Everything Good Will Come (27 page)

I began to count on my fingers. “No husband, bad husband, husband's girlfriend, husband's mother. Human rights were never an issue till the rights of men were threatened. There's nothing in our constitution for kindness at home. And even if the army goes, we still have our men to answer to. So, what is it you want women to say?”

“Two separate issues,” he said.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Bring on the women when the enemy is the state. Never when the enemy is at home.”

My father eyed me. Whenever I stood on my soap box, he wanted me to step down. When he stood on his, it wasn't a soap box; it was a foundation of truth. I smiled to annoy him more.

“Is everything all right at home?” he asked.

“Shouldn't it be?”

He glanced down at the sofa. I knew he was looking for his reading glasses. He simulated fist fighting movements. “You're too... ”

“Me?” I said. “I'm not like that anymore.”

“Since when?”

“I'm a peaceful woman now.”

“You gave me
wahala
.”

So did you, I was tempted to say.

“Just don't end up in prison,” I said. “I won't come to visit you there.”

He found his glasses between cushions. “I don't need your warnings.”

“You're not getting any younger.”

He slipped his glasses on. “If you came here to remind me of my age, then you've wasted your time and mine, because I know how old I am.”

“I've told you, Daddy.”

“I heard.”

“You'll be sorry.”

“I can't be sorrier than I am now.”

We spent the rest of the evening discussing our plans to work together after my baby was born. “Practice some real law,” he said. “Instead of taking minutes or whatever you do in a bank.”

My father was suspicious of my generation of bankers, with their MBAs and other qualifications. Slick and rude, he said about them. They wanted to run before they could walk. Time had proven him right. Some managing directors I knew had been locked up under a failed bank decree.

On my way home, I passed Lagos Lagoon. I could smell animal cadaver, sweet fruit, and burnt tires. Smells were still strong though I'd managed to overcome nausea. A motorcycle growled past. The rider hunched over his handle bars. The woman behind him held on to his waist. Her white scarf blew like a shrunken peace mast. I touched the hard mound below my navel and imagined my child curled up. Nervous bubbles popped inside me. It had to be good this time. I could not bear another mishap.

I drove past a row of houses with balconies and green pyramid-shaped roofs. They were concealed behind high walls, above which coconut and oil palms grew. In this part of the suburbs, there were a few free-ed schools. Uniformed children walked around in shin-high socks. They came from nearby slums. From here, only their El-Shaddai and Celestial church spirals were visible. I stopped by the vigilante gates of our housing estate. Street hawkers sat behind wooden stalls in a small market along the front wall. They were Fulani people from the North. The men wore white skull caps and the women wrapped chiffon scarves around their heads. Their stalls were illuminated by kerosene lanterns. They talked loud in their language, and together they sounded like mourners ululating. Recognizing my car, the guards pushed the gates open. “Evening, madam,” one of them said.

“Evening,” I said.

Our estate, Sunrise, was on the outskirts of Ikoyi, though people here claimed to live in Old Ikoyi. They were mostly young couples in well paid vocations. Plot one was a banker and his wife was a lawyer. Plot two was also in banking and his wife sold Tupperware and baby clothes. No one knew what Plot three did, but he wore good suits and his wife Busola ran a Montessori school from a prettily painted shed in their yard. We lived in Plot four and so on. Our roads had no names.

There was a lot of gossip in Sunrise: who was earning less than they claimed, whose husband was shooting blanks, who owed money to the bank. Whenever we came together, the women sat on one side, and the men sat on another. The men chatted mostly about cars and money; the women about food prices, pediatric medications, work politics, and Disney toys. The advertising world may not have been aware of us, but we bought the merchandise they targeted at others nevertheless, whenever they arrived in our country and when we traveled overseas. We bought to hoard, to show off, to compensate for affairs, for ourselves. We bought what someone else had bought, what everyone else was buying. Consumerism was someone else's embarrassment; we felt privileged to be able to be part of a circle that didn't change much, except with fashion.

Some would say we were New Money. But I thought all money in our country was new, because our money itself, the naira and kobo, was new, devaluing fast and never able to make our country work anyway. So what car was anyone driving? To where, with craters in our streets? What watch was anyone wearing, when a thief could grab it from their wrist? What stereo system; what shoe; what dress. And no matter how much money a person had, they would find their bowel movements floating around in their toilet bowl, not going anywhere, because there was no water to flush our toilets.

We were living in enviable conditions, pre-fabricated homes worth millions of naira, because the naira was worth so little. We were in the middle of another water shortage. On Tuesdays a tanker brought water which we stored in large drums, for flushing toilets and bathing; for cooking and cleaning teeth. Drinking water we bought by the carton. Sometimes we found sediment in it. We drank it anyway. There were no phone lines on the estate, so we carried mobile phones. Power cuts turned our meat rotten and our pots black with kerosene soot, unless we owned electricity generators. At night, mosquitoes bored holes into our legs and every year there was another death to mourn: someone shot in the head by armed robbers; someone crushed by a wayward lorry; someone suddenly taken ill with malaria, typhoid, they-don't-know.

Afterward we congregated in the deceased's house to mourn. Mostly we came together to celebrate: birthdays, holidays, and christenings. My one rule, whenever I was hosting, was that the women should not serve their husbands food. That always brought a reaction, from them: “Well, you always speak your mind.” From their husbands: “Niyi, your wife is a bad influence!” From Niyi himself: “I can't stop her. She's the boss in this house.”

