How Beautiful We Were(56)

“Stop sounding like my mother,” she said. “I didn’t come here to get the same nonsense I get from her. I wish I could just run and hide until this whole thing is over.”

“What whole thing?”



“The thing where you all dance and take me to his hut, he climbs on me, I give him children, he dies, the children grow up and have their own lives, and I’m free again.”

“May the Spirit shut its ears to that wicked prayer,” I said. “How could you call a curse upon yourself by wishing for the best days of your life to quickly pass you by?”

“Best days of my life? What part of serving others from morning to night every day for the rest of my life is going to be so wonderful?”

“Please, enough with your woe-is-woman song. You’re not a child anymore.”

Aisha scoffed. “You must be feeling very wonderful-is-woman these days, with the Cute One whispering cute things in your ear,” she said.

“What?” I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to scold her for her disrespect. “Me and the Cute One—”

“Please, just stop it, Sahel, it’s too late to pretend. I’ve seen you and him flirting.”

“Me?”

“From the way he smiles at you I can tell you’ve shown him your moves.”

I started laughing in confusion, which must have made her think she had cornered me, because she said, “I knew it….I can’t believe it—”

“Aisha, you’re speaking rubbish,” I said amid my laughter. “That mind of yours—I hope your husband tames it. The Cute One? Don’t make me vomit. The very idea—disgusting.”

“Right. But tell me one thing only, Sahel: where do you and him prefer to do it? In the barn, or deep in the forest so you can moan as loud—”

“Get out of my kitchen right now before I kill you with my cooking spoon,” I said, raising the spoon as she ran off laughing.



* * *



—



The morning after my conversation with Aisha, I woke up thinking about the Cute One. I thought about him all day, wondering what he looked like naked. If someone had told me when I first met him that I would someday lust for him, I would have wept in shame. I’d never flirted with him—what Aisha said was her attempt to switch the conversation from her impending wedding—but now that Aisha had put the idea in my head, I started thinking: why not him? He was nowhere as handsome as Malabo, and his large belly carried the threat of suffocating me, but his hands were massive and his buttocks firm. Most important, his wife was in Bézam. She’d never know. I’d never wake up in the morning to find an angry woman on my veranda, demanding answers.

By the third day after my conversation with Aisha, knowing that the Sweet One and the Cute One would come to my hut to check Thula’s schoolwork during their next scheduled visit, I picked out the outfit I would wear for the Cute One. I chose a dress I reserved for trips to the big market. I told Lulu I’d need to redo my hair in eight days. My breasts were no longer what they were when I flaunted them for Malabo years ago, so I stitched my sole brassiere to make it smaller and give my bosom maximum elevation.

If the Cute One was surprised to see me so radiant when he stepped into my hut, he did an excellent job of showing it. His eyes widened. He couldn’t stop looking at me and smiling. When he asked me about the occasion I was dressed for, I told him that life was the occasion. He laughed louder than I’d ever heard him laugh. He seemed to notice my teeth for the first time when I smiled—he stared at them, the way Malabo once did. It thrilled me to do this again, falling all over myself for a man to see me. While the Sweet One checked Thula’s homework, I sat on a bench next to the Cute One in Yaya’s room, pretending to touch him by accident as he asked Yaya questions about her health, and as she responded to his questions with short phrases about how she had no new complaints, every old person should be so lucky as to have someone like me. I smiled at Yaya’s words, not because I needed to hear the praise, but because I hoped the Cute One would realize that I would take care of him too, in whatever way he wanted me to.



When he left that day without asking to see me in private, I did not fret. Nor did I fret the next time, or the time after. I didn’t always dress up for him, but I could tell, from how he smiled at me, that it wouldn’t be long before we made our first arrangement.



* * *



—

I could not read Thula’s report cards, but I attended every parent-teacher meeting, always the lone mother in attendance on behalf of a girl. Her teachers told me every time what great intelligence she had, what a hardworking student she was, the best they’d ever had.

Everything I heard about her passion for knowledge, all the evaluations I got of her report cards, made me happy, because it made her happy. Still, I was aware of what a waste all her reading would amount to in Kosawa. All the hours spent doing homework—what good would it be after she finished her schooling at seventeen and became even more peculiar, an eagle among domestic animals? One of her teachers once said she could go to Bézam and attend a higher school so she could get a job with the government. I was not sure whether to spit in this man’s face or to heap upon him every curse for suggesting that my daughter become a servant for the same people who killed her father. But then the Sweet One and the Cute One came to me at the beginning of her fifth and final year at Lokunja with the letter from the American school, and even though I still don’t understand how going to America will help her after she returns to grow old alone in Kosawa, I agreed to hand her to them, because knowledge is what she seeks, and knowledge is what they’ll give her there.