by Taiye Selasi
“Go,” said Fola. “Go live your life.”
She knocked again. “Please, Mom, I’m sorry.”
But Fola said nothing and didn’t come out. Sadie sat by the door of her mother’s locked bathroom, that chamber of secrets, and waited, an hour, maybe more, while the sun set outside, dripping orange, and the bedroom turned dark and then moonlit, pale gray. Finally she stood, knocked again, said, “I’m leaving,” and waited for Fola to open the door. She didn’t. “I love you.” No reply. Knot in stomach. She went to the bedroom, expunged a late lunch. Then back to the kitchen, the scene of the crime, where she cleaned up the mess, called a Red Cab, and packed; took a cab to the station, the train back to school, still unsure what she’d meant by the things that she’d said.
Fola didn’t call that night. Fola hasn’t called her since. A few days later Olu called to say their mom was moving. “What do you mean, moving?”
“She’s moving to Ghana.”
“When?”
“She’s leaving Friday.”
“What?”
“That’s all she said. And that you still haven’t talked. You should call her.”
“I know.”
But she hasn’t.
She wants to tell Fola that she loves her, that she’s sorry, that she didn’t for a moment mean to say those horrid things, and that however it appears from that apartment in Coolidge Corner, whatever Fola may think, that she isn’t alone—but can’t: for two of the four things aren’t true, and she doesn’t have Fola’s new number.
• • •
Your mother is gone, she thinks, curled on the bed in her clothes on the blanket that smells of the past, of a time, very brief, when they lived in a house with the Man from the Story and they were still whole, and she cries very softly for all that is true, for the loss of that man and for missing her mother, how light things became and how lost she’s become, how alone they all are, how apart, how diffuse. What she couldn’t tell Fola is why she hates Christmas, why she longs to disappear for that week in St. Barth’s: so as not to feel the distance, the heartbreaking difference, between what they’ve become and what a Family should be. At least in St. Barth’s with the bronzed Negropontes she’s spared the iconography: the commercials on TV and the vitrines at the mall and the carols and pronouncements that this is the most wonderful time of the year. At least in St. Barth’s she can observe from the outside the fighting and laughter, the family at play, and a real one, a real family not pretending to be happy because it’s Christmas but happy because it’s St. Barth’s. The beach and the sun and the boats smack of falseness, the truth in the open, that the whole thing’s a sham, roasting chestnuts and sleigh bells, her greatest fear realized: she doesn’t belong. But isn’t meant to. Not here.
What she couldn’t tell Fola is how much less hurtful it is not to belong to a family not her own than to sit there in Boston, just the two of them smiling, rehearsing all the reasons that no one comes home. Even if they do—Ling and Olu and Taiwo, and Kehinde from London—it won’t be the same. Fola thinks she can change things, but Sadie knows better, knows all they will do, all they can do, is lie. And doesn’t wish to brazen it out at the table in the apartment Fola moved to over a weekend on a whim, with her brother and the twins and their mother all lying with their laughter about feeling, each, utterly alone, either eating something Nigerian and delicious made by Fola but out of context somehow, given the tree and the snow, or some traditional Christmas fare even further out of context and not delicious for being bought at Boston Market. She weeps at the thought of it. The lot of them together, scattered fivesome (down one) eating Boston baked beans. And cries herself to sleep in this manner, with her clothing on, with no one coming to look for her, for hours, undisturbed.
Someone is tapping on the bedroom door. “Sadie?”
She is sleeping on the kente throw, still in her clothes. She opens her eyes to the shining gray dorm room and squints out the window: a blanket of snow. Sunrise, pale pinkness, the storm’s grand finale of absolute silence, the whole world washed white. She peers at her iPhone clock. Seven in the morning. She rubs her eyes, swollen from crying and raw. And is thinking that she dreamed it—the phone call, the kiss—when the someone taps lightly, cracks open the door.
