airport on the day we left, I opened my wallet to give Mo a tip in American dollars. I had a few twenties and a hundred. I folded the hundred and pressed it into his hand.
“Thank you,”
he said, turning to leave. “Safe journey! See you next time!”
Moments later he came running back. “You gave me…,”
he started and stopped. “Did you mean to give this to me? Maybe a mistake?”
“No, it’s not a mistake, Mo. Thank you very much,” I said.
“Thank you, thank you,”
he said, bowing, lowering himself.
I stopped to watch him hurry away, until his small figure disappeared through the airport exit.
Then I erupted in sobs.
It was all too much, Darnell’s iciness that, try as I might, I could not thaw, the subservience in Mauritius, as if people were inhaling and exhaling not air but fumes of servility.
Omelogor once said she was happy Nigeria wasn’t a tourist country because “people become props, and countries become performances instead of places.”
I had thought she was being a little intense, as usual, but she could not have been more right. Suddenly everything was doomed, beyond rescue. My lower back was aching and my temples throbbed. I stood there crying.
“What?”
Darnell asked, impatient, pulling his carry-on and mine.
“Tourism in poor countries does something to people that just breaks my heart.”
“You’re hormonal,”
Darnell said.
It was true. Two days to my period and I felt bloated, and constantly, tremulously close to tears. But he said “You’re hormonal”
so carelessly, like flinging a stone at me, and I cried even more, fumbling in my backpack for a tissue to wipe my runny nose.
“Chia, pull yourself together. These folks think I’ve done something to make you cry,”
Darnell said.
—
On the flight back, I curled inward, tired and unwell, saying little but enough to let him know I was only seeking survival, and not shutting him out.
My bloated body was taut, sore, close to bursting.
I felt the sudden urge to talk about Darnell, really talk about Darnell, not in my usual careful way, but with the protective wrapping yanked off.
I started writing Omelogor a text and then I stopped.
Many times in my life, just talking to Omelogor had brought out a backbone I didn’t know I had, her words always so searing and sure.
But now I did not want strength to be asked of me.
I wanted only to complain about my weakness and then retreat, back into my weakness.
There was no point being trussed in Omelogor’s high expectations, I was not seeking help to leave Darnell, I was not leaving Darnell, I wanted only to talk.
It was better to talk to Zikora instead.
About being in a relationship but never feeling at home, about being unsure, and never made to feel that I could one day be less so.
With Darnell, I was like a small animal, newly born and hairless, innately incapable and always falling.
I would say these things to Zikora just to say them, not seeking solutions or resolution.
I immediately felt better merely for making this decision.
As soon as I was alone in my apartment, I called Zikora.
—
“Zikor,”
I said and she burst into tears. Zikora was not a crier. Somebody must have died, or was close to dying. My hands began trembling violently and I wished I had not called, to delay hearing whatever bad news this was.
“Zikor, o gini ? What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m thirty-one years old,”
she managed to say, her sobs distorting her voice. I felt the swift incision of fear, that she had been diagnosed with a serious illness, that it wasn’t someone else who was close to dying.
“I’m thirty-one years old. I thought I would be married by thirty-one, with my first baby.”
“Oh,”
I said, so incredulous and so painfully relieved that I feared I might start laughing.
“Thirty-one with no prospects,”
Zikora said.
“But your birthday is still two weeks away,”
I said, stupidly, as if she might find a man and get married in two weeks.
“My friend Nkechi’s wedding is on Saturday in New Jersey. People will be wondering and whispering. You know how ‘Is she married?’ is what everyone asks about each other these days?”
I hadn’t noticed, but Zikora’s circle was mostly Nigerian, unlike mine, her friends a little older, their concerns a little different.
It was my mother and aunties who talked to me of marriage; last Christmas an aunty in the village said, “, I am very thirsty for wine. I have been wine-thirsty for too long.”
I looked blankly at her, and then smiled when I understood she meant my wine-carrying ceremony. I gave her the standard response that made them leave you alone: “I am praying, Aunty. It is in God’s hands.”
