Walking on Cowrie Shells

by Nana Nkweti

  “Belinda, you should have seen your face …” I’m gasping and giggling, clutching my stomach.

  “Me? Chambu, I thought you were going to slap her when she called you akata gal.”

  “It was close there for a second, Bee.” I loop her arm with mine. “Come on. Let’s go have some fun. You go dance with that handsome husband of yours, and—”

  “And you go hear more about tax loopholes.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Belinda is on the dance floor with John, the kids are running around playing with other children, and Phillip Nyami is watching me. I refuse to turn and look, but the feeling of his eyes on my body is exquisite.

  “Is someone sitting here?” His voice is not quite as deep as I thought it would be, but it’s still very pleasant with a slight accent.

  “No, go right ahead and sit, young man,” says my tablemate and self-appointed tax adviser.

  “I’m Phillip.” He takes the chair right next to mine. A hair’s breadth away; I can see freckles on the bridge of his nose.

  “I know who you are.”

  “Yes.” He gives a knowing smile. “I believe you met my sister.”

  “I’m not quite sure met is the right word for it.” My smile, an echo of his.

  “Encountered?”

  “Nope.”

  “Came across?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Bumped into?”

  “Ballpark. How about collided, clashed?”

  “How about we meet and start fresh? Just you and me. Pretend our relatives haven’t told us everything they think they know about us.” He leans into me, takes my hand. “Hello, I’m Phillip.”

  “I’m Genevieve.”

  “Pleased to meet you, luv. Heard through the grapevine that you’re new in town.”

  “British!”

  “Huh?”

  “Your accent. I’ve been trying to place it.”

  “Nice one. I grew up in Brixton.”

  “Oh, are you just here for the wedding?” Is that disappointment in my voice? Weird.

  “No, no. I’m in finance. My company just transferred me here from our London offices.”

  “London, I’ve always wanted to go. But I’ve been on a ramen noodles budget the past few years, with grad school and all.”

  “Grad school?”

  “Anthropology. I’m an anthropologist.”

  “You must really enjoy this, then.” He sweeps his hand to encompass the circle of dancers forming on the floor as the DJ switches to a ceremonial bottle dance. “Come on, let’s soak up the ‘musical traditions of the grassland peoples of Cameroon.’” The last bit cheekily delivered in a Herzog documentary drawl.

  “I’m not that kind of anthropologist,” I say archly, even as I allow him to take my hand and lead me to the dance floor.

  Five songs later, we are still on the floor. There’s a drop of sweat rolling down my chest in time with the thump, thump, thump of a reggae beat. I feel the weight of several stares on us and I don’t care. It is the first time in a long time that my body has felt wholly my own. I feel wanton, like a Mami Wata, like the fallen woman I’ve been proclaimed to be. I turn around and fit my backside into the groove of Phillip’s body.

  “My sister warned me about the dangers of American girls.” His voice is whispery against the coil of my ear. He pulls me close.

  “Did she now?” I smile at him over my shoulder as I settle into him.

  I may only be half American, but I rub that half against him for all I’m worth.

  Friday, April 29

  Dear Journal ‘o’ mine,

  Home. I need a home of my own. Since the wedding reception I’d been seeing Phillip, first in my dreams, then in person. The first few weeks were filled with infrequent sightings: like glimpses of a yeti, the Loch Ness monster, or the unicorn of my girlhood diary. There he is at the buffet table at a cousin’s graduation party and there again at a recital. After the third sighting he asked me for my number. Since the fourth, we’ve been like teenagers: long phone calls and necking at the back of parties while our loved ones continue their standoff. I need a home of my own. A love shack. The contractors hit some gas main while tearing through the walls now, so I’m in for further delays. I don’t drive. New Yorker, here. We live too far out to catch a Metro. I’ve resorted to peeking at Belinda’s calendar and creating a time line of places where Phillip and I can meet. Tomorrow, it’s a funeral.

