Voice of America (10 page)

E
BONE WAS SAID
to have given her husband away with her own hands. They had come to America on visitor’s visas and had decided to stay on. Her husband had found a job in a gas station with fake papers. She stayed home watching talk shows and daytime soaps and dreaming of a time when she too would begin to wear cashmere sweaters like the women on television. When her husband told her that he could pay someone three thousand dollars to marry him so that he could get a green card, she had told him to go for it. How could she have known that they were both embarking on a journey whose end she did not know? She had not even bothered to ask her husband who the lady in question was, or how they had met. She had trusted him fully as she had always trusted him. When he told her she would need to grant him a divorce so he could marry the other lady, she agreed. He had explained that it was not a real divorce; they would both still be living together. And then he had told her he would need to take a few of his clothes to the lady’s house to keep up appearances just in case the Department of Immigration people needed to confirm they were both living as man and wife, and
again she had agreed. And soon, the lady had a name. Her husband no longer referred to her as the lady helping him with his papers, he now called her Rhonda. The first day she had heard the name Rhonda she had rolled the name around in her head. It sounded short, crisp, and authoritative. Little by little things began to change. He needed to run a few errands for Rhonda. He needed to take Rhonda to the movies, he needed to pay a few of Rhonda’s bills.
Oh, Rhonda has been so nice to us, I think I need to buy her a gift.
Not long after that, he would mistakenly refer to Ebone as Rhonda and quickly correct himself and look at her, his large brown eyes pleading for understanding and asking her to trust him.

One day Rhonda called. Her husband was at work.

“This is Rhonda, I guess you know who I am,” the voice at the other end said.

“Well, yes, I know you a bit …,” she had responded, mystified.

“So when are you getting your lazy ass out of the house to go find a job so my man can move in with me?”

“Did I hear you say, ‘your man’?”

“Yup, you heard right, my man, or is that in doubt?”

“I think you should call back when my husband is here, he’s in a better position to talk to you.”

“There is nothing he has not told me, there is nothing more to discuss, just get your lazy ass out of the house and go get yourself a job like a normal upright citizen, okay, remember you are now in the good old USA, this is not Africa, okay?”

When he came in that night, she had told him about the call. First he had feigned anger and had picked up the phone, and then he had dropped the phone and begun to tell her to show
some understanding. She did not understand what he meant by the word
understanding.

Then he got the eighty-thousand-dollar IT job. He had been attending classes and reading for the examinations for the past three months. He had not touched her in a long while, and claimed that it was because of the examinations. She would never know why he had gone ahead and told Rhonda that he had been offered a job, and had even told her the salary that came with the new job. “Now you are married to me for real, African man,” Rhonda had screamed.

She was sure she smelled Rhonda on her husband when he came in that night. She wished they were living in the village back in Africa. She was sure the village dogs would have given him away. It was her mother who had told her the legend of the hunting dogs. The men would go hunting with the dogs, and on days that there was a kill, the dogs got something to eat. On days when the men caught nothing, the dogs went to bed hungry. The women of the village felt that this was an unfair way to treat the dogs. They were the ones who began to gather the leftovers for the dogs after the evening meal. They would call the dogs and feed them. As a way of showing appreciation for the kindness of the village women, the dogs began to tell on the men. Dogs have a keen sense of smell and can smell semen on a man many miles off. Whenever any of the men walked back from the home of a concubine, the dogs would start barking and sniffing the men’s crotches. That way the wife would know what the man had been up to and scold the man accordingly. Ebone wished that she had a loyal dog in America that could sniff her husband’s crotch and confirm for her that he had slept with Rhonda.

Now he was asking her to return to Nigeria. He promised to
send for her after a couple of years; by then he would have gotten his American citizenship, and she could join him as his fiancée and he would marry her all over again.

