Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

“You think so?”

“Come here.”

• • •

“Your baby is crying,” says the driver to Taiwo, the Ghanaian way of saying your cell phone is ringing . They’ve turned off the highway and onto the street’s unplowed snow. She says, “Thank you,” and, sighing, picks up. “And to what might I owe this anomaly?”

“It’s Olu.”

“Yes, Olu, I know. I have caller ID.”

He ignores this, saying softly, “You sound like you’re crying.”

She notices her tears and his voice. “So do you.”

“What’s wrong?” they say in unison, then laugh as do siblings suddenly reminded of their siblingness after a fight. “You first,” she says, using the old line, “You’re the oldest.” She hears him laugh harder, a choked sort of sound.

He says, “Remember when we used to have something to tell him, and we’d stand by his study, too afraid to go in, and we’d fight over who should go first, when we entered, and I’d say that you should because you were the girl, and you’d say that I should because I was the oldest, and Kehinde would always just go, while we fought?”

She loses her breath for a moment. “W-what are you saying?” But it isn’t her brother. She knows that she’d know. “Olu, what happened?”

“He died today, Taiwo.”

“Who did?”

The drumbeat.

A force field of grief. “How do you know that?”

“Mom called me to tell me.”

Inexplicably, anger. “She couldn’t call me herself?”

“Taiwo.”

She doesn’t answer. She looks out the window. Remembers night sledding, Lars Andersen Park, stars. “How?”

“Of a heart attack.” Here, Olu’s voice catches. “I don’t have Kehinde’s number in London, do you?”

“No.”

“Taiwo.”

“What?”

“You haven’t spoken?”

“No.”

“In two years?”

“It’s been one and a half.”

“He’s your twin—”

“I’m aware of that. Do you have his number? He’s also your brother. It’s not only me.”

“Taiwo.”

“ What?! Stop saying my name like that.” Now she is crying.

“Don’t cry,” Olu says.

“Why do people say that? ‘Don’t cry’?” She is trembling. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll find his number. Don’t worry. It’s okay.”

“You already called Sadie?”

“I’m calling her next.”

“I should do it.” She wipes off her face. “I’m the girl.”

Olu laughs gently, sniffling softly. They are quiet. After a very long silence he asks, “Are you okay?”

“I’m not sure yet. Are you?”

“Sure.”

She looks out the window. “Well, I’m at my apartment.”

“I should hope so,” he says. “It’s two in the morning.”

She ignores this, counting money. “I’ll call you when I’ve spoken to Sadie.”

“Okay.”

The driver peers back through the mirror, engine idling. She hands him the cash, shoulder to ear to hold the phone.

“Are you there?” Olu asks.

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“Okay, listen. She needs to come down to New York for the flight. I’ll try to find something out of JFK tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow?”

“For the funeral. We should go straightaway.”

He continues in his Olu voice, logistics, administration, their duty to be there for their mother, the weather. Finally, a silence. He says, “We’ll talk later.”

“I love you,” in unison, and Taiwo hangs up.

• • •

She sits for a moment, looking out at her building, the Christmas wreaths bleeding red droplets of light. The driver knows better than to ask, and he doesn’t; just sits there in silence until she gets out. She is thinking to ask him to drive and keep driving, to wherever, not here, not this house-not-a-home, but to where? There is nothing. There is the lover who is married. There is the job waiting tables at Indochine, a joke, a private joke with herself, the middle finger to Approval; there is her family, all over, in shambles, down one. Where would she go? There is nowhere. She is laughing. No man and his pug see her step from the cab, fancy heels sinking down in the snow on the curbside, enduring and soft, bare legs trembling with cold. It occurs to her suddenly how stupid she must look to this driver from Ghana in his sensible coat as he watches her, waiting to see that she gets from his cab to her building and safely inside. She teeters up the stoop in the platform stilettos and turns to look back at the driver, the snow.

Downward it dances and lands on her shoulders and nose and his windshield, the hush of a storm, with the street emptied out of all seekers of warmth and a wind blowing gently. She holds up a hand.

They are angels in a snow globe, both silent and smiling, two African strangers alone in the snow: kindly man in a cab in a bulky beige coat waving back as he pulls from the curb and honks once and a girl on her steps in a short white fur coat crying quietly watching him go.

Someone is banging on the bathroom door. “SADIE!”

She is kneeling at the toilet bowl, fingers down throat. Out comes the alcohol, followed by the birthday cake, followed by a thimble of thin, burning bile. She pulls off some toilet roll, wipes off her mouth with this. She listens for a moment. The someone walks off. Elsewhere in the suite swell the sounds of the party, overlapping, boys’ laughter, girls’ squealing, from a distance, as heard by a child at the bottom of a swimming pool, lying down, looking up, pretending to have drowned. She peers in the toilet as she does at such moments, the patient turned doctor, inspecting the food. It is fascinating, however disgusting, the vomit. How it emerges, with a logic, in the order received. With a touch of the ceremonial, she thinks, in the action, the kneeling and performing the same gruesome rite, the repetition and silence, always this moment of silence just after. A sacrifice. Ribbons of blood. She examines her fingernails, religiously short and still stinking of vomit—

the smell interrupts.

A pin in the bubble, an end to the silence, return to awareness: she’s on a cold floor. And not in an act of enlightened purification but throwing up birthday cake (hers). She stands up. The doctor turned criminal. Disposing of the evidence. She rifles through her tote for the usual tools. Handi Wipes, sanitizer, Scope, travel toothbrush. She cleans off the tiles with the wipes as she’s learned. (Sometimes the person who uses the bathroom next notices, if she doesn’t attend to the floor.) She washes her hands and face, flushes the toilet twice, brushes her teeth, and again. Gargles Scope. Out of habit, without looking, she opens the cabinet. She knows this bathroom cabinet and its contents by heart. On the bottom row Adderall and Zoloft and Ativan; middle: Kiehl’s face washes, Molton Brown lotions; top: sweet perfumes and Trish McEvoy makeup and Vera Bradley pouch with the papers and pot. She taps out an Ativan and swallows without water. The phone again. “SADIE!”

“I’m coming!”

She’s not.

• • •

She learned this at Milton, to hide in a bathroom, a perfect place really, a cocoon, a world away. The peculiar insularity of bathrooms, a comfort. The sameness of bathrooms, pale yellows, blues, greens. And the things in a bathroom, a woman’s especially: not the eyes but the toiletries the window to the soul. She would go to their homes after school, or on vacations, to their summer houses — always invited, every year, dearly beloved of mothers, a Good Influence on daughters, with good grades and good manners, what a peach, so polite! — and she’d slip off at some point, upstairs, to a bathroom, the friend’s, or the mother’s, more fascinating still.