She was frightened for reasons she couldn’t explain, by a sense beyond reason but clear all the same: that something was about to go horribly wrong if it hadn’t already, that something had changed. Most of this was her inexplicably keen intuition (along with middle insomnia, undiagnosed at age twelve). But it came without thought, a feeling completely without narrative. An opening up.
Something had opened somewhere.
The fact of her father here slumped in the moonlight meant something was possible that she hadn’t perceived: that he was vulnerable. And that if
he
was—their solid wooden father—then that she was, they all were, and worse, might not know. He had hidden the soles of his feet her whole life, for twelve years; he could hide (anyone could hide) anything else. And finally, that he’d tried, that he had a thing to hide, meant her father felt shame. Which was unbearable somehow.
She rested her head on the stool by his feet. Whispered, “Daddy,” touched him lightly. He continued to snore. “Wake up,” she persisted. “Wake
up
.” But he didn’t. She noticed the slippers by her knees on the rug.
As gently as possible and as silently as she could, she slipped one of the slippers onto one of his feet. It dangled like a shoe on a shoe tree. Then the other. At the very least the bruises were hidden from view.
“No,” he said, barely.
Taiwo leapt up in panic, taking a single bound back from the window and moon into the depth of the dark where, concealed by the shadow, she closed her eyes, waiting for yelling. It didn’t come. He made another noise, a wet, fast-asleep noise, murmured “no” again, softly, then silence. Then snoring. She opened her eyes and stepped forward, still fearful. His head was now upright. He was talking in his sleep.
“It was too late,” he said, just as perfectly clearly as if he knew she was standing there watching him speak. But didn’t smile in his sleep as Kehinde would have at this juncture. His head slumped back over.
She ran for the stairs.
• • •
For all the years after, when Taiwo thinks of her father, when the thought slips in slyly through that crack in the wall—and the picture of him dead in a garden slips with it, his soles purpled, naked, for anyone to see—she’ll ask herself hopelessly, “Where were his slippers?” and as she did when she was twelve, she’ll start to cry.
9.
Where are his slippers?
In the bedroom.
He considers.
His second wife Ama is asleep in that room, plum-brown lips slipped apart, the plump inside-pink showing, and he doesn’t want to wake her. A wonder the change.
Quite apart from the performances for himself and his cameraman, there is this new and genuine desire to
accommodate his wife. It’s as if he’s a different (kinder) man in this marriage, which that Other Woman would argue is not his second but his third. That Other Woman is lying and the both of them know it: they were never close to married (though she’d lived in his house. He’d been desperate for warmth, for the weight of a body, the smell of perfume, even cheap Jean Naté. The thing had gone bust when she’d broken her promise to leave the apartment that morning in May, so as not to see Olu, who’d come for his birthday at last and who left at the first sight of June). With Ama, whom he married in a simple village ceremony, her incredulous extended-family members watching, mouths agape, he is gentle in a way that he wasn’t with Fola. Not that he was brutish with Fola. But this is different.
For instance.
If he raises his voice and Ama flinches, he stops shouting. Without pause. Like a light switch. She flinches, he stops. Or if she passes by his study door and coughs, he looks up; no matter what he’s doing, what he’s reading, Ama coughs, he stops. His children used to do the same, intentionally, just to test him, to weigh his devotion to his profession against his devotion to them. By then he’d moved the sextet to that massive house in Brookline, a veritable palace, although his study door, an original, didn’t close. They’d loiter in the hall outside the half-open door, giggling softly, whispering loudly to attract his attention, then peer in to see if he’d look up from reading his peer-reviewed journal, which he wouldn’t, to teach them. It was a logically flawed experiment. He’d have told them if they’d asked. His devotion to his profession kept a roof over their heads. It wasn’t comparative, a contest, either/or, job v. family. That was specious American logic, dramatic, “married to a job.” How? The hours he worked were an
expression
of his affection, in direct proportion to his commitment to keeping them well: well educated, well traveled, well regarded by other adults. Well fed. What he wanted, and what he wasn’t, as a child.
