His Only Wife

by Peace Adzo Medie

“Well, since I’m here, I might as well tell you that I have some land near the new hospital and I want to build something small there,” he said after clearing his throat.

  “Something small?”

  “Yes, somewhere I can lay my head. The family house has been taken over completely, there is nowhere I can call my own. A man my age needs a place he can relax peacefully.”

  “I see,” I said, nodding. Although what I really wanted to say was: “Who is in the family house? Is it not your wives and children and renters who pay rent to you?”

  “Ahn hahn, so I’ve come to hear what you have to say, what you plan to do. My daughter, I am in your hands.”

  The callousness of this man! The audacity! After denying my mother and me a place to live, he was now coming to ask me to build a house for him.

  “Tɔgã, please, I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “But I’m not asking you to give me everything today. You can give it to me small, small.”

  “I haven’t even started working yet, I’ve gone back to sewing school.”

  “Ah! Afi, what are you talking about? Look at where you are. Look at who you are married to,” he said, stretching his arms out wide.

  “I will see what I can do,” I said quickly, wanting to end the conversation.

  “Ahn hahn, you are now sounding like my daughter.”

  I had no intention of building a house for him, but I did have to give him money to encourage him to leave my home. I couldn’t stand having him around, eating everything, talking cheerily as though he and I were the best of friends, referring to me as “my daughter” when he had never treated me like a daughter. I felt so relieved when he left on Saturday that I took a four-hour afternoon nap, waking up in time to prepare supper, yam chips and kebabs. Eli washed the dishes, despite my objections, and we retired to the sitting room.

  “I won’t be able to sleep over here regularly . . . for a while,” he said. I was sewing strips of batik onto a leather handbag that would be modeled in the Dakar show.

  I tossed the bag onto the sofa beside me. “Why?”

  “Well, you know . . . I’ve already explained my situation to you; I told you that I was having some challenges.”

  “But that was before, before you moved in. Before everything happened between us. And now all of a sudden you are telling me that you are leaving.” The ferociousness of my response surprised me. I clasped my hands in an attempt to restrain myself, to put my emotions in check.

  “I didn’t say I was leaving.”

  “Then what are you saying?” I snapped and stood up. I had obviously failed in calming myself down.

  “Afi, please understand, this is not easy for me either,” he said, standing up too.

  “Then why are you doing it? How can I understand when you haven’t told me anything? Eli, I don’t know what is happening. I don’t know, I don’t know what you want, I don’t know what you want me to do.” I was gesticulating wildly as I spoke to him and tears were running down my face. I hadn’t known that I could burst into tears so quickly.

  “I’m asking you to be patient,” he said.

  “Haven’t I been patient enough?” I screamed, not caring if I upset him, or my mother, or his mother, or his entire family. “I am tired, Eli, I am tired,” I sobbed, snot mixing with my tears and ruining the perfect image I had presented to him since he first walked into the flat.

  He seemed surprised at my outburst, like he hadn’t thought it possible for me to express anger.

  “I’m sorry. I have to think about Ivy too,” he said, trying to hug me.

  I sidestepped his embrace.

  “You know she’s sickly,” he said in a pleading tone.

  “I don’t know anything!”

  “She has sickle cell anemia. She needs care.”

  “Why can’t that woman take care of her?”

  “Afi, I have to be with her, she’s my daughter. I’m going to the States tomorrow to bring them back.”

  “Them?” I yelled.

  “She needs her mother too.”

  “And how about me, how about what I need?” I asked him as I wiped my face with my nightgown.

  “It’s temporary; I just need to sort things out with her.”

  “What things? Tell me.”

  “I don’t want to get into that today, it’s not going to do us any good,” he said, looking at me as if I was being unreasonable. What was unreasonable about me wanting to share a home with my husband? What was unreasonable about me not wanting to share him with another woman?

  “You can’t do this, Eli, you can’t leave me.” I was gripping the hem of his T-shirt now.

