Ghana Must Go

by Taiye Selasi

  “Of course I don’t,” Taiwo had quipped, laughing hoarsely, the sound of the laughter false even to her, in her ears, as she’d shifted, unnerved by the comment, eyes trained out the window. “I already have. You treat me for free, no?”

  “I do,” Dr. Hass said. “And why would I do such a thing, do we think? Your unique family background? Your remarkable accomplishments? Your formidable intelligence? Your stunning good looks?”

  Taiwo laughed again, but it hurt her to do so. She shrugged, rubbed her elbow. “You got me,” she said. She looked at the clock, built-in bookshelf, O’Keeffe print. Cup of Silver Ginger. Out the window again. A word was taking shape on the tip of her tongue but the tears got there first and she swallowed them both. “Time is up.” Stood.

  “I care.” Remained seated.

  “I know,” she said, leaving, and meant it.

  A fraud.

  The word came, belated, and floated before her, a shape in the mirror, a tint to the light. She reached out a finger to touch her reflection, her eyes glowing back at her, strange in the dark (an inheritance, the color, from the Scottish great-grandmother), tracing her lips, conch-shell pink, on the glass. “Taiwo, don’t cry,” she said, softly, in mimicry. She laughed at the sound of it, dropping her hand. What was there to cry about? The same thing as always. The crushing disbelief in the truth of their love.

  She returned to the bedroom and stood in the doorway (in armor) and looked at him, noting the flaws. The torso less taut than the arms and the legs with a thinning of hair near the crown of his head. A better cast woman would have asked at this juncture if the man found it strange to be here in this house, in his mother’s old room (albeit remodeled completely, a childhood apartment turned bachelor pad), but it didn’t occur to her, was vaguely familiar, a son in the bed of his mother. Instead, she found her damp purse by the bed where she’d dropped it and went to the windowsill, steel brown, and sat. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Do you mind if I watch?”

  She was laughing now, changing the subject, blowing O’s. “Think about it. Barring Rastafarians, the real ones, religious ones, what kind of black girl grows locks? Black girls who go to predominantly white colleges, that’s who. Dreadlocks are black white-girl hair. A Black Power solution to a Bluest Eye problem: the desire to have long, swinging, ponytail hair. The braids take too long after a while, the extensions. But you still need a hairstyle for running in rain. Forget the secret benefit from affirmative action; this is the white woman’s privilege. Wet hair. Not to give a shit about rain on your blowout. I’m serious.”

  “You’re gorgeous.”

  “You think so?”

  “Come here.”

  • • •

  “Your baby is crying,” says the driver to Taiwo, the Ghanaian way of saying your cell phone is ringing. They’ve turned off the highway and onto the street’s unplowed snow. She says, “Thank you,” and, sighing, picks up. “And to what might I owe this anomaly?”

  “It’s Olu.”

  “Yes, Olu, I know. I have caller ID.”

  He ignores this, saying softly, “You sound like you’re crying.”

  She notices her tears and his voice. “So do you.”

  “What’s wrong?” they say in unison, then laugh as do siblings suddenly reminded of their siblingness after a fight. “You first,” she says, using the old line, “You’re the oldest.” She hears him laugh harder, a choked sort of sound.

  He says, “Remember when we used to have something to tell him, and we’d stand by his study, too afraid to go in, and we’d fight over who should go first, when we entered, and I’d say that you should because you were the girl, and you’d say that I should because I was the oldest, and Kehinde would always just go, while we fought?”

  She loses her breath for a moment. “W-what are you saying?” But it isn’t her brother. She knows that she’d know. “Olu, what happened?”

  “He died today, Taiwo.”

  “Who did?”

  The drumbeat.

  A force field of grief. “How do you know that?”

  “Mom called me to tell me.”

  Inexplicably, anger. “She couldn’t call me herself?”

  “Taiwo.”

  She doesn’t answer. She looks out the window. Remembers night sledding, Lars Andersen Park, stars. “How?”

  “Of a heart attack.” Here, Olu’s voice catches. “I don’t have Kehinde’s number in London, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Taiwo.”

  “What?”

  “You haven’t spoken?”

  “No.”

  “In two years?”

