Love,
Taiye
PS: Sade came to see me yesterday. She IS pregnant. I’m going with her to the clinic. I don’t want to think about it too much, for my sake as much as hers. You should have seen her when she asked me to come with her. Her eyes were swollen from crying all day. She didn’t want to tell me who the father is. I guess it doesn’t really matter.
Letter no. 23
July 2, 2006
Asylum Rd., Peckham
K,
I just got home. Was at a party. I’m drunk drunk I like it.
Oh my God. I danced with someone that was not a boy and I liked it I’m drunk.
I want to tell you this thing, which is that I talk to myself sometimes, as in when I need someone to talk to, because you won’t answer me and mami can be funny sometimes. So yes
I mss you
T
I’M NOT SURE HOW LONG I’VE BEEN HERE in my childhood bedroom, reading these letters. I’m trying to read them chronologically, but they don’t seem to be arranged in any meaningful order. I read them silently, and the words bring the sound of Taiye’s voice into my mind so that I can hear her hurt.
Sometimes Taiye’s letters are funny, or strange. Like this one, from the night Farouq and I got married …
Letter no. 64
August 10, 2012
Somewhere South London
K,
I just saw you at this club. I was dancing with this girl I’ve come home with. I’m rolling, feel incredible. I saw you! It couldn’t have been you, but it was. Life is weird as shit, and anything is possible. This girl is fine sha, she has this stainless-steel toy, BUT I’m entirely too fucked up to play with that. And you probably definitely don’t want to hear about it! Okay, okay, okay, I have to goooooo. I found this receipt in my coat pocket, it’s for chanterelle mushrooms and scallops and organic butter, ha! Why am I such a pretentious twat?!
Always,
T
Kambirinachi
KAMBIRINACHI HAD JUST TURNED FOURTEEN when her aunt Akuchi enrolled her at the university staff secondary school. A much smaller school than Queen’s College, this one was coed. She hadn’t seen her mother since her birthday just three weeks before. She’d begged Ikenna to stay longer than the three days she’d spent cooking and dancing and braiding Kambirinachi’s hair. The night before she was to start classes, she longed to see her mother’s face, needed to be reassured. Her mother had been far more tender with her those three days than ever before, and she needed some of that tenderness again.
Her time in Akuchi’s home was easy. Her aunt’s joy was contagious because she moved in a world saturated with love, despite the rough edges of life in Ife. Akuchi loved her work. She took Kambirinachi to the campus once to show her the school she would soon attend. She greeted everyone with kindness, from the gatemen to the head of her department, a Hausa man in his early fifties named Yusuf.
Yusuf was the man Akuchi loved. He was unavailable for more reasons than his marriage, and Akuchi knew this. There was his faith—he was a Muslim man. There was his age and his seniority in the department. Yet these facts did nothing to dampen her affections. Somehow she’d learned, or perhaps was gifted with, the ability to love without expectation. Kambirinachi could smell the devotion pouring out of Akuchi’s pores when she introduced her to Yusuf. And she recognized the sweetness in Yusuf’s eyes when he looked at Akuchi.
Kambirinachi’s time at the staff school whooshed past her. It was something that she sometimes let happen when the present was just bearable. She was friendly enough but didn’t make many friends. She did her work well enough but didn’t earn extraordinary marks, except in her fine arts classes. There she poured herself into painting, turning out extraordinary pieces in what was becoming her signature heavily textured and kaleidoscopic style. She continued to listen in on the voices, but she never chimed in to keep from being swallowed up. She cast webs for suitable lovers for Akuchi, but her aunt’s desire for Yusuf kept her blind to any potential partners reeled in by Kambirinachi’s captivating lures.
She waited for her mother to return for her.
She waited almost a year to ask Akuchi why her mother hadn’t come back. Her aunt only looked away, sadness casting a long shadow across her face as she changed the subject.
She let time speed past her like a warm breeze when you drive with your windows down. Three years went by in a languid blink.
