by Taiye Selasi
“They’re thieves,” says the driver. “They come from Mauritania. They steal from the tourists.”
“We’re not tourists,” Kehinde says.
The driver starts laughing, one golden tooth glinting, as if to say only tourists give beggars U.S. dollars, but quickly recovers and rolls up his window, asking casually, “So where are you from?”
Kehinde looks at Taiwo, who is paying no attention, then back at the driver, not much older than they. He can sense in the man a very particular form of aggression, mounting, familiar from Lagos and London and New York, to do with the fact that they’re both brown-skinned males unequally yoked by the side effects. He’d rather be ferrying some tense blond-haired couple in his taxi than them—brown, well dressed, the same age—whom he takes for American and assumes to be rich, at least richer than he by some cruel twist of fate. “Have you ever been to Africa?” he adds proprietarily.
“Nigeria and Mali.”
“But not Ghana,” he insists.
Kehinde shakes his head, and the driver looks satisfied. Kehinde feels the need to add, “Our father’s from here.” The instant he says it he wishes he hadn’t, for now comes the surge he’s been keeping at bay in the form of a headache, a sudden searing something in the space between his eyebrows so sharp he gasps, “Was.”
The driver doesn’t hear this. “Where’s ‘here’?” he asks, challenging.
“Ghana,” mumbles Kehinde. It sounds like a lie.
“Oh yeah? Where in Ghana?” The driver is smirking.
“I don’t know where,” says Kehinde, now closing his eyes.
“You don’t know where he’s from, your own father,” says the driver. He sucks his teeth, glancing at Taiwo, still mute. “Why don’t you ask him?”
As it finally hits him, “He died,” Kehinde answers and starts, at the laugh.
He can’t quite imagine what his sister finds funny, but she appears to be laughing, outright, her back turned. “Taiwo,” he whispers, thinking maybe she’s crying, but she turns to him dry-eyed.
“He’s gone.” She shakes her head. She doesn’t stop laughing.
The driver looks incredulous. “Father na’ dead and she laugh for,” he scoffs. But says nothing further, just turns on the radio (inconsolate gospel) and looks straight ahead.
3.
Both the taxi and Mercedes pull into the drive where the house staff stands waiting at attention, in a line. Sadie has been sleeping for the twenty-minute ride and now opening her eyes says, “Where are we?” Olu and Ling side by side in the back, neither moving nor speaking, peer out at the house. Fola peers also with hands on the wheel as if considering whether this is the right place or not. One breath, then she stirs, pulling the key from the ignition and her sunglasses from her forehead. “We’re home, I suppose.”
The staff comes forward as the car doors open. Everyone alights and stands looking at the house (except Kehinde who—much to the annoyance of Taiwo and the disturbance of Olu—stands looking at Ling). There is the usual combination of disorder and determination that occasions the arrival of a group at a residence: half of the bodies moving busily, lugging suitcases, half of the bodies looking awkward, out of place, trying to help, to be of use but not to get in the way of the bodies who know where to go, what to do. With the lightly frantic energy of awkward introductions, with no one quite knowing what to say or to whom, smiling at no one, shifting positions, making lax observations. Where’s the bathroom? Longing suddenly to be on one’s own.
Fola holds shoulders, steers bodies down hallways. “This is the room where you two boys will sleep.” She pushes in Olu and Kehinde and continues, “The girls in here,” pushing in Taiwo and Ling. “The baby—” she stops herself. “Sadie’s with me. I’d suggest a good nap now. We’ll eat at half six.” Any questions? No questions. “Good. Welcome to Ghana.” She takes Sadie to her bedroom, and leaves them to sleep.
ii
Sadie stares up at the wood-paneled ceiling, alone in this room down the hall from the rest.
“The bloody A/C died this morning—” said Fola, then bent as if nauseous and didn’t go on.
“Mom, are you sick?” Sadie asked, stepping forward, but Fola stood straight, waved a hand, shook her head. “Comes and goes. Going” was her cryptic nonanswer. She turned on the fan, left the room, closed the door.
