She takes a seat by me on the bench, on a diagonal, so that she is facing me. Her hands, with the box, are resting on her lap. She taps the box softly then runs her finger along the side of it, along the surface of the ribbons. I watch her fingers move, slowly, delicately. It is almost hypnotic.
I think of Nwafor caressing those fingers, and there is resentment in me. I start to imagine her wedding, but it is interrupted with thoughts of my divorce, of sitting alone by the fireplace at home, listening over and over to the sound of silence, the crackling of wood, the heavy rustling of the leaves outside my windows. And, really, I think, it was all my fault, if it came down to blame. It was my fault for not being able to devote myself to him, to love him completely, the way a wife should love her husband. But there’d been something missing for me in the marriage, and I’d been lonely all the while. I’d have been lonelier if I’d stayed. Because, as if in rebellion, certain emotions become amplified at the exact moments when you are expected not to feel them at all.
I imagine Grace after her divorce, maybe seated by some fireplace, surrounded by silence, by loneliness, and the image, the lonesomeness of it, makes me feel like crying.
The river is just ahead, and I turn my eyes to look at it. I imagine throwing pebbles into it, imagine the small splashes that the pebbles cause as they cut through the surface of the water.
‘What’s on your mind?’ Grace asks me.
‘Nothing,’ I say.
I can feel her gaze on me, and I imagine she is taking in my wrinkles and all the age spots on my forehead, all those age spots dispersed around the perimeter of my hairline.
‘I’m old,’ I tell her, forcing myself to chuckle at the statement. ‘See the age spots?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Like petals along the fence of a garden. Youthful, really,’ she says. ‘Like spring.’
I laugh. ‘That’s a good one,’ I say, and I turn to look at her. She is looking very serious about her comment, looking like she is scrutinizing my forehead and getting lost in my age spots.
I try to change the subject. ‘The river makes me think of fishing,’ I say. ‘It would be nice to go fishing one day,’ I tell her.
‘I don’t know how,’ she tells me.
‘I could teach you,’ I say, even though it’s been decades since I went fishing myself, when I was still back in college, still dating my ex-husband, running through wooded campgrounds with him, hiking through secluded, serene forests, the leaves of the trees forming awnings above us. He taught me to fish, I remember then. I begin to wonder how much of it I can still do, and I wonder if I would really be able to teach her. ‘It’s not so hard casting lines,’ I say, not wanting to give in to doubt. As I say it, I imagine us farther down the river, in a canoe maybe, with paddle boats and catamarans sharing the water with us. ‘I bet we could hook all sorts. Walleye, crappies, bullheads, catfish, bass, even bluegills.’
She turns her gaze to face the river. She tells me that she hardly recognizes those fish names. Catfish, she knows. Bluegills, too. The rest are new to her, she says. ‘Still, it’d be nice to go fishing with you,’ she says.
It’s a nice thought, she and I fishing together, me teaching her. I feel the rays of the sun on my shoulders, and I hear the distant quacking of the waterfowls. I look at her, and I think how nice it is just to sit here with her.
She clears her throat. And nothing prepares me for what she says next. ‘Have you ever been in love?’ she asks.
‘In love?’ I ask.
‘Really in love,’ she says, ‘the kind where every part of you feels like you could spend forever with the person. And you wish that forever could be more than a lifetime. The kind where you don’t see all the things that are wrong with the person, all the negatives that should have prevented you from falling for the person in the first place.’
‘With love, you see the flaws,’ I tell her.
‘Then that’s what I mean,’ she says. ‘Only I wouldn’t call them flaws.’
I nod. ‘I suppose I was in love with my ex-husband,’ I say.
‘And since then?’ she asks. ‘How many years now, and you haven’t fallen for anyone else?’
‘People come and go,’ I say, fading away, gazing off somewhere into the horizon. ‘And it’s hard to find someone with whom you feel truly compatible.’
‘I’ve fallen in love,’ she tells me.
It shocks me, this confession of hers, and it scares me, too, and so I force myself not to look at her. ‘You’ve fallen in love?’ I say, like an echo, and still I don’t look at her.
