Even at school, Mrs Stephens used to ask about the bruises. I’d tell her how I had fallen off the swing, or how I had accidentally caught my arms in the rope of the swing. Always the swing.
Mrs Stephens would nod at me suspiciously, and eventually I began to wear only long-sleeved shirts, and trousers, even when the weather became hot and muggy, even when the humidity made the fabric of my clothes cling to my skin.
We stood there. After a while, the woman looked into her handbag, pulled out a small card, wrote a number on it.
Mama wiped away her tears, accepted the card, nodded.
Soon the bus screeched to a stop, and the woman climbed inside.
We walked the rest of the way home, Mama and I, neither of us saying a word. Not a word as she quietly unlocked the door. Not a word as she quietly turned the knob. She knew Papa would be asleep by then. She did not want to wake him up.
She did not call. Not the next day. Not the day after. Weeks went by. A month. Two months. Each day that passed, I thought of the card, imagined it sinking lower and lower in Mama’s purse, imagined it arriving at the very bottom, disappearing there, among all her other outdated or unused notes—grocery lists and reminders—dog-eared, wrinkled and forgotten. Lurking in that abyss. Waiting to be gathered and thrown away.
Eventually, I stopped imagining the card.
Then one evening, we went again to the ice-cream shop, Mama and I. Papa had not yet returned home from the university.
We ate our ice-cream cones, teeter-tottered in the park, walked all around Brookline. When we got back home, Mama quietly unlocked the door, like the time before, quietly turned the knob. The lights flickered on just as she shut the door. It happened suddenly, Papa coming at us, dark and looming, like a shadow.
‘I get home and there’s no dinner,’ he shouted. ‘Now that you’re in America, you think you can behave like an American, staying out all hours of the night?’
Mama shook her head frantically, mumbled something about having lost track of time.
‘Lost track of time?’ he asked. His hand came down on her. Once. Twice. The third time, I got in the way, tried to stop him. His hand came down on me.
‘Is it the effect America is having on you?’ he shouted. ‘Did you ever lose track of time like this in Nigeria? No! All of a sudden you’re losing track! I’ll teach you a lesson on losing track of time. I’ll teach you both.’
More hands on us, pounding and pounding until we were down on our knees, crouched by the door, trying to catch our breath. Then the lights flickered off. We remained on the floor. We fell asleep there, Mama’s arms wrapped around me.
She must have called the next morning, after Papa left for the university, after I left for school.
Later, in the afternoon, I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom, sheets of homework scattered across the floor. Papa had not yet returned.
Mama said, ‘Hurry. We have an appointment to keep.’ I wondered what exactly the appointment was for.
We used to straighten our hair with those thick metal combs back then, the kind without electric cords, the kinds you stuck on top of one of the burners of a gas stove, on top of the blue-and-orange flames. You’d leave the comb sitting there on the fire while you parted the hair into sections. When you were done parting, and when the comb was nice and hot, steaming even, you’d pick it up, blow a little on it with your mouth, just to blow off a little of the steam. Then you’d stretch the hair with the comb, piece by piece, until there was not a single kinky curl left on the entire head.
I found her standing in front of the kitchen. I could see the stretching comb where it lay, on an open flame behind her.
‘Five minutes,’ she said. ‘Run into the bathroom, wash your face, brush your teeth, and change into one of your Sunday dresses, something nice.’
The dress I chose was my best one, the purple dress from the Salvation Army on Mass Ave, with the white polka dots and red ribbon in front. The seams were just starting to come apart at the sides, and under one arm a small hole had formed. No one could have seen the hole, so I put on the dress. And afterwards I went into the kitchen, where Mama was still standing by the stove, the stretching comb sticking out purposefully from her hand.
‘Mama, where are we going?’ I asked.
No response.
‘Mama, did you hear me?’
‘Turn your head this way.’