I wasn’t sure which would comfort Zikora more, downplaying marriage or telling her to be positive and believe it would happen soon. So I said, “You don’t have to go to the wedding. Tell Nkechi you’ll be in Hong Kong or London for work, since you have a great job in a great D.C. law firm, and then buy the most expensive thing in her gift register.”
At least Zikora laughed, briefly.
Our call left me with a lingering unrest, an agitation of spirit.
Zikora crying because she was not married at thirty-one—crying so much she had to blow her nose a few times, choking on her tears, heaving as she spoke—felt like something that happened somewhere else, with other people who were not my closest friend.
She had broken it off with her past two boyfriends because they avoided all talk of the future, but each time she had revived herself, her eyes always forward-looking.
She seemed fine, not at all vulnerable to being hijacked by other people’s expectations.
Besides, this kind of collapsing happened on turning thirty, or forty, simply for the symbolism; rounded figures caused panic because they felt like an ending.
Thirty-one was premature, too premature, and more worrying for not being a rounded figure.
When did Zikora take on this despair? From birth an unquestioned hand had written marriage into our life’s plans, and it became a time-bound dream, but when did she go from waiting to raging despair? Burnished successful lawyer Zikora; organized, buttoned-up, ambitious Zikora; Zikora with her manner of always refusing ruin.
I wondered if I had missed a shift, a crack in the certainty of our lives being as we planned.
Would I cry if I was not married in two years? I wouldn’t.
I didn’t think of marriage as shaped by time—how could the merging of two souls be shaped by time? With Darnell, I dreamed not of marriage but of how we might become truly intertwined, how the fear might disappear.
More than marriage, I was looking for what I then did not know as the resplendence of being truly known.
That weekend, I took the train to D.C.
and surprised Zikora.
We had dinner at Busboys and Poets; a poetry reading was just starting, and so we sat and listened to the singsong reading of the woman whose big Afro was dyed burgundy.
Afterwards we walked along U Street, holding hands and laughing at jokes we had told each other many times before.
Tending to Zikora shifted my unrest, and soon, my body no longer in my hormones’ wrecking hold, I returned to talking of Darnell as before.
—
My parents were visiting that summer, but only for a week before going on to London, because my mother didn’t like to spend time in America.
“This country is not civilized. Everything is ‘Do It Yourself.’ Everything is too casual. Look at their airlines, their first class is rubbish. They don’t know how to provide service with finesse. Even the way they talk. ‘Let’s go and grab lunch.’ How can you be grabbing your lunch?”
She always found a way to say this, or something similar, and then my father’s rejoinder would follow, like a well-oiled duet, or a call-and-response song.
“America is great because they have the best people from every part of the world,”
he would say. Or sometimes he said, “America is great because it is the only country that believes in being egalitarian in theory, even if not in practice.”
He liked America and would have spent more time here but for her; he always indulged her, without resentment, as if feeding rich treats to an already-fed pet, and luxuriating in the pet’s purring pleasure.
I liked to watch them, my mother talking and talking, complaining about something, while he made agreeing sounds, not fully present but fully content.
He, born into wealth, hardly grumbled, while my mother acted as if the life she married into had always been her birthright.
But her complaints were slapstick comedy, sweeping and superficial, delivered with the trace of a vanishing smile, as if she, too, knew how difficult it was to take her seriously.
I was looking forward to seeing them.
I enjoyed their short visits, our time together overlaid always with languorous satisfaction, unlike my Nigerian visits, in which nothing was ever still or slow—
the house alive with drivers and househelps, trays of drinks carted in and out of the parlor for visitors; my mother complaining about the vultures out to take advantage of my father; my father working late and coming home tired and apologetic; my mother hosting gossipy meetings of her club in the living room, with the scent of Guinness stout in the air.
For the week of their visit, I would regress and become their little girl again.
Their only girl.
Their last-born.
My mother and I would go shopping in D.C., and she would buy me expensive handbags or jewelry that I didn’t need, and we would eat lunch in a hotel while I half-listened to her entertaining talk.
I now pay Emmanuel’s salary into his wife’s bank account because that Emmanuel is just irresponsible and I want to make sure his children are eating.
I’m going to confront Aunty Njide this Christmas, I’m tired of all these stories she is spreading about me.
I don’t know what this man your cousin wants to marry actually does for a living.
