When We Were Ghouls

by Amy E. Wallen

  Traders came by our house daily selling their wares. On Wednesday, Friday the tailor came through the gates with his black Singer sewing machine balanced on his head, carrying a leather briefcase. From inside the briefcase, he pulled patterns and detailed drawings of dresses and laid them out in the carport. On Friday, Justus came to sell thorn carvings. I always thought it would make much more sense if Friday came on Friday and Justus on Wednesday.

  Friday opened one leather-bound binder filled with brilliant fabric swatches in African prints and rich solids, then opened another with pages and pages of the hand-drawn embroidery fretwork of flourishes and frippery. Mom and I chose fabric and thread color, pointed to pantsuits, dress, or tunic, and within a week my mother had a new wardrobe. She wore maxi dresses and pantsuits for entertaining and minidresses for everyday teas and daytime events at the Ikoyi Club. Occasionally she would pick out a pattern for me. In my red pantsuit with stitched frippery across the bodice, I pretended to be one of the ladies at a daiquiri party, my hand holding an invisible stemmed glass.

  On the other days Mom and I shopped at Jankara Market, Lagos’s largest, open-air bazaar. In one section trade beads were sold, or slave beads as they were also called because they were used as currency for slaves and services during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.

  My dad likes to point out that Nigerians had slaves long before the white man came along and shipped them crowded in the belly of the vessel. He says this as though it excuses Southern plantations, cat-o’-nine-tails, and the tearing apart of families. When I was little, I nodded wide-eyed, taking it in as if fact. As I grew older, the nod gradually became a shake in disbelief and shame at my lack of questioning two wrongs.

  Strings of glass beads dangled from the walls of the Jankara Market booths. Baskets of loose beads spilled out from the front. Mom would string her own combination of round, tubular Krobo or brass beads. Some looked like red-and-white striped peppermints, others like chocolate Tootsie Rolls or caramels or whimsical, painted tubes or coins. I never got my own beads, but I helped her pick out combinations, long strands hung around her neck matching the dresses Friday made for her.

  In Jankara Market anything could be bought, even juju potions and powders. We squeezed through the crowded rows of vendors. People wove through the aisles, women in long iros—rectangular fabrics wrapped around the waist—with geles wrapped around their hair, often holding baskets filled with purchases on their heads, while we carried ours in shopping bags dangling from our arms.

  Mom and I were the only cohesive part left of our family. I missed Marty with a vengeance. But Mom and I had each other, and we were ladies shopping. She may not belong to me, but I belonged to her. We were inseparable.

  Or so I thought.

  A new trader came to the house one day and brought wood and ivory tusk carvings. “Ebony, Madam,” he swore about the black wood. “Ebony. Not fake, Madam.” She pointed to a foot-tall carving of a man—I could tell because he wore a loincloth. The trader picked up the statue along with the one next to it—a woman with long, pointed breasts.

  “Just the one,” Mom said.

  “No, Madam,” he said, and shook his head with vigor. “You must buy both.”

  “I just want one,” Mom said.

  “Real ebony, Madam.” He handed her both dolls, “They go together. See.” He held the male and female carvings side-by-side, identical except for mammary glands and sex organs. “Twins, Madam. Twins are killed by Igbo, Madam. They think they are evil. When twins are born, they throw them in the woods. These are replicas for mother of her babies.”

  “They kill the twins?” Mom asked. I pictured the mothers coddling the wooden statues like baby dolls, as replacements for the babies they had to throw away. I grabbed Mom’s arm, and without saying it, she knew I meant, you have to buy them both, you have to keep them together. “Okay then, I’ll buy both.” She seemed reluctant and disbelieving, but she liked a story that came with a purchase. I liked that she wasn’t giving up one without the other, that she realized they belonged together. I laid my head on her elbow.