As soon as she finished with me, she put on her own dress. Not the adire wrappers she used to wear in Nigeria, no fancy headscarves like the ones she used to tie. Nothing special, just one of those long beige dresses, fraying at the hem, but still one of the nicer ones that she wore to church on Sundays. An American dress. It was the beginning of fall by now, but all around people were still wearing dresses.
Soon we were walking out the door.
Out in the courtyard little Christophine was chasing her big sister Lexine, trying to get the ball that Lexine held in her hands. Romain and Stefon sat on the steps that led down to the courtyard, exchanging cards and candy bars.
Shruti stood up from where she was sitting on the railing of the steps. We were the same age, Shruti and I, and in the same homeroom—Mrs Stephen’s class. Every afternoon, she waited for me. We played together until dinner time. That was the way it was those days. A building of all international students, Indians, Africans, Caribbean mostly. We’d all come out in the late afternoons and we’d play until sunset, until our mothers or our fathers came to call us in.
Shruti followed Mama and me. ‘When will you be back?’ she asked. She walked alongside us, her dupatta carelessly strewn across her body, one end sweeping the floor. ‘Will you be back soon?’
‘Maybe,’ Mama answered.
‘Maybe,’ I echoed.
At the tip of the road, that junction where Buswell Street intersected Beacon Street, Mama stopped, and I stopped, too, and we stood watching the cars pass by, waiting to cross. Shruti stood with us, a disappointed look on her face.
‘You should get back now,’ Mama said, not turning to look at Shruti. ‘You should get back before your mother starts to worry.’
Of course, Shruti obeyed.
We crossed the street then, continued to walk, past Tony’s Pizza shop, up to and past Kenmore Square, where Emmanuel College and Simmons College and all the other colleges formed their little community. We trekked on, side by side, Mama holding my hand. All of it we did in silence.
It was Mama who finally broke the silence. She began slowly and softly, marvelling at how wonderful it was that there were things like churches, food banks and nice people who worked in both. ‘Everything so organized.’
I listened.
‘Who would have known that there were places where people could go to have these types of problems solved?’ she asked. Places that were not churches, not food banks, not hospitals. But they were actually a sort of hospital, she said. Then, ‘Ah, what a country!’ What a country it was that had exactly what a person needed, if only the person knew enough to ask. She hadn’t even known that she could ask, she said. But somehow God had put it in her mind. And thank Heaven she did. Because things would surely get better from here. It would not be like in Nigeria where everyone had insisted that it was her duty to remain with Papa.
We stopped by the tram and got on. Mama held my hand the entire ride. It might have been a thing she did only to steady herself, because her hand shook each time that she loosened her grasp on mine.
We got off at Copley Station. More walking. Past the public library, past Boylston Street. Past block after block of houses. We stopped when we came to a street of row houses.
Mama pulled out the card, the one the woman had given to her. I was surprised by its relative crispness, how even with all this passage of time, it appeared well preserved, not at all as I would have expected, for having been buried so long inside of Mama’s bag.
I stared at it. Mama stared at it too, for a few seconds, as if surprised by it the way that I was.
The
house at which we arrived had a wooden red door and a wooden plate posted at Mama’s eye level. Painted on the plate was a pink triangle without a base, and underneath the triangle, the words FRESH START.
As we stood in front of the door, Mama turned to me, rubbed her hand on my cheeks, as if wiping off any dirt that had accrued from the trip. She fussed a bit with my hair, tucking the straightened strands into place. She fussed with the skirt of my dress, straightened it out. Perhaps wrinkles had formed during the trip, and if so, she made sure to remove all traces of them. Only then did she knock.
A woman opened the door, pretty, with pale skin and dark brown hair that came down to her shoulders. She wore an expensive-looking blouse, something shiny, like silk. Her skirt came down just below her knees, perfectly ironed, perfectly tailored, nothing like Mama’s old, fraying dress.
She invited us inside and offered us seats at her desk.
