“What about him?”
“Do you know that Aunty ordered Richard to dump me as soon as she found out we were together? Ask me why.”
“Why?”
“She said my father once insulted her. My late father who has been dead for twenty-two years! A man who died while I was in primary school! She once came to Kpando to buy palm nuts and took offense that my father wouldn’t accept the price she was offering. So because of something that happened when I was a child, an incident that I knew nothing about and had no hand in, she has ordered her son to leave me. Can you believe it? She told him I wasn’t good for him because she was sure that I would have my father’s ways. In other words, she was sure that I would stand up to her.” Evelyn rolled her eyes and returned to sipping her soup. A bead of sweat lined her upper lip; I didn’t know if it was from the pepper in the soup or from the story she was telling me.
“I don’t even know what to say . . . she has been very nice to us. To me and my mother . . .” I still couldn’t bring myself to criticize Aunty in front of Evelyn.
“I’m not saying that she cannot be nice. I know for a fact that she pays school fees for more than fifty children in Ho. I’ve seen Richard stuffing the cash, fresh from the bank, into white envelopes to distribute to the families. But the fact is that the woman wants everybody to worship her. As long as you are doing her bidding, you won’t have any trouble, but the day that you make a mistake and go against her is the day that you will see hell. My sister, you will see fire! And that is why I haven’t placed my hopes in Richard; I’m not expecting anything from him. As long as his mother is alive, there will be no future for us. Did you know she wanted him to throw me out of this flat? He had to lie to her, telling her that I pay rent; that’s the only reason she let the matter rest. And that’s why we rarely go out together, because he doesn’t want people to see us and tell his mother, even though I don’t know why he bothers because there are people working in this building who tell her everything. I think it’s one of the reasons he’s happy to have you here; he can now use you as cover to come and visit me. And then there’s Yaya, Small Aunty. She’s her mother’s ambassador in Accra and reports on everything that happens here. That family is too much for me.” She sat back with a sigh.
Her description of Aunty was unlike any I had heard, but it rang true. I recognized the generous woman but also the controlling woman who gave with one hand and directed with the other. The only thing I had yet to see was the punishment that she meted out to those who offended her. My heart clenched when I thought of my mother working for Aunty, living under Aunty; I couldn’t go against the woman. And as for Eli . . .
“What about Eli, he’s like Richard, ehn? I asked.
Evelyn gave a frustrated laugh. “Are you not married to the man? Are you not seeing what’s happening?” she said, getting up to take her soup bowl to the kitchen. “You don’t need me to tell you about him, my dear.”
I watched her as she walked away, hoping she would tell me something else than what I had begun to believe, than what I had begun to see as the truth. When she didn’t say anything more, my gaze slid down to my soup. Brown chunks of goat meat, skin still on, floated in it, as did a layer of oil. I didn’t think I would be able to chew and swallow a single piece of meat if I tried. My jaws felt locked and my throat constricted. I could see no way out of the mess I was in and couldn’t think of anyone who could help me. But my spirits lifted and I became optimistic when I found out a week later that I was pregnant.
Nine
“I’m pregnant,” I said to Eli, as though this was something I announced every day. I had practiced this several times in front of the bathroom mirror and then while seated and holding up a hand mirror. I decided to say it sitting because that position made me appear softer, nonconfrontational. And I really didn’t want a confrontation. I wanted this to be a new beginning for us. A happy one.
Eli was seated in the armchair, his phones spread out on the table before him to form an electronic arc, and his legs spread around the table’s sharp edges. It was early August; two days since he had returned from America, one week since I found out I was pregnant. I waited to tell him in person.
“You are pregnant?” he said in an awe-filled whisper.
“I’m pregnant,” I said again, resting my hand on my stomach.
“You . . . you went to the hospital?” he said as he moved from the armchair to join me on the sofa.
“Yes,” I said. We were now face to face, his lips turned up in a smile.
I burst into a happy laugh, encouraged by his smile. He drew me into his arms and I went willingly. I began to cry when he kissed me; I had missed his touch. He placed a hand on my belly, which was still as flat as it had been when he last saw me.
I giggled. “It’s too early, you’re not going to feel anything,” I said. I slowly removed his hand and wrapped his arms around me again.
“I love you,” I whispered, as though the words were fragile.
He loosened his hold on me, drew away, and looked into my eyes. “I love you too.”
We made love and then he left. But I wasn’t upset. I knew that our situation wasn’t going to change instantly. It would take time, but I was certain this pregnancy was going to bring him to me for good.
Everyone felt the same way. My mother, Mawusi, Aunty, Yaya, even Richard, who had been avoiding me since his visit to Sarah’s. They all believed that once Eli had another child, the woman would no longer be able to use Ivy to control him.
“Not only are you his wife, his proper wife, but you are also the mother of his child. Let’s see what she will be able to do then!” Yaya said over lunch in my flat. Since my pregnancy, she had been coming over more often, usually with home-cooked meals and maternity clothing she bought on her travels. My mother also wanted to come for a visit, but I convinced her to wait until I was further along. I missed her but didn’t want to have to deal with her nagging until it was absolutely necessary.