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘It’s not easy identifying love,’ I say.
‘It’s easy enough for me,’ she says. ‘Love is seeing someone the way God would see that person,’ she tells me. ‘Seeing in that person something pure and divinely beautiful, seeing in that person the true image of God.’
‘You couldn’t possibly know what it’s like to see someone from the eyes of God.’ As I say it, I look up at her, and I examine her, as if examining will give me some clue as to what she is trying to tell me. And it occurs to me that perhaps she is right. Because when I look at her, I see something all-beautiful in her, something all-perfect, if there ever was such a thing.
She leaves where she is sitting on the bench, moves to crouch down in front of me, facing me. She is still holding her little box. She stoops on one knee and looks me in the eye and tells me how it’s all wrong. She tells me that, beyond the fact that the Bible condemns that sort of love, she is almost certain that she’ll not be good enough, that she couldn’t possibly have experienced enough of the world to make it work, to rise to the level of the person she’s fallen for. But that she’s in love, and she’s been trying to fight it, but she can’t fight it any more.
‘You’re getting married,’ I remind her. And I imagine the wedding, her mama tinkering with the wedding attire, fussing with the wrappers, placing the jigida beads just so. I imagine that I hear her mama’s voice in the wedding hall, sharp and imperious, ordering Arinze around, telling him how to place the chairs, that sort of thing. I imagine Nwafor’s face, rough with stubble around the chin and cheeks. A man.
I imagine Grace running her fingers across his face, across his stubble, and I try to imagine her enjoying the sensation. I see his arms coming around her waist, I see her forcing her eyes shut, and when the announcement to kiss the bride is made, I imagine a stiff embrace, an awkward and lifeless peck.
I replace Nwafor with myself. I imagine myself kissing her, and I imagine her leaning into me, running her fingers across the wrinkles on my face, through my greying locks of hair. And I feel myself aching. And I feel something like tears moistening my skin.
‘You’re getting married,’ I say again, in a whisper.
‘I know,’ she says.
We don’t say anything for a while, then she speaks, and the words gush out as if she’s in a hurry to spill them. ‘You’re much older, and I’m much younger,’ she says. Her voice is low, and there is a bit of a quiver in it. ‘One day, you’ll begin to stoop, you might have to rely on a cane, and you’ll lose your sight, your hearing, and maybe you’ll even begin to lose your mind. And I will love you still. I’ll love you the whole way through,’ she says. ‘I know that I will.’
I turn to look at her, because I believe her. And suddenly I’m extending my hand to slap her across her face, because I understand what she’s telling me, and I understand that she’s giving me permission to feel a way that I’m not sure I want the permission to feel. But her hand catches mine, as if she has read my mind. And she buries herself into me, wraps her arms around me.
‘But then,’ she whispers, ‘who’s to say that I won’t die first? Who’s to say that you won’t be the one burying me?’
‘Hush,’ I tell her, quietly, shaking my head, and I begin to sob.
As I kiss her, I don’t think of the practical things, like what this will mean for my job, the scandal it might cause, the shame it might bring. I don’t
think of how I will explain all this to my daughter, to her husband, how they will explain it to their son. I don’t think of all the scandalous affairs that I’ve witnessed in my twenty years at the university. I don’t think of my reaction to them, not that I’ve ever been one to condemn, but I don’t think of my former disbelief at people—colleagues who, at such distinguished positions at the university, allowed fleeting romances between themselves and their students to interfere with their careers. I don’t think of any of this as we kiss.
And I don’t think of the Bible, of its verses about unnatural affections and abominations. Because it doesn’t feel sinful to me. Because, unlike with Pharaoh and his magicians, none of this is meant to be a challenge to God.
Instead I relent in her arms and think of how good it feels—how nice her skin feels on mine. And I continue to taste her lips, plump and sweet. And I breathe in her scent, flowery and light, something like lavender.