On Akuchi’s suggestion, Kambirinachi took the matriculation exam for entry to Obafemi Awolowo University. She applied to study in the Department of Fine and Applied Arts.
On the Sunday after her graduation from the staff school, Akuchi threw Kambirinachi a party in the backyard, a large affair. She invited Kambirinachi’s entire class, as well as her own colleagues and friends from the university. Kambirinachi, Akuchi, and Adaora spent the whole day cooking: sugary balls of yeasty puff-puff, palm-sized mini meat pies, several batches of chin chin, crispy fried meat in peppery stew, jollof rice with stewed chicken, and sweet golden fried plantains. Akuchi asked Yusuf to bring crates of Coke, Fanta, and Maltina, and he helped her load the drinks into the deep-freeze by the kitchen door.
Kambirinachi was sitting by the phone beside Akuchi’s bookshelf in the parlour, willing her mother to call. She walked toward the kitchen to ask her aunt why her mother hadn’t called, but before she stepped through the doorway, she heard Akuchi’s soft giggles float to meet her. She peeked through the crack of the door, saw Yusuf holding Akuchi from behind, his bearded face buried in the crook of her aunt’s plump shoulder. He whispered something that made her aunt beam with so much joy that Kambirinachi didn’t dare disturb them.
Kambirinachi felt something waiting for her, paused patiently at a particular point in time. A gift, perhaps, that would justify her choice to stay in this alive way that seemed more about losing to love and eating to stay living than anything else.
BEFORE KAMBIRINACHI MET BANJI, she dreamed of him. It was close to a year after she applied to study fine art at the university, during one of those hazy restless in-between sleeps. She saw only his spirit body, a gentle and curious curve hovering just above the edge of her kaleidoscopic dreamscape. In the morning, she walked to campus with a light giddiness that made her feel almost weightless. It was her first day of undergraduate classes, but she suspected that there was more to her excitement.
So when she stumbled over Banji’s black school bag—which he’d slung carelessly at the foot of his chair—and he caught her elbow to keep her from falling on the dusty concrete floor of the lecture hall—she recognized him by the softness of his gaze.
She steadied herself, looked him right in the face, and said, “Oh, it’s you.”
Taiye
THE COOKING CLASSES AT LA DOLÇA ESPOSA WERE DEMANDING, on account of having to learn new cooking techniques in a new language. Besides Taiye and Bobby, there were eight students. Four white undergraduate students—two from upstate New York, one from North Dakota, and the other from Connecticut—a Japanese woman, Kaoru—she was pregnant and would only start to show as the course progressed—a middle-aged Austrian woman and her brown teenaged daughter, and a very pale Scottish girl with fuzzy orange dreadlocks.
Naturally, the students broke off into smaller groups. The Americans stuck with each other; the Austrian woman seemed to gravitate to the Scottish girl, while keeping a sharp eye on her young daughter, who always drifted to Taiye’s side, likely because she was the only other Black person present. Taiye harboured an obvious empathy for Kaoru since her pregnancy gave her a weak stomach.
All of them, except for Bobby, had at least an intermediate command of the language and seemed to excel not only at deciphering Guifré’s rapid French but also maintaining their composure when he scolded them sharply for improperly descaling fish or facing the partridge in the wrong direction when preparing a perdreaux á la catalane.
During one of their early classes, Taiye broke her intense focus, caught Bobby’s eye, and smiled at the ex
pression of pure bafflement on his face. He smiled back. At their fifteen-minute break, he joined her where she was smoking at the back door of the kitchen.
“You smoke,” he said. He’d meant it as a question, but it came out flat.
“Only in France.” She smiled and offered him a cigarette.
“No, I’m good. Thanks, though.”
“How are you finding this?” She jerked her head toward the restaurant.
“Fuck, I don’t know …” Bobby stretched his lean body. “My French is shit, so I don’t know what he’s saying half the time.”
Taiye dropped the rest of her cigarette on the ground and put it out with her sandal-clad toes. “I can help you out if you want. Take the station next to mine on Wednesday.”
