RIVERHEAD BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Lesley Nneka Arimah
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
The following stories have been previously published, in slightly different form: “War Stories” (Mid-American Review), “Light” (Granta), “Second Chances” (The Butter), “Who Will Greet You at Home” (The New Yorker), “Buchi’s Girls” (Five Points), “What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky” (Catapult).
Ebook ISBN: 9780735211049
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Arimah, Lesley Nneka, author.
Title: What it means when a man falls from the sky : stories / Lesley Nneka Arimah.
Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016036303 | ISBN 9780735211025 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Cultural Heritage. | FICTION / Literary.
Classification: LCC PS3601.R542 A6 2017 | DDC 813/.6-- dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036303
p. cm.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Collectively, this work has received grants and awards from the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Elizabeth George Foundation, AWP, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, the Jerome Foundation, Intermedia Arts, the Caine Prize, and the Minnesota Emerging Writers Grant, and a Mentor Series grant administered by the Loft Literary Center.
Version_1
For my father.
Thank you for telling me your stories.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
THE FUTURE LOOKS GOOD
WAR STORIES
WILD
LIGHT
SECOND CHANCES
WINDFALLS
WHO WILL GREET YOU AT HOME
BUCHI’S GIRLS
WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY
GLORY
WHAT IS A VOLCANO?
REDEMPTION
Acknowledgments
About the Author
THE FUTURE LOOKS GOOD
Ezinma fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her: Her father as a boy when he was still tender, vying for his mother’s affection. Her grandmother, overworked to the bone by the women whose houses she dusted, whose laundry she washed, whose children’s asses she scrubbed clean; overworked by the bones of a husband who wanted many sons and the men she entertained to give them to him, sees her son to his thirteenth year with the perfunction of a nurse and dies in her bed with a long, weary sigh.
His stepmother regards him as one would a stray dog that comes by often enough that she knows its face, but she’ll be damned if she’ll let him in. They dance around each other, boy waltzing forward with want, woman pirouetting away. She grew up the eldest daughter of too many and knows how the needs of a child can drown out a girl’s dreams. The boy sees only the turned back, the dismissal, and the father ignores it all, blinded by the delight of an old man with a young wife still fresh between her legs. This one he won’t share. And when the boy is fifteen and returns from the market to find his possessions in two plastic bags on the front doorstep, he doesn’t even knock to find out why or to ask where he’s supposed to go, but squats with other unmothered boys in an abandoned half-built bungalow where his two best shirts are stolen and he learns to carry his money with him at all times. He begs, he sells scrap metal, he steals, and the third comes so easy to him it becomes his way out. He starts small, with picked pockets and goods snatched from poorly tended market stalls. He learns to pick locks, to hot-wire cars, to finesse his sleight of hand.
When he is twenty-one, the war comes, and while people are cheering in the streets and shouting “Biafra! Biafra!” he begins to stockpile goods. When goods become scarce, he makes his fortune. When food becomes scarce, he raids farms in the dead of night, which is how he will meet his wife, and why Ezinma, fumbling the keys against the lock, doesn’t see what came behind her: her mother at age twenty-two, not beautiful, but with the fresh look of a person who has never been hungry.
Her mother is a brash girl who takes more than is offered. It’s 1966, months before everything changes, and she is at a party hosted by friends of her parents and there is a man there, yellow skinned like a mango and square jawed and bodied like the statue of David, wealthy; the unmarried women strap on their weaponry (winsome smiles, robust cleavage, accommodating personalities) and go to war over him. When she comes out the victor, she takes it as her due.
Almost a year into their courting, the war comes. Her people are Biafra loyalists, his people think Ojukwu is a fool. On the night of their engagement party only her people attend. And when she goes by his house the next day, she discovers he has left the country.
Her family is soon forced to flee the city, soon forced to barter what they have been able to carry, soon forced to near begging, and for the first time in her life, food is so scarce she slips into farms at night and harvests tender tubes of half-grown corn in stealth. They boil so soft she eats the inner core and the fibrous husk, too. One night, she finds a small farm tucked behind a hill and there she encounters a man stealing the new yams that would have been hers. There is no competition; he is well fed and strong, and even if she tried to raise an alarm out of spite, he could silence her. But he puts his finger to his lips and gives her a yam. And being who she is, she gestures for two more. He gives her another one and she scurries away. The next night when she returns to the farm, he is waiting for her. She sits by him and they listen to crickets and each other’s breathing. When he puts his arm around her, she leans into him and cries for the first time since her engagement party many months ago. When he puts a yam in her lap, she laughs. And when he takes her hand, she thinks, I am worth three yams.
