“It’s a fermented tea. The SCOBY is the mother.”
“I don’t think you understand how horrible that sounds. The mother?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s a yeast and bacteria culture that ferments the tea.” He laughed at my horror. “It’s good for your gut, like yogurt.”
“You drink this?” I asked, aghast, looking at the cloudy liquid in the jar.
“Yeah, it’s my roommate’s, but I do a batch here and there.”
He opened the fridge door and took out a cobalt-blue flip-top bottle. “This is mine. It’s blueberry basil.” He flicked open the top of the bottle with his thumb and handed it to me.
I sniffed: fruity and sour. “I don’t know about this.” I sipped tentatively. It was fizzy and sweet and tangy.
“Oh.”
“‘Oh’ good?” he asked.
“Well …” I took another sip. “I taste the basil. I don’t hate it.”
He took out another bottle. “Try this one. It’s peach, mint, and cardamom.”
He opened the bottle, and the contents rushed out in a frothy explosion, right in his face. “Tabarnak!” he swore, slamming the bottle down on the white tiled counter.
Wolfie pulled his T-shirt off to reveal a well-worn V-neck undershirt that was also wet. He had a swimmer’s body, lean and broad, with a belly that protruded noticeably past the bunched waistband of his red tracksuit bottoms. We had never shared such a small space before, and I struggled to seem unaffected.
“You did that on purpose, just so you could take off your shirt, didn’t you?” I teased.
He blushed deeply and tried to suppress a smile, but the rounded apples of his cheeks betrayed him. “And to what end, Kehinde?” he asked, eyebrows raised.
I shrugged. “Maybe you’re trying to charm me,” I said, in hopes that my nervousness would pass for cockiness.
“Is it working?”
“Maybe if I weren’t so hungry I’d be able to tell.”
“I can feed you.”
“Yeah? What do you have?”
Wolfie rummaged through the fridge again. “Kimchi, some sausages, and … smoked beets!”
He placed the items side by side on the counter: a large glass jar of kimchi, sausages wrapped in pink butcher’s paper, and a blue-lidded plastic tub filled with wedges of smoked golden beet.
“Let me guess, you made all of this yourself, yeah?”
He just laughed.
He took down a cast-iron skillet that hung from a hook by the window. With deft hands, he placed the pan on the gas stove, chopped up some onions, and threw them in with a hefty helping of coconut oil. I watched, dazed with sleep climbing into my eyes but the delicious aroma of sizzling onions keeping me awake. Wolfie sautéed thick slices of sausage, tossed in some beets, and seasoned the whole thing with salt and freshly ground pepper. He served it to me on a chipped china plate with a spoonful of kimchi on the side.
He ripped a half-eaten baguette into large chunks and handed one to me. “Eat up,” he said.
We ate in the kitchen. Me sitting on the counter, cradling the plate of food in my lap, him leaning against the refrigerator across the small room. He shovelled the sausage, fried onions, and kimchi medley into his mouth with a piece of bread. I made a sloppy sandwich, tearing my hunk of bread in half and filling it with the chunky mixture.
He’d made the kimchi himself and was very proud of it. He was close with Chef Luca, and they’d spent the summer experimenting with different preserves and fermentation. As for the sausages, his stepfather owned a small pig and poultry farm in Chateauguay Valley, just outside of Montreal, and he paid Wolfie in meat whenever he helped slaughter or butcher an animal. Wolfie had spent the weekends and holidays of his teen years working on that farm. After he turned nineteen, he moved away and worked at an abattoir for a little over a year. In his early twenties he moved to Montreal to apprentice in a butcher shop until the first woman he loved took their dog and left him. He decided that healing would only come through time and distance. Since he had zero control over time, he chose to move across the country to Vancouver. He stayed there for a while, found work, and took some part-time courses to get his Red Seal cook certification. Afterward, he spent a few years working in various resort kitchens in different parts of the Caribbean, but he moved back to his stepfather’s farm when his mother got sick.
The farm delivered meat to Milas, which was how Wolfie met Luca. And it was close enough that he got to see his mother a couple times a week.
