His Only Wife

by Peace Adzo Medie

  “People have spent all their money,” Eli joked when we drove into the almost deserted parking lot of the furniture store.

  He did most of the work setting up the nursery. Yaya, excited about having a new nephew, also helped by ordering personalized wallpaper for the room. My mother stood with her mouth agape in the doorway when she first saw the room. She’d never seen a nursery before and hadn’t even known that there was such a thing, that parents could dedicate an entire room to their newborn child. I had shared a room with her and my father until he died. She was equally in shock when I took her to see the boutique I was going to open and broke into tears more than once as I showed her around. I had settled on a ground floor location in the tower near the airport, between a luxury watch store and a perfumery. I began setting up the boutique in January, even though my graduation from Sarah’s fashion school was not until April, four months away. Eli hired workers to build shelves and to install clothes racks. I was now looking for tailors to hire. They would work out of a nearby house, owned by Richard. I would pay him a monthly rent. But I wasn’t paying rent on the boutique. Eli said we could talk about rent later, when business picked up.

  He was very supportive and caring. We hadn’t had any fights since I fell and had returned to talking and laughing with each other since he moved into the bedroom. And until recently, we’d been having a lot of sex, but now I couldn’t bear to have him touch me. I pushed him away when he crossed the invisible line I created to divide the bed. We started going out again and spent a weekend in the riverfront resort at Kpong, this time without any of his friends. But we spent most evenings in bed, him on his computer or phone while I read a novel or went over plans for the boutique. My mother took his place in bed when he traveled or was late coming home. He once came to find her asleep on his side of the bed, but he didn’t seem to mind. Beyond the usual greetings and short conversations about the baby, he didn’t say much to my mother, which was fine because she was still in awe of him and was uncomfortable in his presence. But he was kind to her and constantly asked me if she was happy and if she had everything she needed. I assured him that she was fine. I knew that she was happy to be with me. She had confided that she didn’t intend to go back to Aunty’s store after the baby was born. She would stay with me as long as I wanted and would start a small business when she went back to Ho. She wanted to go back to baking cakes and pies, this time in the kitchen of our new house. She felt that the relationship between her and Aunty had soured so much that she no longer wanted to work with the woman. Before she left for Accra, Aunty had begun berating her in front of other workers and had once prevented her from joining a Women’s Guild meeting because she was late in coming, that lateness caused by Aunty who had increased her workload. Surprisingly, my mother didn’t blame me for any of this. Instead, she had come to realize that our benefactor was no saint.

  Aunty came to visit at the beginning of March, my eighth month. She had recently had a minor stroke and Eli wanted her close by, but she was eager to get back to work. She only stayed for four days but it felt like four years. Luckily, I had my swollen belly and feet as excuses for staying in bed and out of her way. Of course, that didn’t mean she couldn’t find me. The evening before she went back to Ho, she came into the room and sat on the bed beside me. We talked a bit about my health, the clinic where I would give birth, and the boutique. Even though I was no longer afraid of her, I could not relax in her presence. My back was so stiff that I feared I would have spasms.

  “And your mother has moved,” she said, when I thought there was nothing more to talk about. My mother had returned to Ho for a few weeks to move her things out of Aunty’s house and into ours.

  “Yes. She likes the new house.”

  “I know, I went to see it. I hope she has thanked Eli for it and all he has done for you. And you too. I hope you’re showing him your gratitude.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. Nothing. I just glared at her. Eli had never once made me feel like I owed him anything for the house. In fact, he had made it clear that it was my house, that he had no claim to it. It was the only thing I owned, the only thing of value that truly belonged to me. Even though I shared this house in Accra with him, I was aware that it was his. My name was not on a single document in Accra, not for a house, or a plot of land, or the boutique, or a car, nothing. That three-bedroom house in Ho with a pawpaw tree shading the front porch was the only thing I owned and this woman could not even let me enjoy that fact. I locked myself in the bathroom and refused to come out to say bye to her. My mother and I were glum for the rest of that week.

  I went into labor two weeks early, on the day of my graduation from Sarah’s. I hadn’t intended to attend the ceremony so the unexpected labor did not scuttle my plans. Eli was not home so Yeboah, the new driver, took me to the hospital. My mother sat beside me in the back seat, panting more than I did. Eli met us at the hospital about an hour later and our son was born soon after that.

  Eleven

  I was grateful for my mother’s help after Selorm’s birth. Even though he was almost one year old now, I was still more comfortable having her look after my son than someone we hired. I had heard so many stories of maids abusing children that I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my child with one of them. Every day like clockwork, I would hear him on the baby monitor while we were still in the throes of sleep. My mother had her own monitor and would quickly go to the nursery to pick him up so that Eli and I wouldn’t be disturbed by his cries. She had asked me more than once to switch my monitor off but I refused. I liked to know what was happening in the nursery even if I wasn’t the one responding to his cries. On the days that she was in church or traveled to Ho, Eli or I would go for him when he cried. We would pass him back and forth as we showered and dressed for work, and I usually prepared his breakfast porridge, which was a mixture of rice or corn and dried fish high in protein. My mother said it’s what she had fed me and it’s why I was known as Afi Fatty until I turned five. On days when I was in a hurry, he ate the purees that we bought in jars. Eli usually fed him in the highchair that we had set up in the kitchen. It was best to keep him out of the dining room because he enjoyed projectile spitting his food.