She will have two daughters. The first she names Biafra out of spite, as though to say, Look, Mother, pin your hopes on another fragile thing. And the second is named after her mother, who has since died and doesn’t know that her daughter has forgiven her for choosing the losing side and named her youngest child Ezinma, who fumbles the key against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her: her sister, whom everyone has taken to calling Bibi, because what nonsense to name a child after a country that doesn’t exist.
Bibi, who is beautiful in a way her mother never was. Bibi, stubborn like her mother was always. They’ve fought since Bibi was in the womb, lying so heavy on her mother’s cervix a light jog could have jostled her out. Bedridden, Bibi’s mother grew to resent her and stewed so hot the child should have boiled in her belly. And three years later, Ezinma, pretty, yes, but in that manageable way that causes little offense. She is a ghost of Bibi, paler in tone and personality, but sweet in the way Bibi can be when Bibi
wants something. Bibi loathes her. No, Ezinma can’t play with Bibi’s toys; no, Ezinma can’t walk with Bibi and her friends to school; no, Ezinma can’t have a pad, she’ll just have to wad up tissues and deal with it. Ezinma grows up yearning for her sister’s affection.
When Bibi is twenty-one and her parents are struggling to pay the university fees, she meets Godwin, yellow skinned and square jawed like his father, and falls in love. She falls harder when her mother warns her away. And when her mother presses, saying, You don’t know what his people are like, I do, Bibi responds, You’re just angry and bitter that I have a better man than you, and her mother slaps her and that’s the end of that conversation. Ezinma serves as go-between, a role she’s been shanghaied into since her youth, and keeps Bibi apprised of all the family news, despite their mother’s demands that Ezinma cut her off.
And Godwin is a better provider than Bibi’s father, now a modest trader. He rents her a flat. He lends her a car. He blinds her with a constellation of gifts, things she’s never had before, like spending money and orgasms. The one time she brings up marriage, he walks out and she can’t reach him for twelve days. Twelve days that put the contents of her bank account in stark relief; twelve days that she sits in the flat that’s in his name, drives the car also in his name, and wonders what is so precious about this name he won’t give to her. And when he finally returns to see her packing and grabs her hair, pulling, screaming that even this is his, she is struck . . . by his fist, yes, but also by the realization that maybe her mother was right.
The reunion isn’t tender. Bibi’s right eye is almost swollen shut and her mother’s mouth is pressed shut and they neither look at nor speak to each other. Her father, who could never bear the tension between the two women, the memories of his turbulent childhood brought back, squeezes Bibi’s shoulder, then leaves, and it is that gentle pressure that starts her tears. Soon she is sobbing and her mother is still stone-faced, but it is a wet face she turns away so no one can see. Ezinma takes Bibi to the bathroom, the one they’ve shared and fought over since they were old enough to speak. She sits her on the toilet lid and begins to clean around her bruises. When she is done, it still looks terrible. When Bibi stands to examine her face, they are both in the mirror. I still look terrible, Bibi says. Yes you do, Ezinma replies, and they are soon laughing, and in their reflection they notice for the first time that they have the exact same smile. How have they gone this long without seeing that? Neither knows. Bibi worries about her things that are still in the flat. Ezinma says not to worry, she will get them. Why are you still nice to me? Bibi asks. Habit, Ezinma says. Bibi thinks about it for a moment and says something she has never said to her sister. Thank you.
And so Ezinma fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her: Godwin, who grew up under his father’s corrosive indulgence. Godwin, so unused to hearing no it hits him like a wave of acid, dissolving the superficial decency of a person who always gets his way. Godwin, who broke his cello when he discovered his younger brother could play it better, which is why he came to be here, watching Ezinma—who looks so much like her sister from behind—fumbling the unfamiliar keys against the lock of Bibi’s apartment so she doesn’t see who comes behind her: Godwin, with a gun he fires into her back.
WAR STORIES
This time, my mother and I were fighting about what I had done at school to prove with no question that Anita Okechukwu was not wearing a bra. That Anita and I had been in the middle of the playground hadn’t bothered me, that there were boys around hadn’t bothered me, but Anita Okechukwu was far more sensitive than I.
“Nwando, you can’t just go around opening people’s shirts,” my mother said after she closed the door on Mrs. Okechukwu, a broad-shouldered, broad-hipped woman whose need for a bra was unassailable. Mrs. Okechukwu had wanted an apology and an explanation, and my mother was ready with the first but unsure of the second. That’s why she’d called me onto the veranda to explain myself. I wanted to tell them about how Anita had started the Girl Club after claiming that her father had sent her expensive bras from London edged with barely-there lace and soft ribbons and powdered with fairy dust, and how she made the rule that only girls with bras could be in the Girl Club and that if you weren’t in the Girl Club you couldn’t sit in the Girl Area and you had to play with the boys. Anita would confirm who was Girl by escorting each applicant behind the school to check if she was wearing the required undergarment. They’d emerge short minutes later, the Bra Princess followed by her newest lady-in-waiting. In the jostling to be a Girl, with friends borrowing one another’s intimates and rejected applicants stewing in bitterness, no one had thought to check if Anita actually owned the bras she’d shown us in a catalog.
