no one else can believe.
“Remember that day my mother came to your house?” she says after a short pause.
This time his reply is hesitant, quiet. “Yeah,” he says.
“When she came to drag me away? How she was saying, I have warned you about this boy, you can’t be here, you have to leave.”
She is laughing as she says it. And it’s a laugh I know, one most women I know have. Mother has it, too. Laughter you use when nothing is funny, but you are lighthearted and resilient and eager to show it.
“Have you seen anyone else lately? Anita? Banke? Emmanuel?” she asks with leftover laughter in her mouth.
The conversation on his side is no longer loud or discernible. There is no way to be sure why he now mumbles. Maybe it’s been a long day and he is tired and wants to ride the bus in peace. Maybe he has never liked her or maybe she just reminded him of the hurts he has also covered up with laughter, and muscles, and gorgeous facial hair.
“Banke is married, she has like six kids or something,” she says.
“Really,” he exclaims. “Banke. Married! I definitely did not see that coming.”
There is more laughter, more exclaiming, more naming names, more asking what are they up to now.
“So, are you seeing anyone?” she asks, deliberate, flippant.
“No, I am just focusing on leaving this stupid country. Ties just make things difficult,” he says.
If she says anything after this, I do not hear it. The bus conductor announces the next stop and several people shuffle and respond. When the doors open, she grabs the black briefcase and lab coat that I had assumed were his, he has a doctor’s face. She gets out of the bus, shouting, Excuse me, excuse me, at all the people in her way. One of the public school kids now sits where she was sitting. There is quiet and there is noise.
She will walk to her apartment, where she lives with her older sister and her sister’s husband, and wonder if the universe was helped by her vulnerability, if she will get any closer to living in her dreams because she laid bare her desires to a man like that. She will wish for a second encounter with him. One where the best decisions of her years are on display. Like he walks into the hospital where she is a pharmacist or the church where she sings solos on Sundays. Or they meet in the parking lot of a supermarket the weekend after salaries are paid so he can witness all the imported foreign things she can now afford to buy on her own.
I hope she finds someone new.
I wish her love without this shared lament of people who remain in a failing city when others who are not stupid have left. I wish her love that makes her less ashamed, love that is ignorant of the specifics of her failed dreams and unaware of the details of her lost youth. I hope she finds a loving gaze that will not see how her face has fallen and where her arms have swollen or how her family has lost all they took great pride in.
WE GOT HOME a little after five p.m. that day, bubbling with the ignorant excitement of young children who’d completed their first adult task. It did not occur to us to wonder why our schedules had changed or whether this was a permanent kind of change. We did not yet have the kind of familiarity with misfortune that cultivated a sense of foreboding. We could only assume that Father was too busy to come pick us up and Mother was beginning to understand that we were grown enough to navigate Lagos streets on our own.
WE ATE OUR dinner in a hurry and, while we ate, Andrew and Peter watched cartoons and argued with each other in the living room. As soon as we were done with dinner, Father and Mother called us into their room for a talk. I was absolute in my certainty that they were about to announce we were expecting a new sibling.
This was the first time we had been allowed in our parents’ room. It was, until this day, an odd place, with regular fluorescent lamps for the daytime and a tiny blue bulb turned on at night. The lights were like secret codes for access—white light meant it was okay to knock, to ask to be let in; the night-light meant to keep away.
But on this day—the day things were beginning to fall apart, the day we were too stupid to notice—we swelled with the confident pride of new initiates. The room smelled like Cussons baby powder and Mother’s favorite perfume, Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door.
I sat on the rug in the center of the room. It was yellow, brown, blue, and black, stripe-patterned and soft. It made me think of Joseph and his coat of many colors. My sister lay on the brown leather armchair opposite their bed, folding herself in it like a bush baby, one foot swinging down the side of the chair.
Mother and Father sat next to each other on the king-size bed.
It was Mother who spoke first:
“You are big girls now, so behave yourselves. Something really bad has happened to this family and—”
“We will be all right, though. This is nothing for you both to worry about,” Father interrupted.
“I am not telling them to worry,” Mother said. “We agreed to tell them, so we can handle this as a family.”
“A few weeks ago, your mother got into some trouble at work and she was let go,” Father said. “None of it is her fault. We will get through this, I promise you girls.”
Mother was with the Ministry of Petroleum for ten years. In the last two years, she worked as one of the three personal assistants to the minister of petroleum. Her boss, the Honorable Minister Dakuku, had been fired by the military president, and a new minister of petroleum was appointed in his place. It was this new minister who, rather unexpectedly, considering that civil servants existed, under the national laws and in the valid assumptions of many, in a labor-protected space where the worst thing that could happen was a transfer to a remote village, fired all those staff he considered close associates of the former minister.
The ex-minister’s falling-out with the military president was over approval given to an American company for oil drilling in the Niger Delta. It was not until the agreements were signed and money was paid that the president became aware that the Americans were in fact an Israeli company incorporated in the United States. The military president was a great friend of Yasser Arafat, apparently, and an avid defender of his politics. He wanted nothing to do with the American company once these facts were revealed.
Father explained these facts to us in short, straight-to-the-point sentences.
“The ex-minister is in hiding. Some say he is in America.”
“Many people were also let go. It was not only your mother.”
As much as he tried, he did not help me understand how anything that happened was our mother’s fault. Until that day I’d thought her job as an assistant was limited to serving the minister and his guests tea and smelling nice as she did this. Even though I was confused, I was not surprised. In Lagos bad things happened all the time.
My sister’s dangling foot tapped the leg of the armchair over and over, a little loud, but no one told her to stop doing that. Father reached over and patted me on the center of my head, ta, ta, ta, harmonizing with the tidi, tidi, tidi my sister was making with her foot against the wooden chair leg. He patted me on the head several times, until it started to hurt. I started trying to think of something to say, something reassuring, sensing that Father had planned a more confident rendering of this tale, but he now sat quiet and absentminded, forgetting the
