“Yes, I’d heard that. I just wondered if you knew any specific details.”
“Not really. They say she was alone, crossing a busy road on foot, and that’s when she was struck.” Angie looked at Solo, eyes pleading. “You grew up in Lagos. Does that sound right?”
He nodded solemnly. “There is no word in any Nigerian language for ‘pedestrian.’ I’m afraid that every day people who cross main roads on foot risk their lives—so yes. The roads in Lagos are especially dangerous.”
“Only, apparently no one saw her cross,” said Angie. “Even though it was supposed to be a busy road.”
“Do you think there is another explanation?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Angie. “We never got any clear information. The State Department, the embassy, they were all useless.”
“Well, perhaps there’s no more to know,” said Solo. “The explanation you were given is quite probable.”
His words saddened her. She drank more.
“You don’t really look like her, you know,” said Solo. “She was a big girl. You’re so much thinner.”
Angie felt a familiar discomfort. She wanted to seem more like her sister, not less. People who saw pictures of Ella tended to point out their dissimilarity in physique, and always with an unspoken assertion that Angie was the lucky one.
The percussive horns and relentless drums of Fela’s music swelled, as Angie drained her glass, riding the top of the notes, floating along. “I’m thinking of going to Nigeria,” she blurted out, overcome with a need to show just how much she and Ella actually were alike. “Soon.”
“Is that so?” asked Solo, as if he didn’t believe it.
“Yes.” She felt woozy. “And maybe to a couple of other West African countries too.”
He nodded. “Well, I’d say that’s a perfect graduation present.”
Her mother had said something similar. She’d suggested Angie take a trip this summer, encouraging her to consider Europe, or Brazil perhaps. She’d read an Ebony article about Bahia. There was some life insurance money—several thousand dollars—from the policy her mother took out on Ella in the early days of her addiction. A family friend, Dr. Benjamin, assisted in securing the policy by administering a lenient physical exam, given that Ella couldn’t pass a drug test. Her mother wanted Angie to use the money to travel. “Get away from here for a while,” she told her. But Nigeria? Her mother would never, ever approve of that, which made the fantasy more appealing.
“I have figured it out.” Solo slid closer to Angie, put his finger under her chin. “What is different about you and Ella. It’s not just your size. She looked like a Yoruba and you look like one of my people, a Fulani.” He rubbed her cheek. “A beautiful Fulani.”
He moved in to kiss her, and Angie let him. His mouth tasted like oranges. She had always wanted a Nigerian boyfriend, someone to impress with her knowledge of his country. But her only real relationship had been during her semester at U of M, where she’d fallen in love with Romare, a black American engineering student. But then, after It happened, she and Romare parted ways and there’d been no one else since. Still hopeful, she’d kept taking her birth control pills.
“Did you and Ella ever do this?” she asked Solo.
“Do this?” he repeated.
“You know, did you two ever . . . get involved?”
He smiled and his dark eyes became slits. She saw that he had dimples. “I am not the type to kiss and tell,” he said, guiding her down gently onto the couch. As his tongue pushed through her mouth, she tried to feel something, but nothing moved inside her, even when she felt Solo’s erection against her leg. His smooth palm slid up Ella’s caftan, cold against Angie’s naked thigh. She shivered as his hand moved to her panties, fingers slipping inside.
“Wait!”
“Hmm, come on,” he murmured in her ear. “We are having such a good time.”
She gently pushed him. “Stop, please.”
He kept going, and frightened, she pushed harder. “No!”
He stopped and sat up, looking confused. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t even know you.”
He gave her an incredulous look. “How can you say that?” His voice rose. “I was there, with your sister in her best days. We share that. How many people share that with you?”
