Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

Speaking of infuriation, something about the way she was speaking was starting to infuriate me. Out the kitchen window, a heavy rain was falling. There was a steady rapping above. I could not tell what amount of it was the sound of my head thumping and what amount was the sound of the rain beating on the roof.

Mama continued on about the man and about his lack of decency, as if decency were some kind of religion. Because I could no longer just sit and listen, I asked, “What if his behavior has nothing to do with decency?”

There was something red and bright and burning like firewood in her voice now, and she said, “How can it not, ehn? In fact, the first few times he came loitering in front of the shop, I went up to him, pointed a finger at him, and gave him a good talking-to. If you’ve ever heard a lecture on decency, that’s what I gave to him, and still, Ijeoma, I tell you, the man is incapable of simple decency. Imagine, he still continues to place his raggedy, disheveled self right in front of my store! A person like that, in front of the store every day, will eventually cost me my customers!”

It was clear that she had a point. Still, a feeling of sadness descended upon me in hearing her words. I thought: The poor man. What if he had nowhere better to go? And I thought of Mama. How terrible the way she was actually trying to make herself the victim in someone else’s tragedy.

I said, “But Mama, what if he turned it back around on you? What if he asked you, out of decency, to stop shooing him away with your broom? What if he explained to you that he was more than a fly and that he had nowhere else to go? What if he told you that you were the one being indecent by shooing him away?”

Her voice was very quiet now. “He really should try harder to find another place to go.”

I could have said more, but instead I asked, “And what about Ndidi? Does she still stop in?”

“Every once in a while, but not as often as before,” Mama replied.

I got off the phone with Mama and went about the remainder of my day the same way I always did. When night came, I sat in bed and wrote to Ndidi. Maybe I would send the letter, or maybe not. Either way, better to get out the things on my mind than to allow them to fester and grow mold and cause my insides to feel rotten. Better to get them out before they became the worst kind of wound: oozing with pus and with a pungent kind of odor, oozing and decaying and stinking up the place like a dead and decomposing body.

I could have waxed poetic, said something about my love for her being as large and wide as a whole country. I could have written sappy lines that floated thinly in the air without any grounding in reality. But it would have been risky to do so — to let out all of my emotion in a letter. What if someone else got ahold of the letter and exposed our relationship?

Anyway, it didn’t seem to me that flamboyant flourishes should have any place in love letters. Love cannot live by poetry alone.

I simply wrote:

I am pregnant with Chibundu’s child, and yet I keep thinking of you. Last night I dreamed you in a field of dandelion clocks, and in our church. Do you still think of me?

Chibundu, by my side, was snoring slightly. I folded the paper in fourths and then again into eighths and placed it in the wooden hand-painted chest where I kept my pens and pencils and my journal. I made sure to put the letter at the bottom, beneath the pens and pencils, even beneath the journal, where I was certain Chibundu could not see it.

I bent over the side of the bed, placed the chest in the bottom drawer of my bedside table, pushing it safely behind all the other odds and ends — a small sewing kit, a pair of scissors, containers of pomade, my Bible. I slid the drawer closed, set myself back down on my side of the bed, and allowed myself to drift peacefully into sleep.

CHIBUNDU WAS IN the bathroom carrying on with his morning rituals. I got up and walked out of the bedroom and outside the flat, the way I had begun to do those days.

I took my place out on the front stoop. Day was breaking and the sky was growing light.

My eyes found the hedges. These hedges were nothing as majestic as the ones in our old Ojoto house. But they were fine enough. I rose from my seat on the stoop and walked over to them. The leaves and flower petals were glossy with dew. I picked a small ixora flower and placed it in my hair. If my child were to be a girl, I would pick even more of them and place them like decorations all around her little head.

The night before, Chibundu and I had been at it like a baboon and a leopard, snapping at each other at the supper table, each of us threatening to pounce on the other.

“This food is tasteless,” he said.

“Then next time you can make your food yourself.”

“I go to work all day and you have the audacity to look at me and tell me that to my face?”

“I cook for you all day and you have the audacity to complain that the food is no good to my face?”

His lips folded out like two thick millipedes, one on top of the other. If he were Mama, this sort of complaint would be expected, and I would just take it in and let it come out my underside. But this type of complaint was not at all usual for him.

He continued to sit there, silently moping and fuming.

I watched him for some time, then finally I said, “What exactly is the matter with you tonight anyway? Did something happen?”

For some weeks now his eyes were appearing heavy, but now they were heavier than usual.

I said again, “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

“How was work?”

“Fine.”

After a while, he said, “Funny how life has a tendency to go unexpectedly downhill.”

“Is something going unexpectedly downhill for you?”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said.

“Aha!” I muttered. “That’s what you’ve been doing wrong!” I added, “Don’t you know that thinking is like carrying a large stone in your stomach? Not only the pain of it, but also the feeling of your insides being all muddled and clogged up. And I bet you’ve not just been thinking. I bet you’ve been overthinking. Imagine a tall heap of stones just sitting in you. Take it from me, I know.”

He said, “I’ve been thinking that I’m not too happy about the way things are around here.”

“You’re not too happy about what, exactly?”

“And it’s not just me. Even at work, everyone seems to be sad and depressed. It must be something in the air. Like everybody got caught in a monsoon and came to work all soaked and sulking from it. I know it’s just the state of things. But I am determined to be happy. Where happiness is concerned, there’s a lot to be said for simple determination.”

I thought about it. Finally I said, “Yes, it’s certainly true. There’s certainly something to be said for simple determination.”

I was sitting outside, clearing my head with the fresh morning air, daydreaming about a girl child with a crown of ixora flowers.

I felt a kick in my stomach, and then I felt exhilaration wash over me. I thought of God. Maybe this was the way that God was choosing to talk to me. Maybe He was choosing to speak through my child. So what was He saying? I tried to still my mind, so that maybe I could hear God’s voice within me.

Try as I might, I could not clear my head.

I prayed:

Dear God, I am unhappy. Even as I carry my child, and even as the thought of this child makes me happy, I am yet unhappy. Dear God, I want to be happy. Please help me to be happy.

Maybe all I could do was carry on with my life the way it was. Become a mother to one or more children, follow through with all that motherhood entailed.