She stares at the water, eyes blurry for seeing things clearly, unsure what to do or think next. (If she hears it the first time, her name doesn’t register.) She lights another cigarette. She smokes this one slowly. The sun beating down on her shoulders and back is a comfort of sorts, a reminder of skin, a reminder of pain in a different dimension, outside of her body, outside of this grief. She lies on her back in the sand, which is damper than she realized sitting upright, a welcome surprise. She stretches her toes in the direction of the waves, but the tide doesn’t wash in this high at this hour. And is lying there, smoking, her locks full of sand, when she hears it again.
Someone calling her name.
• • •
“Taiwo,” and again from a distance, insistent. “
Tai
-wo!”
She props herself up.
Sees her mother.
Fola, as if conjured, calling, “Darling!” Coming toward her. The little boys pointing, informants, behind her. Fola, out of nowhere, storming frantically toward her, white linen pants billowing, gesturing. (All but the torches.) “Kehinde said you went to the bathroom, but I looked there. The driver said he saw you walking here toward the beach. What happened, my darling?” she’s saying, coming closer. “Did you get hurt? Can you stand?” She reaches Taiwo, and kneels.
Perhaps it is the proximity that overwhelms Taiwo, having Fola so close after all of these years? Something. She snaps, leaping up, startling Fola, who stands, reeling backward. “DID I GET
HURT
?!” Taiwo screams. Almost as if a thread that’s been dangling gets pulled on, or catches on something, the whole thing unraveling. She is laughing and crying and screaming, “What
happened
? Mom, what did you
think
was going to happen to us?” And then, because Fola looks utterly baffled, Taiwo sneers, “I’ll tell you what happened, sure, fine.” Though she promised she wouldn’t and hasn’t for years, though she never once imagined the moment like this (empty beach in the daytime, young boys standing, staring), she tells, without pausing, how it happened, how it started:
• • •
how they shared the second bedroom, the one given Kehinde, with the creaky twin beds because hers was too big and too cold with the air conditioner, which she couldn’t turn off (it was too high to reach), whereas his didn’t work. That first night she came to his door in her nightdress. “Can I sleep here, Kehinde?” Her brother said yes.
At first she took the one bed and Kehinde the other, but his room was too hot not to sleep by the window, so after a week they just shared, head to foot, like sardines in a can, sheets thrown off to the breeze. After two, she stopped sneaking to her room before sunrise, afraid that Uncle Femi would discover and scold them; they’d seen him only twice since they’d arrived in Nigeria, at the elaborate Sunday lunches he threw for his friends. The rest of the time he was virtually absent, locked away at the top of the four-floor apartment, accessible only by an elevator that required a code, which the twins didn’t have, so an invisible world. They could hear their uncle’s guests always coming and going, riding up, riding down, music playing, all hours, the raucous parties on Saturdays, women laughing, glasses smashing, muffled shouting, Niké complaining—but they never went up.
They lived on the second floor like two (wealthy) orphans in the care of Uncle Femi’s large all-male staff. The houseboys would wake them and set out their uniforms. The cooks served their meals. The drivers took them to school. They’d spend the whole day there, returning for dinner. They ate by themselves, did their work, went to bed. Sardines in a can, by the window for breeze, telling stories about Boston, most involving the snow, as if by remembering the cold they might actually
feel
it, and lessen the pressure of the humidity somehow. Auntie Niké would appear in the evenings after dinner to reiterate the rules about the use of the elevator, to see that they hadn’t dropped dead in the daytime, to complain about Femi, then ride back upstairs. They didn’t make friends at the American International School, where their peers thought them arrogant on account of their looks. So mostly stuck to each other, eating, sleeping, doing schoolwork, watching television, playing cassette tapes, swimming, riding in cars.
When they spoke to her, Fola, on the phone at the weekends (the one call allotted them, five minutes each), they said they were “happy” so she wouldn’t be worried. They weren’t sad in the beginning. They were simply alone. They knew there was something not right in the apartment—different people always coming in and out at all hours, speaking Yoruba and Arabic and English and pidgin; on weekends they could see them, from the bedroom, by the pool; they saw the girls prancing in leopard-print dresses and heavy fur jackets and stilettos and wigs, and the fat men beside them, and young men in batches, all slender and handsome with dark, hungry eyes—but they didn’t ask questions. It didn’t seem worth it. They did what they were told to and kept to themselves. Three months, then six, and then nine in this fashion. With the summer arriving suddenly with cool, drier air, then the end of the school year, a change in the program, an emptiness appearing in the middle of their days.
