Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

“I admit I was a little rough on you last night,” he said. “We are husband and wife, and it shouldn’t have to be that way.”

“Chibundu—”

“I’ve been thinking, and my sense of it is that there’s a way in which you can just tell yourself to love me instead of her. I shouldn’t have to force myself on you night after night. I am your husband, and it shouldn’t have to be that way.”

“Chibundu, that’s not how it works.”

“How do you know if you don’t try? You can just try. It shouldn’t be that hard to love me. Or am I that unlovable?”

“Chibundu, it’s not that—”

“Tell me, what exactly can she give you that you don’t think I can?”

Silence.

“I don’t hate you for it,” he said. “I really don’t. You know already that I don’t believe all that nonsense about abominations. Maybe there’s something special about that kind of love, about a man loving another man, or a woman loving another woman in that way. Maybe there’s something appealing about it. But what makes me so angry is that I loved you first. Before there was her, there was me. And more than that, you made me a promise. Marriage is a promise, not just to marry, but also to love.”

I took his hand, began stroking it gently.

He looked down at our hands together, followed my movements with his eyes. He said, very softly, “I am your husband and you are my wife, and I just know that we will make it work. I can feel it in my bones, in my lungs, in my heart. You’ll see. We will make it work. None of that thing with Ndidi matters. We can still make it work.”

No string of words could have been more devastating than those. The desperation from which they came.

There was a sudden sharpness to his voice. “The answer is simple. You haven’t tried enough. If you put your mind to it, I know you can love me the way a woman is supposed to love her husband. You will try harder. And if all else fails, I really do want my son. You really must keep in mind that you are my wife. If all else fails, you will at least give me my boy.”

The remainder of that morning, after he had left for work, and for all of that afternoon, I found myself caring for Chidinma with an aloofness that even she must have felt — watching her, but barely watching.

Evening arrived. I tied her with a wrapper to my back and went out to pick up some missing ingredients for the stew I should already have finished but was yet to make. Outside, along the road, birds were zigzagging across the sky, sparrows and orange-blue trogons stopping to perch on the trees and on the roadside. A small boy was throwing a ball to his friend. Several girls were skipping rope. A woman was calling out to a man on a motorcycle. Everyone looked like puff-puffs, fat and round and chock-full of all the energy that I felt myself drained of.

“Aunty, good evening,” Anuli, the shop owner’s daughter, greeted me when I entered the shop.

“Good evening, Anuli,” I replied.

She was a girl of around sixteen or seventeen, a pretty face, and very bright: sharp-witted, sharp-mouthed, always a clever observation just waiting on the tip of her tongue. And her proverbs: as if she were a village elder reincarnated in the body of a girl, she was always ready to spew out something wise.

She appeared to study me with her eyes. “Ah, Aunty, you no dey look well o. You dey sick?”

I averted my eyes, not feeling in the mood for conversation. Mustering as much cheerfulness as I could, I asked, “Biko, you fit give me some fresh tomatoes and Maggi?”

The baby on my back was making small noises and squirming around.

Anuli went to the rear of the store and brought out a bowl of tomatoes. I looked through the bowl, picking some out for myself. She left me for a moment, and when she returned, she placed a box of Maggi seasoning cubes on the counter.

I reached into my purse and pulled out some bills.

As she collected the money, she said, “Aunty, whatever the matter, just remember that it is the same moon that wanes today that will be full tomorrow. And even the sun, however long it disappears, it always shines again.”

I smiled slightly at her. She smiled back. Her smile was more than a little like consolation.

Back at home, I cooked the stew with Chidinma still tied to my back. Afterward, I retreated from the kitchen to the parlor and set Chidinma down. I moved the center table to the far end of the room, where she could not be injured by the table’s sharp corners. I gathered a handful of her toys and put them on the parlor floor, on the area of rug on which the center table usually sat.

I stood for some time just watching her play with the toys. Then I took a seat on the sofa to give my back a rest. She gabbled delightedly as she hit the button of a toy book that immediately set music playing, and as she fussed with a set of plastic building blocks, I faded away into a series of incoherent thoughts. I must have fallen asleep to the sound of her gabbling and of her music book.

I woke up slowly to silence. Not a sound in the room. My eyes darted to the rug, to that space where the center table had sat, looking for Chidinma, but she was gone.

It was as dark inside the house as outside. I stayed a moment on the sofa while I called out to her.

“Chidinma!”

No answer.

I rose from the sofa and went straight to the light switch. How late was it now? Had Chibundu already arrived home and eaten and afterward put Chidinma to bed?

“Chibundu!”

No answer.

I turned in the direction of the kitchen. I saw her then, quietly sitting by the sewing machine in the corner.

The pincushion sat with the bobbins on the cloth plate, far enough away from the needle bars. The cushion was in the shape of a garden egg. Yellow-gold skin with meandering stripes of green. Its stem, twig-like, stuck out of its top. Chidinma had somehow climbed her way up to the machine to be able to grasp it in her hands.

She was holding the garden egg now, very near to her mouth, pins and needles glistening silver in the bright gold and green fabric of the cushion. Threads dangling from it like beautiful ribbons, a little like serpents, tempting her with their devilish charm.

She was not at first aware that I was watching her. Then, for whatever reason, she looked up, and her gaze caught mine.

I watched as she stuck the garden egg, pins and all, into her mouth, the pincushion deforming her mouth, one whole corner buried away.

She looked wide-eyed at me, green and red and black threads dangling from her mouth. And for some unknown reason, I could not get my feet to move.

I stood where I was. “Chidinma,” I whispered, and again, in a whisper, “Chidinma.”

Suddenly Chibundu entered the parlor, and he walked up to us in our little corner. He looked at me, and he looked at her, and at the threads dangling out from her lips.

It’s hard to say how much time passed, but I know that he shook his head (at me, or at her, or at all of us?), before going to her. He prodded and dug the cushion out of her mouth, with enough force that it either startled her or hurt her. She began to cry.

He picked her up and cuddled her as he replaced the garden egg on top of the machine.

I stood just staring idly, neither at her nor at Chibundu, but at the machine. It had been some time since I last used it. I now found myself engrossed in it. The spool of thread was sitting on the holder. Bobbins in cases, like medicine in capsules, surrounded the cloth plate. I thought of the handwheel. Just one. Not two. Not like a bicycle. If I were to have used it then and there, I imagined the way it would move: the needle, sharp in its movement. Needle up, needle down. Up and down, like a nod. Like an affirmation. Maybe yes, everything would be fine. Or maybe yes, one wheel was enough. No marriage of two. Just a single person would do.