Six
On the day they broke up, they went back to her apartment after the gala, and she told Kwame, “So I’m very late and I’m never late.”
He looked confused.
“I might be pregnant.”
She was so certain of his delight that she made her tone playful, almost singsong. But his face, instead of warming and melting in delight, went still, his mouth pursed, and suddenly this most communicative of men retreated into the cryptic.
He said, “It’s a shock.”
She said, “You know I stopped the pill.”
He said again, “It’s a shock.”
He walked to the living room and back to the kitchen where she stood, and he said, “We’re at different places in our lives.”
“What do you mean?”
she asked.
He didn’t respond.
“Kwame,”
she said finally, in a plea and a prayer, looking at him and loving him. Their conversation felt like a poor rehearsal and not the real conversation they were supposed to have. She wanted to reverse their day, just by a few hours, and have them walk into her apartment again, laughing, her saying let’s make margaritas and him saying should we order burgers, because I don’t know what that tiny Chilean sea bass thing at dinner was about.
“Kwame,”
she said again. Then she saw it, the almost imperceptible shrug. He shrugged. His response was a shrug. From the deepest vaults of his being, a shrug, to rid himself of an encumbrance.
“I think I should leave. Is that okay?”
he asked, as though he needed her permission to abandon her. But even as he asked he was already heading, in flight, to the door.
—
They had often had sex on her velvet couch, she straddling him.
On that same couch she lay blankly reading his past text messages while the hours slid one into another, time spent on remembering and time lost on remembering.
She lingered on a message sent when he drove to the Middle Eastern place in Silver Spring to get her hummus.
They ran out of regular, just red pepper, sorry babes.
How well he knew her.
It was real hummus or nothing for her; none of those flavors invented to appeal to the American need for variety. She read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so easily hold. Each time she called him, she felt newly startled by the burr-burr-burr of unanswered ringing, and she hoped the number had somehow misconnected until she heard that voice, that boyish nice-guy voice, say, “Kwame here. You know what to do!”
That voice she knew so well. She knew his worries and his jokes, could read the slightest modulations in his mood. She sensed, even before he told her, when he had a challenge at work or a hiccup with a client. And always he told her, always he laid himself open to be known. Or had she seen only what she wanted to see of him? Had she merely cast on him the glow of an answered prayer? But other people had seen his radiance too, and so it could not just be a fantasy built in her head. After Chia met him, she said, “He’s so genuine. The best was saved for last.”
They had dinner at Chia’s house, and Kwame ate two helpings of Kadiatou’s fonio and groundnut sauce, saying he remembered eating groundnut sauce as a child in Ghana. He chatted easily with Kadiatou, asking if ndappa was a kind of polenta, telling her he once did a high-school report on African languages and Pular was one of them. Kadiatou smiled and repeated the word “Pular,”
to show him how it was pronounced.
“I wish I knew more of my African side,”
he told her, which felt to an unnecessary confidence, but it moved her to see Kadiatou bloom under his attention and become unusually chatty, telling Kwame about her uncle’s farm back home. “Everything farm,”
she said, smiling. “He grow everything, fonio and groundnut and sweet potatoes.”
The next time saw Kadiatou, she said, “Miss , God bring your husband already,”
looking delighted, as if the effects of Kwame were yet to wear off. And then, of course, her parents. Kwame traveled with her to Enugu for Christmas and tried kneeling when he met her father, and her father laughed, waving him up, saying, “No, no, we Igbo don’t do that, that’s Yoruba,”
and Kwame said, “I can’t believe I didn’t do my research better.”
“Do your research better”
became their joke, her father’s and Kwame’s, in that blustery male manner of men who feel unthreatened by each other. The evening her father took Kwame to his tennis club alone, it was, he joked, to do his research better. Her father had liked Kwame right away, but her mother watched him for a while before she, too, caved. On the phone heard her mother say to a friend, “’s fiancé,” even though Kwame didn’t propose during the three days he spent in Enugu before he had to fly back, without her, for work.
He didn’t propose but he asked her father to explain the smallest details of Igbo marriage rites to him. He didn’t propose but he told her things like “You know I can’t keep that up when we’re in our fifties,”
or “We should save that for when we retire.”
Once, when he joked about traveling the world after they retired, she said, “Only if we’ve put away enough for the kids’ college,”
and a flicker crossed his eyes, before he changed the subject, as if uninterested in talking about children. But he would have told her if he didn’t want children. The cruelty required to lead people on was simply not in him.
