What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky(2)
And Godwin is a better provider than Bibi’s father, now a modest trader. He rents her a flat. He lends her a car. He blinds her with a constellation of gifts, things she’s never had before, like spending money and orgasms. The one time she brings up marriage, he walks out and she can’t reach him for twelve days. Twelve days that put the contents of her bank account in stark relief; twelve days that she sits in the flat that’s in his name, drives the car also in his name, and wonders what is so precious about this name he won’t give to her. And when he finally returns to see her packing and grabs her hair, pulling, screaming that even this is his, she is struck . . . by his fist, yes, but also by the realization that maybe her mother was right.
The reunion isn’t tender. Bibi’s right eye is almost swollen shut and her mother’s mouth is pressed shut and they neither look at nor speak to each other. Her father, who could never bear the tension between the two women, the memories of his turbulent childhood brought back, squeezes Bibi’s shoulder, then leaves, and it is that gentle pressure that starts her tears. Soon she is sobbing and her mother is still stone-faced, but it is a wet face she turns away so no one can see. Ezinma takes Bibi to the bathroom, the one they’ve shared and fought over since they were old enough to speak. She sits her on the toilet lid and begins to clean around her bruises. When she is done, it still looks terrible. When Bibi stands to examine her face, they are both in the mirror. I still look terrible, Bibi says. Yes you do, Ezinma replies, and they are soon laughing, and in their reflection they notice for the first time that they have the exact same smile. How have they gone this long without seeing that? Neither knows. Bibi worries about her things that are still in the flat. Ezinma says not to worry, she will get them. Why are you still nice to me? Bibi asks. Habit, Ezinma says. Bibi thinks about it for a moment and says something she has never said to her sister. Thank you.
And so Ezinma fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her: Godwin, who grew up under his father’s corrosive indulgence. Godwin, so unused to hearing no it hits him like a wave of acid, dissolving the superficial decency of a person who always gets his way. Godwin, who broke his cello when he discovered his younger brother could play it better, which is why he came to be here, watching Ezinma—who looks so much like her sister from behind—fumbling the unfamiliar keys against the lock of Bibi’s apartment so she doesn’t see who comes behind her: Godwin, with a gun he fires into her back.
WAR STORIES
This time, my mother and I were fighting about what I had done at school to prove with no question that Anita Okechukwu was not wearing a bra. That Anita and I had been in the middle of the playground hadn’t bothered me, that there were boys around hadn’t bothered me, but Anita Okechukwu was far more sensitive than I.
“Nwando, you can’t just go around opening people’s shirts,” my mother said after she closed the door on Mrs. Okechukwu, a broad-shouldered, broad-hipped woman whose need for a bra was unassailable. Mrs. Okechukwu had wanted an apology and an explanation, and my mother was ready with the first but unsure of the second. That’s why she’d called me onto the veranda to explain myself. I wanted to tell them about how Anita had started the Girl Club after claiming that her father had sent her expensive bras from London edged with barely-there lace and soft ribbons and powdered with fairy dust, and how she made the rule that only girls with bras could be in the Girl Club and that if you weren’t in the Girl Club you couldn’t sit in the Girl Area and you had to play with the boys. Anita would confirm who was Girl by escorting each applicant behind the school to check if she was wearing the required undergarment. They’d emerge short minutes later, the Bra Princess followed by her newest lady-in-waiting. In the jostling to be a Girl, with friends borrowing one another’s intimates and rejected applicants stewing in bitterness, no one had thought to check if Anita actually owned the bras she’d shown us in a catalog.
My mother’s raised brow asked, Well? and Mrs. Okechukwu frowned at me until my nuanced defense deteriorated into “I wanted to see her bra.” My mother pinched her nose and Mrs. Okechukwu muttered about girls with no home training. That’s when my mother got angry. I could tell by the way her left shoulder hunched forward with the effort not to make a fist, how her lips pressed so tight they disappeared. She remained polite to Anita’s mother but her glare seared holes into me.
“Wait till your father hears this thing,” her cry of last resort. At such moments I became my father’s daughter, a confounding creature who had no doubt inherited a vein of insanity from one of his yeye ancestors. I was his problem to solve.
Dinner that night amounted to my mother chewing smugly while I tried to swallow garri around the lump in my throat. My father said nothing.
While my mother cleared the table, he set up the chessboard on the veranda, a sporadic ritual that had begun a few months before, when we relocated to Port Harcourt. As the stand-in for Emmanuel, my father’s old friend, I was to match him in chess and swap stories, though my mother drew the line at serving me beer. A poor strategist, I never offered much of a challenge, but my father was a quiet man who did not make friends easily, and I would do.
“So what is this your mother is telling me?” he asked, giving me another chance to explain myself. I had the words this time and told my father about Anita and bras and the machinations of girls. He listened without interrupting, stealing my pawns as I moved them on the board. When I finished, my story dangled in the air between us. Then my father began to tell one of his own.