EVEN AS A YOUNG CHILD, Taiye recognized when her father started earning more money because they switched from using margarine, the kind that comes in a yellow plastic tub with a blue lid, to butter imported from Ireland, the salted kind that comes wrapped in gold foil. Kehinde didn’t seem to notice, but Taiye’s palate sang in response to the butter’s superiority. In London, she didn’t buy butter unless she could afford the organic cultured kind from health food shops. It was a treat when she could spare the money, and she could make an eight-ounce block last well over a month.
In Catalan cuisine, though, it was all olive oil.
“Ici, nous ne mangeons pas toujours du beurre comme les stéréotypes français. Dans la cuisine Catalane nous utilisons l’huile d’olive,” Guifré announced at the beginning of a lesson on sauces and condiments.
At La Dolça Esposa, the dishes on the menu—designed to resemble humble parchment paper—were all written in Catalan, with their descriptions written below in French. The curriculum of Elodie and Guifré’s culinary course covered how to make every item on the restaurant’s seasonal menu. During the summer that Taiye studied under them, it was a small selection of five starters, five main courses, and three desserts. The wine list was three times as long as the food menu.
The first starter they learned to prepare was a fair-style octopus dish: pop estil a feira. The dish involved curling the tips of the octopus’s tentacles by dipping it in boiling water for fifteen seconds a few times. Kaoru ran out of the kitchen to vomit at that particular point; Taiye grabbed the octopus that Kaoru had flung aside in her haste and continued dipping its tentacles in the bubbling pot so that she wouldn’t fall behind.
They had to cook the octopus, sans head, with onions, garlic, and salt, until tender—but not too tender, or Guifré would eye them as if they’d just insulted his mother. While the octopus simmered, they set some potatoes to boil. Then they thinly sliced and layered the octopus over the potatoes before drizzling a generous helping of extra-virgin olive oil and sprinkling with coarse salt—or, as Guifré preferred, smoked black salt—and both sweet and hot paprika.
“Done!” Taiye exclaimed, after she’d assembled her dish on a black slate plate.
Guifré looked over her dish and did his best to conceal a smile. “Pas mal,” he said, and went to inspect Bobby’s to the left.
“AW, MAN, YOU KILLED IT!” Bobby said, handing Taiye a small glass of gin and tonic with a bright green lime wedge fizzing at the bottom.
“Merci, merci,” Taiye said. “How did you guys find it?” she asked the table.
It was Friday evening, the end of their first practical exam. Taiye had loved it.
“I hate to be this person,” the Scottish girl said. Her name was Fiona, though Taiye had taken to referring to her, rather unkindly, as white-dreadlock-girl.
“Then don’t be!” one of the Americans, a boy named Evan, retorted. The table erupted in laughter.
“No, no, I must,” Fiona continued. “Octopus—wait, what’s the plural for octopus?”
“Octopi!”
“Yes, thank you. Octopi are actually quite brilliant.”
“You mean delicious?” Kaoru asked. Her belly had swelled well past her small breasts by then.
“No, like really intelligent.” Fiona said. “They recognize people, they open jars. Some organization in Ireland is trying to make it illegal to eat them.”
“But they’re so yummy,” the brown Austrian girl said. Her name was Johanna, she was seventeen, and her mother had reluctantly left her in Taiye and Kaoru’s care that evening.
“You know what’s also yummy?” Evan asked. He’d thrown back four beers within the first hour at the Cuban bar somewhere off Place de la Comédie in downtown Montpellier.
“What’s also yummy?” Johanna asked.
“Human flesh!”
“Ew, no!” another American, Tabitha, exclaimed.
“What?! It’s true. Cannibals call human flesh the ‘long pork.’”
“Why? Why would you tell us this?” Fiona asked in mock annoyance.
Evan shrugged. “I’d give it a try.”
“That’s because you’re disgusting,” Fiona said. “I need the loo.”
“Wait, I’ll come too,” Kaoru said. The two women waded through the crowded bar in search of the toilets.