There she is. Gorgeous, inappropriately dressed Taiwo, her face flushed a ruddy shade of brown from the cold, peeking her head in the door with the snow on her dreadlocks and furry white coat smelling thickly of cologne. “You’re here,” she says, breathless. “Thank God you haven’t left yet.” And other things also, about having been wrong, having rushed to Grand Central when they finished their call for a train to New Haven, having seen her mistake: it wasn’t true that there was nothing, no one, nowhere to go, there was Sadie turning twenty, Baby Sadie, at school . . . none of which Sadie follows for her deafening astonishment, the same two words blinking, on, off, in her head. Such that all the years after, when she thinks of this moment—of her sister on the threshold of her dorm room at Yale, covered in snow, in high heels, closing the door, falling silent, coming to lie at her side on the extra-long twin, wrapping her arms around Sadie like wings of white fur that smell strangely of father, someone Sadie doesn’t know—she’ll hear only her voice in her head in the quiet she came she came she came she came she came.
5.
They ride to the city, Sadie’s head on Taiwo’s shoulder, Taiwo’s head against the window, both pretending they’re asleep. When they get to the station Taiwo wonders whether Sadie shouldn’t contact this professor, bring the essay over now? They’re closer to Brooklyn, she explains, at Grand Central; they can take a cab there then the subway uptown. Sadie says it’s awkward, like, to call a professor, that she’ll simply leave the essay in the mailbox with a note. She produces a manila envelope, on the back of which, cursive, “No 79 Huron Street, Brooklyn, New York.” A gruff Russian driver assents with some grumbling to take them, cash only, over the Queensboro Bridge, wondering what one could possibly want besides maybe kielbasa in Greenpoint on Sunday at ten? Taiwo peers out at the store signs in Polish, white fences, the brick, has never been here before. When they arrive at the building, she frowns out the window. The driver, equally dubious, “Seventy-nine. This is it.” Number seventy-nine Huron looks more like a bunker, a little brick warehouse or garage, than a home, with its huge grid of windows with industrial casings too high to see into, a rusting front door. Taiwo asks Sadie if she’s sure about the address; exactly what kind of professor lives in a two-car garage? Sadie says a professor of feminist theory at Yale and is opening the door on her side when Taiwo, feeling newly protective of her sister, tells the driver, “Run the meter,” and gets out on hers. Sadie, suddenly anxious, hands the envelope to Taiwo. Taiwo, suddenly gallant, says, “Stay in the cab,” and hobbles-slides across the heaps of snow hiding the sidewalk to get to the door of the strange warehouse-home, and is looking for a letter slot or mailbox in the doorway when, squinting, she sees it.
The name by the bell.
6.
Kehinde is listening to Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre, the screaming of a kettle and the heat’s steady whir. Though he’ll remember hearing rustling sounds and going to investigate, he senses (not hears) that there is someone at the door. In his chest, on the left, a light tugging sensation. He abandons the painting, the kettle, the heat, coming calmly to the entrance, down the hallway to the doorway. Not the mailman on Sunday, he thinks, but who else? The only people who know that he’s living in Brooklyn are his assistant in London and his dealer in Bern. (All the rest seem to think that he’s holed up in Mali or, judging by his auction results, that he’s dead.) He is holding a brush dripping blue on the floor, brilliant ultramarine mixed with white as per Fez. He is wearing what he always wears to work: spattered sweatpants, an NYU T-shirt, Moroccan babouches. He is thinking that he maybe should have turned off the kettle or put down the paintbrush before coming out, that the blue need
s more white, that it’s cold in this hallway, a scatter of thoughts, and the fixed one, of her, when he opens the door, scattered-thinking, not looking, so hearing (not seeing) his sister.
“Is it you?”
She is standing in his doorway, a taxi behind her, the passenger door opening and Sadie getting out. Her eyes, which are his eyes, are filling with tears, as are his. She is touching his cheek, jawbone, chin, the faint beard he’s been wearing since summer (a new thing, the one thing that makes his slim face not her face, the one thing of all things that have come in between them in months of not speaking that they can both see), she is touching this, barely, her fingertips skimming, a pianist, a blind woman taking it in, this new difference between them, new distance between them, her eyes open wide as she touches him, just, as if pressing too firmly might cause him to vanish, might ruin the illusion, that they are here, now, after all that was said and unsaid came between them, that all that remains of this distance is fur—when her hands start to shake, with the cold, he might think were it not for the heat in his fingertips.