  She placed the woodcarving on the shelf above the living room couch. After a few weeks under the air conditioner running full blast, the wood dried out then cracked at the base, the pink, fleshy wood peeking through the outer black shoe polish. I watched the splintered “ebony” open wider and wider each day, until I could stick my pinky inside. But I never said a word. I didn’t want Mom to know she had been cheated. I didn’t want her to know one wasn’t as good as the other. If she knew, she might throw that twin away. One shouldn’t be without the other. I stood tiptoe on the couch and placed one statue just behind the other twin so the pink crack wouldn’t show.

  Our trips to the stuffy and crowded phone company to wait our turn to make an international call were a curiosity to me. Even now looking back, these special days spent waiting and sweating on Naugahyde make no sense to me. I know we had no telephone or television at the house; no one did in Nigeria. To make a phone call required driving to the public utilities building downtown. At the front desk a clerk took a reservation, then we waited in the unair-conditioned lobby until the call was placed. As we waited hours for our call to go through, I watched the fruit bats hanging in the giant umbrella tree out front.

  That’s how I remember it: that we went to make phone calls on a semiregular basis. But when I call my sister and tell her I remember going down to the phone company to call her and Marty at boarding school, I find out that again my memory had it all wrong.

  “No one ever called me during the school year when we were in Switzerland,” Suzanne replies.

  This stings. Why had no one called Suzanne and Marty once they’d left home? Sent so far away, and our parents never called them?

  “No one called?” I say.

  “Not once,” she says. “My roommate and I became close. I made friends; that helped.”

  I don’t ask my mother about this. I know the answer, and I’m too broken-hearted. She will say that it was too expensive, too difficult, that it just wasn’t done. Instead I ring my mother and ask who it was we did call in the memory I so clearly have in my head of when we went to the phone company and I watched the fruit bats.

  “We must have been calling Mom,” she says, referring to her own mother, my grandmother, Mommom. A telex came. “She had gotten sick, so we called home.” My mom pauses for a moment. “She died during my flight over, before I got there.”

  A familiar pang of sadness for her rips through my gut—losing her mother while she’s trying to get to her. I want to hug her. If only my mother were closer. If only she didn’t live so far away. I miss my mother for who she was, for who she is. My memory erases, and my thoughts shift. If I squint my mind’s eye, if I look through the kaleidoscope of stories—my sister’s, my mom’s, mine—I see a montage of family each surviving in her own way. I see my eight-year-old self coloring in her Places I Have Lived book. That little girl doesn’t know that this giant, seismic shift in cultures, this upheaval, isn’t normal. She doesn’t comprehend time, abandonment, or death.

  I say to my mother on the phone, “You left me in Lagos alone, after everyone else was gone when you went to the States.” I don’t accuse. It’s a statement. I only say it with the hope she will respond with remorse or regret. Or awareness. Maybe she’ll want to hug me too.

  “I left you with the Griffins,” she says, matter-of-factly.

  I should have realized the placed call from my memory was an emergency because Dad was home from the bush and not at the office. I recall that he paced the floor in front of the counter.

  The Nigerian women, professionally dressed in Western seersucker dresses and neckerchiefs, looked up each time Dad stopped to ask how much longer.

  “Your telephone call must travel many miles,” the bouffant-do’d lady behind the counter replied.

  “We’ve been here two hours already,” he told her.

  “Yes, Master,” she replied. “We too have been he
re four hours, still your call has not gone through.”

  “We just put the call through when we—. Never mind.” He resumed his pacing. The illogic in the woman’s response irritated him, but he knew it was no use. The women continued to put up with my dad’s complaining for the rest of the afternoon. He was John Wayne waiting behind the saloon doors for the gunman to show up.

  “Jaime,” my mother said each time he griped, “they can’t do anything about it.”

  “You think we should just wait until they get around to it? We’ll be here for a month.” It felt like a month already. I sat on a hard plastic chair with nothing to look at except the dangling bats out the window, the linoleum floor, or the red telephone booths lined up against one wall.

  Finally when our call had been placed, Mom and I both crammed into the red Naugahyde-covered phone booth. Tight and hot from the body heat of previous callers, the snug, unair-conditioned box was oppressive. The phone booth reeked of sweaty, stale body odor and pomade. But I didn’t care as I sat on Mom’s thigh, my hand holding onto her knee, her skin always soft like kid leather. My ear glued to the backside of the receiver, I just heard a squawking buzz come through.

