Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

Panic. Rising gently from the place in her stomach such panic lies waiting for moments like this. She runs from the bed to the adjoining master bathroom and kneels by the toilet to let the thing out. Up come the peanuts and Coke and six bread rolls she ate on the plane behind Olu and Ling, tearing the bread into pieces more appropriate for pigeons before scarfing them down when the rest fell asleep.

iii

Taiwo and Ling in the one-bedded bedroom.

Awkwardly pretending to begin to unpack.

Ling sees the vase on the nightstand and thinks of it. “Your mother’s so gorgeous.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Taiwo says. She is crouching on the floor by the bed with her suitcase, looking vaguely for a shirt for the household-wide nap. She can feel Ling behind her trying to strike up conversation as if they were roommates, day one at the dorm, by turns nervous and excited at the distinct possibility that this stranger might well be a lifelong best friend. They’ve met on other occasions — Olu’s various celebrations, mostly birthdays, when the family would drive down to Yale in the little blue hatchback, a mess from the flowers, Baby Sadie in grade school, and they just returned — but those were the years that she, Taiwo, spent mute, when she’d sit there in silence at Sally’s, and eat, so it wasn’t until later, circa med school graduation, that she spoke to Ling really, got to know the girl some.

It was then she discovered that Ling, much like Olu, is dead set on things going well at all times and so cannot sit still: flutters, flits, laughing constantly as if trying to keep a beach ball from touching the ground. The problem, to boot, is the lack of a filter. She says what she’s thinking, then laughs at her thoughts to an endearing effect (if exhausting, adolescent). If she weren’t pretty, she’d be annoying. Instead she is cute.

This more than anything is what disturbs Taiwo, how cute is Ling, barely five feet off the ground, with her skinny black ponytail bobbing along as she bobs beside Olu double-step to keep stride. She doesn’t find cute women trustworthy, not grown-ups. A cute girl is one thing, cute adult another. Such women always seem to have something to hide, to be playing at helplessness, masking desire. Invariably, she sees in their sweet long-lashed eyes the same smoldering want that burns blatant in hers, if not more of it, cunning, more clarity of purpose, obscured by the girlishness, false to its core. They are women in the truest sense, ripe with soft power, yet pretending not to know what they want, that they want — as if want were unbecoming, a flaw cleverly masked by the appearance of being both needy and content.

As invariably, it is she who seems flawed in their presence, who feels herself strangely too present, exposed, somehow pungent, almost threatening, too much of a woman, exposed for a woman, a dark thing, black swan. While Ling laughs and flits from one thought to the next like some erudite Tinker Bell with ADHD (and with forceps), she Taiwo looms solid and livid, unyielding compared, a thing fallen to earth. She wants now that Ling feel this same sense of weightiness, awkwardness at failing to get her to chat — so abandons the search for a T-shirt to sleep in and lies on her back on her side of the bed fully dressed, yawning loudly and covering her face with her forearm to mean that she’s moments from sleep.

Ling doesn’t notice, her back turned to Taiwo, unfolding small clothes at the foot of the bed. “I don’t think your brother likes me.” She laughs, after a moment.

“Olu’s just like that,” Taiwo mumbles. But smiles. Does this mean that Olu has abandoned the pretense of being in love with his college best friend? Fair enough, only fools rush, but this is excessive: some fifteen years in and no wedding in sight. Her brother never kisses the woman in public nor touches her unthinkingly when putting on coats; all but left her there standing in the driveway on arrival; displays nothing of the clinging that passion begets. Taiwo has long since suspected a cover-up (asexuality, abortion in college, that sort) and imagines that, compelled by the tragedy upon them, the two of them might be at last coming clean.

Instead, Ling says, “Kehinde. He looks at me strangely.”

At the name Taiwo tenses, the age-old reflex, as if her name were spoken and not her twin brother’s. She peels off her forearm to glower at Ling. “What do you mean, strangely?” Without waiting for an answer, “It’s a difficult time for our family—”

“Of course.”

“So if Kehinde looks strange ,” as if the words were not English, “it isn’t because he is… looking at … you.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest…”

The suggestions float there between them.

“I’m tired,” says Taiwo, as if this were Ling’s fault. She turns to the window, heart racing from lying, from the surge of aggression that still coats her throat, an old feeling resurfacing: thick, visceral, inexplicable, unnatural that she should feel jealous.

iv

While Olu and Kehinde lie looking at the ceiling.

“Sure is strange,” Olu says, “sleeping like this.”

“Like the old days,” says Kehinde, to say something. Silence. They agree, by soft laughter, to leave it untouched.

• • •

Olu folds his hands on his stomach, eyes open. He is thinking that the smell is familiar, though strange, the thick/sweet combination of sap and humidity and burning and sweat and dark reddish-brown oil. He knew it the moment he alighted the Mercedes and stood in the pebbled drive breathing it in and was seconds from placing it (1997, Accra) when he noticed that Kehinde was staring at Ling.

Staring , not looking, unaware he was staring so squinting, lips pursed as if finding the word, until Olu said, “Shall we,” and picked up a suitcase and, leaving Ling standing there, marched for the door. He’d never seen his brother interact with a woman and had always kind of vaguely thought Kehinde was gay, less so interested in men than uninterested in women, almost womanly himself, like a dancer, the hair. It startled him therefore to find himself threatened, offended, by Kehinde’s reaction to Ling. The feeling, like the smell, was both strange and familiar, an old one, gone rusty and loud with disuse. The last time he felt this they would have been children, he fourteen or fifteen, his brother not ten, when some friend of their parents, more careless than callous, said, “One got the beauty, the other the brains.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed the difference between the reaction of others to Kehinde and to him. They were extraordinarily good-looking, his two younger siblings, and twins ; there were two, more extraordinary still. It was perfectly logical the way people ogled, a matter of science, of cause and effect. Causes: the infrequent occurrence in nature of greenish-gold eyes against deeply brown skin and the incidence in America of dizygotic multiples (as opposed to, say, Nigeria where twins were the norm). Effect: thrill of shock, like the trick to a punch line, the eyes zooming in on the sight, unprepared. If anything, he felt that he had to protect them, not least on account of their relative size. To him they seemed frail, not just younger but weaker, thin-wristed and — waisted, his brother the more. Compared to his body, athletic and solid, his brother looked fragile. The opposite of threat.

Then Sadie was born, and the thing sort of shifted. Their father disappeared for four, almost five days. Olu knew where he was — down the street at the Brigham — but couldn’t shake the fear that his father was gone , gone away, called away to some faraway battle, with mothers and children left to fend for themselves. It would have been one thing if Fola were present. He was close to his mother, unusually so. In those days they went every Friday for ice cream, Carvel, on Route 9, just the two of them alone eating Rocky Road sprinkled with fine cookie crumbles, he prattling away on the short ride back home. On weekends, if his father had parties with colleagues, she’d take him for dinner at the Chestnut Hill Mall, leaving Taiwo and Kehinde with the kind Mr. Chalé while they ate clam chowder at Legal’s. He took a quiet pride in their physical resemblance; almost everybody noticed, and she smiled when they did. Furthermore, his father looked awed when he looked at her, and Olu thought he saw a sparkling residue of awe when his father turned to look at him , now and then, a hint of it, in the hospital for instance, when the baby was born.