A month later Fred sent Richard, who at that time wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life, to Liberia with a bank account number and a directive to help Eli set up this other branch of the family business. The bank account held start-up money that they would use to purchase material and access. It was during this time, when the two brothers were knocking on the doors of government officials after regular office hours and inspecting the land for a real-estate project, that Eli had met the Liberian woman. Richard, who was there when the two first met, said that he hadn’t given her a thought. She was nothing like the women Eli had dated in the past. She had been working as a secretary for a Lebanese hardware wholesaler who had sent her to their construction site to deliver an invoice. When Richard saw the woman in Eli’s car and then two weeks later in their shared flat at 2:00 a.m., he questioned his brother.
“She’s my girlfriend,” Eli told him.
“Girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Ehn?”
He hadn’t understood what was happening. The woman was tall, almost as tall as Eli, and hard. There was no soft spot on her body; her bicep muscles were visible when she moved her arms, and her calf muscles sat round and high, like a sprinter’s. There was a gulf between her compact, lemon-sized breasts, and her buttocks was as flat as a sheet of plywood. Plus she had no hips to speak of. Her skin was as dark as roasted coffee beans, and her face, the only soft part of her, was plain. She kept her hair in long braids and liked wearing skirts and dresses that showed off her manly features.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know what my brother sees in that woman,” Richard had confided to my mother that day.
“His girlfriend in the university looked just like you, Afi. Beautiful face, flesh at the right places, and fair skin,” he said to me while my mother shook her head at the travesty of it all, the idea of a man like Eli being hooked by such a woman. I, on the other hand, folded my hands in my lap in a useless attempt to cover my lower body. I was uncomfortable with the knowledge that Richard, and possibly the rest of Eli’s family, had assessed my physical proportions.
“On top of it all, she smokes. Now every time you go near my brother, he smells like an ashtray,” Richard said.
“The woman smokes?” my mother asked, her eyes wide with disbelief.
“And drinks hard liquor. She can outdrink any drunk in this town,” Richard added.
“Woh!” my mother exclaimed and swiftly rose off the bench on which she was seated, unable to contain her shock.
“No wonder,” she said, slowly shaking her head.
“No wonder O Afinɔ, no wonder. Why won’t she keep producing sickly children?” he said sullenly.
But it wasn’t the woman’s appearance or her relationship with tobacco and alcohol that had led to Eli’s family’s distrust. It was the way she treated them. Even in the beginning when she was a secretary, she had shown no regard for the family. When Richard saw her in his and Eli’s flat at 2:00 a.m. she had simply sashayed past him without so much as a “Hello” or “Sorry for surprising you in your kitchen at this hour.” She never greeted him but would respond through her teeth when spoken to, and walked freely around the place as if she owned it, even when Eli was not there. By the time that Richard realized how serious the relationship was and alerted his family, Eli had rented a house and moved in with the woman. And by the time Fred came to Liberia to reason with him on behalf of their mother, the woman was pregnant; conveniently within six weeks of meeting a rich man.
I was bored by the third day in Accra. I missed sewing on our verandah. I imagined how many orders I would have completed if I were there. I missed my customers who sat and chatted with me as I made the last stiches on their clothes, and the friends and neighbors who stopped by on their way from some place or the other to say hello and to talk about an upcoming funeral, a church event, or whatever it was that was of interest that day. Here, there was nobody, with the exception of my mother, who I feared was becoming addicted to the TV and who was only interested in talking about how I should behave with my husband and his family, and the guards at the gate. There was no one else for me to talk with. I imagined the scene at Tɔgã Pious’s, my older cousins sitting on the benches outside the compound walls and talking or fighting about something while the younger ones ignored their mothers’ calls and prolonged their time outside as much as they could. I missed the noise, the endless chatter, the familiarity, the simplicity of it all, where every activity was a social one, where we girls strolled to the civic center almost every evening to buy koko from the women who cooked the porridge in cauldrons right in front of us and sold sugar, milk, and groundnut on the side. Even the walk to the dumpsite to empty the trash when we were teenagers had been a social one. At my new home, there was a garbage chute on each floor and the housekeepers threw the trash bags down it for you. I had insisted on doing it myself once I figured out where the garbage disappeared to.
I didn’t bother to tell my mother that I missed Ho. I knew she would tell me to stop complaining and be grateful, so I soldiered on. Daily phone calls to Mawusi, who had gone back to school and was preparing to leave for a semester abroad in Côte d’Ivoire to study French, put some life in my days. I was happy when Richard sent a car and a driver to take us to the market and then the supermarket on Friday. My mother and I had been in awe at the selection of items on sale, and the prices too! In fact, the prices had left her upset and making plans for buying food from Ho and sending it to me when she returned. I was even happier when the driver, Mensah, did not leave after dropping us off.
“Fo Richard says that I’m now your driver. I will be here every day,” he said after he had delivered the last grocery bags up to the flat.