Kwame was lovely, he truly was. Silence was not his fighting tool; he was a man who talked things through. But day after day he ignored her calls and texts, and then he sent back her apartment key by courier, in a clasp envelope, the lone piece of metal wrapped in plain white paper.
—
She held on to a deranged hope because he hadn’t asked her to return his own key. His apartment doorman looked pitying the third time she turned up, telling her again that Kwame had said he would be away for a while. In the cavernous soullessness of his office reception area, his assistant, Keisha, said, “I’m sorry, he doesn’t wish to see you,”
and instead of turning around to walk through the sliding door and into the sunlight, asked, “Did he say anything else?”
Keisha arched an ironic brow.
“Did he say anything else?”
asked again.
“You mean, apart from he doesn’t want to see you?”
Only then did leave, sunken in the ruins of shame. The insolent paralegal was laughing at her, she could tell; she felt the young woman’s eyes on her back. She called Kwame’s mother and listened for something in her tone, a clue, a reason, anything. She asked if she could come and visit, and his mother said, after a pause, “That might not be the best idea.”
She imagined herself in their living room, all neutrals and beiges, with pillows perfectly plumped, always prepared to impress whoever came by. She would sit down politely and then, when his parents were seated and unsuspecting, she would leap up and run upstairs to check if Kwame was there.
“He said you had a fight and he seems very upset,”
his mother said.
“I can’t reach him. I need to talk to him.”
paused, and added, “Please.”
“My understanding was you didn’t want to have a conversation,”
his mother said, her tone so rich with righteous accusation that wondered if what had happened had happened, or if she had dreamed it all. She should tell his mother, she should say, “I’m pregnant,”
but the words would not form on her tongue. In this antagonistic silence over the phone, her hope was weeding itself out.
“Okay. Thank you,”
she said.
She hung up and looked out of her tall windows and felt the acute desolation of being alone.
God had retreated, and her intercessions to the Blessed Virgin sounded limp, weakening as soon as they were spoken, unable to reach their destination.
From outside herself she saw her own dwindling, her drift to depression, and she worried that stress was harming the baby, and her worry only added layers to her stress.
She told herself that she could bear the beast of her loneliness alone as she had before in the past, that she must defeat this malaise that lay over her like a mist.
She had to do it for the baby, she had to.
And as she told herself this, her resolve would rise and swell and then collapse again as her mind deflated itself with the pinpricks of self-doubt.
On an impulse, she went to the basilica on Michigan Avenue.
Years of living in Washington, D.C., and she had never been.
It seemed to her a mere tourist attraction, America’s biggest Catholic church; even the name felt grandiose, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
As soon as she stepped in, awed goosebumps spread on her skin.
The magnificence overwhelmed her, and she looked around as though in a godly wonderland, at the stately marble columns and the mosaics, so alive, with minute details devotedly done: the Jesus in the vaulted ceiling with one angry eye and one loving eye almost blinking.
This was faith boldly shouting, “We are not holding back.”
A testament, a rebuke to all doubt.
She lit a candle for her baby.
She lingered in the chapels on the crypt level, each so different and all so tenderly intimate.
In the pale gold light of the Our Lady of Pompei Chapel, her faith soared and steeled itself.
This sweeping majestic place built for God, all the people who built it for God, who worshipped and witnessed God here—that God could surely not now forsake her.
—
“This makes no sense. Did something else happen?”
Chia asked, as if might be concealing the real reason for Kwame’s abandonment. Then Chia collected herself and said, “Zikor, a baby, a baby! That’s all that matters now, what you’ve always wanted.”
“Not like this.”
Chia talked about hosting a baby shower and told her she had gone mad, to think of a baby shower while she was still jousting with the monster of shame. She had not told anyone that Kwame had left her, but she was haunted by the sense that everybody knew. The paranoia of the abandoned. Each time a friend called, her heart lurched, thinking they knew and were calling to offer their false sympathy while masking their glee.
“Chia, what will I tell people? I know everybody says don’t worry about what people think, but I worry. I care what people will say when they hear that I’m pregnant with no man.”
“They’ll talk, and after some time they’ll stop and talk about somebody else.”
“When I look in the future everything feels so difficult.”
“It won’t be easy but it won’t be as hard as you think, Zikor. How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,”
Chia said. The easy wisdom, emollient words so smoothly rolled out, rankled rather than soothed . She remembered Chia once saying that she would choose to have a baby on her own, with donor sperm, than a baby with a man she did not desperately love. Chia was out there, Chia could not possibly understand.
“Whose surname will the baby have?”
asked, with a short bitter laugh. “I never imagined giving birth alone.”
