All about Skin (7 page)

She insisted I use them too. With Movate, patches formed all over my skin, dark and light patches, like shadows on a wall. She insisted I stop. People would know, she said. Those dark knuckles and kneecaps and eyelids. People would surely know. We tried Esoterica next. A six-month regimen. Three times a day. No progress at all. Skin Success was no success. Same with Ambi. “Not to worry,” Mama said. “They're always coming up with new products in America. Soon enough we'll find something that works.”

We must have been on Ambi the day Ekaite walked in on us—into my bedroom, not thinking that I was there. I should have been at school. She was carrying a pile of my clothes, washed and dried and folded for me.

Ekaite looked at the containers of creams on my bed.

Mama chuckled uncomfortably. “
Oya ga-wa
,” she said. Well, go ahead.

Ekaite walked to my dresser. The drawers slid open and closed. Empty-handed now, she walked back toward the door.

Mama chuckled again and said, “Uzoamaka here will soon be fair like you.”

Ekaite nodded. “Yes, Ma.” There was a confused look on her face, as if she were wondering at the statement.

Mama cleared her throat. “Fair like me, too.”

Ekaite nodded again. Then she turned to Mama. “
Odi kwa mma otu odi
.” She's fine the way she is.

Mama shook her head. “
Oya ga-wa! Osiso, osiso
.”

The door clicked closed.

I tell Mama that I'm not feeling well. An upset stomach. I excuse myself from the table before Mama has a chance to respond.

I carry my dishes into the kitchen, where Eno is waiting for me. Ekaite sits on a stool close to the floor. I feel her eyes on me and on Eno.

Inside the bathroom, the air is humid and smells clean, purified, a chemical kind of freshness. There is no lock on the door, but we make sure to close it behind us.

Eno holds the towel and stands back, but I call her to me, because I am again finding myself skeptical of the water and of the bleach. In my imagination, I see Clara's suspicious eyes, and I hear Boma's disbelieving laugh. Fear catches me, and I think perhaps we should not bother, perhaps we should just pour everything out. But then I hear Mama's voice, saying, “Foolish Eno. Dummy Eno.” I take the towel from Eno. “You should go first,” I say. It is a deceitful reason that I give, but it is also true: “Because you're not supposed to be here. That way you'll be already done by the time anyone comes to chase you out.”

Eno nods. She concedes straight away.

She gets on her knees, bends her body over the wall of the bathtub so that her upper half hangs horizontally above the tub, so that her face is just above the bucket.

“We'll do only the face today,” I say. “Dip it in until you feel something like a tingle.” She dips her face into the water. She stays that way for some time, holding her breath. Even if I'm not the one with my face submerged, it is hard for me to breathe. So much anticipation.

Eno lifts up her face. “My back is starting to ache, and I don't feel anything.”

“You have to do it for longer,” I say. “Stand up, stretch your back. But you have to try to stay longer.”

Eno stands up. She lifts her hands above her head in a stretch. She gets back down on her knees, places her face into the bucket again.

“Only get up when you feel the tingling,” I say.

Time passes.

“Do you feel it yet?”

The back of Eno's head moves from side to side, a shake with her face still in the water.

More time passes.

“Not yet?”

The back of Eno's head moves again from side to side.

“Okay. Come up.”

She lifts her face from the water first. She stands up. The color of her skin seems softer to the eyes, just a little lighter than before. I smile at her. “It's working,” I say. “But we need to go full force.”

“Okay,” she says. “Good.” She watches as I pour the liquid from the bucket into the tub. We both watch as the water drains; we listen as it gurgles down the pipe. I take the bucket out of the tub, place it in a corner of the bathroom by the sink. The bath bowl is sitting in the sink. I pick it up, hold it above the tub, pour the bleach straight into it. I get down on my knees, call Eno to my side, tell her to place her face into the bowl. She does.

