His Only Wife

by Peace Adzo Medie

  If there’s one thing I knew about my brother-in-law, it was that he didn’t hold back when he chose to tell a story. I still remember how his face had contorted in anger as he described the misery the Liberian woman had caused his mother.

  “She has done something to your brother,” Aunty had lamented when she spoke to Richard and Fred. This was when they finally gathered the courage to tell her that Eli had moved into a house with the woman, abandoning Richard in their flat. This was after she announced she was pregnant and less than two months after she first met Eli. “This is not natural,” Aunty had added wearily.

  Fred had grunted in agreement, he had been thinking the same thing. Because why else would Eli, a man who previously had introduced his only serious girlfriend to his older brother and sought his approval, suddenly move in with and impregnate a woman who didn’t want his relatives around? Eli had always been the sweet brother. The middle brother who walked alongside his mother in the market after school, balancing a wooden board stacked with bread on his head, and never complaining. The one who, as a boy, cried whenever his mother fell sick, and who came home from the university to be with her when she slipped in her tiled driveway and sprained her ankle. The one who consulted his older brother before making any major decisions and kept a stern eye on his younger brother, who was prone to recklessness. No one could ever have imagined him with this woman. There had to be something behind it. She must have done something to him, something to turn him away from his family and get him to follow her blindly. Fred only had to discreetly ask a few people before he began to hear about the potions that young women, desperate for a way out, put into men’s food to scramble their brains and get them to forget their wives and children and buy houses and cars for women whose last names they didn’t even know. The same medicine men who had given the rebels invincibility potions to rub on their bodies during the war were now brewing love potions.

  But Richard was skeptical. Not because he didn’t believe in the power of the supernatural but because his brief encounters with the woman had convinced him that there was something intrinsic to her that had netted his brother. The way she carried herself, sinewy shoulders held high and face shuttered close as though she thought the whole world stunk. Her rude confidence could not have come from any love potion; it came from within, from some barren and rough place inside. And the only person who knew her well enough to explain her actions was only interested in defending her, or perhaps in saving her.

  Eli assured his family that once they got to know her, they would love the woman as much as he did. But her hostility increased with the size of her belly. She sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes when Richard came to visit and stayed away the first day that Aunty visited, coming home late at night, long after the old woman was asleep. And she had no excuse because she had quit her secretarial job the week after meeting Eli. When Aunty asked to meet her family, the woman had brought two cousins who were not more than twenty years old. Aunty had left after that, unable to countenance such disrespect. Eli, of course, had continued to make excuses for the woman.

  “She just needs to get comfortable with you,” he had assured his mother on the drive to the airport. The woman had pled morning sickness and stayed home, to Aunty’s relief.

  “Are you okay?” she had asked him worriedly because of a sudden fear that this would be the last time she saw him, that this woman would somehow make him disappear from their lives. She had spent most of the previous night on her knees, praying for God to break this hold that the woman had over her son, this hold that made him almost unrecognizable to her.

  “I’m fine, Ma,” he had said, and unleashed the smile that she loved so much. “She’s a good woman. You’ll see.”

  “Okay,” she had said without attempting to reason with him. It had become clear to her that this battle would be fought in the spiritual realm; she silently entrusted her son to God as they parted at the entrance to the airport. “It is well,” she had continuously reminded herself on the almost two-hour flight from Robertsfield to Kotoka. But no matter how much she prayed, it wasn’t well. And that is when she thought of me.

  Four

  When Richard came by on Saturday I told him about my plans to attend fashion school.

  “That’s a great idea,” he said. “Ask your husband when he comes.”

  “When is he coming?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “This Tuesday?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s coming here?

  “Ah, Afi. I said he’s coming, he’s coming,” Richard said with a smile, as though speaking to a troublesome but lovable child.

  That bit of news pushed thoughts of design school to the farthest corner of my mind. I finally knew which day I would see my husband! But how in the world was I supposed to welcome him? Would he knock on the door or did he have his own set of keys? Would I have to go to meet him at the airport? What would I wear? What should I prepare for him to eat?

  “Who will pick him up from the airport?”

  “Don’t worry about that, it’s all taken care of.”

  “What does he like to eat?”

  “Eli eats everything, he won’t complain about anything you give him.”

  “But does he have a favorite food?”

  “I know that he likes yam a lot, yam and any kind of stew.”

  “Okay. What time will he get here?

  “As for that I can’t say, he always has a lot of running around to do so you just expect him on Tuesday. Or do you have somewhere to go on Tuesday?”

  “No, I will be here.”

  “She’s not going anywhere; she will be right here,” my mother piped in. She had been in the bathroom and I hadn’t even heard her enter the sitting room. These soft carpets could get a person in trouble.