The room was wide, with posters on the walls, of mothers and children, of families with smiling faces. There were other types of posters, too, of purple ribbons and bold letters that read: STOP DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.
I exhaled—one of those lengthy exhales that seemed to tumble on and on, whose end you were eager to reach, because somehow it held the promise of something good. I exhaled, and I settled comfortably into my seat.
Soft music came from somewhere. There were also sounds from above, of feet and of children’s hushed voices.
On the main floor, where we were, there were two other women like Mama, each one sitting at one of the three desks in the room.
One woman had two sons; they appeared to be twins, perhaps about three or four years old. They gathered around her lap, each one resting his head on a thigh.
At the other desk was a woman with her daughter. She sat filling out, I suppose, the same forms Mama was filling out for us. The woman’s daughter sat quietly, her hair in pigtails.
A widescreen television sat in the corner of the room, muted, alternating between news and weather reports. No broken antenna sticking up above it, not like our television, its antenna having been chopped off by Papa in one of his fits of anger.
The chairs were nice and cushioned—nothing new, but without the holes that ours had at home. And no broken legs, like some of ours had come to have after so many instances of Papa throwing them into the wall.
It was a good place, I thought. Fancy television, nice furnishings, mostly quiet. No Papa to worry about.
The woman helping Mama had been speaking all the while, but I had been too busy observing my surroundings to hear what exactly she was saying. Now, I listened closely, and I heard. She had handed over a clipboard to Mama. On the clipboard was a form. She was instructing Mama on which blanks to fill on the form.
Mama was still filling out the forms when another woman came down the staircase from upstairs.
She was the same woman from the night at the bus stop. The same woman from our visits to the food bank at our church on Buswell Street.
She patted me on the head. She looked at Mama, told her how happy she was that we had come. Her eyes were soft, a little tired-looking.
‘You’ll be safe here,’ she said. It could have been to me or to Mama.
Mama nodded, then continued to fill out the forms.
The woman walked across to the other two desks, appearing to check in with the mothers and children. She checked in also with the counsellors at the desks before turning around and going back upstairs.
We waited. Our counsellor made some calls. We waited some more. Intermittently, Mama rubbed my shoulders, told me how all this was really for the best. It was not as if she needed to convince me of it. I had begun imagining evenings at the place, imagining that those noises I was hearing upstairs were voices of children my age. After five or six o’clock, when the counsellors went home, I imagined that all the kids came down the stairs, like we did in our Buswell Street apartment building, all the children gathering together in the hours before dinner. Here, we’d gather around that widescreen television and watch our choice of movies.
I was thinking all this as the woman from the bus stop approached us again. She stood by Mama’s side, shaking her head from side to side. At first she did not say a thing.
‘What?’ Mama asked, finally.
Our counsellor stood leaning on her desk, just watching, her eyes going between Mama and the woman.
‘Is something the matter?’ Mama asked.
A pause. ‘Your husband,’ the woman responded, like a question.
‘He doesn’t know,’ Mama said, answering what she assumed was the question. ‘You won’t need to tell him, will you?’
The woman shook her head. ‘He would only know what you allowed him to know,’ she said. ‘But that’s not the problem.’ Silence. ‘Your husband,’ the woman tried again. ‘He’s a student?’
Mama nodded. ‘Engineering,’ she said. ‘Boston University.’
‘He is here on a student visa?’ the counsellor asked.
Again, Mama nodded.
Then the woman was shaking her head once more, telling Mama how sorry she was. A slip of her mind, she said. It was something she should have done, but that evening by the bus stop, all she had thought was of the swollen lips, of all the bruises she’d seen on us over the past few months. It had somehow not occurred to her to ask what papers we had. It had not occurred to her that day to inquire about the status of our residency.
