Under the Udala Trees (28 page)

W
E HAD BEEN
married for just over six months now, and living in Port Harcourt for five of those.

I stood up from the front steps, lifted myself from the weeds I had been picking.

What was it?

The headache was now beyond persistent. I could no longer continue. I marched into the kitchen, short of breath.

Something was changing in me. New qualities, a new restlessness.

Every day for all of that week, I had called Mama on the phone. Something was not quite right.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don't know, Mama. That's the point. I don't know.”

I found the teakettle and set some water atop the stove to boil.

I picked up the phone.

A breeze through the kitchen windows gently lifted the curtains.

I found a ginger root in the pantry. I scraped away the skin with a spoon, cut off a small piece, and allowed it to sit like a communion wafer on my tongue.

On the phone:

“Mama?”

“Yes, my child?”

“Mama, these days I have this feeling of being trapped in my body.”

“Being in a new place is not easy.”

“But Mama, it's been months already.”

“It takes time to adjust.”

“Mama, you're not hearing me.”

“What, then?”

“These days, I smell too strongly the scent of wet earth. I catch a whiff of the rain before it starts to fall. Even the sun is a burning odor in my nose. Every scent is as sharp as a knife.”

Outside in the backyard, swallows hovered around the guava tree. I observed them from where I stood by the window.

“So what do you think is wrong with you?”

“That's the point, Mama. I don't know.”

She made her pronouncement one day over the phone: “Depression.”

“I suppose it could be.”

“Just think of all the things you have to be happy about in your life!”

“Like what?”

“Are you sad? Do you cry?”

“Mama, I'm too tired to cry.”

“I can come stay with you two in Port Harcourt for a while.”

“No, Mama. It's not necessary. I'm sure I'll begin to feel better soon.”

“Of course you will.”

“Yes, I think I should.”

“The blind man wanted badly to see. He said, ‘Today I will see.' But today he did not see. He said, ‘Tomorrow I will see.' But tomorrow became today, and today became yesterday, and still he did not see.”

“Mama, I'm sure I'll feel better soon.”

“God helps those who know to ask for help.”

“You are not God.”

“No matter. I am coming. I will come and see what I can do. Whatever the problem, I'm sure I can fix it.”

“Anyone home? Ijeoma? Chibundu? I told you I would come. I have shut the store, put up the Closed sign. Please don't tell me that I have done all that for nothing, coming all the way here and finding not even a soul to welcome me. Children these days! What is the world coming to?”

I swung open the front door. In the air, the too-sweet scent of the guavas, which hung in scattered arrangement from the branches of the tree, guavas ripe and yellow and nearly bursting with juice.

“Mama, welcome,” I said. I opened the door wider to allow her in. The scent rushed in, stronger.

“How was your trip?” I asked.

No answer, but she entered. When she did, she remained near the entrance, would not take another step forward.

“Mama, why are you just standing there?”

She was scanning the flat with her eyes. After a moment she exclaimed, “I see the problem now! There is still so much to be done around here! Why have you two not taken the time to fix up the place? Well, we can certainly take care of all of this now. There's really no better cure for depression than hard work. We have our work cut out for us, but believe me, once things start to look nicer around here, you will surely start to feel better!”

Afternoon. Lunchtime. The thick scent of garri and Mama's okra soup.

“Look at you looking so miserable. When I was your age, I was wearing my marriage like a badge of honor. It's not every woman who is lucky enough to snatch herself a husband, you know. What's wrong with you that you still can't see that? God has been good to you, and you don't even have the common sense to see it.”

“Mama, I'm not in the mood.”

“Just as I thought you would reply.” She rubbed the palms of her hands against each other as if my words were crumbs, as if to dust off the crumbs from her hands.

After breakfast of agege bread and tea. Chibundu long gone to work. My head full, a terrible dizziness, as if someone took a hammer and pounded and pounded until I blacked out, and now I was just coming to.