Her head hurt. It was true he was all that linked her to that dynamic time in her sister’s life. She tried to think. Solo took her hesitation as approval and gently lay her back down on the couch. As he pushed up the loose dress and pulled off her panties, she told herself Ella would approve. Ella was naturally voracious—for food, for drugs, and yes, for sex—in a way Angie never managed to be. As Solo entered her, she tried to relax and enjoy it. He thrust and the slightest tinge of pleasure made its way up her groin. She squeezed shut her eyes and put her hands on Solo’s back; it was smooth save for his bumpy backbone. She tried to shut off her thoughts, but her mind landed on a memory: Ella in their basement with friends, the smell of weed wafting around them, and Ella is inhaling on a joint so hard, her cheeks hollow out. Next, Ella is sprawled on the red leather couch, eating a gigantic slice of chocolate cake, icing smeared across her cheeks. Her new boyfriend, Nigel, with his soft gray eyes and widow’s peak, is laughing, saying, hey leave some for me, I got the munchies too, and Ella is saying, you slow, you blow, laughing, grabbing his arm, pulling him away from the crowd, to Angie’s little playroom in the back. Nigel catches Angie’s eye, saying wait Ella girl, wait, that’s Angie’s room, but goes through the door and closes it behind them. Angie, a sixth grader, stares at the door, the plywood door on which she’d scrawled the words “My House” when she was just six. Inside, a little home—complete with Suzy Homemaker toy appliances, a toy-chest sofa, and a tiny bookshelf beside a lamp and chair—her haven after their father died, with her mother always working late and her older sisters too busy for her; the place where little Jeff Charles would come over and play house for hours. She hasn’t outgrown it yet, doesn’t like the idea of someone trespassing through. She worries about Nigel and Ella in there, on the other side of her closed plywood door.
She presses against the door, waiting and waiting, leaning against it, wanting them out of there, and finally the door opens. Ella bursting through, saying, move out the way, pushing Angie aside as she runs to the metal sink beside the washer and dryer. Nigel hovers over her, pulling Ella’s hair out of the way while she throws up. He catches Angie’s eye again as she watches, suddenly worried for her big sister, stricken.
“Girl, I told you to slow it down,” Nigel says to Ella. “You gotta pace yourself!”
Just like that, Ella lifts her head from the sink, wipes her mouth; she is fine. She looks over at Angie. “What’s wrong Princess?” she says. “What’s wrong?”
Angie can’t answer, because she doesn’t know what’s wrong, only that she is scared for Ella, a fear that will grip her long after the night ends. It is the same fear that had consumed her when Ella took off earlier that year for Nigeria. Angie worried that Ella wasn’t coming back. But Ella did return, wearing ivory bangles and that caftan, dazzling in her newfound cultural awareness, her love of all things African.
Solo came and she lay very still until he eased himself off her, kissed her forehead. She’d never had sex with a man she’d just met, and it was like crossing over into another realm. She certainly wasn’t a virgin, and yet she felt initiated into a new club, changed. Maybe now she’d be more spontaneous with her life. Angie slipped on her panties, smoothed out the dress. Fela’s music raced along as Solo zipped up his pants, tucked in his shirt. She wanted to feel closer to him now, not because they’d just had sex, but because he’d known Ella and she felt they’d just consummated that connection.
“What do you remember most about her?” she asked him.
His face flush with a post-coital slackness, Solo seemed not to know whom
she was talking about. But he caught on quick enough. “Well, she was very smart. Your sister knew a lot about Africa actually. The first black American I’d met who had real knowledge about the continent. She never asked me if we lived in huts, if we had running water, if we wore shoes.”
She wasn’t sure whether she’d known that about Ella—whether it was new information or something she’d once known. This saddened her. “I’m forgetting so many things about her,” she told him. “Every day, it’s like I forget another detail. It feels so cruel.”
“Well, she has been gone for some years now,” said Solo. “That’s to be expected.”
Angie stiffened. That was not what she wanted to hear.
“When will I see you again?” he asked.
She leaned away from him. “Hard to say.” She couldn’t imagine going backward, having a chaste date with this man. “I may be leaving soon.”
He smiled big. “Yes, go to my country, then come back and tell me your grand impressions.”
“Sure.” She stood, ready to get away from his stuffed apartment, from her own deception. “I have to go.”
Solo stood too. “Let me give you something.”