She pulls just a bit away then, fusses with the gold ribbons on the red box, tugs the ribbons until they come undone. She reaches inside the box and takes out a small round object in gold wrapping. She holds out the object in the space above my thighs. ‘For you,’ she says to me. ‘A wedding favour,’ she says.
I reach out to accept. She places the object into my cupped hand, and then she covers my hand with her own. Our hands linger in mid-air that way, mine in hers. Then I pull away, because the whole thing feels not quite like a celebration, something like unadorned acceptance, just a bit short of joyful.
And I think that perhaps all this will do. The waterfowls are still quacking, and the sun is high in the sky. The river is still glowing in shades of silver and gold. Grace is sitting next to me, and I can’t help thinking that perhaps the verge of joy is its own form of happiness.
Designs
The peeling linoleum on the countertop, near the sink, is the only sign that Celeste was here, that she is gone. It is speckled grey and turned up at one corner like the flap of an old envelope. Celeste’s blood, that tiny drip of it, now dry and jagged around the edges, is the envelope’s seal; but it is a seal that does nothing to tack the envelope closed.
Ifeinwa stands at the sink, rinsing leaves. She rinses them one by one, and then the tomatoes, and then the carrots. All of them, she rinses carefully, as she would in Port Harcourt; and of course, there, where vegetables are sold fresh from the farm with specks of dirt and sand on them—there, such fervent rinsing would be necessary.
But she is here. Still, she rinses them that old way, as if they have not already been washed and dried and packaged for her to use: it is always some time before the salad is made.
I stand by the door that separates the kitchen from the dining room, and I watch. She is humming, and the sound is like an old lady’s song, a folk song, the kind my mama used to sing back home, her legs braced against the sides of the mortar, her arms rising and falling with each strike of the pestle on the yam.
I imagine Ifeinwa back in Nigeria, her wrapper tied around her chest or in a knot above her shoulder. She is in her family’s compound, and she is carrying a large bowl on her lap—rinsing palm kernels for oil. Soon, she switches from the kernels to rinsing beans. And after the beans, she pours a small bag of rice onto a tray. She stays with the rice for some time, first shuffling the grains with her fingers, picking out tiny stones as she goes. Then she flips the rice in the tray. With every flip she fills her mouth with air and blows the air over the rice. The chaff rises from the tray like dust in the air. She flips and flips, and she blows air over the rice until chaff no longer rises from it.
I shake the images away. Here, where fruit and vegetables and grains are sold as ready-to-eat, where they glisten under the grocery-store lights, all that cleaning and rinsing is not necessary. I walk over to Ifeinwa at the sink. ‘Let me help,’ I say. I’m carrying with me two small tubers of yam, purchased on my way back from work, at the African store down the block from Beacon Street.
‘You do the yam,’ I say, handing the tubers to her. ‘I’ll finish the salad.’
She laughs. ‘I’m taking too long?’ she asks. Her voice is soft, and suddenly I’m aware of how smooth her words have become. Already there is that fluidity of American English in her tone, a lilt which took me the better part of a decade to master. Already, she is mastering it.
She lifts her hands from the bowl where the leaves soak. She shakes the water off her hands and dries them on the skirt of her dress. It is autumn, and the window in front of the sink is cracked open. I feel a draught of the cold breeze on my face, and it surprises me that Ifeinwa is even wearing that dress.
‘You’re not cold?’ I ask, eyeing the little red dress. It was I who chose it, who bought it for her, eager for her to fit in. The first time she wore it, she complained of the cold. She changed back into her wrapper and blouse, both of them with the traditional ankara design. I was petulant about the change, but she insisted. They were better, she said, because she could layer the wrapper all around her body, and its warmth would be only a little short of a blanket’s.
I continue to eye the dress. ‘You’re really not cold?’ I say. I watch as she shakes her head in response. It is not too fervent a shake, but her braids are long, and the movement of her head causes them to whip mildly around her face. I think of Celeste, who does not wear braids, and whose hair is nothing like Ifeinwa’s hair.
Ifeinwa speaks, but with my mind on Celeste, the words that reach me are indecipherable, so I have to ask, ‘What?’
