Changes

by Ama Ata Aidoo

  ‘Permanently?’

  ‘Oh no, only until the end of August. Then she’ll come back to me for the re-opening of school.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Six. She is in Primary One this year.’

  ‘Already? But of course, she was born about the time I had my last born, no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Time does fly.’

  ‘It does.’

  The sadness that had descended on them was not proving easy to get rid of. They even went back to what they should have tried to find out from one another when they first met at the hotel: what they were doing here at the Hotel Twentieth Century. Esi told Opokuya about the friend she was supposed to be meeting from abroad, and Opokuya told Esi about the arrangement for Kubi to collect her from the hotel.

  ‘So you and your husband have taken to dropping into the Twentieth Century for drinks?’ Esi made a great attempt to tease Opokuya.

  Opokuya went on to tell Esi about the trip she was planning to her mother’s.

  ‘Homesick?’ Esi asked, trying hard to keep her teasing tone.

  ‘Yes.’ Opokuya answered, too enthusiastically, and fell into Esi’s trap.

  ‘Oh Opoku, shame on you. At your age!’

  ‘Now you stop it. I miss my mother. You know I haven’t seen her for a long time.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘And I miss the feeling of being special with someone.’

  ‘You are very special with Kubi.’

  ‘Esi, you were very special with Oko.’

  Esi did not know how to answer that. In the silence that followed, each woman was thinking that clearly the best husband always seems to be the one some other woman is living with! The sadness returned, heavier than before.

  One reason why Esi was almost tongue-tied was that she was too aware that Opokuya was her last hope of gaining understanding or at least some sympathy for her point of view. So far, nobody to whom she had tried to state her case had been remotely sympathetic. Like her mother and her grandmother. She had driven home one Sunday morning to discuss the whole business with them. They had found it very hard to listen to her at all. Although they had tried. When Nana’s patience had been stretched beyond endurance, she had asked Esi to tell her truthfully whether the problem was that her husband beat her.

  ‘No, Nana.’

  ‘So, does your husband smell? His body? His mouth?’

  Esi couldn’t help laughing. ‘No, Nana. In fact, for a man, he is very clean, very orderly.’

  ‘So then … Listen, does he deny you money, expecting you to use your earnings to keep the house, feed him and clothe him too?’

  ‘Nana, we are not rich. But money is not a big problem.’

  ‘What is the problem?’ both her grandmother and her mother really screamed this time: the former with her walking stick raised as though to strike her, and the latter bursting into tears.

  Esi had to tell the truth. Her husband wanted too much of her and her time. No, it was not another woman. In fact, she thought she might have welcomed that even more.

  ‘Are you mad?’ The older women looked at Esi and she looked at them. How could she tell them she did not want Oko? Where was she going to get a man like him again? At the end of the discussion, her grandmother had told her the matter sounded too much for her ears: she didn’t want to hear any more of it. At least not for some time. The declaration was accompanied by a proper palm-rubbing gesture. Finally, as Esi got into her car to drive back to Accra, and almost for a farewell, her mother had called her a fool. She had driven to Accra feeling like one.

  As for Oko’s people, there never was a question of Esi talking to them. She was convinced they hated her. She knew that for some time his aunts had been trying to get him a woman, ‘a proper wife’. What had discouraged them was his lack of enthusiasm and the fact that they suspected Esi didn’t care one way or another. The purpose of the project had been two-fold: to get him to make more children, ‘because his lady-wife appeared to be very satisfied with only one child,

  a terrible mistake, a dangerous situation.’

  They also wanted to hurt Esi: very badly, if they could. And if she didn’t care one way or another, then there was no point to it, was there? As far as Esi was concerned, his sisters were no better. They used to come and insinuate that their brother was failing in his duties to the family because she had turned his head — with ‘something’.

  ‘She fried it with the breakfast eggs!’

  ‘She put it into cakes!’

