by Taiye Selasi
Now she is laughing and crying in her beach chair. Mr. Ghartey is watching, alarmed, from his perch. Mustafah abandons the car and just stares with his mouth hanging open, the hose on the loose. Amina hurries back with an earthenware tray, with the glass and the drink in a measuring jug. Fola laughs harder, says, “Thank you, Amina,” and swigs from the jug.
Amina stares at her, shocked. “Madame, but, the glass.”
“This is perfect,” says Fola. She takes off her sunglasses, wipes off her eyes. “Thank you, Amina.” The telephone is ringing. Amina goes to get it, comes back, still aghast.
“The telephone, Madame.”
“Who is it, Amina?” She takes another swig from the measuring jug.
“A sir, Madame.”
“Is it? A sir with a name?”
“No, Madame.”
“Very well. To the sir with no name.” She gets up, still laughing, and crosses the garden. Through the doors, to the foyer. She picks up the phone. “Benson,” she says.
“Mom, it’s Olu.”
She straightens. “Olu, my darling, how are you?”
“We’re fine. We’re coming tomorrow. The five of us.”
“Lovely.” For a moment it doesn’t strike her that the number is off. The five of them. Olu and Taiwo and Kehinde and Sadie. And Kweku. She bends at the waist. Another wave passes. She whispers, “Four, darling. The four of you.”
“Ling’s coming also.”
“Of course.” She wipes her eyes quickly. “I’ll make up the guest rooms. I fired my driver so I’ll be there myself.”
“Of course.” Olu laughs. “It’s the Delta.”
“I know it.” They laugh again, together, and, presently, hang up.
• • •
She stands at the table in the mountainside foyer with her hand on the telephone, catching her breath. Olu and Taiwo and Kehinde and Sadie. All four, her whole oeuvre, her body of work. All here, in this house, with its retro wood furniture. And Ling, she thinks, smiling; at last he brings Ling. Her tall, guarded son who feels, more than the rest of them, frightened of loving, uncertain of love. And her baby, whom she hasn’t called once since October, since that day in the kitchen, that horrid exchange. She’d heard Sadie sitting just outside of the bathroom, had heard her “I’m leaving,” but couldn’t reply. Had just sat, staring blankly at the trees out the window, the light in the leaves at that hour like oil, like the light on that evening in the autumn in Brookline when Kehinde came in and she knew one was gone. And they. Her ibeji, whom she hasn’t seen in decades, since watching them walk to their gate in their coats, airline escort beside them, Kehinde turning to face her, to wave and to smile, Taiwo not, marching on. The children who returned to Logan Airport, months later, now fourteen years old with their skin tanned to clay and their eyes—her mother’s eyes, which she’d found so disturbing—were not the same children. Not children at all. All of them. Coming. Together. Tomorrow. She wants to tell someone, to shout of her joy. But looks at her hand on the old Slimline phone and thinks, letting it go, There is no one to call. “Amina!” she calls. “Let’s go make up the bedrooms.”
Amina comes running. “Yes, Madame.”
Part III
GO
1.
Mr. Lamptey sleeps balanced at the edge of the ocean, a foot from the foam line, legs crossed and eyes closed, palms on kneecaps, back upright, the stray waiting, patient, its eyes on the water, its chin on its paws. The ocean moves, lazily, forward and backward, advancing to a point near the paws and then not, a few inches, no more, of net movement, indecisive, redrawing its borders then rolling them back. Does the water not wish to come further, in conquest, own more beachfront property? Subdue more damp sand? Apparently not. Forward, backward, net change a few inches, while bored with this, watching, the clouds start to yawn.
In trickles light, weakly, drab, without color, its single distinction not being the darkness. A star, blinking slowly, vivacious by contrast, alerts the dog, waiting, that this is the dawn. The dog leaps up, legs out in adho mukha svanasana, then licks its wake up to the sleeping man’s soles.
• • •
The garden is empty of all but its shadows. He hears but can’t see for the eyes going off. The issue is the cataracts, he knows, without minding. The surgeon minds terribly and offers to help. (A friend, an operation, no cost to Mr. Lamptey. The surgeon is foolish, if determined and kind. An unusual combination, determination and kindness. An unusual individual, the surgeon.)