My mother’s raised brow asked, Well? and Mrs. Okechukwu frowned at me until my nuanced defense deteriorated into “I wanted to see her bra.” My mother pinched her nose and Mrs. Okechukwu muttered about girls with no home training. That’s when my mother got angry. I could tell by the way her left shoulder hunched forward with the effort not to make a fist, how her lips pressed so tight they disappeared. She remained polite to Anita’s mother but her glare seared holes into me.
“Wait till your father hears this thing,” her cry of last resort. At such moments I became my father’s daughter, a confounding creature who had no doubt inherited a vein of insanity from one of his yeye ancestors. I was his problem to solve.
Dinner that night amounted to my mother chewing smugly while I tried to swallow garri around the lump in my throat. My father said nothing.
While my mother cleared the table, he set up the chessboard on the veranda, a sporadic ritual that had begun a few months before, when we relocated to Port Harcourt. As the stand-in for Emmanuel, my father’s old friend, I was to match him in chess and swap stories, though my mother drew the line at serving me beer. A poor strategist, I never offered much of a challenge, but my father was a quiet man who did not make friends easily, and I would do.
“So what is this your mother is telling me?” he asked, giving me another chance to explain myself. I had the words this time and told my father about Anita and bras and the machinations of girls. He listened without interrupting, stealing my pawns as I moved them on the board. When I finished, my story dangled in the air between us. Then my father began to tell one of his own.
“When I was your age, my lieutenant—”
“You were in the army when you were twelve?” I interjected, knowing my father’s penchant for exaggeration. Emmanuel used to take him to task for it, interrupting my father with laughter and calls for “Truth! Truth!” With Emmanuel gone, the assignment fell to me, but my father didn’t crack a smile.
“Lieutenant Ezejiaku was a hard man. I feel bad for him now because he was surrounded by boys and fools and charged with creating an army of men. He would wake us at three in the morning and make us run around the compound with our gear. When we complained, he would shout, ‘Do you think the enemy will let you fetch a wheelbarrow to carry your things?’ Sometimes he would wake two of us at random in the middle of the night to run drills. We would always fight to sleep in the spots we thought he wouldn’t pick.”
“Is this about the time he took your gun?”
The tale, intended to impart some inscrutable lesson, was a stale one my father had trotted out at various infractions over my short life. I heard it when I stole lipstick from my aunt’s dresser. I heard it when my mother discovered me gathering ants in a plastic bag to put in a schoolmate’s hair. I heard it after I got into a fight with the children who said my father was strange, and again when I wanted to know why Emmanuel couldn’t come to our house anymore, and later, why he’d done what he’d done. My father never shared stories from before or after the war, as though he’d been born in the barracks and died the night of the final volley.
“Yes, it’s about the time he took my gun, and it was entirely my fault. Lieutenant stressed to us time and time aga
in the importance of keeping our weapons within reach and sight at all times. One night, I was eating around the fire and placed my gun behind me. That was when the lieutenant must have taken it. I panicked when I couldn’t find my gun, but it never occurred to me that he had it. My friends and I took turns rotating so that when one unit was resting, I would have a weapon. This lasted for three days, until the lieutenant mobilized all the units at once for inspections. When he came to me, he looked me in the eye and handed me my gun. I never sweated so hard in my life.”
My father laughed harsh and loud, then quieted, staring at the chessboard. He was still for so long I wasn’t sure if he was contemplating his next move or if this was the genesis of one of the thick skins of silence my mother would spend days peeling off. Just as I was about to go and get her, he moved his queen to check my king and continued.
“I was flogged so hard my back looked like pureed tomatoes. Then they buried me in sand for three days. After that, I never took my eyes off my gun. Checkmate.”
—
I arrived at school the next day a hero. Fellow students patted my back and I was soon surrounded by the girls who hadn’t made Anita’s club and a few who had but wanted to curry favor with the new regime. By exposing Anita and cutting the head off the beast, I’d inherited my very own Girl Army.
During vocabulary class Ms. Uche asked us to select a word from the dictionary to use in a sentence. The person with the best word would get to lead the class to assembly tomorrow.
“I feel luminous,” I said, heady with power.
“Stop being obnoxious.” This from Femi Fashakin, a thick-waisted girl with a plague of pimples. She’d been part of the Girl Club and wasn’t ready to relinquish her membership. Ms. Uche, already bored with the exercise, intervened.
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky Page 1