I slapped at the moths swarming in the back porch light’s glow. Alice had told me they were trying to get to the moon. The soft bodies and fluttering wings left gray powder dust on my fingers when I’d cup my palm to catch them. Speckled wings flattened against the surface, they rested, catching their tiny breaths until they were ready to bang themselves against the bulb again, persistent in their determination. Persistent in their determination to get what they wanted, even if it might harm them, like flying into a flame.
It’s a phenomenon. A moth is “positively phototactic,” meaning they are attracted to fire, even if it means they won’t survive. There’s no definitive explanation.
No definitive explanation comes to me as to why my mother would leave me alone in Nigeria for so long. Her leaving wasn’t negligent, it was like the moths—a phenomenon. An enigma. A mystery with no explanation. No definitive explanation tells me why I keep flying into her light.
Bats and moths, flying, flitting, fleeting.
As my mom said—she didn’t leave me alone, she left me with the Griffins.
We had known the Griffins when we lived in the U.S. I had a vague memory of traveling to a trailer park, Mom and I getting out of the car and climbing over the loose toys in the front yard. My mom whispered that this was the divorced daughter’s place. The toys belonged to Mrs. Griffin’s grandkids, a pitiful slew of them, my mom reprised.
Mr. and Mrs. Griffin were wrinkled like crumpled brown paper. I considered them nice, except her smile sat crooked on her face like Joker’s on Batman. Mr. Griffin always looked like he was going to pinch me, like teasing a little girl was his next favorite thing after whiskey and cigarettes. They sat in their dark living room staring out as the fruit bats darted around the trees, the screeching muffled through their glass wall. Swirling whiskey in their glasses, the ice tinkling, Mrs. Griffin said, “You go on up to bed. I’ll come up later and kiss you goodnight.” Her voice raspy and too happy, she smelled of hairspray and sour mash.
The Griffins’ house was identical to ours, down to the same modern Danish teak furnishings, provided by the oil company. The only difference was the color scheme. Their dining room seat cushions were black leather, while ours were white. Our living room couch cushions were aqua blue. Theirs were seaweed green. My same room at their house was the guest room. But the twin bed shoved against the wall by the air conditioner felt the same if I closed my eyes tight. The buzz of the A/C drowned out any noises from downstairs, and deadened Mr. Griffin’s phlegmy, emphysemic cough.
When Mrs. Griffin came upstairs to say goodnight the first night, I could hear her thick breathing from the doorway. I pretended I was asleep, afraid she’d come over and kiss me. She didn’t, and she never came back any night after.
I crossed the carport to my own house to have Philip fix me breakfast. Every morning he asked the same thing, “Small Sister want pancakes?”
“Can I have kippers instead?” I’d ask.
A row of small brown bottles sat on the lazy Susan in the long table’s center. While Philip opened the can of smoked fish, I’d take the prophylactics one by one to keep the various and sundry tropical diseases at bay. I took my pills diligently. The hard, bullet-shaped drugs with the bitter aftertaste always lodged in my throat, choking me before going the rest of the way down. Paludrine and chloroquine we took for malaria. Vaccines: Gamma Globulin for hepatitis, tetanus and typhoid, rabies, polio and yellow fever. I had been told the pills, vaccinations, and boosters protected me.
Who needs parents when you have inoculations?
When Samson honked the horn of the Volkswagen school bus in the driveway, I’d grab my water bottle and run out the door, Philip wishing me a splendid day. Alice would be there when I returned. And this, with a rock in my throat, is how I passed the time Mom stayed away.
What Won’t Rub Off
“The world was now peopled with vague, fantastic figures that dissolved under her steady gaze and then formed again in new shapes.”
—Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The first time I ventured outside the gates of the compound alone, James the gateman had left the white wrought iron gates open, and he was nowhere in sight. Usually he squatted in the compound’s front house carport. His pin-striped robes splayed out around his wide feet while he hovered over the tiny tin-can stove. When the Harmattan winds brought a chill, he’d warm his hands over the flame. The dry Harmattan haze made my skin want to peel off like a snake’s. I’d heard a tree trunk could break from desiccating during Harmattan season.