The birds.
They are clustered in the fountain, all but covering the statue. They coo very softly and flutter their wings. Ten of them, twenty, or thirty. A conference. He enters the garden and hears first, then sees.
“Good morning,” he says to the birds, bows politely. They coo very softly and flutter their wings. “Really?” he says, with some shock, and great sorrow.
The dog whimpers sadly and sits by his feet.
A light flickers on in the house-with-a-hole-in. A shape through the window, slow moving and round. The woman, young, plumpish, her face like a cushion with buttons for features, as pleasant and soft. He likes her, this woman. There is nothing not to like in her. Usually he likes to have something to dislike, finds the likable dull, but he’s not the right age for it, too old for effort, too young for ennui. At ninety he’ll dislike her. He’ll mock her bad English and semiautonomous buttocks that move one at a time; he’ll say that the country will never move forward so long as the common man moves in this way. Without line. Unambitious thighs and shoulders rolling over, all round edges, like amoeba, like an early form of life. Like the ocean. He watches her move through the shadow and feels for her something as soft as her shape.
She walks to the kitchen where she turns another light on. She stands for a moment, a cloud at the glass. She comes to the door to the sunroom and pauses, then opens the door and comes out with a drink, Milk and Milo. She is crying, he can see by the moonlight, the breasts trembling lightly against the sateen, but she doesn’t seem to notice all the birds in the fountain nor the man by the mango, bare feet, saffron cloth. She goes back inside, turning each of the lights off, the kitchen, the bedroom, a shadow of light.
He rolls out his mat by the base of the mango and sits. Padma asana.
Five after four.
ii
They fly into Ghana, Taiwo’s head on Kehinde’s shoulder, Kehinde’s head on Taiwo’s head, before they wake and detach. Olu sits upright, his arms on the armrests, his leg bouncing lightly, Ling’s hand on his thigh. Sadie, behind them, with no one beside her, her head on the window, legs tucked on her seat, gazes listlessly out at the clouds, also listless, the sunrise a flatline, bright red in the black.
iii
Fola hauls her catch in, from garden to kitchen, still dark: couldn’t sleep, went to snip this and that, spongy earth, damp with dawn, dripping blossoms and dirt, sets the boughs on the countertop, wipes off her hands. She fills four small vases with just enough water, stands six boughs in each and sets two in each room. On each nightstand, just so. And is turning to go when it hits her: There aren’t enough rooms anymore.
There are just these two small ones apart from the master, a shortage she hadn’t perceived until now, always thinking (rather dreaming) if they all came to visit, the girls would take the queen bed, the boys the two twins. Now that there’s Ling, there’s the question of etiquette. She knows that they’re grown, frankly couldn’t care less, would quite like that they seek some small respite from sorrow in dancing together to breath after hours, but he’s always so scrupulous, Olu, so proper, saying grace before eating, Sunday service and that (not that she is a heathen, good friend of hers Jesus, but one that she speaks to as such, as a friend, a wise, good-natured friend with an air of detachment, not Olu’s stern Jesus with long face and hair) and she doesn’t want to make him feel awkward, self-conscious, not least as he’s
never brought Ling to the house. Olu would do better in the bedroom with Kehinde, less blushing and bumbling at bedtime, less suffering, but that leaves the question of where to put Ling as she can’t very well put a guest on the couch. To put her with Taiwo would border on callous as Taiwo tends not to treat other girls well (not that she fares much better with the gender, in general: they all seem to find her aloof or too proud, insufficiently histrionic while she tires of their tragedies, cosmetic, romantic, long faces, long hair), and she wishes for Ling to feel part of the family, whatever “the family” in their case might mean. Better in the bedroom with the queen bed with Sadie—a lover of girls skinny, pretty, like Ling; of things girlish, shared soap and told secrets—but Taiwo, left bedless, would think she was being left out. And mightn’t then Sadie feel awkward, self-conscious, to share the one bed with a woman like that, when she’s taken to acting like Olu, puritanical, and hasn’t done the stating of the obvious yet? Not that she minds in the least whom they love—where they love for that matter, be it guest bed or couch—just as long as they’re happy or not too unhappy, in the condition she delivered them, etc., no worse. If the baby likes girls or this one girl, this Philae (who seems to be cheerful and clueless enough not to break a heart badly), then so be it, bully, but what does it mean for the rooming? she asks. Can the baby double up with a woman in comfort? Or might she take this as a comment on what Fola knows. Rather, what Fola thinks. Perhaps she doesn’t know Sadie, not really, and not the baby, mustn’t call her daughter “baby.” She is twenty years old, as she said, as of—
“Yesterday.” She breathes this aloud, with a twinge, upper left.
