Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

“Mama!”

Her eyes focused now, her look no longer vacant. “Well, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” she said, staring straight into my eyes. “There’s nothing more meaningful in a marriage than having a precious child of your own.”

Our second night, Chibundu came again to me, wrapped his arm around me where we sat on the edge of the bed. There was more determination in his gestures, and in his eyes was the look of a man who was expecting to get what was denied him the night before.

I shifted away instinctively. His eyes turned soft, pleading, just as soon as I did. He began to stroke my shoulders. “It’s not by force,” he said in a whisper. “It’s not something we should do by force. Just let me know when you feel ready.”

That night, I saw the foolishness of my resistance in his words. Just let me know when you feel ready. I knew in my mind that I might never feel ready. There was no sense prolonging my resistance. Anyway, better to have one person miserable rather than two.

That night, he moved closer to me, unzipped his pants. That night, I allowed him to make love to me.

OUR HOUSE IN Port Harcourt was a small, two-bedroom flat. It had peeling paint, leaking ceilings, buzzing fluorescent lights, cracking stone tiles. Holes in the walls, which allowed cockroaches to crawl in. Windows that could not be properly shut.

I sulked: Out of the way things had taken this unexpected turn. Out of the fact that I had gone and allowed myself to marry Chibundu. Out of the fact that his job had led us away from Aba, away from Ndidi.

He sulked: Out of the rigidness of his job. Out of the newness of his responsibilities.

And of course there was, again, the state of our new home. So many things old and falling apart as they were, it was a home that fueled our bad moods. If it could have done as much, the home itself would have sulked with us.

Our first month in the flat, Chibundu and I had taken time to tape up the peeling walls. We had taken time to seal the holes in the ceilings and the floors. For a while, the rain stopped dripping in and the cockroaches stayed away. But a month later, the problems returned, a crude reminder that patching would not be enough.

But Chibundu was hopeful too.

One evening, he came back from work not looking his usual miserable way. I had gone to the market that day, spent hours there, and had returned with only a batch of snails. Snails were what we would have had for dinner, if we had bothered to have dinner that night.

I rinsed the snails in a bowl and transferred them to a pot. The pot was still on the counter, not yet on the stove, when Chibundu called my name.

I could see him from the corner of my eye, his tall frame coming toward me. There was a slowness to his movements, as if the room were a pool of water and he was struggling to wade through it. But finally he arrived.

By the stove, he wrapped his arms around me and said, “One morning, you will look around the flat and see all the things that are wrong with it — the peeling paint on the walls, the cracks, the holes. You will see all those things, and yet everything will feel just fine.”

“Impossible,” I said, a little annoyed by the stupidity of the statement.

He removed his arms from around my body. He walked off toward the shelf in the farthest corner of the kitchen. He returned holding a tuber of yam. He reached for a knife and began peeling off the skin of the yam.

“Broiled or fried?” he asked as he peeled.

“Broiled,” I said.

It was not unusual for him to cook. This was one of the things that made Chibundu different from so many other men I knew, even from Papa. Every once in a while he cooked, and even enjoyed doing so.

He cut up the yam into cubes, scooped them up, rinsed them off, spread them on a tray, and sprinkled some salt and pepper and coconut oil on them. All the while I watched. I watched as he bent over with the tray, sticking it into the oven to broil.

As he closed the oven, I turned from watching him back to the snails that I had been tending to on the counter. I carried the pot to the stove. I struck a match, lit the fire. Before I turned to leave, I bent over to peek into the oven, just to check that the yams were fine. From the small glass window on the front of the stove, I saw Chibundu’s reflection, his legs crossed, arms folded. He was leaning against the sink watching me.

“What?” I asked, straightening up and turning to look directly at him.

“That morning,” he said, “you will make your way out of the bedroom, through the parlor, and straight into the kitchen. You will find me here by the sink, beating some breakfast eggs for you. The fork will be clanking against the bowl. The windows will be open, and a breeze will be entering through it. Music will be flowing from the radio. Everything will be fine.”

“And just how exactly will everything be fine?”

His face was earnest and hopeful as he stood there leaning his back on the sink. He said, “You will be somebody’s mother, and I will be somebody’s father.”

I snickered, pointed to a crack in the wall. “Is that right?” I asked. “Are you sure you want to bring a child into this?”

“It’s not so bad,” he said.

By then there was the slight, sandy scent of snails in the air.

He straightened himself so that he was no longer leaning against the sink. He moved forward and took me once more into his arms. He pressed himself against me, and me against him. What else could he have done?

I buried my face into the nook between his neck and his shoulder. In that recess, I felt his body tighten. Soon his hands came between us, his fingers tracing the buttons on my blouse. He slipped the buttons out of their holes, one after the other. His hands made their way beneath my blouse, along the upper hem of my bra.

“Shhh. It’s okay,” he whispered, as I recoiled.

He planted a kiss on my forehead. The air was humid. The water in the pot of snails had come to a boil, the sound of gently popping bubbles.

He led me into the parlor. Our clothes trailed the path, my blouse and skirt mixing with his shirt.

On that tattered old couch, he caressed and kissed me some more, soft kisses, unhurried, even a little slow. All this time he’d been nothing but patient with me. Here he was, a man I wanted badly to be rid of. But I knew full well that he also held the key to my only imaginable escape: Perhaps by making me a mother, he would save me. Maybe motherhood would make me feel more invested in the marriage. Maybe motherhood would cause me to forget Ndidi. All of this I reasoned so that by the time he rooted me to the sofa, I had already relented. He planted a million and one more kisses on me, and when he moved to enter me, I made sure not to turn away.

WE HAD BEEN married for just over six months now, and living in Port Harcourt for five of those.

I stood up from the front steps, lifted myself from the weeds I had been picking.

What was it?

The headache was now beyond persistent. I could no longer continue. I marched into the kitchen, short of breath.

Something was changing in me. New qualities, a new restlessness.

Every day for all of that week, I had called Mama on the phone. Something was not quite right.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Mama. That’s the point. I don’t know.”

I found the teakettle and set some water atop the stove to boil.

I picked up the phone.

A breeze through the kitchen windows gently lifted the curtains.

I found a ginger root in the pantry. I scraped away the skin with a spoon, cut off a small piece, and allowed it to sit like a communion wafer on my tongue.