Only a little time passes, and then she screams, and her scream billows in the bathroom, fills up every tiny bit of the room, and I am dizzy with claustrophobia. Then there is the thud and splash of the bowl in the tub, then there is the thud of the door slamming into the wall. Ekaite rushes toward us, sees that it is Eno who is in pain. She reaches her hands out to Eno, holds Eno's face in her palms. Eno screams, twists her face. Her cheeks contort as if she is sucking in air. She screams and screams. I feel the pain in my own face. Ekaite looks as if she feels it too, and for a moment I think I see tears forming in her eyes. Papa looms in the doorway, then enters the bathroom. He looks fiercely at me. He asks, “What did you do to her? What did you do?” In the doorway, I see Mama just watching, her eyes flicking this way and that.

“What did you do?” Papa asks again. I turn to him, pleading, wanting desperately to make my case, but I don't find the words. I turn to Mama. I beg her to explain. She looks blankly at me, a little confusion in her eyes. I stand in the middle of them, frozen with something like fear, something not quite guilt.

By then, even Emmanuel has made his way into the house, abandoning his post at the gate. He stands just behind Mama, and his peering eyes seem to ask me that same question:
What did you do?

My legs feel weak. I turn to Eno, I smile at her. I think of Mama with her yellow skin, with her creams. “Don't worry,” I say. “We'll find something that works.” Eno screams.

They leave the bathroom quickly then, all of them, Ekaite and Papa leading Eno. The door crashes closed behind them, their voices becoming increasingly distant, still frenzied. I blink my eyes as if to blink myself awake.

Days later, when the scabs start to form, I imagine peeling them off like the hard shell of the velvet tamarind. Eno's flesh underneath the scabs is a pinkish-yellow like the tamarind pulp, only a little like a ripe pawpaw peel. And even if I know that this scabby fairness of hers is borne of injury, a temporary fairness of skinless flesh, patchy, and ugly in its patchiness, I think how close she has come to having skin like Onyechi's, and I feel something like envy in me, because what she has wound up with is fairness after all, fairness, if only for a while.

ZZ Packer

Y
ou know what I mean? I was nineteen and crazy back then. I'd met this guy with this really Jewish name: Gideon. He had hair like an Afro wig and a nervous smile that kept unfolding quickly, like someone making origami. He was one of those white guys who had a thing for black women, but he'd apparently been too afraid to ask out anyone, until he met me.

That one day, when it all began to unravel, Gideon was working on his dissertation, which meant he was in cutoffs in bed with me, the fan whirring over us while he was getting political about something or other. He was always getting political, even though his PhD had nothing to do with politics and was called something like “Temporal Modes of Discourse and Ekphrasis in Elizabethan Poetry.” Even he didn't like his dissertation. He was always opening some musty book, reading it for a while, then closing it and saying, “You know what's wrong with these Fascist corporations?” No matter how you responded, you'd always be wrong because he'd say, “Exactly!” then go on to tell you his theory, which had nothing to do with anything you'd just said.

I don't know when I'd begun hearing when he went on that way as “
something something something something something
,” but one day, he was philosophizing, per usual, getting all worked up with nervous energy while feeding our crickets. “And
you
,” he said, unscrewing a cricket jar, looking at the cricket but speaking to me, “you think the neo-industrial complex doesn't pertain to you, but it does, because by tacitly participating in the
something something something something something
you're engaging in
something something something something something
and the commodification of workers who
something something something something something
therefore allowing the neo-Reaganites
something something something something something
but you can't escape the dialectic.”

His thing that summer was crickets, I don't know why. Maybe it was something about the way they formed an orchestra at night. All around our bed with the sky too hot and the torn screen windows, all you could hear were those damn crickets, moving their muscular little thighs and wings to make music. He would stick his nose out the window and smell the air. Sometimes he would go out barefoot with a flashlight and try to catch a cricket. If he was successful, he'd put it in one of those little jars—jars that once held gourmet items like tapenade and aioli. Before, I'd never heard of these things before, but with Gideon, I'd find myself eating tapenade on fancy stale bread one night, and the next night we'd rinse out the jar and voilà, a cricket would be living in it.