I contributed to that illusion, claiming to be free from domesticity, and encouraged our friends to argue about division of home duties. The men would profess how they took charge of manly tasks like programming videos, opening jars, and changing light bulbs. The women would respond with such halfhearted attempts to appear indignant, that I would be tempted to take the men's side, just to stimulate a real discussion. But I wouldn't. Then from the opposing side would come an accusation so venomous, I'd almost fall backward from the force of it: feminist.

Was I? If a woman sneezed in my country, someone would call her a feminist. I'd never looked up the word before, but was there one word to describe how I felt from one day to the next? And should there be? I'd seen the metamorphosis of women, how age slowed their walks, stilled their expressions, softened their voices, distorted what came out of their mouths. They hid their discontent so that other women wouldn't deprive them of it. By the time they came of age, millions of personalities were channeled into about three prototypes: strong and silent, chatterbox but cheerful, weak and kindhearted. All the rest were known as horrible women. I wanted to tell everyone, “I! Am! Not! Satisfied with these options!” I was ready to tear every notion they had about women, like one of those little dogs with trousers in their teeth. They would not let go until there was nothing but shreds, and I would not let go until I was heard. Sometimes it felt like I was fighting annihilation. But surely it was in the interest of self-preservation to fight what felt like annihilation? If a person swiped a fly and the fly flew higher, would the fly become a flyist?

I thought not, but that was before, in my twenties. These days, if ever I carried on that way, on my soapbox, it felt like an exercise in vanity, childish, in the scheme of dangerous living.

The houses in our estate lined up along the road trying to assume separate identities within cramped spaces. One had a palm tree in its front yard, another a thatched gazebo. Several had wide satellite dishes perched on their roofs to capture CNN and other television programs from overseas. All had barred windows and doors. My headlights beamed on our iron gates. Beyond them was our house with a bush of violet bougainvillea. Our gate man unlocked the gates. His prayer beads hung from his wrist. I realized I must have disturbed his prayer. Soon it would be the Moslem fasting period, Ramadan.

“
Sanu
, madam,” he said.

“
Sanu, mallam,
” I replied in the only Hausa I knew.

“How now,” Niyi said.

He aimed his remote at the stereo system. The sound of trumpets jarred my ears like Lagos traffic. He was trigger happy, my husband, and listening to jazz again.

I dropped my car keys in my bag. “How now,” I answered.

“What did he say?”

“You know him. He won't listen.”

He pressed a button to lower the volume. “He has to this time.”

“I'm nervous about working with him again. The man doesn't compromise.”

Niyi was busy nodding. He liked the women who sang or the men who played. Never the other way around. What if a woman could blow a horn? I would ask. “Can't,” he would say. What if a man could sing? “Can't,” he would answer. He dreamed of buying a Bang and Olufsen by the year 2000 so he could hear each instrument clearly. I only hoped he would be satisfied with our Hitachi in the year 2000. Our savings were geared toward replacing our electricity generator since it had broken down.

I slipped my shoes off, and turned down an offending light. Our living room was furnished with black leather seats and glass tables that matched the keyboards of my old piano, on top of which were financial magazines. The room reminded me of a chess game. We had plants, but no flowers, because flowers flopped within a day. I owned nothing except a framed print of gazelles from the Ivory Coast and an ebony stool on which Niyi rested his feet.

I turned the music down and walked toward him. Niyi placed both feet on the floor and his knees jumped up. There was never enough space for him wherever he was.

“You have giant in your genes,” I said, placing my hand on his head.

“Good. I will pass it on.”

“What if she's a girl?”

“She will be a giant, too.”

“Who will go out with a giant?”

“She won't go out with anyone. But she will be beautiful and she will look like me.”

“Big feet and a skinny nose?”

He turned his profile. “It's my foreign roots.”

My laugh rushed through my nostrils. “Foreign my ass.”

Niyi liked to remind me of his Brazilian ancestry the way an English person might say he were part French or part something else. He grouped himself with black people who had a direct claim to foreignness: West Indians and African- Americans. I kept reminding him that there wasn't a single black soul who hadn't descended from Africa. His ancestors would be rejoicing. They were back where they belonged.

I watched him in amusement. With his bald head he could pass for one of those American basketball players, but a girl who looked like him would be finished in a place where men loved small shapely women.

“Did you get through to London?” I asked.

He nodded. “That crazy woman answered the phone.”

“What did she say?”

“He's doing it for attention.”

I shrugged. “Well, teenagers. Maybe he is. It's tempting to play your parents against each other.”

He'd been trying to reach his ex-wife all day. Their son was refusing to call his stepfather “Daddy.” His mother was insisting that he did, and Niyi was saying the boy never should have in the first place.

“Stupid woman,” he said. “I stayed with him while she was working. She practically kidnapped him. Now she's complaining he's difficult. I told her if she can't live with him, she should send him back here. He can go to school here. I didn't go to school abroad and there is nothing wrong with me. She didn't go to school abroad and there is nothing wrong with... ”

He realized he was about to pay her a compliment. He straightened his leg so fast he kicked my wooden stool over.

“Foolish woman. If she were here, she'd be begging me to see him.”

“Don't break my one piece of furniture in the world,” I said, smiling.

Two disgruntled men, one evening. The truth was that neither was used to feeling powerless. Niyi would not rise above anger for his son's sake. He preferred to disrupt the boy's life and bring him home twelve years later.