  And they would whisper and laugh. As far as the sisters were concerned, Oko never had money to spend on them because he was busy wasting his salary on her. When Esi let it be known that in fact she earned more than he did, their new line of attack was that it served him right, marrying a woman who had more money than him. His wife could never respect him. It was also around this time that the hints began to drop here and there: about the need for him to get himself an unspoilt young woman, properly brought up, whose eyes have not jumped over her eyebrows with too much education and too much money of her own … No she couldn’t go to them.

  As a result of Esi’s growing uncertainty about the justification of her decision, she was hesitating to tell Opokuya her story. And since any hesitation with communication was itself a new development in their relationship, it too was creating its own nervous tensions in her. If Opokuya was her last hope of getting an understanding at all, then she had better not let go of her. For here, where no one ever made the mistake of thinking that any marriage was strictly the affair of the two people involved, one could never attempt to fight any war in a marriage alone. And if she lost Opokuya too, she would have to fight alone.

  Before Opokuya moved into Accra recently, she and Esi had only once before lived in the same town since they were in secondary school. It was when Esi and Oko were first married and Esi returned with Oko to Kumasi, where he had been teaching. Kubi was then an assistant surveyor, and Opokuya was still a midwife at the Central Hospital. At the time, neither of them had any marital problems to share. Of course Opokuya as usual had sounded as if she had plenty. But then, as some of her colleagues always said unkindly, Opokuya searched for problems to talk about, so that she too would sound just like any other wife. As for Esi, she was then expecting her baby, and was too recently married to be aware of problems even if there had been any.

  After her baby was born, Esi had wanted to return to work. But that had not been easy. She had had to face the difficulty of having to choose between two not so attractive options. She could stay on at Kumasi, but that meant that she would not be working at all, or not meaningfully. It was not every government department that had regional branches. The Department of Urban Statistics was one of those that didn’t. Or she could return to Accra for her regular job: as long as she first convinced Oko that they could still see one another as often as possible at weekends, either she going or he coming. But at the merest hint of that, Oko had made it clear that the subject wasn’t even up for discussion. He made it clear that as far as he was concerned they had done enough of that kind of travelling when they were just friends’. In fact he had thought one reason why they had got married was to give themselves the chance to be together properly, no?

  In the end the only option left her, which she had had to take, was to ask to be seconded to the regional census co-ordinating office. She had ended up keeping the Birth and Death register.

  ‘Surely, one doesn’t need a Master’s degree in statistics to do that?’ she would fume and rage daily. Oko ignored her complaints. The truth was that he didn’t feel that sympathetic. And neither did the men in the office. In fact, they let her know that she was unwelcome, and a burden they did not know what to do with.

  Having to deal with a man who is over-qualified for a job is bad enough.

  To have to cope with an over-qualified woman in any situation is a complete misfortune.

  Now six years later, both she and Opokuya were here in Accra, wor
king. And she had a marital problem. A big problem. She should just gather herself together, and tell Opokuya what she felt. If Opokuya too could not understand her, then that was that. She would accept that she was just a fool, like her mother and her grandmother had said.

  After all, people change. Look at her. Esi had changed. If she now found Oko’s attentions so suffocating that she wanted very badly to split, then people change. There was a time when she had been made to fear that in fact she would never marry.

  ‘You have waited too long,’ Esi’s mother had complained. ‘Given your structure, you shouldn’t have.’ (The poor woman shared the popularly held belief that a young woman who is too tall, too thin, and has flat belly and a flat behind has a slim chance of bearing children. The longer she waits after puberty, the slimmer those chances get!)

  Esi’s main problem was that she was easily bored. And no woman ever caught a man or held him by showing lack of interest. Esi had known that she would have to work up some enthusiasm in her relationship with men. ‘But how?’ she had kept asking herself. Now looking back she didn’t dare admit, even to herself, that perhaps what she had felt for Oko in the first years of their married life was gratitude more than anything else. Gratitude that in spite of herself he had persisted in courting her and marrying her.

