“It’s okay. Not such a big deal,” I said.
I did not think she understood, but she was trying to. She laughed out loud for no reason. She walked ahead of me until we got to her house. I walked in right behind her. It was dark inside. Standing in the darkness while she fumbled around for matches and a candle, I imagined what would happen if her boyfriend arrived and I was still here. I daydreamed that he would go crazy with jealousy and start a fight. Then all of us, the boys in the neighborhood, would gather together to beat him senseless, then send him away.
There was one full-size mattress on the floor and one bean bag in the corner. I sat on the mattress. Stacy brought out some blankets and covered my legs with them. It was always too cold in her house. Once, I asked her if she cared that people knew what she did for money. “The people who love me are more than those who hate me,” she said. “But I try to be the kind of person who is hard to hate.”
As she poured the pureed beans into small tins and set them in a pot filled with boiling water, I lay on my back and looked up at the ceiling and thought about Stacy living here alone for so long. Maybe that was why she had us come here. Maybe that was why she did not pick just one for so long. Did she need all of us to feel less lonely? Was a prostitute just another type of lonely girl?
When she was done, she came to lie right next to me. Her breath was warm. She smelled like smoke and kerosene.
“I heard your Mother is back,” she said. “Is it really her?”
“Yes, it is. She came this morning,” I said.
“If you are worried about what happens next, you should not be. If her absence could not kill you, then her presence cannot kill you. Look here, you and me, we are like the barracks. Like Fela sang, ‘Soldier go, soldier come, barracks remains,’” she said.
I put my left hand in her right, then I squeezed gently. We locked hands for a few minutes and then we let each other go. Just like we did when we were younger, our hands went beneath the blankets. I shuffled my way out of my boxers and jeans; her waistband made a smack sound as she pulled it down. I waited until the air smelled different and the force with which she moved rocked the little mattress and then I began rubbing myself. Remembering that she always finished first, I rubbed valiantly, trying to get to the end before her. I worked in vain. She went to the kitchen to tend to her moimoi and I remained on that bed. The room was cold and I was going so fast that my heart was racing, beating so loudly that I could hear it in my own ears. The blanket alone was failing to keep me warm; my legs were tingly and it felt as if I were about to lose feeling in them.
Stacy was moving about in her tiny kitchen. This made it so much harder to keep my focus. Just when I was about to give up, she started singing again. Her voice lifted, pulled, reinvigorated me. I worked faster, thinking that if she realized what her singing Follow the ladder the heaven did to me, she’d laugh and I would never stop feeling ashamed.
I pulled the first thing I could grab from a pile of clothes in the corner. It was a black-and-yellow headscarf. I wiped my hands all over it and sat up, my back to the wall.
“I will wash this and bring it back,” I said when she came into the room.
“I know,” she said. “You always do what you say.”
When I left Stacy’s house in the morning, I saw that there was a basket of fruit sitting on her doorstep.
I considered going back in to wake Stacy to tell her what I had seen. It was six a.m. on a Monday and people were opening their stores or homes, sweeping out dirt and debris, all evidence of a weekend of carelessness. I picked up the basket and walked away with it. I imagined that someone was watching me walk away. I imagined that the someone watching was cheering me on.
It took me almost thirty minutes to walk back home. I was slow, absentminded, hesitant to see my mother again. When I got home, there was nothing but three soft limes in the basket. I threw them in our trash can.
THE NEXT MORNING, two days after Mother arrived, I woke to the sound of loud arguing. My sisters were in the living room, and our mother was there with her baby, and they were talking all at once, over one another. I borrowed one of Peter’s jalabias, got dressed, and walked into the living room. I was startled immediately by how ordinary it all seemed. As though we had been this family forever.
Sometimes, Mother would pause right in the middle of what she was saying to take a sip of water. As she did, I just stared at her. Her fingers seemed crooked, the skin on them wrinkly and hyperpigmented. My sister Ariyike, the one who was marrying Pastor David Shamonka, the one all the commotion was about, had a giant number 2 pencil in her hand that she waved this way and that as she spoke. The pencil was bright yellow and thick, making a wisp through the air as she waved it. Their voices over one another sounded both pleasant and weary, traveling through the air and landing in my ears. It seemed to me that whatever they were arguing about, the point had been made long ago and they were persisting just for the privilege of hearing one another, over and over, like the pleasant hook of a catchy song.
IT WAS FOR this reason that I sat down but said nothing.
“We all know that man is too old for you,” our mother said.
“Age is just a number, madam,” Ariyike replied.
“You are too young to be married, you have done nothing, gone nowhere,” my sister Bibike said.
“I have done enough and I will do more,” my sister Ariyike replied.
“We all know you do not love that man,” our mother said.
“He loves me. That is enough for both of us,” my sister Ariyike said.
“You are too pretty to end up with someone like that,” my sister Bibike said.