How things changed:
that one morning. Auntie Niké, without warning. Appearing in the kitchen as they sat down to eat. It was the first time they’d seen her in the morning, out of costume, without face paint or wig, a silk scarf on her head. Taiwo happened to glance up from her Weetabix and saw her, and choked on her milk with dismay at the sight.
The woman looked like a ghost. With her beige-grayish skin and her small vacant eyes, a white sheet in her hand. A ghost laughing. “Surprised to see me,
ehn
? You think we don’t live here? You think you can do as you please in this house?” She was laughing very softly as she liked to, when angry, and jabbing her finger like the tongue of a snake. They’d observed this performance on a number of occasions when Niké stood berating the houseboys outside: the measured opening (soft laughter or whispered derision), one finger thrust forward on salient points, the slow build to full volume, with rhetorical questions (“you think we don’t live here?”), the use of “my friend,” then the climax, the screaming, the invocation of the Bible, the melodramatic finale, Shakespearean in tone. Always ranting about honor and justice and such, before beating the houseboys, a violent to-do. To Taiwo’s mind, Nigerians seemed to
like
being angry, to derive pleasure from conflict, some physical thrill; she would watch them in the marketplace, at school, the way they carried on, their eyes alive with pleasure as they screamed and tore their hair. It was hard to take seriously. She was listening to Auntie Niké but absently, carefully mashing down her Weetabix in milk. It was only when the woman started shouting, “It’s disgusting!” that she looked up from the cereal.
“It’s
disgusting
what you’ve done!” In a single dramatic gesture Niké shook out the bedsheet, a white fitted sheet with a small reddish stain. Taiwo and Kehinde both stared in confusion. Niké continued, shouting, “I know what you’ve done! The houseboys have told me that you sleep in one bedroom, and now we can see what you do in there,
ehn
?” She pointed at Kehinde, eyes slit. “She’s your
sister
. Your very own twin. You are a sinner, my friend.”
Kehinde sat blinking with shock. “I-I-I’m sorry?”
A question, not an apology, but Niké raged on, “It’s a sin what you’ve done,
ehn
? ‘I’m sorry’ isn’t good enough! You tell me what happened. You tell me right now.”
“We don’t understand, Auntie,” said Taiwo very calmly, though it was beginning now to dawn on her, what had happened with this sheet: not a week ago she’d woken up bleeding, just a little bit; her first period, she knew, from sex ed class last year. She’d informed the youngest houseboy, Babatunde, the nicest, who’d returned hours later with tampons and pads, a huge bag, unceremoniously. Had thus “become a woman.” That was the phrase that their teacher had used. Becoming a woman. Taiwo didn’t feel womanly. She felt irritable and uncomfortable (perhaps how womanhood felt?). Now here was Niké with this sheet with this bloodstain, which Taiwo hadn’t noticed at the time, fair enough. Easy to explain that she’d gotten her period. Harder to explain why they slept in one bed. Heretofore it hadn’t seemed odd, much less “disgusting,” but now as she started to speak, she had doubts.
Two memories returned, the one faint in its details, a bit like a dream recollected at dusk: of some morning, one of many she had woken beside Kehinde, a month ago, longer, maybe months, she didn’t know. All she remembered was waking from dreaming, very early, before sunrise, eyes blurred, still half-sleeping, and feeling something firm against the back of one thigh as she rolled from her back to her side, away from Kehinde. Eyes closed, barely conscious, she thought
it’s his foot
and reached down, mumbling, “Move, man,” to push it away. The feel of the erection in her palm was so foreign—so hard and so warm, yet so fleshy, so soft—that she didn’t for a moment fully process what she was holding. Her brother stirred, snoring. Alarmed, she let go. She lay there beside him, eyes open, heart pounding, afraid for some reason, of what she didn’t know. Maybe she thought she was dreaming, had dreamed it? She fell back asleep. Only remembered it now.