I don’t like his face, he looks like a ritualist.
Your father is allowing these villagers to manipulate him again.
He has already done so much for them. Our people are so ungrateful.
—
I told Darnell my parents were visiting, hoping he would say he wanted to meet them, but he said, “Oh, okay.”
So I gathered all the pieces of my courage to my tongue and said, “I’d love for you to come to Maryland while my parents are here.”
“Not sure that’s a good idea. You need your quality time with the parents. I don’t want any pressure on you,” he said.
Who said anything about pressure? I was asking him to meet my parents and he was backing away, casting his withdrawal as a thoughtful act, and all I could say was “Okay.”
“I could come the week after,” he said.
I did not know what else to say. Stevie Wonder was playing in the background.
“Okay,”
I said again, and then I mustered my lightheartedness and said, “Well, at least you’ll finally meet Kadiatou when you visit!”
“Your housekeeper?”
“Well, yes, but you know she’s like family.”
“There’s some scholarship where folks argue that slaves and slave owners were like family, with Mammy raising the white babies and all,” he said.
“That isn’t fair, Darnell,” I said.
“I’m kidding, come on.”
—
My parents had hardly settled in before my mother asked, “Chia, so have you and Dr. Ojukwu’s son decided on a wedding date?”
A perpetual joke, Dr. Ojukwu’s son was socially awkward, a brilliant engineer who brought his face too close to people when he spoke to them. For years he had sent me tortured love letters.
“Mummy!”
“When is the Black American coming to greet us?”
I now wished I had not, in a rare reckless moment, told her about Darnell.
“He was going to come but he’s doing a lot of research, he’s writing a book, he’s a rising star in academic circles.”
I regretted my words as soon as I said them. Too many words desperate to be believed. I should have said we were no longer seeing each other, to save me from more questions.
“What is his discipline?”
my mother asked.
“Art history.”
“Art history.”
A sniff. It wasn’t engineering or medicine.
“He’s in high demand. Different universities want to poach him.”
“He’s writing a book on art history, and that is why he didn’t come to Maryland to greet your parents? Aren’t you writing a book too?”
“No, Mummy, it’s not like that.”
I stopped, flustered, and felt as if a crime was about to be uncovered.
“My child, my sunshine, is everything okay?”
she asked, her eyes wary with worry. Underneath her faultless ability to find faults lay a deep apprehension. She wanted the world to be perfect for the deserving, and the deserving were those she loved.
“Everything is fine,”
I said. I hugged her, pressed my face into the strong floral scent of her neck. Whenever I walked past airport duty-free, a waft of any florid perfume would bring pangs of nostalgia so intense they almost hurt—for childhood, when my mother and I would sit at her enormous dressing table while she held my hair in bunny-tails, never too tight, all the time song-praising me: Omalicha m, nwa m mulu n’afo, anyanwu ututu m. My beautiful one. Child of my womb. My sunshine in the morning.
—
My mother had wanted my father to buy a different house for me, because she worried about the dense grove of protected trees at the back. “Why should they say we cannot cut down some of those trees? Why do these White people like to live in dangerous forests? One day snakes and wild animals will kill somebody,”
she would mumble in Igbo each time they visited. As she did before we went out, standing at the sliding glass doors that led to the deck and looking almost accusingly at the trees.
I watched her, sleek wig grazing her chin, asking imperious questions in the shops in CityCenter, then loudly saying, “We should have gone to New York.”
At lunch I watched her, swirling her wine, napkin floating down on her lap. She enjoyed it all, and I enjoyed her enjoyment.
“Oh, there’s nothing in the house for your father to eat,” she said.
“Kadi said she will stay and cook.”
“Kadiatou’s cooking, is that even food?”
my mother snorted. “Why would anybody eat cassava leaves that is goat food? Tufia. ”
I laughed. Any African food that wasn’t Igbo met the same fate at her hands. All she said after a trip to Nairobi with my father was “Did nobody teach Kenyans about seasoning and spices?”
When we finally got back home, my father was sunk on the sofa, legs propped on a stool, watching the news, the volume a little too loud.
“We abandoned you. I was worried about what you would eat,”
my mother said.