Whenever he'd come back to bed from gathering crickets, he'd try to wedge his cold, skinny body around my fetal position. “Come closer,” he'd say. And I'd want to and then again I wouldn't want to. He always smelled different after being outside. Like a farm animal or watercress. Plus he had a ton of callouses.

Sometimes I'd stare in the mid-darkness at how white he was. If I pressed his skin, he'd bruise deep fuchsia and you'd be able to see it even in the dark. He was very white compared to me. He was so white it was freaky, sometimes. Other times it was kind of cool and beautiful, how his skin would glow against mine, how our bodies together looked like art.

Well that one day—after he'd railed against the Federal Reserve Board, NAFTA, the gun lobby, and the existence of decaf—we fed the crickets and went to bed. When I say went to bed, I mean we “made love.” I used to call it sex, but Gideon said sex could be commodified. Making love—which if done right could be “tantric”—was all about the mind. One time, in a position that would have been beautiful art but he would have called “art for the masses,” he said, “Look at me. Really look at me.”

I didn't like looking at people when I did it, like those tribes afraid part of their soul will peel away if someone takes a picture of them. When Gideon and I did lock eyes, I must admit, it felt different. Like we were—for a moment—part of the same picture.

That night, we did it again. I couldn't say for sure if the condom broke or not, but it all felt weird, and Gideon said, “The whole condom-breaking-thing is a myth.” But we looked at it under the light, the condom looking all dead and slimy, and finally he threw the thing across the room, where it stuck to the wall like a slug, then fell. “Fucking
Life
styles
! Who the hell buys fucking
Lifestyles
?”

“They're free at the clinic,” I said. “What do you want, organic condoms?” We looked it over again but that didn't stop it from being broke. Then Gideon made a look that just about sent me over the edge.

I had to think. I went in the bathroom and sat on the toilet. I'd done everything right. I hadn't gotten pregnant or done drugs or hurt anybody. I had a little life, working at Pita Delicious, serving up burgers and falafel. Almost everything else there was Pine-Sol flavored, but the falafel was always amazing.

It was at Pita Delicious where I first met Gideon with his bobbing nose tip and Afro-Jewish hair. The Syrian guys who owned the place always made me go and talk to him, because they didn't like him. The first couple of times he came in he'd tried talking to them about the Middle East and the Palestinians and whatnot. Even though he was on their side, they still hated him. “Talk to the Jew,” they said, whenever he came in. Soon we were eating falafels on my break with Gideon helping me plot out how I was going to go back to school, which was just a figure of speech because I hadn't entered school in the first place.

When I came back to bed, Gideon was splayed out on top of the blanket, slices of moonlight on his bony body. “All right,” he said. “Let's get a pregnancy test.”

“Don't you know anything?” I tried to sound as calm and as condescending as possible. “It's not going to work, like,
immediately
.”

He made a weird face, and asked, “Is this the voice of experience talking?”

I glared at him. “Everyone knows that it's your first missed period.”

He mouthed
Okay
, real slow. Like I was the crazy one.

When my period went AWOL, I took the pregnancy test in the bathroom at Pita Delicious. I don't know why. I guess I didn't want Gideon hovering over me. I didn't even tell him when I was going to do it. One blue stripe. Negative. I should have been relieved, relieved to have my lame life back, but the surprising thing was that I wasn't. Then I did something I never thought I'd do, something unlike anything I've ever done before: it was really simple to get a blue marker, and take off the plastic cover and draw another little stripe across to form a blue “plus” sign.
A plus
, the test said,
means you're pregnant
.

When I got back home, I'd told him the test was positive, and flicked it into his lap. I told him that I didn't know what I was going to do—what
we
were going to do. He paced in front of the crickets for a while. Then he tried to hide his shock and disappointment, then tried hiding his attempt to hide his shock and disappointment, then his attempt to hide his attempt to hide his shock and disappointment, and put his arm around me, hugged me with deep breaths, as if he'd finished a chapter in Stanislawski, and was method-acting condolences: how one musters up courage from deep within, how to enact compassion.