Sadie stares up at the blades in the shadow, like bats on the ceiling, too hot all the same. Through the thin bedroom walls she can hear other voices but can’t extract words from the soft throbbing din. Olu, maybe Kehinde. A phone in the hallway. The pretty girl, Amelia or something like that. “Please, Madame. Telephone.” The rustling of footsteps, then Fola’s voice, gravelly, the words indistinct. Someone’s laughter. Her mother’s, she realizes after a moment. But higher than normal, a burst of it, false.
She rolls to her side, where she glimpses a photo in light slipping in from the stiff wooden blinds. Just barely she makes out the faces, the location, and suddenly remembers: why Greenpoint seemed familiar: this strange-looking warehouse on Oak Street in Newton, the famed home of Paulette’s Ballet Studio. Winter. Her family stands bundled in coats close together on the sidewalk outside, the recital just over. The Man from the Story holds her up on his shoulders; she is still in her costume, red lips, pink tulle tutu, her four-year-old potbelly pushing unabashedly against the pink skin of the leotard, laughing. Taiwo and Kehinde wear matching red earmuffs, neither looking at the camera, Fola looking at her. Olu looks dwarfed by a massive brown coat. A stranger, another parent, must have taken the picture.
She wonders why Fola has this, of all photos, here framed on the nightstand, the frame the wrong size so the photo slips sideways, the shot out of focus, some Christmas performance of no real consequence. She abandoned ballet sophomore year, first semester, despite great potential and greater “commitment.” Had seen it: could lift her big toe to her forehead, demanded a split of her muscular legs, had defied her flat arches to bend into pointe shoes, could do all the steps in her sleep, no mistakes, but had stood at the bar in a line that September and noticed the palette, the pinks and the whites, light brown hair, light brown wood, clean-straight lines in the sunlight, and noticed herself, neither long, straight, nor light, and had seen in an instant what was meant by commitment: she was great at ballet but was no ballerina. (Philae had suggested that she take up Team Management to meet her requirement for after-school sports, and indeed she had found a perverse kind of pleasure in watching her light-brown-haired classmates in skirts—yellow mouth-guards bared, snarling, browned legs churning earth, drawing blood from bare shins with their field hockey sticks, later ice hockey, lacrosse sticks, so bafflingly violent, “Blood makes the grass grow!”—while she ticked off stats.)
She rolls the other way but feels the photo-faces watching her. She turns the photo over so it’s lying facedown. The position has promise. Unseen and unseeing. She rolls to her stomach and lies there facedown. At first she finds comfort: the intensified silence, the absolute darkness befitting the occasion. She isn’t quite sure what she’s meant to be feeling, but this here would seem the appropriate pose, sort of prostrate with grief (that won’t come) for her father and guilt at the thing with her mother, what’s left. If she embarrassed them all with that scene at the airport, she unburdened a bit of the anguish at least. Maybe they’ll talk a bit more a bit later. Probably not. It is not Fola’s thing, “talking out.” More likely they’ll act as if the thing never happened, not least as there’s now this more solid despair that her siblings won’t mention, not once at the airport, not once in the car, as if it’s not really true, as if they’re all here in Ghana—where no one has been except Olu, someone mentioned, when he was just born—just by chance, here for Christmas, a family vacation, and not for their father, unmentioned and gone.
The comfort becomes panic, with her face in the pillow, unable to breathe for the cloth and the heat, and n
ow, rolling back over, she finds that she’s crying for nothing more epic than feeling left out. There they are, the lot of them, somewhere else, talking, their voices drowned out by the overhead fan while she’s here on her own, the one not like the others, feeling inferior as she always does whenever they’re home. With one of them (two max, the twins for example), she can generally rise above it but not with all three, so much older and taller, inexplicably taller, and surer, more spectacular, more shiny than she.
Her siblings are shiny. Olu, Taiwo, and Kehinde. They shine into rooms with their confident strides, their impressive achievements, and she with her beauty; they glow with their talent, their stuffed bag of tricks. There is Olu’s calm brilliance, his mastery of science, his deep steady voice sure with knowledge of facts. There is Taiwo’s dark genius, her hoarse luring whisper aglow with long words and the odd phrase in French; all her life she has had it, since Sadie can remember, this thick air of mystery, of effortless grace, as have only those women whose beauty is given, not open to interpretation by beholder, a fact. There is Kehinde’s pure talent, the gift of the image, that quiet assurance with which he looks out as if all of the world were overlaid with some pattern indescribably beautiful and meaningful, a grid, and if only you could see it as clearly as he could, then you too would take to blank easel with brush just as simply as one watches movies, the news, without commitment, simply seeing and understanding the seen. And there’s she. Baby Sadie. A good decade tardy, arriving in winter, a cheerful mistake, with her grab bag of competencies—photographic memory, battement développé, making lanyards—but lacking entirely in gifts.