We moved back to the living room to share the couch. I sat with my back against the arm of the sofa, my legs almost fully extended on the plush seat. Wolfie sat on the other end, and my toes grazed the fabric of his trousers. We passed a bottle of his home-brewed kombucha between us. With each exchange of the bottle, our bodies softened and escaped the rigidity that nerves bring when bodies want, badly, to touch. We drew closer to the centre of the sofa until my legs were well nestled in his lap, and his arm was draped around my shoulder. It all felt inexplicably familiar.
“How old are you, Wolfie?” I asked.
“I’m twenty-nine. Can I kiss you?”
I was surprised by his directness, but I liked it. Still, I continued to feign impassiveness. “Can asks if you are capable, may asks permission.”
“May I kiss you, Kehinde?” He offered a smile that faltered after only a moment.
I nodded. Practically on top of him, I didn’t understand why we weren’t kissing already.
He leaned in until I could feel the warmth of his breath on my face. “May I?” he asked again, and I pulled his scruffy face into mine. We kissed softly at first, gentle pecks that melded into something else at once intense and urgent and playful. He pulled me closer so that I was straddling him, and his hands ran up and down my back. He moved back, and we looked at each other for what felt like a long time.
“This is okay?” he finally said.
“Yes. Why did you wait so long?” I asked.
“Honestly, I wasn’t sure if you were into white guys. I didn’t want to make it awkward at work.”
“Well,” I said, “only the good ones. In fact,” I continued, “I don’t really date them. I just make out with them on the very first night that we have a full conversation.”
“Nooo.” He shook his legs so that I had to hold on to his shoulders to keep from tumbling off.
I laughed and laughed. “Okay, okay,” I said.
“For real, though.” He cupped the side of my face with his right hand, kissed my cheek, kissed my shoulder. “I want to see you more, like this, outside work.” He held his face close to me so that our noses touched. “Will you see me?”
I liked myself when I was with Wolfie.
Again, I nodded. “Yes.”
WOLFIE DIDN’T LOOK THAT BEAUTIFUL, BUT HE WAS. He was generous and kind. Moody when drunk, but other than that, his flaws were forgivable; I never had to do more than my fair share.
He wasn’t my first lover. That goes to a boy named Wale, the TA from my third-year conflict and development class. Wale was a Nigerian who had never been to Nigeria. He’d grown up in Toronto and was thrilled to know that I’d never been with anyone before him. We went out once, when I felt reckless and deserving of a wound. It hurt when he put himself inside me; otherwise, the sex was unremarkable.
Perhaps I fled my body out of habit. Later, in the shower, I scrubbed and scrubbed my skin raw. I suppose I wasn’t ready.
I think Wale intended to ghost me afterward, but I honestly felt indifferent toward him, and that seemed to pique his interest. I spent the remainder of the semester gently eschewing his advances. We became friends later.
Wolfie shaved his beard the first time we slept together, but the two incidents weren’t necessarily related. It was early November. I’d worked a ten-hour shift at Milas the night before and woken up barely five hours afterward to catch the bus to campus for an early class. Later in the afternoon, after three back-to-back courses, I tumbled into his bed, leaving my jeans and cardig
an in a rumpled pile on the floor.
Wolfie kissed my forehead and let me sleep. A few hours later, I awoke to the smell of fried plantains and, for a very brief moment, forgot where I was. I found myself at home in Lagos. Then I found my way to the kitchen and was startled by the clean-shaven man sautéing onions for sauce.
“Hey,” he said.
“No, who are you?” I joked, eyeing him suspiciously. “What did you do with my man?”
“Damn, I love that.” He smiled to reveal the dimples his beard had hidden.
“Love what?” I asked, still feigning suspicion.
“When you call me your man.”
“Well, you were, before you”—I waved my hand around my face—“transformed.”
“Aw, come on.” He put the wooden spoon down and reached for me. “Tell me you like it.”
I pulled a face and let myself be dragged into him. He smelled freshly showered, like the citrus body wash I’d left at his place just the week before. I held his newly shorn face between my palms, held his gaze for a long time, kissed the scar that ran from his lip to his right nostril, kissed both cheeks, the spots where his dimples formed. “You’re beautiful, my beautiful man.”