  The Memorial Service

  At the cry-dies back home they have professional keeners—women who, for a nominal fee, will blubber and produce high-pitched wails on cue. I am sure it’s not completely disingenuous. I imagine that in small villages there must be some point of connection, however distant. A cousin of a friend of the teacher who knew the deceased. I imagine they must have some touchstone, some place deep down inside they access to draw forth the requisite sadness. Like an actor getting into character, they find their motivation—a lost love, a found love that went sour. They find that one hurt to make the tears, when they do come, real.

  “Papa God, we knowsay you di make a way where way no dey. We knowsay you be Alpha and Omega. Through you all things dey possible,” the Nigerian pastor intones in pidgin, his words in a language we all can understand—prayer.

  Mr. Elias Fonchuak’s memorial service is a small one. It turns out his family had paid the exorbitant price to ship their loved one’s body to be buried on his native soil. At age seventy-two, Mr. Fonchuak made the same trip back home he had every other year in life. On this last and final journey, he traveled in the plane’s cargo hold instead of an economy-class window seat. Belinda tells me he was laid to rest in the village with all the attendant rites and rituals for funerals. The delegations of mourners from various tribal constituencies. Drumming, dancing, and blowing of horns. Plenty chop, plenty mimbo: libations of palm wine, Guinness, Heineken, and 33 Export. Yet despite the pomp and circumstance, all the public fanfare, I find funerals back home intimate. Mr. Fonchuak’s family had the chance to wash his body, to dress him in his favorite suit themselves, to lay him out in a coffin in their own parlor. They had the chance to really say goodbye. A chance to mourn.

  A chance I never had with my own baby when she died.

  “Papa God, you be talksay ‘ashes to ashes dust to dust.’ We dey here for this life only at your mercy.”

  “You killed my baby.” Those were some of the last words Steven ever said to me.

  Have mercy.

  I was hitting him before I even realized. Arms flailing.

  “Don’t you dare! Don’t you fucking dare blame this on me!” But hadn’t I already questioned myself? Hadn’t I wondered if I’d been working too hard? If I’d been eating right?

  Steven grabbed my arms and, none too gently, he shook me.

  “You are sick, you know that? What woman, what real woman, doesn’t want to have a baby?”

  This negro. Throwing that in my face then. In our early days, I’d made the mistake of telling Steven that sometimes I was terrified of pregnancy, of growing huge and immobile, beached by my own body. I craved movement and momentum in my life. He had teased me then, held me, joked about saving money to travel to Gujarat like we’d read about in the Times—a place where entire villages of Indian women were renting their wombs. It was all a joke till I got my fellowship. It’s only a year, I told him. A lot can happen in a year. I don’t want us to fall apart, he replied. There were tears from me, lots of angst from him, then suddenly everything was fine. He was his cheery, optimistic self again. And me? I was getting plump.

  I didn’t think anything of it at first. I was on the pill. My weight always fluctuated. I always ate when I was stressed. I was tired a lot, but assumed it was just the pressure of getting ready to travel, finishing my thesis, the relationship. I assumed a lot till a thin blue line told me otherwise.

  “Steven, I’m pregnant,” I blurted out at dinner one night. I hadn’t told him for a month; now I had spurted it out over dim sum. I hadn’t told anyo
ne, not even Belinda. I don’t think I could have borne her joy. Instead I had started writing it all down.

  Steven dropped his chopsticks.

  “Finally,” he said. This look came over his face then. It wasn’t surprise, it was something akin to relief.

  “Finally?” I echoed weakly.

  “I mean, it’s just so great. Finally, we can really be together. Really get on with our lives without all the distractions.”

  I saw something in him then, something sly, slithery.

  I said nothing for the rest of dinner at Hai Fu’s Kitchen, nothing in the ride back to our apartment, nothing until we were alone in bed together that night. Steven had been carrying on a one-man conversation filled with plans—with BabyBjörns, day rompers, night rompers, and Diaper Genies.

  I turned to him. Palmed his face with both hands.

  “Steven, I want you to be absolutely honest with me. What did you mean when you said ‘finally’?”

