Happiness, Like Water

by Chinelo Okparanta

  ‘Do you know the men?’ I ask.

  She shakes her head and then leans it on my shoulder. I can feel the roughness of her braids rubbing on my jaw. And her scent is fleshy but sweet.

  ‘There’s one,’ she says. ‘Nwafor.’ She lifts her head. ‘An Igbo man who lives in the Lekki district of Lagos, in one of those big houses with uniformed gatemen. Owns his own accounting firm.’ She pauses. ‘Mama likes that part,’ she says. ‘The part about owning his own business. And she likes that he really wants to marry me,’ she says.

  She tells me that his letters are filled with things like, ‘You’re the wife of my dreams, my African queen.’ She pauses, then she exclaims, ‘How silly it is for Mama to expect me to marry a man I’ve only seen in pictures!’

  I ask her if he has seen her, if he has any idea what she looks like, or is he just operating under some kind of divine guidance?

  She tells me, yes, that he’s seen her picture. That her mama took the picture herself, that her mama placed the stool by the empty wall of the dining room and forced her to sit there. Her mama arranged her braids so that they framed her face and shoulders just so. She rubbed some maroon lip gloss on her lips, and lent her a pair of gold-and-pearl chandelier earrings. Then she snapped the picture, over and over again, until finally she got the one that she said was just right. This was the only picture of her that Nwafor saw, as far as she knew. Somehow, she tells me—and she can’t even begin to understand how—it was exactly what he needed to make the decision to marry her.

  I rub her shoulders and tell her that I’m sorry. ‘Has a date been set?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. She tells me how it was just the beginning of this semester that Nwafor made the official request to her mother, in a letter. And, of course, her mother said yes, told her that it was all for the best. Any girl would be a fool to decline a man who wanted her as much as Nwafor wanted her. All of this, she tells me, happened the day that I found her by the entrance to the bathroom.

  I ask her what’s been going on since then.

  ‘Just waiting,’ she says. ‘And praying that Nwafor or Mama would have a change of heart.’

  I say, ‘No luck, I take it.’

  She shakes her head. ‘No luck,’ she says. She tells me that this morning she finally got the courage to say something to her mother. That she walked down the hallway in their house, climbed up the stairs and into the attic, because her mama was there, sorting piles of paper, maybe business papers. She says to her mama, ‘I’m not marrying him.’ I imagine her mama hunched over on the ground, and then slowly straightening up, a pair of glasses hanging on the bridge of her nose. At first she doesn’t respond to Grace. And then she clears her throat, or adjusts her glasses, whatever the appropriate tick. ‘Stop that nonsense,’ she finally says.

  And then her brother Arinze walks into the attic room, holding a box, the one into which she assumes her mother will be sorting the piles of paper.

  ‘Mama, I’m not getting married,’ Grace says.

  Her mother goes back to not responding, so Grace raises her voice and says, ‘Did you hear me, Mama?’

  ‘She’s not deaf,’ Arinze says.

  ‘Mama?’ Grace says, softer.

  Her mother still does not answer.

  Grace tells me that suddenly her mama speaks again, all serious and threatening. ‘All that studying,’ her mother says. ‘You’ll marry your studies? Marry your books? You already have one degree but you want another. You’ll marry your degrees?’

  This time it’s Grace who does not answer.

  ‘Am I talking to the wall?’ her mama asks. ‘Answer me!’ And then she doesn’t wait for an answer. She says, ‘Before you know it, you’ll look around and find yourself all alone, just you and your degrees. And then what?’

  She tells her mama then that it’s not for her.

  ‘What’s not for you?’ her mama asks.

  ‘Marriage,’ she says.

  ‘Marriage is not for you?’ her mama scoffs. ‘Your papa, God rest his soul, would cringe in his grave if he heard you say such nonsense. What good is having that doctorate that you’re going for, if your life is empty—no husband, no children?’

  ‘It’s not for me,’ she tells her mama again. But she doesn’t tell her mama the entire truth. It’s not the marriage part that’s not for her. It’s the fact that she doesn’t like men in the marrying way. She’s never been interested in them like that. She tells me this now, though, truth be told, I think I already knew.