  “Darling, don’t be like this. It’s only for a short while, until I figure things out.” He tried to frame my face with his palms but I pulled away.

  “What is a short while? How many days? How many weeks?”

  “I don’t know yet; I just need time.”

  “Eli, I love you, please don’t leave me,” my tears were blurring my vision so much that I couldn’t see the look on his face.

  “I love you too, darling, you know I do. That’s why I want to sort things out with her.”

  “But do you have to live with her to sort things out? Why do you have to be in the same house with her?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “It’s not! It’s very easy. You’re the one making it complicated!” I snapped.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Then make me understand, make me understand why you keep going back to her.”

  “Afi,” he began, reaching out to me.

  “Don’t touch me,” I yelled, spit flying out of my mouth.

  “Afi,” he said, his eyes pleading.

  “If you’re going, go. Stop calling my name and go to her. Go!”

  He left that night and afterward I could not sleep. I sat in the sitting room throughout the night, and for most of the following morning. I ignored the phone when Sarah called, and again when I heard the special ringtone I had assigned to my mother. I began dialing Mawusi, but hung up before her phone could ring. Finally, that evening, I found myself knocking on Evelyn’s door.

  “Come in,” she said quietly when she saw my face.

  I surprised myself by telling her everything.

  “I’m sorry,” she said when I had finished speaking. “So what are you going to do?”

  I shrugged. I did not have a plan. I realized then that I would have had a plan by now if I had spoken to my mother or Mawusi. Of course, my mother’s suggestions would not have been hers but would have come from the Ganyos, packaged as words of concern and encouragement. I wanted none of that.

  I fell asleep in Evelyn’s guestroom after an evening of eating and drinking but very little talking. She had no more news on the woman and seemed to be out of advice. She, however, had ample wine, so for the first time I drank good wine, not the sugary nonalcoholic kind that I was used to. I woke up with a dry mouth and a sense of disorientation. Evelyn had already left for work but had left breakfast on the kitchen counter for me. I ate, showered, and went in to work. Sarah was less than pleased when she saw me.

  “I was calling you all of yesterday. What happened? Did you forget you had the bags?” she said, a tape measure around her neck and a pin precariously tucked between her lips.

  “Sorry. I wasn’t feeling well,” I said. The effects of the wine combined with the heartache made my excuse close to the truth.

  “But you could have answered your phone, you could have sent your driver to deliver them,” she said, the pin still between her lips so that she whistled some of her words.

  “I’m sorry,” I said and walked to my work station, embarrassed. I managed to place Eli in the farthest corner of my mind as I pushed myself to finish sewing the batik on to the bags. I felt bad about letting Sarah down; I had begun to see her as a friend. Luckily for me, her frown was replaced by a smile when I handed her the bags at lunchtime, and by the end of the day, we were huddled in
her office, signing invitation cards for celebrities she hoped would attend the show.

  Eli called six times while I was at work and three more times when I got home. I ignored all his calls but answered when my mother called; the last thing I needed was her coming to Accra to find out what was happening to me.

  “He has left,” I told her unceremoniously.

  “What do you mean he has left?”

  “He’s gone back to the woman.”

  “Afi, you don’t listen! What did you do?”

  “I did everything you told me to do, everything that you and Aunty told me to do. I cooked, and cleaned, and smiled, and spread my legs as wide as I could, but he still left!”

  “Why are you talking like that, what is wrong with you? Have you forgotten that I am your mother?”

  “You asked a question and I answered it. Are you not the one who said that as long as I took care of him he would stay? I did that, and even more, and he still left.”

  “You are not yourself, I’m coming to Accra.”

  “There’s no need for you to come to Accra, there’s nothing you can do here. Besides, the man is flying to America this evening to go for his woman and child. This same woman that you people said would disappear.”

  “Stop shouting. Why are you shouting?”

  “My husband has left me.”

