by Tope Folarin
* * *
My father changed jobs a few weeks later, and then he changed jobs again. We saw him even less than before, but he began to talk to us for long periods of time at random moments; sometimes after we’d finished our dinner, sometimes before he left for work, sometimes after he’d tucked us in.
“I have big dreams for both of you,” he’d say. “You guys are the only reason I am still in this country. I should have left a long time ago, because I don’t have any opportunities here. No one takes me seriously. But whenever I think of leaving I ask myself what the both of you would be like if you grew up in Nigeria. Here you can become leaders. I don’t know what would happen there.”
We always nodded, but I can’t say that I really understood what he was talking about. Nigeria, to me, to us, was merely a chorus of scratchy voices over the telephone, a collection of foods and customs that our friends had never heard of. It was a place where everyone was black, where our cousins spoke a language we couldn’t fully comprehend. Where our mother lived.
But somehow I knew that my father was right. And I was glad we were living in America. In Utah. I never wanted to be anywhere else.
After Dad tucked us in, Tayo and I would stay up and read to each other. We waited until we saw the thin patch of light beneath our door go dark, until we heard Dad’s soft snores rattling down the hallway. Then Tayo would reach under his bed, pull out our emergency flashlight, and walk over to the single, tall bookshelf on the other side of our room.
We had dozens of books. My father never bought us toys, and he always claimed that he was too broke to buy us new clothes, but somehow we each received at least three new books each month. Most of our books were nonfiction—short biographies, children’s encyclopedias, textbooks—because Dad was convinced that novels were for entertainment purposes only, and he always told us that we would have time for entertainment when we were old enough to make our own decisions. So Tayo and I would huddle in a single bed, his or mine, with a biography about George Washington, or a book about the invention of the telephone, and each of us would read a page and hand the flashlight over.
We eventually grew tired of these books, though, so we began to make up our own stories. Actually, Tayo made them up. Even though Tayo was younger than me, even though he looked up to me and followed me in every other part of our lives, he was a much better storyteller than I was. He was almost as good as Mom.
He always began:
“Once upon a time . . .”
“There was . . .”
“There was a large elephant with a long purple nose and polka-dot underwear . . .”
“That liked to run . . .”
“That liked to run all over the valleys and desert, and the elephant had many friends, giraffes and leopards, and a cranky orangutan that always wore a pair of bifocals like Dad’s . . .”
We’d continue in this manner, sometimes for an hour or more, until Tayo fell asleep. Then I’d pull the flashlight from his hands, place it back under his bed, and snuggle in next to him.
* * *
One Saturday morning, as Tayo and I were playing basketball on the concrete courts behind our apartment building, laughing, shouting, and leaping, Tayo stopped dribbling and looked up at me, his eyes shining, hopeful.
“Don’t you wish Mom would come back?” he asked.
I didn’t know what to say. I took my status as older brother seriously, and I knew that Tayo would probably mimic whatever I said. I wasn’t sure if it would be OK for me to tell the truth, or if I was supposed to say what Dad would say in this situation. I chose something in the middle.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“I do all the time,” Tayo said. “I want her to come back now.”
And a part of me agreed with him. I wanted her to come back, I wanted everything to be the way it had been before she got sick. Before she left us.
But the other part . . .
Looking back, I think I was open to the idea of a new mom because there was a part of me that was ready to consign my mother to memory. I wanted to install a false version of her in my mind. I wanted to forgive her by forgetting her cruelty, the pinching, the slapping, the screaming. I wanted to forgive her by forgetting her.
But now, Mom, I remember your hugs. They were warm and tight. When you wrapped your arms around me I always felt as if I was home. And your food was delicious. Even when you stopped cooking, even when you would only warm up a few pieces of frozen chicken in the oven and open up cans of beans and corn for dinner, your food tasted as if you’d spent hours preparing it.
And your smiles; I will always remember your smiles. They were rare and lovely, like priceless coins from an ancient kingdom.
* * *
Our new mom finally arrived in August of 1991, almost three years after our mother returned to Nigeria, and a few months after we moved from Bountiful to a small apartment in nearby Hartville. Tayo and I didn’t know who she was—Dad told us she was not the same woman he’d visited in Nigeria before. My father had flown back to Nigeria right after I completed second grade, and this time he dropped Tayo and me off with the foster family we’d stayed with once. They took us in without any questions, and Dad promised them he would be back in a month. When he returned—this time after only a couple weeks—he informed us that we had to prepare for the arrival of our new mother. We excitedly cleaned everything—our walls, our floors, our tables, our chairs—and asked him for more details about her. How does she look? “You’ll see,” he said, preparing our food as Sunny Ade sang sweetly to us from the living room. What does she do, we asked as we did our homework. “She’ll tell you,” he replied as he cleaned the stove. Will she love us, we asked as he tucked us in. “How couldn’t she?” he said before kissing each of us on the forehead and turning off the light. He gave us the same ambiguous responses each time we asked about her, and after a few weeks we stopped believing that she was even real. But on the day of her arrival he told us that we would have a new mother by the evening.