  International calls in those days were a hassle, the sounds so distant and the time it took one voice to travel to the next so long you inevitably talked over one another. The price was exorbitant and not much could be discussed in the short time and tiny air space.

  This must have been what happened: On our end, my mother relayed her arrival date and time. She would be going to the States, to Texas. Her mother was deathly ill.

  I remember nothing of the events leading up to the day she left. I am certain though that I stood at her side as she packed her Samsonite suitcase. I imagine she filled it with Nigerian souvenirs for her sisters, strings of beads from Jankara, funny thorn carvings of dentists pulling teeth, ebony and ivory bookmarkers—trinkets that fit easily inside a suitcase. No room for a seven-year-old girl. I don’t remember a single thing about her preparing to leave, perhaps because I didn’t understand or just didn’t want to believe it.

  But I do remember clearly the day she left.

  I hid behind the curtains, looking out the sliding doors, and watched through the decorative cuts in the carport’s concrete block as Pious, the Griffins’ driver, put Mom’s suitcase in the trunk of the blue Renault. I grabbed the blue-and-orange African print curtains that hung the length of the living room glass wall. A bigger cry than I had ever cried pushed itself up from my belly. I know what “wracked with sobs” means because of that day. I was not a crier, but from my hiding place, I dropped to my knees, grabbed hold of the rough curtain fabric, and covered my face. I pleaded. I sobbed.

  She waved as she slid into the Renault’s backseat. She’d spotted me! I reached up with my little hand, smudging the glass. I pounded my balled up fist, rattling the glass. The car backed out. I banged harder, the glass shimmying in its track. I couldn’t catch my breath from bawling. I ached with each gulp and wail.

  And she left anyway.

  I blubbered. I bawled. I wailed. I rolled myself up in those curtains. Snuffling, I wiped my nose on the orange bird print. Maybe I did know something from those long-distance calls at the phone company. Maybe I comprehended the essence of the calls. Maybe I knew that even though Papa told me about the deer he’d shot, or how next time I came to visit he’d have M&Ms for me, that something had shifted. Maybe I sensed what traveled beneath all the aunts’ and uncles’ sepulchral echoes through the transatlantic wires lying at the bottom of the ocean.

  I stared at the empty carport, at the grease stain where a car should have been. I hiccuped, trembled out more sobs, dried my eyes on the scratchy orange-and-blue curtain. If I kept staring, I thought, she might pull back into the carport. She might get out of the backseat of the Renault.

  She might realize she had forgotten something.

  I watched. I waited. I sat on the cold marble floor clinging to the curtains.

  She was gone.

  Dad had returned to Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta, and he could call only when he had shortwave radio reception.

  This meant one thing: now my family was just me.

  Behind me I heard, “Small Sister, may I cook pancakes?” It was Philip. I peeled my face away from the curtain. “Do not cry all day,” he said.

  Why not? I wondered. That’s what I wanted to do. He reached out his hand, his pink palm bigger than my little hand. He helped me get back to my feet and find my way out of the curtains I’d wrapped myself in. He had tissue for my eyes. I didn’t like for anyone to see me cry, so I quickly swiped away the snot running down my chin.

  “Pancakes, Small Sister?” he asked again. “Will this help make you not so sorrowful?”

  By pancakes, he meant crepes, thin, holey little flapjacks smeared with, worst of all, this new jam we had on our table—orange marmalade. All foreigners liked pancakes, so he assumed our family would too. By all foreigners he meant British people. We were IHOP and Denny’s Americans. Where was the Welch’s grape jelly? Or the maple syrup?

  “Syrup?” I asked Philip. “Can we get syrup for the pancakes?” If you smother anything in maple syrup it tastes good.

  “Yes! Small Sister, we have.” Philip was a master at people-pleasing.

  I sat at the modern Danish teak dining table, seats covered in white leather. The scene in my head now is like one of the cartoon character Richie Rich, the Poor Little Rich Kid—the richest kid in the world with no companions.

