Chinelo Okparanta: Happiness, Like Water

Weeks go by, and then a month. By then, Allen High School has adjourned for summer break. Mama and I continue to take Papa back and forth for his check-ups. Everything seems to be going fine, and I’m thinking that my services are no longer even needed, and then suddenly, one day, Mama and Papa return from the check-up, and he goes directly to his room. He looks to be in a bad mood, so I ask Mama what it’s all about. Mama announces to me then that he will indeed need to go in for radiation. She tells me that she will need to prepare low-iodine diets for him, because limiting his intake of iodine before the radiation treatment will help increase the effectiveness of the radioactive iodine in his body.

‘What does a low-iodine diet mean?’ I ask her.

‘No seafood,’ she says. ‘No dairy products, no egg yolks, no soybeans, no Red Dye #3. Rice, fresh meats and cereals in moderation. Plenty of unsalted nuts and fresh fruit, except rhubarb and maraschino cherries (the ones that contain Red Dye #3).’ She says it dutifully, carefully, as if she’s memorized the doctor’s pamphlet.

‘It’s a lot of planning and preparation,’ she says. ‘And it will only get worse when the treatment is done.’

I only listen.

‘I need more help,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to stay a bit longer.’

I nod, because things haven’t been so bad.

‘I have to think of my work,’ Mama goes on. ‘I really can’t afford to lose my job.’

I think about my first year in college, how I was banned from coming home, how she compromised and allowed me to sneak in at night. There’s something different, something almost satisfying in being wanted. I nod and tell her that I’ll stay a while longer.

Mama has to work the day he undergoes the radiation treatment. She has used up all her vacation and personal days, and taking a leave of absence from her job would mean going without health insurance for that period of time, which is not an option with Papa still needing treatment.

I drive him to his appointment, and the plan is that he’ll take a taxi back, because there’s no telling how long he’ll need to be in the hospital.

After I drop him off, I head to the Borders by the mall. I find a small cubicle and sit there, reading the newspaper. Then I switch from the newspaper to a collection of short stories, and before I know it, it’s evening. I return the book to the shelf where I found it, and I head home.

By now Mama has made me a copy of the house key, so I open the door and enter. I’m only halfway up the stairs when I see the signs that Papa has posted. Four of them, printed in red ink, on white paper. They all read: CAUTION! RADIATION! STAY AT LEAST THREE FEET AWAY! Even though things for the past month have not been bad at all with Papa, and even though, with the passage of time, I’m getting more and more confident with my diseased butterfly theory, the obligation to stay away causes me to sigh with relief.

I walk between the dining room and the kitchen. There are two long lists, duplicates of post-treatment procedures. The lists begin: for the first two days, maintain a prudent distance from others. Sleep alone in a separate room. Avoid close prolonged social contact as much as possible. Use only separate, disposable eating utensils. Do not prepare food for others or have any prolonged contact with foods of others.

I am still reading the list when my cell phone rings. It is Mama on the line.

‘When your father is ready to eat,’ she says, ‘put some of the yam and spinach pottage onto a plate, heat it up in the microwave for two and a half minutes, then transfer the food onto one of the paper plates from the dining room. Place the food on the small table by your papa’s bedroom door. Knock on the door when you’ve placed it there. He will come out and take the food when he hears the knock.’

‘How will I know when he’s ready to eat?’ I ask. She works at Sayreville Assisted Living Home, at least twenty minutes away. She works the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift. I imagine her in her nurse’s station, leaning towards old Jack and his metal walker, her mouth close to his one good ear, coaxing him loudly to give her just one moment, one moment so that she can make this call to me. ‘How will I know when?’ I ask.

‘I’ll give him your cell phone number,’ Mama says. ‘Some time within the next hour, he will send you a text message telling you that he is ready. That way you’ll know to prepare the food.’ My heart starts to beat fast. I feel like suddenly there is no air going into my lungs, but I know I need to say something. Before I can respond, she says she has to go and hangs up the phone.

I was a senior in college the last time Papa lost his job. Over five years ago, almost six now. Not that he hadn’t been laid off from jobs before, but this was the first time that he had trouble getting another job right away. This was also the period when he first began to fall sick. First there was the lump in his neck, then the hoarseness, the problems swallowing, the difficulty breathing. He was in and out of the hospital even then.

One evening during that time, Mama calls me at my dorm room in the university, tells me that she thinks it would be a good idea for me to write to him, to show him some sympathy in this time of distress. ‘I make no excuses for the man,’ she says. ‘Your father has done many things wrong, but he’s a sick man now. A sick man without a job.’

I say no. The line seems to go dead. ‘Hello?’ I say. ‘Hello?’

She doesn’t say anything, but just as I am about to hang up the phone, she clears her throat and tells me she is disappointed, that she has to go. She hangs up the phone.

Days later, as I’m about to run off to class, the phone rings. It is Mama again, and we have the same conversation once more. ‘Be the bigger person; forgive and forget,’ she says. ‘Write him the letter, or an email even, show him you’re the bigger person, that you can be sympathetic, especially to someone like him. Forgive and forget.’ That’s what she’s had to do, she says.

As we get off the phone, I tell her that I’ll think about it. And I do.

Nearly a week later, I’m sitting in my dorm again, at my desk area, when I decide to call her back. She picks up, and from the sound of her voice, I can tell that she is expectant.

I ask her if she knows what she is asking me to do. She says yes, she realizes what she is asking. Write the letter, she says. He is a changed man. He is changing as we speak, what with all these bad things happening to him, a man can’t help but change for the better.

‘How long has this change been going on?’ I ask, disbelieving. Just a year before she had called me crying about how he brought the car to a stop, dragged her out by the hair, slammed her onto the body of the car, screaming at her, all because she had made a comment about his speeding. After that incident, she had promised that she would leave, would come and find an apartment near me, anything to get away from him.

I remind her that before that, he kicked her out of the car in the middle of the highway on their way to some church conference, forced her to find her own way home.

I tell her that some things, and some people, don’t change. ‘It’s no different from when we lived in Massachusetts,’ I tell her. ‘Even then he was banning us from entering his car if he happened to find crumbs or dirt that he thought we had tracked in.’ Does she remember how I saved up two hundred dollars from babysitting kids around the block, from collecting and recycling empty cans and bottles from the streets every day after school, just so that I could help her buy her own car? Does she remember how she worked twelve hours a day at her under-the-table housekeeping job at Beacon Hill Hotel, changing sheets and scrubbing toilets, so that we could put together our money, so that we could buy her that Dodge Omni, the maroon one with the peeling paint, which ran just fine, but was sold so cheap because of its terrible paintwork? I was only in middle school then. ‘Do you remember?’ I ask.