They went on and on like that for a while. Sometimes, for a couple of minutes, Sister Ariyike pretended to be engrossed in the list she was making. She smiled as she scribbled in her notepad, looking up only when asked a direct question. She did not appear to be offended by their questions. It made me think of the types of argument strangers had in public places about soccer, how passionate people got and yet how no one fretted because it was all jocular, harmless fun. Soon enough, they were talking about dresses, decoration, colors, about the numbers of guests coming to the wedding. Did our mother have anyone from her extended family she wanted to invite? Would there be a camera crew? Had Ariyike met any of Pastor David’s exes?
When our mother first came back, it was hard for me to believe our family could fit together again like an old jacket after a little mending. I would have been quite sure, once, that this jovial teasing was fraudulent—there was a suspicious ease in it, a hollow sweetness in their kindness to one another. However, as I watched them that morning planning for a wedding, I thought about Stacy and my heart ached because I realized how lucky she would have felt to have her mother back to argue with, to laugh with, to lie to.
THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE AND THE BELOVED COUNTRY
PETER
2011
MY MOTHER, WHO had appeared again in our lives easily and without warning, like a pimple on my forehead, asked me that Saturday morning to go to Tejuosho market with her. My grandmother, placated by gifts she had received—packed foods from Walmart and shiny fabric from Mother’s stopover in Dubai—assured me that it was okay to go.
When her encouragement was not enough to make me decide, our grandmother tried tears. She made a production of weeping and wailing, accusing me of ingratitude.
“Peter, you have only one mother, for God’s sake. You are too young to be this unforgiving. Can’t you just be grateful she’s here with us now and be thankful to God she is alive and well?”
I was nineteen. Old enough to keep a grudge until I decided for myself it was time to let go. Tall enough to look down into the center of Mother’s head where the repeated doses of blond dye had thinned her hair into near baldness.
My mother, who stood there staring with hope-filled eyes, looked up at me and patted my right shoulder.
“My dear, please come with me. I will leave Zion with your grandmoth
er. It will be just the two of us,” she said. “I just need to buy some sandals and ankara fabric to take back home with me. You can get whatever you want.”
My mother picked up her handbag, flinging it over her shoulder as she pleaded, wrapping her blond hair in a thick green scarf and exchanging her fluffy pink slippers for flat sandals.
“Have you decided? Are you coming along? Are you gonna wear those?” she asked.
She motioned with a flick of her wrist in the direction of the half-a-size-too-big shoes she had bought me, black-and-white sneakers I would not have dreamed of wearing around our neighborhood. It would have been nothing more than an advertisement to thieves or an invitation for a violent beating from jealous boys.
“I am not wearing those,” I said. I slipped into the tried and trusted rubber slide sandals I wore everywhere those days. My toenails were dirty and chipped, but I pretended not to care about what I looked like. Our mother looked at me, her eyes narrowing with hurt by what appeared to her to be my rejection of her gift.
“I will wear them. I promise,” I said without thinking. “I will wear them when I have someplace nice to go, not to the market.”
She said nothing. I was not sure if my reply satisfied her. She walked out of the living room, through the veranda, out to the gate. She said nothing as we walked down the street to the closest junction hoping to find a vacant taxicab.
When we arrived at the end of our street, Mother stopped by the last of the small goods kiosks. There was a bench in the street next to the kiosk, and Mother sat on this bench. I stood next to her. We waited.
It was Emmanuel’s mother’s kiosk. She was the young widow who took over her late husband’s business selling fried yams and potatoes in the night market. After her husband died, her friends had encouraged her to start taking new lovers in the city to help pay her bills. It was said around the neighborhood that she went out with one man her friend introduced her to and the very next day, her mouth began to swell up like a balloon. Within a week, her gums had turned black and all of her teeth had fallen out. Grandmother was the only person I knew who acted like any of it was normal and expected.
“Mama Emmanuel knows that her late husband was a very jealous man. What did she expect?” she said.
Mother ordered some fried yams and peppered snails. She waited for Emmanuel’s mother to finish wrapping them up then she handed the pack over to me. “There’s something I want to tell you, son,” she said. “Something I’ve not yet told your sisters or your brother. Can I tell you? Then you can let me know what you think. Is that okay?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Peter? Think so?” she asked.
“I don’t know what else to say,” I said.
“You can try to say something definite,” she said.
As she talked, she flagged down a private car. The driver stopped, and Mother got closer to the car, leaning over the front passenger’s seat with the exaggerated giddiness of a teenager as she asked for a ride to the nearest bus stop. Her voice was bright and calming, with just a hint of her American-influenced accent. I did not hear what the driver said but I watched her move away to let the car drive off.
“That man wasn’t nice. What happened to all the okadas around here?” she asked.
“The government banned all commercial motorcycles,” I said.
“How do you all get around, then?” she said.
“We walk everywhere,” I said.
“Of course. No wonder you are all so skinny,” she said.
I almost said something about hunger, but I did not. I unwrapped the fried yams and began to eat.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We walk. We walk to the bus stop,” she said.
