by Taiye Selasi
This was the first time that she learned to leave her body, just to leave the body lying there, mind wandering off. Not with effort. It simply happened: she was lying there in Lagos on a chaise lounge in her nightdress when she felt herself go. Weary party guest departing. She was floating above them, then, watching the proceedings just as calm as could be, watching Kehinde in his T-shirt and his matching cotton Mickey shorts, his finger in his sister, Uncle Femi in his chair, the two boys at the door, their eyes wide with shame, pleasure, the portrait above the mantel, “Tuesday” panties on the floor—then floating elsewhere: to their parlor in Brookline, to the piano, to Shoshanna shouting, “Faster! Faster! Fast!” while she tried to play Rachmaninoff—and elsewhere: to the classroom, to the teacher’s nervous laughter while she shaded in o’s—to her bedroom: to the window watching Kehinde in the driveway, with their father looking guilty, little light on in the car. It seemed almost impossible that she, in this body, had covered such distance, from Brookline to Lagos, from piano and classroom and bedroom and safety to here, to this nightmare unfolding: too far. She floated above them and wondered who was this, then, here in that body? Wasn’t her. Couldn’t be. Was simply a body. A body she’d left there as one drops a towel.
To which she returned.
Kehinde had finished. Slid his finger from her body. She opened her eyes. Saw the stain on his shorts. Uncle Femi was clapping. “E kuuse!” Well done.
Sweat, or something like it, ventured shyly down her thigh.
“You can go,” said Uncle Femi. Kehinde hurried from the room, his shoulders shaking, leaving Taiwo there alone. She sat up. She looked at her uncle. She collected her panties (but didn’t put them on, not yet, the gesture too abasing). She walked out the door with a hole in her body, a space where her girlhood had been, no longer crying. Babatunde was there waiting with an expression on his face that suggested he knew what had happened and how. She didn’t find Kehinde in the kitchen or their bedroom. She went to her room down the hall, still too cold. She lay on the bed looking up at the ceiling for the rest of the day. No one called her for dinner. The next morning Babatunde came to fetch her. Up the elevator. For a week their uncle watched as Kehinde touched her like that. He said what the molesters say in made-for-TV movies: that he’d report them to their mother if they ever told a soul.
Then there was a party, and they were made to wear makeup and to walk around smiling at guests, boys and men, Nigerian and South African and white, of all ages. A gay man from Ghana: “I know who you are.” They left without luggage in a taxi with the Ghanaian. He put them on a plane to JFK and they came home. And . . . scene.
• • •
Taiwo pauses, her breathing grown labored. She means to say, “Happy? Now you know,” or the like, but she can’t catch her breath; is weak, sweating, dehydrated; intends to storm off and instead starts to sway. Fola lurches forward, catching Taiwo as she buckles, managing to grab her by the shoulders as she slumps to the sand. The movement is instinctive—less embrace than intervention—but it puts their skin in contact for the first time in years. Taiwo jerks backward, the dizziness mounting. She tries to say, “Don’t,” and erupts into tears.
vi
Fola pulls the girl to her chest, clutching tightly to prevent her from attempting to flee or pull away—but Taiwo clings back, body wracked by the sobbing, too weakened to stand without something to hold. So holding Fola. Barely choking out words, as a child does attempting to give voice to its grief between sobs, “How could you send us there? How could you send us? You knew what would happen. You knew, Mom. You knew.”
Of the many things Fola thinks, holding her daughter, is the thought that it’s useless to love with such force, for the force doesn’t travel, doesn’t keep them, protect them, doesn’t go where they go, doesn’t act as a shield—and yet how to love otherwise? What else might she feel but this raw, desperate love as she clutches the girl, wishing only to protect her, to act as a shield, and this raw, desperate grief, having long ago failed? “I’m sorry,” she whispers, stroking Taiwo’s long dreadlocks, knowing sorry won’t do, not knowing where else to start.