“Kadiatou served me something nice before she left, rice and a sauce.”
“You ate that Guinean food?”
My father smiled sheepishly, slow to admit he liked Kadiatou’s cooking.
“Can the driver go?”
my mother asked. “We don’t need him until tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
She drooped, as if our shopping had exhausted her. But I knew it energized her; she came alive in front of displayed things. The drooping was a cue for my father, and he sprang up, saying, “Sit down. I’ll tell the driver.”
He went outside to the black SUV in the driveway. They used the same car service and always requested the same driver, Amir from Jordan. But Amir was unavailable and the driver was a South Asian who my mother said was dangerous because he stepped too forcefully on the brakes. Back inside, my father asked her, “Did you eat something good?”
“Yes.”
She showed him the shopping bags, she always did that— look at this one, that one was the last they had, I’ve been looking for this exact color for years —while he looked perfunctorily at them.
“That Dior shop was tiny. We should have gone to New York,” she said.
“London and Paris are waiting for you,”
he teased.
She pulled off her wig and put it on a side table, relaxing deeper on the couch next to my father. Sans wig, her cornrows lifted her face, slanting the wide-set almond jewels of her eyes. I was eight when I first saw my mother as others did. We were in the village for Christmas, our house a whirl, as always, people streaming in and out, and the air smoky from many firewood fires across the village. My mother was standing by the fountain near the colonnaded entrance, surrounded by a crowd of small children, handing naira notes to each child and then saying briskly, “I have given you, now go!”
I was skulking by the front door, and next to me was a cluster of benches with villagers who had wandered in for Christmas rice. Two women, shoveling jollof rice into their mouths with plastic spoons, were watching my mother.
“O dika ife akpulu akpu,”
one of them said. To look like sculpture, like art, was to be unusually beautiful, and I was startled, because until then I hadn’t thought of my mother as a distinct person, separate from merely being my mother. After that, I felt a flash of sadness as if in hearing strangers admire her, a unique privacy between us was now lost. I learned later of how rare that admirer’s tone was, because my mother trailed envy and bitterness, even hatred, in her wake.
Fate had been too kind to her—beauty, wealth, an adoring husband who never looked outside—and she sailed through her days as if she deserved it all. People wanted humility from her, to prove that no woman deserved so much. She was guilty of being not only a peacock, but also an unmoving boulder in the path to my father. He never gave out one kobo, the story went, without first getting her permission. Of her band of detractors, the loudest were disgruntled men whose improbable business plans my father had refused to fund.
“Will you drink tea?”
my mother asked my father.
“Yes. Chia, I hope you bought decaf.”
I got up to make the tea. Another childhood ritual, my parents drinking Lipton after dinner, the squeezed shrunken tea bags placed together on my mother’s saucer. This was the kind of evening when my father talked about the Biafran war, and as he spoke he would seem to me like a blessed sorcerer, summoning solid things from bare air. My brothers and I called it “Daddy’s Bank of British West Africa talk.”
“I started from zero after the war, zero,”
he would say. “The Nigerian government stole my houses and warehouses in Lagos, in Port Harcourt, in Kaduna. During the war, the banks confiscated our business accounts, and after the war, the same banks refused to give me loans. Every Igbo person got twenty pounds, twenty pounds, for all the money they had before the war. All the money in my private accounts, the money I made and the money I inherited, all gone. My great-grandfather traded pepper with the Portuguese and built the first modern mansion in Port Harcourt. My grandfather was one of the biggest traders with the British. He was the first Igbo man to open an account with Bank of British West Africa. The first! My father worked hard, multiplied what he inherited from my grandfather. And then just like that, during the war, gone! The government stole everything, everything!”
As he said “everything”
his hands drew an arc in the air. He never raised his voice, his face held its usual calm, but in that wave of his hands I understood so much of him, his cautiousness, his low-burning paranoia. He always had a small, packed bag under his bed and an envelope full of never-touched cash in a safe whose code we all knew. The war ended before I was born but it left him forever in the shadow of Just in Case, never fully relaxed, always in a muted crouch of preparedness, saying Igbo people could be attacked en masse again at any time, as happened in the nineteen forties and fifties and sixties. He pushed us three to study business, even when I kept failing economics, saying, “My children must carry on. When I die, I want to know the business will continue growing.”