“She is a good woman,” he said. “Trust me.”
There were other questions I wanted to ask. Why did we need someone else? After all, we already had something special. After months of disorientation we had finally managed to fashion a new family from the wreckage of what had been before. I was beginning to understand that a family could be something more than a group of people who were supposed to stay together despite the pain they caused each other. My brother and I were living in a single-parent home, and our father was rarely around, but we were as happy as we had ever been.
Why did anything have to change? How did we know this would even work?
And what about our mother, our real mother? I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with all the love I had for her, pulsing inside me.
But then I remembered what my father had said when we’d asked about her before—that we had eyes at the front our heads for a reason. I suddenly understood what he meant: he wanted us to keep looking forward, no matter what, to keep moving, to overcome our pain by acting as if pain was something temporary and easily forgotten. He was my father, and I loved and trusted him, so I tried my best to heed his advice. I didn’t know how much anguish I would cause myself by doing this.
Much later I would come to understand that the only way my father had survived in the United States, in Utah, was by doing exactly this: staring ahead always, kicking the pain and heartache away. This was how he was able to survive the torment of living in a place that never fully comprehended his presence, that sometimes treated him as if he were someone who would never really matter. This was how he survived the loss of his wife to a disease that prevented her from remembering him, and his love for her, for more than a moment at a time. My father bore his burdens well; he was a walking, talking smile. But now, knowing what I know, and feeling as I do, I can only imagine what was actually happening inside. It makes me wonder how well I know him, if he is actually the person who raised me, who hugs me so warmly when I see him today.
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* * *
We drove to the airport in Salt Lake City that evening, and Dad told Tayo and me to wait in the car. After he’d walked a few feet he turned around and looked down at me in the passenger seat. “You’re going to have to move to the back,” he said, and I saw something like sadness glimmering from his eyes. I moved as quickly as I could, but he ignored the smile I flashed at him after I’d settled in the backseat. He stood there looking at Tayo and me for a few minutes, but even as he looked at us it seemed like he was staring at something far away, something we would never see no matter how long and hard we tried. Then he shook his head slowly and his eyes began to tear up. He turned around and walked away.
Twenty minutes later we saw Dad approaching with a tall woman beside him and a young child walking slightly in front of them. The woman was carrying another child.
Tayo and I stared at each other. We were shocked. Dad hadn’t mentioned anything about kids. When the woman arrived at my window she reached down from the sky and took my hand into hers. She stared deep into my eyes. Her eyes were large, brown, and oval. I saw something like love flickering faintly from them. She smiled. I smiled back.
“Hello,” she said. “It is wonderful to meet you.”
The two children scampered into the backseat with us. They were wearing clothes just like ours, T-shirts and whitewashed jeans. They didn’t acknowledge our presence. The older one looked sullenly ahead and the younger one tucked himself into a ball and began to suck his thumb. Dad settled into the driver’s seat and appraised us in the rearview mirror.
“How is my new family doing!” he boomed, and he started the car. As we drove out of the parking lot he slipped his right hand into the left hand of the woman.
* * *
Our New Mom seemed surprised when we arrived at our apartment. She placed her bags down at the threshold and looked left and right as if she was searching for something. She looked at Dad.
“Where . . .” she began, and then she walked over to the sink and grabbed a pair of bright yellow cleaning gloves from the middle of the drain board. She wiped her face with her forearm and pulled the gloves on. Then she reached into the cabinet, pulled out a bucket, and filled it with soap and water. We were all watching her as she placed the bucket on the floor and got on her hands and knees.
“Join me,” she said simply.
We were bewildered. The little one continued to suck his thumb. Dad looked deflated, as if her words had deprived him of air.
Now she scrubbed the floor with a sponge I’d never seen before, and my eyes opened to a different apartment. The floor resembled a painting I had once seen on television, on a show hosted by a man who violently attacked a blank canvas with vibrant colors, as if he were at war with it. When the host finished Dad scoffed at the finished product, those intersecting jagged lines of color. “That isn’t art,” he said. Our floor looked exactly the same. It wasn’t art. Our walls were even worse—handprints, bug corpses, the remains of bug corpses, stains of indeterminate origin—maybe it was art. A portrait of our poverty.
Tayo walked to the sink and retrieved another sponge, and he bent down to work. Soon the older one bent down too, and then I joined them. Only Dad and the little one stood together, and as I glanced up at them I noticed, for the first time, how similar they looked. Dad was short and thick, like the little one, and their faces held the same features in the same proportion. They were both frowning now, and Dad’s frown, spreading slowly over the lower half of his face, was a larger copy of the little one’s frown. Dad stared at us.
“Do we have to do this now? You just arrived! Change your clothes! Go take a shower! I have already prepared a meal for you. And we have already cleaned the house! We can clean some more in the morning!”