  After breakfast on days my mother was away, I would take him with me to work, either to the workshop or the boutique, although I usually went back and forth between the two. The shop girls helped me tend to him during the day by carrying him on their back or playing with him while I tried to get some work done. Thankfully, my mother was rarely away from the house. She relished the time spent with him and was often reluctant to hand him over to me when I came home in the evening. I complained that she was spoiling him but she wouldn’t listen. He only had to sniffle and she would come running to pick him up. I had told her that it was okay to let him cry every once in a while, but she didn’t want to hear that. Now he expected to be carried around throughout the day and would begin wailing as soon as his chubby feet touched the ground.

  Eli was almost as bad as my mother. As far as he was concerned, we had to indulge Selorm to no end. Many mornings, he would give the squealing baby a piggyback ride while already dressed for work. My mother never ceased to be amazed at the sight, to see someone so big become so small. He also had no problem giving his phones to Selorm to play with. Now Selorm seemed to enjoy nothing more than pushing the buttons on his father’s phones and listening to the sounds this made. I had bought him two toy phones, much bigger and more colorful than his father’s, but he loved the real thing. He had already plunked one into the guest toilet downstairs and cracked the screen on another, but Eli kept giving them to him whenever he stretched out his hand. He was incapable of saying no to his son. He had started taking Selorm to work with him around his seventh month. I worried that he would be too disruptive and make work impossible but Eli said he had been easy to manage. His assistant, Joanna, had helped, and Selorm had charmed everyone in the office with his cheeks that got rounder as he got older and a laugh that
triggered laughter in everyone around him.

  Yaya also adored him and came by quite regularly to play and bring him toys, which were rapidly accumulating in his room. There were so many that I wondered if I should turn one of the guest bedrooms into a playroom. My mother had scoffed at the idea, even she who adored him to no end thought this was too much. It was one thing to strap him to her back all day, another to devote a room to his playthings, especially when there were children in our family whose only toys were empty milk tins, sticks, and old tires.

  Aunty also visited several times. She had suffered a second stroke but was determined to keep moving. Even she seemed to be captivated by Selorm. I had been amazed the first time I saw her chasing after him as he crawled on the back porch. Somehow, he could not tire her out despite how energetic he was and how frail she was becoming. Indeed, it was only with him that I saw her let her guard down. I heard her burst into laughter more than once, and when I poked my head into the room to investigate, I found her alone with Selorm, holding him or running behind him. She wasn’t this affectionate with Fred’s teenage daughters, though she might have been when they were younger.

  “Finally, a grandson. Well done, Afi,” she had said on her last visit. We were on the back porch watching as Selorm pounded the keys on a colorful, miniature keyboard that Yaya had brought for him. I knew that it would soon be discarded onto the toy heap in his nursery and he would move on to something else. Before I would have been happy about Aunty’s comment, happy that I had pleased her and met her approval. But now her words irritated me. I hadn’t given birth to my son to fulfill her desires. I knew she was now more content than ever before, Selorm had righted my every wrong, and her affection for him seemed to have caused her to forget my insubordination. In fact, she hadn’t reminded me or my mother of the gratitude we owed her and her family since he was born.

  She was now free to come and go as she pleased, unlike when the other woman had occupied the house. She and Eli’s relationship had long recovered from the quarrel I started with my ultimatum in Ho; he was now welcome at her funeral. He visited Ho regularly, more than he had when he lived with the woman, sometimes with me by his side. Aunty waited on him hand and foot during those visits and he loved it: what do you want to eat, is it too warm, is it too cold? None of her househelps were allowed to cook for him; she did all of it herself no matter how many times he begged her to stay out of the kitchen. And during the meal she would sit at the table, ready to dish more food onto his plate at the slightest sign. She seemed to forget that I was there, which was fine by me. I usually ate at the other end of the table, in silence, while she mounted this performance of motherly love. I would have preferred to stay at my mother’s house but Eli insisted we stay together. After two such visits, I concluded that she loved him more than her other children. Even Yaya, her only daughter and youngest child, did not receive a fraction of the affection that Eli received. Luckily, this didn’t seem to affect his relationship with his siblings.

  Eli’s siblings spent a lot of time in our house. In fact, they too came and went as they pleased. On more than one occasion, I had returned from work to find Yaya barefoot on the sofa in the sitting room, working on her computer, or Richard and Fred in the dining room, eating a meal they had asked Mrs. Adams to prepare. Fred’s two secondary school–aged daughters came by almost daily during their vacation to use the pool and they slept over when they felt too tired to go home. No one ever asked me before doing any of these things, which I accepted. And I knew that Eli also paid similar visits to their homes. He had returned home on several occasions with plates of food for me, sent by Cecelia, and he told me that he sometimes napped in Richard’s house, which was less than five minutes away from their office.