She’s never before felt what she feels in this moment. Three feelings at war for her breath, for her strength: first the anger at Femi, the pure, crystal hatred, a rage undiluted by pity or doubt; then the grief that is Taiwo’s, her shame and her sorrow, a well of it rushing beneath the right breast; then her own shame and sorrow, to know what has happened, to know what she’s sensed all along in her twins, who got hurt, she thinks, badly, because they didn’t have their mother. Because their mother thought they didn’t need a mother like her. “I thought,” she tells Taiwo, as she thinks of it, anguished, “I thought I was helping. That you’d be better off. I thought that your uncle—” heaves once and continues—“I thought he could provide things I couldn’t afford. I wanted you to have, I don’t know, to have more . . .”
“More than what?”
“Than a single mother. Than a mother like me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I never had a mother. I was making it up as I went. I was scared. I was lonely. I was a coward. I was afraid of disappointing you, of holding you back from the things you deserved. You were gifted, so brilliant, even smarter than Olu. Your teachers all said it. ‘She’s special,’ they said. ‘Make sure that you challenge her, stimulate, encourage her.’ I feared I’d be the reason that you didn’t excel. I was afraid that I’d fail you. So I sent you to . . . him . . . and he hurt you. And Kehinde. I failed anyhow.” Fola stops talking abruptly, embarrassed. This isn’t at all what she wants to be saying. Taiwo is silent, her arms around Fola, her chest quivering palpably against Fola’s breasts. Fola pulls back, just enough to see Taiwo, to hold the girl’s face with her fingers. “I’m sorry.”
Her daughter looks back at her, blinking, eyes bloodshot, dry-raw from the salt of her tears and her sweat. She looks like an infant, thinks Fola. My infant. My baby, my daughter. And not Somayina. The eyes don’t remind her at all of her mother’s, perhaps for the first time since Taiwo was born. The clear amber eyes look to Fola like Taiwo’s: the eyes of a child, not a ghost’s but a girl’s. Taiwo says nothing, just stares at her mother, who stares at her child, overwhelmed by her want. She wants to give healing and comfort and answers. She wants to undo what was done to her twins. She wants to find Kehinde and hold him here also. She wants to find Femi, to kill him. By hand. Very slowly. To torture him. She wants to stop crying. She wants to make Taiwo stop crying. But can’t. All she can do is stand weeping with Taiwo alone on this beach in the bearing down heat, knowing someone has damaged her children irreparably, unable to fix it. Able only to hold.
She kisses Taiwo’s forehead, still holding her cheeks in her palms, and is moving to hug her again when she, Taiwo, says, “Don’t,” thinking Fola has kissed her by way of hard stop and will now pull away.
“Don’t go,” whispers Taiwo, and startles her mother by grabbing her fiercely and gripping her waist. “Don’t let me go yet, please don’t let me go.”
“I won’t,” whispers Fola, and doesn’t.
vii
Olu is getting annoyed now. Where are they? His mother and sister just up and disappeared, leaving the rest of the family to receive the food offering, a beans-and-rice dish served on plates made of tin. They ate this politely, chewing, nodding, and smiling, then gulped down warm Fanta, surrendered their plates. Sadie hurried off with her newfound instructor to learn further dance moves behind some mud hut while Benson received a call on his cell and began pacing the clearing in search of reception. “Hello? Hello?” Kehinde dematerialized in typical fashion, leaving Olu and Ling with this Shormeh and Naa, the two sisters in black whom his father never mentioned, both older by the look of it, sixty or more. Naa, the somewhat friendlier, dead ringer for Sadie, asks would they like to come see the old house? “That’s okay,” says Olu as Ling gushes, “Yes!” and they’re ushered along to the hut at the back.
&nb
sp; He noticed the roof when they entered the compound—a triangular dome stitched of some sort of reed, five feet taller at least than the tin roofs surrounding it—but only now thinks of his father’s remark. Kweku, in a ramble about renting versus owning, said something about a father having “designed his own property.” Olu asks Naa, “Who designed this? Who built it?”
“His father,” she answers. “Your grandfather. Come.”
They duck in the door and stand still for an instant, adjusting to the relative darkness and silence. The space is much cooler than seems possible given the burdensome heat in the courtyard outside. Olu peers around at the rounded clay walls, at the sixteen-foot roof, one small window, faint light. Intelligent construction, he thinks. Ling takes pictures, the flash from the phone bouncing off this and that.
