Chinelo Okparanta - Happiness, Like Water

‘You could pay for your mama’s bills with the money,’ she said.

‘Abeg, comot from here!’ I said, glaring at her with my eyes wide open, shocked that she would even suggest such a thing for me. She could do as she pleased. But to go so far as to involve me in her sinful ways, that was another thing. ‘Tufiakwa!’ I said, snapping my fingers. ‘God forbid!’

‘You’re a pretty girl,’ Njideka said. ‘Or at least you can be. And I know of a man who would love a girl like you.’

She tugged the scarf that I was wearing around my head. Thin braids fell loose around my shoulders. She stood up and disappeared into one of the rooms of the flat. She came back holding a wide mirror, and a bag of beauty products: nail polish, lipstick, eye pencil, lip liner, small boxes of blush and eyeshadow. ‘Ten minutes,’ she said, ‘and I’ll show you what you can look like.’

She brushed the hair at the base of my scalp, straightening out the tight curls. She rubbed powder on my face, smoothing it on with soft cotton balls. The movement of her fingertips was hypnotic. Slowly I surrendered myself to her hands. She rubbed blusher onto my cheeks. She finished with my lips. It was my same pale skin, my same bushy brows. But certain features had become magnified, and others had been changed, moulded to arrive at something more striking.

She took out a handful of plastic-wrapped packets from a small box that she had brought from the room. She stuck them in my purse. ‘Condoms,’ she said. ‘Just in case.’

‘I didn’t say I’d do it,’ I said.

‘Your mama is sick, and there’s a good chance you won’t even have to sleep with the man.’

‘My mama is waiting for me at home,’ I said, tossing the condoms from my purse. I picked up my headscarf, along with my purse. ‘It’s sinful,’ I said, and walked out the door.

Back at home, there was no light again, and I used a kerosene lantern to prepare Mama’s pepper soup. She’d still not grown tired of the soup, or perhaps she was still clinging to the hope that it alone could cure her of the curse.

I’d grown tired of it. I roasted a plantain and ate that with some tomato stew.

That night, Mama asked me to help her bathe. For a week, she had only been able to give herself sponge baths, because it was too painful for her to climb in and out of the bath.

I boiled a kettle of water on the kitchen stove. We waited till the sun had gone down completely, then I poured the hot water into a bucket, took it to the tap outside and filled it with cool water so that the temperature was just right.

There was a cement slab in the backyard on which we washed our clothes. Above the slab were wire lines on which we hung the clothes to dry. Mama stood on the cement slab. She crouched a bit, as if shielding herself from peering eyes. But our fence ran the whole way around the compound, and the houses nearby were flats like ours, not high enough to allow the possibility of second-storey peeping Toms. Still she crouched, because of the pain. And though it was mostly dark outside, the moon and stars shined brightly enough that I could make out the redness all around her shoulder and chest.

With a small bowl, I poured the water over her shoulders, down her back. I lathered up a washcloth with a bar of soap and rubbed her skin gently with the cloth.

I poured the water down her breasts, lifted them one at a time and washed underneath. They were heavy and sagged, nothing like mine, though I knew that mine would surely one day become weighed down with age, too.

She squeezed her eyes shut each time the cloth touched her skin. It didn’t matter how gentle I was. The fear had been implanted in her, and so she’d squeeze so hard that wrinkles formed on her forehead and crow’s feet around her eyes. That night, it was hard to tell what the droplets on her face were: tears from so much pain and suffering, or merely splashes of bath water.

Even with the aroma of the soap, there was still something yeasty, almost stale, and a little honey-like about her scent. It was a smell that resembled that of the sweet powdered milk which we used to drink in our morning tea. And I thought, so this is what it smells like to be old and weak.

I imagined rubbing powder on her face, all over her body, smoothing her out, the way Njideka had smoothed me out. I imagined erasing the age from her face, imagined putting life into her cheeks. If only it could be as easy as rubbing some of Njideka’s blush onto them. But of course, that was not an option.

We prayed again that night and Mama read again from Job. Despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For He maketh sore, and bindeth up: He woundeth, and His hands make whole .

‘You must speak good English,’ Njideka told me the next time we met. It was a Friday, after classes. I had told Mama that I would have to run some errands, university business, pick up groceries at the market. Those types of things. She had nodded and told me she’d be waiting, whenever it was that I got back home.

‘None of this pidgin that we use when we are by ourselves,’ Njideka said. ‘These men are looking for intelligent women who can hold a conversation.’ Of course, I could do just that. I could discuss budget and political issues comfortably. It was what I studied at the university. If I did well, I could bring in five hundred dollars or more. American dollars.

I would do it just that one night. To get the money for Mama. To get the money so that I could take her to a specialist, one that Njideka would recommend. I knew that Mama would ask where the money had come from. I’d tell her that I’d taken up a short-term job. It would be the truth. She’d probably ask more questions. What kind of job? How did you find it? I’d figure out answers for those questions later, I thought.

Njideka did my make-up just as she had that first afternoon. Then she lent me a red wrap-around dress, a little too tight on her, she said, but just my size. It formed a V around my neck. I’d never before given any thought to my collarbone, but in the mirror that evening, I thought what a beautiful thing the collarbone was. And I thought how terrible that Mama’s was so damaged.

The man arrived in a BMW — a Be My Wife, Njideka teased. He was tall and dark, his simple linen buba and sokoto crisply ironed. He reached out and took my hand, drawing it upwards and tipping his head just a bit as he placed a kiss on its back. He wore gold rings on three of his five fingers. They were not massive rings, but small diamonds circled each of them and sparkled so that the rings appeared much larger than they actually were.

It was supposed to be a simple dinner, at one of those swanky restaurants in GRA — Blue Elephant or G’s Barracuda — those expensive hangout spots for the wealthy. And it seemed that this would be the case as we headed down Abacha Road, past the GRA Everyday Emporium, the grocery store with the escalators and fancy security guards. But then he continued to drive, taking some turns and winding up in a place that, in the dark, I did not recognize. He stopped the car there and asked me to untie my dress. I shook my head, smiling just a bit, like a mother gently scolding a misbehaving child.

‘Come on,’ he said, his voice soft and pleading. ‘Don’t be afraid of me, beautiful Ada.’

My name on his tongue sounded vile. Like an insult.

‘What about dinner?’ I asked, trying to sound calm. ‘Let’s eat first, and then we’ll go from there.’

‘Come on,’ he said again, his voice more gravelly, more urgent. He lifted his buba, lifted it so high that I could see the drawstring of his sokoto and the dark coils of hair just above, on his belly.

I shook my head again. ‘Dinner first,’ I said, my voice trembling. Njideka had said that most of the men wanted nothing beyond dinner and maybe a kiss. How could I have been so unlucky as to wind up with this man? I began to cry, begging him to take me back home.