Eight
never told the boy who didn’t love her, the boy she was trying to make love her when she didn’t yet know that you cannot nice your way into being loved.
He was her first lover. She had met him in sophomore year in college, her second year in America. A basketball player, near-comical in his self-regard, tall, his head always held high, his gait something of a trot. He often said, “I don’t do commitment,”
with a rhythm in his voice, as though miming a rap song, but she didn’t hear what he said;
she heard what she wanted to hear: he hadn’t done commitment yet. From the beginning, she was of no real consequence to him.
She knew this, because she had to have known, but she was also nineteen, and feeding the reeking insecurities of that age.
The first time she knelt naked in front of him, he yanked a fistful of her braids, then pushed at her head so that she gagged. It was a gesture brimming with unkindness, an action whose theme was the word “bitch.”
She said nothing. She made herself boneless and amenable. She spent weekends willing the landline next to her bed to ring. Often it didn’t.
Then he would call, before midnight, to ask if she was still up, so he could visit and leave before dawn. When her grandmother died, she called him crying and he said sorry and then, in the next breath, “Has your period ended so I can stop by?”
Her period had not ended and so he did not stop by. She believed then that love had to feel like hunger to be true.
“The rubber came off,”
he said carelessly that night. He’d been drinking and she had not.
“It’s so funny how you say ‘rubber,’?”
she tittered, wishing he wasn’t already distracted and reaching for his clothes, eyes on his car keys.
But she thought nothing of it, because the condom slipping off once couldn’t possibly matter.
Symptoms can mean nothing if a mind is convinced, if a thing just cannot be, and so the sore nipples, the sweeping waves of fatigue, had to have other meanings until they no longer could, and she walked to Rite Aid after class and bought a pregnancy test.
How swift the moment is when your life becomes a different life.
She had never considered getting pregnant, never imagined it, and for long minutes after the test showed positive, she sat drowning in disbelief.
She didn’t know what to do because she had never thought she would need to know.
She went to the health center and lied to the nurse practitioner, saying the condom had slipped off the night before.
The sad-eyed woman gave her a white morning-after pill, which she swallowed with tepid water from the dispenser in the waiting room.
It was too late, of course, she knew, but still she did other desperate nonsensical things: she jumped up and threw herself down on the floor violently, and it left her stunned, too jolted to try it again.
She drank cans of lemon soda, dissolved sachets of fizzy liver salts in glasses of water.
She disfigured a hanger in her closet and held it steely in her hand, trying to imagine what distraught women did in old films, before she gave up and threw it down.
A clutch of emotions paralyzed her, bleeding into each other, disgust-horror-panic-fear.
Like slender talismans, she lined up different pregnancy tests on her sink, and each one she urinated on she willed to turn negative.
They were all positive.
Something was growing inside her, alien, uninvited, and it felt like an infestation.
There are some kindnesses you do not ever forget; you carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time.
Such was the kindness of the African American woman with short pressed hair at the Planned Parenthood clinic on Walnut Street.
She smiled with all of her open face, and she touched ’s shoulder as she settled tensely on her back.
She held ’s hand through the long minutes.
“It’s okay, you’ll be okay,”
she said. Her fingers tightened around ’s while cramps stabbed her lower belly. was utterly alone, and this woman knew it. “Thank you,”
she said, afterwards. “Thank you.”
She felt light from relief, weightless, unburdened.
It was done.
On the bus home, she cried, looking out of the window at the cars and lights of a city that knew her loneliness.
For years after that she avoided going to confession; she could not get herself to say in words what she had done.
She would never say it even to herself, and if she locked it up in her mind, then one day it would be as though it had never happened at all.
She deserved God’s punishment, she knew, but also His mercy, and she continued to receive Communion at Mass, but with more humility than usual, more gratitude.
The week before her graduation from Georgetown Law, she spent the weekend with Chia, and on Sunday morning she asked where she could go to Mass, because she didn’t want to drive all the way to D.C.
Chia, vague, trying to be helpful, gave her the wrong time and she arrived at St.
John the Evangelist in Columbia with Mass already over.
But a priest was offering confession and she found herself moving toward the confessional, sinking to her knees in the dim cubicle, the priest behind a screen.