“There were six of us, then, with your father,” says Naa. “And our mother. Ehn, seven. We all slept in here.”
“Eight, with your father,” says Olu. “My grandfather.”
“No,” Naa says brusquely. “That man disappeared. He wasn’t our father. Just Kweku and Ekua’s.”
“He died?” Olu asks.
“No. He left.”
“To go where?”
“Jesus knows,” Naa says, shrugging. “By now he is dead. Both his children are, too. And his wife. Prideful man. That one, our mother, she loved him too much, oh. Too much. And for what, ehn? You came when she died. The woman was gone but he brought you to see her. He never came back here apart from that time.” She laughs without joy. “Now the space is sufficient. Your father would always fuss, fuss, for the space. ‘It’s too small,’ ‘it’s too hot,’ always hot, like a white man.” She sucks her teeth. “Obroni. Too hot in the shade.” She is quiet for a moment, her hands at her elbows. Then, her voice breaking, “A shame, oh. So young. My own junior brother. That foolish boy Kweku.” She wipes off her eyes with the back of one arm. “They say he bought a big, big house. Someplace very, very cold.”
Olu nods. “Yes.”
“Then he did it.” Tiny smile. “You wait. I am coming.” She dabs at her eyes again, shuffles to the doorway, ducks out. “I go and come.”
Ling comes to Olu by the one wooden bed. “What are you looking at?”
But Olu doesn’t know. He thought he saw something, a bird or an insect, flittering briskly around the window near the top of the dome, but when he points to it now he sees nothing but light spilling in full of dust to the mats on the floor.
viii
Kehinde comes tentatively to the entrance to the compound and stops by the wall, looking left, looking right. The outhouse was empty and so is the road, Benson’s car left alone on its tilt in the groove. He approaches the window to peer in to see if the driver is sleeping, but no one is there. He looks up the road at the line of small kiosks and sees, just past these, one large stand-alone shack. It looks like those cabins, the square wooden cabins they slept in, in Boy Scouts, the one year he tried, age eleven, before abandoning the pretense of boyness in favor of painting and working with beads. He can make out some movement inside it, a shadow, and thinks to go ask if the person here saw either Taiwo or Fola or Benson’s lost driver these last twenty minutes they’ve all disappeared? He walks the short way to the large wooden structure and stops at the doorway before ducking in, a low door, squinting twice in the dim of the space that is the coffin maker’s workshop and a clinic in the clutch.
He doesn’t see the man. He sees the one metal table bearing basic tools for woodwork and medical exams, wooden benches by the walls, single window by the doorway, rusted ceiling fan squeaking with every slow turn. Incongruously, at odds with the torture cell effect, a string of white Christmas lights blinks on one wall. The window is closed, as are three massive shutters that make up the top of the wall at the back. The only illumination is bright whitish sunlight thrown in from the door to the rough slatted floor. Even so, eyes adjusting, Kehinde makes out the coffins that hang more like boats from the beams overhead: one a car, one a fish, one a rose by the look of it, absurd in one sense, wild, fantastic in another. The idea of it. Coffins in shapes, like kids’ birthday cakes, celebratory, colorful, laughing at death. Sangna would love these, he thinks, with a start, caught off guard by the thought, by this flash of her face:
Sangna’s narrow brown face with its ill-fitting features reviled by their owner for being “too big.” An image out of context. On the backs of his eyelids. Her face on that screen in that space in his mind where such images materialize when his thoughts begin to wander, when forms replace words, like a photo exposed. (This is how paintings begin, and revelations, a form floating up out of dark on that screen, at first blurry, then detailed, then clear as a memory, as if to “create” were in fact to recall.) Here on that screen appears Sangna, lovely Sangna, whose narrow brown face passes by all the time, a flash here, a flash there, while he’s working in Brooklyn or writing her texts or while they talk on the phone—but whose face he has never really properly considered, like this, out of context, on its own. In other light. As he thinks of it now, he can see that she’s right, that her features don’t fit in their slender-cheeked frame, that there’s something too big about the teeth and the brows, a man’s eyes, a man’s nose, a man’s mouth, a child’s chin. An exquisite imbalance, he thinks, even thrilling, with the tension it creates when he sees her again after months and feels nervous those first thirty seconds, as if watching a juggler, afraid and amazed: they’re still there, all in order, those huge gorgeous features at war with their borders but not yet seceding.