“You won’t be alone. Your mom will be there. I’ll be there.”
sighed. “Chia, please don’t tell Omelogor, not yet.”
Why did it matter about telling Omelogor? She just didn’t want Omelogor to know just yet.
“She’s not doing too well in grad school,”
Chia said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think it’s depression, but she doesn’t accept that it’s depression. Maybe she shouldn’t have come to America. It really worries me. The other day she was crying and not talking, just crying.”
felt cheered by this news, by the sense that misery was now being evenly spread. Omelogor crying? Omelogor could cry? Whatever America had done to her, God bless America.
—
In an unfinished dying, you feel you must mourn yet you can’t begin, because you haven’t reached an end that you understand. Kwame was an unfinished dying. She could not accept that it was over; so much lay loose and incomplete. She sifted through her memories for reasons, as though through debris left by a fire to find uncharred fragments. He had always wanted them to make all decisions together, and it amused her sometimes, how seriously he meant this, even for small things like what table to select when making a restaurant reservation online. “Okay, babes?”
he would ask, and wait for her nod.
Was it how she had told him that she was pregnant? He must have heard the lack of doubt in her voice, how settled this news was.
It came to him as an already sealed box.
But she had said she might be pregnant, not that she was, and if he felt she had already decided without him, couldn’t he have tried talking, in that easy open way of his that had shriveled up so quickly that day? They talked all the time, but just when they most needed to talk, he had walked into a wall and disappeared.
He was able do that, just leave unscathed, choose the option of doing nothing, but she would never have that option, because it was her body, and a baby must either be birthed or not.
In this way, the decision could never be truly shared.
If he was to become a father, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say she did not know, since Nature demanded so much more of the mother.
The baby’s conception was the one shared decision, perhaps, because they had both participated, knowing what the outcome could be.
That ancient story: the woman wants the baby and the man doesn’t want the baby and a middle ground does not exist.
What would a middle ground be, anyway? They couldn’t have half a baby.
But she rejected this as their story.
She could not accept that he was merely running away from fatherhood, like so many men had cowardly done throughout time.
It was too common, and Kwame was not common.
She had seen the wonderful father he could be when he went with her to visit her friend Ijemma in Delaware.
Ijemma had come to America to have her second child, and brought her toddler and a nanny.
It amused how quickly Kwame displaced the nanny for the length of their visit, and was on his knees, his palm swallowed in a puppet, wiggling his fingers, his voice tuned to a funny high pitch, and the riveted two-year-old so adorably giggling.
“It’s frightening when somebody you know just changes, completely changes,”
she told Chia. “It’s as if an artery burst inside him and his whole body is now wired differently and he is no longer the person he was. I don’t understand how I get off birth control and we have sex for so long and then I get pregnant and he reacts like he never knew it could happen.”
“Zikor, have you considered that maybe he didn’t know?”
“What do you mean?”
“Men know very little about women’s bodies.”
“Ahn-ahn. Even teenagers who have no business having sex know what the consequences are.”
“You’d be surprised. Omelogor wrote this thing the other day. She’s started a website that she’s calling For Men Only, where she asks men to send in their problems and she gives them advice.”
swallowed a groan. The last thing she needed was that smug sureness, but she couldn’t help clicking and skimming the link Chia sent her.
Dear men,
Women know more about your bodies than you know about theirs.
Not that there is much to know about yours. Women know your brains are between your legs. Just kidding (not really). Women know you’re anxious about getting it up even when you’re ninety-eight years old and women know about that gland near your balls that starts to give you problems as you age, makes you pee too often at best, and becomes cancer at worst.
But women’s bodies? Phew. Where to start.
What did you learn in sex-education class in school? You were separated from girls and ended up knowing nothing about the inner workings of female bodies.
You rolled a condom over a banana. You don’t know where women’s pee comes from.
So millions of you in the world who want to learn about sex and women’s bodies end up learning from where? Adult films.
It’s funny that they’re called adult films because they are actually very immature.
Like a bad cartoon for grown-ups.
Even if you enjoy porn, at least be clear that you’re watching fantasy, and the whole point of fantasy is that it isn’t real life.
You watch porn and you think women are always shaved smooth and women never have periods and pregnancy can be wished away.
Pornography is actually very disrespectful to you because it starts with the premise that men are stupid, and so it teaches you so much nonsense and gets away with it.
The statistics are staggering: more than sixty percent of you watch porn often.
You, reading this, where did YOU learn about women’s bodies? Stop being fuzzy and go do your homework.
Remember that I’m on your side, dear men.
