Chinelo Okparanta - Under the Udala Trees

Maybe yes, sometimes one was enough.

“IJEOMA!” CHIBUNDU CALLED from the front yard.

I sat in the parlor, watching Chidinma play with her rag doll and sewing up a seam that had come undone on one of our sofa pillow covers. It was a Saturday afternoon, just after lunchtime, the time of day when the sun, traveling in and out of the puffed-up rainy-season clouds, should have caused light and dark reflections to dance about the walls. The time of day when the rainy-season rains should have been pelting our corrugated aluminum roof like music. It was the time of day when afternoon siesta should have been on everyone’s mind, the thought of it as sweet as cake.

But all around the air was still, and not a drop of rain. For a while now — more than a handful of months — it seemed we had all grown too rigid for afternoon naps.

This particular afternoon, it was even as if the sky had grown too rigid to allow for rain. And yet no sun, either, in sight.

Chibundu had left long before siesta time. He had been gone all morning, in fact, and had not bothered to say where he was going, but now his voice came booming from outdoors.

“Ijeoma!”

I tied the last stitch to a stop, rose from the sofa, gathered Chidinma and her doll into my arms, walked out of the house to answer his call.

Outside, the air was thick.

A short distance away, farther into the gravel but before the gravel met the hibiscus bush, Chibundu stood in front of a deep blue 504. The sky was overcast, but the way the black tires and the car’s body glistened, it was as if the sun had suddenly come out, just for a moment, to cause it to shine that way.

Chibundu opened up his arms wide, like a magician who had just demonstrated a trick. Or as if he were a character from one of those books that Amina used to read, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves or something to that effect. Abracadabra, his arms seemed to say.

“What is this?” I asked.

“What do you mean, what is this? Do you not see that it’s a car? I have gotten us a car. What do you think? Can you imagine, we now have our very own car! See the way I’m making sure to provide for you? See the way I’m doing my best to give you a comfortable life? No more walking if you don’t want to! No more taking the bus or taxi! Now we have our very own car!”

I smiled.

“Now, there’s one more thing,” he said, and he went to the back of the car, opened the trunk with a key, and pulled out a red toy car, sharp-looking, a cross between a Jeep and a Land Rover. It was the kind of toy car that was big enough for a child to sit inside and drive: a car with a set of real-looking tires, a set of real-looking doors, and a real-looking windshield — all of those real-looking things, but made of plastic rather than from the materials of the real thing. There was a wide opening at the top, which was too wide to be accurately called a sunroof, and too enclosed for the car to be accurately described as a convertible.

Chibundu laid the car down in the yard and stood behind it, smiling an impishly wide smile.

“Here is what we really need!” he said. “A good-luck charm! Something to help bring the boy along.”

I set Chidinma down so that she was standing by my side, her hand in mine. She was now almost a year old and was newly learning to walk — one wobbly step carefully placed before the other, like an old man without his cane.

It was not hard to imagine her in the toy car, in the driver’s seat, driving alongside me as I walked to Anuli’s father’s shop, or around the neighborhood to another of the small shops.

The girl slipped her hand out of mine and went to the toy car, leaned against it, placed her hands on its red body. Chibundu was, at this point, back at the big car — the real car — not looking at me and Chidinma, but rather wiping something — road dust, perhaps — off the driver’s side door.

I allowed Chidinma to remain with the toy car, and I set off toward the veranda, intending to sit on the front stoop and watch her play. When Chibundu was done, he could instruct her on how to ride the toy car. It would be a nice bonding moment between the two of them.

I had taken only a few steps when I heard Chibundu’s voice, loud and scolding: “ Oya , Ijeoma, come carry your daughter away from here! If she thinks this car is hers to play with, she better think again. Ijeoma, do you hear me? You better come carry her before she gets any nonsense ideas in her head.”

I turned around to find Chibundu pulling Chidinma away from the car, shaking his head at her, reprimanding.

“For your brother, not for you,” he was saying. “Even from the land of the unborn, he will see how much we want him to come, he will see how much I am preparing for him, and he will come.”

I hurried to Chidinma and lifted her into my arms.

Chibundu looked up at me. “Our son will come. Our son will surely come.” And he smiled widely again.

He wrapped his arms around me as we lay in bed that night, and just as I thought he had fallen into sleep, he pulled me to him. I closed my eyes tight and pretended to be asleep. I parted my lips and allowed a small sound like a snore to come out of my mouth. Every once in a while I made the sound appear to catch, so that it gave the impression of a deep kind of snoring, of someone who was well into sleep.

Eventually I felt the pressure of his hands on me subside, and a little later, I listened to the tranquil sound of his own snoring.

WE WERE IN bed again. The lights in the room were out.

Moments earlier he had lain down beside me. Now he spoke. “You think I don’t know that you’re awake?”

I ignored him, continued to pretend to be asleep.

He pulled on my hair.

“Chibundu, please,” I shouted.

“‘Chibundu, please’ what?”

“I’m trying to sleep. Please just let me sleep.”

“You’ll sleep when you’re done.”

I shifted farther away from him, very close to the edge of the bed. A moment later, I felt his weight lift from the bed. I listened to his footsteps. I heard the flick of the switch. Light flooded the room.

I remained where I lay, very still on the bed, listening to a rustling sound that could only have been coming from him. Soon he was stamping his feet and coming around the bed, and I opened my eyes to find him standing before me, his wallet and some naira bills in his hand.

“ Ngwa , tell me, how much do you want? How much does it cost to get you to do it tonight?”

“Chibundu!” I exclaimed.

“Tell me, if it’s not enough that I’m your husband, maybe I can pay you to do it. Tell me, how much should I pay?”

“Chibundu, stop. I’m not a whore.”

He laughed loudly. “You’re not a whore! Are you sure about that? You’re not a whore? So why is it that I have to fight to sleep with you? You must be a whore. You must be giving it to someone else, which is why you have nothing left for me.”

I ignored him.

He moved forward. I felt his presence heavy over me. He threw the money in my face. The bills scattered around me, on the bed and on the floor.

He dug back into his wallet. This time he filled his hands with kobo coins. He tossed them in my face. The coins fell, making sounds like tiny bells as they hit the floor.

He stood there looking intently at me, waiting for me to react. I only continued to sit where I was, only continued to look intently back at him. I must have felt so tethered to him, so tethered to my life with him, to the superficial normalcy of it. That tethering way in which what is familiar manages to grab ahold of us and pin us down. Marriage to him was what I now knew as normal and familiar, so that even with this terrible treatment of me — calling me a whore, throwing money in my face, and the rest — the thought never once occurred to me that these were grounds on which I could now pack up my bags and leave.