Ghana Must Go

by Taiye Selasi

  “Hello,” he would greet them, sounding shy, speaking quietly. Not really shy, Taiwo knew. Not really interested was all.

  Hi was a three-syllable word in their mouths. Hi-i-i. As they caught sight of Kehinde, and blushed. Taiwo would observe this in Westin Hotel slippers. Four blond ponytails bowed in reverence before her brother’s babouches. Jealousy and bemusement would tangle, a knot. When the girls looked up Kehinde was gone.

  Ninja slippers.

  • • •

  A religion or a fetish, like a form of podophilia—or so it suddenly seemed to Taiwo, encountering the word in eighth-grade Classics. Rather, auto-podophilia. She wrote this neatly in her notebook, shading the o’s in with her pencil while someone asked, “Then what’s a pedophile?”

  The teacher’s nervous laughter was a distant sound in Taiwo’s head, the shading of the o’s her more immediate concern. She was thinking of her father and the lavish care he gave his feet: the salt scrubs and the peppermint oils and the vitamin E before bed. Love of feet. But later they’ll return to her, this laughter and its nervousness, the tension in the teacher’s face, the classroom air, the titters, every movement, sound, and image, every instant of that moment, plain: precisely the kind of moment one never knows for what it is.

  An end.

  A warning shot.

  A boundary mark. Between “the way things were” and “when everything changed,” a moment within which one notices nothing, about which one remembers all. Which is the point. The difference between Taiwo’s life at twelve, before everything changed, and the life that came next is this: not noticing. Not having to notice, not knowing to notice. That she never looked out. Not “innocent” as such—she’s never thought herself innocent, not as Kehinde was innocent, of judgment, distrust—but insular, contented in the world in her head, a whole life taking rise from her dreams, her own thoughts.

  She was thinking just then of her father’s “love of feet,” of his love of his feet, when someone asked about pedophiles and, half paying attention, she wrote the word down. A person who loves children. Who loves his own children.

  Pedophile.

  Auto-pedophile.

  Auto-podophile.

  And then. That familiar tingling in the pit of her stomach, the butterflies she felt when she knew she was right. Excitement and comfort and satisfaction mixed together with a touch of something heavier, more sinister: relief. Relief that she knew, that she’d gotten it right, tinged with terror at what might happen were she one day to be wrong. This is what she remembers most clearly ever after and laughs at most cruelly, her self-satisfaction that day: that she’d answered correctly, as she might have at a spelling bee, the question of who was her father?

  One who loved his own feet and who loved his own children.

  Misunderstanding the Greek phile, the connotation of “love.” And misunderstanding her father, who would abandon his children and who hated his feet, as she discovered that night.

  • • •

  Rather, morning.

  Four A.M., the house frozen in silence, Taiwo staring at the ceiling, her hands on her ribs. Suffering “middle insomnia,” as yet undiagnosed. She got up and went to the kitchen.

  • • •

  Generally, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d sneak in to Kehinde through the little trap door at the back of her closet. There she’d stand silently at the foot of his bed looking down at his face, watercolored by moon, and marvel how serious he looked fast asleep; he could only look serious, only frowned, when he slept. Awake, he looked like Kehinde. Like her, but with a secret, his gold-brown eyes hiding a smile from his lips. She’d smile at his frown until he, without waking, smiled back at her, eyes closed, a smile in his sleep. Just the one. A small smile, fifteen seconds and not longer, his eyelids still restive with Technicolor dreams. Then she’d blow him a kiss and return through the closet to her bed, where she always fell promptly asleep.

  Instead, she went down the back stairs to the kitchen, one of several secret passageways lacing that house. This was the Colonial she hated, in Brookline, which the man had bought proudly after Sadie was born (and though Mom had wanted a townhouse, South End, pregentrification; better value for money, she’d said, and was right). It was perfectly lovely. Red brick with black shutters, white trim, gable roof, ample yard in the back. But comparing it to the massive Tudor mansions of their neighbors, Taiwo found the house lacking. Anemic somehow. (She’d laugh to herself that first evening in Lagos, in the car passing streets that made Brookline look broke.)

