I don’t know how she insinuated herself into our lives. I barely knew her. But she sent these little notes through her son to my office. She didn’t even pronounce my name right and I didn’t bother to correct her. She had the habit of showing up at my office with a head of lettuce in a plastic bag—‘Got it real cheap, girl, from the farm,’ she would say and dump it on my desk. Another time it was a visit to the bakery. She was going to introduce me to the best bargain in town. Melody Bread it was called. You half expected the loaf to start whistling as you sliced it. It was cheaper to buy bread straight off the baker’s clay oven before it hit the supermarket shelves. Did I like pork, she enquired. She knew a place where pigs were slaughtered on Saturday mornings. Pork was cheaper than beef anyway. With pork fat you could save on margarine. She bought baskets of tomatoes in season and dumped them in the freezer. She advised me on re-fashioning old clothes rather than buying new ones, and introduced me to Yusuf, the Liberian tailor, who turned out these good-as-new culottes and tank tops for her.
We were sisters in spirit—in situation rather—in a country of beginnings. You were forever beginning, never forging ahead, always ‘managing’, just catching up. And when you thought you had got to the point where you could perhaps start a poultry farm in the backyard, armed robbers raided your house, stole your 1970 Peugeot 504, the Labour Congress called for a nationwide strike, and you started all over again. Democracy was set in motion, then the army stepped in and you were back where you began. For some it was a lifetime of beginnings. Others like Brenda stumbled ahead in an oblique bid to make a living in spite of numerous setbacks.
‘Did you notice how Nigerian men never call their wives by name?’ she asked me as we drove in her little blue Beetle, heading for one of her cost-saving ventures. ‘As if they were goats or furniture or something.’ But her husband called her Brin, she said, and she called him by his first name, which continually shocked her sisters-in-law.
I ran into her next when she was on the street arguing, holding a man by his collar, getting hysterical over something, her face and hair wet in the rain. Her aggressive driving combined with a sudden downpour had caused a man in his car to go off the road and land in a ditch. The man had emerged from the ditch in a fury, come up to her car and snatched her keys. That had unleashed Brenda’s foul temper. She hit out at the man, screaming ‘Gimme back my keys,’ and when the man had cooled down sufficiently to return her keys she slapped him across the cheek before jerkily driving off. A gathering crowd of spectators looked aghast.
Brenda talked about the Dominican Republic like it was a piece of paradise itself—mostly in terms of food, lobsters, crabs, shrimps, everything that was in abundance there and totally unaffordable in our given circumstances. Is it not on the other side of Haiti, I asked, conjuring up visions of hungry children waiting on the shores to be spirited away to more prosperous lands. Maybe Brenda met Emeka in a palm-fringed ambience. Their wedding picture had the two of them in their finery, captured in a glowing wine glass—a photographic trick. If only they had remained in that ecstatic and inebriated state forever.
Every once in a while Emeka would roll up his metal garage door (a novel and noisy installation) and pull out his gleaming yellow Mercedes Benz. The car would stand outside his house for a couple of hours, decorating the yard with the chickens scratching amidst the corn, and the okra leaning over the driveway. Then he would climb in regally, in an agbada to match, and cruise out slowly down the bumpy dirt road. The children were allowed in the car only at Christmas time when, with his wife by his side in her enormous starched head-tie, children propped up rigidly, with clean hands and noses wiped, he took them to his hometown. It was a seven-hour drive during which he stopped for petrol and wandered into the bush a couple of times. But the children were not allowed to eat in the car or drink. So they arrived stiff and famished and dead beat in their Sunday best. His bank balance was known only to himself and to God. He made sure his wife knew nothing about what went in and came out. ‘Is it not your women who are capable of poisoning their husbands for money?’ Brenda taunted him.
Her favourite story was of the time Emeka gave her 500 naira to prepare the Stew of the Week. With that, Brenda went to the market, bought the ingredients, cooked the meal lovingly and served it at the table before inviting her husband to eat. One day the table was set elaborately as usual, with his placemat, his plate with a porcelain lid covering the food, the water poured into his glass, flowers in the vase. With a keen appetite he sat down, washed his hands and lifted the porcelain lid. There, on his plate in the centre, sat his 500-naira note. No food. ‘How do you expect me to cook with the money you gave me?’ asked Brenda, coming in from the kitchen, toothpick in hand. I knew then that the outsider had acquired the tricks of the insider.
She had the air of someone constantly improving herself, whether it was in the food she cooked, the plants she tended to or in her relationship with her husband. She read books like The Perfect Woman and The Misunderstood Man, and gave out advice freely, garnered from pulp fiction. She read out portions from the Family Circle Magazine as we waited in a petrol queue, our cars parked bumper to bumper.
‘Be your partner’s best friend. Show a real interest in his life. Celebrate his successes and empathize with his hurts and frustrations,’ she read. ‘And girl, this is for you,’ she continued. ‘Be a partner not a parent. Care for him but don’t hover.’
‘I don’t hover,’ I said.
‘You smother,’ she said, flipping the pages to recipes.
‘And how about you and Emeka …?’
‘We’re all right as far as he’s concerned. As long as I don’t do or say the wrong thing. And don’t rock the boat by wanting something he doesn’t.’
I could tell that she was through with perfuming the sheets and lingering at the doorway till his car disappeared from view.
Brenda surfaced after three months and breezed into our living room as if she had never left it. She was chirpy, excitable, curious and facetious, all at the same time. ‘You seem to have lost weight,’ she said and then, ‘Did you notice I cut my hair? Can you make some yam fries for Miriam’s birthday party on Saturday?’ Everything came on fast as it always did with her. She brought me a bunch of dried grass, artificially coloured, as a peace offering.
‘Girl, what did Lawal give you for your birthday?’