“Okay, Mrs. Ganyo,” she had said when I told her to hold off on visiting, the joy she was feeling at my pregnancy carried through the phone.
“Has he been coming to the flat?”
“Almost every day.”
“And is he staying?”
“Sometimes. But I’m not worried. He spent five nights here last week.”
“Ahn hahn, very soon it will be seven nights.” We both burst into giddy laughter.
I became even more confident when my doctor revealed that the baby was a boy. I was twelve weeks along and Eli had come with me to the clinic in Achimota, which was unlike anything I had ever seen—nurses smiling with patients! Who knew that nurses could be so kind?
“A boy?” Eli asked the doctor, his eyes widening in wonder as he carefully followed the movement of her hand on the ultrasound screen. “It’s a boy,” he turned to me and said, as though I hadn’t heard the doctor. I was still on the table, my shirt bunched beneath my breasts, and the gel glistening on my small but growing belly.
I nodded and began to cry.
“Don’t cry,” he said as we tried to hug each other without getting the gel on him. His words made me cry even more. I was going to have Elikem Ganyo’s son. His first son! My mother began crying on the phone when I told her, and I think Aunty’s voice broke, but I’m not sure.
“Everything will change now, you’ll see,” she told me. And she was right.
Eli fussed over me even more when he got back from the clinic. He insisted on dishing out the take-out food we had ordered and brought it to me on a tray while I sat in front of the TV.
“We should get you a maid, someone to help you around the house,” he said. He had been going on again about getting a maid since I told him I was pregnant.
“There’s no need; besides my mother is coming soon,” I said with a mouthful of mpoto-mpoto, made with mashed sweet potatoes and sprinkled with sugar. Pregnancy had given me a serious sweet tooth. I had put honey in a stew I made the day before.
“You can’t expect your mother to do everything when she comes.”
“Let’s wait until I move into the other house to get a maid. This place is too small for five people.”
He looked away from me when I said this, picked up one of his phones, and began running his finger across the screen.
“So when?” I said, pushing him, determined to take advantage of this opening. It had been three months since I told him I was pregnant and all I had gotten so far was sleepovers and one small suitcase. But I wasn’t going to allow that to continue. Not when I was carrying his son, his first son, his only son.
“When, Eli?”
“Look, these things . . .”
“I don’t want a long speech, just give me a date. Say ‘Afi, this Friday, you’ll move out of this flat and into our house.’ Finish.”
“Afi, don’t be difficult.”
“Difficult?”
“You know what I mean.”
I lifted the tray off my lap and plopped it on the center table with so much force that the mpoto-mpoto splattered, orange globs landing on the polished glass. I was surprised the glass did not shatter. He dropped his phone in surprise. “I’m not giving birth to this baby while living in this flat. I swear to God, if you refuse me, I will go back to my mother.” I stood up and brushed past him.
“Afi.” I turned around. “I won’t have this,” he said, as though he was speaking to a disobedient child. His words enraged me even more. I stomped into the bedroom and slammed the door. He didn’t stay over that night.
I went to see Evelyn after he left, and told her I would leave for Ho the next day.
“Don’t force these things, Afi, let him do it because he wants to.”
“What do you mean? How can you say that after all I’ve been through?”
“Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying, you know I’m the last person to side with your husband. But I don’t know if leaving will get you what you want.”
“And staying here, what will it get me, and what will it get my child?”
“Afi, look around you, look at the life you have. A beautiful flat, a car and driver parked in front of the building; you even said he’s promised you a boutique in the new mall. On top of that he’s kind and loving. So what if he sometimes goes to stay with another woman? Men have side-babes, that’s just the way it is. But it doesn’t matter because you are his wife. You are the one his family and friends recognize, and that’s what’s important. I don’t think giving him an ultimatum is the way to go. You have to learn to enjoy the money and ignore the man’s faults. Enjoy yourself, go shopping, ask him to move you into a big house of your own, one with your name on the title, ask for a bigger car, a four-wheel-drive, in fact, ask for two cars! Invest the money he gives you, start your own business, help your mother start a business. Let him go and spend the weekend with another woman if he wants. You just live your life and enjoy it.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Because you’re in love with him? Please, put love aside and be practical. Love will not put food on the table; it won’t hold you at night.”
“You don’t understand, you don’t know how it feels, how much it hurts. I wish I could be one of those women who are able to live with another person in their marriage, those women who proudly say that they are the farm and the other woman is only a garden. I wish I could be like them but no matter how hard I try I can’t bring myself to accept her. I love him and I just can’t share him with another woman, I can’t.”
I ignored Evelyn’s warning and the next day packed two suitcases. Mensah drove me to Ho.
“Why are you here?” my mother asked; it was obvious from my expression that this wasn’t a happy visit. We sat in the sitting room and she offered me water. I’d walked through the door just as she was leaving for choir practice. Now her hymnal lay on her lap, its maroon cover blending into the cloths tied around her waist.