When Ama loiters noisily—and she is testing him also, Kweku knows—he marks his sentence and lowers his book. He gestures that she enter and asks if she’s all right. She always says yes. She is always all right. And if they’re riding in the Land Cruiser and she shivers even a little, he orders Kofi, who’s started driving, to turn off the A/C (though he can’t stand the humidity, never could, even in the village; they used to mock him, call him
obroni
, albeit for other reasons, too). And if he’s watching CNN when she comes padding into the Living Wing in pink furry slippers, pink sponge rollers in her hair, he switches the channel instantly to the mind-numbing cacophony of the Nollywood movies that he hates and she loves.
And so forth: attends church (though he can’t stand the hoopla), buys scented Fa soap (though he can’t stand the smell), instructs Kofi to make the stew to her exact specifications (though he can’t stand the heat, weeps to eat it that hot). He wants her to be satisfied. He wants this because she can be. She is a woman who can be satisfied.
She is like no woman he’s known.
• • •
Or like no woman he’s loved.
He isn’t sure he ever knew them, or could, that a man
can
know a woman in the end. So, the women he’s loved. Who knew nothing of satisfaction. Who having gotten what they wanted always promptly wanted more. Not greedy. Never greedy. He’d never call his mother greedy, neither Fola nor his daughters (at least not Taiwo, at least not then). They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all.
They were dreamer-women.
Very dangerous women.
Who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, “brutal, senseless,” etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become.
So, insatiable women.
Un-pleasable women.
Who wanted above all things what could not be had. Not what
they
could not have—no such thing for such women—but what wasn’t there to be had in the first place. And worst: who looked at him and saw what he might yet become. More beautiful than he believes he could possibly be.
• • •
Ama doesn’t have that problem.
Or he doesn’t have that problem with Ama.
First of all, she isn’t as smart as the others. Which isn’t to say that she’s stupid. Far from. He knows that people talk, that people call the girl “simple,” and he knows it’s cliché, surgeon shacks up with nurse. But he also knows now that his wife is a genius, of a completely different sort than her predecessors were. She has her own form of genius, a sort of animal genius, the animal’s unwavering devotion to getting what it wants. To getting what it
needs
, without disrupting the environment. Without tearing down the jungle. Without causing itself harm. He wouldn’t have guessed this a talent at all, but for those smarter women’s gifts of self-flogging, self-doubt.
Ama doesn’t hurt herself. It doesn’t occur to her. To question herself. To exact from her psyche some small payment of sorrow for all worldly pleasure, though the world demands none. But she isn’t a
thinker
. Isn’t incessantly
thinking
—about what could be better, about what to do next, about what she’s done wrong, about who may have wronged her, about what
he
is thinking or feeling but not saying—so her thoughts don’t perpetually bump into his, causing all kinds of friction and firestorms, explosions, inadvertently, collisions here and there around the house. Her thoughts are not dangerous substances. The thoughts of the dreamers were landmines, free radicals. With them breakfast chat could devolve into war. Ama isn’t a fighter. She comes to breakfast without weapons and to bed in the evening undressed and unarmed. She has no vested interest in changing his mind. Her natural state is contented, not curious. And so second of all, she isn’t unhappy.
This was a complete revelation.
• • •
To live in a house with a woman who is happy, who is consistently happy, in her resting state—happy? And who is happy
with him
, not as an event or a reaction, not in response to one thing that he did and must keep doing if he wants her to remain happy, churning the crank, ever winding the music box,
dance, monkey, dance!
—but whom he makes
happy, has made happy, and who’s miraculously
stayed
happy? Who has the
capacity
to stay happy, with him, over time?
Never.
He didn’t know this was humanly possible, or womanly possible, until fifty-three years old, when he packed up his tent and decamped to the Master Wing but finding it too quiet one day considered his nurse, and the rise of her buttocks, and the chime of her laugh, and the odd way she tittered and blushed when he approached, and asked if she might like to join him for dinner?
This is why (he believes) he loves Ama.