  “It’s been one and a half.”

  “He’s your twin—”

  “I’m aware of that. Do you have his number? He’s also your brother. It’s not only me.”

  “Taiwo.”

  “What?! Stop saying my name like that.” Now she is crying.

  “Don’t cry,” Olu says.

  “Why do people say that? ‘Don’t cry’?” She is trembling. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll find his number. Don’t worry. It’s okay.”

  “You already called Sadie?”

  “I’m calling her next.”

  “I should do it.” She wipes off her face. “I’m the girl.”

  Olu laughs gently, sniffling softly. They are quiet. After a very long silence he asks, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Are you?”

  “Sure.”

  She looks out the window. “Well, I’m at my apartment.”

  “I should hope so,” he says. “It’s two in the morning.”

  She ignores this, counting money. “I’ll call you when I’ve spoken to Sadie.”

  “Okay.”

  The driver peers back through the mirror, engine idling. She hands him the cash, shoulder to ear to hold the phone.

  “Are you there?” Olu asks.

  “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  “Okay, listen. She needs to come down to New York for the flight. I’ll try to find something out of JFK tomorrow night.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “For the funeral. We should go straightaway.”

  He continues in his Olu voice, logistics, administration, their duty to be there for their mother, the weather. Finally, a silence. He says, “We’ll talk later.”

  “I love you,” in unison, and Taiwo hangs up.

  • • •

  She sits for a moment, looking out at her building, the Christmas wreaths bleeding red droplets of light. The driver knows better than to ask, and he doesn’t; just sits there in silence until she gets out. She is thinking to ask him to drive and keep driving, to wherever, not here, not this house-not-a-home, but to where? There is nothing. There is the lover who is married. There is the job waiting tables at Indochine, a joke, a private joke with herself, the middle finger to Approval; there is her family, all over, in shambles, down one. Where would she go? There is nowhere. She is laughing. No man and his pug see her step from the cab, fancy heels sinking down in the snow on the curbside, enduring and soft, bare legs trembling with cold. It occurs to her suddenly how stupid she must look to this driver from Ghana in his sensible coat as he watches her, waiting to see that she gets from his cab to her building and safely inside. She teeters up the stoop in the platform stilettos and turns to look back at the driver, the snow.

  Downward it dances and lands on her shoulders and nose and his windshield, the hush of a storm, with the street emptied out of all seekers of warmth and a wind blowing gently. She holds up a hand.

  They are angels in a snow globe, both silent and smiling, two African strangers alone in the snow: kindly man in a cab in a bulky beige coat waving back as he pulls from the curb and honks once and a girl on her steps in a short white fur coat crying quiet
ly watching him go.

  4.

  Someone is banging on the bathroom door. “SADIE!”

  She is kneeling at the toilet bowl, fingers down throat. Out comes the alcohol, followed by the birthday cake, followed by a thimble of thin, burning bile. She pulls off some toilet roll, wipes off her mouth with this. She listens for a moment. The someone walks off. Elsewhere in the suite swell the sounds of the party, overlapping, boys’ laughter, girls’ squealing, from a distance, as heard by a child at the bottom of a swimming pool, lying down, looking up, pretending to have drowned. She peers in the toilet as she does at such moments, the patient turned doctor, inspecting the food. It is fascinating, however disgusting, the vomit. How it emerges, with a logic, in the order received. With a touch of the ceremonial, she thinks, in the action, the kneeling and performing the same gruesome rite, the repetition and silence, always this moment of silence just after. A sacrifice. Ribbons of blood. She examines her fingernails, religiously short and still stinking of vomit—

  the smell interrupts.

  A pin in the bubble, an end to the silence, return to awareness: she’s on a cold floor. And not in an act of enlightened purification but throwing up birthday cake (hers). She stands up. The doctor turned criminal. Disposing of the evidence. She rifles through her tote for the usual tools. Handi Wipes, sanitizer, Scope, travel toothbrush. She cleans off the tiles with the wipes as she’s learned. (Sometimes the person who uses the bathroom next notices, if she doesn’t attend to the floor.) She washes her hands and face, flushes the toilet twice, brushes her teeth, and again. Gargles Scope. Out of habit, without looking, she opens the cabinet. She knows this bathroom cabinet and its contents by heart. On the bottom row Adderall and Zoloft and Ativan; middle: Kiehl’s face washes, Molton Brown lotions; top: sweet perfumes and Trish McEvoy makeup and Vera Bradley pouch with the papers and pot. She taps out an Ativan and swallows without water. The phone again. “SADIE!”