He asked her name and she felt the queasy fear of her teenage years when she had disguised her voice at confession, worried that Father Damian would tell her mother what she had confessed.
But this priest, this White American man who told her his name was Father Tillman, was not like Father Damian or the other priests back home.
There was no doctrinaire drone, no harsh-tongued scolding, no giving out a generic penance of “five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys” with the bored rote tone of having already said the same thing a hundred times that day.
Father Tillman seemed actually to listen to her.
Maybe this was because he wasn’t overwhelmed with work; everyone went to confession in Nigeria, unlike here, where people seldom did.
“There is no sin that God cannot forgive,”
Father Tillman said. “All God asks of us is true repentance.”
“But what is true repentance?”
“True repentance is what made you come here today.”
—
When her mother left for the cafeteria, the nurse came in with the circumcision-consent forms.
“Is it really about causing Baby pain?”
she asked gently.
stared at her, at the eyelashes that made it difficult to take her seriously.
“Baby won’t remember the pain. If everyone in your culture does it, you should do it too. Kids hate being different. I used to work in a pediatrician’s office and that’s one thing I learned. We don’t have kids yet—my fiancé is training to be a police officer—but I’m keeping that in mind for when I have my kids.”
The nurse held the forms for a moment before placing them on the table. Something about her manner made rushing sobs gather at ’s throat. It was compassion; this nurse thought that whatever was feeling mattered. Had she missed it before, or had the nurse suddenly changed?
“Thank you,”
said, wanting to reach out to hold her hand, even though she knew it might be a bit too much, but the nurse had turned to leave. She almost collided at the door with Dr. K, who had come back to say goodbye.
“Your mother is wonderful. She speaks so well. I like hearing proper English. My relatives in Iran speak like that. She owns a private school in Nigeria?”
“Yes,”
said, and wondered when her mother had told him that.
“It’s wonderful that she could come and be with you,”
Dr. K said.
“Yes,”
said. She never doubted that her mother would come to be with her, but when she first called to tell her mother, “I’m pregnant and Kwame has disappeared,”
she felt tense, as she did when she was a teenager and somebody had reported her for doing something bad. She expected sharp recrimination from her mother, wasting no words, for getting pregnant, and for losing Kwame. But her mother said, “When is your due date, so I can start making arrangements?”
—
In the nursery procedure room, her son was placed on a board, restrained, arms and legs strapped down, under a warming light.
It felt sacrificial.
She wanted to reach out, push the doctor aside, and rip off the straps and free him.
Why had she done it? Why had she signed those forms, with her mother looking over her shoulder? She almost believed her earlier empty fighting words, that she was causing her son unnecessary pain.
Her son.
Those words: her son.
He was her son.
He was hers.
She had given birth to him and she was responsible for him and already he knew her, moving his face blindly at her breasts.
Rooting, it was called.
How did newborn babies know to do that? He was hers and his tiny translucent arms lay precious against her skin.
He was hers.
She would die for him.
She thought this with a new wonder because she knew it to be true; something that had never been true in her life now suddenly was true.
She would die for him.
A new lurch in her chest, utterly alien; the intense urge to live, to stay alive, for somebody else besides herself.
After they unstrapped him, his tiny mouth was pinkly open and from it came a high-pitched wail.
Her baby boy, his skin peeling, his gums bare, and between his legs an angry raw nub.
She cradled him and hushed him and pushed her nipple into his mouth.
“I would die for him,”
she said into her phone and sent it to Chia, because she needed to speak this miraculous momentous thing that was true. Chia was in Milan, about to board her flight to Dulles, and kept sending text messages with more red heart emojis than words:
Send more pictures!
Zikor, you did this. Odogwu! So proud. I love you!
Is that color on his skin normal?
Maybe they should check it, Zikor.
Make a video.
Zikor ndo.
He’s still crying?
—
In the weak hospital Wi-Fi, her father’s face froze on the screen, mid-smile, and he looked for a moment like a caricature of himself, teeth bared, eyes widened.
“Z-Baby!”
he said to her.
Her father told jokes, and laughed, and charmed everyone, and broke things and danced on the shards without even knowing he had broken things.