Yesterday was her birthday.
She forgot Sadie’s birthday.
She covers her mouth, shakes her head. Of all days. She laughs for not knowing what else she can do, leaves the room, and goes back to the kitchen.
Never mind. Sadie can share the big bed in her bedroom; let Olu get over his issues with sex. She starts to call Amina, then remembers, too early. She takes down the flour for a cake.
iv
“Why did your mother move to Ghana?” Ling asks him. “I thought she was Nigerian.”
Olu thought she was asleep. He smiles at her, shifting positions. “Something different.”
Behind them, Sadie, listening, sotto voce, “Because of me.”
Taiwo, in the aisle seat, peers out the window. “You haven’t been back,” Kehinde says, looking, too.
“Did I say that aloud?” she asks quickly, snapping backward. He hasn’t meant to bother her. He shakes his head no. “I do that now,” she mumbles, frowning, rubbing her forehead.
“I can hear what you’re thinking,” he says in his head.
“No, you can’t read my thoughts,” she adds, leaning back over to pull down the window shade, closing her eyes.
v
A plane overhead.
2.
Fola stops at MaxMart to pick up the candles. The cashier smiles blandly. “Yes, ma. Right this way.” She looks at the candles and laughs. “No, not this kind. The small ones, for a birthday cake.”
“This is all we have.”
She drives to the airport, unnerved by the silence. She turns on the radio. It appears not to work. Then blasting through static comes Joshua’s gospel, off-key and forlorn, like a shrill cry for help. She switches the station. Evangelical Mormons. She switches again. BBC, all bad news. She turns off the radio and peers at the traffic. The usual crush on the new Spintex Road. She rolls down the window and peers at the junction where a policeman appears to be making things worse, shouting, “Bra, bra, bra, stop,” with conflicting gesticulations, the newly installed stoplight not working (no power). She rolls up the window and hums, without thinking of it, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” two bars of it, stops. Where did that come from? she thinks, frowning, honking. That hymn, which he always used to sing before work, perfect pitch, though if ever she mentioned it, his singing voice, he’d shake his head, laughing, “Just sound waves,” and stop.
• • •
Arrivals is teeming with Christmas returnees deplaning in coats with freight tons of checked luggage. She pushes her way to the front of those waiting, not roughly, but firmly, in the Nigerian tradition. And stands. She is early, she knows, thirty minutes, but couldn’t brook waiting alone in the house with the cake on the countertop sitting there, done, with the look of one waiting for something as well. Better here: closeness, the throng, humans being, aunties wailing as prodigals appear half-asleep, pushing forth from the crowd to grab, hug, sob, and welcome, the tearful theatrics of old women’s happiness. Better here, sweating, surrounded by talking, the low steady throbbing of heartbeats in wait, hundreds, all of them waiting in collective anticipation of some beloved somebody’s coming back home. Bodies. Familiar. She never told him how familiar, she is thinking, thoughts drifting as thoughts will in heat as one waits standing still with still time all around one, a space into which enters Past, seeing room. Some motion, slight movement, away from the moment, and off one goes, drifting, from this day to that:
to the airport, same airport:
“Be careful, this is Ghana!”
“My friend, I’m from Lagos.”
And I’ve been here before.