Once I asked him, teasing, “Why would it matter, Daddy, if you’re not here?”
“We want what we’ve made to stay long after we’re gone. That is how we seek immortality,”
he said, and because he hardly spoke in this solemn way about a future without him, I felt tearful at those words “seek immortality.”
—
I listened when Darnell’s friends talked about books they had read—never novels, always academic books with colons in their titles—and I ordered them without telling Darnell, and tried to read them, but they were like the sacred texts of an exclusive sect whose code I did not know. Each one that I gave up on, I dumped behind a pouf in my study, and now I hurried to hide them in the basement so he wouldn’t see them.
“What time he’s coming?”
Kadiatou asked.
“He lands at BWI at seven. I’m picking him up.”
Please like him, Kadi, I thought. Please like him. If she liked him, it would be a good omen. Kadiatou, with her calm face and wise eyes, her faltering English and her contagious dignity. Sometimes, rarely, you meet a person who blends into your life as if the designers of destiny had long made room for her. Something about her drew me from the beginning, a clarity of spirit. At first she braided my hair in her relative’s braiding shop in Laurel, then in my living room, an easy silence always between us. She cleaned up the hair attachments after each braiding and then she cleaned the kitchen, and the whole house, until I said we must agree on a fee, not just her “Give me anything, Miss Chia, you help me a lot already.”
The loving, territorial attention she paid to the house reminded me of well-meaning relatives in Nigeria. A tear in the window netting by the deck, a dead bulb downstairs—I said I would call Pedro and she snorted and climbed on a ladder and changed the bulb. “In Conakry I take care of very big house,”
she said. She always stood by, watching quietly, when someone came in to service the heater or fix a pipe. Now that Zikora had helped her get a job at the George Plaza in D.C., she came in on her days off. Sometimes she brought her daughter, Binta, whose skin was like glistening blueberries. Binta’s earnestness, her lack of teenage sass, surprised me. She seemed older than her American age-mates. At first, Kadiatou said, “Don’t disturb Miss Chia,”
and made Binta sit in the foyer or vacuum the stairs, and I would say, “Kadi, leave her alone.”
Binta asked about my travels, reverently examining my collection of carvings and sculptures, especially the tiny seated black doll from Colombia; a black woman in a market in Cartagena had lovingly thrust it in my hand after I said I was from Nigeria.
“Aunty Chia, I will be a travel writer too,”
she said in her utterly American voice, so unlike her mother’s.
“Don’t let your mother hear you! I think she wants you to be a nurse.”
And we laughed a conspiratorial laugh.
“Binta is saying what?”
Kadiatou asked.
Kadiatou was not a talker, even in Pular. I heard her on the phone sometimes, all silences and humming, her words always sparse. She spoke rarely about her past. I knew she had been married off young and her husband had died. I knew her grandmother once slapped their cow for not producing milk, the cow itself as bony and undernourished as everyone.
“What will poor cow do?”
she asked after she told me the anecdote, saying nothing else. Very often, as if they were punctuations, she said, “I’m so happy to come to this country, so Binta can have this country.”
One day I stood up and saw that I had left a large bloodstain on the kitchen barstool; my heavy period defying my double padding. Kadiatou was beside me, and her eyes darted from blood to me.
“Oh,”
I said, almost ashamed. My mother had raised me to hide all incarnations of my female body, burn used pads in the evening at the back of the house with nobody else around, wash any bloodstains furtively, so nobody noticed.
“I clean it,”
Kadiatou said.
“No, Kadi, I’ll do it.”
She was already marshaling detergent and scrubber from the cabinet beneath the sink.
“I have fibroids,”
I said, to apologize, explain, or even absolve.
“You have fibroids?”
she repeated in a strangled tone, staring at me, her eyes clouded over, but she didn’t say more and I didn’t ask. Maybe fibroids prevented her having other children; maybe large tumors had sprouted from the walls of her uterus, invading the hallowed space where a baby should have been. I waited to know if she would tell me about the fibroids, but she didn’t, and I resolved not to bring up fibroids again, so as not to poke at whatever pain she was guarding.