Two
I wake up thinking of Aunty Jane.
Days have passed and still her words chafe.
My drawn-out disquiet must mean something, but what? That she struck close to truth, or else I would not now train this searching light on my own life?
How easy it is to manufacture a problem; I had never thought of liking my life, never mind proving I did, until Aunty Jane said I didn’t.
I should send her a link to read For Men Only, but even if she gets it, and she won’t, how does that show I like my life?
You can write popular posts on a website, you can have a surfeit of things, and still have an empty life, so there really is no way to prove to someone else the fullness of your own life.
Your true experience is the only proof.
In the evening, in the warm gathering of friends, I stand outside of myself and watch myself, as if to assess one of my life’s passing scenes.
I pour red wine and choose song playlists on my phone and tease Belema about her chunky chain anklet: “Are you sure you can walk with that thing?”
Laughter floats above oldies music turned low.
Nine people who without me might not be friends are eating and sharing their small sorrows and triumphs.
Ehigie says his New Year’s resolution is to give up smoking Loud, and Jide says that is unnecessary self-punishment, and Belema asks if he has any left at home so she can come by and take it.
Hauwa says nothing, raising her glass of water to her lips, and I admire the henna patterns that circle her wrist in ornate whorls and run gracefully down her finger.
She’s very careful, even cagey, and while everyone knows she doesn’t drink, not everyone knows she smokes.
At the center of the table, Philippe has floated some leaves in a vase filled with water and they look striking and give off an herby scent.
“Please, does Philippe want us to eat that thing too?”
Chinelo asks, peering at it.
Chinelo is the cheery one, a bright pitcher brimming with jokes.
We met during Youth Service Corps and I enjoy her relentless joyfulness, even though I do not believe that anybody can be that happy all the time.
Ahemen is saying Christmas holidays depress her.
Eval and his wife Edu look at each other and start laughing, because they were just saying the same thing on their drive here.
“Next Christmas we are not going away and not doing anything,” Edu says.
“It’s January broke blues. You’re depressed because you’re regretting all the money you spent,”
Chinelo says, and scoops one more piece of peppered turkey onto her plate.
“My own problem is that everybody in Abuja is taking pictures wearing pajamas on Instagram. Just looking at them makes me tired,”
Adaora says.
Belema says her family’s cross-over prayer on New Year’s Eve was all about her reconciling with her husband. “He’s still jobless! They should pray for him to get a job. I was the one feeding him and he was beating me. At least if you want to continue beating me, then you should be employed.”
Everyone has some jollof rice on their plates, and I am satisfied to see that the peppered turkey and stewed goat meat are more popular than Philippe’s French chicken that smells too strongly of mustard. Jide forks a piece in his mouth and says, “This virus in China is very bad,”
and for a moment I think he is talking about the food.
“Very bad how?”
Hauwa asks.
“They’re not telling us everything,”
Jide says.
“My cousin lives in China.
He came back for Christmas but he has decided he’s not going back.
He lives in Guangzhou, which is where many Nigerians are, and even though it’s not close to the town where this virus thing is happening, he says the hospitals are full of infected people and that it’s spreading like mad.”
Jide stands to reach for another can of beer from the drinks on the sideboard.
He always manages to look disheveled, as if something about his clothes needs straightening out, and I cannot count all the times that I have taken one glance at him and gone on to tug at his collar, or flatten his trousers bunched up at the belt loops.
He was sweetly round-cheeked when we were children and now he’s sweetly plump.
“What if it comes to Nigeria? We’ll be finished,”
Jide says.
“But isn’t it from something they ate in the market in that town?” Edu asks.
“There is nothing they don’t eat in China, even frogs,”
Chinelo says.
“Whatever they ate, they have already eaten and this thing has started. If it comes to Nigeria, we are finished,”
Jide says. He is drinking too fast, can after can of beer, as he always does in the aftermath of a phone call with his parents. I want to calm him down. My tongue tingles from peppered turkey, and a bit too much pepper in the jollof rice too.
“Jide, it’s not coming to Nigeria. I read the WHO statement. There’s no human-to-human transmission,” I say.
“ has spoken. Jide, leave it,”
Ehigie says.
“My cousin said it is much worse than Ebola,”
Jide says, almost defiantly.
“God forbid,”
Chinelo says.
Ahemen, as if to change the subject, tells us yet again the story of her former househelps who twice stole her jewelry.
You might be discussing rockets going to space and Ahemen will find a way to bring in the wicked housegirls who stole all her gold.