Maybe James had gone to run an errand, or maybe he’d gone back to the servants’ quarters at the rear of the compound for a pee break. Whatever the reason, the gates were open, wide open, and I was alone and bored with no one to play with. I had been told to never go outside the compound unless someone was with me. Mom had said it with that tone of voice that sounds like she would never want to lose me. So I didn’t intend to disobey.
I hadn’t gone more than a few feet, maybe to the end of the driveway, maybe across the street. Ladies carrying baskets as big as Land Rover tires, piled high with mangoes or bolts of fabric or even chickens, bustled around me. A cacophony of horns honked. Car engines revved as they sped off the roundabout from the main road on the next block.
I was looking up at the towering skyscraper across the street. The French girl from school lived in the silver-and-blue building. She didn’t ride in our oil company VW school bus, so I never saw her except at school. She didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak any more French than one to ten, but I wanted to be her friend. I wanted to be her friend for the sole reason that I wanted to listen to the lyrical twill of her words. I wanted to learn how to roll vocabulary around inside my mouth as she did. I wanted to learn how her tongue and lips made all pronunciations soft and lilty, how the simplest sound escaped so gracefully.
With my neck craned upward, I didn’t notice what had started. I didn’t notice until they started touching me. I had been surrounded by Nigerian children more or less my age. I could tell they also didn’t speak English. Their language wasn’t so much lyrical like French, but their words seemed to bounce. I liked listening to it too for its excitement and round consonants, letters that sounded nothing like mine. Right then it wasn’t the language, it was the crowding. They had encircled me and jabbered so fast, laughing shyly. Their round, uplifted sentences resonated as if they were asking a question. I had no idea what it could be.
They took turns touching my arms, rubbing their hands down my forearm, back and forth, then giggling, then trading places with another kid in the back of the crowd. They’d rub a part of me, then look up into my face and ask the question that I couldn’t decipher. If I had the answer, I thought, they’d let me go. It was like when Marty played calf rope with me. He’d hold me down and tickle me until I said “Calf rope!” It’s the Texan version of crying uncle. I also imagined they had no idea what a calf rope was. They crammed in closer and closer and closer, until I couldn’t budge. Until I couldn’t breathe. They held my arms aloft and rubbed them incessantly with their little hands.
I heard James’s flip-flops first—flap, flap, flap. Then his voice yelling, again in a language I didn’t understand—lots of O’s and B’s and D’s. “Scram,” is what he must have said, because the kids surrounding me now scattered. As they dispersed, James touched the tops of their heads and reprimanded them. One smaller boy dodged James and ran up and rubbed my arm quickly before he could get caught then skedaddled off with the others.
“So sorry, Small Sister. So sorry,” James said. “They just want to see if it rubs off.”
“If what rubs off?” I asked, looking down at my arms where I could still feel the gentle, little fingertips.
“The white. They want to see if the white comes off.”
The fingers had brushed at me no harder than someone trying to rub off talcum.
“Come back to compound, Small Sister,” James said, waving me back nervously. He did not wan
t me outside.
Across the street I saw Philip, our house steward, at the gate. In his white uniform, he was a figure of authority on the street, a man with a House Job. Philip shouted more Nigerian words, words round and thrust from the top of the throat. He didn’t acknowledge me, and I knew James was in big trouble. Philip stuck his narrow chest out when he walked, pushing the buttons on his white tailored shirt as he trotted up to James. They shared a few sticky exchanges—I figured there would have been more if I hadn’t been there—then Philip turned to me.
“Small Sister, you must not go outside compound.” He put his big hand with the pink palm against the back of my arm and steered me ever so gently toward the gate. James rattled off more, and Philip shushed him. No one talked back to Philip.
The gate creaked closed then clanged behind us as James replaced the stick that normally latched the two gates together.