Because she said, “Thank you, I would, please,” and the same thing again when he asked her to marry him (she always says yes) and is loyal and simple and supple and young. Because her thoughts don’t explode over breakfast. He believes he loves Ama because of the symmetry between them, between his capacity for provision and her prerequisites for joy. Because he finds all symmetry elegant and
this
symmetry quiet: an elegant kind of quiet, here and there, around the house. He believes he loves Ama—although he once thought he didn’t, thought he cared for and was grateful for but didn’t “really love” her, and in the beginning he didn’t, before he recognized her genius—because he knows something, now, about women. He has come to understand his basic relationship to women, the very crux of it, the need to be finally sufficient.
To know he’s enough, once and for all, now and forever.
This is why (he believes) he loves Ama.
• • •
He is wrong.
In fact, it is because as she sleeps at night, with a thin film of sweat above her ripe plum-brown lip and her breath sounding sweetly and loudly beside him, she looks so uncannily like Taiwo. Like Taiwo when she wasn’t yet five years old and when he was a resident, postcall, staggering home, too tired to sleep, too sleepy to stand, too worked up to sit—and so pacing.
He’d pace to and fro about the narrow apartment (the best he could afford on his resident’s pay, the dim, skinnier half of a two-family duplex on Huntington Ave where the ghetto began, beneath the overpass that separates Boston from Brookline, the wealth from the want) in his scrubs, in the dark. Down the hallway, through the kitchen, to the first room, the boys’, with its rickety wooden bunk bed, Kehinde’s drawings on the walls. To the little windowed closet, from which he’d watch some minor drug trade. To the bathroom, where he’d wash his face.
Press a towel to it.
Hold.
But finally to the front room and to Taiwo on the pullout couch, with no bedroom of her own as he so wanted her to have, his first daughter, a complete mystery despite the resemblance to the brother. A girl-child. A new thing. More precious somehow.
With a thin film of sweat above her lip care of the “project heat.”
Which he’d wipe away, thinking
it’s the least I can do
.
For a girl with no bedroom and conch-shell-pink lips.
Where he’d fall asleep upright, sitting next to her.
• • •
In fact, he loves Ama because, asleep, she looks like Taiwo when his daughter wasn’t five and slept sweating on the couch, and because when she snores she sounds just like his mother, when
he
wasn’t five and slept sweating on the floor. In that same thatch-roofed hut where his sister would die, on a mat beside his siblings’ by the one wooden bed, where their mother snored sweetly and loudly, dreaming wildly, as her son listened carefully to the places she went (to the operas and jazz riffs and snare drums and war chants, to the fifties as they sounded in faraway lands, beyond the beach), dreaming aloud of on-the-radio-places that he’d never seen and that she’d never see. And this sight and this sound, these two senses—of his daughter, (a), a modern thing entirely and a product of
there
, North America, snow, cow products, thoughts of the future, of his mother, (b), an ancient thing, a product of
here
, hut, heat, raffia, West Africa, the perpetual past—wouldn’t otherwise touch but for Ama.
A bridge.
Loyal and simple and supple young Ama who came from Kokrobité still stinking of salt (and of palm oil, Pink Oil, evaporated Carnation) to sleep by his side in suburban Accra. Ama, whose sweat and whose snores when she’s sleeping close miles of sorrow and ocean and sky, whose soft body is a bridge on which he walks between worlds.
The very bridge he’d been looking for, for thirty-one years.
• • •
He thought when he left that he knew how to build one: by returning home triumphant with a degree and a son, laying the American-born baby before the Ghana-bound grandma like a wreath at a shrine, “See, I told you I’d return.” And with a boy-child on top of it, a luckier-Moses. A father and a doctor. As promised. A success. He imagined this moment every day in Pennsylvania, how his cameraman would film it, panning up to her face. Cue strings. Tears in mother’s eyes. Wonder, joy, amazement. The awe of the siblings. The jubilation. Cue drums. Then the dancing and feasting, fish grilled, a goat slaughtered, red sparks from the fire leaping for joy in the sky, a black sky thick with star, the ocean roaring contentedly. The reunion a bridge, her fulfillment the brick.
This is how he planned it.
But this isn’t how it happened.
By the time he returned she was gone.