Taiye felt responsible for ensuring that Johanna got home before midnight and Kaoru made it to her flat before exhaustion wiped her out, so she kept it to two drinks that evening. The group left the bar at a quarter after eleven and split up. Taiye, Kaoru, Bobby, and Johanna headed toward Kaoru’s neighbourhood, which was a short walk from the tram station, and the rest of the group went off to find more music. Taiye and Bobby walked Kaoru to her flat and took a tram with Johanna to the house her mother had rented for the summer. Then they walked the forty-five minutes to their neighbourhood.
The walk was mostly silent. To Taiye, Bobby seemed much drunker than she’d seen him before. She allowed it when he reached for her cold hand.
“Your hands are freezing, girl,” he said. “You cold?”
“A little,” Taiye said. “This seems like a dumb choice now.” She gestured at her white button-down. It was sheer silk, bought second-hand as a gift to herself a year prior. Underneath it, she wore denim shorts and a sports bra.
“You look beautiful.” Bobby took off his dark denim jacket and gave it to her. “Here, let me,” he said, and draped it over her shoulders.
“Thank you, but now you’ll be cold.”
“Nah, I’m good.”
They walked the rest of the way home in more silence.
When they arrived at Elodie and Guifré’s place, Taiye waved Bobby toward the kitchen. She switched on the pot lights above the shiny stainless-steel gas stove, filled a glass with water from the tap, and handed it to him.
“You know,” she whispered to keep from waking up their hosts, “you’re probably the most soulful boy I’ve ever met.”
Bobby gulped the water down and placed the glass on the counter. “Soulful?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“What does that even mean?” He stood closer to Taiye and took her hand again.
She let him kiss her hands, her voice shaking with uncertainty. “Like, I don’t know … soulful.”
Bobby leaned in and lightly touched his lips to hers. She didn’t move away, so he kissed her with more firmness and moved his hands to her waist. Still, she didn’t move away, but she didn’t kiss him back, either.
He stopped and looked at her. “No?” he asked, wincing as if in preparation for a blow to the face.
“I’m sorry Bobby, I …” Taiye inhaled sharply and looked away for a moment before settling her eyes back on his.
“No, no, it’s all good.” He pushed back the dark curls that framed his face. “I guess I just, ah … misread the situation?” He stepped back and took a seat at the counter. “I definitely thought you were into …”
“No, Bobby, I’m sorry.” Taiye struggled with the words. “You’re lovely, and I would probably want to kiss you if … but I’m gay … that’s all.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I’m totally into you, but just as a friend. It’s nice to feel close to someone.”
> Taiye realized the truth of her statement as the words came out of her mouth. It had been a long time since she’d felt close to anyone. She’d figured out fairly quickly that Bobby harboured feelings for her. She relished his attention and the intimacy that developed with their late-night conversations on the balcony.
“Okay,” Bobby said, looking at her. “Okay …”
“Yeah …”
Taiye took a seat next to him, and they rested in silence for a long while.
“So, you’re like full-on homo, huh?” Bobby said and gave her a playful nudge with his elbow. He put his hurt away quickly; he wanted to make it okay.
“Yeah.” Taiye chuckled softly. “Yeah, it’s like the first time I’ve said that out loud.”
“For real?”
“Yes.”
“Wow, okay. Well, I feel pretty special.” He flashed her an impish grin that was entirely at odds with the sadness of his eyes.
Upstairs he gave her a hug and said, “Well, good night.”
Taiye asked, “Bobby, would you like to have a platonic sleepover?”
“Right now?” he asked, eyebrows raised.
Taiye nodded. She didn’t want to sleep alone.
“All right, get in here.” He let her into his bedroom ahead of him.
Taiye undressed down to her sports bra and underwear. They held each other tight in the centre of his soft mattress. Taiye started to snore shortly after they climbed into bed. But Bobby never slept.
CLOSE TO THE END OF HER STAY IN MONTPELLIER, Taiye was eager to figure out the “gay thing,” as Bobby phrased it. So, on his suggestion, she began to make eyes at women she found attractive.
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