She stood there crying, “My daughter. My daughter. I warned you not to dress like a boy. Now see what you have done to yourself.”
I told Ariyike that all the women who stood there earlier, accusing him of stealing food, laundry drying on the line, generators and coolers, came to the mother, pulling her away from the body, crying with her. That one of them gave her another wrapper to wear but she rejected it. Instead she stood there in her little green slip, crying and screaming, saying that they had stripped her naked in the streets and she would now be naked for the rest of her life.
I told Ariyike all the things I saw and heard, and she was as quiet as a mouse until I was done.
“He was just a stupid girl, Bibi, just a stupid girl,” she said.
Then she put her arms around me and cried with me, and this was how I knew that she felt all the things that I felt, and we did not sleep at all that night because we were the same sad the same angry the same afraid.
ARIYIKE
1998–1999
WE WERE SITTING at the back of the house, peeling the skin off black-eyed beans we had soaked in water for hours. The water was dark and particulate, black eyes and brown skins slid off the beans, away from our grasp, floating around the kitchen bowl. The skins reminded me of those newly hatched little tadpoles swimming in the drains out in the street. We could hear Jennifer Lopez playing from speakers in the neighbor’s house. My sister was singing along, quietly because she did not want the neighbor to hear her enjoying it and turn it off.
“Jesus is coming soon, Bibike,” I said.
“Okay,” she said and continued singing.
“You can’t be singing these types of songs. Do you want to be left behind?”
She was ignoring me. She continued singing along. She grabbed a handful of beans and swirled it quickly several times in the bowl, troubling the water until it moved around and around on its own, dark and misty, like a dirty whirlpool.
“I’m serious,” I said. “Jesus is coming really soon. Like before the end of this year.”
“Okay. You know this how?” she said.
“I saw it. No. Pastor David told us. But he prayed our eyes open and I saw, too.”
My twin sister, Bibike, started laughing at me. She kissed her teeth, letting out a short but loud sound. She laughed hard, shaking her head, cackling. She is the one everyone calls quiet, so all the noise she was making was a surprise.
“Stop laughing at me. You are being annoying and rude,” I said.
She did not stop. Her laughter made me think of water in the canal and how we loved to go there when we were younger. The canal water was usually calm and still. I hated it when it was like that. I used to throw rocks in the water just to disturb it. First, I’d cause a small ripple, which would create a larger one, and then another ripple, and then it was no longer calm undisturbed water but a series of unending circles. That’s how laughter poured out of her, in waves and ripples. When I thought she was done, she only paused to laugh even harder.
“Are you done laughing?” I asked.
“Are you done saying stupid things?” she answered.
“Have you finished?” I asked again.
She did not answer. She just wiped her eyes with the back of her dress.
“These are the last days,” I continued. “Everything the Bible talked about so far has happened. Wars, pestilences, rebellions. The only thing left is the Rapture. God told Pastor David that it’s happening really soon.”
“Ariyike, even if that is true, God won’t tell anyone. Especially not Pastor David.”
“Why won’t he?” I said.
“Because it will be unfair.” She got up as she said this, pouring the beans out from the bowl and into a large sieve, washing them under running water, splashing everywhere, on her dress, running down her legs, settling around her feet in a small puddle. “He will have to tell everyone or tell no one at all. God should be fair. Treat everyone the same. Like sunlight—”
“You’re getting drenched,” I said, interrupting her.
“I know. I will change before Mother gets back.”
MOTHER HAD A new job. She was teaching business studies, shorthand writing, and typing at Oguntade Secondary. It was a private school, two streets away from us. She was offered a discount to enroll two children, but she didn’t take it. We were enrolled in the neighborhood public school. She complained about her job every day.
“These children are so terrifyingly lazy.”
“This proprietor is the most miserly man I have ever met. He is making us pay for tissue paper in the teachers’ lounge, can you imagine it?”
“The parents want you to give their children marks they haven’t earned; not me, let the other teachers cater to these nincompoops.”
Mother was unsuited for this position. I felt sorry for her students. She was taking out her disappointments on them, I was sure. I hoped they knew that when she called them stupid or insolent, it was not because they were exceptionally incompetent. She just did not expect to be herding other people’s children at this stage in her life.
Bibike and I were making moimoi. Mother sold moimoi wrapped in clear plastic bags to kids at her school during lunch. Lately we also had moimoi for lunch every day. We half joked to Mother as we cooked, “Can we eat something else? Peas will soon start growing from our ears o.”
But her reply was: “You’d better be grateful you have any food to eat.” She said this like it was the most normal thing to say to your own children.
Since she’d lost her job, Mother had been different, always angry, always tired, always looking for something to criticize us over. The boys, though, could do nothing wrong. One Friday, Andrew stayed out late. He was playing football at the stadium. Mother did not even notice he was not home. Or if she did, she said nothing. Bibike and I would never have tried something like that.
Father noticed everything but said nothing. It was harder for him, I assumed, because when Mother lost her job, he lost his inside connections and could no longer get printing contracts from the government. Father had never had a regular job. This was why he was our favorite parent; he had the time to do things with us. Before Mother lost her job and we all became poor, Father drove us to school every day. The first car I remember was a yellow ’88 Mitsubishi Galant, but then he had it repainted to a brash red-wine color, because people in Lagos always thought it was a cab. They sold that car when Bibike and I were in primary 6, to buy a white Volkswagen Jetta. I loved that Jetta so much. Father washed it by himself every single day and it always had a fresh clean smell like a baby’s bathwater.
Ever since selling the Jetta, Father had been home all the time. He had no connections, no car, and nothing to do. He spent
