I wanted to know why he’d stayed away. At the same time, I was afraid of what consequences the truth might bring. “Wow,” I said, keeping my voice light, “I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“It has been a long time, hasn’t it?” He smiled up at the server who’d brought his Regab over. He took a gulp, then sat back with a sigh. “Rough week.”
The Regab, however, soon revitalized him. We chatted about recent goings-on until he glanced at his watch. “So, I take it Jenny hasn’t shown up yet?”
I frowned. “Why would Jenny be here?”
“She’s coming through the area.”
Lance and I looked at each other, perplexed, before turning back to William. “What do you know about it?” I asked, uneasy.
“She’s visiting me for a few days. She wanted time away, so I invited her to my village.”
The Regab leapt around in my stomach. “And that’s why you came here today?” My voice came out shrill and accusing.
William smiled at me with a determined brightness. “Yes, one of the reasons.” He noticed my expression and his voice grew gentle. “She’s struggling. I think she’s going through the ‘this isn’t what I thought it would be like’ phase. Remember that? I just wanted to try and help out. When I was in Oyem a few weekends ago, I told her to visit any time. I got a message this week and we agreed to meet here.”
He’d gone to Oyem on a weekend and not stopped in Bitam along the way. Or maybe he had stopped in Bitam but had avoided the mission. Which was to say, me.
Lance and William continued talking, unaware of my dismay. Surely William hadn’t forgotten about the wedding, I told myself. All I had to do was offer a little prompt.
Unfathomably, I didn’t.
Jenny showed up an hour later, as afternoon thunderheads piled up in the sky. She waved, her assertive, confident smile and American voice drawing attention as she strode over to us. “Hi! Sorry I’m so late!”
“No problem,” William assured her. “Want a beer, or are you ready to go?”
“I’m ready when you are!”
William gestured to his empty bottle. “I’m ready.”
Was he deliberately trying to snub me?
“But… wait!” I cried.
“Yes?” he asked me. “Was there something you wanted from me?”
Oh, very much a snub. And painful confirmation that, one, he hadn’t remembered about the wedding, and that, two, even William could let people down. I wouldn’t have thought it.
“No,” I told him. “Sorry.”
The four of us rose and left the bar. Lance and Jenny began acting goofy together, humming the theme music to The Brady Bunch, trying to change the words to fit the Peace Corps experience. I trailed behind, wheeling my bike, as we passed through the market alleys that reeked of urine and rotting fish guts and the other smells I was usually too cheerful to notice. Jenny and Lance stopped to peruse a crate of pirated music cassettes on sale in a stall. When the merchant gestured to two big boxes behind him full of new inventory, Jenny gave a little coo of pleasure.
“Ooh, I’ve been looking for a chance just like this. Do we have time, William?”
“Sure we do.” William paused and looked around for me. When he saw me, something in his expression seemed to soften. “I need to pick up a truck part from Mohammed at the mission. Do you want a ride there? We can throw your bike in the back.”
A tiny bit of the familiar, beloved warmth had returned to his voice.
I thought fast. “Sure. In fact, if we want to move right now, you can get the part while Jenny and Lance finish up here. So once she’s ready to go, you’ll have done your errand.”
“Great idea.” He turned to Jenny. “Why don’t you and Lance take your time here? Fiona and I are going to make a run to the mission. I’ll swing back here and pick you up once I’m done.”
Jenny hesitated and cast me a flickered glance. “Well… okay.”
“Be back soon,” William promised.
William and I walked side by side as I wheeled my bike. With each step, my heart lightened. Okay, so I wouldn’t get an evening with William. But I could have a few minutes. It would clear the air. It would give me a chance to argue my case.
Because I could feel what was starting to happen. Jenny had plans to claim him. I could read her intention loud and clear. I couldn’t afford to have a misunderstanding hinder my own chances with him.
The accumulated storm clouds issued ominous rumbles as William and I approached his truck. William looked up. “Uh oh. We’ll want to make tracks before this storm hits.”
“Wait!” we heard behind us. I looked over and saw Jenny running toward us.
“I changed my mind,” she called out. “William, I don’t want you to have to go back and forth on my account. How selfish of me! I’ll just go with you now.”
She stood there, smiling in that controlling way of hers.
Oh, so clever in the way she’d phrased it. She and I, if not William, understood that her “selfish” and “noble” behavior were the other way around. I could only smile back at her as my toes curled up against the base of my sandals.
“Sure, okay,” William said.
As I paused to dislodge a too-big chunk of mud from my bicycle wheel, she scampered over to the door on the truck’s passenger side before me. She stood there, hand already gripping the door handle, and I saw that she would not allow me to even sit by William.
There would be no ten minutes of heartfelt communication. Jenny would see to it that William and I were never alone.
I was too discouraged and low to compete with her today. I stopped in my tracks, twenty feet from William’s truck. He looked back at me curiously.
“I’m sorry, I just realized something I forgot,” I lied. “Go on ahead without me.”
“But it’s going to rain on you. We can wait while you take care of your business.”
“No. Really. Just go.”
I hadn’t meant for my reply to sound so harsh. Jenny tried unsuccessfully to hide her gloat.