That face.
And her laughter.
“So you want to make coffins,” he hears Sangna laugh. “You just started the Muses! You’re mad. But I like it, man. ‘Kehinde Sai, Coffins.’ Materials list Monday. And please no more dirt.” A home, he would tell her, he thinks, for the homeless, a home in the space after bodies, before. The thing he’s been after perhaps prematurely, a home, not a coffin. His next major show. Fantasy coffins. A museum installation. When he finishes the paintings in Brooklyn of her, of his sister as each of the Muses, huge portraits—
the thought of which sends up a warm wave of grief. The image shifts abruptly from Sangna to Taiwo: the girl on her back on that rococo chaise in the Minnie Mouse nightdress, her voice in his head a faint whisper please help me, and after, her face. After, when he’d done all their uncle instructed so the jaundice-eyed guard wouldn’t touch her instead—after, when he looked at his shorts, as did Taiwo, and saw there the wet spot—the look on her face. He hadn’t been able to brook the expression, had run from the room like a coward, a fool, but can see the face now, that one glimpse of it, frozen, held steady before him as if he were there: the pure shock in her eyes at this proof of his pleasure, the strange spreading wet spot, the strange spurting shame.
This was the first time that he learned he had a body, that he was bound inside this body, trapped, an airborne being caged. In his mind he’d been elsewhere, far, farther than snow, had been floating with Taiwo in space beyond space: they were drifting in nightclothes like Wendy and Peter, her hand in his hand, not his fingers in her. He heard Uncle Femi and did as instructed, could feel the walls’ smoothness and warmth and the wet, but his mind wasn’t joined to his finger; was with Taiwo, perhaps where they started? Then his body began. The beginning of having a body: that moment. The feel of the liquid a snake on one thigh. The clapping, Uncle Femi, “E kuuse, o, Kehinde!” His mind coming back.
To that look on her face.
How could he tell her that he didn’t enjoy it, when here was the proof that he had, on his shorts? When the body had betrayed him, and her, inexplicably? How could he persuade her? What could he say? He couldn’t say anything. Or didn’t. And hasn’t. Not for the week that the thing carried on. Not when they flew to New York to meet Fola, when they got back to Boston, for the next fifteen years. He has never said anything (nor she) of the moment, has never once revisit
ed her expression until now: at the door to this storehouse of coffins and stethoscopes, from the dim of which someone says, “You, are you sick?”
Kehinde turns, startled, to the bench by the doorway and finds here a man with a paper, reclined. The man is quite old, dressed in trousers and T-shirt and worn leather sandals and dirty white coat, short and stout, with a belly and Coke-bottle glasses, with none of the famous Ghanaian good cheer. He has lowered his paper to glower at Kehinde but doesn’t get up, just repeats, “Are you sick?”
Kehinde shakes his head, caught off guard, stepping backward. “I didn’t see you sitting there.”
“Of course, there’s no light. Too hot with the light. Me, I don’t like the heat, oh. I see in the darkness. You look like you’re sick.” He sets down his paper and stands with some effort. “You came from Big Milly’s? A rastaman, ehn?”
“N-no,” Kehinde stutters. “We came for my father. He lived here. Grew up here, I mean. Now he’s dead.”
“Your father?” The man shuffles closer to Kehinde. “That one, the Sai boy? I heard that he died.” Kehinde nods, silent. “It’s a coffin you want then. What’s your name?”
“Kehinde.” He holds out his hand.
The man takes the hand, starts to shake it in greeting, then turns it face up to examine the palm. He leans in to squint down at Kehinde’s raised calluses. “Rough. You are a laborer.” Kehinde shakes his head. “Then why are your hands so, so rough like my own? The Sais I knew, self, they were thinkers.” Sarcastic. “At least that, the first one, could put up a house. But the boy? Good for nothing but thinking, thinking, thinking. He thought he was smart, ehn, too smart to break wood. Tss. Your hands are good, rough, like my own. Like a man.”