  “That’s just how it is,” my mother had said. We were watching Fred’s girls, still in their wet bathing suits, walking back and forth in the kitchen. Those children could open and close the fridge more than a hundred times in the course of one visit. Only God knows what they were looking for! That day I instructed my driver, Yeboah, to take them home even though they wanted to sleep over. I needed a break. Besides, their grandmother would be arriving the next day to cook for her son with ingredients that she carted all the way from Ho. “He needs home-cooked meals,” she had the audacity to tell me over the phone. Now all she had to do was spoon-feed him. I would have been more bothered by this intrusion if I didn’t have work to do.

  The boutique was thriving. Despite Eli’s objections, I started working six weeks after Selorm was born. Knowing that every day I stayed at home the shop was empty pushed me out of the house. With Sarah’s help, I was able to hire five tailors; three of them were Togolese men. One of the women had graduated from Sarah’s school before me but hadn’t made it on her own, and the second woman was the product of a rival design school. I also employed three young people to assist the tailors with the ironing and to clean and organize. Nancy, my overly serious cousin and Tɔgã Pious’s daughter, oversaw production and kept everyone in line in my absence. I had brought her from Ho to help me set up and manage the workshop. She had been selling tomatoes in the big market and had been happy to leave that job behind.

  At my workshop, a three-bedroom house I rented from Richard, I tried to maintain everything I had learned at Sarah’s. We began work at eight and closed at five, both at the workshop and the boutique. I usually arrived at the workshop around the same time as Nancy and the assistants to ensure that everything was in order before the tailors arrived and production began. That meant assigning bundles of pre-cut fabric to each tailor for the day, recording the previous day’s expenses and production, and topping up the fuel in the generator in preparation for power outages, among other tasks. When I was satisfied that all was in order, I drove to the boutique, which was thirty minutes away in bad traffic. Ellen, the boutique manager, and her two assistants usually opened before I arrived. The boutique was everything I had wanted. The interior was white with bright paintings and colorful ornaments; it looked just like the ones I used to watch on the style channel. We had the white leather couch and served champagne, fruit juices, and cupcakes to our regulars. And in addition to the clothes, we sold handbags and jewelry. I designed and produced some of the handbags, including the ones made of raffia, but I bought most of them from artisans around the country. The beads were authentic Krobo ones; Yaya had introduced me to the guy who made them because she bought her beads from him as well. They were some of the most popular items in the store. Our customers couldn’t get enough of the brightly colored glass bead necklaces, earrings, and bracelets and didn’t seem to mind that they were sometimes as expensive as gold. I had to call the beadmaker every week for a new consignment and I think that’s why he recently informed me that he was raising his prices. I would need to find another supplier soon.

  But Yaya was right when she said I would attract the right kind of customers in the tower. Sales had been slow in the beginning because people were still figuring out who we were, but now our clothes flew off the racks. In fact, we had several items on back order and my tailors had to come in on more than one Saturday. Within a few months, all of the fashionistas in Accra knew of my brand and my trademark mixing of feathers, lace, beads, and leather in the garments I produced. Seamstresses had even begun copying my designs around Accra. Less than a month ago, I saw a woman climbing into a trotro with a half-beaded skirt that looked exactly like mine but couldn’t be mine because I didn’t recognize the beads and no one who shopped in my boutique traveled in trotros. But I wasn’t worried about the copycats because people still wanted the originals. I had already lost count of the number of celebrities who had worn my custom designs. I attracted more customers by pricing my ready-to-wear pieces just below my competitors, who believed that they should charge Versace prices. It was three months before I was able to pay rent to Richard but I hadn’t missed a payment since I started. I still wasn’t paying for the boutique space yet though. The location cost several thousand dollars more
than I had left over every month after paying my employees, paying the utility bills in the workshop, buying supplies, and paying rent to Richard. I would either have to sell much more or drastically raise my prices but none of this seemed feasible now. I brought it up with Eli but he thought I should first focus on building my brand. With a strong brand, I could sell more and raise my prices if I wanted. He asked Richard to help me mount an advertising campaign and Richard eventually handed me over to Evelyn and her firm. So I was getting to see a lot of my next-door neighbor and friend again.

  She and Richard were still together in a way that I didn’t quite understand. Richard had recently begun a relationship with a young woman from Anfoega. He had met her at church of all places; I didn’t even know that Richard attended church. She was an anesthesiologist at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. Most importantly, Aunty knew her family well and approved of her. She and Richard had already visited Aunty in Ho and had been warmly received, according to Cecelia, who told me this one day when she came to pick up the girls from the pool. In fact, the Ganyos were already talking about the knocking ceremony when they would visit her family to ask for her hand in marriage. All of this while Richard still spent nights in Evelyn’s flat.

  “But how can you bear this?” I asked her. She had come to the boutique to discuss some concepts for the ad campaign. She had on a fitted gray suit and electric-blue pencil heels that made her tower above me.

  “I told you a long time ago that Richard and I will not be going anywhere as long as Aunty is alive. This is not unexpected. He has his doctor and I have my lawyer,” she said and laughed, throwing her head back. We were seated on my white leather couch sipping fruit juices in flutes. Neither of us could stand champagne in the morning; I don’t know how my customers did it.