Transcendent Kingdom(29)

That summer, Nana had hit six feet tall at just thirteen years old. I’d helped my mother measure him on the wall just off the kitchen, climbing up onto her shoulders and placing the faint pencil mark where Nana’s head touched. “Ey, Nana, we’ll have to lift the ceiling soon,” my mother teased once the tape measure snapped back into its case. Nana rolled his eyes, but he was smiling, proud of his genetic luck.

Basketball was, of course, a logical sport for a tall, athletically gifted child, but we were a soccer family in football country. It never really occurred to any of us. And, though we never admitted it to ourselves or to each other, we all felt like a change in sport would be an insult to the Chin Chin Man, who had once said that his time would be better spent watching giraffes in the wild than watching basketball players on television.

But, clearly, Nana missed sports. His body was of a kind that needed to be in motion for him to feel at ease. He was always fidgeting, bouncing his legs, rolling his neck, cracking his knuckles. He wasn’t meant to sit still, and those of us who had loved to watch him play soccer knew that there was something right, true, real about Nana in motion. He was himself, beautiful. My mother signed the consent form.

It was clear right away that this was the sport that he was intended to play. It was like something, in his body, in his mind, clicked into place once he held that basketball in his hands. He was frustrated with himself for being behind the other players, having not started the sport when he was younger, and so my mother bought a hoop she couldn’t really afford and assembled it, with the help of Nana and me. It stood there in our driveway, and the very second it was erected it became like a totem for Nana. He was out there every day for hours, worshipping it. By his third game he was his team’s fifth-highest scorer. By the end of the season he was the best.

    My mother and I used to attend his games and sit in the very back. We weren’t versed in the sport and neither of us ever bothered learning the rules. “What’s happening?” one of us would whisper to the other whenever a whistle blew, but it was pointless to ask questions when we didn’t really care what the answers were. It didn’t take long for people to notice Nana, then us. Parents started cozying up to my mother, trying to get her to sit closer to the front, next to them, so that they could say things like “Boy, does he have a future ahead of him.”

“What kind of nonsense is that?” my mother would say in the car on the way back. “Of course he has a future ahead of him. He has always had a future ahead of him.”

“They mean in basketball,” I said.

She glared at me through the rearview. “I know what they mean,” she said.

I didn’t understand why she was upset. She had never been like the stereotypical immigrant parents, the ones who smack their kids around for anything less than an A, who won’t let their children play sports or attend dances, who pride themselves on their oldest, who is a doctor, their middle, who is a lawyer, and are overly worried about their youngest, who wants to study finance. My mother certainly wanted us to be successful, to live in such a way that we wouldn’t end up having to work tiring, demanding jobs like she did. But that same tiring, low-paying work meant that she was often too busy to know if we were making good grades and too broke to get us help if we weren’t. The result of this was that she had taken to simply trusting us to do the right thing, and we had rewarded that trust. It insulted her, I think, that people were so keen to talk about Nana’s basketball prowess as the key to his future, as though he didn’t have anything else to offer. His athleticism was a God-given talent, and my mother knew better than to question what God gives, but she hated the idea that anyone might believe that this was Nana’s only gift.

    Sometimes, when Nana was feeling generous, he’d let me play HORSE with him in the driveway. I liked to think that I held my own in those weekend afternoon games, but I’m sure Nana went easy on me.

We lived in a rented house at the end of a cul-de-sac, and the top of our driveway, where the basketball hoop stood, was the peak of a small hill. Whenever one of us missed a shot, if we weren’t fast enough, the ball would bounce off the backboard and launch down that hill, gathering speed as it went. Though I was an energetic child, I was lazy, lousy at sports. I dreaded chasing the ball down the hill and would make little bargains with Nana so that he would do it instead. When I missed my “S” shot, I promised him I would wash all of his dishes for a week. It took Nana five long strides to get down to the bottom, six strides to get back up.

“Do you think the Chin Chin Man would have liked basketball if he’d grown up playing it?” I asked.

I was setting up a shot from inside the frame of the garage. It was physically impossible to get the ball as high as I would need to in order to sink it from there, but I hadn’t yet studied physics, and I had an abundance of misplaced confidence in my skills. I missed the shot by several feet and chased it down before it could start its descent.

    “Who?” Nana said.

“Daddy,” I said, the word sounding strange to my ears. A word from a language I used to speak but was forgetting, like the Twi our parents had taught us when we were small but then had grown too tired to keep up.

“I don’t give a fuck what he thinks,” Nana said.

My eyes widened at the use of the swear word. They were all understood to be forbidden in our house, though our mother used the Twi ones with abandon because she thought we didn’t know what they meant. Nana wasn’t looking at me. He was setting up his shot. I stared at his long arms, the veins tracing their way from biceps to hand, pulsing, exclamation points on those newly formed muscles. He hadn’t answered my question, but it didn’t really matter. He was answering his own question, one whose large, looming presence must have been something of a burden to him, and so he lied to try to get out from under its weight. I don’t care, he told himself every time he spoke to the Chin Chin Man on the phone. I don’t care, when he scored twenty points in a game, looked up to the stands to find his bored sister and mother and no one else. I don’t care.