“I'm off to pick up some groceries from Mile One market.”

“Mama, there's food already in the flat.”

“Is that right? There's food already and yet your fridge is looking like someone took a bulldozer and gutted it out. Let me ask you, what will we be having for supper tonight?”

“We still have that pot of okra soup remaining. We can finish that off for supper.”

“Ehn-hehn! So you want me to eat for supper what I already ate yesterday for lunch?”

“What's wrong with that?”

“What's wrong with that!”

“Yes, Mama. What's wrong with that?”

“I'll tell you what's wrong with that. For one thing, you're a newlywed. You should be making all sorts of food for your husband, not making him eat the same things over and over again.”

“Chibundu doesn't mind.”

Now she was opening and closing kitchen cupboards and drawers, inspecting for missing food items.

“Do you have beans at home? No. Do you have akamu? No. Do you have corn? No. Any oha leaves? Any ogbono seeds? No. What if I want to make egusi soup? Do you have water leaves? Any crayfish? Do you have palm oil?”

“We have other things.”

“Listen, I won't spend time arguing with you. I'm thinking maybe we can make some moin-moin and eat it with akamu for supper tonight. Or do you think Chibundu would prefer some rice and stew?”

“Chibundu will be fine with anything.”

“Very well, then.” She picked up her handbag from the kitchen table. “I will see you in a few hours. This place needs to be made to feel like a home, not a boarding room. I will pick up some food, and then I will also see what I can begin to do about the rest.”

I had fallen asleep on the sofa. I woke up to a tapping on my shoulder. The sun was streaming in through the windows.

She was hovering over me, pointing to the back wall of the parlor. I straightened up on the sofa and saw what she was pointing at: against the wall, a small Singer machine, propped up on a wooden encasement, a stack of threads, a pair of scissors, and some other sewing supplies on the table near it.

“Look what I brought for you!” Her eyes shone with self-satisfaction. She was waiting for my reaction, which I knew should be a mixture of shock and gratitude.

I replied weakly, “Mama, thank you, but you didn't need to.”

She looked at me aghast. “I buy you a sewing machine—not just buy it, but also pay someone to carry it here for me—and you have the audacity to tell me I didn't need to? Where are your manners?”

She continued: “This is exactly the thing you need so that your guests will know that a woman lives here. I regret that the war came and made it so that I never had a chance to really teach you these things. But better late than never. It's never too late to learn how to keep a beautiful home.”

“Mama, none of this is really necessary.”

“The place needs some curtains, a proper tablecloth for the kitchen table. Some pillows for the sofa. What kind of place is this that you call a home, and yet there are no curtains on the windows, no tablecloth on the table? This is what the machine is for. And speaking of the sofa, why did you two go and buy secondhand? All those holes in it, and then add to it the peeling walls. Holes everywhere.” She waved her hand as if to say none of it mattered now. “Lucky for you, all of these things can be fixed. Remember what I told you about the Aba house and how we fixed it up? We can do the same here. We will make you a beautiful home.” She rambled on and on, all in that same vein.

New curtains: a cornsilk-colored brocade fabric with an olive-green lace valance.

“This will be perfect,” she said. “You see, these windows get a lot of sun. With brocade you won't have to worry so much about sun rot.”

“Sun rot, Mama?”

“When the sun eats into and discolors the fabric. You won't have that to worry about. Not for a long time, anyway.”

Other new additions: a coral-colored cover for the sofa, a matching tablecloth.

Food and more food, enough to leave the pantry overflowing, as if our flat were a rich, fat man's house.

In the hours when Chibundu was at work, we cleaned, fixed, rearranged.