Why didn’t she tell him? It wasn’t a secret. He knew that she’d fled at the start of the war, that she’d somehow left Lagos to finish her studies and showed up at Lincoln in bell-bottom denim, but he never asked how, how she got to Pennsylvania, as if her life had begun where their shared life began, and she never proffered answers at night in the dark after he had gone diving and held to her, wet. Then, it seemed normal to lie there beside him alive in the present and dead to the past with the man in her bed, in her heart, in her body but not in her memory and she not in his. It was almost as if they had taken some oath—not just they, their whole circle at Lincoln those years, clever grandsons of servants, bright fugitive immigrants—an oath to uphold their shared right to stay silent (so not to stay the prior selves, the broken, battered, embarrassed selves who lived in stories and died in silence). An oath between sufferers. But also between lovers?
She doesn’t know. Maybe. So much she never asked him. So much she never told him. The aching for example. “Enough,” she would say, which he took to mean “stop,” and he would: floating gently to the surface, coming up, thinking she was exhausted when in fact it was the opposite: she feared his exhaustion. She was aching for more. More, always more of it, more of him, all: having opened, having been opened, wanting only to be filled: but never saying it, just holding him, lying, in silence, he sleeping beside her, he fulfilled, she unfilled. Why didn’t she tell him? And other things also. Why she never said yes when he asked her to come to those parties in Cambridge with colleagues in khakis and cheese cubes on toothpicks and immigrant maids and the requisite child trotted out after drinks to rend “Für Elise” proficiently before trotting to bed. Yes, they were boring. But the more it was heartbreaking, to watch him seek approval from far lesser men in his own fresh-pressed khakis, small eyes wide with hope that he, too, might soon be so at home in the world. Why didn’t she tell him? “You don’t have to impress them,” she might have said, “your excellence speaks for itself.” Instead of “the dishes” or “Sadie has a recital” or “Olu needs help with his science fair booth.” Instead of the silence, protective, destructive, like mites on a daylily nibbling away undetected for decades. And the biggest thing. The precedent. How she got to Pennsylvania.
How she packed up and left.
• • •
How: she had lain in that bedroom, in Lagos, unable to move or to think or to breathe with her head under covers, her hands on her ribcage, her chest emptied out, until nightfall. The housegirl returned as she did every Sunday and let herself in through the door at the back. She’d prepared the whole dinner and laid out the table before she thought strange that the house was so qui
et. “Master!” she called, up the stairs, down the corridor. “Master, are you home? Miss Folasadé? Ah-ah.” Only then had Fola left his bed covered in sweat to ride, trembling, to the second-floor kitchen. “I’m here.”
The housegirl Mariama grabbed her forehead when she saw her. “A fever, you have a fever, where’s your father?” she cried.
Fola shrugged, groggy. “He went to Kaduna.”
“No!” cried Mariama, slumping promptly to the floor.
How: they’d just sat there, neither speaking nor eating, at a dining table set for two, built for fourteen. The Nwaneris from their portrait watched them sitting, black John seated, too, white Maud beside him standing, hand on husband’s epaulette. The food was set out, Fola’s favorite, egusi, but neither of them touched it; after an hour it was cold. After two her father’s partner at the law firm, Sena Wosornu, leaned frantically on the doorbell. Fola looked at Mariama. The housegirl was trembling, rocking, clutching her elbows and shaking her head, noiselessly mouthing some prayer. Fola took the shaking of the head to mean “don’t get the door” and stayed seated. Mariama lost her nerve. She stumbled to the entry, from which Fola heard whispers, then loud sudden sobbing, then Sena’s high voice. “The baby will hear you,” he scolded. The baby. What her father always called her, even then, and his friends.
Later that evening Sena came to her bedroom. He knocked on the door, came to sit on her bed. She was lying on her back with her feet on the wall on a poster of Lennon, her head hanging off.
“Fola,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”
She didn’t lift her head up. “I know, I know, I know.” Sena was upside down, bending to face her.
“Your father—”
“Don’t say it,” she said, and sat up.
He said she should pack. They would leave in the morning. His parents lived in Ghana. She’d be safer with them. If anything ever happens, take the baby to Ghana. Don’t leave her in Nigeria, her father had said. She packed a gold aso-oke, a birthday gift, records, his thick kente blanket and bell-bottom jeans. She didn’t pack photos or dresses or teddy bears. The details came later. They left before dawn.