  ‘A woman needs to marry, have children,’ her mama says. ‘Life is more satisfying that way.’

  ‘She’ll marry her books and degrees,’ Arinze says, chuckling.

  ‘Shut up,’ she tells her brother, in a whisper.

  ‘You shut up,’ Arinze says. ‘And better watch how you talk to me, old maid.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ her mama says to her. ‘You’ll get married. That’s final,’ she says, and she returns to the piles of papers that she is sorting.

  Grace then turns to leave the attic room, but something makes her turn back. So she stands facing her mama. She fixes her eyes on one of the holes on the brick wall. She takes in slow, calculated breaths to steady herself. Then she says, calmly, in a clear, firm voice, ‘I won’t.’

  Suddenly her mama is slapping her, saying something about defiance. And she is screaming, and her mama is screaming too. She is trying to push her mama away, and then she feels Arinze towering above her, pounding his fists down on her shoulders. ‘Don’t you dare disrespect Mama like that!’ he shouts. ‘Don’t you dare!’ More pounding. She struggles to breathe, but every breath by then is suffocating, saturated with the scent of mothballs, and of undiluted Mentholatum. And then the brick walls in the room start spinning around her, and her shoulders are throbbing, because she is now down on her knees, she tells me, and still Arinze’s fists are pounding down on her.

  ‘I can’t take it any more,’ she finishes, like a sigh. I can see the tears in her eyes. I sit there and allow her to lean her head once more against my shoulder.

  Before she leaves, I mention the counselling services at the university. I ask her if she’s ever been there. She shakes her head. I tell her that perhaps someone there can help her more than I can. She shakes her head again. ‘Try it out,’ I say, trying to sound adamant. ‘At least think about it,’ I say. But even as I say it, there is a part of me that wishes she won’t, because there’s the possibility that if she finds the counselling people more helpful than me, she might begin to rely wholly on them and stop coming to me.

  That night, I take a walk around town. Christmas lights hang above every doorway, and the ground is covered with snow. The air is cold and feels as if it is pricking the skin on my cheeks. I imagine pins and needles, and thin, rusting metal wires, poking my skin. I tell myself that perhaps this is my punishment, for these new thoughts, these inappropriate desires. All the same, I tug at my scarf and my hat, adjusting them so that they both come together to cover the exposed portions of my face.

  There is a strong hazelnut aroma in the air, which I follow instinctively. It leads me to a coffee shop, Brewed Awakenings. Even with the cold, the scent is so strong and oddly appeasing, like a balm, that for a moment I consider stopping to buy myself a cup of coffee, even if coffee is not my thing, has never been. But I don’t. Instead, I take a seat at one of the benches a short distance from the tall glass window. And I breathe in the aroma. And I watch the people inside.

  There is a couple sitting by the window. They are wearing hats, and they have muffled themselves up with oversized scarves that appear more like cloaks. Then he removes his hat and removes his cloak, and she does the same. He smiles at her, reaches out and stirs the contents of her cup while she is still struggling to take off her gloves. Their hands come together, his dark on her fair skin, and I think of Grace, and I imagine Nwafor putting his hand on her. And then the woman takes her cup, takes a sip out of it, and she laughs at something he says. She looks happy, a
nd I find myself hoping that Nwafor will make Grace happy like that. So long as she is happy, I say to myself. And I find myself trying hard to remember if I’ve ever heard of or read about or watched any stories in which an arranged marriage ends up being successful. Of course the only examples that come to my mind are from the Bible. I think of Isaac, how Abraham asks his servant to go find a wife for him. And that woman ends up being Rebekah. And the servant asks her father for permission to take Rebekah back home to Isaac. And her parents give the permission. She does not know what Isaac looks like, neither does Isaac know what she looks like. And yet the marriage ensues and for all intents and purposes appears to be a success. Of course, the big difference is that Rebekah agrees to marry Isaac.

  ‘Will you go with this man?’ they ask her.

  ‘I will go,’ she says.

