The reunion isn’t tender. Bibi’s right eye is almost swollen shut and her mother’s mouth is pressed shut and they neither look at nor speak to each other. Her father, who could never bear the tension between the two women, the memories of his turbulent childhood brought back, squeezes Bibi’s shoulder, then leaves, and it is that gentle pressure that starts her tears. Soon she is sobbing and her mother is still stone-faced, but it is a wet face she turns away so no one can see. Ezinma takes Bibi to the bathroom, the one they’ve shared and fought over since they were old enough to speak. She sits her on the toilet lid and begins to clean around her bruises. When she is done, it still looks terrible. When Bibi stands to examine her face, they are both in the mirror. I still look terrible, Bibi says. Yes you do, Ezinma replies, and they are soon laughing, and in their reflection they notice for the first time that they have the exact same smile. How have they gone this long without seeing that? Neither knows. Bibi worries about her things that are still in the flat. Ezinma says not to worry, she will get them. Why are you still nice to me? Bibi asks. Habit, Ezinma says. Bibi thinks about it for a moment and says something she has never said to her sister. Thank you.
And so Ezinma fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her: Godwin, who grew up under his father’s corrosive indulgence. Godwin, so unused to hearing no it hits him like a wave of acid, dissolving the superficial decency of a person who always gets his way. Godwin, who broke his cello when he discovered his younger brother could play it better, which is why he came to be here, watching Ezinma—who looks so much like her sister from behind—fumbling the unfamiliar keys against the lock of Bibi’s apartment so she doesn’t see who comes behind her: Godwin, with a gun he fires into her back.
WAR STORIES
This time, my mother and I were fighting about what I had done at school to prove with no question that Anita Okechukwu was not wearing a bra. That Anita and I had been in the middle of the playground hadn’t bothered me, that there were boys around hadn’t bothered me, but Anita Okechukwu was far more sensitive than I.
“Nwando, you can’t just go around opening people’s shirts,” my mother said after she closed the door on Mrs. Okechukwu, a broad-shouldered, broad-hipped woman whose need for a bra was unassailable. Mrs. Okechukwu had wanted an apology and an explanation, and my mother was ready with the first but unsure of the second. That’s why she’d called me onto the veranda to explain myself. I wanted to tell them about how Anita had started the Girl Club after claiming that her father had sent her expensive bras from London edged with barely-there lace and soft ribbons and powdered with fairy dust, and how she made the rule that only girls with bras could be in the Girl Club and that if you weren’t in the Girl Club you couldn’t sit in the Girl Area and you had to play with the boys. Anita would confirm who was Girl by escorting each applicant behind the school to check if she was wearing the required undergarment. They’d emerge short minutes later, the Bra Princess followed by her newest lady-in-waiting. In the jostling to be a Girl, with friends borrowing one another’s intimates and rejected applicants stewing in bitterness, no one had thought to check if Anita actually owned the bras she’d shown us in a catalog.
My mother’s raised brow asked, Well? and Mrs. Okechukwu frowned at me until my nuanced defense deteriorated into “I wanted to see her bra.” My mother pinched her nose and Mrs. Okechukwu muttered about girls with no home training. That’s when my mother got angry. I could tell by the way her left shoulder hunched forward with the effort not to make a fist, how her lips pressed so tight they disappeared. She remained polite to Anita’s mother but her glare seared holes into me.
“Wait till your father hears this thing,” her cry of last resort. At such moments I became my father’s daughter, a confounding creature who had no doubt inherited a vein of insanity from one of his yeye ancestors. I was his problem to solve.
Dinner that night amounted to my mother chewing smugly while I tried to swallow garri around the lump in my throat. My father said nothing.
While my mother cleared the table, he set up the chessboard on the veranda, a sporadic ritual that had begun a few months before, when we relocated to Port Harcourt. As the stand-in for Emmanuel, my father’s old friend, I was to match him in chess and swap stories, though my mother drew the line at serving me beer. A poor strategist, I never offered much of a challenge, but my father was a quiet man who did not make friends easily, and I would do.
“So what is this your mother is telling me?” he asked, giving me another chance to explain myself. I had the words this time and told my father about Anita and bras and the machinations of girls. He listened without interrupting, stealing my pawns as I moved them on the board. When I finished, my story dangled in the air between us. Then my father began to tell one of his own.
“When I was your age, my lieutenant—”
“You were in the army when you were twelve?” I interjected, knowing my father’s penchant for exaggeration. Emmanuel used to take him to task for it, interrupting my father with laughter and calls for “Truth! Truth!” With Emmanuel gone, the assignment fell to me, but my father didn’t crack a smile.
“Lieutenant Ezejiaku was a hard man. I feel bad for him now because he was surrounded by boys and fools and charged with creating an army of men. He would wake us at three in the morning and make us run around the compound with our gear. When we complained, he would shout, ‘Do you think the enemy will let you fetch a wheelbarrow to carry your things?’ Sometimes he would wake two of us at random in the middle of the night to run drills. We would always fight to sleep in the spots we thought he wouldn’t pick.”
“Is this about the time he took your gun?”
The tale, intended to impart some inscrutable lesson, was a stale one my father had trotted out at various infractions over my short life. I heard it when I stole lipstick from my aunt’s dresser. I heard it when my mother discovered me gathering ants in a plastic bag to put in a schoolmate’s hair. I heard it after I got into a fight with the children who said my father was strange, and again when I wanted to know why Emmanuel couldn’t come to our house anymore, and later, why he’d done what he’d done. My father never shared stories from before or after the war, as though he’d been born in the barracks and died the night of the final volley.
“Yes, it’s about the time he took my gun, and it was entirely my fault. Lieutenant stressed to us time and time again the importance of keeping our weapons within reach and sight at all times. One night, I was eating around the fire and placed my gun behind me. That was when the lieutenant must have taken it. I panicked when I couldn’t find my gun, but it never occurred to me that he had it. My friends and I took turns rotating so that when one unit was resting, I would have a weapon. This lasted for three days, until the lieutenant mobilized all the units at once for inspections. When he came to me, he looked me in the eye and handed me my gun. I never sweated so hard in my life.”
My father laughed harsh and loud, then quieted, staring at the chessboard. He was still for so long I wasn’t sure if he was contemplating his next move or if this was the genesis of one of the thick skins of silence my mother would spend days peeling off. Just as I was about to go and get her, he moved his queen to check my king and continued.
“I was flogged so hard my back looked like pureed tomatoes. Then they buried me in sand for three days. After that, I never took my eyes off my gun. Checkmate.”
—
I arrived at school the next day a hero. Fellow students patted my back and I was soon surrounded by the girls who hadn’t made Anita’s club and a few who had but wanted to curry favor with the new regime. By exposing Anita and cutting the head off the beast, I’d inherited my very own Girl Army.
During vocabulary class Ms. Uche asked us to select a word from the dictionary to use in a sentence. The person with the best word would get to lead the class to assembly tomorrow.
“I feel luminous,” I said, heady with power.
“Stop being obnoxious.” This from Femi Fashakin, a thick-waisted girl with a plague of pimples. She’d been part of the Girl Club and wasn’t ready to relinquish her membership. Ms. Uche, already bored with the exercise, intervened.
“Why don’t we query the class? Class, which word is better, luminous or obnoxious?”
My army responded like a rehearsed choir.