‘A toaster.’
‘Men! What imagination!’
That afternoon I gained the status of godmother to her daughter, got organized into helping at a school carnival and agreed that she join us for the evening meal. Quite an achievement for one visit, I thought. It was as if I had known her all my life, in saris, wrappers, skirts, trousers, tall, short, skinny, fat. I proposed we eat out in a local rice-and-beans place before going to the carnival.
‘Girl, why spend hard-earned money on a meal in the restaurant?’ she asked. ‘It will only go down the sewers.’ She probably took the children to the market and bought them a pair of slippers each with the money. She was going to buy a sack of rice before the prices went up at Christmas. She talked about ‘investing’ in sugar, which meant she had found a store where she could get it cheaper. Every naira was accounted for.
It is not as if one were prepared for calamities in life simply because the traditional structures of security were absent. As alien wives we had no recourse to employer or government. We placed our faith in providence and lived from day to day just as the local women around us did.
There were too many friends to keep in contact with the year I spent away from the country. Writing to my family used up most of my emotions, and worrying about them took up the rest. Every now and then someone or something reminded me of Brenda. ‘Girl, would you?… Could you?’ It came as an absolute shock when my husband sent me an obituary cutout from the local newspaper. ‘Translated to Immortality,’ it said, and had a picture of youthful Emeka in his seventies’ suit and tie.
The day I walked into Brenda’s living room she was in a black chiffon dress, hair done up in a subdued knot, watching a video of her dead husband being lowered into the ground in an ornate box. She hugged me perfunctorily, groaned, and then went back to watching the video, dry-eyed and intense, like she didn’t want to miss the details. I squirmed on the sofa beside her and waited. ‘Doesn’t Daddy look nice in his suit?’ she commented.
If he had died after an illness it would have been better, she said. She flicked out a roll of lavatory paper from her handbag, tore off a piece and wiped her nose. It was, as they say, A Ghastly Motor Accident. Brenda had chased out all the relatives who had come to have a satisfying mourning period according to custom. In the bedrooms the women lay, she said, in crumpled wrappers and head-ties. When the coast was clear they brought out the basin of jollof rice from under the bed, heaped it on plastic plates and gorged themselves. They washed it down with mineral drinks. Energies replenished, they assumed the posture of Irreparable Loss and Grieving.
This is a tragedy, Brenda had screamed at them, not a celebration. She was not going to allow for a ‘decent’ wait-before-the-funeral. She had slung the handbag over her shoulder, tied a black wrapper on and said she was going to shop for a coffin. The women had fallen over her and restrained her.
‘Madam, take it easy,’ they had pleaded. ‘This sort of thing is not done. We will take care of it.’
‘He was our brother,’ said a distant cousin with an eye on the Mercedes Benz parked outside.
Brenda had taken the money out of her handbag and given it to a friend. The coffin was purchased and buses were hired so that all the relatives and friends could travel east to Emeka’s hometown for the funeral. Brenda had locked up the house and car and released the dogs in the yard. ‘You see these children,’ she had said to the relatives, pointing to her young ones. ‘If the man has left anything, it is for these children. So don’t worry yourselves hoping for a share in it.’
There had been disputes in the village. The Catholic priest maintained Emeka had to be buried in the churchyard. Brenda had made up her mind that he was going to be buried beside the only house he had built in his lifetime, the shell of a mud-brick house in the village. She had threatened to take the corpse back to the city if the church did not cooperate. There were mutterings around her. Women gathered in corners and whispered. She had ignored them. ‘When I married my husband overseas I didn’t see any of you,’ she told them. ‘You are not going to be the ones to tell me where to bury him.’
Finally she had abandoned the Catholic Church, got a local Igbo priest in his white robes, with his white-robed companions, to officiate at the funeral ceremony. The Igbo brother from the charismatic sect wished to give Brenda her money’s worth—he beat his gong and danced around the casket, chanting. The children were lined up on chairs in the front. Behind them sat Brenda’s friends. The relatives and village people had stood at the back, still murmuring. They seemed to be afraid of her. Brenda sat taut and waited, wiping the sweat off her forehead. An hour, half an hour, fifteen minutes to go and the man would be buried and there would be peace. She had carried it out this far. She had to see the whole thing through and then leave this village.
Brenda looked so charming in her purple blouse with gold buttons, her ears pierced in three places and three sets of gold rings adorning each of her earlobes. Four months had gone by since we had last met. ‘If it weren’t for God I couldn’t have bounced back,’ she declared cheerfully, squinting in the February sunshine. ‘A relationship with God. That is the important thing. If I didn’t have this longstanding relationship I would have despaired. Girl, it is lonesome without a husband. A whole new ball game, as the Americans say. Even if the man wasn’t doing anything at least there was the security that you were his wife and he was there. If you were sick in hospital he would come in and say, “What’s going on, how’s my wife?” Now you drag yourself to hospital and drag yourself back. Every doorknob, every hinge that is faulty in the house, is your headache. This one needs school fees, that one a chemistry textbook. You buy rice, yams, garri. You pay every blessed bill. I tell you, girl,’ she heaved, ‘if it weren’t for the good Lord I would have followed the man in ten days.’ She got into the car and gently shut the door. ‘You have to wait for the Lord. That’s what the Bible says. We all have to die one day and then you either meet Him as your judge or your king. I tell you, I want to stay on His right side, girl. If you don’t know God you don’t know where you’re going. You turn over and die like a chicken. I know exactly where Emeka is … What are you doing on Saturday? I’m running short of kerosene. Let’s join the queue at the Mobil station and then maybe look for some flour to buy. You don’t have some to spare, do you? I have this idea of making coconut bread to sell …’
She left me standing there as the Mercedes Benz pulled out smoothly and was gone.