  “Afi, I’m sure it’s nothing, I will call Aunty right now to tell her what is happening.”

  “Call Aunty, but know that I’m not interested in receiving any more advice or encouragement. What kind of marriage is this? Afi, do this and he will choose you. Afi, do that and you will win. Is he a husband or a prize? Ah, Ma, I’m tired, I’m tired.”

  “Afi . . .”

  “No,” I said cutting her off. I hung up and shut my phone off. It was only then that I realized that I was crying. I had never felt so alone and small as I did at that moment. I wished I knew how to turn things around. It hit me then that I was hopelessly in love with him, that more than anything, I wanted to be by his side. Not because of his mother, or mine, but because of how I felt when he looked at me, when he said my name, when he held me close. At that moment, I wished more than anything that I hadn’t fallen in love with him, that I didn’t love him.

  Yaya and Richard came to see me at work the next day, and although they arrived separately, they came with the same message: this is nothing to worry about; he will be back. I listened quietly as they spoke about their niece, my stepdaughter, about how much Eli loved her, about how incapable the woman was of caring for her.

  “He’s doing all of this for the little girl, not the woman,” Yaya said, trying to reassure me. We were seated in her car because there was no space in the workshop where we could talk privately. I was stoic as she spoke, not caring to pretend like I wanted to hear what she was saying. I had allowed them to pull me around by the nose long enough. I had had enough.

  The only person who had been straightforward with me from the beginning was Evelyn. Though it went against everything I believed, I started spending more time with her. She recommended a foreman from Kpando to work on the house I was building in Ho, on my mother’s land.

  “He’s going to steal a bit from you, they all do, but he will make sure the work is done and he will stop the other workers from stealing. The only other way is to sit on the construction site yourself, every day from morning to evening, and oversee the work. And even if you were to do that, they could still steal from you without getting the work done. Do you know how many times I’ve caught workers leaving my site with boxes of nails stuffed into their boxers? Nails! You need someone who’s used to dealing with these people.”

  She was right. Within a week of bringing in the foreman, the house was at the roofing level and my costs went down; the bags of cement and everything else were lasting much longer

  But advice on the house wasn’t the only area where Evelyn helped me. One Friday she took me to a reception at her office. It was for their top clients so everybody who mattered was there, even many people from outside Ghana. I recognized some of the business people Eli had told me about, but I was more interested in the celebrities, their clothes, and their entourage. The first person I spoke with was the anchor from the evening news on TV2.

  “Did you tell her about your boutique?” Evelyn asked me, a glass of wine in hand. She had noticed me talking with the woman.

  “What boutique?”

  “The one you will soon open.”

  “Ah, Evelyn.”

  “Don’t ah me. This is the time to start advertising your work. Tell them you will soon be graduating from Sarah’s and opening your own place. Tell them about some of the pieces you’ve designed, and also tell them Eli is your husband. Everybody knows him and they will remember you because of that. There’s Lady X over there, let’s go talk to her.” I followed Evelyn, confident that she would do most of the talking and she did. But my cheeks were still sore from smiling when we returned home that evening. I really did not know how Evelyn did it.

  The following Saturday she asked me to accompany her to a funeral because Richard had refused to go with her. It was the funeral of some rich woman’s father and everyone who was everyone was going to be there.

  “I might find Richard’s replacement there,” Evelyn said jokingly as we entered her car. But then I knew three women who had met their husbands at funerals, so I knew there was a kernel of seriousness in what she was saying. It was one of the many reasons why the highways were clogged over the weekends with people going to and returning from funerals, dressed up in the latest fashions.

  Before we went to the church, we stopped by Evelyn’s block-making factory, which was in Adenta, to inspect the work being done.