  Steven was a terrible liar. It was one of the things I had loved about him. He was too good a man to be too good at deception. But that slithery look came again. It took an hour, but he told me everything. The solicitousness—the maraschino cherry ice cream, the hour-long foot massages whenever he thought it was time for my cycle. He’d been monitoring me, my fertility, and tampering with my birth control. There were tears again, lots of angst again as well. I just didn’t want to lose you, baby, he’d said. Lose me, you’re going to lose more than me when I get an abortion! But even as I said the words, I knew they weren’t true. I was so angry with Steven at that moment, but not angry enough to kill our child. Even as much as I hated him right then, I stayed. I was in love. I was terrified. What was I going to do about my life, my fellowship, my graduate work?

  Four months into my pregnancy with my daughter, the baby we had decided to name Belinda, Mother Nature answered all my questions for me. I miscarried. When I told Steven, some of the last words he ever said to me:

  “What woman, what real woman, doesn’t want a baby?”

  “Maybe it’s just your baby. Maybe I don’t want your ‘special delivery,’” I said, knowing this would wound Steven—a postal worker, a man who’d worried I would someday outgrow him. “Maybe I just didn’t want to have a baby with you.”

  He shook me then, again, then again, and again, and again.

  For months after, I’d been filled with nothing but rage. But I understand him better now. His grief, his need to lash out, his lazy need to place blame. I understand now, but I still can’t forgive.

  “Papa God, as we di mourn your son, we knowsay he dey for your side, he dey for heaven.”

  I think of my baby Belinda in heaven and I am crying. Teary-faced mourners look at me in sympathy, no doubt thinking how beloved Mr. Fonchuak was by all. I think only of my baby girl and begin sobbing in earnest, my face in my hands. Belinda is rubbing my shoulders. They shake with the force of my grief. From somewhere I feel a strong hand at my back, turning me into an even stronger shoulder. I look up. Phillip. He has come to me, oblivious to the stares. The whispers now.

  I put my head on his shoulder and settle into him.

  Friday, May 13

  Dear Belinda,

  My darling baby girl. I am finally in my own home, with my own bed. I feel like you are watching over me now. But try not to watch too hard when Phillip comes over tomorrow night. Before I left her home, Bee told me she felt like she was losing me. I knew she was talking about more than just the move. There was a distance between us. We had come a long way from those little girls who dreamed together, who spoke pidgin English as a secret language in the make-believe kingdoms only the two of us shared. I have kept a lot of secrets from her, secrets like you. When I told her about you, she was wounded. Hurt by my silence on something so dear, then I told her your name. We are not what we once were but we are getting there.

  It’s quiet here tonight. So empty my voice echoes. Sometimes I holler just to hear it bounce off the walls. I don’t mind being alone so much now. I hug myself, grab hold of my chest, my arms, my persistent pooch, and take comfort in the feeling of my own flesh and blood.

  The Living Infinite

  Since the death of her husband Nala has felt at sea. Memories are rare pearls sifted from the silt of her grief. She remembers years as a youngling raised on the shores of an African land. Portuguese explorer Fernando Pó had named it for the spectral crustaceans flitting forth from sandy burrows, mating in opal lagoons, for days on end. In the sun-dappled throes of their ecstasy, they made easy, and quite tasty, prey. Secreted away in the shade of mangroves, Nala would cleave open their porcelain shells, reveling in the burst of salt and zesty life as her tongue dove into the sweetly tender morsels of flesh within.

  Her most recent memories flow from the bayous and wetlands of Louisiana, home to her late husband of forty-five years, Byron. The night she met him was a watershed moment of which, if one embraces life in all its complexities, there are sure to be many. Especially for one such as she who has lived to the ripe young age of 202.

  • • •

  Across a humid bar, in a beachside gazebo, set so close to the shore that the pounding of the soukous beat nearly rivaled the din of crashing surf, Byron laid eyes on her. He was all fiya-burn and swagger, ordering a grasshopper for the lady “in the coral dress” without so much as a bonsoir, chérie. And though she was a whiskey-neat woman, Nala wasn’t one to turn down a complimentary cocktail or the good-looking man bold enough to buy it. Full of big dreams and sweeping plans, the akata was nothing like the ton-tons of her sleepy waterfront town or even the big shots she bedded in the bustling port town of Douala. The hunt grew new to her. HER. A Mami Wata. A seasoned seducer of thousands of men, now made eager and shy, trembling as he took her hand. She thrilled to it. As they danced hip to hip, she inhaled an intoxicating mixture of clean mint, briny sweat, and something unknowable that reminded her of whale song and undertows and dark ocean depths where there be monsters.