  Just a few days before Christmas, my daughter calls me from Massachusetts, tells me that because of a mix-up in plans, they will be spending this Christmas with her in-laws, that they will no longer be coming down to be with me. It’s been this way since my grandson was born, three Christmases now, and each time she comes up with a similar excuse. She tells me it has to be done because her husband’s family will be very upset if they don’t make it.

  ‘What about me?’ I ask.

  She says, ‘Mom, it’s just you. He’s got the whole family, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins. They’ll all be angry with me. Please understand,’ she says. ‘I’ll make it up to you. In the meantime, better for one person to be mad at me than the whole gang.’

  I tell her fine, that I anyway have research to do and lectures to prepare. And the truth is that I’d much rather not be dealing with the chaos of family Christmases, all those people gathered in one small space, and not in an orderly fashion, as in a lecture hall. Still, it’d be nice to bake pies and prepare the meal together, to chit-chat and catch up as we do. It’d also be nice not to have to eat alone, because these days, maybe as a result of the Christmas season, or the cold weather, I’m feeling lonelier than ever, and eating has begun to feel like a chore, a solitary task without any enjoyment in it. Even so, I tell my daughter, ‘Fine.’ She thanks me hastily and hangs up the phone.

  I immerse myself in work the entire break, but between the research and the preparation for lectures and conferences, I find myself thinking of Grace. I think of the feel of her braids on my skin and of her smile. I remember her collared dress and her musty perfumed scent. And every now and then there is a feeling of dread when I think of the possibility that she will be a married woman the next time I see her.

  The New Year arrives, and then a week later, classes resume. The first week, I don’t see Grace. The second week, I’m sure she will show up, but she doesn’t. I begin to mope about. Every passing day becomes a great disappointment, though there are those brief moments of hope, moments where I find myself recognizing Grace’s features in another young woman. But then the young woman turns around and I see that it’s not her. And I’m left feeling even emptier than before.

  The third week, sitting in my office, flipping through the pages of the New Testament, I hear the knock. She enters without my inviting her in. I’m expecting that she will head straight to one of the two empty seats. Instead she stops near me. My front is facing my desk, and my back is to her, so she simply hugs me from behind before taking a seat. She apologizes for being gone all this time, for returning so late into the semester. She asks me if I had a good Christmas break, and all I can do is nod.

  She stretches out her hand to stroke my arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. Maybe the look on my face somehow tells her how miserable I’ve been.

  I look down at my arm, at her hand on it. She retracts it, shyly, as if she’s suddenly aware of an indiscretion. I want to tell her that I’ve been thinking of her, but instead I find myself saying, ‘Are you married now?’

  She looks curiously at me, and for a moment I feel as if I am trespassing, as if the question is not mine to ask. But her curious glance quickly fades away, and she shakes her head and tells me ‘No,’ but that soon she will be. This time it is I who reaches out and strokes her arm.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ I ask, wanting her to tell me that it is in fact the end of the world, wanting her to begin crying so that I can hold her again.

  She shakes her head. She says, ‘No.’ Then she clears her throat. ‘I’d like you to come,’ she says.

  ‘To your wedding?’ I ask.

  She nods.

  I shake my head and tell her I can’t. That I’ll probably be at a lecture somewhere. But that even if I weren’t, there’d be no reason for me to attend her wedding, given that I’m just her professor.

  ‘Really?’ she asks.

  ‘Really,’ I say, forcing myself to stick to the excuse.

  We both stare at each other for some time. Neither of us speaks. Then she says, ‘I was in Nigeria over the break.’

  ‘Really?’ I ask.

  She nods.

  She tells me how it was sort of in preparation for her own wedding, because her cousin Ogechukwu was getting married, and her mama wanted her to attend the wedding ceremonies—the traditional and the white—to remind her first-hand how authentic Nigerian weddings were done, so that she would know what was expected of her in her own wedding.

  She stops there, and when she doesn’t continue, all I can think to ask is whether or not her brother or her mother went with her.

  She nods. ‘Mama went with me,’ she says. ‘Not Arinze,’ she says. Because, she tells me, according to her Mama, Arinze already knew the culture, already knew what it meant to be Nigerian. It was she who caused her mama some concern.