Shame.
Hers. Of foreign origin, now familiar, unmistakable. Her shame, which he feels as if it were his shame but is not, albeit born of the same place and time, much like they, separate shames at the same sudden thought. We shouldn’t be touching. She thinking, he feeling, she dropping her hand and he dropping his eyes, saying, “Yes,” then, “It’s me,” to his paint-splattered fingers, and she, disbelieving, “Is this where you live?”
• • •
It is: above the studio, a two-story workspace with massive brick walls painted white and skylights and nine half-finished portraits against the back wall that he hopes they won’t see from their chairs by the door, painted blue, the original, a massive garage door that he kept when he purchased the building last year from the elderly Yugoslavian who lives at the corner, who used to fix cars here before he fell ill. Little foyer by the entrance, a “reception” for guests, should they come, with a rug, raw-log table, three chairs, Frank Lloyd Wright chairs, a gift from a now-dead admirer, a critic, in exchange for a portrait he’d done. Nothing else. Just the paints and the one work-in-progress stretched out on the concrete, some seven feet long, so-called mudcloth, the new thing, a departure from the portraits he’s made out of beadwork since going abroad.
At the top of the stairs, overlooking the studio, is a mezzanine with kitchen and bathroom and bed, like the top of a duplex with two white-brick walls and one floor-to-ceiling window that leads to a deck. This is where he lives. For a year now, just over, the doctors having decided it was safe for him to do, after six months of in-patient chitchat and relaxants and rehashing all the reasons that he’d wanted to die (just the one) in a room overlooking a garden, very drizzly, very English, but calming somehow, underwater, all greens and grays, porcelain nurses and porcelain service for pain meds and tea, half a year sitting facing and painting that garden, the scars turning taupe and the gray branches green, until one day in August, “You’re ready,” Dr. Shipman, his bushy white eyebrows uplifted, “to live.”
This is where he came to. Left London in August, the flowers gone mad with the heat in the parks, asking Sangna to pack up his flat and to ship it, unable to face it, the scene of the act. As she’s done. Saintly Sangna, the assistant-cum-accountant without whom he’d cease to exist in the world. In his mind, in his skin, sure, could go on without her, a spirit, just visiting, a dream, passing through—but the outside world? object world? art world? the body world? Not without Sangna. No. Not for a day. He’d drift, red balloon-like, away from his body and up through his art to the clouds, where he’d pop but for Sangna, the string twirling earthward below him, unfurling in air like a braid come undone. Sangna who, having been yanked out of RISD by her family and remanded to LSE for reform, had approached him at an opening: “Mr. Sai, I am Sangna. I have a degree in business management, and I can mix paint.” He was twenty-six, young with the newness of money, the strangeness of money and fame and the world; she was thirty, looked twenty, the long braid and glasses, as skinny and browned as he’d been as a child, grounded, grounding, clipped accent, Gujurati, no nonsense: the dealers all feared her, which made them both laugh, on the floor of his flat where they often ate dinner, aloo ghobi and chapati homemade by her aunts. Sangna, who’d flown to New York for the week on a tip from a buyer, “there’s a warehouse for sale,” rode to Greenpoint with cash, spent an hour with Hristo, brought the price down by thousands and bought him a home—and who’d called, early morning, from London, October, “I found her,” voice steady as ever, “New York,” with an address for a place on Lafayette Street in Soho to which he’s gone nightly, bang nine, ever since.
Just to see her.
Sixty seconds, never longer, often shorter, just to peer in from the sidewalk, just to glimpse her whizzing past, dyed-bronze dreadlocks in their upsweep bobbing, bobbing, past the window, just to know that she is near him. Peering in then going home. Miraculous that nobody has noticed nor harassed him, a black man at the window, with dreadlocks, no coat, although it’s always been his magic trick to be there without being there, to muddy his form, not to need to be known. This is what he lives from. The art of not being there. With Sangna, who remains there, sending payments to Yale and attending openings and refusing interviews and generally sitting at the control board of the mother ship in Shoreditch (her loft apartment, formerly his), selling paintings for gazillions on the spreading speculation that he bled to death in bathwater, art world it-boy’s tragic end, a kind of darkly comic comment on the nature of this art world, wherein nothing is so thrilling as an artist’s dying young.