He went to the crowded desk, grabbed a black address book, tore off a piece of that day’s newspaper lying on the table, and copied something from the book. She watched, desperately wanting to leave. He moved close and handed her the scrap. “Here’s my uncle’s information,” he said. “He’s the head of mass communications at the University of Lagos. When you arrive, go see him, tell him I sent you. He’ll take care of you.”
She slipped the piece of paper into a side pocket of her purse, thanked him as she reached for the doorknob.
“Hey!” Solo called to her.
She turned back to face him.
“Say yeah, yeah!”
“Yeah, yeah!” she echoed, feeling self-conscious as frenetic Afrobeats followed her out the door.
As Angie walked along Second Avenue, she tried to sort out her feelings. Maybe this was fate? She got into her Ford Escort, turned the ignition. She rolled down the window, let in the night’s warm breeze. She’d certainly thought about going to Nigeria when she’d been at Fela’s concert last year. She’d sat in her seat at the Fox Theater, surrounded by Africa enthusiasts, looked up at the faded majestic ceiling with its blue sunburst, and imagined herself there. The truth was, she’d been unwittingly inching toward this moment all along. But she hadn’t allowed herself to entertain the thought because her mother would strongly disapprove. Yet now was different, wasn’t it? She’d done the thing her mother most wanted her to do: graduate from college. Of her three daughters, Angie’s was the only college graduation her mother got to attend. So that was done. She’d been dutiful. Now, she could go. And this was the time to do it. She was the exact age Ella was when she first visited Nigeria.
As Angie drove home she got more excited. She’d saved all of her sister’s letters from that last trip. She could retrace her steps—see what Ella saw, be with the people Ella had been with—just to know how her sister had spent her last months. Going to Nigeria would calm the achy feeling inside Angie, a feeling she couldn’t shake—that Ella’s soul wasn’t at rest, and it was somehow her job to change that.
Ella died in Lagos on January 1, 1984. She was twenty-seven and Angie was eighteen. She died at the scene. Their mother, Nanette, refused an autopsy, so no one knew whether drugs were in Ella’s system. Angie felt certain they weren’t.
She had spent the three-and-a-half years since the deadly accident in a holding pattern of denial. She couldn’t, wouldn’t accept that her sister had survived years of heroin addiction, and then rehab, only to die in front of a speeding car in a foreign country. The more Angie obsessed over it, the more her own life receded. Her own ambitions and desires got crowded out, no place to go. If she’d witnessed the scene, then maybe she could move on. Or if she’d sat in a hospital waiting room, filled with fragile hope until the doctor came out, said those fateful words, and she’d felt the agony, then maybe. Instead Angie found herself living in a perpetual state of anticipation mixed with dread, waiting for the thing that would provide finality, quell the feeling that Ella had disappeared into the ether. Until then, she lived as a kind of caretaker to the obsessions Ella left behind, an executor of her sister’s Afrocentric politics, new age beliefs, Fela Kuti devotion. Ella died just as Angie entered college, on the precipice of forming her own ideas about who she wanted to be in the world. She never got to do that. Instead, Angie chose to preserve these things that mattered most to Ella, indefinitely, until . . . until . . . she didn’t know when.
Their mother flew to Nigeria to bring back Ella’s body. The whole ordeal had been deeply traumatizing. Angie’s mother developed an allergic reaction to the pre-trip vaccinations, and spent her days in Nigeria with a swollen face. Her luggage was stolen at the airport. And as fate would have it, she’d arrived on the heels of a bloodless coup d’etat. She had to pay the Nigerian customs officials a shameful amount of cash to get Ella back home. Nanette couldn’t say enough bad things about Lagos—its filth, its corruption, its horrific traffic.
They held a small service at the Unity Temple behind Palmer Park. Angie read a quote from Khalil Gibran, whom Ella loved, in a quivering voice. “For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.” She had chosen Ella’s dress, a lace-collared navy shift. But Angie never saw the dress on her. At the service, when it was time for the family to view the body, their mother held her sister Denise’s hand as they approached the casket together. Angie didn’t join them, remained seated in the front row, watching Denise’s back heave up and down. Even though she needed to see her, make all this become real, she didn’t want to. She thought she couldn’t bear to look at Ella’s face, and wished the sprays of white snapdragons, gardenias, and hydrangeas surrounding the casket would hide her profile from view. But she saw her. And still, it wasn’t real.