“I had to come home.”
“Home? This is not your home anymore.”
“Ma?”
“Does Aunty know you’re here?”
“I didn’t tell anyone.”
“You didn’t tell your husband?”
“No.”
“You left your husband’s house with two big suitcases and didn’t tell him?”
“I don’t live in my husband’s house.”
“You’ve started with this thing again, ehn? You’ve started again!”
“How will you have felt if Da had married you and never brought you to his house?”
“What did Aunty tell you?”
“I don’t want to talk about Aunty,” I said, then slowly stood up. I was beginning to feel heavier and was now doing everything slower than before. My mother stood up with me. She looked both worried and angry at the same time.
“I’m tired, Ma, I’m tired. I don’t care what anyone says. If he doesn’t kick that woman out and move me in, I won’t go back to Accra.”
“Afi, what is he doing to you that is so terrible? Is he beating you?” she asked. I refused to answer her; I wasn’t going to play her game. “Is he starving you? Are you hungry? Tell me!” Now her face was close to mine. That might have bothered me before but not anymore. I simply walked past her and into my former bedroom, which was just as I had left it. She followed me.
“Ma, I’m not going back. You can go and tell Aunty. If he wants me back, he should get rid of that woman.” I lowered myself onto the bed, which creaked under me.
“Where are you going to stay? In this house? Have you forgotten that this is Aunty’s house?”
“We will move to the new house.”
“Is that why you have been sending me money to finish the house? Was this your plan all along?”
“No, this wasn’t my plan. I didn’t plan for my husband to impregnate me and stash me in a flat while he lives with another woman in our home.”
My mother grimaced and for a moment, I believed that my words were causing her physical pain, but I wasn’t going to back down.
“Stay here, I’m going to Aunty.”
“Okay.”
“Stay here, don’t go anywhere, don’t call anyone. Don’t call Mawusi. In fact, who saw you when you arrived?”
“I don’t know, a few people. I stopped to greet the charcoal seller.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Nothing, I only said I was visiting.”
She exhaled loudly. “Stay inside. I will tell Mensah to go and park at Aunty’s house before this whole town starts asking questions,” she said, her voice hushed. Even in her anger, she didn’t make the mistake of speaking loudly enough for anyone outside to hear.
I stretched out on the bed when she left and winced when I felt the wooden slats press against my back through the mattress. I almost tumbled out of the bed when I rolled over to my side in search of a more comfortable position. Had the bed always been this narrow and the mattress this thin? Around me the room seemed old, dusty. The table with my mother’s suitcases and boxes on it was unvarnished and sloppily assembled so that several unsightly nails were visible. I could see spirals scratched into the concrete floor where the mason had smoothed the cement mixture with a trowel and when I squinted, I saw dust particles floating around me. Every flutter of the threadbare doorway curtain sent even more dust my way. I’d never noticed these things before. In fact, I had been proud of the fact that I had my own room; how many young people living with their parents in Ho have their own room? All of my cousins shared a room with someone. Even Mawusi, when she came home during the holidays, shared a room with her mother. Now it all seemed shabby; that’s what living in that gilded flat had done to me.
“Where are you?” my mother called as she entered the front door.
“I’m where you left me.”
“Is it me you’re talking to like that? Be careful!”
“I’m just saying . . .”
“I said watch yourself. If you’re a big woman, you’re a big woman only for yourself, no
t for me.”
I rolled my eyes but said nothing.
She was now standing by my bed looking down at me. A deep wrinkle divided her forehead into two, and her hair, which she had recently dyed such that I could see traces of the inky dye on her hairline, was held in a tight bun. I knew she was waiting for me to ask what had transpired at Aunty’s, but I refused; I didn’t send her over there. When she tired of my silence she said, “I’m going to heat something for us to eat.”
I sat up.
“Where are you going?” she said, snapping at me.
“To help you in the kitchen.”
“I don’t need help.”
I heard her plunk a pot onto the tabletop gas stove and then begin stirring; it sounded as though she was scraping the bottom of the pot with the ladle. I sighed; we were going to have aluminum for dinner tonight. The scent of spice-infused palm oil soon wafted through the doorway and pulled me out of my room. My mother dished our food into two enamel plates and set them on the scarred wood of our dining table. We sat on two mismatched chairs that had once belonged to Aunty. I looked down into my plate and frowned at the anchovies in the sauce.
“Keta school boys?”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“You know I don’t like them,” I said in a whiny voice.
“Then you should have stayed in your own house and eaten what you like,” my mother replied before breaking off a piece of cassava with her fingers, immersing it in the sauce, and eating it. After this, she picked several Keta school boys out of the sauce and chewed them.
She knew I didn’t like anchovies. The fishmongers never cleaned them well enough before drying, so that every bite was laced with sand.
“Did I know you were coming? I made my stew to eat by myself and then you showed up. Do you expect me to throw away my food because you have decided to leave your husband’s house?” She drank a mouthful of water from a large plastic cup.
His Only Wife Page 15