  She went into the kitchen and opened a cupboard.

  Then opened another.

  Then reopened the first.

  Olu had just started at Milton Academy and was insistent upon eating what prep school kids ate. The cupboards were now stocked with mysteriously named products like Mi-Del Organic Lemon Snaps. She closed the cupboard. Opened the fridge.

  There was a remnant Capri Sun behind the Apple & Eve apple juice. She stabbed in the straw, drank the juice in one sip. Then threw out the carton and glanced out the window, clamping her hand against her mouth to stop the scream.

  There, gazing back at her, alarming in moonlight, was the statue of the mother with the hand-carved stone twins. It looked like a child between the silhouetted fir trees, a four-foot-tall alien-child, glowing pale gray. She hated that thing. They all hated that thing. Even Mom sort of secretly hated that thing. She’d unwrapped it on Christmas, said, “I love it, Kweku! Thank you,” and stood it after dinner by itself in the snow.

  Taiwo laughed softly, her heart pounding loudly. She decided she should check all the locks on the doors. Just in case some little alien-child was roaming around Brookline trolling for lemon snaps. The back door was locked. She tiptoed through the dining room, which no one ever dined in, to the cold, empty foyer to check the front door. She almost didn’t notice the figure huddled in the sitting room, which no one ever sat in (except important, slippered guests), to the left, off the foyer through the grand Moorish arch with the two sets of couches and red Turkmen rug.

  Almost.

  She was slipping through the darkness to the doorway when she turned her head a half-inch to the left and there he was.

  • • •

  Slumped on the couch, his feet propped on a footrest, his head tipped down, leaden, his lips hanging slack. He was still in blue scrubs, lightly spattered with red, as if he’d left the OR and gone straight to the car. His white coat was pooled on the floor where he’d dropped it. Both slippers had slipped from his feet to the rug. The moon from the window behind him fell brightly on the bottle of liquor still clutched in his palm.

  She froze in the foyer. Her heart resumed pounding. She glanced at the stairs, trying to think, walk or run? She knew she’d get in trouble if he woke up and saw her, not for sneaking, for not sleeping, but for seeing him like this. Collapsed on the couch with his mouth hanging open, his coat on the floor, his head slumped to his chest. She’d never seen her father so—loose. Without tension. He was always so rigid, so upright, strung taut. Now he looked like a marionette abandoned by its manipulator, puddled in a jumble of wood, limbs and string. She knew he’d be furious to know he’d been seen so. She knew she should tiptoe-sprint back up the stairs.

  But couldn’t. Or didn’t want to. She wanted to disturb him. She wanted to revive him, make him wake up, sit up. So, she went and stood in front of him as if he were Kehinde, at the edge of the footstool in front of his feet, then recoiled, hand to mouth again to keep herself from crying out with shock at all the bruises on the bottom of his feet.

  • • •

  How she’d never seen them was beyond her, is beyond her now, to think she’d only ever seen the one side of his feet, the smooth. The soles, by sharp contrast, were chafed, calloused, raw, the skin black in some places, puffed up at the toes. It was as if he’d quite literally crossed burning sands barefoot (in
fact, had gone shoeless for most of his youth). Taiwo pursed her lips shut to mute her revulsion, but what she felt next had no shape and no sound:

  an odd emptiness, weightlessness, as if she were floating, as if for a moment she’d ceased to exist: some new odd sort of sadness, part grief, part compassion, a helium sadness, too airless to bear. In the future, in adulthood, when she feels this same airlessness, when she feels her very being rushing out of her like breath, she’ll long to touch and be touched, to make contact (and will, with an assortment of consequences). This longing, like most things, was innocent at birth, taking root in her hands and her fluttering heart: the urge to touch, to kiss his feet, to kiss-and-make-them better. Put her father back together. But she didn’t know how. She didn’t have the answer. She didn’t know this father. She knelt. Began to cry.