New Mom looked up.
“I will not be showering in this filthy apartment. Come and help us clean. Or if you are too tired you can go lie down and I will tell you when we are finished so we can eat together.”
She returned to her cleaning and the rest of us looked at Dad to see what he would do. He sheepishly reached over our heads for a rag and went to work on the walls.
We cleaned for about two hours, and at the end our apartment looked better. But not quite clean. I felt ashamed of our apartment for the first time, and I wondered how it appeared to my new brothers, fresh from their trip across the sea. New Mom rose to her feet and smiled broadly.
“Now we can eat,” she said, and she turned to the stove. She laughed when she saw what was inside the pots.
“Let me work on this for a moment. I will tell you when I’m finished,” she said.
The rest of us moved to the living room. A few minutes later I smelled the mingling aromas of tomatoes and onions and peppers. We sat there staring awkwardly at each other for half an hour until New Mom called for us.
There were six steaming plates of fufu and chicken stew on the table. We sat and my father asked us to hold hands. New Mom was sitting next to me, and she squeezed my hand every few seconds as Dad prayed. When he finished she winked at me. Then we dug in. The food was beautiful and good. We all smacked loudly, and then we all went to bed.
* * *
That night I felt the older one pressing his knees into my back as I tried to rock myself to sleep. At dinner Dad had informed Tayo and me that we would have to share our beds with our new brothers until he could afford to buy new beds. When we arrived at our bedroom the little one plopped onto the bottom bunk of the bunk bed I shared with Tayo, and when I tried to get in with him he began to scream. Dad and New Mom rushed in, and Dad shook his head after the little one pointed a miniature accusatory finger at me.
“You have already started trouble?” he said, and when I protested he yelled over me:
“They have just arrived after flying for godknowshowmany miles, and now you want to prevent them from sleeping? What is wrong with you?” I looked around to see who he was talking to. My father was still staring at me when I glanced at him once more. I was confused. My father had never spoken to me this way.
The little one fell asleep shortly after Dad and New Mom left, and Tayo crawled into bed with him. The little one turned around and hugged Tayo tight around the neck. I climbed up to the top bunk and the older one followed me. We soon began a war for space.
We traded subtle elbows and knee jabs until he fell asleep against my back. I tried, inch by inch, to push him out of the bed, but I became tired myself, and I fell asleep too.
* * *
New Mom woke me up the following morning and I saw her face up close for the first time. She had large, open, even features. Her wide nose was framed by ample cheeks, and her hairline was beginning to leak into the top part of her forehead. I woke up my brother and stepbrothers, and we all sat around the dining table and introduced ourselves to each other. I learned that the little one was called Ade, and the older one was called Femi. Femi resembled his mother more than Ade, but they both had her nose and small ears, and when they smiled it was hard to tell them apart. For some reason I was surprised that they spoke English so well. Dad must have been listening in on my thoughts because he looked over at me and said,
“Yes, they are very smart! You know that in Nigeria the early school system is much better than it is here. Both of them will probably end up skipping some grades. They may be smarter than you!”
At this he laughed and New Mom looked down with embarrassed pride. I scowled at the table.
Our first few days together were consumed with the business of becoming a family. We threw out countless articles of clothing and various knickknacks. We went to the department store and purchased new drapes, sheets, and comforters. New Mom threw out all of our pots. By the evening she had us cleaning again, and by the following morning we started to become more comfortable with one another. Mom came up with nicknames for Tayo and I—she called me “thick eyes” because of my glasses, and she called Tayo “handsome.”
GRANDMA + TUNDE
“Hello, Grandma.”
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br /> “Who is this?”
“It’s Tunde.”
“Tunde! How are you? What time is it over there?”
“It’s about six.”
“It is almost 2 AM here.”
“Oh! I’m so sorry, ma! I will call back—”
“Nonsense. Is something wrong?”
“No. I just have a question to ask you.”
“Does your daddy know that you are calling?”
“No.”
“Do you know how expensive it is to call Nigeria?”
“Yes, ma.”
“OK, ask me quickly so you won’t get in trouble.”
“OK. I’m just wondering how Mom is doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is she OK? Can she talk?”
“She is asleep right now.”
“Can you wake her up?”
“No. She does not get much rest these days. Anytime that she falls asleep is a blessing.”
“Is she doing better?”
“We thank God. Every day she is getting stronger.”
“When can I talk with her?”
“I don’t know. You should ask your father.”
“OK.”
“How is the weather over there?”
“It’s really warm. It’s been like ninety degrees all week.”
“Ninety? Ah, ah! How is that possible?”
“That’s actually normal for the summer.”
“Ninety is normal? What are you saying? How are you still alive if ninety is normal?”
“It actually gets hotter by the middle of the summer.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“Grandma, I’m serious! It gets really hot here.”
“Ah, you have reminded me. In America you use crazy numbers for temperatures. What is the name of the system? Here it is centigrade.”