He yielded to me, to something in my voice. He said my name in this way. We kissed like a fervent prayer until we smelled the onions burning. Wolfie turned the stove off, and we went to the bedroom. He sat on the edge of his rumpled bed, and I stood before him. I stroked his hair as he unbuttoned my shirt to kiss my belly.
We had been naked together before; in fact, since our first kiss, we were naked countless times, but there was only so far I was willing to go. I’d told him about the bad thing, about Wale and the scrubbing. I wanted him just as much as he did me, but I was afraid that the memories of Uncle Ernest—which I’d shoved to the furthest corner of my mind—would spill out and touch my space with Wolfie, corrupt it.
They didn’t corrupt it. I mean, the memory reared its scaly head for a brief moment, but the hum in Wolfie’s throat as he kissed me, it brought me back before I could panic. I felt a sudden sharp pain and heavy pressure when he put himself inside me, and it was delicious, like relief from a deep longing I hadn’t realized was there until he filled me up. It took some time for our rhythms to sync, but the space between was playful.
“I don’t want you to think I’m just saying this because we fucked, Kehinde.”
“But …?”
“But I’m really into you.”
“That’s all right. It only happened because you shaved your face, so we’re both horrible shallow people.”
He laughed and his whole body shook; I had to move my head from its place on his quivering chest. “I suppose.”
He rolled onto his side so that his body was facing mine. I looked him up and down, and he blushed. He put his hands under the covers in which I’d wrapped myself, found my legs, and nudged them apart. He asked, “You okay?”
“Yes,” I answered, and then I guided his fingers inside me again.
“STAFF EXCURSION!” Luca shouted from the driver’s side of his black truck.
“Next week’s menu is all pork, all the way, so we’re getting a big ol’ piggy!”
“It’s only about a half hour away,” Genevieve said, as she hauled a bright red duffle bag into the back of the truck, “but we like to make a night of it, camp out on the farm, butcher and freeze the meat, get a little high.”
“High?” I asked.
“Yeah. No pressure, though.” She smiled.
“So we pick the pig and have it killed?” I asked.
“Have it killed?” Luca asked incredulously. “We kill it.”
Luca shot the massive pale-skinned creature right in the head. I wasn’t expecting that. I’d seen livestock slaughtered before—goats, rams, chickens, killed for Salah and Christmas. I thought he would slit its throat and let the blood drain out with a prayer, halal, like we do at home.
After Luca shot the pig, he and Wolfie strung it up and used a blowtorch to singe the translucent hairs covering the animal. The pig’s body shuddered when the flames touched it, and I felt my breakfast rise in my stomach. I looked away and clutched Genevieve’s arm. I almost cried when I asked her, “It’s still alive?”
“No, love.” She was sympathetic. “It’s just its nerves still reacting, but it’s dead, promise.”
AFTER THE BONFIRE HAD EATEN ITSELF DOWN TO GLOWING EMBERS, Wolfie and I kissed until the cold drove us into his tent. Inside the tiny space, his skin felt hot against mine. We undressed quickly and pressed against each other. He flexed his fingers inside me like he always did when we were naked together. We kissed sloppily and my toes curled, but quite suddenly, I remembered the pig.
The memory of the sound the rifle made when it slugged the bullet into the animal’s head reverberated in mine as though I’d just heard it. The way it hung from the hook, blood pouring out into the dirty plastic bucket, flashed again and again in my mind. The way that Wolfie handled its bloody, hideously lifeless body; the animal’s blood coated and dripped off his callused hands, thick like molasses, chunky, already coagulating.
The wetness that slicked my thighs was blood, pig’s blood! A small squeal escaped me, and I shoved Wolfie off me.
“Wha …?” he asked, his face flushed, confused.
I sat up and grabbed his hands to check for blood. There was nothing.
I touched myself and brought my fingers up to see. Nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had a scary thought.”
He leaned away from me, cautious and concerned. “What did you think?” he asked.
“I don’t know; I’m sorry.” I reached for him. “I just imagined there was pig’s blood on your hands.”
