She fed me Fanta and chinchin and listened to me talk and talk and talk. Sometimes, greased by loneliness, her secrets would slip out and she would mention things she shouldn’t have, like how her oldest son couldn’t find a job and how Mr. Ajayi was getting tired of lending him money. I was her young confidante, the daughter she never had, except for the two daughters she did have, who came by every few Sundays with their young children.
I wasn’t worried about Mayowa replacing me. She wasn’t the sort of girl who could sit and listen to old women and their problems. In fact, she seemed like the sort of girl who would hide an old woman’s medication and watch the trembling in the woman’s hands increase till she was too incapacitated to stop Mayowa from cleaning out her purse. I liked her a lot.
And so I stepped up my visits to Mrs. Ajayi, my sometimes biweekly calls multiplying to weekly, then near daily, as I found any reason to stop by.
“Mrs. Ajayi, my mother needs the pot she borrowed you six months ago.”
“Mrs. Ajayi, can I have the ripe guava from your tree?”
“Mrs. Ajayi, there is a string hanging from my dress, can you fix it?”
And when she called Mayowa to fetch the pot or the scissors or the old mop handle to knock the tallest fruits, I stared, trying to figure out what aspect of this girl made her brave enough to throw shit at my mother. Her hair was cropped short, barely enough left to cover her scalp, and did nothing to enhance the squat ordinariness of her face. That’s all she is, I told myself, an ordinary girl. And yet.
My visits to Mrs. Ajayi steadied at twice a week, once when Mayowa was there—I’d ask for something that needed fetching so I could watch her, study the boldness of her movements—and once when she wasn’t, so Mrs. Ajayi could talk freely.
Mrs. Ajayi would ask after my mother and sometimes, tentatively, my father, in between the recitation of her week so far and its most exciting aspects. This usually meant hearing about something Mayowa had done.
I picked these stories out of the trash of Mrs. Ajayi’s boring day, her lazy son, Mr. Ajayi’s intestinal distress. There was the time Mayowa held down one of the students at her school, pinned the girl’s head between her knees, and scraped off half her cornrows with a razor blade before an adult intervened. And the day she taunted the dogs so much, leaving their bowls just out of reach, that they growled and bit their caretaker for the first time since they were untrained pups. Or how she served Mr. Ajayi far more meat than his old gut could handle, so she could feast on his leftovers. When I came across these morsels of Mayowa, I shelved them in my memory, where I could reimagine them over and over till I’d convinced myself I was there. I liked to think she would have wanted me to be.
—
Church meant my mother dressing me in frills too young for my years, sweating the starch out of said frills in the un-air-conditioned building, and seeing the woman my father left us for. She came every few Sundays, when the weighty sin of fornicating with a married man became too heavy to bear. My mother didn’t know that I knew who she was and understood why my mother never clapped when the woman gave a testimony of God’s goodness. She always wore yellow, and she looked pretty in it. Not abandon-your-only-legitimate-child pretty, but you could see what a man would see in her. I imagined throwing something at her house, something hard, something that would hurt a man kissing her a distracted good-bye, his back turned so he doesn’t see the rock sailing his way.
Brother Benni was the youth minister this week, and when they announced that the children should leave for Sunday school, I faked stomach pains to stay with my mother. She was annoyed and didn’t hide it.
“You will stop with this Benni nonsense soon, he is a nice man.”
And he was. After church, Brother Benni would mingle, bearing candies and biscuits, and the boys would mob him and snatch him bare in seconds. He’d lift the boys who could be lifted, roll them like barrels under his arms, and mock-stagger under their mock weight to the delight of almost all who watched. But the girls had learned to keep their distance.
Years ago, before my father left, when my mother was a different person, I told her what Brother Benni had done to me. She went to my father, who went to the pastor, who went to Brother Benni, who called me a liar. That was the beginning of the end for us. The stink that was raised was what must have driven my father away, my mother occasionally reminded me. The humiliating stench of a daughter who bore false tales.
—
My mother was preening. Every third Sunday, a special offering was taken to support the Widows and Orphans Fund. And once in a while the pastor would give the week’s donations, secured in a red velour bag with gold tassels, to a church member to take home and return the next week. It was a gesture of faith on the church’s part and a testament to the trustworthiness of its members. This was the second time in a row my mother had gotten it and her sixth time overall. She was the most trusted woman in our church. She made sure everyone knew it.
“Six times, oh. Evelyn, you are the only one to beat me in this. Ah-ah, you’ve only had it four times? I forgot.”
When she brought the bag home, she put it where she always put it, on the shelf in the nice sitting room. If anyone stopped by during the week, they would see it on full display.
She made Grace dust around it and reminded her that “men want a trustworthy and godly woman. It is not just looks, you have to be honest and good.” Grace, who had been on the receiving end of a few too many of my mother’s corrective thrashings, pursed her lips and said nothing.
The next day, when my mother and Grace were at the market, Mayowa stopped by.
“Madam wants to know if your mummy has any lime.”
My mother would have said no, even if we had, but I invited Mayowa inside while I checked. She hesitated at the back door, then stepped inside. She looked around the kitchen and I imagined her comparing it to the Ajayis’. It was larger but in poorer condition. Two cabinets were missing their doors, broken during one of my mother’s rages. The door leading to the pantry was missing the handle. Bare concrete was visible in sections of the floor where the tiles were broken. It was a room that hadn’t seen a man’s handiwork in an age.
Wanting to impress Mayowa, I asked if she wanted to see the rest of the house. She raised her brow, a gesture so like my mother’s the hair on my arms prickled. My mother would have fainted with shame if she saw me treating a house girl like a guest, so I rushed her through the house, pointing to this and that. In the nice sitting room Mayowa stopped by the offering bag and, already more comfortable in my own house than I was, picked it up. Her eyes bulged at the roll of money inside.
“It’s from the church,” I explained, oddly proud for the first time. “They gave it to us to keep.”
Mayowa put the bag down and I led her to the next room.
When we got to my bedroom, I pulled out the stack of old magazines I reread every few weeks. The covers were wrinkled and on the verge of losing their gloss. After my father left, we stopped buying magazines, the once-commonplace purchase now a luxury. I picked out my favorite one, a fashion magazine with pages and pages of women dressed in custom aseobi, and Mayowa and I fell into a silence as we envied the styles we were too young to wear. If she felt the sheet of protective plastic crinkle when she shifted on the bed, she chose to say nothing. I tried to even my breathing and silence the rapid thudding in my chest. When I took a breath, I smelled the soap she used to wash her hair (disproving my mother’s assertion that all village girls are dirty) and the muddy scent of yams she must have chopped earlier in the day. I wanted to know what she was thinking, if she found me as interesting as I found her, if she was as drawn to me as I was to her. If she wanted to be my friend.
I flipped the page and Mayowa pointed at a woman wearing a red-and-orange dress with too many frills and a train that belonged on a different dress. The image was circled with a pen and the page dog-eared.