Three
She had always imagined her future in a vivid timeline—first a lucrative and prestigious job, then a splashy Catholic wedding, followed shortly by two children, or maybe three.
Minor details changed from time to time—sometimes she saw herself in London, walking briskly to work on foggy mornings, or in Lagos reading briefs in her air-conditioned SUV, or on a different American coast, in California, wearing open-toed shoes to work—but the fundamentals remained unchanged.
She did her part, doggedly pursuing the job at Watkins Dunn, and then waited for the heavens to roll out the rest as they should.
But the blithe heavens seemed oblivious.
She watched the years glide past, and relationships come and go, always thinking: It has to be the next man, it can’t not be the next man.
Why did it not happen? She had never doubted that marriage would happen, as naturally as day becomes night.
A wedding at twenty-seven or twenty-eight was ideal, but twenty-nine was fine too, and by her thirtieth birthday she felt cast out in the wilderness of her mind.
Wedding invitations were arriving from friends in Nigeria and here in America, and she was sickened by the envelopes with their subdued sheen, their words written in floral font.
The heavens had turned a key and marriages were raining down for everybody else but her.
As her thirty-first birthday approached, she felt more sanguine, because she had begun saying novenas, to St. Joseph, husband of the Blessed Virgin; to Raphael the Archangel, who had helped a couple in the Book of Tobit; and most often to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Reciting simple prayers for nine days and then starting again. The repetition brought calm, like a softly moving cloud, the rise and fall of wind, the assurance that hers would come, and come soon.
She knew the pope was unwell—he looked frailer by the day, brokenly bent and clutching his staff—but when she woke to the news that he had died, shock spread numbly through her.
John Paul II was gone and her certainties were breaking apart and the pieces blinded her. She had been eight when the pope visited Nigeria, and his visit felt even more momentous because her mother said,
“This is his first time traveling since they shot him, and he’s coming here,”
as if it was a sign of how special Nigerians were and how special she and her mother were.
The pope’s gentle face had smiled from the gilt-edged brooch perched on her mother’s collar, and from the framed photo hanging on their dining-room wall, and from church almanacs lying around the house.
A face she knew well, but how unprepared she was to see his smile in person, and him, smaller than she expected, vital and vibrant, his skin pinking in the sun, but still no less Christlike.
He seemed to come from a blessed spectral place, a generous place, from where he came to bring them only good.
That day, in the crowd of people lining the road to the field, she and her mother and aunties were in front, close enough to reach out and touch the pope’s jeep, because Father Damian had saved them a space, and the sun briefly fell as the pope raised his hand and waved at her.
The pope waved at her and smiled at her, and in that moment when his hand was raised, joy as she had never known before descended from above and rested on her.
She was so happy, so unutterably happy.
He saw her.
She never doubted that he saw her.
Her life lay wide open then, her dreams’ path secure.
Now he was dead and her dreams were no longer nesting where they should.
She was almost thirty-one years old and she was unmarried and there was no serious man on the scene.
Her breathing quickened while her spirits sank.
Her phone was ringing, Chia calling, and she exhaled calmly before she answered, but hardly had Chia said “Zikor” than found herself weeping. Her nose was running and she was coughing from choking tears. She had never been so emptied of self-control, crying like that. She should have been married with a child by now; her life was not where it was supposed to be, and she did not know why other people were being given what she too deserved. Her wailing alarmed and confused Chia. “Zikor, stop crying, please. Biko I bezina, ”
Chia kept saying.
When Chia came down from Philadelphia to see her that weekend, she felt sorry and a little ashamed of the naked desperation she had displayed. Chia urged her, again, to try online dating and she, again, resisted. All she could think of were the TV commercials with unlikely couples looking too blissful, the soft lighting and hopeful music that had a fraudulent tinge, as if designed to lure. Advertising herself on the Internet was out of the question, the final shame. What if one of her classmates saw her picture online? Well, Chia said, if your classmates see your picture, then they are on the dating site, too.
“I would be on the dating sites if my heart wasn’t fully taken by Darnell,”
Chia said. Darling dreamy Chia, her gauzy expression unchanged since primary school, when she was just “the twins’ little sister,”
two classes below . would go to their house to swim in the pool that was bigger than the Hotel Presidential pool, and there would be Chia, in dresses too pretty for just staying at home, pampered but somehow unspoiled, offering to get her a towel or a bottle of Fanta; courting her, so eager to be liked, and so unaware of her own appeal. “Not the brightest pea in the pod,”
her mother said once about Chia, and felt the urge to defend Chia, even then, before they were really friends. Not until they both moved to America after secondary school, and found themselves in Philadelphia and then in Maryland, did a real friendship of equals begin.
“Zikor, I’ll set up the online dating profile for you. Just try it and see,”
Chia said, and gave in.
In the photograph Chia used, was sitting at an outdoor café, laughing a carefree laugh in dappled light.
Not a bad picture.
She signed on and looked warily at potential matches, clicking on each with a reluctant finger, but soon she began to check her always-full mailbox with a sweet rush of anticipation; one of those messages might be from my husband, she would think.
She talked to a few on the phone.
One of them asked, “How’s your cat?”
and she hung up; it was the second conversation and he still mistook her for someone else.
Only one she agreed to meet in a bar downtown.
On the dating site, he belonged to the subgroup she had favorited from the start, International Black, which she understood to mean non-American Black.
A tall Jamaican lawyer, chocolate and thick in his profile photo, responsible-sounding over the phone.
His Jamaican accent pleased her ear.
She perched expectantly on a barstool, prepared that he might be fatter or shorter, because she knew people used younger photos of themselves, but absurdly, it was a slight, skinny light-skinned man who appeared and said “Hi, ?”
as if all was normal.
It was indeed him, the voice and the accent were the same.
He made to sit down while she gathered her phone and handbag and left.
She tried another dating site, for Black people living in the DMV, where most of the profiles displayed international travel laurels: pictures of passport pages and the Eiffel Tower, landscapes from descending planes.
I love to travel, do you love to travel? She thought it a plebeian status symbol, this obsession with international travel that Black Americans had, like people from a bush village boasting about city trips.
Can I come through? Many Black men asked after a few text messages.
Can I come through now? How did they know she wouldn’t be waiting with a sharpened knife or a poisoned drink?
She tried a Christian dating site but it felt ghostly, with too few men, and even fewer Black men. The only man she matched with looked like the man in the news who had just killed two women and put them in trash bags. She deleted all her accounts. Online dating felt faithless, as if she was doubting the assurance that hers would come.
—
By the time she considered freezing her eggs, she was in her mid-thirties. “I would not advise it at your age. I would advise you start IVF to try and conceive now,”
the doctor said, while she nodded sagely to conceal her devastation.
Try and conceive now.
If she could conceive now, she would not be in his fertility clinic for a consultation about freezing her eggs.
Or maybe the doctor meant a sperm donor, which was out of the question, almost blasphemous, to have a baby alone with a father whose provenance was unknown.
She left the clinic and drove back to work, and she did not know it then, but she would soon have two relationships with men who were thieves of time, because she stayed waiting for them to propose, waiting while her late thirties slid past, and waiting still.
If she wanted a nice necklace, or a holiday, or a condo, she could swipe her credit card and it would be hers, but her truest longing, for marriage, depended on someone else.