  We spent the next few days preparing for Eli’s arrival. I scrubbed and mopped and swept and wiped, even though there was really no need to do these things because we kept the flat looking like a display in one of the posh furniture stores that were advertised on TV. I went to the market, the one near our house where the prices were high because the sellers believed that rich people had money to throw away, and bought two tubers of puna from two different sellers. Two tubers just in case one of them turned out to be bitter and two sellers because hopefully they wouldn’t have gotten their yams from the same farmer. I was torn between garden egg and kontomire stews. I thought garden egg was basic but then I had never tasted garden egg stew that wasn’t delicious. Kontomire on the other hand could go wrong easily; a slight bit of overcooking and you would have a pot of tasteless greens on your hands.

  “Then cook both of them,” my mother said impatiently when she tired of seeing me pace between the stalls of the kontomire and garden egg sellers. So that is what I did.

  If only it was that easy to quell the turmoil within me. I was nervous beyond words. On Monday night when I spoke to Mawusi, I could barely hold myself together.

  “Have you done your hair?” she asked

  “It still looks fine,” I said.

  “Are you sure? Have you washed it? You know these weaves are worse than braids, they start to smell after a while.”

  “I didn’t wash it,” I said, on the verge of tears. What if this was one of those weaves that turned frizzy as soon as they came into contact with water and had to be tamed with all kinds of hair products that I didn’t have? But how could I welcome this man with a head of smelly hair?

  “You can still find a salon and wash it first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “But I don’t know what time he will come tomorrow. What if he comes in the morning?”

  “Then use rubbing alcohol to clean your scalp.”

  “What if he’s one of those men who don’t like women with artificial hair?”

  “Well, that is what you have now . . . don’t worry about that. All you can do is find a way of cleaning it.”

  Her words didn’t make me feel better. After I hung up, I imagined the Liberian
woman hugging Eli, her head on his chest, her sweetly scented, natural hair tickling his chin.

  I first heard about the woman in my final year of secondary school. When Aunty and Eli’s uncle went to Liberia to outdoor the baby girl after the woman gave birth, she refused to let them touch the child; her baby would not be subjected to any outmoded foreign customs. No libation would be poured to any gods or ancestors, and the child would not be named by the visitors from Ghana! She had thrown a fit when Eli tried to reason with her, so Aunty, not wanting to upset a new mother, had boarded the next flight back to Accra, Eli’s old uncle by her side. Sickly from the day she entered the world, the poor child died two months later. Fred and Richard represented the family at the funeral. It was only after this that Eli succeeded in convincing the woman to visit his family in Ghana. He had hoped that she would learn to like, or at least respect, them if she spent more time with them. I was away at boarding school and only heard the stories from my mother after I returned. While she hadn’t seen the woman, my mother had heard other workers at the depot whisper about the strange woman that Eli had brought back with him.

  She had refused to stay in Aunty’s six-bedroom house and had instead insisted on staying in a hotel. When she visited Aunty’s during the day, she would sit pouting in a corner, her face covered by sunglasses the size of a car windscreen, until Eli abandoned all who had come to visit him and came to her side. She refused to taste any of the food prepared in Aunty’s house and instead brought food from the hotel each morning. She wouldn’t even answer when people came up to her and playfully tried to speak Eυe to her. A friendly “Ŋdi” or “Èle abgea” would only elicit a dead stare even though Eli had been teaching her Eυe since they met. She refused to wear any of the three suits of kaba that Eli had asked Sister Lizzie to sew for her despite his exhortations. “Only country women tie cloths . . . where I come from,” she had told Aunty when the old woman inquired why she was wearing a pair of tight jean trousers at the durbar for the yam festival. Even the American tourists at the durbar knew not to come dressed in jeans.

  The final straw was when the woman ejected Yaya, who had recently returned from South Africa, from their hotel suite because she wanted to take an afternoon nap. Yaya had been excited to see her brother again and to meet his partner, but the woman hadn’t shared her excitement. Although Eli had begged his sister to stay, she had left the hotel in tears and reported the incident to Aunty and Fred. They had called Eli to a meeting the following morning, the old uncle in attendance; the family could not go on like this.

  “I’m leaving her,” he had said before either of them could ask him to reassess his relationship with the woman. “I’ve had enough. I’m leaving her,” he had repeated dejectedly, like a person who had prepared well for a test but had failed to get even one question correct. His mother had hugged him, happy that he would finally be escaping the dark cloud that had hung over his life for the past two years. But the woman had no plans of pulling her claws out of Eli. She had announced she was pregnant again as soon as they returned to Liberia and he had, therefore, been unable to bring himself to pack his bags. She had given birth to another sickly baby, another girl, Ivy, and had refused Aunty’s offer to come and help care for the child, even though she was obviously not good at it. Exasperated, Eli had insisted that they move back home. He wanted to be near his family and closer to their investments in Ghana, which were now generating more revenue than their Liberian holdings. She moved to Ghana reluctantly, her cigarettes and booze clutched in one hand and her baby in the other. Since then, her relationship with Eli had been a series of starts and stops. She had moved out of their shared home more times than anyone cared to count and dragged her poor, sickly child behind her each time she did. In fact, she had resorted to using the little girl against Eli, so every exchange they had ended with her threatening to take Ivy away. I really didn’t understand why Eli couldn’t simply take the baby and send the mother back to where she came from, to working as a secretary and delivering documents to construction sites. After all, she wasn’t the one who cared for the baby. It was the two housegirls who did most of the work. The latest stunt she had pulled was taking Ivy to Spain for vacation while Eli was in Beijing on business. He only found out when his call to one of her cellphones was answered by one of the housegirls, who told him that she had not seen her madam for three days. He had become worried upon hearing this because he knew the woman wasn’t able to care for Ivy by herself. When he called and told this to his mother, she had become enraged and immediately decided that the woman had to be permanently cut out of Eli’s life. As long as she was there, he would not know a moment of peace or happiness. But she knew her son; he was blessed and at the same time cursed with a good heart, so no matter how miserable she made him, nothing the woman did would cause him to turn his back on the mother of his child. It was up to Aunty to put an end to this.