“Just go, Guillaume,” I said in a less hostile voice. I didn’t wait for his answer. Instead I turned my bicycle around abruptly and walked back toward the market.
Of course the rain came down in torrents on my own return to the mission, soaking me in seconds. Mud clung to the tires and I dismounted, walking my bike in the rain. Eventually it subsided. By the time I made it back to the mission, soggy and bereft, it was almost dark, but the rain had stopped. And William and Jenny were long gone.
Grading tests was a shitty way to spend the evening when, right then, seven time zones away, my sister was getting married. The grounds were silent as I worked. But just before I went to bed, I heard the drums start up. My lone escape.
I took it.
Chapter 28
We didn’t need Marie-Belle and her acolytes tonight to make the dancing feel electric. I’d come alive; I was all but on fire. My legs, hips and arms felt unstoppable. My sandals slapped the dust as my skirt, faded after nearly two years, flapped against my knees. I’d freed my hair from its clasp and it spilled out in profusion like a lion’s mane. Sweat beaded my brow, my back, little trickles rolling down my spine. Energy poured out of me, filling the space.
I could feel Célèste and the other women responding to it. They didn’t seem to notice it was induced by agitation that buzzed around in my thoughts like flies near a carcass. I might have lost William. I’d missed the most important day of my sister’s life. The Gabonese were still going to tragically die no matter what I did. The thoughts made me want to crumple and sob. Instead I danced. When Célèste and the other dancers stopped for a break, I kept going, ignoring my protesting muscles and growing fatigue.
Thirty minutes more. An hour.
I began to feel better. Lighter. More lightheaded, yet, paradoxically, more energized. It was as if the energy from Marie-Belle and her acolytes had remained here, in the dirt of the dance circle, lying in wait for the right person to step in a
nd assume the role of dance priestess. No, I hadn’t had eight years of training in Ghana. But I’d devoted over a decade to the art and craft of dance. I’d lived in Africa for twenty-two months and, after all, I was the white woman with spirit eyes. I let Marie-Belle’s spectral presence fill my mind and guide me, my body following obediently.
Time ceased its relevancy. I kept going. So did the drums. I began to think of one particular drummer as my drummer—an aging man with a shock of fuzzy hair and alert eyes. His hands moved so fast, they were a blur. I found, however, when I moved in synchrony to his hands, my steps became effortless. It was as if I’d been lifted off my feet, marionette-style, and all I had to do was give into the experience. The drum had a curious counter-rhythm, a high, popping sound. I could pick up every nuance of the music, could even feel the drummer’s hand slapping the drum, and hear the taut skin’s reply. The drummer looked up at one point and smiled at me, an expression of fiery glee. We exchanged grins, a conspiracy between two performers who understood that once you got inside the music, anything was possible.
A dizziness came over me, as if the borders of my world had grown fuzzy, and yet in another way, things had never seemed in sharper focus. I could feel every sensitivity receptor turned on high, straining to pick up information. I tried to translate what the drum was saying, but it made me too dizzy, as were the turns I began doing. Not elegant pirouette or fouetté turns from ballet days. These turns were performed looking up, with arms flung out randomly, feet pattering in their own little circle of dirt.
How far can you go? The rules in ballet were simple. You focused on a fixed point on the wall to avoid getting too dizzy during turns. If you failed to do so, the dizziness would overtake you and at some point you’d fall, maybe even pass out.
Or would you? What happened at that moment when you lost control? Was there a divide? Could you suspend that moment between conscious and unconscious? Would being in that place give you answers?
The other drums seemed to be coming from all around me now—even inside me as I continued to spin, with the little pop-pop drum leading the way, always right in front of me, urging me on. Nausea arose. I needed to stop and throw up, but the drums told me no, so I kept going, focusing on that one sound, coming from my drummer guide. Things grew blurrier and blurrier until the night scene around me became a great, long tunnel of blur, screaming past me in a rush. I knew that I dared not stop, not even look around, because then I would surely be cast off into the great abyss that existed outside the tunnel. I clung to the pop-pop beat until the world upended and I spilled onto it, the cool, crumbly earth catching me.
The drums gave a few final pop-pops before stopping. Then everything grew still and dark.
Sunday morning. Or afternoon. Who knew? Who cared? Only the sound of persistent knocking pulled me from my fog of sleep.
I opened one eye. My bedroom was bright with late morning sun.
“Fiona?” I heard William call out. “You home?”
What was William doing back in town?
I stumbled out of bed, pulled on a pair of shorts and shuffled to the door. I opened it, squinting at the bright light. William stood there, alone.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I managed back.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Fog still clogged my brain. I couldn’t bring up what had transpired last night, because I still wasn’t sure what had happened. Beyond the drums, the dizziness, the tunnel, had been something that hurt my head to even try to ponder it. I remember the way my head rang, pounded, like it had after my bicycle accident, and that I’d been so unutterably drained in ways that had nothing to do with physical fatigue. I remember the other women helping me walk once I’d risen, treating me gently, with reverence and respect. Even a little fear. It had seemed to take everything in me, the acting skills of a performer, to affect a casual demeanor.
