Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

To the airport again.

How: she crossed the tarmac to the aircraft with the smell of dripping evening in her nostrils thick with soon-arriving rain. She didn’t turn to smile or wave or look back at the terminal at the reverend, whom she’d rather liked, or Vera, whom she’d hated. So almost didn’t see him coming running in his three-piece suit. The passenger behind her had to tap her on the shoulder. “Miss?”

And there was chubby Sena, jacket flapping out behind him like a broken magic mantle. “Fola, stop!” Fola stopped. He was wheezing when he reached her. “Thank goodness I caught you. How are you?”

She shrugged.

“I’ve been meaning to come. The firm is still operating, if you can believe it, in Lagos.”

She shrugged.

“But I should have come sooner, I know.” He hugged her now, pressing an object against her. An envelope. “He left this. Don’t open it yet. I was afraid that my mother would steal it so I waited.” He hugged until she had it, then he backed away. “ Go .”

How: when she got there she opened the envelope. United States dollars in crisp bounded stacks. Enough to start over, to remain in America, enough not to have to watch fat women eat or take handouts or need them or ever go hungry or go back to that airport in Ghana again.

• • •

A passenger behind her is tapping her shoulder. “Miss?”

She turns, startled. The passenger points.

And there they are, all of them, watching her, waiting, here, back at this airport in Ghana again.

ii

“She doesn’t look happy to see us,” says Sadie.

“I’m sure she’s still shocked,” Kehinde tells her. “Don’t worry.” But pulls down his sweatshirt sleeves, covering his wrists with them, worried that Fola has noticed the scars.

“You remember my mother,” Olu murmurs to Ling, thinking how much this airport has changed since he came.

Ling whispers, awestruck, “She’s beautiful , Jesus.”

Taiwo feels inexplicably angry.

• • •

All of them slow to a stop and stand staring. Someone should do something , everyone thinks. Kehinde steps forward to hug her but Fola, thrown, cradles his face, rather thwarting the hug. “A beard,” she says, laughing.

“Don’t cry,” he says gently.

“Oh, am I?” Still laughing, she wipes off her cheeks.

The others come forward now, forming a huddle, and taking their turns with their hugs and hellos. “Ling,” breathes out Fola. “I’m so glad you made it,” while Sadie waits, watching them, trying not to scowl.

• • •

She knows this moment. This welcoming smile. This weightless expression of genuine warmth such as only exists for like-a-member of the family. Actual members get heavier welcomes. “And Sadie,” says Fola, her two hands extended, her mouth folded over, head tipped to the side. Sadie shuffles forward, suddenly nervous at the audience, intending a calm, very grown-up embrace, a stiff “Mom. Good to see you,” but the smell is overwhelming, and she feels herself crumbling, sobbing desperately instead.

The smell of her mother — so instantaneously familiar, the smell of baked goods and Dax Indian Hemp, Fola’s twenty-year-old hair product, green with brown speckles like something she uses for gardening, too — and the feel of her mother, so impossibly yielding, the skin on her arms and her hands like a child’s, are a welcome too warm, undiluted, wide open for Sadie to bear it, to feel she deserves it. She buries her face in her mother’s soft shoulder and grips her waist tightly. “I’m sorry,” she slurs.

• • •

Fola laughs softly, stroking Sadie’s braids lightly. Olu watches, wishing that they’d do this at home. At least without Ling looking awkwardly at her sandals, remnant smile from “you made it” gone stiff with surprise. Fola lifts her chin up to peer over Sadie and gestures that the rest of them join in the hug. Olu looks at Taiwo, who looks inexplicably angry, and worries that she won’t accept Fola’s soft “Come.” By way of good example, he takes a step forward and wraps a long arm around Fola’s tall frame. Kehinde moves also to stand behind Sadie, pressing gently between her shoulder blades, calming her down. Ling touches Olu, too, maintaining some distance, reaching quickly for his elbow, squeezing once, letting go. Taiwo watches, thinking that she wants to go forward, for once in her life to feel part of the thing, however loose and misshapen the form of the huddle to feel somehow inside it. But she can’t.

iii

There isn’t enough room in the Mercedes for all of them. Taiwo and Kehinde follow behind in a cab.

iv

She is sitting with her face to the window, her back to Kehinde, remembering seeing Lagos for the first time: the grayness, the haze and the chaos, the road from Ikeja, the hawkers with trinkets and live death-row chickens, the way Femi clapped when they reached the apartment, his cocaine-cold lips on her browbone, his laugh, how her brother looked standing there colder and harder than she’d ever before seen him except when he slept—

when the memory jump-cuts to Barrow Street, November, nude, sitting in the windowsill, blowing out O ’s—

and then onward to the end of it, sunrise, late summer, the wife in Apuglia in search of wet cheese, little inn on the oceanfront ideal for endings, the paper between them, the silence a knell.

• • •

It was always the ocean they came to on weekends. He called her his “water girl,” appropriately so: she was happiest the closest she was to the water, the ocean foremost, though the Hudson would do. (A matter of astrology, he says, she’s a water sign. Nonsense, says Taiwo, just doesn’t make sense. The scorpion is terrestrial, but Scorpio a water sign? And Aquarius an air sign? The logic is flawed.) A wind from the water washed over the porch where they sat, and she drew in a breath of the salt.

“I’ll withdraw,” she exhaled.

“No. I can’t let you do that.”

“I don’t want to be a lawyer,” she said, with some bite. She ran her middle finger along the incriminating headline. Allegations of Infidelity Mire Elite Law School Dean . “You didn’t even think I should be a law student.”

“Two years ago, Taiwo. You’re at the top of your class.”

“I’m always at the top of my class,” she snapped quickly. “Has it ever occurred to you it’s bullshit, the ‘class’? What is this ‘class’? Just the same group of cowards seeking solace in schoolwork. How smart can we be?”

Helpless laughter. “You’re relentless.”

“I’m honest.”

“No difference. I can’t let you quit.”

“Well you can’t make me stay.” She stood in demonstration and walked down the porch steps. “Taiwo!” he called, but he didn’t give chase. She walked and then jogged and then ran to the beachfront, and sat looking out at the Atlantic alone. How wonderful it would be to walk in, she was thinking, just follow the path of the sunrise on waves, pinkish-gold, in her flip-flops and lover’s wool cardigan, to walk and keep walking, onward, under, away. Instead she just sat there, an hour, maybe longer, just long enough to hurt him, to ensure he felt pain. She wasn’t particularly angry — at least not with her lover; she’d been angry with her lot now for fifteen odd years — but she wanted him to suffer, and not from disgrace, but from a sense of having failed her. Of having caused her to fail.

Why did she want this?

He never deceived her. Neither chased the other, nor clung, nor insisted. They’d simply fallen into it, both, in an instant. Succumbed to the sucking-down feeling, and drowned. Now there were whispers and photos and rumors, a manner of discourse she’d never before known, as if some well-trained robot were spitting out stories involving some facts from her life but not her . This wasn’t his doing. He was clumsy and lovestruck with modest amounts of what one might call power; had been able to entertain her where no one could see them but unable to resist his own need to be seen. Two years of sex in a room in the Village and sweet beachfront inns up and down the East Coast, and he’d started to long for an audience to applaud him, to see his great conquest, to know his great joy. A dinner did them in. There were friends of his wife’s there and friends of his enemies from government days. In less than a month there was scandal in the offing. University president and board were apprised. In the middle of August they repaired to Cape May to negotiate the terms of surrender. End scene.