As she watched the daytime talk shows, she wished she could take her problems to Oprah or Dr. Phil. The guests on the shows talked about problems that sounded like trifles, so insignificant and minuscule compared to hers. She wondered if they would understand. Americans did not overly concern themselves with the tortuous paths immigrants took to obtain a green card and citizenship.

She had confided to another Nigerian woman, the woman who owned the African store in Silver Spring. The woman had laughed out loud and told her that the day she left America would be the last time she saw her husband.

“Suppose I leave and you never send for me ever again, what would I do?” she had asked her husband.

“And if I chose to move in with Rhonda now and never return to this house, what would you do? How would you pay the rent? In a matter of weeks you’d be thrown out of the apartment, and Immigration would bundle you back to Nigeria,” her husband had responded.

She had watched the callous unfeeling words spill out of his mouth as if he had rehearsed them. He said the words without pity, looking at her straight in the eyes. And then his voice had dropped, and he had pleaded with her to trust him.

Every night she waited to hear the sound of his key turning in the lock. Was he coming back, or had he decided to move in with Rhonda? Only the click of the lock held the answer.

….

M
ALOBI’S HUSBAND WANTED
a child. His family also wanted her to have a child, because her husband was an only child. They did not want the family name to disappear. Back in Nigeria, they pointed out decrepit houses that had been owned by rich people who had no progeny to inherit the properties after their death. Her mother-in-law sent her by courier all the way from Nigeria medicinal concoctions in dark bottles that stank horribly. How she managed to convince the courier company to ship the stuff, Malobi could never tell. One of the concoctions stank even more horribly than the previous ones. Her mother-in-law confessed to her that the base was from the urine of a female cow, and asked her if she had ever heard of a barren cow, to which she responded no. “Aha!” her mother-in-law had exclaimed, “I’ve been assured by the
babalawo
who prepared the medicine for me that just as there is no barren cow, you too will not be childless.” The conversation had left Malobi feeling like the proverbial cow without a tail, which was said to be at the mercy of all manner of flies.

Then her husband began traveling to Nigeria every summer. He had vaguely told her that he had a project in Nigeria. The nature of the project was never fully explained. At first she assumed he was building a house, but he had told her it was not that kind of project. The military had just handed over power to a civilian government, and she thought he was perhaps pursuing a government contract. She hinted at this, but he was not forthcoming, so she let it be.

He was away on one of his trips to Nigeria when she got a call from her mother-in-law.

“Your husband is dead. Yes, he died in a car accident on the road to Abuja.”

Malobi gasped and clutched tightly at the phone, her mouth
suddenly without saliva, her palm clammy, and her breath becoming faster.

“What happened? How could he be dead, I spoke with him only two days ago….”

“Your husband is dead. He is my son, and I am confirming it to you.”

Malobi paused and tried to read her mother-in-law’s tone. There was something in that voice, some inflection she was missing, and days later, after the conversation, it came to her with the clarity of dawn. Not once had her mother-in-law said, “My son is dead”; she had kept saying “your husband.”

“I am going to try and get on a flight back to Nigeria tomorrow.”

“There is no need to trouble yourself with coming home. We have already buried him.”

“Buried him? How can you bury my own husband in my absence?”

“He’s been buried, he is dead, is all I can tell you. You have your own life to live. You are still young. There are many men in America, I am sure you will find a good man,” her mother-in-law said, and the line went dead.

Malobi called the president of the Nigerian Union in Philadelphia, a balding old man with bulgy froglike eyes and a kind face, known as “Baba” by members of the Nigerian community. Though he had lived in the United States for many decades, Baba still spoke English with a very thick Nigerian accent.

Baba had laughed out loud, tears streaming out of his froglike eyes, when Malobi told him of the call from her mother-in-law.

“It is the way of our people; she means that the marriage is
over,” he told her. “She means her son is no longer your husband. It is the way of riddles, the way the elders spoke to each other. When the man of the house dies, they say the big tree has fallen, the thumb has been cut off, we can no longer snap the fingers. I still have contacts back home; I will make a few calls and get back to you.”

