Chinelo Okparanta - Happiness, Like Water

Tears well up in my eyes, not because I’m sad or embarrassed. Tears well up because suddenly I feel relieved.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Mr Loftin asks.

I nod and start to speak. ‘My father,’ I say. I pause.

‘Your father?’ Mr Loftin asks.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He gets angry.’

‘Did he do something to you?’ Mr Loftin asks.

Do you want to be responsible for sending a diabetic man to jail? I hear in my head.

I wipe my eyes and smile. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘Everything will be fine.’

Mr Loftin nods.

I say, ‘You know, I have a perfect 4.0. I’m in all those AP classes. I’ve taken the tests and have a semester worth of AP credits. Before you know it, I’ll be in college. And I’ll do well in college. Everything will be fine.’

It comes out like a rehearsed speech, which is sort of what it is, because I’ve told it to myself so many times those past few months, every time Papa lashed out at Mama and me.

Mr Loftin nods. ‘You’ll do just fine in college, yes,’ he says. ‘But there are other issues. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.’

I shake my head.

‘Are you sure?’ he asks.

I nod.

‘I’ll be here if you change your mind,’ he says, as I get up to leave.

Somewhere in the middle of going to and from the hospital, I find out that the thyroid gland is butterfly-shaped, that its two lobes look somewhat like wings. Butterflies should be soft and beautiful, but I imagine that perhaps this is the issue with Papa’s thyroid. Perhaps his thyroid has never been quite the way it should be. I imagine that removing it from his neck might result in the change that we’ve always wanted.

He stays in the hospital for a week. The surgery is simple, goes exactly as expected, the doctors say. He will be back to normal within a couple of days of being discharged, they tell us.

He comes home, walks around in his blue-and-white-striped pyjamas for more than a couple of days. He drags his feet, mutters.

We beg him to eat, but he shakes his head and tells us that he has no appetite. One week passes. Two weeks pass. ‘It’s a shame,’ he says one evening. His voice is throaty and his accent is heavy like Mama’s. ‘Such a shame to be so sick and weak.’

‘Munchausen’s syndrome,’ I whisper to Mama when we leave him.

She scowls at me.

‘Better this way,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll take Munchausen any day over the shouting and the hitting.’

She is wearing her mauve gown. It is sleeveless and goes down to her ankles. Her cheekbones are high, and the skin on her face appears supple and young. At first glance, hers is not the face of a fifty-five-year-old woman. But there are grey bags under her eyes. And her forehead wrinkles just a bit, like the creased linen of her gown. She looks at me and shakes her head. ‘Don’t call trouble where there’s no trouble,’ she says.

She is right about there not being trouble. For once, Papa is placid, docile.

That evening, Papa calls my name. He calls it loudly, so that I can hear it even from the kitchen, even with their bedroom door being shut. He is sitting up on his bed when I open the door, his back facing the wall. His comforter is a tawny landscape of purple and green swirls, like little snakes on sandy desert land. It is pulled midway up his torso. I stand at the entrance of the room, just under the arch of the doorway. ‘Yes, Papa?’ I say.

He is wearing a white singlet and fussing with his comforter. He asks for a glass of water. ‘Are you okay?’ I ask.

He nods slowly as if his head is a heavy ball on his neck, as if any movement must be slow and calculated in order that the ball does not tip over.

I leave the room to fetch his water. When I return, I walk up to his bedside. I hold the glass of water out to him. ‘What a wonderful child,’ he says, as he takes the glass from me. ‘You’re so good to your poor old papa.’ His voice is gentle, and the words are kind and unexpected. So unexpected that all I hear is what I’ve gotten accustomed to hearing from him, especially those last few years at home, my high-school years: I hear in his voice something gravelly and harsh, which causes me to grimace and pucker my brows the way I would at the sound of fingernails scraping across a chalkboard. But then I think of his cancerous butterfly, and I think of tumours extending out of its lobes, out of its wings. I think of the doctors plucking the tumours out, tossing them away. I think of the medications stabilizing him in a way that his diseased thyroid did not manage to do. Only then do I recognize his voice for what it is: a soft and gentle embrace.

My second month in college, I called and called Mama on the phone, but she did not pick up. After a week of my calling, she finally called back.

That day, I pick up the phone, and I’ve barely said hello when she says, ‘Now that you have gone off to college, your father does not feel that it is a good idea that you come back. He feels you have been disrespectful to him by interfering with things in our marriage, by getting involved.’

‘Me? Disrespectful?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘There’ve been times when you got in the middle of our fighting,’ she says. ‘When your parents are having an argument, it’s not your place to get involved.’

‘It wasn’t just an argument,’ I say. ‘He was hitting you.’

‘He says I should tell you that he is disowning you,’ she says.

At first, I’m silent. Then I tell her that she is weak. I ask her how she can be so unemotional, how she can even dare to relay the message as if she’s just stating a fact. My voice is shaking the whole time, still I force myself to finish: I ask her if she even bothered to tell him that he was the one at fault, that he had no business disowning me? I don’t wait for an answer, because I already know the answer. I hang up the phone, because, deep down, I understand that this is what she feels is right, this is what she believes she needs to do.

For Christmas break, I pack up some of my things from the dorm room and stay in my friend Melissa’s empty apartment. State College is dead and cold during the winter break, but I decide that there is something to be said for a real, honest winter, that there’s something enjoyable about tumbling in and sliding on piles of unmuddied snowflakes. So I put on my boots, take the tray that I had previously stolen from the dining commons outside with me. I lay the tray on the ground. I sit on it, and I slide down the small hills of the snow-covered fields, over and over again. I do this almost every other day. Before long Christmas break is over.

The entire spring semester, I don’t hear from her, and then in the summer Mama calls, tells me that we can arrange something, a meeting at the mall, maybe. Perhaps I can even sneak into the house when he has gone to bed. I can park my car two streets down from the house. We can catch up while he sleeps, like good old times, maybe even watch some of the newest Nollywood movies together. What good old times? I wonder, but I don’t say it to her. Instead I’m thinking of the dozen or so times we watched a movie. Almost every one of those times, Papa came in, took the remote control, and changed the channel to some WWF match or whatever else he claimed he had to watch. The last few times, we’d decided to wait till late, till he was asleep. And we’d watched the movie quietly and stiffly, worried that Papa would somehow come in and change the channel on us.

Still, that summer, I go to her. We meet at the mall, have dinner at the Chinese place. After dinner, she leaves. I wander the mall, read at the Borders bookstore to kill time. At around 10 p.m., I go to the house. We are sure he’ll be asleep.