But how can he tell her—now standing before him, the blur at the window resolved into flesh, when she means: have you been here, this close, without calling, this whole time, here in Brooklyn, just over a bridge?—that he doesn’t, doesn’t “live” here, or lives without “living,” by which he means hurting and causing to hurt; that it is all he has wanted and all he was seeking in etching thin T’s into both of his wrists: a way out of the hurting, for her, who is life-full, who lives and has always lived fully on earth, in the world, in and of it, not grounded nor grounding but ground, in her person, the canvas itself?
“Is this where you live?” she says, peering behind him, then at him.
He shakes his head. “. . . ,” then, “come in.”
• • •
Later, indoors, another congress of three blowing, all, on the tea he’d been brewing from leaves (and on other things, hot things, to cool down the anguish, as one soothes a baby, shhhhh)—Sadie explains. “I wanted to call you,” she says to him, sheepish, “but I didn’t have a number. I only had this.” She holds up the card that he made for her birthday, on the one side a drawing in simple pastels, brown and violet and orange, her face vaguely, close up, the other his writing, happy birthday, baby s, which he’d sent to her wrapped in glycine via FedEx, having scribbled on the label the required return address. “So I made up that story about the paper, I mean, kind of, we did have to write one instead of an exam, and the professor said if we needed extra time after Friday, we could leave it with the doorman at her building in New York, but I mean, clearly, I lied,” with a quick glance at Taiwo, “because I didn’t think you’d come if I told you the truth,” with a quick glance at Kehinde, “and you’re, like, in hiding and no one can call you . . .” and more in this vein, not a word of which Kehinde can hear for the silence his mind sometimes lays on his tongue and his ears. Like a mother, protective, covering the ears of her infant as something too loud makes a sound in its space, or its eyes in the sunlight. Two soft hands of silence that rest on his mouth and his ears. “. . . Are you mad?” Sadie is frowning, at him, then at Taiwo. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing,” says Taiwo, sipping tea.
“I’m not mad at you,” he says in his head.
“Why aren’t you talking?”
“I don’t
know why,” he says in his head.
“He doesn’t know.” Taiwo nods to Sadie and gestures. “Keep going.”
“We haven’t even gotten to the bad part.” Sadie sighs. She looks at him pityingly. She looks like their father. The tilting-up eyes set in valleys of bone. He has always rather envied her this, and his brother, that they bear such a resemblance to the people they come from, Olu a darker-skinned Fola, classically Yoruba, Sadie a lighter-skinned Kweku, classically Ga. “Aboriginal intransigent” he calls this kind of feature set, the marker of a people with a sticky set of genes or else the product of a process of refinement and reinforcement over century upon century of mass reproduction. Ethiopian eyes, Native American cheekbones, the black hair/blue eyes of the Welsh, Nordic skin: it’s a record of something, he thinks, a visual record of the history of a People, capital P, in the world. That he can find, and finds familiar, the same squarish lip shape, the high-riding brow bone and regal hooked nose on his mother and brother as carved out of ivory by sixteenth century artisans on ritual masks, that the face keeps repeating, the one face, over and over, across ages and oceans and lovers and wars, like a printmaker’s matrix, a good one, worth reusing—is wondrous to Kehinde. He envies them this. His siblings and their parents belong to a People, bear the stamp of belonging.
He and Taiwo do not. Their features are a record, yes, but not of a People, the art history of Peoplehood, constant and strong, but the shorter, very messy, lesser history of people, small p, two at least, who one day happened to make love. As children they’d decided they were aliens, or adopted, notwithstanding the funny photo of their mother in the hall (Fola massively pregnant with a smiling Mr. Chalé and the pink twinned tomato she’d grown in his yard). It wasn’t until later, at thirteen, in Lagos, just arrived at Uncle Femi’s, ushered into the lounge, that they’d see, from the threshold, standing frozen with wonder, the face that theirs came from, there, white, on the wall.