‘Maybe I am, just a little,’ she says. She laughs softly. ‘You know. A little cold. Maybe I’m just a little cold.’
I nod. ‘Yes, of course,’ I say, and then I watch her as she moves away from the sink.
She places the yams on the countertop and then picks up the knife. I think of Celeste holding that knife, of Celeste helping me to plant the surprise. I urge myself to stop looking at Ifeinwa, but it is a struggle to stop, and so I watch from the corner of my eye.
Ifeinwa picks up the first tuber of yam. She peels off the bark until all that remains is the flesh, which glows a milky white. She cuts the yam into cubes, the way we do before boiling. Then she reaches up, opens the cupboard, which is not too far above her head. She grabs a pot from there, transfers the cubes into the pot. She moves on to the remaining tuber of yam.
By then I have progressed from the leaves to the carrots and now to the tomatoes. I slice the tomatoes into thin circles, and I watch as Ifeinwa begins to peel the second tuber of yam.
There is a line that runs along the circumference of that yam. Perhaps she doesn’t think much of it. I imagine now that if she were to have given it only a bit of thought, she might have commented on how eccentric the yam was, as if it had been cut in half and then stuck back together with a kind of invisible glue. Instead, she proceeds to cut it along that preexisting line. Suddenly it’s as if her knife hits a block. She makes a soft, muffled sound, a bit like a whine. I stop with the tomatoes, and I ask her if something is wrong. But I do not offer to help as I usually do, when, for example, she has trouble opening a jar.
She does it all on her own, carving slowly around the core of the block. There is a look of determination on her face. She digs, fusses, groans. When she arrives at the box, she stays a moment just staring at it. Then she extracts it slowly, cautiously, knowingly. It is a light shade of green, the box, delicate like jade.
She exhales. The sound of her exhale is a little like vindication.
She smiles brightly. The ring inside is just a band. Celeste saw that it was so. Still, Ifeinwa tells me, her eyes glazed with tears, how perfect it is.
I go closer to her. I get down on one knee and I take her starchy hands in mine.
‘M huru gin a anya,’ she says, looking down at me. Her voice is suddenly heavy with the cadence of Igbo, but it is soft still. I see you in the eyes, she says.
I look up at her—at her teary eyes, her smile, at the braids that dangle limply around her face. ‘I love you, too,’ I say
. And it is true.
That evening, we eat the salad, and then we eat the yam, dipping cubes of it into palm oil—the good old-fashioned way, which is the only way that Ifeinwa will have her yam. This—the yam with palm oil—has become her favourite meal. (She used to buy fufu at the African store down the street. Then she’d spend hours preparing okra soup to eat with the fufu—this used to be her favourite meal. But the odours of the soup and the fufu would rise in the air and would linger, sometimes for days at a time. Eventually I had no choice but to protest. Too rancid, I explained. Not at all American scents.
When she could no longer bear my complaints, she gave in and did away with the fufu and okra soup. She settled for the yam with palm oil.)
After we have eaten, and after Ifeinwa has washed the dishes and I have wiped them dry, she punches the numbers into the phone, all fourteen of them. The phone hangs on the kitchen wall near the fridge and Ifeinwa plays with the dangling cord while she waits for her mother to pick up: she tangles and untangles the cord around her fingers. She does this every time.
‘Mama!’ I hear her say from where I am sitting in the living room. First her back is to the wall, and she is standing. I am not there with her, but I know that this is so, because this is the way that all her calls go.
Next, there is the sound of her sliding, and I know that she has slipped down to the floor, that she is squatting there, talking to her mama on the phone that way. It is the only way she has done it since she arrived.
‘Kedu?’ she says. I imagine her mother answering, ‘Odi mma.’ All is well. I don’t listen to what follows next. But I imagine that when she tells her mama the news, her mama screams and asks, ‘Ezi okwu?’ Is it true? And there is more screaming, happy screaming, and the wrinkles on her mama’s face deepen. At least, I imagine they do.
Happiness, Like Water Page 14