Chinelo Okparanta - Happiness, Like Water

‘Any time,’ I say.

Two weeks later, I’m sitting in my office, my back to the door, when I think I hear a knock so soft that I have to turn around to check if someone is really there. From the opening, I can see a bit of her face, standing by, waiting for me to answer.

I pull open the door, invite her in. She is holding a white paper bag in one hand and a card and envelope in another. She tells me she’s brought something for me. She sits down, signs the card in front of me, and as she’s signing it, she’s muttering something about my having to excuse her cursive, because she never really learned how to write in cursive. I ask her why. She looks up at me, all thoughtful, and says, ‘They didn’t teach cursive in Nigeria.’ She puts her head back down and continues to write.

I say, ‘Oh, I would have thought maybe it’s because of your age or something. I don’t believe they’re still teaching it in schools these days. I don’t believe they’ve taught it for at least a couple of decades now. Probably they wouldn’t have been teaching it for people your age, even if you were in America.’

She looks back up at me and smiles. ‘I’m not so young,’ she says, handing me the card.

‘Does it say something sweet?’ I ask, and immediately I’m embarrassed by the question, because I realize that I’m not only hoping that it does, but that I’m also voicing my desire to her.

‘Not really,’ she says. ‘But what it says should be good enough.’

I feel the heat rise in my face. I tell her thank you. She gets up, tells me to have a good day. She leaves the room.

In class the next week, I keep from looking her way and I’m not sure exactly why.

Another week passes by, and then she comes back to my office. It’s the same routine each time, and it repeats every other week or so. She knocks on my door, peeks in and asks me how I am. I tell her fine. She says, ‘Good.’ And then she wishes me a good rest of the day and leaves.

Thanksgiving comes and goes, and we all start to wrap ourselves up with thick scarves and wool mittens.

The last week before Christmas break she knocks on my door, and I tell her to come in. She is wearing a brown hat, some kind of knit, and half her face is wrapped up with a matching scarf. She enters the room, closes the door behind her, raises her hands to her face to remove the scarf, and it’s only then that I realize she’s upset — and quite a bit angry even, which results in a look that I’ve not until then seen on her face.

I stand up and wrap my arms around her. ‘Somehow it all works out,’ I say. I used to tell this to myself during my divorce, and weeks afterwards. Then the weeks turned into months, and months into years. And I found myself chanting it less.

She mumbles something about letters, about her mother. Then she stays silent for a while, and I feel her body gently relax into mine.

‘It’ll be all right,’ I say, my arms still wrapped around her. She exhales.

We stay like that for some time, and then I loosen my hold on her, allow my hands to drop to her waist. Her hands also make their way down to my waist.

She tells me then, her voice faint and contemplative, that she was the one who signed for the packet the day the first batch of letters came, nearly a year ago now. She starts to laugh, softly, as if she’s suddenly in a trance, but then she stops with the laugh and continues to speak. She tells me that the forecasts that day called for snow, but the delivery man only wore a shirt — the standard yellow-and-red polo, with its red collar and red hem around the sleeves. She tells me that the colour pattern of the shirt matched that of his van, yellow and red all over again. He wore a hat, she says, which, when he removed it, revealed a head of greying hair. She looks at me. ‘Salt and pepper like yours,’ she says. ‘He had blue eyes, too,’ she continues. ‘Only not as beautiful as yours.’ She stops awkwardly then and looks down as if suddenly embarrassed or shy.

Our hands are still around each other’s waists, and there is only a little space between us, and suddenly I have this image in my head of John Rosenberg making out in his office with that female student of his. I don’t remember who it was that walked in on them, but I know he lost his tenure that way, created a scandal in the department that lasted quite a while.

It occurs to me that if someone were to walk into my office at that very moment, things between Grace and me would appear inappropriate. I’ve never consoled a student like this before. And with my closest family members half the country away, in Massachusetts, it’s been a while since I stood this close to anyone, excepting a few cursory hugs with friends and coworkers. It occurs to me that I should take my hands off her waist, but I don’t, and, thinking back now, the reason I don’t is quite clear. But at that very moment, all I am thinking is that I prefer to leave my hands where they are, and that, anyway, it couldn’t possibly be inappropriate, being that I’m a woman, and she’s a woman, and I’m probably older than her mother.

She continues to tell me about the DHL man. How he handed her the yellow package with a smile on his face. Always the same delivery man, she tells me, with the same truck, DHL printed on it and Worldwide Express underneath the DHL. She tells me that she thought she knew what the package was, some silly correspondence for her mother from Nigeria, because silly correspondences were often coming for her mother from Nigeria.

‘Did I tell you I have a brother?’ she asks suddenly, her hands letting go of my waist.

‘No,’ I say, also letting go.

She nods. ‘Arinze,’ she says. ‘Five years older than I am. When we were little, he and I used to take turns climbing a stool that my mother kept in the attic. It was our playroom, that attic room,’ she says. I wonder why she is telling me this, but I don’t ask. Instead, I pull out a seat for her and then one for me. We both sit.

‘It only had one window,’ she continues, ‘which was so near the ceiling that we had to climb on the stool to open it up.’

She tells me that my office reminds her a bit of the attic room, with its exposed brick walls, with the tiny holes between the bricks. She says something about millipedes and centipedes crawling out of the holes in the summer and the spring. It all comes out like something in between a statement and a question, and I wonder if she’s asking me about my office or telling me about her mama’s attic.

‘But it’s been years since either of us used the stool,’ she says. ‘Years since either of us opened or closed the window. Which explains the smell,’ she says. ‘Building up and then settling into every corner, into every item in every corner of the room. The scent of mothballs, and of Mentholatum.’ She laughs softly again, shaking her head as she does. Then she tells me that she’s wrong. That my office is nothing like the attic, because even though there are the brick walls and the tiny holes, the scent is missing. ‘It’s a good thing,’ she says.

I nod and say, ‘Okay.’

‘I handed the envelope to Mama,’ she says. And she tells me everything in so much detail that I can see their kitchen in my head and I can see her mama sitting on the short stool, her legs wrapped around the circumference of the mortar, pounding yam with the pestle. ‘All this time in America,’ she says. ‘And still, Mama must pound her yam in the mortar, the good old-fashioned way.’

‘How long have you been in America?’ I ask.

‘Years,’ she says. ‘Just over twelve years now.’ She came around age eleven, she tells me. I do the math and am a bit disappointed to find out that she’s barely in her mid-twenties.

She breathes deeply and continues. ‘I walk into the kitchen and hand the envelope to Mama,’ she says. ‘Meanwhile Arinze is downstairs, I can hear the hammering and the drilling. He is putting together a shelf for Mama. Always stopping by, helping Mama around the house, fixing or putting together something for her. A perfect son, really,’ she says. ‘Which is why Mama put him in charge of managing her stores, coordinating the shipments of the products from Nigeria, that sort of thing.’