“Daddy,”
she said happily. To see him, in all his good-humored mischief, was to remember her life as it once was, when she was only a daughter, not a mother.
“Congratulations my princess! My Z-Baby! Where is my grandson?”
was eight when her mother told her that her father would marry another wife, but nothing would change, they would still live in their house and sometimes Daddy would visit the new wife in her own house.
“Your father will live here. He will always come home to us,”
her mother said, with emphasis. She made coming home to them sound like victory.
“But why is he marrying another wife?”
asked. “I don’t want a new mummy.”
“She’s not your new mummy. Just your aunty.”
Aunty Nwanneka.
Her father took her to Aunty Nwanneka’s house soon afterwards, a brief visit, on their way to his tennis club.
Aunty Nwanneka was plump, skin glistening as though dipped in oil.
She smiled and smiled.
She slipped in and out of the parlor, and each time reappeared with a new source of enchantment for : a tube of Smarties, a small bag of chin-chin, a cup of Ribena.
She called her Zikky, not Zikor like everyone else, and liked that it sounded cooler and older, that Aunty Nwanneka took her seriously.
She liked her.
Only later did she see how, to survive, Aunty Nwanneka wielded her niceness like a subtle sharp knife.
When came to America for college, she began to call Aunty Nwanneka her father’s other wife, because people assumed “second wife”
was the woman her father had married when he was no longer married to her mother. But with Kwame she said “second wife”
because he understood. She and Kwame laughed whenever she mimicked her law-school classmate, an intense American woman, asking her, “How should we understand the contradiction of your mother?”
It was after her presentation on traditional Igbo property laws, and she had used her mother’s story to make it come alive:
an educated woman from a prominent family marries an educated man from a prominent family, she has one daughter and many miscarriages, after which her husband decides to marry again because he needs to have sons, and the woman agrees because her husband needs to have sons, and it is those sons who will inherit all his property.
“My mother is not a contradiction. She is uncommon but normal,”
she had replied to the woman, and then corrected herself: “Uncommon and normal.”
“Perfect response,”
Kwame always said, each time they laughed about that story. He knew of an uncle in Ghana, a government minister, who had married a second wife.
“Can’t have been easy for either wife,”
he said, and she agreed, loving him for his sensitivity. They told and retold each other stories from their past lives, until they felt as though they had been there. She was flooded by sadness in the hospital room with lights too harshly bright. She could not imagine being with someone else, someone who was not Kwame, who did not know her as Kwame did and did not say the things that Kwame said and did not have Kwame’s easy laugh.
“He looks just like me!”
her father announced, when her mother placed the phone over her son’s face.
“Zikky, congratulations, God has blessed us,”
Aunty Nwanneka said, and a slice of her round face appeared above her father’s on the screen. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired,”
said, and sensed her mother’s disapproval. Her mother would have wanted her to tell Aunty Nwanneka that she was perfectly fine, thank you.
“Aunty, congratulations,”
Aunty Nwanneka said to her mother. She had always called her mother “Aunty,”
to show respect.
“Thank you,”
her mother said serenely.
“Z-Baby, is anybody else there with you apart from Mummy?”
her father asked.
“No, Daddy.”
Is Kwame there? Has Kwame called? Does Kwame know? The questions he wanted to ask but didn’t. Her mother hadn’t asked either. She sensed her mother’s suspicion, as though she had not told the full truth about Kwame, because how could Kwame have left her just because she got pregnant, Kwame who had come to Enugu wanting her father to explain Igbo marriage customs to him?
Her father was asking to see the baby’s face again and her mother lowered the phone above the tiny sleeping form.
“Z-Baby, I won’t be able to make it after all, but I’ll definitely see him before he’s one month old,”
her father said.
“Okay, Daddy.”
had expected it. When he said he would come from Lagos to be there for the baby’s birth, she knew it was just one more of the many promises he made.
“I have a stubborn cold,”
he said. “So it’s best not to be around a newborn.”
“Yes,”
she agreed, even though she knew the cold was as good a reason as any. It could have been a business meeting or a last-minute issue with a contract. Her mother handed her the phone and walked to the window.
“I’ve had this cold for almost two weeks now, and it doesn’t help that this house is like a freezer,”
her father said. “The air conditioner is so cold, but your aunty still wants to reduce the temperature. I’ve told her that we have to reach a compromise, because we don’t have the same condition!”
