Helen Oyeyemi - The Opposite House

I try to put the corsage box back into Mami’s hand, but she skips away, giggling.

‘It’s just that, you know, she’s. . I can’t explain. She’s. . well, it’s just not right to wear her flower. And this is not a big-deal occasion. Even if it was a big-deal occasion, it still wouldn’t be right to wear her flower.’

Tomás rolls his eyes and withdraws. Mami stamps her foot. ‘Am I a bad mother?’ she demands.

‘Chabella.’

‘I said, am I a bad mother? Didn’t I always tell you how beautiful you are and what a good singer you are? Who is Billie Holiday, anyway?’

‘Mami! She’s —’

‘Yes, I know. Anyway, you’re better at singing than she is. She just growls. And you’re better looking, too, even if you spoil your dresses with strange tops. So put that flower on.’

I turn to the mirror and comb my hair into an upsweep so that I can clasp it, but Chabella dives at me with the gardenia and fixes it at the back of my head with a hairclip. She puts her hands on my shoulders, her face a little behind mine, and looks at us in the mirror. We smile.

‘When are you going to make up with Papi?’ I ask. I have to ask while her gaze is on me.

‘Is my altar back yet?’ she asks. It is not a rhetorical question; she is not being stubborn, she looks so hopeful. And that’s worse. I close my eyes because I had not expected to be taken by this feeling of steam, angry like a new player in a game where someone has suddenly changed the rules.

The wood-panelled café is low-lit and arranged like a fifties speakeasy, with tables ranged in concentric circles around a makeshift stage with a microphone stand. Chabella’s pretty hair is driven back with minuscule black pins so that it tickles her shoulders from high up, like a long feather. She clasps her hands and looks around, enraptured.

‘They’ll have a spotlight on you, and you’ll look like a princess, except for that purple lipstick,’ she tells me.

Having blown Amy Eleni kisses and pointed out to Chabella those seats that I consider safe for her to sit in, I am the last of our band to arrive in the box room behind the café. Michael is there, tense as ever, waiting with one arm curled around his propped-up saxophone, drinking water in tight swallows that don’t even wet his lips. When he sees me, he nods and smiles, but I know he’s only pleased to see me because now we can start our sound check. Maxwell, dreadlocks swaying in the rush of their own weight, body bumps me, and Sophie, our tall, prettily spoken cellist, gracefully offers her cheek to be kissed. She is from Senegal, and she is, just as Maxwell (who has been trying to ask her out for six months) says, sexy like chocolate.

When we go out to warm up on the stage I am happier than I thought I’d be, my foot tapping as Maxwell’s taps, but it’s always that way when I allow the song to come to me without question. Maxwell’s face is serene as he drums, never airless, never strained. He beats time for himself and Sophie — and for Michael, who sways as his fingers ride his saxophone’s polished stops. They are letting me take my own time, letting me fall in after them, but they know that I’m with them.

Really it’s Michael’s band; he cares most, he’s the one who calls for all-day rehearsals, he’s the one who helps us to understand where we’ve gone wrong when we fail to move together. I joined the band mainly because, after graduating, everyone became anxious that I should find something to do. Papi handed me weekly sheaves of job listings and told me to ‘start my life’. Tomás said, ‘It’s cool that you’re home, but you’re disturbing my growth.’ I kept beating him at Nintendo; he didn’t like it, I knew. Chabella found me a post as an assistant librarian — one of her friends ran the local library. That roused me in a way that Papi and Tomás had been unable to. I screamed at Mami, ‘A books job! Chabella, are you mad?’

Amy Eleni came by with some cassettes for me; Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. With no real interest in the answer, I asked her how her teacher training was going. With no real interest in answering, Amy Eleni shrugged and said, ‘It’s going.’ I wanted to defer the future indefinitely, and I sort of wished that Amy Eleni would too. But I listened to the cassettes. And I started singing in a way that I hadn’t before, a kind of singing that made Mami and Tomás say, ‘Waaah, didn’t know you could do that!’ though Papi said nothing.

I sang to Amy Eleni. She didn’t say ‘Waaah’, but she came back with a bunch of ads put out by instrumental groups who wanted singers. I auditioned for Michael’s because his ad was the shortest and the least demanding. He wanted someone to do standards, no particular look or age, and he’d added ‘No divas’.

Michael didn’t seem impressed at any point during the audition, but I thought maybe he’d taken me on because he did an internal ‘Waaah’ at my voice. When we were better friends he told me I was the only one who’d showed up for his auditions. He said, ‘I suppose I offended all the divas.’

Standing discreetly near the back, the café’s owner watches us with her fingers in her mouth — her eyes are boiling-water blue and she looks as if she might snap if she’s not hearing good sounds. But I’m not ready to try my voice yet; we just test the microphones for static, and I follow the pieced strands of song that Maxwell and Sophie and Michael carelessly let swirl.

Amy Eleni, now contemplatively smoking a cigarette in a silvered holder, has seized Mami and they’re both sitting behind glasses of Bacardi and Coke

(Mami smiles a small and unforgiving smile if I ever refer to the mixture as a ‘Cuba Libre’)

their backs are to the other seats, which are filling with sprawled legs and talk. They’re sitting at the table that falls directly under my gaze. Amy Eleni is wearing purple-tinted shades. Chabella waves and smiles at me; I shake my head sorrowfully at Chabella because this is not one of the tables I told her she could sit at. Amy Eleni is wearing a black hat identical to mine over her smooth, shiny blonde bob. She is swathed from top to toe in black. She is wearing red stilettos, and jiggling her feet with impatience under the table.

I am certain that Amy Eleni’s students fear her. It’s not just that her expression constantly suggests that she’s about to say something extremely harsh. She wears mirrored sunglasses indoors as often as she can get away with it, walks with her shoulders, and snaps her fingers when things aren’t happening fast enough for her. But she doesn’t look like a woman at all; she has all the angular, callous, radiant and uncompromising beauty of a girl who has only just grown into her body and barely has an understanding of what has happened. Her eyes are bright and keen and worrying.

When we were seventeen, she told me that she was gay. I was nonplussed; I kept expecting her to say ‘jokes’. I thought she hadn’t had boyfriends and never confessed to crushes because she had yet to meet a boy brave enough to take her on. I asked her if she was sure, because I hadn’t noticed any struggle inside her, any extra-special looks levelled at girls, or any of the things that lesbians were supposed to do. Amy Eleni was resolutely non-tactile — in our school, friendship was intricately tied in with touch; girls pinged each other’s bra straps and poked each other’s bellies and crowed ‘puppy fat!’, and flicked their skinnier friends in the taut bands between their ribs. That was affection. Amy Eleni dispensed winks and air-kisses. That was distance.

I pointed out Amy Eleni’s no-touching thing as one of the factors that made her not gay. She winced, laughed. ‘It just means that I don’t feel like running around grabbing people. It just means I’m sane,’ she said.