Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

“Whose apartment?”

“My professor’s.”

“Okay, where?”

“In New York.”

“Okay, where in New York?”

“I think somewhere in Brooklyn.” (Scribbled on the FedEx form, a Greenpoint address.)

“Sadie, fine.” Taiwo sighs. “Come. I’ll take you to Brooklyn. How soon can you get here?”

“I’ll take Metro-North. If I leave around seven, I’ll be there around nine-ish?”

They exchange parting pleasantries.

Sadie hangs up.

• • •

Quiet. She sits in the darkness, repeats it, “Our father is dead.” Not so much as surprise. Squeals, peals of laughter from the hallway, a sing-along, “‘Under the bridge down-tooooown!’” The snow. “ Your father is dead,” she says, waiting for (willing) the sadness. Still nothing. She closes her eyes. She wants to feel something, some normal reaction, some sign that it matters that someone is gone, never mind it’s her father now gone for so long that his gone-ness replaced his existence in full. She squeezes her eyes shut, envisioning him sitting at the center of the picture having just saved her life, but feels only the distance, the gathered-up absence like soft piles of snow in between then and now. “Your father is gone,” she tries, squeezing — or hears it, remembered, a memory that rarely comes up, of an afternoon, wintertime, when she was in kindergarten, her mother in the kitchen, her eyes and voice flat.

“Your father is gone,” announced Fola, then, softly. A weekend, it must have been; Olu was home. They were sitting at the table eating breakfast, the four of them, Fola at the counter chopping onion. There was snow. No one asked questions, at least none she remembers; she was marveling at the colors of her Lucky Charmed milk. She looked at their faces, her brothers and sister, one stern Oyo mask and the four amber sparks. Taiwo left the table, saying nothing. Fola nodded. Kehinde left the table, saying, “Taiwo,” giving chase. Olu walked over to their mother and hugged her. Fola said, “I love you,” and Olu, “I know.” Olu left the kitchen, kissing Sadie on the forehead. Fola looked at Sadie. “Just the two of us then.”

Now comes the sadness, an upswell from silence. She opens her eyes and the sorrow pours out, not the one she was bidding at the loss of her father but longing for Fola. She misses her mother. The simplest of feelings, a low-throbbing longing, though a few minutes pass before she knows what it is, and a few minutes more before she catches her breath and lies back, crying, tired, on her old kente throw. (Rather, Fola’s old throw — threadbare, faded and soft, with the blacks turned to grays and the reds turned to pinks — but her favorite thing, Sadie’s, unearthed in the basement in Brookline playing dress-up with Fola’s old things. She’d wrapped herself up in the kente, delighted, and marched to the kitchen, “I’m a Yoruba queeeen!” Fola had seen her and let out a breath, as if punched in the stomach. There were tears in her eyes. “You’re a princess,” she’d whispered, and hugged her, “a little princess,” but never said more, never speaks of her past.) Sadie lies back with her knees to her chest and the tears rolling down to her ears on both sides, to the pillow. And thinks of it:

Fola, years later.

That look as if punched.

It didn’t need to be said.

• • •

Another house, another kitchen, two months ago (barely, seven weeks, though it feels like two years, Sadie thinks). She was home for the weekend, Halloween, carving pumpkins, Fola’s newest invention, a hit at the shop: scooped-out pumpkins full of foliage, Cottage Apricot chrysanthemums, African marigolds, gold rudbeckia, heather, cranberry branches, all the rage among Chestnut Hill housewives that season since appearing in the Boston Globe ’s Sunday magazine. Mini pumpkins as flower pots. In every way Fola: the something-from-nothingness, the making of the best of it, an ode to Halloween, her most favorite of rites, what with spirits in costume and giving of gifts. “Like a Yoruba fetish ceremony, with candy,” she’d delighted. Had hand-sewn their costumes, each year an orisha , half mocking as ever, never taking things seriously. Anything other than beauty. And sometimes her, Sadie.

The baby. “Baby Sadie,” Fola calls her (or called her), the most like their mother and the closest in a sense, having remained in the house for ten years without siblings, just they, only child and single mother, BFF: used to talk every day at least once on the phone, spend two weekends together each month without fail, making stew, baking cobbler, unbraiding her braids, watching natural disaster movies, discount-shopping downtown. Taiwo says Fola treats Sadie like the favorite (to which Fola, “She’s my favorite second daughter; you’re my favorite first”), but Sadie says it’s more that Taiwo doesn’t get their mother who, for whatever reason, Sadie understands, accepts as is. The way Fola thinks, the funny ways Fola acts, with her vague, neutral answers and faraway laughter, the appearance of indifference and impenetrable silence — Sadie finds these things calming, relieving. What is more, Philae says she’s jealous of how “chilled out” Sadie’s mother is, and Sadie rather overflows with pride at Philae’s envy. It’s the only thing that Sadie has that Philae doesn’t (she thinks). Her mother. Her loyal, indispensable, keeper of secrets, secretive, unflappable, beautiful mother.

Whom, nevertheless, as they stood in the kitchen disemboweling pumpkins not two months before — with the afternoon turning to evening unhurried, the leaves in the garden a gem show outside, with that odd film of quiet that settles between them, around them, now forming, as thick as the light — she suddenly begrudged her impenetrable silence. A knot in the stomach. She set down the knife. “So, Mom—” she started.

“Mmm?” said Fola, but distracted, not looking, wet seeds on her hands.

The theme song for All Things Considered began, giving texture to the quiet.

Sadie turned to look at the leaves in the sunset, the New England Spectacular, a modest backyard in a grid of small yards for these townhouse apartments (the third and last house to which Fola had moved when she’d started at Yale, up and moved in a week, put their bedrooms in boxes, the boxes in storage), still foreign, the view, after three years of weekends — then back at her mother, trying to gather the thought. What was it, she wonders now, there, out the window, in that firestorm of yellows and umbers and reds in the sun, like a postcard, idyllic Coolidge Corner, Indian summer running long this year, wish you were here! — that made her so lonely, so desperately lonely? Made her feel that their life, hers and Fola’s, was a sham? That they didn’t belong to this picture, in this postcard? That both were impostors? She still doesn’t know. “I know what you wrote about Christmas vacation, but last year was Boston. This year is St. Barth’s.”

“I know that, my darling,” said Fola without looking. “You can double up next year.”

Sadie faltered. What now? She spent every other Christmas in St. Barth’s with the Negropontes, always leaving on the twenty-third with Philae from JFK and always returning on the thirtieth for New Year’s in Boston with Fola, their one family tradition. First Night festivities, then dinner at Uno’s, spinoccoli pizza, then the harbor to count, with the twins never home, Olu always with Ling, just the two of them, huddled up, arms interlinked. Now, for whatever reason, her mother was insistent that Sadie be in Boston two years in a row and that all of them come, Olu, Taiwo, and Kehinde, at least for the event, Christmas day. In a wholly uncharacteristic display of emotion and even more uncharacteristic use of electronic communication, she had sent out a message three sentences long on the subject last week, a group e-mail. It read: “My darlings, I would like us to be together this Christmas, all of us. Please let me know. Love, your mother.” A strange salutation, as she’d never once called herself mother, their mother. Sibby, yes: red-faced and sobbing and seething at the bottom of stairs with the shaking of fists, “I am your mo -ther, young la -dy,” each syllable separate, “You’ll do as I say!” Fola doesn’t sob or seethe. She never raises her voice at them. Whenever one of them shouts at her she simply tips her head and waits. It’s not exactly patience, nor dismissal, something in between, an interest in the shouter’s plight, an empathy, with distance.