Everything Good Will Come (14 page)

“Ibrahim ?”

Her head appeared around the corner. “Hassan,” she said. “The Brigadier. Have you heard of him?”

A tall, skinny man who played polo. He collected polo ponies and women as young as his daughters and was always in the papers during the Lagos tournament.

“He has a stomach ulcer,” she said, and disappeared into her kitchen.

I stared at the spot where her face had been.

“Does he treat you well?”

She came out again, cleaning her hands with a dish towel. “I live here. I don't have to worry about money.”

“Yes, but does he treat you well?”

She sat down. “Which one of our men really treats women well?”

“I don't know many.”

“So,” she said.

I inspected my nails. “Isn't he married, Sheri.”

Polygamy was considered risqué. Women in our generation who opted for it ended up looking quite the opposite of traditional.

She nodded. “To two women, and he can marry two more if he wants. He's a Moslem.”

“Is that what you want?”

She laughed. “Want? I beg you, don't talk to me about want. When my father died who remembered me? Chief Bakare done die, God Bless his family. We didn't even know where our next meal was coming from, and no one cared. Not even my uncle, who took all his money.”

“But your father and uncle were close.”

She shook her head. “Don't let anyone deceive you. Pray you're never in a situation to need them. It is then you will know what two plus two really makes. Listen, I take care of my family, I even take care of Ibrahim. Since morning I'm cooking. He may not show up, and this won't be the first time. So if I have to tie my head up when I go out... ”

“You have to tie your head?”

“He's a strict Moslem.”

I rolled my eyes. I knew strict Moslems. Uncle Fatai was one. He was gentle and monogamous. His only vice was gluttony. His wife was a Lagos state judge and her head was covered because she wanted it to be.

“And if I can't go out once in a while,” Sheri was saying.

“He stops you from going out? What's next? Purdah?”

She laughed.

“You think it's funny?” I said. “You're better than this, Sheri. Anyone you want, you can have.”

“Who said? You remember what happened to me?”

I remembered only that she was the most powerful girl I knew, and then she wasn't anymore, and I became disappointed with her.

“Not that,” she said. “You can say it. I did not rape them; they raped me, and if they see me they'd better cross the road.”

“The border and hemisphere even,” I mumbled.

“Yes,” she said. “They can cross that too, because if I get my hands on them, there will be nothing left to cross with.”

The boys were absurd in my mind, with their red eyes and hemp, and skinny bodies. I would have to exaggerate them to explain why they jinxed her life and why I still couldn't open my mouth to talk about them.

“I didn't know,” I said apologetically. “I shouldn't have talked to you as if it was your fault.”

“And me, myself,” she said. “What did I know? Taking a hanger to myself, with all the biology I studied. I still thought I had a black hole inside me. So, which single man from a normal family would have a person like me?”

Better to be ugly, to be crippled, to be a thief even, than to be barren. We had both been raised to believe that our greatest days would be: the birth of our first child, our wedding and graduation days in that order. A woman may be forgiven for having a child out of wedlock if she had no hope of getting married, and she would be dissuaded from getting married if she didn't have a degree. Marriage could immediately wipe out a sluttish past, but angel or not, a woman had to have a child. For me, coming home to Nigeria was like moving back to the fifties in England.

“You are strong,” I said.

“Have no choice,” she said.

I'd been looking at my hands. I had feeble nails and they wouldn't grow past the tip of my fingers. I never bothered to paint them. Sheri's nails were varnished and sometimes she clicked them as she spoke. If she sounded cynical, I'd always found the cynical to be honest, like the mad: they could not be manipulated into pretending that it was good to ignore the bad things in life.

“Let's eat,” she said.

Her stepmothers had kept their family together by buying and selling gold jewelry. Gold from Italy was the best, Sheri said. It was eighteen-carat, and the Italian traders were no different from Nigerians: they loved to shout and bargain. Saudi gold was also good. They had those twenty-four-carat pieces Lagos people wore for traditional functions. Sheri didn't care much for the gold from Hong Kong. It was too yellow, and didn't suit our skin color. Neither did the gold from India. She would never buy fourteen-carat gold, like the Americans, or nine, like the British. Never.

My mouth watered as she brought out one steaming Pyrex dish after another. Sheri had prepared food I hardly saw in my father's house:
jollof
rice;
egusi
stew with crushed melon seeds, and eba, a meal made from ground cassava. She cooked with enough pepper to tear the roof of my mouth off. I was crying and eating. Sheri meanwhile sprinkled dried pepper over her stew, because none of it was hot enough for her.

“I cook for a week,” she explained. “Ibrahim sometimes shows up with friends, and there has to be food. I make his separately. He can't eat pepper because of his ulcer.”

“That's nonsense.”

“Why?”

“You are not his cook.”

“You have that attitude?”

“Who has time to sit in a kitchen from morning to night?”

She shook her head. “You've been away too long. You've become a butter-eater.”

“It's rude for him to behave that way, that's all.”

She laughed until she spilled her water.

“Is this what you learned abroad,
aburo?
”

I waited for her to stop.

“You want to marry someday?”

“I might,” I said.