  “Syrup for Small Sister,” Philip said, and he put the Karo corn syrup on the table. My tears slowed, but only to explain that the kind of syrup I wanted was brown, not clear. He returned with a bottle of dark Karo corn syrup.

  My routine stayed the same. Except for one thing.

  Philip made sure my meals were all served hot and on time, and the house was kept tiptop. After school Alice sat with me while I read or drew in the map book I was making of all the places I had lived so far—Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana again, then Nevada and Nigeria. Other days Alice ironed and watched out the window of the laundry room, as James, the gateman, taught me how to ride my bike. With one hand on the back of my bike, he jogged in his babban riga, a flowing caftanlike gown, up and down the long driveway of the compound. The flopping of his leather sandals reminded me that if I toppled someone would be there to catch me. James’s job was to sit by the front gate of the compound and allow entry only to visitors or traders, like Friday or Justus. Now each was turned away. I’d wave a small wave, wishing they would still come into the compound. Through the white wrought iron bars of the gate, they would wave back. They knew me because I was always with Madam. If they came in, I thought, laid out their wares in the carport, maybe Mom would come out the front door to haggle.

  I may not have understood time, or abandonment, but I knew longing. I didn’t have the word for it yet, but I knew lonely.

  So close to the equator, the sun set early in the evening. As it got dark, bats flew out of the giant umbrella tree in the front yard. I had to duck when they swooped too close. Alice told me the giant hay-colored fruit bats were good bats. They ate bugs. The disappearing sunlight filtered through the giant bats’ translucent, veined wings, the span as big as my own arms’. We watched the bats circumnavigate the tops of the outlined corkwood trees, shrieking and tumbling. I jumped as they rustled inside the banana tree fronds, and Alice hugged me close.

  It is a dream, with bats that stays present in my consciousness no matter how old I am. Maybe I should call it a nightmare but although frightening and dark, it saves me much grief throughout my life:

  I was five years old, and we still lived in Nevada. I had awoken from one of those dreams that seems so real that I felt it might still be going on. When I opened my eyes, my bedroom was dark, but I was trying to listen more than see. The house remained quiet. My sister, Suzanne, lay next to me in our double bed, asleep. I listened for the sounds of any other people in the house, but I h
eard none.

  In my dream giant black bats flew screeching into my mom and dad’s bedroom. With their tiny bat feet and clawed thumbs, the bats lifted my parents up and flew off with them. Behind those bats, more bats flew in and replaced Mom and Dad with another set of lookalike parents. A mean version, whom you could not tell apart from the good parents.

  Next to me in bed my sister stayed still. I strained my ears for any noises coming from the other side of the wall, the wall shared with our folks’ headboard. But, I heard nothing.

  A secret was revealed to me, my five-year-old logic concluded: The parents who spanked me when I misbehaved, who left me at home alone when they went to bridge club, who told me they were disappointed in what I did—those were the ones the bats had left behind. The mom who took me to the fabric store with her, who combed my hair into braids and had my picture taken at Olan Mills, who let me eat her chocolate Aids diet candies, that was the good mom, the benevolent overseer of my life. The dream explained why my mother could be so pleased with me and then not have the time of day in one fell swoop.

  Easy as that, I explain away any transgressions. Easy as that, I dispel any apprehension about why my family would leave me in Lagos, Nigeria, only three months after we’d arrived with staff I barely knew. Easy as that, she is my beautiful, flawless mother. And to her, I will be as loyal as that dog in the grave, the one curled up under the stone, buried with his master. My subconscious dreamt a new truth: all the hideous people had been lifted and carried off by bats. They made appearances but weren’t the real people. My conscious mind directs the traffic of my conscience as though around a wreckage: Keep going, people. Nothing here to see. Keep going. When there was plenty to see.

  One part of my routine had changed.

  As the sun disappeared, Alice went home to her family, Philip went back to the quarters, and James changed guard duty with Nicholas, the “watchnight.” That’s when I crossed the compound to the Griffins’ back door, where I would spend my nights.