We walked for several minutes, saying nothing to each other. I focused on eating the yams as quickly as I could, hoping none of the neighborhood girls I liked passed by. We walked past many people. None of them paid too much attention to us. We walked past Maisuya, who appeared to be on his way to the bus stop as well, but he was slower, a thick roll of newspapers tucked under one arm, a working transistor radio hanging from a rope on his shoulder.
“Peter,” he called out in jovial tone. “Peter the goalkeeper, the magnet, Sanu,” he said.
“My customer, good evening. How’s the Amariya? How’s work?” I replied.
There was no need to introduce Mother to him. I did not want to have to explain her absence or be asked to relay greetings when she left again.
“Fine, everyone is fine,” he said as he stopped to fiddle with his batteries. It seemed to me as though he was just giving us time to create distance. I did not like that even this neighbor, who knew me only through my fame as the one-handed goalkeeper, could sense how uncomfortable walking down the street with Mother was making me.
“So, I can talk to you about it?” she asked. Again.
“Yes. Go ahead,” I said.
She reached into her handbag and pulled out a smaller clutch made of some type of velvety red material. She handed me a folded photo.
“I was in a detention center for eighteen months,” she said. “Those are the friends I made there.”
In the picture were four women, all dark and slim like my mother. They wore oversize men’s clothes and brown boots.
“I was arrested for being an illegal alien. They got me six months after my visa expired. It took eighteen months for my asylum application to be granted.”
Ori-ona, the mentally ill woman who claimed to talk to God, was screaming close to a bus parked in front of the beauty-supply store. She was dressed in her usual attire, two woven poly sacks formerly used by farmers to pack red beans, repurposed into a knee-length dress. Her head was clean shaven, her face glowing with a bright shiny oil. Apart from the odd choice of attire, she looked quite clean, almost ordinary, like any other woman in the neighborhood.
“I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” she shouted as we walked past. “Prepare the way of the Lord.”
“Who is that?” Mother asked.
“No one really knows. We call her Ori-ona,” I answered.
“Ori-ona? Because she always knows where to go?” Mother asked.
“Well, it has been said that she hears directly from God,” I said.
“Who said?” she asked.
“Everyone around here. People take her warnings seriously.”
“Well,” Mother said, “I guess that makes sense. God can use anyone, even babies.”
A few months before Mother returned, the government had hired a construction crew to strengthen the pedestrian footbridge above the highway. Ori-ona made her camp inches away from the construction workers’ tent. No one paid her any mind. Every morning she was awake before the sun was up, screaming till she was sore, “Repent, the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, the kingdom of God is here.”
She went on like this until one day a part of the footbridge being repaired collapsed. Just like that, without warning, one of the pillars cracked, killing more than fifty people. All of the construction workers died in the rubble. The government arrested the head of the foreign-owned construction firm who had won the contract. Nurses from the Lagos psychiatric hospital removed Ori-ona from her spot in the street.
We did not see Ori-ona in the neighborhood for months after that. Then, one day, she was back. Just like that. No one could tell why she was released from the hospital or how she found her way back to her old spot on our street.
I did not tell Mother about any of this. There was no need to. I did not care if she believed it or not. It did not matter. There are stories you can appreciate or understand only by living in a particular place at a particular time. Ori-ona is necessary for us here. In the middle of the worst type of tragedy, we got strange comfort from the idea that it was possible someone somewhere had been trying to warn us, to prevent it. This is how we know that we are not completely forgotten.
Mother and I walked for a few more minutes until we arrived at the bus stop. We
got on a danfo bus going to Yaba, sitting next to each other in one of the two rows of passenger seats in the middle.
The moment we got into the bus, I noticed a middle-aged woman outside in iro and buba running and heaving toward our vehicle. She held two large covered plastic bowls, one in each hand. They seemed full and bubbling with liquid. As she ran, she stopped several times to catch her breath.
“Look at that yeye woman,” the bus driver said to a male passenger in the front. “When I married her, she was slim, fine lepa shandy, now just look at her, like Agege bread someone threw in the river.”
The passenger laughed. We watched the woman hurry to the bus. She was the driver’s wife, bringing him his lunch. Several passengers grumbled as the driver got out of his seat to meet with her.
“Sorry, just give me five minutes to quickly eat this food,” he said to the grumbling passengers.
They sat in the waiting area attached to the bus shelter. We sat in the bus and counted the minutes until it was time to leave. He was softer, kinder, in front of her. I watched as she tended to him, how he spoke with her; he was so different talking to her. I could see that she excited him and I wondered why he had sounded so ashamed of her a few moments earlier. Why, in spite of how obviously fond of her he was, did he disparage her to a bus filled with strangers? Maybe this is what love is for some people. It requires them to do nothing, only receive.
My mother was also watching them, saying nothing to me. I appreciated the silence, the way she permitted me the illusion of thinking. Many people feel pressured to fill silences with words, to give more information, or to ask you to convince them that what they have spoken to you is still on your mind. I do not like forced discussions.
I was not thinking about her time in the detention center, not at first. I was thinking about Father, wondering how much he knew, wondering if learning what had happened to her was what broke him. Why did he leave like that? Why did she, who went to prison in another continent, come back first?
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