Transcendent Kingdom(27)

“You don’t have eggs. You don’t have milk. You don’t have flour. What do you eat?” she said. She was wearing a robe she must have found in one of my drawers. Her left breast, deflated from the weight loss and shriveled with age, peeked out through the thin fabric. When we were children, her propensity for nakedness had embarrassed Nana and me no end. Now, I was so happy to see her, all of her, I didn’t care.

“I don’t really cook,” I said.

She sucked her teeth at me and continued working, slicing the plantains, salting the jollof. I heard the sizzle of the oil, and that smell of hot, wet grease was enough to make my mouth water.

    “If you had spent time in the kitchen with me, helping me, you would know how to make all of this. You would know how to feed yourself properly.”

I held my breath and counted to three, waiting for the urge to say something mean to pass. “You’re here now. I can learn now.”

She snorted. So, this was how it would go. I watched her lean over the pot of oil. She grabbed a handful of plantains and dropped them in, her hand so low, so close to the oil. The oil sputtered as it swallowed the plantains, and when my mother lifted her hand from the pot, I could see glistening specks from where the oil had spit at her. She wiped the spots with her index finger, touched her finger to her tongue. How many times had she been burned like this? She must have been immune.

“Do you remember that time you put hot oil on Nana’s foot?” I asked from my spot at the counter. I wanted to get up and help her, but I was nervous that she would make fun of me or, worse, tell me how every move I made was wrong. She was right that I had avoided her kitchen my entire childhood, but even now, even with my small sample size of days spent cooking with her, it’s her voice I hear, saying, “You clean as you go, you clean as you go,” whenever I cook.

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t remember? We were having a party at the house and you put oil—”

She sharply turned to face me. She was holding a mesh strainer in her hand, high up in the air like a gavel she could bring down at any moment. I saw panic in her face, panic that covered the blankness that had been there since she’d arrived.

“I never did that,” she said. “I never, never did that.”

I was going to press her but then I looked into her eyes and knew immediately that I had made a mistake. Not in the memory, carried back to me through that smell of hot oil, but in the reminder.

    “I’m sorry. I must have dreamed it,” I said, and she brought the gavel down.



* * *



—

My mother rarely threw parties, and when she did, she spent the entire week leading up to them in enough of a cooking/cleaning frenzy to make you wonder if we were hosting royalty. There were a handful of Ghanaians in Alabama who made up the Ghana Association, and many of them had to drive upward of two hours to come to any of the gatherings. My mother, never the life of the party, only went to a meeting if the drive was under an hour, and she only hosted if she had four days off in a row, a rare enough occurrence to mean that she only hosted twice.

She’d bought me a new dress and Nana new slacks. She pressed them in the morning and then laid them out on our beds, threatening death if we so much as looked at them wrong before it was time to get into them, and then she spent the rest of the day cooking. By the time the first guests arrived, the house was practically sparkling, fragrant with the scents of Ghana.

It was the first time many of the other Ghanaians were seeing us since the Chin Chin Man’s departure, and Nana and I, already outcasts for our taciturn mother, were dreading the party, the stares, the unsolicited advice from the grown-ups, the teasing from the other kids.

“We’ll stay for five minutes and then we can fake sick,” Nana whispered through his smile as we greeted an auntie who smelled like baby powder.

“She’ll know we’re lying,” I whispered back, remembering her CIA-level interrogation into the mystery of who had stolen a Malta from the back of her closet.

It didn’t come to that. By the time the other children showed up, Nana and I had moved from enduring to enjoying the party. My mother had made bofrot, puff-puff, balls of fried dough, and before long all of the children were engaged in an all-out war, the bofrot as our weapon. The rules were ill-defined, but the general idea of the game was that if you were hit with a flying bofrot then you were out.

    Nana was, as usual, an expert player. He was fast, he had a good arm, and he was especially adept at escaping detection, for we all knew that if the adults caught us wasting food by throwing it at each other, the game, and our lives, would surely end. I knew I wasn’t fast enough to outrun Nana, and so I hid behind our couch, waiting with my pile of bofrots, listening for the frustrated sighs and giggles of the other children who’d been pelted out. That couch, the only couch I’d ever known, was so old, so ugly, that it was slowly giving up on itself. The seams on one of the cushions had burst, leaving its stuffing, like guts, spilling out from the sides. The left arm of the couch had a decorative wooden piece nailed in, but every so often the piece would fall off, nails out, and Nana, my mother, or I would have to shove it back into the upholstery. I must have knocked the wooden piece off to get behind the couch that day, because it wasn’t long before I heard Nana scream. I slunk out from behind the couch to find him with the wooden piece nailed to the bottom of his foot.