  She tells me her mama is right. That sometimes she barely feels Nigerian, which she knows has never been the case with Arinze. Growing up, Arinze was always speaking Igbo with her mama while she could only understand and respond in English. Arinze would always swallow his balls of garri after dipping them into the soup. She, on the other hand, chewed hers. Arinze knew the Igbo names of all the food items they sold in the store, from the crayfish to the oils to the seeds. He could differentiate the egusi from the ogbono. She could not. And, of course, there was the time that Arinze told Mama that he would find himself a good Igbo girl and marry her. He was much younger then, she says, and she laughs a dry, sarcastic laugh. She tells me that perhaps he has changed his mind by now. But even as far back as then, she says, she had no desire to marry a man, much less a Nigerian man she’d never actually met.

  ‘Did you finally get to meet him, then?’ I ask.

  She nods but doesn’t say any more about it. Instead she tells me that she and her mama only stayed a week. They helped to prepare the food for the wedding, pots of egusi soup, okra soup, jolloff rice, fried fish and of course, the ishi ewu delicacy—fried goat head in pepper soup.

  They helped to fit Ogechukwu’s outfits, too, pinning the sides of the wrappers and the white wedding gown, picking out the beads of her necklaces and the beads of her jigida—her waist beads—which were numerous, about fifteen sets all together, all of different colours. They measured the jigida, fitted them, because she would wear them as she danced, and they would jingle, and onto them money would be stuck. But if they were not correctly fitted, the jigida would start to descend down Ogechukwu’s buttocks, down her thighs, with all the dancing that she would do that day, and all the money would drop with them.

  ‘Sounds very festive,’ I say, when she finishes. ‘Very rich in tradition.’

  She nods. ‘You should come to mine,’ she says.

  ‘Will it make you happy?’ I ask.

  ‘Happiness is like water,’ she says. ‘We’re always trying to grab onto it, but it’s always slipping between our fingers.’ She looks down at her hands. ‘And my fingers are thin,’ she says. ‘With lots of gaps in between.’

  I’m not sure how to respond, but I say the first thing that comes to mind: ‘I wouldn’t kno
w how to behave, all the rites and rituals. I wouldn’t know what to wear.’

  ‘Dress as you do to teach,’ she says. ‘Only remember that after you’ve dipped your garri in your soup, you must swallow, not chew.’ She laughs. ‘That will definitely give you away,’ she says.

  ‘As if that’s the only thing that will,’ I say.

  We both laugh.

  February comes and February goes, and March and April, all passing by with the snow and the bitter cold. The weather reports call for sun throughout the week of her wedding. That week we meet again during my office hours, but she asks that we meet outside of the office, at the park by the river, under the light and dark shadows of the trees. And I agree.

  It is mid-afternoon when I make it to the park. The sun is reflecting itself on the river, causing the water to shimmer, like silver and gold threads on a bed of grey silk. I take in the trees that line the trail, each one several yards away from the one before. I take a seat on a bench near one of these trees. I examine it. Its oblong leaves dangle from frail branches and flutter in the air. I reach out and touch the bark of its trunk, which appears jigsaw-like, akin to craters on the surface of the earth. I am still running my fingers across the surface of the trunk, about to pick at a piece of the bark when I catch sight of Grace. My heart skips a beat.

  She walks towards me holding a small red box, about the size of her small King James. But it is not the same shade of red as her King James, and around the box strands of gold ribbons have been tied into a bow. Others dangle freely in spirals. She approaches, with slow steps and long strides. She is wearing a mossy green dress that comes down to her ankles. I notice the way her shoulders seem to sag. It causes me to let sag my own. Her loose braids dangle freely around her shoulders, and I take them in, thinking how pretty and dark and youthful they are. And suddenly I’m aware of my age, and of my slumping posture, of my grey hair, and of the wrinkles around my eyes and mouth. I think how counterintuitive my slumping is, how much more the sagging shoulders must be aging me. I sit up, square my shoulders, tuck the loose strands of my hair behind my ears, and wait for her to come to me. All the while, I’m wondering what’s in the box.