Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

The girls who formed my bridal party were just a group of Aba girls — daughters of some of Mama’s friends whom Mama had recruited for the purpose of being bridesmaids. (I had insisted that I did not want any bridesmaids, and Mama had insisted that I should have them.) They danced in place. Soon, other members of the wedding party approached — Chibundu’s groomsmen — breaking through the circle to throw their wads of naira bills at me. All the guests approached. The wads came apart. The bills danced about in the air like oversized feathers, then fell to the ground, spreading out like floor decorations around my feet. My bridesmaids crouched down and gathered them for me. I continued to dance, though all the while Ndidi was on my mind.

Toward the end of the celebration, Mama tugged at my shoulder, led me inside.

“You’ve done well. Very well,” she said. All over her face was a rabid kind of excitement, which I knew must have been a struggle for her to contain. We went into the kitchen and she pulled out a stool for me, the one on which she usually sat to pound yams with the mortar and pestle. All over the kitchen was food — plates and trays and baskets of food covering all the counters. Garden eggs, their meandering green stripes seeming to creep like roots onto their yellow-gold skin. Kola nuts. Bowls of groundnut paste. Trays of meat pies and fried chin-chin. Jerry cans full of palm wine.

“What a wonderful day for all of us,” she said. “The day we’ve all been waiting for.”

I did not see fit to respond.

“Is something wrong?” Mama asked, but then she quickly brushed away the question, so determined was she that nothing would spoil this day for her.

I sat fussing with my hands, tangling and untangling my fingers. “Mama,” I began, but I stopped. There was suddenly a startled look on her face, as if she already knew the words I was about to speak.

“This is the way things go,” she said firmly. An exasperated laugh escaped from her. “The will of God.”

She repeated it: “The wonderful will of God.”

The white wedding came next, and there we were, in one of the small prayer rooms in the church. Mama slipped the gown over my head, zipped up the back so that its tight bodice hugged me. There was a bit of claustrophobia in its embrace. Sweat formed on my forehead. Several times I reached up and wiped it away. Eventually Mama folded a newspaper in half and began fanning me with it. “We can’t have sweat spoiling this day for us,” she said, her voice very impatient.

We stayed silent a while.

“What if it’s not for me?” I said after some time. Perfect pleats ran down the waistline of the dress. I traced the pleats with my fingers, up and down, up and down. There was a tremor in my hands.

“What if what’s not for you?” Mama retorted, like a dare. She looked down and observed my trembling hands.

“Marriage,” I said. “What if marriage is not—”

I did not finish, because Mama’s voice came booming: “Hush before you breathe life into your doubts! Marriage is for everyone! Remember, a woman without a man is hardly a woman at all. Besides, good men are rare these days. Now that you’ve found one, you must do what you can to keep him.”

She studied me for some minutes, peering at me with hard eyes. Then she softened, shook her head slowly, and studied me some more. Finally she said, “ Nwa m, ke ihe ichoro ka m me? My child, what do you want me to do? A woman and a woman cannot be. That’s not the way it’s done. You must let go of any remaining thoughts you have of that.” She said it very softly, but firmly too. “If that’s what this is all about, you must let go of it. It’s not the way things are done.” She took a deep breath, then exhaled, composed herself. “You’ll see. This will all work out. Bia ka ayi je. Come, let’s go.”

Soon I was going through with the sermon, the prayers, the kiss, the handshakes, the smiles, the nods, and the tangential congratulations. Because that’s what you do when you find yourself married to a man who both logic and your mother insist is the right man for you.

Port Harcourt, Rivers State

1980

THE SUN WAS relentless, its heat so oppressive that even the flies appeared too tired to fly.

I forced one foot in front of the other. Even with my body heavy and distended at the middle, I continued to walk.

The woman in front of me was wearing a colorful wrapper and matching blouse and carrying a hen in her hand, its legs tied together by a string. The hen was clucking. A motorcycle sped by, blowing its horn and adding to the noise.

I crossed the tar-and-chip road, wrapping my hands underneath my belly like a brace. The road opened up on the right into a smaller, winding, dusty path. Along the path, two brown dogs were barking and a woman was shooing them away.

The church was a small rectangle of a church, unremarkable aside from its zinc roof, which shone like tinsel in the sun.

Inside, I took a seat at the front, in one of the pews, a simple bench like all the rest: one long plank set on two thin, cylindrical cement blocks. All over the place, the waxy scent of burning candles, though it did not appear that any candles were lit.

Every day for nearly two months I had been coming and taking a seat in that same spot. Every day the same routine, in the morning or in the early afternoon while Chibundu was away at work, until late afternoon just before he returned home. And I would continue to come, because all the women were talking about it still, even if nearly two months had since passed. The women did not seem to be able to stop talking about it: How the cursed mother’s cries had been heard day in and day out in all the flats surrounding the clinic as she pushed and screamed and pushed and screamed. How, when the baby finally slid out, a sigh was heard, not just the woman’s, but an exhale of multitudes, a collective flicker of relief. Everything should have been fine after that, and things were, in fact, fine. But then the midwife took one clean look at the baby boy’s face and saw the horror that he was: a hole in his upper lip where flesh should have been, his left nostril spread wide and flat, not circling above the mouth as it should have been. Not surprising that it did not circle above: it could not be expected to. Not above what was an imperfect reproduction of a mouth, soggy and half-baked, like undercooked batter. A sight to see. A curse, they agreed. A bad omen. A harelip.

By the following morning the woman had fled. After two days of labor she had simply fled. Fled, of course, without her baby boy. And the boy? Maybe he would be sent away to some orphanage, or maybe one of the midwives would take pity on him and resign herself to taking care of him. But more than likely he would be left to perish, unwanted and unloved. Because this was the nature of such things, of anything that was outside the norm. They were labeled with such words as “curse,” and wasn’t it wise to keep curses at bay?

I settled into my seat on the bench. “Lord, have mercy,” I whispered, as I had been whispering every day now for the previous two months. If there were ever another person to be cursed, to be punished in the same way as the harelip’s mother, it was me. If it wasn’t bad enough that I had lived in sin all those years, lying with woman as I should instead have done with man, here I was, carrying Chibundu’s child, yet still allowing thoughts of Ndidi to linger in my mind. Thoughts of Amina, even. Thoughts of loving these two women.

Why was it that I could not love Chibundu the way that I loved Amina and Ndidi? Why was it that I could not love a man? These days, I’ve heard it said that the gender of your first love determines the gender of all your future loves. Perhaps this was true for me. But back then, it was not a thing I ever heard. All I knew in that moment was that there was a real possibility of God punishing me for the nature of my love. My mind went back to the Bible. Because if people like Mama and the grammar school teacher were right, then the Bible was all the proof I needed to know that God would surely punish me.