And the other, not a memory. A habit. “Disgusting.” The thing she started doing when they got out of school, when they started spending days in the apartment, lazy hours, floating idly in the swimming pool or watching cartoons. The one day she’d come from the pool to the bedroom to shower and change, leaving Kehinde afloat. She’d pulled off her bathing suit and was looking for a towel when she found the one book she had brought here from home. A massive encyclopedia of gods and mythology, a gift from their father the Christmas before. She’d become obsessed with the Muses that winter in Classics; he’d inserted a leather bookmark at the chapter on Calliope. Some conspiratorial houseboy had placed the large volume in the last dresser drawer where they hid stolen snacks. There with the three-packs of biscuits and towels was the book she’d assumed to be stolen or lost. Delighted to find it, she’d flopped down at once on the bed that she shared with her brother to read. And was lying there naked with her stomach on a pillow when she flipped to an illustration of “The Rape of Persephone,” a pink-fleshy picture of plump-breasted girls in a meadow of flowers with the accompanying text:
Persephone was gathering flowers in a meadow with her companions Artemis and Athena. There she was attracted to an exceptionally beautiful narcissus with one hundred blossoms. When she reached out to pick it, the ground split open and from deep within the earth, Hades came forth in a golden chariot pulled by black horses. He raped Persephone and took her to the underworld. She screamed for help from her father Zeus but he gave her no help.
Demeter also heard Persephone’s cries and rushed to find her. Carrying burning torches, she searched for nine days and nine nights over land and sea for her abducted daughter. She never stopped to eat, sleep or bathe in her frantic search. On the tenth day Helios, God of the Sun, told Demeter that Hades had kidnapped Persephone. Furthermore, he said that the abduction and rape of Persephone had been sanctioned by Zeus.
Standard fare. What came as a surprise was what she felt as she read, staring repeatedly at the image of Hades’s hand on the breast: a tingling pressure between her legs where the sheet was bunched up, which grew stronger and sharper until she peed on herself. She leapt up, alarmed and embarrassed, shut the book. She stared at the sheets, first ashamed, then confused. There was no spreading wet spot from where she had urinated. She patted her thighs, also dry. She hadn’t peed. Squinting at the sheet, she saw the little damp spot and the liquid, almost slimy, like a drop of egg white. This is what had come from her body, not urine. She wiped it away with the towel, and showered.
But began to do this daily, after swimming, before showering: ritually peeling off her suit, then to bed with the book, always the one-page description of the Rape of Persephone, with the sheets in a ball between her legs as before, always squeezing her thighs, always listening for Kehinde, always losing her breath when the egg white slipped out. And now wondering—mashing Weetabix, Niké repeating, “It’s disgusting!”—why it pleasured her to do this, did she want him to walk in? She knew she wouldn’t hear him if he slipped up to their doorway in the pointy-toed ninja red leather babouches. He was Kehinde. He could do that. Appear without warning. And still she would lie there, nude, wet, while he swam.
She put down her spoon, feeling heat in her fingers. Kehinde turned to look at her, chewing his lip. Whatever she was sensing was apparent in his expression. Niké chortled, “
Look
at him!” Suspicions confirmed. “There are other stains, too,” she sneered, holding up the sheet again. “You think I don’t know what these white splotches are?”
Kehinde was staring at Taiwo. “What is it?” It was a question for his twin, who was looking away.
Assuming he was mocking her, Niké dropped the sheet and slapped Kehinde so hard that he fell from his chair. Before she could stop herself, Taiwo leapt up and pushed the woman, just once, screaming, “Leave him alone!” But Niké lost her balance, reeling backward in her slippers, fluffy, pom-pom–bearing slippers, landing splayed on her back. The dressing gown, parting, exposed her fat thighs to the houseboy who, entering, dropped his glass tray. Taiwo grabbed Kehinde and pulled him toward her, suddenly aware of their vulnerability, their defenselessness here. Something had broken. The casing around them. The distance between fourth floor and second had closed.
How Niké started screaming:
bloody murder. A madwoman. How she dragged them to the elevator and up to the lounge where they’d come on arrival, last seen in late August, that mishmash of marble and zebra and velour. Their uncle was reclining in his underwear and a bathrobe, Babatunde the little houseboy cutting a line on the table. Uncle Femi stroked the back of his neck as he worked, almost idly, as one strokes a pet at one’s side. Two older boys, teens, were standing guard at the doorway, in white sailor uniforms, like costumes from a play. But with guns. Slender rifles, which they clutched to their chests, neither moving nor speaking as Niké stormed in.