She leaned forward. “Maybe you don't know this because you were raised by your father, but let me tell you now, to save you from unnecessary headache in the future. Forget that nonsense. Education cannot change what's inside a person's veins. Scream and shout, if you like, bang your head against this wall, you will end up in the kitchen. Period. Now, where I differ from most women is, if you lift your hand to beat me, I will kill you. God no go vex. Secondly, while I am there cooking for you, I won't be thinking of dropping some poison in because you've gone to eat another woman's stew.”

“Because?”

“I'm getting what I want in return,” she said.

“Love?”

“Please, my sister.”

“Sex?”

She sucked on a bone. “I beg, which one of them can do.”

“Money?”

She threw the bone on her plate.

“One day your eyes will open.”

By the time I was ready to leave, I was bloated, but Sheri wouldn't hear of it. She served more
jollof
into a Tupperware container and handed it to me.

“You should start a catering business,” I told her.

“I wish I could,” she said.

“What's stopping you? You have property in a good location; your stepmothers can cook, and you trust them.”

“I can't come and go as I like.”

“I don't want to hear that, Sheri.”

“I can't,” she said.

I realized she was serious.

“Okay,” I said. “My father sometimes entertains and his cook is terrible. I will mention you to him.”

She patted me toward the door. “Thank you,
aburo
.”

As I left her home, it occurred to me that I was glad I was not pretty. Prettiness could encourage people to treat a woman like a doll, to be played with, tossed around, fingered, dismembered, and discarded. Prettiness could also make a woman lazy, if she were congratulated for it too often and remunerated too long. Sheri was the Nigerian man's ideal: pretty, shapely, yellow to boot, with some regard for a woman's station. Now she was a kitchen martyr, and may well have forgotten how to flaunt her mind.

I took her
jollof
to my father; the Tupperware was still flexible and warm when I arrived. Over the years, our neighborhood had changed. New houses and condominiums stood where the park once rambled and most of them were now sinking in marshy land, and yet Ikoyi Park was still considered prime property. I found my father sitting on the veranda, reading a brief.

“My dear,” he said.

“You're on your own?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I sat in the cane chair next to his. “Hm. Working on a weekend. Don't tell me Peter Mukoro is in government trouble again.”

My father didn't confirm, but Peter Mukoro had enough law suits to keep fifty lawyers fully occupied, I was sure.

“Where is Titus?” I asked.

“Day off,” he said.

“You're lucky. I brought you
jollof
.”

He made a show of being shocked. “I know it is not you who cooked that. Is this part of military training?”

I smiled. “It's my friend. She has a catering business.”

“Which friend of yours does that?”

“Sheri.”

“I don't remember her.”

“She lived next door.”

He followed my finger. “Chief Bakare's daughter?”

I nodded.

“The one who?”

“Yes, the one who, and now she's catering, so if you ever need help... ”

My father resumed his reading. “Let us see if her cooking is any good.”

I went to the kitchen and placed the Tupperware container into the refrigerator. Except for two bottles of water, a shriveled orange and three pots, my father's refrigerator was bare. Titus, his cook, was a myopic old man from Calabar. He could barely discern peppers from tomatoes, and yet he would come into the living room and announce, “Dinner is served.” The first time I witnessed this, I asked my father what was happening in his house. Dinner was beans and fried plantain. Dinner was always beans and fried plantain, except when it was boiled yams and corned beef stew. My father replied, “Titus used to work for an English family. Let him say what he wants, so long as he doesn't cook potatoes.”

My father trusted Titus, enough to leave him in the house alone. Titus sometimes corrected my English.

I returned to the veranda.

“How are you?” my father asked.

“Fine,” I said.

He patted my arm. “That will end when you start work with me.”

“Pay me well, that's all I ask.”

“I will pay you according to your experience.”

“You better not be miserly.”

He pretended to be deaf. “What?”

“I said, you better not be miserly with me because there are plenty of people who would like to employ me.”

“Like who?” he asked.

“Uncle Fatai,” I said.

“Fatai is cheaper than me.”

“Well, be careful how you treat me. One day you'll be begging me to run that place.”

We watched the Lagoon. There wasn't a movement, not even a ripple around the sticks the fishermen had left to mark their fishing traps.

“We had trouble during the week,” my father said.

“Eh, what happened?”

“Fishermen. They scaled over the fence and stole three chairs.”

“I thought they were in the garage or something.”

“They were stolen.”

“What will fishermen do with cane chairs?”

“Sell them.”

“We've had those chairs for years.”

“I don't care about them,” he said. “It's about what is happening to our country. Men who fish for a living becoming robbers. We're in trouble.”

I shook my head. “What will save us in this place, Daddy?”

“When the army leaves. When we can vote in a good leader.”

“But, look at the last civilian government; throwing champagne parties, embezzling, and all that.”

“That was 1979.”

“It is the same kind of politicians who will surface next time around.”

My father nodded. “Let them come. We will drive them out with votes. Anything but this. These military boys don't care. They step in with one policy or the other, suspend the constitution, mess up our law with their decrees... detain people without charge. I'm sure they're deliberately trying to ruin the country.”

“How can they benefit from that?”

“Who knows? Most of them are millionaires now. Maybe it's a sport. I don't understand it either.”

My father was still passionate about politics, but one single event had catapulted me into another realm. I viewed the world with a bad squint, a traveling eye, after that, seeing struggles I could do little about. Sheri's brigadier, for instance, was he one of the military men who deprived me of my right to vote, or one of those house dictators who seriously made me wish I could beat up somebody.