The post annoyed . She read it in Omelogor’s voice, resisting the smugness and sureness of it. How absurd to infantilize men like this. But small queries began easing themselves into her mind.
One sleepy weekend morning in Kwame’s apartment, after slow sex, and a slower brunch of eggs she made and pancakes he made, he was playing a video game with lots of noise and flash, and she was reading the news online, and she looked up and said, “Can you believe an elected official in the United States of America is actually asking why women can’t hold their periods in?”
She laughed, and so did he, but she remembered now his first fleeting reaction, the slightest of hesitations, as though he was holding back from saying, “You mean women can’t?”
Still, even if he did not know about periods, he surely understood birth control. Or did he not? Could it be that Kwame was fuzzy, that when she had said, “I’m stopping the pill,”
and he had said, “Okay, babe,”
they had not shared the same understanding of what that exchange meant? That night, they had showered together and she was patting cream on her face and examining a purplish discolored patch that had appeared like a map on her chin. “It must be my birth-control pills causing this,”
she said, and he came closer to look at it. “Does it hurt?” he asked.
“No, it’s a reaction.”
And then she said, looking at him, “I want to stop the pill,”
and he said, “Okay, babes.”
Maybe she should have been clearer, maybe they should have talked plainly, as they talked about so much. Why hadn’t she been clearer? Did she choose to assume he understood, because she didn’t want to give him the chance to say he didn’t want a child? Now she was flagellating herself, slipping on the cloak of responsibility, looking for a reason to excuse him. But the alternative was to accept that she did not truly know Kwame, that perhaps we can never truly know another human being.
—
She worried that she wasn’t eating enough, and in quiet moments of subdued panic, she imagined her baby floating in her womb, sickly and sallow, starved of nutrients.
She could hardly keep anything down.
She sucked natural ginger sweets, because the pregnancy website said avoid nausea medicine, but always she felt a breath away from vomiting.
Nausea became her norm.
She no longer remembered when she was free of biliousness.
Chia ordered bottles of an organic protein drink from a custom website, and for weeks it was all she could keep down.
She craved extra sharp cheddar but the pregnancy website said no soft cheese and she decided not to eat any cheese at all.
A sense of desperate guilt dampened everything she did and everything she did not do, because she had already failed her baby with such imperfect circumstances, to be born without a father, without clarity about the future’s shape.
“Zikor, you’ll be fine,”
Chia always said, even before spoke, as though to give her no room. “You’ll be fine.”
Some days she was fine and some days she was underwater barely breathing. At her twenty-two-week checkup, newly flush with well-being, her nausea receding, she laughed at the grainy-gray image moving on the ultrasound screen, and gaily waved at the front-desk women as she left the doctor’s office, but alone in the elevator, she sank to the floor, a stark dissolving all around her. She sent Kwame a text. I’m 22 weeks today.
He did not reply. A woman wearing torn jeans had entered the elevator and was looking at her. “Are you okay? Do you need some help?”
“No,”
said, getting up. “No, thank you.”
—
Her job took on a new shimmering significance; it had not betrayed her and she had not failed it, this part of her life that stayed stable, an unconfusing recourse.
She began arriving a bit earlier and leaving a bit later, and she volunteered to take on extra tasks.
At first, she wore chic loose-fitting dresses that hid her burgeoning middle, and when her belly’s gentle swell could no longer be disguised, she stayed late every day, noisily late, and at morning meetings she said with false casualness how traffic thinned so dramatically after nine, so that everyone would know she had been in the office then. She took breaks from meetings to throw up in the toilet, and then walked back in with practiced aplomb as though she had just gone to pee and reapply her lipstick.
Donna watched her with the eyes of a person willing you to stumble, the two of them the only women vying to make partner. Donna talked often about choosing to be “child-free,”
and she always said “child-free”
with relish, as if she knew how much it annoyed , an expression that made a child sound like a disease. Donna was thin and vegan and did yoga and wore fitted dresses made for flat-chested women, low-cut but still appropriate since they exposed no bulging flesh. Now Donna kept asking about her pregnancy, always loudly so the men would hear, tawny adversarial eyes fixed on her belly.
“Think you can handle that, ?
“You okay? Need some water? Are you feeling lightheaded?
“You look exhausted. Sleeping is tough, right?”