He was laughing, that mischievous laugh that meant he knew his joke was less than appropriate. But what was the joke?
laughed a little, too, because she always laughed at her father’s jokes.
Then she realized it was about Aunty Nwanneka always feeling hot when nobody else did, a menopause joke.
She looked at her mother, by the window, turned away, separate and apart from the conversation.
Her father would never have joked about her menopause.
With her mother his jokes were smaller and safer, careful always to show her respect.
Respect, a starched deference, a string of ashen rituals.
Respect was her mother’s reward for acquiescing, for not being difficult about Aunty Nwanneka, for not fighting her father and not sprinkling discord among relatives.
Instead, her mother always bought Christmas and birthday presents for Aunty Nwanneka’s sons.
She was civil, proper, restrained, running her schools, always respectably dressed, a subdued gloss in her gold-framed eyeglasses.
Senior wife.
It was her mother who sat beside her father at weddings and ceremonies.
It was her mother’s photo that appeared as wife in the booklet his tennis club published on his sixtieth birthday.
It was her mother who was married in the church, while Aunty Nwanneka had only a wine-carrying, under traditional law, and no church wedding.
Senior wife.
Aunty Amala, her father’s sister, said “senior wife”
as if it were a coveted title, a thing that came with a crown. “You are the senior wife, nothing will change that,”
Aunty Amala told her mother a few days after her father had moved out of their house.
’s brother (her half-brother) Ugonna, only in primary school, had been caught cheating in an exam. A teacher saw him sneak a piece of paper from his pocket and shouted at him to hand it over, but instead of giving up the paper, Ugonna threw it in his mouth and swallowed it.
Her father decided to move in with Aunty Nwanneka, to set Ugonna right.
“He needs to see me every morning when he wakes up.
Boys can so easily go wrong, girls don’t go wrong,”
he told her mother.
It was a Sunday, with the slow lassitude of Sundays, and they were in the living room upstairs, playing Scrabble, as they always did after lunch before her father left to spend the rest of the day at Aunty Nwanneka’s and she and her mother left for benediction.
remembered that afternoon in drawn-out, static images: her father blurting out the words, eyes trained on the Scrabble board, words he must have been thinking about how to say for days, and her mother staring at him, her body so rigid, so still.
Later, her mother stood at the top of the stairs, in her father’s way, as he tried to go downstairs.
She reached out and pushed him backward and he, surprised, tottered.
“This is not what we agreed!”
her mother shouted.
She was a different person that day, shaken, splintered, and she held on to the railings as though she might fall.
Her father left anyway.
The next day his workers moved his clothes and his collection of tennis racquets to Aunty Nwanneka’s house.
For weeks spoke to her mother only in sullen monosyllables, because she thought her mother could have better handled it.
If her mother had not shouted, if her mother had not pushed him, her father might have stayed.
For some months her parents were estranged.
Her father did not visit; he sent his driver to pick up on weekends, and bring her to his tennis club, where they drank Chapman and he told her jokes but said nothing about moving out of their house.
Slowly, things thawed, and her mother accepted that he would no longer come home to them, that they were now the family who would merely be visited.
Her mother began to hang her newest dresses in his wardrobe, which was almost empty, a few of his unloved shirts hanging there.
looked now at her mother, standing by the hospital-room window.
How had she never really seen her? It was her father who destroyed, and it was her mother she blamed for the ruins left behind. Her parents decided early on that she would go abroad for university, and in the evenings after school, lesson teachers came to their house, to prepare her for the SATs and A levels. Her father wanted her to go to America, because America was the future, and her mother wanted her to go to the UK, because education was more rigorous there.
“I want to go to America,”
said. Had she really wanted America, or did she want what her father wanted, or did she not want what her mother wanted? The way her mother said “rigorous”
had irritated her; her mother’s addiction to dignity irritated her, alienated her, but she had always looked away from its cause.
Her son woke up and began to cry. His tiny tongue quivered as he cried his high-pitched, screeching cry. Her mother hurried to his glass-walled crib next to ’s bed, picked him up, and began pacing back and forth, holding him until he fell asleep.