‘It complicates things,’ she said, still shaking her head. ‘But basically, I’m afraid there’s not much I can do given the situation.’ Surely we still had family back in Nigeria. Couldn’t we simply return home to them, and leave Papa here to finish his studies on his own? There was that look on the woman’s face as she spoke, an almost blank stare, as if she knew, as we did, that that solution was as good as no solution at all.
Mama remained silent, listening, or maybe no longer listening. Maybe trying to readjust her mind, like I was, to the idea that we would be returning to Papa.
I looked into the woman’s eyes, big and blue, which reminded me again of E.T. Of course, she would actually have been more like Elliot or Gertie or Michael. We had somehow become stranded in her country, and she’d have loved to hide us in the closet the way that they’d all hidden E.T. She’d have helped us, would have taken care of us. Only, somehow, she couldn’t.
We walked down the street, past the row houses, climbed into the tram, climbed off the tram, all in silence. It was not until we turned the corner on Buswell Street that Mama finally spoke. ‘She’s a nice lady,’ she said.
I nodded.
‘She tried,’ Mama said.
I nodded.
‘Maybe things will get better with your papa,’ she said.
‘Maybe,’ I said. We climbed down the stairs leading to the courtyard of our building, and I imagined E.T., sick and weak, lying helpless on the bathroom floor. That was partly the way the movie would have ended that evening long ago, if I had watched it to the end. Government agents invading the house. Then E.T. on that hospital-looking bed, all those masked scientists, dressed in white, trying to nurse him back to health. The children on their bicycles flying into the sunset, then landing back on the ground. The children staring expectantly at the greying sky, watching and waiting for E.T’s people to land and carry him back home.
Grace
The first time I see her, she is crouched by the entrance of the third-floor bathroom, at an equal distance between my office and the lecture hall where I teach. She is sobbing, and her shoulders are shaking slightly, so I stop, crouch down to be closer to her level, pat her on the shoulder and ask her if she’s all right. She nods and mumbles something under her breath. Then she lifts her head, wipes away tears with her hands and smiles at me, a weak smile. ‘I’m okay,’ she says. Her voice is faint and comes out like a croak. There is a pause, and then another croak. I’m not sure what she says that second time around, but the sound makes me think of frogs, small and slimy, of Exodus and the second plague, of the
inundation of the Nile, of Pharaoh and his magicians challenging God by creating more frogs. I think of all this because that’s what’s on my mind these days. That’s what I teach that semester. The Old Testament.
I straighten up and look in the direction of my office. There is a yellow cart in the centre of the hallway, and not too far from the cart, a janitor is pushing a tall broom across the floor. There is a clock hanging from the ceiling on the far end of the hallway. I look at it and then I look back down at her. ‘It’s about 5 p.m.,’ I say. ‘They’ll be locking up the building very soon.’
She nods and lifts herself up from the floor. She is clutching a handbag to her chest, grasping it as if it is some kind of life support, and then all of a sudden she starts to bawl so hard that she seems to be gasping for air. I start again to pat her on the shoulder, and somehow I find myself leading her back to my office, pulling out a seat for her, one of the two seats in the room that are reserved for my students. Except I’m not even sure that she’s a student of mine. And in my twenty years at the university, I’ve never seen any of them weep like this before.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say to her, because I truly am sorry to see her crying so hard. She leans forward on the chair, still clasping her bag, rocking it and herself back and forth. Slowly her sobbing declines until I can only hear the occasional catch of her breath. She rises from her seat and heads for the door.
‘If you ever need someone to talk to—’ I say. I don’t finish.
At the doorway, she turns to look at me. ‘Thanks,’ she says, and as she says it, I allow my eyes to linger on her. I look at her braids—thin, black braids that extend down past her shoulders. I observe the tone of her skin—a dark olive complexion, unique in its hue. Her lips are swollen and reddish, and there are streaks of tears staining her cheeks. I wonder where exactly she is from. As she walks out the door, I find myself thinking what a shame it is that anybody should be made to cry that much.
Happiness, Like Water Page 11