I worked dutifully at my new machine, making decorative covers for our new sofa pillows, my eyes taking turns between the fabric that I was sewing and the large bold letters on the machine. SINGER. I pedaled, and I turned the wheel. The needle bobbed up and down, up and down, and I imagined that the sound from the machine was a song, and that the machine was singing sweetly to me. I lost myself in the features of the machine, in its curves, in the color of it, a shiny, unapologetic shade of brown, sticking out in regal fashion from its encasement of wood. I hummed along with the sound of its sewing, a different song each time.

We taped up the peeling walls, again. We sealed up the holes, again.

Those hours after Chibundu returned from work, he made sure to express to us just how much he was liking the changes. “Incredible!” he exclaimed. “Just incredible!”

We washed clothes, swept floors. We peeled yams and corn, soaked beans and palm kernels. When all of that was done, she made lists of items to be bought at the market. We went together to the market, bought the items, brought them back home to cook.

Another day done. Another day gone.

The afternoon of her second week in Port Harcourt, I was in the middle of preparing to go to the market when I noticed Mama looking closely at me. “You're looking very pale,” she said.

I nodded. “I'm feeling very pale,” I replied.

“You might hurry, then,” she said. “There are quite a few more items to be bought and, afterward, food to be made.”

I nodded.

She looked at me some more.

The plan had been that I go to the market on my own while she took care of other things. But now she said, “I could go with you.”

I nodded. “That would be nice,” I said.

She grabbed the market bag. We made our way out the door.

The bus station was just up the road from our flat. We climbed onto the bus, rode it until our stop, still a distance from the market but as close as the bus could get us.

As we walked the rest of the way to the market, I got a whiff of something roasting, something sweet, like ripe plantains. I ran to the bushes on the side of the road, parted the tall green shrubs, bent over, my hands at my knees. I allowed it all to gush out, to flow out of me, that disease that had been for all this time inside me.

Minutes passed before I noticed Mama standing at my side. She simply stood there, her feet visible through the overgrown grass. I straightened up, wiped my mouth with the backs of my hands. I could see tears in her eyes almost right away. She wrapped her arms around me, very unexpectedly, as soon as I was done wiping off my mouth. “You've done well,” she said. “You've made your mother proud. Do you know what this means?”

I shook my head.

There is a story about a snake that, out of stubbornness, decided that it would not swim across the river. Near the edge of the river was a crocodile, getting ready to cross. The snake twisted itself into a tight ball and set itself atop the crocodile. The crocodile went ahead and crossed the river, too foolish, or just too plain oblivious, to realize that it was carrying a curled-up constrictor on its back. By the time the crocodile noticed, there was no use in fighting. The snake had unraveled itself and wrapped itself around the crocodile. It didn't take long before the snake devoured the crocodile. Then it let out one tumbling burp, and then another, brushed itself off, and said thank you to the crocodile in its stomach, not only for being its food, but also for helping it to cross the river.

Chidinma was by no means a snake, but only that she had come upon me the same way that the snake had come upon the crocodile. Somehow it had not occurred to me that all those weeks I was carrying a baby inside me. But of course, Mama was right.

I
BEGAN THE FIRST
of this particular set of letters the night Mama left, because that very night, Ndidi appeared to me, more vividly than ever, in a dream.

There were, in fact, two dreams. In the first, she was dressed in a calf-length romper, walking in slow, measured steps, all zombie-like, holding out her arms to me. It was outdoors, and above her an orange sun was peeking through the clouds and causing her to glow, almost electric-like, a human bulb. She was saying, like a chant, “One day I will need you to carry me on your shoulders the way Atlas carried the world.”

The scene changed abruptly, and just as soon she was in a field of whitish-gray dandelion clocks. Above her, an overcast sky, clouds on the verge of raining down tears.

I woke up with a start, expecting to find myself also in the field. Instead, I looked to my left, laid my eyes on a set of rumpled sheets and a sleeping Chibundu by my side.

In the second dream, Ndidi and I were in that double-functioning construction of a church in Aba, seated face to face at one of its tables. She handed me a glass of kai kai. I took a sip and, not wanting any more, gave it back to her.