Inside the compound, alone again, I rubbed my arms. The white was there to stay. The Harmattan wind gave me goose bumps.
I will always be white. I will always live in a compound, maybe not physically but metaphorically, whether I want to or not. I will always be American. Does this make me a hideous person? I have my whole life to figure that out, to try not to be, but maybe it’s my destiny. Maybe I don’t have a choice because of the color that will not rub off.
What I am now in these pages is but a little girl with fingerprints leaving their impressions on my skin.
“Small Sister,” called James. He had found me by the hibiscus bush. “Want lesson on bike?” James would teach me how to ride without training wheels.
Only a sliver of Mom returned. It was as if she’d remembered to pack her suitcase but forgotten to pack herself before she left the U.S. She couldn’t have known she had contracted malaria before she’d flown home. On the plane ride back to Nigeria, the fever, the chills, the delirium showed up.
The narrow space next to her bed, in my opinion, became too crowded with her friends. They seemed to just want to know what someone with malaria looked like. They worried that they too could end up sleeping the sleep of a thousand deaths. They whispered as if their voices would wake her from her sleep. But they could have shouted, and Mom wouldn’t have woken up.
Unlike the other women who came and saw and never came again, Mrs. Betteridge came and sat by Mom’s bedside for hours every day. Together we watched Mom sleeping, sweating, shivering. I stared at Mom’s mouth hanging open as I hung my body over her big unpacked suitcase. This was the longest nap my mom had ever taken.
My mother is prone to napping, so I question my memories again. I want to confirm that the gaping mouth, death-rattle breathing, and comatose limpness is all true. Her returning only to be wasting away is a twisted course, an unreasonable mash-up of good and evil. She’s like a wet bar of soap—the more I try to tighten my grip, the more she slips out of my hold. I remember her as not even here. Or there. Not with me. But somewhere else. Not in the U.S. at Mommom’s funeral, but gone inside her delirium.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Plasmodium falciparum is the parasite found in the Anopheles mosquito in sub-Saharan Africa. This tiny parasite causes the deadliest form of malaria. The symptoms include severe anemia, fever, chills, shaking, vomiting, and delusions.
This confirms. She was as close to death as I remember.
Near the ceiling above Mom’s head, the air conditioner poked out of the wall and rumbled nonstop, pouring cold air into the room. Despite being early October, Africa didn’t seem like fall at all. In the tiny spaces between the air conditioner and the wall, geckos slipped through. As I did with the horny toads in Texas, I snatched the long, lithe bodies, transparent with their blue veins visible through the rubbery skin. The geckos were quicker than their Texas cousins though, and I ended up holding many dangling tails between my fingers. I felt I had defiled them. Told again and again that the tails would grow back, I wanted to know how long it would take for the tail to grow back. How long would the lizard have to go about his life without his tail? How long would my mother sleep the sleep of a thousand deaths?
Every day I thought soon Mom would get up, and we could do something: sew, shop, sit in the sun. The things we used to do together. Jankara Market waited. Friday came to the gate with his pattern books and was turned away. Justus sold no thorn carvings at our house. Mrs. Betteridge and I sat side-by-side, waiting.
From my dad’s empty side of the bed, I scooched in little increments closer to Mom. I stopped to see if I had disturbed her, then wiggled another inch or so closer. I checked to see whether her breathing changed. Then I zigzagged even nearer, until I was alongside her. Mom’s body was so small, so thin that I could line up my body a hair’s breadth next to hers. I neatly tucked myself into the crevices of her folds or curves, but we didn’t fit together anymore. I had become bigger than she was. Or had she become smaller than I?
She was a sylph, her mass just an apparition in satin. I was seven and solid bone in cotton shorts.
Her breath, the intake and outgo, rattled like quills trying to flitter their way back into place on a wing. As long as I heard the thin whistle of air, I hoped she could still wake up. Since I expected at any moment she would slip away, I kept watch; if I were vigilant, she wouldn’t disappear. She shivered. She trembled and shook, and through the covers I sensed she was about to split apart, that her needle bones would crack. I watched and waited, too afraid to touch. Too afraid with my touch her bones would break off into my hands like the lizard tails.