“My hands?” He held both of his hands up to show me: clean. “I washed them.”
“I know, I know.”
“It really bothered you, eh?”
“More than I thought, I guess.”
“Okay.” He looked at me for a long time before asking, “Can I touch you?”
I nodded, and he showed me his hands again, smiling. He was gentle. He touched my shoulders, my neck. He ran his hands through my thick braids. He kissed my temples, the tip of my nose, and said, “We could shower together.”
“Right now?”
“Yeah, there’s a guest washroom in the house.”
“Okay, yeah.”
“You can watch me wash my hands again,” he joked.
IT DIDN’T OCCUR TO ME THAT I MIGHT BE PREGNANT until the vomiting started. Most things I ate returned in vicious spurts. Everything at the restaurant smelled vile. Everything at Wolfie’s place smelled vile.
I didn’t want to be pregnant, and, true to form, Wolfie said he would do whatever I wanted.
I didn’t want to be pregnant, yet when I miscarried just a little after eleven weeks, I felt something more than clotted blood drain out of me. The cramps were horrendous, and the clinic visit to clear out what was left inside me was a cold, fluorescent blur. I felt this caustic shame that coloured everything; it was clear to me that the almost-baby knew that I didn’t want it, so it dissolved away.
Internally, I tripped on something—I tripped and landed a long way down a damp and lonely hole. So far down that Wolfie’s voice became a faint echo. His care seemed pointless. I seemed pointless. I’d never felt such a downward-pulling hollow inside myself before. I stopped taking shifts at Milas and genuinely wasn’t sure if I should take the semester off school. My sadness seemed melodramatic, but the consistency of classes gave me a reason to leave my room four times a week. I was shocked to learn later that it was my most successful semester.
I wanted Wolfie to go away because I wasn’t doing anything for him. I felt smothered by his affections. I felt like an empty vacuum, and I started to despise myself too much to let him look after me. I tried to break up with him, but he fought me on it. “Kehinde, please don’t do this, we can make it work …” he pleaded.
That just made me furious, a
nd I shouted at him often. After scouring self-help blogs online, Wolfie found testaments on journaling as a healing practice. He brought me an unlined brown leather-bound journal and suggested I write about my sadness. I started many sentences, but the writing was peeling me open and unearthing questions I didn’t want to think about, so I let my pen glide over the smooth pages in meaningless lines and loops. I doodled for what seemed like ages, page after page, in a soothing flow, emerging hours later feeling rested.
I started attempting to render objects in ink, simple still lifes of dirty plates, stacked books, fruit. Eventually, I grew more interested in drawing faces, so I looked through my things for family photographs. I was looking for a particular portrait of my father as a boy, the one with his hair picked out into a glorious Afro, a toothy smile stretched wide across his round face, the embroidered neckline of his dashiki peeking through, just barely in the frame. I found the photo, browned to sepia by time, and it struck me how much of Taiye’s face I saw in his.
There was another photo stuck behind the portrait, and I peeled them apart to find a photograph of our house, in the vivid colours of the late nineties. It was taken within two months of our father’s death and funeral, when our great-aunt Akuchi had us paint across our black gates and fences: THIS HOUSE IS NOT FOR SALE. BUYERS BEWARE. I overheard her say to Sister Bisi in rapid Yoruba, “We have to make sure Banji’s useless family don’t try and sell this house from under this poor woman’s nose.”
The “poor woman” was our mother. Distraught, she just sat in her room, alternating between wailing and silently rocking back and forth.
Sister Bisi took the picture of us: Taiye and me on either side of Aunty Akuchi. Miniature replicas of her in our matching orange and black ankara bubus. Smiling smugly at having graffitied our own house, faces shining with sweat. We stood by the lopsided words, brushes in hand, paint weeping down the corners of our freshly written warning.
Looking at that picture, I couldn’t pick out which one of the little girls I was. Both of them looked like Taiye. I chose to draw that picture, over and over again, until I could tell which one was me. I filled the journal with ink and pencil drawings. Then I attempted several renditions in cheap watercolours, then pastel crayons, then beeswax encaustics, then collage, then glass beads …
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