No one had asked me to explain. Which was a good thing. There would have been no coherent way to explain what had happened. Not then, not now.
Maybe not ever.
“Are you going to invite me in?” William asked.
I stood there dumbly. “Why are you here?”
“I screwed up. Fi, I’m so sorry.”
If he was going to tell me, with all that regret in his eyes, that he and Jenny had become intimate last night, and that he was here to apologize for leading me on, I was going to crumple on the spot.
“It was your sister’s wedding. I promised you I’d make the night special for you.”
Relief made me even more lightheaded than I’d been.
“It’s fine,” I said, opening the door wider for him to pass. “It was my problem, not yours. And it’s over, so no big deal.”
“Yes, it is a big deal.” He sounded angry. “I was going to help you celebrate it and I screwed up.”
“It’s okay, Guillaume.”
“No, it’s not.”
We stood there, face to face, inside my house. I knew I must have looked terrible, but I couldn’t summon enough artifice to fake it.
“Want some coffee?” I asked. I looked at the clock. It was past ten o’clock. “Wait. Jenny’s visiting you. Where is she?”
“She’s still in the village. That was what she wanted, the village vibe. I told her I needed to come see you and she assured me she could fend for herself there.”
“I’m sure she’s right. She’s an excellent fender.”
Which came out wrong and made her sound like a car part, but my brain was still only firing on one cylinder.
What happened last night?
It scared me that I didn’t know the answer.
“A cup of coffee would be great,” William said. “Why don’t I make it while you get dressed.” He gestured to my stretched, skimpy, nearly transparent nightshirt.
Whoops.
“Good idea. Thank you.”
We carried our hot drinks outside and took seats on a bench in a nearby grove. In silence, we sipped our coffees.
“Thanks,” I said a few minutes later. “This is good.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And thank you for coming by. You didn’t have to do that.” I spoke carefully, afraid that the weirdness circling my head might still slip out and make me seem stranger than people already thought me. They’d all looked scared of me last night. Reverential though, too. Like I’d been to the spirit world and back. Then again, maybe I had.
“It’s a nice day today,” he commented, looking around at the dewy freshness of the grove.
“Sure,” I replied without glancing around.
“What did you do last night?” he asked. “I thought you said something about grading papers.”
“I went dancing.”
“What, like in town, with… your fellow teachers?”
Fellow male teachers, the hesitation meant. I almost smiled.
“No, no. I was hardly in the mood for that.”
He grimaced. “No thanks to me and my obliviousness.”
“I told you, it’s okay, Guillaume. It’s past.”
“So, where did you dance?”
“Célèste’s neighborhood.”
“Where the ceremony for Christophe took place?”
I nodded.
“Well, that’s interesting.” He studied me over his steaming mug. “They could hardly get you to dance the last time.”
“Christophe had been right. It was time for me to start dancing again.” I sipped my coffee. “I don’t know what was keeping me from it. My pride? Fear of failure?”
“So, it was good to dance last night?”
“Not really.” The reply came out, uncensored.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh… nothing.” I took a too-big gulp of coffee and felt it burn the topside of my mouth.
William didn’t reply. Nor did he seem interested in changing the subject. I gave an irritated wave in his direction.
“Fi. Talk to me.”
“Look,” I bega
n. “I’m not trying to be difficult here. But it was weird, last night. Dancing until… I don’t know. I honestly can’t explain it. It hurts my head to even think about it.”
What happened last night?
Joshua. With all his involvement in bwiti, he’d get it. The weird, spiritual-meets-scary world that the Peace Corps certainly hadn’t trained me for, nor would be willing to discuss. I’d see Joshua in a few weeks’ time when the education volunteers met for their annual conference. Followed by a meeting for all the second-year volunteers to reunite and discuss COS—close of service—its issues and details. Because, unfathomable as it seemed right then, this would all come to an end in a few months’ time.
“Put down your coffee cup.”
William’s words startled me out of my thoughts.
“What?” I looked at him, uncomprehending.
“Your coffee cup.” He’d shifted, straddling the bench. “Set it down.” Sighing in mock-exasperation, he took the cup from my hand, set it on the ground, and pulled me back toward him. Before I could protest over being hauled around, he began to massage my tight shoulders. “Oh, wow. You’re tight,” he said.
“My shoulder muscles have been in knots for days,” I admitted. Weeks, in truth. Months.
“That’s something I know how to fix.”
The massage dissolved my tension. The fog in my brain, the brooding thoughts, miraculously dissolved as well. William’s hands were a marvel. His fingers found and kneaded the knots below my shoulder blades, the tightness of my back, the spots where I hadn’t even realized I’d been tensing. I relaxed deeper, taking fuller note of our surroundings. He was right; it was a nice morning, still cool from the earlier mist, fragrant with damp earth. I studied the adjacent morning glories and neatly tended euphorbia shrubs with their brilliant, showy red flowers. Next to us huddled the delicate, orchid-like flowers of the butterfly bush. It was so beautiful here. Sometimes I forgot that.
A Dancer's Guide to Africa Page 26