The family hadn’t heard from Nigel, Ella’s boyfriend, since the funeral. A friend of Ella’s told Angie that he was now a foreign correspondent.
Her childhood playroom, the words “My House” scrawled across the closed door, Nigel and Ella inside. Angie waiting, waiting, worried they’d never come out. And once they did, leaving behind turned-over kiddie furniture, smudges of chocolate on the walls, a mysterious smell.
TWO
Whenever Angie shopped with her sister Denise, they silently competed, each working hard to be least impressed with the other’s taste. Denise whizzed through Hudson’s Department Store with her charge card and bought Coach purses and Gucci sunglasses and Liz Claiborne dresses with aplomb, wanting Angie to show how impressed she was. Angie refused to do any such thing, and would later drag Denise to a vintage store in Royal Oak to buy some floral dress or suede vest that someone else had already owned, relishing in her sister’s obvious disgust.
“I could use some new suitcases,” said their mother as the three of them walked through Somerset Mall. “Mine is so old, it’s the one I used when we moved here from Tennessee.”
“God, that’s sad!” said Denise. “First up on the list today is some new luggage. Maybe we should get you some Hartmann. It’ll actually still look good in twenty-five years.”
The giant fountain in the center of the mall spewed water cascading like diamonds as Angie, Denise, and their mother strolled, eyeing the stores on either side. Their mother was headed to Atlanta for a few days of vacation, and to mark the occasion, her daughters were helping her shop for a few new things. In fact, Denise was treating.
At twenty-seven, Denise was a pharmaceutical rep in Atlanta, a job she snagged the week after she graduated from Spelman College. Pushing her artistic talent to the side, she’d been working for Bristol-Myers for five years. She loved to tell Angie and their mother how vital her services were to doctors, how they relied on her insights and advice on which medications worked best for
which illnesses. Angie didn’t trust prescription drugs, found their mysterious names and side effects scary. She leaned more toward herbal remedies and homeopathic medicine. Still, she was taken aback by how well Denise had done so quickly: a condo in a new development, the latest model Honda Accord sedan, and a closet full of shoulder-padded power suits and high-heeled pumps. Denise was now the same age that Ella was when she died, and Angie marveled at how deeply Denise had driven her stake into the ground of stability, and how immortal she seemed.
“What else is on the list?” asked Angie, already feeling tired, an effect malls had on her. They walked by a B. Dalton bookstore. She wished she could slip across its threshold, and wait out the rest of the shopping spree browsing the shelves. She wondered if there were any travel books on Nigeria. Ten days had passed since her encounter with Solo, and it didn’t feel real anymore, the sex part; but what did feel real was the part about going to Africa.
“There’s not that much for me to get,” said their mother. “I want some new lipstick, and one or two summer dresses, maybe a pair of sandals . . .”
Denise gave her mother a knowing look. “And a nice new nightgown. Something lacy.”
Their mother shook her head, but Angie could see she was smiling.
“Why do you need a new nightgown?” she asked.
“What woman doesn’t?” said Denise, as she guided them into Saks Fifth Avenue.
Angie thought of her mother’s simple cotton nightgowns with matching robes, how lovely she looked in them. She recalled that many years ago, her mother once wore her nightgown all day, her small girth moving easily underneath, and then changed into her armor of heavy underwear and a pretty top and pants in the evening, looking fresh when their father walked through the door. Angie remembered how he’d hug his wife, pull her to him, and plant a sloppy kiss on her lips. “Samson,” she’d whisper. “You smell like them horses something awful.” “Ain’t that how you like me?” he’d respond, making her blush. She was so young when he died, just thirty-four. Angie knew of only one man her mother dated and cared about afterward, but he moved away and that was that. Denise set her up on dates with two former high school teachers years later, but Nanette said those men weren’t her type. Since Ella’s death, she’d given up dating completely, and Angie was secretly relieved.
Into the Go Slow Page 2