  So she had invited my mother into her small office at the flour depot after work and told her as much as necessary for her to understand the situation (Aunty was not the kind of woman to cry on anyone’s shoulder). Then she had added the most relevant piece, the reason for which she had called Ma: she wanted Eli and me to get married.

  “Afi is respectful and hardworking. And she is a beautiful girl,” she had said as my mother listened with mouth agape. When she finally gathered her composure, my mother had said a breathy, “Yes.” And that was how I came to be married to Elikem Ganyo. Now I was waiting for him to show up and be my husband.

  When Tuesday morning came my hair (yes, it was mine; I paid for it) was washed, dried, brushed, and held back in a neat ponytail. My mother peeled one of the yams for the fire and then sliced the kontomire because both foods gave me an itchy rash on my hands when I touched them. As the kontomire and garden eggs simmered in separate pots on the stove, I set one place at the table. Then I took three serving bowls and spoons out of the cupboard and placed them on the island. I would dish out the food when he came so that it didn’t get cold while we waited for him.

  “Go and have your bath,” my mother urged me as I stood surveying the kitchen, convinced that I had forgotten to do something. She was poking a finger into the pot of boiling yam to test if it was ready; if overcooked it would break apart and form a gooey mess.

  “Okay. How is the yam?”

  “It is fine; it is sweet,” she said. She was now chewing a small piece that she had taken out of the pot.

  I finished showering in no time. Not having to boil water in a pot, pour it into a bucket, and take it to the bathroom shortened the process; here I only had to twist a knob and hot water would flow out of the tap. I wore the same dress that I had on when we first moved to Accra. I used a bit of face powder and squirted perfume into the air in front of me and ran through the droplets with eyes closed; now my whole body smelled like flowers. My mother interrupted my preparations to tell me that everything was set in the kitchen and that she was going to have her bath. She looked me up and down and smiled when I turned to face her. I was ready.

  Eli came at 1:36 p.m. I knew the exact time because I was sitting and staring at the analog clock on my phone when the doorbell rang. The sound startled me and I dropped the phone; I hadn’t heard the lift stop and open on my floor. My mother rushed out of her room and mouthed “Go” while pointing to the door. I hesitated; for some silly reason I wanted to fish my phone from under the chair before I answered the door.

  “Ah, open the door,” she said with sound this time.

  I stood up and smoothed my dress over my hips. My armpits were moist; it was a good thing that the fabric was light and patterned so that my sweat stains would not be visible. My feet felt heavy so that I needed extra effort to lift them. I imagined that I looked like a marching soldier. The frown on my mother’s face told me that she was displeased. The bell rang a second time. She flashed her eyes as if they had the power to physically push me toward the door. My hand was so damp with sweat that it slipped off the round doorknob when I
tried to turn it. I wiped my hands on my dress and tried again. This time I was successful.

  Eli broke into a smile that reached his eyes when he saw me. He was leaning against the doorframe like someone who had been waiting for a long time to be let in.

  “Please, good afternoon,” I managed to say in a near whisper. Should I shake his hand, should I hug him, a kiss on the cheek? Last night I had imagined hugging him but now no greeting seemed right for this almost-stranger who was also my husband. It didn’t help that he was jauntily leaning against the doorframe and openly staring at me, his smile intact.

  “Afternoon, Afi,” he said, his eyes never leaving my face. I lowered my eyes to look at my hands, and then my feet. Anything to avoid the intensity of his gaze.

  “Please come in, Fo Eli,” I heard my mother say from somewhere behind me. Only then did he look past me into the flat. I breathed a soft sigh of relief and stepped aside to let him in.

  He was seated in one of the armchairs, his feet splayed, his arms resting on the armrests, and his lips slightly curved in a smile. In his hand were two large cellphones. He had a beard; I didn’t remember him having a beard before. It was so neat that it looked as if it had been trimmed by someone using a measuring tool for accuracy. I assumed that the same person had trimmed his hairline. He had on a white shirt folded up to his elbows and tucked into black trousers. The brown leather belt at his waist matched his shoes.