  “I’m coming!”

  She’s not.

  • • •

  She learned this at Milton, to hide in a bathroom, a perfect place really, a cocoon, a world away. The peculiar insularity of bathrooms, a comfort. The sameness of bathrooms, pale yellows, blues, greens. And the things in a bathroom, a woman’s especially: not the eyes but the toiletries the window to the soul. She would go to their homes after school, or on vacations, to their summer houses—always invited, every year, dearly beloved of mothers, a Good Influence on daughters, with good grades and good manners, what a peach, so polite!—and she’d slip off at some point, upstairs, to a bathroom, the friend’s, or the mother’s, more fascinating still.

  The bathroom of a mother.

  A world of concealment.

  A chamber of secrets, insecurities, scents, crystal bottles with spray pumps and baby blue boxes, an undue proportion of labels in French. She would twist off the tops, smelling this, smelling that, creamy lotions, perfumes, and the small shell-shaped soaps. She would wash off her fingers with hand soap (a revelation: at home they used black soap for all body parts), then dry them on the monogrammed hand towel provided or, better still, the towel on the back of the door.

  She’d always use the towel on the back of the door if there was one, which smelled of defenselessness, skin, of a person in a vulnerable, sweet-smelling state, of a girl in the morning, false tropical fruit. Sometimes she’d press up her face to these towels, overwhelmed by the smell, suddenly wanting to cry. Always, she’d peer in the tote bins, the cabinets, the makeup bags, Kaboodles, and take something with: a kind of clumsy kleptomania, not as professional as the bulimia, not as clinically executed, and nothing of note. A scrunchie or eyedrops or squashed tubes of lip gloss or sample-sized hand creams brought back from the spa or, the one time, an earring, uncharacteristically, a diamond. Until someone called “Sadie!” or knocked on the door.

  “Did you get lost in the bathroom?” they’d ask her, eyes smiling, all waiting to hear what smart thing she would say, Clever Sadie, so bright, and so nice, and so cute, like a member of the family. “I locked myself in.” Always this lie. Inexplicable, really, that anyone believed it, but everyone did.

  Then other times she would just sit in the silence or lie in the bathtub, alone, in her clothes, looking up at the ceiling or ducks on the wallpaper, exhausted from making an effort.

  As now.

  She sits on the toilet seat, feet up beneath her and hugging both shins with her chin on her kneecaps. Again the phone rings, with the shrill “SADIE! PHONE!” from a distance, but no one comes knocking. She counts.

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

  A game that she plays with herself, or against. Goal: guess how many seconds it will take them to notice that someone’s gone missing, that Sadie’s not there? She made up the game in that first house, in Brookline, with its funny little stairways and secret trap doorways. She’d hide in the bedroom just next to her parents’ (when her parents existed as such, in the plural) and hear them all talking in the kitchen below her, their voices a rumble, a hum through the floor: her father and brother, his voice newly deepened, the twins in eighth grade with their one husky tone, and her mother always laughing, steady rainfall of laughter, pitter patter, like crying, a laugh full of tears.

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

  Which of them would notice that Sadie was gone? It was Olu, usually Olu, a bass in the distance, “Where’s Sadie?” floating up through the floorboards, a flare, but she always somehow hoped that her sister would notice, would come up to look for her. Taiwo never did.

  9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.

  Sitting in the bathroom she shares with her roommate, waiting for Philae to notice she’s gone.

  • • •

  Philae. “Like a sister” to Sadie. As skinny. The light of her life and the thorn in her side, Philae Frick Negroponte, former darling of Milton, a sophomore-year transfer from Spence in New York, now the darling of Yale, with her Greek magnate father and American mother of Henry Clay fame. Philae, whose smile and gray eyes and blond hair and tan skin and long legs Sadie loves as her own, who had walked into homeroom that day in September knowing no one at Milton and sat next to her. Of all people. Of all miracles.

