“What?”
Dee could see him measuring her, deciding what he could and couldn’t say. “Tell me,” she added. “You can tell me anything.” It was almost a plea, this desire to know him better.
“We lived on the Upper East Side, where most of the apartment buildings have doormen.” He smiled at her blank look of suburban ignorance. “They are men who sit at the entrance of the building, like a guard, except they help you too, with packages and shopping and hailing you taxis and things like that. There were not many…people like us in that neighborhood. So every time I walked past a doorman he would watch me closely, and whistle so the doorman at the next building would notice, and he would watch me, and whistle. This whistling would happen all the way down the block. Usually they only did this when a pretty girl walked past. Even once they knew me, and had seen me walk by every day for months, they did this thing with the whistling. They said it was a joke, and maybe after a while it was for them, but it never felt like a joke to me. It was like they were waiting for me to do something.”
“Do what?”
“Steal something, or mug someone, or throw a rock.”
“That’s…” Dee didn’t know what it was. She was still trying to get her head around the idea of him living in an apartment, rather than a house the way she and all her friends did. But she lived in the suburbs. There weren’t that many apartments out here. “What about your own doorman?”
“He was all right, eventually. He was teased by some of the other doormen, but my father gave him a generous Christmas tip, and that helped. He would never hail us a taxi, though, not even when we could see empty ones driving by. He would say there were none, or that they were going to other jobs. I only went in two taxis the whole time we lived there.”
Dee herself had never been in a taxi—had never needed to. What an exotic life, to need a taxi! “Tell me some more about Ghana,” she said, just to hear him talk.
Osei sat up straighter. “What would you like to know about my country?” The mention of Ghana seemed to make him even more formal.
“Well…” Dee paused, considering whether or not to bring up a thought that had lodged in her head when Ghana had first been mentioned. But she liked him—really liked him—and wanted to be as open with him as she could. “Don’t they…eat people there?”
O smiled. “You are thinking of Papua New Guinea. Not Ghana. Papua New Guinea is near Australia.”
“Oh! Sorry.”
“That is all right. My sister, Sisi, had a teacher once in Rome who made that mistake too, and assigned her to do a class report on cannibalism. She practiced it on me first, so I heard all about it.”
This was even more surprising than the doormen and the taxis. “How do you say ‘cannibalism’ in Italian?”
“Cannibalismo.”
Dee giggled, then grew serious. “Maybe you can explain to me why people eat each other, then. I’ve never understood it. It’s just so gross.”
“Well, one reason is that sometimes there is not enough food. If there is a famine, or people are stuck somewhere with nothing to eat. Did you hear about the plane crash in the Andes two years ago where people had to eat the dead to survive?”
Dee shuddered, not sure why she had turned the conversation in this direction, but not sure she wanted to change it either. She had never talked about anything this serious with any other boy—or girl, for that matter.
“But most of the time cannibalism is not about hunger,” O continued. “People eat others if they have beaten them in battle, as a trophy of war. Or sometimes they eat part of someone they love who has passed. It is like bringing them back into the community—like reincarnating them through their own body.”
“Ew!”
O chuckled. “In Ghana we dance and sing after someone has passed, but we do not eat them!”
Dee thought of her grandfather lying in an open coffin in a church in South Carolina. It had been solemn and awkward and her new shoes had pinched. “You dance?”
“Yes. It is a big party that goes on all night, with food and bands playing and many people. The family puts up billboards around town to advertise and everybody comes. We spend a great deal of money on a funeral—as much as we do on a wedding.” His accent seemed to become more African as he talked about Ghana, his vowels more extreme and his voice more emphatic.
“Very strange. Do you go to Ghana a lot?”
“We visit every summer to see my grandparents.”
“And you like it?”
“Of course.”
“When you go there, do you stay in the city or the country?”
“Both. We have a house in Accra and a house in my grandfather’s village.”
Dee wanted to ask if the house was a mud hut with a grass roof as she’d seen in photos of Africa in her dad’s National Geographic. But her mistakes over cannibalism and over dashikis earlier had stung her, and she didn’t dare ask something else that would reveal more ignorance.
She thought about what she could ask. In the silence she became very aware of them sitting together under the cypress trees, the playground active around them but everyone also angled toward them, watching. She wished they were walking or climbing the jungle gym or swinging on the swings rather than sitting still.
“Are there lots of wild animals there?” Dee could have kicked herself for asking something so obvious, but the conversation seemed in danger of stalling, as it often did when a boy and a girl suddenly felt self-conscious together.
“Yes. We have buffalo, baboons, warthogs, monkeys. And many others.”
“Are there elephants?”
“Yes.”
Though he seemed willing to be asked questions, he was not asking her anything. But boys rarely did—they were better at talking than at listening, and better at doing than at talking. Dee had not sat and talked with a boy for this long, ever.