  As he walked her home later, she noted that he’d grown solemn. Perhaps wondering where his night would end—by her doorstep or her bedside. She was wondering herself. She would fuck him silly of course, but the rest, this strange need to hear him talk, to smell the crème de menthe on the tip of his tongue. What was that? She was damned if she knew. Seeking answers, she began the first of that night’s several tests. Ordering him the tasty fried grasshoppers she loved to munch on after an evening out.

  “Taste this,” Nala demanded, pressing a small brown packet from a street vendor into Byron’s waiting palm, even as she pressed the first mystery bite to his lips.

  She watched him take a tentative nibble, chew contemplatively, taking his sweet, sweet time.

  “Well? Say something! Do you like it?”

  “It’s pretty good. Très bon. What is it?”

  “A local delicacy—fried grasshopper.” And she waited. For the spit take. For the frown.

  “Well, damn!” he said, smiling. “You’re already halfway to being a bayou girl. When you come visit me, I’ll cook you up some ’gator and frog legs.”

  Ha! She laughed and whirled around in a little jig. Went keeling into him. Dizzy. Like she’d swum up to the surface too fast. Her soul effervesced. Was this “happy”?

  • • •

  “Would you like it?” he asked her later still. He was standing behind her, hands surfing the crest of her hip bones in a teasing grip. The evening’s gloam shadowed his words, casting them against the bare walls, against her bare back.

  “Like weti?” She smiled coyly in the dark, her forehead joining her palms to rest against the concrete wall, a cool respite in her sweltering bedroom. “What is it you think I need, Monsieur Stillwater? I have sunshine and music and the ocean vast. That’s more than enough for me.”

  “Would you like something more?” he asked. “An adventure? A love? Would you like to be my woman?” Those words, whispered into the shell of her ear, somehow felt beyond her, an eternity away, a mirage on
a distant horizon.

  “Foolish man,” she said. “Be serious. Habi you drank too much Guinness and palm wine tonight?”

  In answer, he licked a wet groove up the Gaboon viper tattoo slithering along the column of Nala’s spine, sidling round the curve of her ribs, then the conch shell of a breast, the poison pink of a forked tongue coiled around an areola, fangs bared. Byron bit her nipple. She shuddered. Her mind whirled ahead with the complications and the this-can’t-be’s till the very moment he fit himself to her backside, pushing past parted thighs to stroke that sweetly tender spot again and again and again, so that moments later she would cry out yes and know she was ready for anything and everything.

  • • •

  The wedding of Byron Thelonious Stillwater to Nala Wouri DeCamaroes was officiated by Reverend Dr. Felix Tidwell III at St. Augustine’s Church in the Tremé, New Orleans. Of the 126 guests throwing birdseed on the church steps, dancing in the brass band’s second line, or later supping on shrimp and grits, oyster bisque, paupiette de poulet, and bananas Foster, all 126 were friends and family and a grudgingly invited colleague, or two, of the groom. At the reception, the bride delivered heartfelt regrets on behalf of her family, which was admittedly diminutive—no living parents, just three sisters—in comparison to the groom’s booming clan. So many had made the trip, special, up from Pointe à la Hache way down there in Plaquemines Parish. But the bride’s people were back in Africa, and that’s a long, long ways away. So there’s that.

  “Putain, I hate those broke-foot bitches!” This was Nala to her newly minted husband in the limo to the reception, where 126 guests, none of whom were the twenty-three female sister-cousins from around the globe she had actually invited, waited to fete them. “Not one word from them—no RSVP, no nothing. Connasses!”

  It was not in her nature to cry, but she felt her pupils kerning her eyes to full-on eel black, so she turned to her husband and let him see her in full fury. Reminded him, poor human man, what he was getting himself into.