I nodded but did not speak, afraid to show my elation. Instead I looked at the late-model silver Toyota Camry with new eyes. “Afi, this car is yours,” I told myself. Technically the car wasn’t mine; Richard had assigned it to me, of course, but that made no difference. It would take me wherever I wanted to go, wait for me as long as I wanted, and bring me back home. Now I just had to figure out where I wanted to go.
“I’m going to town,” I told my mother the next morning.
“Where? For what?” she asked.
“I want to go and see the Accra mall.”
“What are you going to see there? And what if your husband comes when you’re away? This is not the time to be running around Accra.”
“Ah Ma! If Fo Eli hasn’t come since I’ve been here, why would it be this morning that he will come? I can’t just sit around waiting for him.”
“Why not? You have everything you need here. Look at this place. And what if Aunty calls and asks for you, what will I tell her?”
“Tell her I’ve gone to the mall. It’s not like I’m going to a night club or to a party. I’m just going to the mall; it’s less than thirty minutes away from here.”
“Okay then, I will come with you.”
I sighed loudly, eliciting a sharp look from her, but waited while she changed out of her TV-watching clothes, after which Mensah took us to the mall.
I’d heard so much about the Accra mall from Mawusi but hadn’t been there before. My mother had insisted that we do the wedding shopping at Makola, the huge open-air market in Accra where people, stalls, vehicles, and rubbish were in a constant battle for supremacy, while the scorching sun smiled with approval. But the mall was different. It seemed like everything shone and even though one couldn’t walk from one end to another without bumping someone, the air-conditioning made it all bearable. Although I couldn’t bring myself to shop, not with the prices that were quoted, I marveled at the display windows of the boutiques selling clothes and fabric.
“Do you want to buy it?” my mother asked when I wouldn’t stop staring at a mannequin draped in a fabric with a peacock-feather pattern. Two-and-a-half yards of that fabric would make a beautiful party dress.
“No,” I told her, without looking away from the mannequin. I had to be car
eful with how I spent my money; I didn’t know when my in-laws would be giving me more pocket money and I couldn’t afford to run out. Accra wasn’t like Ho, where I could go next door to borrow money or ingredients for the evening meal from neighbors or from someone in Tɔgã Pious’s house. Besides, I had yet to try on all of the clothes in the four large suitcases that the Ganyos presented at my wedding. Of course, this didn’t mean that I couldn’t fantasize about owning the shops I visited and everything in them.
The next few mornings, after breakfast, I went out to explore the neighborhood. My building was on a quiet street that was home to houses that sat behind high, electrified, barbwire-lined walls and a couple of two-story office buildings. The five- or six-feet wide pieces of land that separated the houses from the road were planted with grass and flowers and the branches of acacias grew over the walls and into the street, creating a shade for pedestrians. As people drove to work in the morning I had to be careful to walk on the very edge of the narrow road, which did not have a sidewalk, so that I was either in the road or in the open gutter. But that didn’t bother me because I enjoyed the beauty of it all. It was not like anywhere in Ho, not even the Residency where the regional minister lived and where we would visit as children to peer over the fence at the peacocks strutting in the garden.
Our block transformed at a T-junction that connected it to a major street. Here, stores selling everything from wheelbarrows to milk lined the road along with so-called boutiques, banks, and a few smaller houses, less imposing than the ones on our street. Although cars were forced to drive at moderate speeds because of the presence of car-scraping speed bumps, it was still busier than where I was coming from. Farther down this road was a small market where women sold vegetables, fish, and grains in stalls at prices that would make people in Ho cry or laugh, depending on whether they were the ones buying or if they were hearing that I had used my money to shop there.
“It’s because this area is for rich people,” one of the security guards at my building told me. He was pimply faced and looked younger than me. He wore his uniform with pride but frequently spoke about when he would permanently take it off and move on to better things. On my way out and when I returned from my exploratory walks, I often stopped at the booth inside the fence that served as a guard post to chat with whomever was on duty. They had initially been guarded around me, knowing who I was, but within a couple of days they were answering questions that I hadn’t even asked them. There were six of them assigned to the building, four men and two women, and they rotated during the day. I liked that the women were always on the day shift so that I got to chat with them more than the men. I learned that they mostly came from villages around Vakpo and worked for a security firm owned by Fred’s brother-in-law. On my third day with the two women, Savior and Lucy, Savior asked me which bleaching cream I used.
“I want to buy it,” she told me, gazing at my face as though I was a picture in a magazine.
“I don’t use anything; my color is natural.”
She responded with a frown that made clear her disbelief.
“Or is it a pill?” she pressed.
“No,” I said, unruffled by her questions. People had been asking me the same thing for as long as I could remember. She asked me again the next day. When I gave her the same answer, she shifted to other topics. She told me that Fred owned the building. The furnished flats were rented mainly to expatriates for thousands of dollars a month. I had already noticed the foreigners leaving in their four-wheel-drives in the morning, some of them in the backseat and their drivers at the wheel. In fact, just that morning one of them had nodded at me and had left me wondering what it was that she had been trying to communicate.