He indeed made the calls, and confirmed that her husband was still alive. A few months later Baba brought her a copy of one of Nigeria’s soft-sell magazines. There was a picture of her husband and his new bride beaming into the camera at the christening ceremony of their new baby at Christ’s Church Cathedral.

T
HESE ARE OUR
stories, and the stories of the men we married. Once we had dreams of growing old together and reminiscing of our early days in this land of big dreams; how could we have known that the underbelly of the black snake is white, and that the land of big dreams is also the land of huge nightmares? It is a good thing that we share our stories with the world, because we also have daughters and sisters, and they will hear these tales, our stories, and say to themselves, This will not be our fate; we will never become married widows in our own lifetime.

I
was thirteen when Uncle Siloko came to live with us in Belts-ville, Maryland. Siloko was the nickname he and my father called each other, both of them having attended Siloko Grammar School back in Nigeria. He had a one-semester lectureship position in the English department at the state university. His family was in Minnesota, where he had done his graduate studies. His plan was to leave his family, a wife and a daughter, in Minnesota because he could not yet afford to rent a place. He would send for them as soon as he was settled in.

I went with my father to pick him up from the Greyhound station. He wore a well-cut black winter coat and a two-tone brown-and-black beanie. He was carrying a small bulging suitcase and another large blue bag that had “Safari” written on its four sides.

“How was the trip?” my father asked him.

“Tortuous,” he responded, and laughed, a big booming laughter that made a few people at the bus station turn around and stare at us. As he laughed, he took off his beanie, folded
it and put it in one of the pockets of his coat, and brought out a pack of chewing gum. He unwrapped a piece, put it in his mouth, and was about to start chewing it when he turned to my father and asked, “Why have I not had the honor of meeting the beautiful young lady?”

“My daughter, Adesua,” my father said.

He looked at me and smiled and chewed vigorously on his gum. It was my first experience of meeting a grown Nigerian man who chewed gum. He smiled, and I could see the deep dimples on both sides of his face.

I curtsied and said, “Welcome, Uncle.” I had been taught by my parents to address every older Nigerian male as “Uncle,” and older females as “Auntie.”

“Adesua, the pleasure is all mine,” he said, and his laughter boomed once again. He offered me a piece of gum. I took it and threw it into my mouth and was pleasantly shocked by its strong strawberry flavor.

As we drove off in Father’s car with the heat turned on full blast as usual, he began to wind down the glass on his side of the car.

“Are you hot?” my father asked.

“Oh, yes, quite hot, or have you forgotten I’m coming from Minnesota, where the major economic commodity is snow?”

He spoke like a character in a play. He had a way of making everything he said interesting. He would sometimes say something very serious and laugh, and when he was joking, he wore a very serious expression. For the entire time that he lived with us, I could never tell when he was joking and when he was serious.

I had heard my parents say that Uncle Siloko would be staying in the basement; for some reason, by the time we got home, my
father had changed his mind. He moved into the room upstairs, the room next to mine and opposite my parents’ bedroom. He did not stop my father from carrying his bags upstairs for him. He no doubt expected people to do things for him.

He went into the bathroom, which until that morning had been mine, to take a shower and was soon whistling in the bath. He came out smelling strongly of aftershave and was still whistling as he walked into his room. When I walked past my old bathroom, I could see through the half-open door that he had swept my cream and other stuff to one side, and his bottles and lotions now occupied half of the space before the bathroom mirror. There appeared to be such a wide array of stuff, three kinds of face cream, an aftershave lotion, aftershave balm, and other tubes and bottles.

I was downstairs watching television when he came down. My father was in the kitchen, bringing out different soups and stews from the fridge, and a half pot of water for
fufu
was boiling on the stove.

“Siloko, what will it be for you? Wetin you wan chop?” my father asked him.