Fola is convinced that the thing is there latent; for years now she’s said, “Just you wait. It will out.” Nothing has outed. She has done all her homework and studied with diligence so done well in school, not like Olu or Taiwo, more so eighty-fifth percentile; has made it to Yale (off the wait list but still); has settled in comfortably to a life of B-pluses and management positions on teams and class councils; has basked in the attention refracted by Philae of tow-headed frat boys endeared by her braids—but has yet to unearth any particular gift that might place her in league with her siblings at last.
Panic. Rising gently from the place in her stomach such panic lies waiting for moments like this. She runs from the bed to the adjoining master bathroom and kneels by the toilet to let the thing out. Up come the peanuts and Coke and six bread rolls she ate on the plane behind Olu and Ling, tearing the bread into pieces more appropriate for pigeons before scarfing them down when the rest fell asleep.
iii
Taiwo and Ling in the one-bedded bedroom.
Awkwardly pretending to begin to unpack.
Ling sees the vase on the nightstand and thinks of it. “Your mother’s so gorgeous.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Taiwo says. She is crouching on the floor by the bed with her suitcase, looking vaguely for a shirt for the household-wide nap. She can feel Ling behind her trying to strike up conversation as if they were roommates, day one at the dorm, by turns nervous and excited at the distinct possibility that this stranger might well be a lifelong best friend. They’ve met on other occasions—Olu’s various celebrations, mostly birthdays, when the family would drive down to Yale in the little blue hatchback, a mess from the flowers, Baby Sadie in grade school, and they just returned—but those were the years that she, Taiwo, spent mute, when she’d sit there in silence at Sally’s, and eat, so it wasn’t until later, circa med school graduation, that she spoke to Ling really, got to know the girl some.
It was then she discovered that Ling, much like Olu, is dead set on things going well at all times and so cannot sit still: flutters, flits, laughing constantly as if trying to keep a beach ball from touching the ground. The problem, to boot, is the lack of a filter. She says what she’s thinking, then laughs at her thoughts to an endearing effect (if exhausting, adolescent). If she weren’t pretty, she’d be annoying. Instead she is cute.
This more than anything is what disturbs Taiwo, how cute is Ling, barely five feet off the ground, with her skinny black ponytail bobbing along as she bobs beside Olu double-step to keep stride. She doesn’t find cute women trustworthy, not grown-ups. A cute girl is one thing, cute adult another. Such women always seem to have something to hide, to be playing at helplessness, masking desire. Invariably, she sees in their sweet long-lashed eyes the same smoldering want that burns blatant in hers, if not more of it, cunning, more clarity of purpose, obscured by the girlishness, false to its core. They are women in the truest sense, ripe with soft power, yet pretending not to know what they want, that they want—as if want were unbecoming, a flaw cleverly masked by the appearance of being both needy and content.
As invariably, it is she who seems flawed in their presence, who feels herself strangely too present, exposed, somehow pungent, almost threatening, too much of a woman, exposed for a woman, a dark thing, black swan. While Ling laughs and flits from one thought to the next like some erudite Tinker Bell with ADHD (and with forceps), she Taiwo looms solid and livid, unyielding compared, a thing fallen to earth. She wants now that Ling feel this same sense of weightiness, awkwardness at failing to get her to chat—so abandons the search for a T-shirt to sleep in and lies on her back on her side of the bed fully dressed, yawning loudly and covering her face with her forearm to mean that she’s moments from sleep.
Ling doesn’t notice, her back turned to Taiwo, unfolding small clothes at the foot of the bed. “I don’t think your brother likes me.” She laughs, after a moment.