  She was frightened for reasons she couldn’t explain, by a sense beyond reason but clear all the same: that something was about to go horribly wrong if it hadn’t already, that something had changed. Most of this was her inexplicably keen intuition (along with middle insomnia, undiagnosed at age twelve). But it came without thought, a feeling completely without narrative. An opening up.

  Something had opened somewhere.

  The fact of her father here slumped in the moonlight meant something was possible that she hadn’t perceived: that he was vulnerable. And that if he was—their solid wooden father—then that she was, they all were, and worse, might not know. He had hidden the soles of his feet her whole life, for twelve years; he could hide (anyone could hide) anything else. And finally, that he’d tried, that he had a thing to hide, meant her father felt shame. Which was unbearable somehow.

  She rested her head on the stool by his feet. Whispered, “Daddy,” touched him lightly. He continued to snore. “Wake up,” she persisted. “Wake up.” But he didn’t. She noticed the slippers by her knees on the rug.

  As gently as possible and as silently as she could, she slipped one of the slippers onto one of his feet. It dangled like a shoe on a shoe tree. Then the other. At the very least the bruises were hidden from view.

  “No,” he said, barely.

  Taiwo leapt up in panic, taking a single bound back from the window and moon into the depth of the dark where, concealed by the shadow, she closed her eyes, waiting for yelling. It didn’t come. He made another noise, a wet, fast-asleep noise, murmured “no” again, softly, then silence. Then snoring. She opened her eyes and stepped forward, still fearful. His head was now upright. He was talking in his sleep.

  “It was too late,” he said, just as perfectly clearly as if he knew she was standing there watching him speak. But didn’t smile in his sleep as Kehinde would have at this juncture. His head slumped back over.

  She ran for the stairs.

  • • •

  For all the years after, when Taiwo thinks of her father, when the thought slips in slyly through that crack in the wall—and the picture of him dead in a garden slips with it, his soles purpled, naked, for anyone to see—she’ll ask herself hopelessly, “Where were his slippers?” and as she did when she was twelve, she’ll start to cry.

  9.

  Where are his slippers?

  In the bedroom.

  He considers.

  His second wife Ama is asleep in that room, plum-brown lips slipped apart, the plump inside-pink showing, and he doesn’t want to wake her. A wonder the change.

  Quite apart from the performances for himself and his cameraman, there is this new and genuine desire to accommodate his wife. It’s as if he’s a different (kinder) man in this marriage, which that Other Woman would argue is not his second but his third. That Other Woman is lying and the both of them know it: they were never close to married (though she’d lived in his house. He’d been desperate for warmth, for the weight of a body, the smell of perfume, even cheap Jean Naté. The thing had gone bust when she’d broken her promise to leave the apartment that morning in May, so as not to see Olu, who’d come for his birthday at last and who left at the first sight of June). With Ama, whom he married in a simple village ceremony, her incredulous extended-family members watching, mouths agape, he is gentle in a way that he wasn’t with Fola. Not that he was brutish with Fola. But this is different.

  For instance.

  If he raises his voice and Ama flinches, he stops shouting. Without pause. Like a light switch. She flinches, he stops. Or if she passes by his study door and coughs, he looks up; no matter what he’s doing, what he’s reading, Ama coughs, he stops. His children used to do the same, intentionally, just to test him, to weigh his devotion to his profession against his devotion to them. By then he’d moved the sextet to that massive house in Brookline, a veritable palace, although his study door, an original, didn’t close. They’d loiter in the hall outside the half-open door, giggling softly, whispering loudly to attract his attention, then peer in to see if he’d look up from reading his peer-reviewed journal, which he wouldn’t, to teach them. It was a logically flawed experiment. He’d have told them if they’d asked. His devotion to his profession kept a roof over their heads. It wasn’t comparative, a contest, either/or, job v. family. That was specious American logic, dramatic, “married to a job.” How? The hours he worked were an expression of his affection, in direct proportion to his commitment to keeping them well: well educated, well traveled, well regarded by other adults. Well fed. What he wanted, and what he wasn’t, as a child.