Savior and Lucy were full of stories about the happenings in King’s Court, the name of the building, which was written in gold letters on a black plaque affixed to the fence, but which I had not noticed when we first drove in. The two young women, who changed their hairstyles so often that I was tempted to ask them if they reused the artificial hair pieces, especially loved to gossip about the residents. They pointed out to me the civil servants who could miraculously afford to rent these flats on their meager government salaries, and the old white men who showed up with girls who were young enough to be their granddaughters and those who showed up with the boys. They also showed me the foreign women who had a succession of dreadlocked men visiting them and staying overnight. But most scandalous were the married Ghanaian men who rented the flats for their girlfriends and divided their time between two homes. The guards told me that there had been a huge fight some months before my mother and I arrived. A wife whose husband was a senior manager at one of the banks found out that he was keeping a woman at King’s Court. She had driven over with two friends, deceived her way into the compound, and then stormed the girlfriend’s flat.
“They would have finished her if we hadn’t heard her screaming and rushed upstairs,” Savior said, before doubling over with laughter.
“You are laughing? You know that they almost sacked us; we are only here because of God’s grace,” Lucy said, clearly rattled.
Savior dismissed her with a wave of her hand and continued with the story. “It was in number fourteen, the flat next to yours. It’s a good thing that her balcony door was open or no one would have heard her screaming. She moved out that same day,” she told me. “In fact, she crawled out that same day because by the time we got there they had given it to her well.”
I shuddered at the image of the mistress barely able to walk out of King’s Court. “So the flat is empty now?” I asked her.
“No, Fo Richard’s girlfriend moved in soon after.”
“Richard? Richard Ganyo?”
“Ehn.”
Richard hadn’t told me that his girlfriend was my neighbor. I itched to hear more but knew that it would be foolish to ask these two for information. Who knows what they would report back to the girlfriend, or even Richard?
“Her name is Evelyn,” Savior volunteered as I walked away, deep in thought.
“I want to enroll in fashion school,” I told my mother that evening during a commercial break in the TV show we had been watching.
“Now?” Ma asked with a scowl. I was somewhat surprised because she had always been passionate about my education. Although she hadn’t said this to me, I knew she had been deeply disappointed by my failure to make it to the university and had blamed herself. She had told me more than once that I would have fared better if she had bought more books for me and if she had hired a tutor to help me with the subjects I struggled with. When I failed a second time to gain admission into one of the public universities, she had proposed getting a loan from Aunty to pay for my enrollment in one of the private universities that were springing up like mushrooms and charging way more than they were worth. But I had refused, my confidence having sunk with each disappointing result. Also, I had grown to love sewing and begun to see it as a career. What I now wanted was to attend a proper fashion school. Sister Lizzie taught all of us well, but she taught us the basics. How to cut and sew a straight dress, or a dress with gathers or pleats, with a round, square, or V neckline; how to sew a simple skirt and top or a plain kaba and slit. But we hadn’t learned how to sew trousers because in Ho few women ordered trousers and those who did went to the tailors. She hadn’t taught us how to sew the kind of kabas that the tailors from Togo and Côte d’Ivoire made, the strapless kind and the kind with wires threaded through the fabric so that it formed every shape imaginable on the human body, or the ones where they cut patterns out of the fabric to create floral arrangements on the bodice or on the skirt. Those were the kinds of clothes that I wanted to learn to sew. The kind worn by the career women in City of Gold, the popular soap opera, where feathers and beads were sewn into dresses and leather and cotton were combined into the same evening gown. My mother had always approved of this desire to further my training. This is why her scowl was surprising to me.
“As soon as possible,” I answe
red.
She sighed heavily and turned away from the screen to face me on the sofa.
“You just got married; it is better that you spend time at home, getting to know your husband and taking care of him.”
What husband? I wanted to ask, but didn’t because I knew it would annoy her even more. Instead I glared at her.
“Don’t look at me like that. I am simply telling you what is best for you. There is no need to rush, the school will still be there next year. You are a new wife only once.” She turned back to the screen, the commercial break over.
I went into my room. In a few weeks my mother had changed from a friend into a dictator and her transformation was unexpected and troubling. And even though she kept saying that she was doing what was best for me, I had begun to feel like I was not her first priority, that her desire to please the Ganyos came first. It was a good thing that she would be leaving soon, going back to Ho. Despite what she had said, I was determined to begin my training as soon as the vocational schools began admitting a new crop of students. I couldn’t imagine spending all my days in this flat, waiting for Eli, my dear husband, to one day come and see me.
When my mother went to bed, I listened out for Evelyn. I looked through the peephole when I heard the lift stop on my floor and saw a woman get off. She moved so quickly that I only caught a glimpse of her. She had on a black skirt suit and heels that looked like they could easily injure a person. In one hand she held what looked like a computer case and in the other she carried a handbag, the large kind that had become fashionable. The side of her head that I saw was covered with softly flowing waves that reached past her shoulders. As I heard her key turn in the lock I considered stepping outside and speaking to her, but then thought better of it. What exactly was I going to say to such a woman? Besides, if Richard did not tell us about her then maybe we weren’t supposed to know about her. I wasn’t going to look for trouble.
His Only Wife Page 5