She’d returned the first long holiday, Christmas. Enebeli memorized her scent and the feel of her hair. He’d often find himself staring at her. They slept very little, making up for lost time. When her return to the States was fraught with delays and visa issues, they made their first big mistake, deciding that she should not risk traveling back to Nigeria again for the duration of her studies. There was some noise made about how the girl should accompany her mother—she had barely left her side the whole visit—but Enebeli vetoed it and his wife relented. They knew that of the two of them, she might be able to soldier on without her daughter, but Enebeli would shrivel like a parched plant.
So the girl stayed with him and they learned to survive, but for one relationship to thrive, the other must not, and Enebeli saw this dwindling in the conversations the girl had with her mother via Skype. They were friendly conversations, filled with the exchanging of news and the updating of situations, but there was a whiff of distance, as though the girl was talking to her favorite aunt whom she loved very much but would not, say, tell about a boy.
At fourteen the girl is almost a woman, but still a girl, and her mother is trying to prepare her for the world. Stop laughing so loud, dear. How is it that I can hear you chewing all the way here in America? What do you mean Daddy made you breakfast, you are old enough to be cooking. Distance between mother and daughter widens till the girl doesn’t enjoy talking to her mother anymore, begins to see it as a chore.
And speaking of chores, father and daughter share them, each somewhat inept, each too intimidated by their sullen house girl to order her around. She spends most of the day watching Africa Magic, mopping the same patch of tile till it gleams, and when she isn’t pretending to clean, the house girl talks to the girl in whispers and Enebeli isn’t concerned because they are in the house and how much trouble could they get into. Talk is just talk. This is what he tells his wife, but his wife is horrified and worried that the girl is learning all the wrong ways to be in the world and she badgers and badgers till Enebeli sends the house girl back to her village. The girl becomes sullen with her mother after this and waits with arms crossed for the Skype calls to end, and the mother becomes more nitpicky, troubled that her daughter cannot see she is trying to ease her passage. What is this the girl is wearing? The girl should be sitting with her legs crossed at the ankles. Why is the girl’s hair scattered like that, when was the last time she had a relaxer?
Enebeli shrugs at the hair questions and his wife sighs, then says she’s calling her sister. Enebeli balks at this. His wife’s sister is a terrifyingly competent woman with three polished, obedient sons and the wherewithal to take on another child. She’s been trying to get her hands on the girl for years. In a fit of spite and panic, Enebeli buys a box of relaxer and does the girl’s hair himself, massaging the cream into her scalp like lotion, and the smell of it makes both their eyes water. When they wash it out, half the girl’s hair comes out with it, feathery clumps that swirl into the drain like fuzzy fish.
His wife’s sister doesn’t say a word about the overprocessed mess, or about the scab forming on the girl’s forehead, but when she brings the girl back, her hair is shorn close to her scalp, and she turns her head this way and that, preening, and they all, even her mother, agree that her skull has quite the lovely shape and, yes, she looks beautiful. But then her mother ruins it by adding that she can’t wait till it grows out so she can look like a proper girl again. This starts another argument between husband and wife, mild at first, but then it peppers and there is this thing that distance does where it subtracts warmth and context and history and each finds that they’re arguing with a stranger.
The girl stops talking to her mother, and for a week his wife pleads with him to soften her and he agrees. But really he enjoys having the girl like this, as angry with her mother as he is, and so he does nothing. It doesn’t matter; the girl holds a grudge as well as she holds water in her fist, and soon she is chattering away. But the space between mother and daughter has widened to hold something cautious, an elephant of mistrust and awkwardness. The girl feels it, doesn’t want it, and in a bid to close the distance, confesses to her mother about the boy. She strings his virtues out like Christmas lights—he’s shorter than her, so he has to obey her, he’s finally learning how to kiss well—and her mother silences her by saying, sadly, that she didn’t think she’d raised that kind of girl. This is the first time the girl becomes aware that the world requires something other than what she is. It dampens her for a few days that worry Enebeli, and then she returns, but there is a little less light to her.
And when his wife says that she has been offered a job in the States, management at a small investment firm, Enebeli says nothing. They promised each other at the beginning of all this that when she got her degree, she would come back and find a snazzy job as a returnee where she would be overcompensated for her foreign papers.
Later, even knowing what it will do to him, she will request that he send the girl to her in America, where her mothering hand will be steadier. He will fight her. He will use vicious words he didn’t know he had in him, as though a part of him knows that his daughter will never be this girl again.
But before all this, before the elders are called in, before even his own father sides with his wife, and his only unexpected ally is his wife’s sister. Before he bows to the pressure of three generations on his back. Before he sobs publicly in the Murtala Muhammed airport, cries that shake his body and draw concern and offers of water from passersby. Before he spends his evenings in the girl’s room, sitting with the other things she left behind, counting down the time difference till they can Skype. Before she returns from school and appears on his screen more subdued than he’s ever seen her. Before he tries to animate her with stories of the lovelorn boy who keeps asking after her. Before she looks offscreen as though for coaching and responds, Please, Daddy, don’t talk to me like that. Before she grows cautious under the mothering of a woman who loves but cannot comprehend her. Before she quiets in a country that rewards her brand of boldness, in her black of body, with an incredulous fascination that makes her put it away. Before all that, she is eleven and Enebeli and the girl sit on the steps to the house watching people walk by their ramshackle gate. They are playing azigo and whenever the girl makes a good move she crows in a very unladylike way and yells, In your face! and he laughs every time. He does not yet wonder where she gets this, this streak of fire. He only knows that it keeps the wolves of the world at bay and he must never let it die out.
SECOND CHANCES
Ignore for a moment that two years out of grad school I’m old enough to buy my own bed and shouldn’t ask my father to chip in on a mattress, so that he shows up with my mother, who looks like she’s stepped out of a photograph, and she tries to charm the salesman, something she was never good at, but it somehow works this time and he takes off 20 percent. Ignore for a moment that she is wearing an outfit I haven’t seen in eighteen years, not since Nigeria, when she was pregnant with my younger sister, though not yet showing, and fell down the concrete steps to our house, ripping the dress from hem to thigh. Ignore that she flits from bed to bed, bouncing on each one like she hasn’t sat on a mattress in a while, and the salesman follows her around like he’d like to crawl in with her. Ignore all this because my mother has been dead for eight years.
My father avoids the look I give him and I’m glad there are beds around because I collapse onto one, unable to stand. When I grab my father’s wrist—I cannot at this juncture imagine touching her—he twists away from me. I follow him but he refuses to be cornered, so I walk up to my mother and ask, “What the hell are you doing here?”
The salesman looks at me like I kicked her and my mother looks pained, like I might as well have. But shock leaves very little room for guilt.
“Your daddy and I are buying you a bed, didn’t you say you wanted a bed?”
The gentle chiding is something I never thought I’d hear again and my knees almost buckle, but something about the casual way she’s correcting me, like she’s got any right, angers me.