  ‘Not many women are this lucky …’ Esi could hear her grandmother’s voice. ‘And who told you that feeling grateful to a man is not enough reason to marry him? My lady, the world would die of surprise if every woman openly confessed the true reasons why she married a certain man. These days, young people don’t seem to know why they marry or should marry.’

  ‘What are some of the reasons, Nana?’

  ‘Ah, so you want to know? Esi we know that we all marry to have children

  ‘But Nana, that is such an old and worn-out idea! Children can be born to people who are not married.’

  ‘Sure, sure, but to help them grow up well, children need homes with walls, a roof, fire, pots.’

  ‘Oh Nana. But one person can provide all these things these days for a growing child!’

  ‘Maybe ... yes... Yes, my lady. We also marry to increase the number of people with whom we can share the joys and the pains of this life.’

  ‘Nana, how about love?’

  ‘Love? … Love? … Love is not safe, my lady Silk, love is dangerous. It is deceitfully sweet like the wine from a fresh palm tree at dawn. Love is fine for singing about and love songs are good to listen to, sometimes even to dance to. But when we need to count on human strength, and when we have to count pennies for food for our stomachs and clothes for our backs, love is nothing. Ah my lady, the last man any woman should think of marrying is the man she loves.’

  6

  It was night in Accra. It was not as hot as it had been in the day, but it was still hot, and the atmosphere was heavy with the moisture from the gulf. The Hotel Twentieth Century was blazing with light, consuming enough electricity to light up the whole of the nearby fishing district. But the fishing villages did not have electricity. In fact, all that the fishing community knew of that facility were the huge pylons that stood in their vegetable patches, and the massive cables passing over the roofs of their homes as these bore the electricity to the more deserving members of society. Like users of hotel lobbies. Like Mrs Esi Sekyi and her friend, Mrs Opokuya Dakwa.

  Kubi had not shown up yet, and the two women had long stopped expecting him. In fact, they had decided that their chance meeting, along with his failure to be there on time, was a definite advantage. In spite of the long pauses, they were having an old- fashioned relaxed chat, and Esi could always take Opokuya home anyway. However, Opokuya was feeling a little uneasy even though she had long ago taught herself to see her husband as a grown-up person who was perfectly capable of looking after himself; and also that people being late does not always mean they are bleeding to death by some roadside. ‘But sometimes they are,’ screamed the nurse in her. Maybe she had worked too long in hospitals.

  ‘Esi, exactly what is the problem?’ Opokuya couldn’t help putting it in her blunt way this time. ‘Is it another woman?’ As Esi opened her mouth to answer she was also wondering how Opokuya could speak with her grandmother’s voice.

  ‘Opokuya, do you remember when you were still up north, and I stopped at yours for the weekend on my way back from Ouga?’

  ‘You had been on some Ghana-Burkina joint commission, no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I had told you then that I was already beginning to feel fed up.’ ‘Yes, Esi. But why? Is it other women?’ Opokuya hated to, but couldn’t prevent herself from repeating the question.

  In any case, everyone knows that a man’s relationship with women other than his wife, however innocent, can always help ruin a marriage. And that includes his love for his own mother.

  ‘Oh no. To be fair to old Oko, it was never that. In fact sometimes, I wished he would behave like other men in that respect.’

  ‘Esi you are mad.’ Opokuya truly couldn’t believe her ears.

  ‘That is what my mother and my grandmother said.’

  ‘How many women wouldn’t give everything they’ve got to have a man like that?’

  ‘Well, they can all have him.’

  ‘Listen my sister, you have to be realistic.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About life!’

  ‘It’s he who wasn’t being realistic.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Well … well … here we are, two people, each with a demanding job …’Opokuya was surprised. Esi was beginning to sound childish and petulant. She had a strong urge to scream at her to stop her story. But that she knew would be unfair. ‘Esi, what about your job?’