  “Do you mind if I sit here?”

  “Of course not, no.”

  “Thank you.” In black leather pants, the first leather pants Sadie had ever seen in person. “Is it me, or is everyone looking at you?”

  “You. And I wouldn’t say looking. More staring, or gawking.”

  She was laughing. “I’m Philae.”

  She was smitten. “I’m Sadie.”

  “Philae and Sadie,” proclaimed Philae, smiling brightly. “I like it. I like you.” And the rest on from there: movies, sleepovers, vacations, matching BFF necklaces with BFF in Arabic (gift from Philae from Dubai), applying early to Yale, where Philae’s mother and uncles and grandfather and great-grandfather and Sadie’s brother had gone. Philae and Sadie: the inseparable, the invincible, Miss Popularity in partnership with Most Likely to Succeed, a high school match made in heaven relocated to New Haven as Campus Celebrity and Most Valuable Friend. The loyal, the indispensible, the wing beneath, etc. A role Sadie plays as if made for the part: the Nick to Philae’s Gatsby, the Charles to her Sebastian, the Gene to her Finny: there is always the Friend, Sadie knows, any freshman who’s done all her reading knows the narrator of the story is always the Friend.

  Still, Taiwo is wrong when she mocks her for speaking like Philae—overusing whatever and like, or for dressing like Philae, monthly stipend permitting—by saying she, Sadie, secretly wants to be white. It isn’t a matter of “white,” though it’s true that she’s never had many African American friends, neither at Milton nor at Yale where they all seem to find her inappropriately suburban, nor a “secret” as such. For all of the hoopla about race, authentic blackness (which, as far as she’s concerned, confuses identity and musical preferen
ce), it is obvious to Sadie that all of them carry this patina of whiteness, or WASP-ness more so: be they Black, Latin, Asian, they’re Ivy League strivers, they all start their comments with overdrawn ums, and they’ll all end up working in law firms or hospitals or consultancies or banks having majored in art. They are ethnically heterogeneous and culturally homogenous, per force of exposure, osmosis, adolescence. She accepts this without anguish as the price of admission. She doesn’t want to be Caucasian.

  She wants to be Philae.

  Rather, part of Philae’s family, of the Frick Negropontes, of their pictures on the wall along their stairs on the Cape, mother Sibby, sister Calli, Philae, father Andreas, of their photos on the Internet, Fashion Weeks, galas. They are larger than life—at least larger than hers, Sadie’s family, spread out as it is, light, diffuse. Philae’s family is heavy, a solid thing, weighted, perhaps by the money, an anchor of sorts? It holds them together, the wealth, Sadie sees this, it makes them invested in one solid thing and so keeps them together, first Andreas and Sibby, then the Fricks and Negropontes, a gravitational pull. It isn’t only that her family is poorer by contrast that makes Sadie cling to the Negropontes as she does. It is that they are weightless, the Sais, scattered fivesome, a family without gravity, completely unbound. With nothing as heavy as money beneath them, all pulling them down to the same piece of earth, a vertical axis, nor roots spreading out underneath them, with no living grandparent, no history, a horizontal—they’ve floated, have scattered, drifting outward, or inward, barely noticing when someone has slipped off the grid.

  • • •

  17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24.

  It was Philae’s idea to throw this party for her birthday. Sadie abhors birthday parties—they always make her feel sick, the crushing pressure to be happy!, to be having a happy birthday! such as she can’t remember having had once in her life—but Philae insisted, and Sadie relented, and now their dorm suite is a mess of drunk friends. They’d gathered at midnight to belt “Happy Birthday!” and cut a massive chocolate cake shipped from Payard, very festive and dramatic, very Philae, who’d hugged her, and kissed her on the lips to the delight of the crowd. In a way she’d been waiting six years for this moment, for Philae to grab her and kiss her like this (perhaps minus the eighty-odd onlookers whooping, lacrosse players shouting with glee, “Girl on girl!”), but just after, as Philae was shouting, “Are you one?! Are you two?! Are you three?!” Sadie wanted to cry.