When I returned to our house after school, I ran upstairs, always finding Mrs. Betteridge. I stood at the end of the bed watching the rumpled sheets for movement. The linens puckered, the only clue Mom was there. The curtains drawn, the room felt dank, despite the pumping air conditioner. A dull, pink light cast from the bathroom. Mold grew in the corners of the white concrete walls, like the only living creature in the room. The carved mahogany headboard over her head showed scenes of Nigerian men and women dancing, carrying pots on their heads, strings of kola beads on their ankles, life on the outside portrayed as a still life on the inside.
Her eyes, once sea green now milky gray, opened a slit. They looked at me and said, You’re here. Of course. I left only because I had to.
As I am writing this very scene—about sliding across the sheets to be near her itty-bitty body, about wanting her to wake up, about betraying her—this email from my mom arrives in my inbox:
From: martha wallen
Subject: Re: Hi
Date: August 13, 2013 8:20:57 AM PDT
To: Amy Wallen
Amy, I had such a realistic dream about you, when I woke up I expected you to be there. You were little and I was asleep and you wanted me to get up so you crawled up in bed with me. I woke up and you weren’t there.
But I am there. Doesn’t she know that? I’m always there. I am right here.
She does that—knows things. Even with her all the way in Texas and me in California. Is this a sixth sense? Is she with me even when she’s not with me? Or is it me? Am I with her even when not there physically? Did she hear me banging and rattling the sliding glass doors with my little fist after all? Maybe I am the dream, the apparition. Maybe we are all apparitions. The physical realm is where we come and go. The imagination is where we really reside.
But that is too ethereal an explanation for me. I continue my plundering, my digging, my search to see what is true, what is not. Right now, my mother’s absence in Nigeria, both real and esoteric, feels like a curse. But, remember, I don’t believe in curses. She does.
It’s too early for the Chancay Curse. Maybe it’s something we picked up in the ghost towns in Nevada. Or maybe it’s just a funeral, a mosquito, and an American child.
She left only because she had to.
Things carried on: Dad came and went from the bush. I went to school every day. Philip prepared my breakfast of kippers and set my water bottle by the front door to grab on my way out. Samson picked
me up in the little blue VW school bus. Alice met me after school. James watched me ride my bike.
And Mom slept.
From Gypsy to Socialite
When approached by a precocious young girl selling Girl Scout cookies, Wednesday Addams asks, “Are they made from real Girl Scouts?”
—Christina Ricci playing Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family movie
A month later, just before Halloween, I found Mom sitting at her black Singer sewing machine. With Suzanne gone, my room doubled as Mom’s sewing room. Suzanne’s bed was covered in fabric swatches, dresses Mom had started before she got sick, and spools of thread and bobbins, her sewing notions spilled from their container.
To see her out of bed, I was electric with both giddiness and fear. Her upright presence, albeit slouched, surprised me. I sat and watched in awe as Mom held the sharp-pointed seam ripper in her hand and snipped the hem of the orange paisley skirt I’d worn for last year’s Halloween costume. With rhythmic speed, she slit open each stitch.
“You’ll be Mrs. Astor this year,” she said to me, holding the orange skirt up to my waist. Her tone as slow as her skin was pallid.
“Mrs. Who?” I looked down at the ruffled hem at my toes. “Isn’t this the skirt I wore as a gypsy last year?” I instantly regretted arguing but was disappointed all the same. The air conditioner kicked on, sucking out the humidity.
“The Mrs. Astor?” she said.
Doesn’t every seven-year-old know about wealthy socialites from the nineteenth century? Aren’t all the other seven-year-olds begging their moms, please, oh please, let me be a Vanderbilt, a Roosevelt, or at the very least a Carnegie this Halloween!
When We Were Ghouls Page 8