  When Ama loiters noisily—and she is testing him also, Kweku knows—he marks his sentence and lowers his book. He gestures that she enter and asks if she’s all right. She always says yes. She is always all right. And if they’re riding in the Land Cruiser and she shivers even a little, he orders Kofi, who’s started driving, to turn off the A/C (though he can’t stand the humidity, never could, even in the village; they used to mock him, call him obroni, albeit for other reasons, too). And if he’s watching CNN when she comes padding into the Living Wing in pink furry slippers, pink sponge rollers in her hair, he switches the channel instantly to the mind-numbing cacophony of the Nollywood movies that he hates and she loves.

  And so forth: attends church (though he can’t stand the hoopla), buys scented Fa soap (though he can’t stand the smell), instructs Kofi to make the stew to her exact specifications (though he can’t stand the heat, weeps to eat it that hot). He wants her to be satisfied. He wants this because she can be. She is a woman who can be satisfied.

  She is like no woman he’s known.

  • • •

  Or like no woman he’s loved.

  He isn’t sure he ever knew them, or could, that a man can know a woman in the end. So, the women he’s loved. Who knew nothing of satisfaction. Who having gotten what they wanted always promptly wanted more. Not greedy. Never greedy. He’d never call his mother greedy, neither Fola nor his daughters (at least not Taiwo, at least not then). They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all.

  They were dreamer-women.

  Very dangerous women.

  Who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, “brutal, senseless,” etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become.

  So, insatiable women.

  Un-pleasable women.

  Who wanted above all things what could not be had. Not what they could not have—no such thing for such women—but what wasn’t there to be had in the first place. And worst: who looked at him and saw what he might yet become. More beautiful than he believes he could possibly be.

  • • •

  Ama doesn’t have that problem.

  Or he doesn’t have that problem with Ama.

  First of all, she isn’t as smart as the others. Which isn’t to say that she’s stupid. Far from. He knows that people talk, that people call the girl “simple,” and he knows it’s cliché, surgeon shacks up with nurse. But he also knows now t
hat his wife is a genius, of a completely different sort than her predecessors were. She has her own form of genius, a sort of animal genius, the animal’s unwavering devotion to getting what it wants. To getting what it needs, without disrupting the environment. Without tearing down the jungle. Without causing itself harm. He wouldn’t have guessed this a talent at all, but for those smarter women’s gifts of self-flogging, self-doubt.

  Ama doesn’t hurt herself. It doesn’t occur to her. To question herself. To exact from her psyche some small payment of sorrow for all worldly pleasure, though the world demands none. But she isn’t a thinker. Isn’t incessantly thinking—about what could be better, about what to do next, about what she’s done wrong, about who may have wronged her, about what he is thinking or feeling but not saying—so her thoughts don’t perpetually bump into his, causing all kinds of friction and firestorms, explosions, inadvertently, collisions here and there around the house. Her thoughts are not dangerous substances. The thoughts of the dreamers were landmines, free radicals. With them breakfast chat could devolve into war. Ama isn’t a fighter. She comes to breakfast without weapons and to bed in the evening undressed and unarmed. She has no vested interest in changing his mind. Her natural state is contented, not curious. And so second of all, she isn’t unhappy.

  This was a complete revelation.

  • • •

  To live in a house with a woman who is happy, who is consistently happy, in her resting state—happy? And who is happy with him, not as an event or a reaction, not in response to one thing that he did and must keep doing if he wants her to remain happy, churning the crank, ever winding the music box, dance, monkey, dance!—but whom he makes happy, has made happy, and who’s miraculously stayed happy? Who has the capacity to stay happy, with him, over time?

  Never.

  He didn’t know this was humanly possible, or womanly possible, until fifty-three years old, when he packed up his tent and decamped to the Master Wing but finding it too quiet one day considered his nurse, and the rise of her buttocks, and the chime of her laugh, and the odd way she tittered and blushed when he approached, and asked if she might like to join him for dinner?