She now has Filipino househelps and often tells me, with the vague air of a threat, that my staff will show me their true colors one day.
“With foreigners, you pay them and it ends there. They don’t steal from you and they don’t tell you about their mother’s leg pain and their sister’s kidney failure,”
she says, in ending her much-told story. She can’t accept that I actually like the Africanness of unclear boundaries with staff. If I didn’t, I would not pay Paul’s children’s school fees or Mohammed’s mother’s hospital bills or rent for the tailoring shop where Mary spends the rest of each day after her cleaning is done.
Philippe appears and begins to clear away the empty platters.
“The au gratin was very nice,”
Eval says.
“Is that what they call that tasteless potato full of cheese?”
Chinelo asks. “This is the problem with going to school abroad, you start giving complicated names to tasteless food.”
“My sister!”
Ahemen says in agreement.
For dessert, with a self-important flourish, Philippe presents a pineapple upside-down cake.
“People: Monsieur Philippe!”
I say, and we all clap and hoot, our usual routine, and I remember Chinelo once telling me,
“You know why everyone likes coming here? A big house, no husband that we have to tiptoe around, and you are a seriously generous host. Many of these rich people, you go to their house and they don’t even give you food.”
Glazed slices of pineapple gleam on the cake.
Philippe says sorry and dashes back to the kitchen to get a knife.
Affection is softly rising in me, and softly spreading out first to my friends seated around my table bathed in light and then to the whole phosphorescent world.
I do like my life.
Hauwa leans over the table to sniff Philippe’s vase of herbs.
“Oh, lovely,”
she says.
Diamond earrings in the shape of intertwined O s sparkle on her ears.
She often wears them to work.
I noticed them right away when we first met, diamonds too big and flashy for the office, just what you would expect from the woman Amanze said was the spoiled Northern wife of a very rich man.
Amanze the gossip queen, dishing with bile about everybody in Abuja.
She said Hauwa was like all the other Northerners, a know-nothing employed in a government agency only because of who she knew.
“Empty vessel”
was the expression Amanze used. “That Hauwa is just an empty vessel, and they made her a unit head even though she doesn’t know anything.”
So when Hauwa brought me some accounting documents, which were orderly and transparently done, I asked, “Who prepared these? I have a few questions.”
She laughed a high laugh with an inappropriate edge. She had a darting, playful air that felt unsuited for formal work.
“They told you all the Northerners here are Big Men’s children and don’t know anything,” she said.
“Yes,”
I said bluntly. I was newly back from America and I must have had some lingering disagreeableness from my sour saga there. I wanted only to do the project well, to convince myself that I had made the right decision by leaving the bank to do my own consulting.
“I prepared the documents,”
she said. “I have a master’s degree.”
I hadn’t looked properly at her until then. So many Northern women were pretty in an expected way, their features even and their skin light, and Hauwa was like that but also not. She had large inquiring eyes, a pronounced cupid’s bow on a small childlike mouth. She seemed like a person who asked questions of life. She said “I have a master’s degree”
with all traces of laughter gone from her voice, and I felt sorry for the brusqueness of my earlier “Yes.”
How often she must deal with the poison of assumptions, and how easily she let out that laughter to shield herself from it. I understood something of this, the pressures of proving oneself.
“I can see they were wrong about what they told me,”
I said, thinking that I should just say sorry for earlier and yet not knowing how to just say sorry for earlier.
“They weren’t wrong,”
she said. “All the other Northerners here are thick. Don’t ask the women on the second floor for anything, because all they do is gossip and plan what outfit to wear for this nikah and that nikah.”
Her face was expressionless in the halo of her pink silk scarf.
I looked at her and thought: Here is a person who enjoys unsettling people.
She sounded rehearsed.
She had said this before many times to many people, and this thought annoyed me because suddenly I wanted her to tell me only what she had told no one else.
“How would you know?”
I asked, quite coldly.
“What?”
She seemed disappointed by my response. I was supposed to laugh at her surprising outrageousness. I was supposed to admire the courage it took to joke like that about her own people.
“How would you know that all they do is gossip?”
I asked. At least I did not add, “If you don’t gossip with them too.”
“It was a joke,” she said.
I turned back to the documents and said, “Thank you.”
She made to leave but she didn’t leave. We laughed about it later, because she said if she had walked out of that office, she would have hated me for the rest of her life, rude, arrogant Igbo woman that I was.