Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

She looked at her friends (Philae’s friends more precisely) now shouting “Are you seventeen?!” in orangeish light, with the birthday candles twinkling and reflected in the window. She looked out the window. It was starting to snow.

“Are you eighteen?!”

“It’s snowing,” she said, but too softly; the friends kept on shouting.

“Are you nineteen?!”

“I’m twenty.”

She sits in the bathroom and thinks of it. Twenty. She doesn’t feel twenty. She still feels four. With the tears surging up from her stomach, someone banging. “I’m coming,” she mumbles as she sets her feet down.

And here she is, gorgeous, inebriated Philae, her face flushed a pale shade of pink, and the smile, sticking her head in the door without waiting, entitled and smelling of Flower by Kenzo and beer. “Your sister keeps calling.”

“My sister?”

“Yes, Taiwo. She called, like, four times on the phone to the house. You’re missing your party. Wait, why are you crying?”

“I don’t know,” Sadie says.

“You don’t know ?” Philae beams. “Is my little girl becoming a woman? Are you rolling ?” She claps with delight. “It’s about fucking time! Dare to do drugs, Sadie Sai! Dare to do them!” She grabs Sadie’s shoulders and spins her around. Then hugs her, abruptly, too tightly. She whispers, slurred, “Love you, S. Never forget it.” And leaves.

The landline is ringing again in the hallway. Sadie pushes out through the crowd and picks up. “Taiwo?”

“Where are you?”

“You called me at home.”

“I’ve been calling for hours. What is that?”

“What’s what?”

“The music.”

“It’s a party. For the end of exams.” She doesn’t remind her sister of her birthday.

“… bad news.”

Taiwo continues, but Sadie can’t hear her. “It’s kind of hard to hear. Can you call me on my cell? I can go to my bedroom.” She thinks she hears, “Sure,” and repairs to her room, doesn’t switch on the light. Later, she’ll count back the hours, back to midnight, the start of the snow in New Haven, the kiss, Philae’s lips on her lips, and the tears in her stomach: five hours ahead of her sunrise in Ghana. Did she know? Did she feel it? The loss of her father, the death of a man she had almost not known, who was gone before she was in grade school, a stranger? How could she have? What could she claim to have lost?

A memory.

Someone else’s.

The man in the photo, that one blurry photo of her and her dad in those dull shades of yellow and brown and burnt orange that all of their photos from the eighties seem to have: of him sitting in the rocking chair in the hospital nursery as seen by the nurse from the nursery doorway, she bundled up, newborn, her hand on his finger, he dressed in blue scrubs with an unshaven beard. The Man from the Story. Who barely resembles the man she remembers , the upright, precise, always leaving, clean-shaven and crisp, in the morning, breezing out the front door in a fresh-pressed white coat. But the man she imagines when she thinks of “her father,” this frail, handsome figure with Olu’s dark skin and the same eyes that she has, thin, narrow, and angled, the shape vaguely Asian, as soft as a cow’s (not the eyes that she longs for, the eyes that the twins got, exotically hazel, but gentle dark brown), not so tall, maybe five foot ten, same height as Fola, but large as all heroes are, thirty-eight years old.

The Man from the Story.

How he valiantly saved her.

A memory of Fola’s, of Olu’s, not hers — and yet crying at midnight, undone by her sadness, a hurt without cause until Taiwo calls back. “Our father is dead.” But not now. There is nothing now, hearing the news. Not so much as surprise. She looks out the window at the Davenport courtyard, remembering a poem she memorized once. Whose woods these are I think I know, his house is in the village though . “‘Then he will not see me sitting here,’” she murmurs. Taiwo hasn’t heard. Marches on, “I realize that you didn’t really know him that well…” while Sadie’s thoughts drift to the smaller of things, to the oldest of things, the most trivial, really: the sense that her sister doesn’t like her.

Never has.

It started that summer when they came back from Lagos, when Sadie was five, almost six, they fourteen. Olu had gone off to school the year prior, leaving Fola and her in that house with the twins, “little house on the highway” as Kehinde had called it, its back to Star Market, single story, no yard. Sadie was meant to share a bedroom with Taiwo but most nights her sister would slip down the hall to the boys’ room (i.e., Kehinde’s, with an air bed for Olu), hardly talking to Sadie, hardly talking at all. Kehinde spent the bulk of his time in his bedroom with Discman and old sheets for canvases, painting, Fola at work at the shop until late, and she, Sadie, on play dates with friends after school — but she never knew exactly what Taiwo was doing, where she went in the daytime, on the weekends, with whom. She never had boyfriends, at least none she spoke of. She had, but seemed bored with, her few female friends. She was prodigiously gifted at playing piano but hardly ever practiced and quit at sixteen. Fola found weed in the bathroom that one time and, dramatically and defensively, Taiwo confessed. But hiding in her bedroom with the window half open to the front stoop below it, just after the scene, Sadie heard Kehinde say, “Thank you, I’m sorry,” and Taiwo, “Stop saying that. Stop saying sorry.” Sadie peered down at them, backs bronzed by streetlamp. “Anyway, she wouldn’t have believed it was yours.”

So not getting high.

What had Taiwo been doing? Getting As, getting taller, getting attention, getting angry, picking fights with their mother or picking on Sadie or simply not speaking for days at a go. Kehinde assures her that their sister doesn’t hate her, that Taiwo’s “just like that” with everyone else, but Kehinde would say that, playing peacemaker always, and Sadie thinks Olu is telling the truth. “She resents you for getting to stay,” he says plainly. “They got sent to Nigeria. You got to stay here.” Maybe. Or maybe like Olu and Kehinde, who aren’t exactly bosom buddies, they just don’t match: mismatched siblings, the one dutiful, unrebellious, fair-to-middling if affable. The wind beneath. The other the bird.

• • •

A bird squawking. “Are you listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“Make noise then. I thought you hung up.”

“No, I’m here. I’m still here. I’m just… quiet when I listen.”

“I know this is hard—”

“It’s not hard. It’s surprising. I’m listening. You said?”

Taiwo is saying, “I said , if you’d been listening, that we need to get our visas from the consulate at ten, so you need to take a train down to the city soon as possible,” when Sadie thinks suddenly of Kehinde, of the card. “Have you spoken to Kehinde?”

“W-what? Not yet.” Here, Taiwo’s voice catches. “Did you hear what I said? You need to come down to the city.”

“I… I can’t. I have to submit an essay.”

“You what now?”

“I have to submit it in person.”

“Why?”

“It has to be signed for. To show, like, the date.”

“Our father is dead.”

“It’s half of our grade.” (Which touches the nerve.)

“Are you joking right now?”

Taiwo continues, the usual ramble about socialite values in her gravelly voice while Sadie sorts, frantic and silent, through the trash until she finds the FedEx envelope in which the card came. She hears a brief silence, then “again with the silence,” lifts the phone to her lips. “No, I’m here. I’m still here. And you’re right. I just thought of something. I can bring it to her apartment.”