“Olu’s just like that,” Taiwo mumbles. But smiles. Does this mean that Olu has abandoned the pretense of being in love with his college best friend? Fair enough, only fools rush, but this is excessive: some fifteen years in and no wedding in sight. Her brother never kisses the woman in public nor touches her unthinkingly when putting on coats; all but left her there standing in the driveway on arrival; displays nothing of the clinging that passion begets. Taiwo has long since suspected a cover-up (asexuality, abortion in college, that sort) and imagines that, compelled by the tragedy upon them, the two of them might be at last coming clean.
Instead, Ling says, “Kehinde. He looks at me strangely.”
At the name Taiwo tenses, the age-old reflex, as if her name were spoken and not her twin brother’s. She peels off her forearm to glower at Ling. “What do you mean, strangely?” Without waiting for an answer, “It’s a difficult time for our family—”
“Of course.”
“So if Kehinde looks strange,” as if the words were not English, “it isn’t because he is . . . looking at . . . you.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest . . .”
The suggestions float there between them.
“I’m tired,” says Taiwo, as if this were Ling’s fault. She turns to the window, heart racing from lying, from the surge of aggression that still coats her throat, an old feeling resurfacing: thick, visceral, inexplicable, unnatural that she should feel jealous.
iv
While Olu and Kehinde lie looking at the ceiling.
“Sure is strange,” Olu says, “sleeping like this.”
“Like the old days,” says Kehinde, to say something. Silence. They agree, by soft laughter, to leave it untouched.
• • •
Olu folds his hands on his stomach, eyes open. He is thinking that the smell is familiar, though strange, the thick/sweet combination of sap and humidity and burning and sweat and dark reddish-brown oil. He knew it the moment he alighted the Mercedes and stood in the pebbled drive breathing it in and was seconds from placing it (1997, Accra) when he noticed that Kehinde was staring at Ling.
Staring, not looking, unaware he was staring so squinting, lips pursed as if finding the word, until Olu said, “Shall we,” and picked up a suitcase and, leaving Ling standing there, marched for the door. He’d never seen his brother interact with a woman and had always kind of vaguely thought Kehinde was gay,
less so interested in men than uninterested in women, almost womanly himself, like a dancer, the hair. It startled him therefore to find himself threatened, offended, by Kehinde’s reaction to Ling. The feeling, like the smell, was both strange and familiar, an old one, gone rusty and loud with disuse. The last time he felt this they would have been children, he fourteen or fifteen, his brother not ten, when some friend of their parents, more careless than callous, said, “One got the beauty, the other the brains.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed the difference between the reaction of others to Kehinde and to him. They were extraordinarily good-looking, his two younger siblings, and twins; there were two, more extraordinary still. It was perfectly logical the way people ogled, a matter of science, of cause and effect. Causes: the infrequent occurrence in nature of greenish-gold eyes against deeply brown skin and the incidence in America of dizygotic multiples (as opposed to, say, Nigeria where twins were the norm). Effect: thrill of shock, like the trick to a punch line, the eyes zooming in on the sight, unprepared. If anything, he felt that he had to protect them, not least on account of their relative size. To him they seemed frail, not just younger but weaker, thin-wristed and -waisted, his brother the more. Compared to his body, athletic and solid, his brother looked fragile. The opposite of threat.
Then Sadie was born, and the thing sort of shifted. Their father disappeared for four, almost five days. Olu knew where he was—down the street at the Brigham—but couldn’t shake the fear that his father was gone, gone away, called away to some faraway battle, with mothers and children left to fend for themselves. It would have been one thing if Fola were present. He was close to his mother, unusually so. In those days they went every Friday for ice cream, Carvel, on Route 9, just the two of them alone eating Rocky Road sprinkled with fine cookie crumbles, he prattling away on the short ride back home. On weekends, if his father had parties with colleagues, she’d take him for dinner at the Chestnut Hill Mall, leaving Taiwo and Kehinde with the kind Mr. Chalé while they ate clam chowder at Legal’s. He took a quiet pride in their physical resemblance; almost everybody noticed, and she smiled when they did. Furthermore, his father looked awed when he looked at her, and Olu thought he saw a sparkling residue of awe when his father turned to look at him, now and then, a hint of it, in the hospital for instance, when the baby was born.