  “You own all of this?” I asked in awe as I surveyed what seemed like hundreds of rows of cement blocks lined up like soldiers on a parade ground, gray and grainy and drying in the sun. Young men, most of them shirtless and glistening with sweat, shoveled cement and sand into three yellow concrete mixers, while another group shoveled the mortar into blue block-making machines, leveling the mortar as they put it into the mold to get rid of the excess. Each of them stopped to greet Evelyn as she walked by in her black sheath dress, stepping gingerly so as not to get mortar on her high heels as she inspected the open space that served as the factory. The foreman stood with his arms behind his back, as though he were a student addressing his headmistress.

  “Did Richard set it up for you?” I asked when we returned to the black Escalade that seemed to intimidate everyone on the road, even policemen, who never dared to stop her for made-up road infractions because they assumed she was a big man’s wife, girlfriend, or daughter.

  “Richard?” She laughed long and hard. “Please, I started my business before I met Richard,” she said as we crawled in traffic down Legon Road toward the 37 Military Hospital; the funeral service was at the Holy Spirit Cathedral.

  “How?”

  “How did I start?”

  “Yes, how were you able to start?”

  “Small, small. I saved money from my first year of working at the agency and bought the land. I had planned to build a house. In fact, that is why I bought the first block machine, but other people building in the area kept asking to buy my blocks and I figured I could make good money selling to them. I didn’t even have a mixer when I started; the boys used to do everything by hand, but I’ve since been able to upgrade. And let me tell you, the money is good. I’ve already built three houses out of the block factory, one in Accra, one in Tema, and one in Kpando. That’s why I don’t even bother with that so-called Aunty and her nonsense. Behaving like she’s the only one to ever give birth to sons. What kind of mother insists on choosing girlfriends and wives for her sons? And Yaya! Yaya who acts like she’s not also a woman, like she’s not also going to one day marry someone’s son.” She sucked her teeth after she said this, and then became quiet. But her words hung over us, even as we attended the funeral reception that was so glitzy that minus
the black clothes, it could have passed for a wedding reception. The drumming and dancing that followed the reception was still going on when we left. When we returned to King’s Court that evening, I asked her about what she had said earlier.

  “Look, they are your in-laws. I’ve never wanted to bad-mouth them to you. There’s no need to make you feel worse than you already do. I shouldn’t have said anything today.”

  “It’s not bad-mouthing; it’s the truth,” I said, wanting her to tell me more. We were sitting around her dining table sipping perfectly seasoned goat light soup that we had brought back from the reception in plastic bowls. Evelyn knew the caterer, who had insisted on giving us food to bring home. She had changed into shorts and a T-shirt, but I was still in my kaba and slit, which, from what I had seen that afternoon, appeared to be the attire of older women at Accra funerals. Almost all of the younger women had shown up in sheath dresses, fascinators, and high heels that would make for dangerous walking in a regular cemetery—where there were no footpaths and it wasn’t unusual to step on unmarked graves—but did not pose much difficulty in the new private cemetery where the burial took place today, with its paved pathways and demarcated burial plots. At least I now knew what to wear if I was invited to another Accra funeral. I brushed invisible dirt off my top as I waited for Evelyn to speak.

  “Look, Afi, you should know the kind of woman Aunty is by now,” she said with a sigh.

  “It will surprise you to know that I’ve had very little interaction with her, especially since the wedding. My mother is the one she talks to.” I sounded like a teenager trying to deny a friendship in order to appear cool.

  “Well, I will tell you this: Aunty is controlling. She behaves like she is God. She wants to tell everybody what to do, how to live, even strangers. But I don’t blame her, I blame the people who keep bowing down to her; beginning with her sons who have never had the courage to open their mouths and say ‘no’ to her, not once in their whole lives. I cannot understand how men like Richard and Eli allow themselves to be treated like small boys. You should see how Richard jumps to answer the phone when she calls, and then drops everything to carry out her orders. I’m not joking. Even if he’s on top of me, pumping away, he will stop and hop off like a kangaroo to speak with her and do her bidding. Can you believe it? And Eli, hmmm. As for Eli . . .”