  ‘As you know, my job can be very demanding sometimes. I have to prepare materials for ministers, permanent secretaries … you know, such people. And then I have to do a lot of travelling; inside the country, outside. Oko resented every minute he was free and I couldn’t be with him.’

  ‘But that is so natural.’

  ‘For whom?’

  ‘My sister, if a man loves a woman, he would want to have her around as much as possible.’

  ‘To the extent that he would want me to change my job because he thought it took me away from him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Opokuya, wondering where she had acquired such ideas from, and the confidence to express them so forcefully. ‘To the extent that he would want you to change your job.’

  ‘But when we first met, Oko told me that what had attracted him most about me was my air of independence!’

  Opokuya had begun to giggle, and then discovered she could hardly stop. ‘You see, it happens to all of us. Esi, listen: men are not really interested in a woman’s independence or her intelligence. The few who claim they like intelligent and active women are also interested in having such women permanently in their beds and in their kitchens.’

  ‘Which is impossible. It’s a contradiction.’

  ‘Yes. But there it is. Very few men realise that the sharp girls they meet and fall in love with are sharp because, among other things, they’ve got challenging jobs in stimulating places. That such jobs are also demanding. That these are also the kinds of jobs that keep the mind active — alive. Look, quite often, the first thing a man who marries a woman mainly for the quickness of her brain tries to do is get her to change her job to a more “reasonable” one. Or to a part-time, not a full-time job. The pattern never, never changes. And then a “reasonable” job is often quite dull too.’ ‘And no part-time job has the stimulation that its full-time version can give.’

  ‘Exactly! So that when a woman changes jobs in such a manner, more likely than not, her vision begins to shrink, and she begins to get bored and dissatisfied.’

  ‘And even he might begin to find her dull.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Swiftly Esi had become aware of a certain desolation moving towards her from far away.

  ‘It’s
an impossible situation,’ she said rather heavily ‘It is,’ Opokuya agreed, with equal cheerlessness. For a time, they were quiet, Opokuya stirring the cold ghost of her tea, and Esi twirling around her empty glass.

  ‘Let’s have another drink,’ they both said, at the same time. They ordered a second beer for Esi, and this time, a gin and lime for Opokuya, looking with a mischievous understanding at one another.

  ‘Surely, Kubi is different,’ Esi picked up the thread of their conversation from where they had left it before their drinks came.

  ‘How little you know my husband,’ Opokuya declared, not really wanting to say more.

  ‘He’s always seemed so reasonable.’

  ‘Well, go on thinking that. I don’t want to disillusion you... But Esi, what are you going to do?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Esi, you can’t stay alone forever?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s just not healthy.’

  ‘Says the local representative of the SWI.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  Esi was giggling. ‘It means Satisfied Wives International. It’s how another girlfriend refers to you all.’

  ‘All of us who?’

  ‘All of you happily married women who are always saying that being single is not healthy.’

  ‘Oh really?’ She hadn’t thought of herself as either ‘a happily married woman’ or that she belonged to a club of such characters. Now they were both laughing. ‘Actually, I don’t know ... I thought …’

  ‘Don’t think,’ said Esi, rather sharply, ‘especially if your thoughts are in the region of me going back to Oko.’ She took a big gulp of her beer rather sulkily.

  Opokuya stayed quiet for a while before saying seriously that in fact that was what would normally be expected of her as a good friend. ‘In any case, what are you planning? A proper divorce soon? A remarriage?’ She tried not to sound like a stern busybody. Esi was vehement: ‘Me? Never!’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘I could not bear it,’ exclaimed Esi, quite obviously having a problem keeping her voice down. ‘Another husband to sit on my back all twenty-four hours of the day? The same arguments about where a woman’s place is? Another husband to whine all day about how I love my work more than him? Ugh, Opokuya, I couldn’t. And thank you very much.’