“I don’t have a debilitating illness, Donna. I’m only pregnant,”
would say, with a laugh she hoped sounded unstrained. She made jokes about pregnancy. Let’s try balancing this file on my belly! She said she still drank once in a while, because her mother had drunk Guinness throughout her pregnancy with her. It was untrue, her mother had not drunk any, nor did she, but she wanted to seem in control, even slightly reckless, as though her pregnancy was a glamorous adventure that would not impede her ascent at Watkins Dunn. Sometimes when she saw Donna’s thin form approaching in the hallway, she thought of a demonic bony bird circling to snatch away the last egg in another bird’s nest.
“I figured I better have this baby because it might be my last chance. I probably wouldn’t want to keep it if it were ten years ago,”
she told Donna breezily. “It’s funny how pregnancy is like body hair. We scrub and scrape our armpits and upper lip and legs, because we hate to have hair there. Then we pamper and treat the hair on our heads, because we love hair there. But it’s all hair. It’s the wanting that makes the difference.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying a baby is like body hair,”
Donna said, deliberately misunderstanding, her lips in a downward curve, the same curve as when she spoke of people who ate meat.
“Oh, come on, I’m not saying a child is like body hair. I’m saying our relationship with body hair is similar to our relationship with pregnancy. It could be the thing we most desperately want and also the thing we most desperately don’t want.”
Donna, lips still downward-turned, changed the subject. “Are you sleeping okay?”
she asked.
“I’m great, I’m sleeping really well,”
said brightly, but she barely slept at all, propped on three pillows, tossing this way and that, seeking an elusive comfort, her chest aflame with heartburn and a stubborn throbbing ache in the joints of her fingers. Each morning, she coated concealer over the dark bags under her eyes and wore red lipstick to draw attention to her lips instead.
Sometimes she thought her other colleague, Jon, saw through her. He was sensitive, and he made subtle gestures of support, helping her without calling attention to her pregnancy, as if he knew how much energy it took to pretend, how it drained and flattened her, and how much she cried and then upbraided herself for crying because crying meant stress and stress harmed the baby.
—
She was lying in, on a Saturday morning, falling in and out of unrestful sleep, when the sustained door buzzing startled her.
She had been dreaming that Kwame appeared at her office holding a covered basket, which he placed on a desk and then backed away. In the basket was a dead baby, curled and cold. The dream was so lucid, she saw a mole on the dead baby’s cheek, so frightening, and she jumped and stumbled to the door, half-expecting to see Kwame standing there with the basket.
“Miss , it’s me. Kadiatou. I come to braid your hair.”
stopped, still confused. “To braid my hair?”
“Yes.”
She opened the door. Kadiatou was holding a big plastic bag. Her short wig looked glossy, and she had the mournful expression of people who went on condolence visits, bearing gifts of alcohol and cash.
“Miss Chia tell me what happen,” she said.
felt a flash of irritation. Chia needed to keep her mouth shut, nobody else needed to know. She didn’t want pity.
But she could have run into Kadiatou on her way to work or back from work, and how then would she hide the rise of her belly, the human being growing inside her body. She let Kadiatou in. Kadiatou smelled faintly of jasmine. Her presence instantly felt soothing; she had an elegant calmness, a lack of abrasiveness, that thought of as a trait of Francophone Africans. A Nigerian version of Kadiatou would bring a different, more bracing energy and leave the air unsettled, even unpleasant.
“I bring some things to help with your stomach…”
Kadiatou gestured with her hand, to mimic throwing up.
“Thank you, Kadi.”
“You don’t eat. You have food?”
“A little.”
Kadiatou was unpacking her plastic bag, revealing its treasures: fresh grated ginger in a container, leafy herbs, a small bottle of what looked like oil.
“Somebody put curse on Kwame. Like juju in the Nollywood film. Somebody is jealous of you,”
Kadiatou said.
laughed. “Kadi, you watch too much Nollywood; all those things you watch are not true.”
But it comforted her that Kadiatou still believed Kwame to be the person she also wanted him to be, a person too good to abandon her of his own accord, now helpless in the grip of a demonic curse.
“He will come back. He’s afraid to be father, so he run. Men run away and after they come back,”
Kadiatou said.
A prickle of irritation on ’s skin. Kwame was not running away from fatherhood—he couldn’t be, she refused to accept it—and Kadiatou had no idea what she was talking about.
“The hair color two,”
Kadiatou said, laying out the long rolls of attachments.
“Kadi, please remember not too tight.”
“Miss Chia always say African braid perfect but break your hair, and African American braid rubbish but your hair don’t break. So choose one.”
It was a joke, Chia’s joke, and knew the ending. “I choose both,” she said.
“Even if Mr. Kwame don’t come back, always you have your baby,”
Kadiatou said quietly, placing a hand to her heart. “Your baby is your own.”