Tomorrow Harbors the Unknown
In the rearview mirror, Enyinne smacks her lips so the color blends, matching the maroon of her gleaming Range Rover. The security guard materializes like sudden rain to open the gate, which does not need opening because it’s automatic. He makes a deep obeisance, surprised that it is Enyinne at the steering wheel and not the driver. She hardly looks at him. But she can perceive his sweaty body trapped in the detergent-scented uniform.
She puts up the window. Her car stereo plays a Flavour N’abania tune from her phone. She hums along. Her son sings, too, but his singing is directed at the door; he’s a toddler and small things can hold his fascination, especially the car door. The little boy reaches for the handle, fails, tries again and fails before giving up and chuckling as Enyinne sings and makes faces at him in the rearview mirror. He, this toddler, has guaranteed her place in the world. Or maybe not in the world, but at least in Chief D.O. Thomas-Okike’s world.
Growing up the last child and only daughter comes with its own wahala. Enyinne’s father is retrenched from the Nigerian Railway and slides into painkiller dependency, which leads to a tramadol addiction that kills him by the year Enyinne turns ten. His death forces soup to be as plain as tea, forces meat to be diced as small as St. Louis sugar. And there’s Enyinne’s mother, choked by the needs of five children and an insufficient pocket of income. With squirreled savings, she can afford a room and parlor apartment, with shared cooking privileges, housed in an ugly concrete building that was first built when the British crown still lay claim to the land. With the money she has left she rents a shack where she sells cold beer and pepper-soup, but also opens her legs to men for small favors: to complete a child’s school fees here, to make up rent there. All under the guise of selling cold bottles of beer on warm evenings. These favors are insufficient, though, because she still must spread two of her sons between relatives.
When Enyinne is fifteen and studying for her university entrance exam, she begins helping her mother serve guests at the beer parlor. She brings a birdlike man his sixth bottle of Gulder and peppered chicken gizzards. She turns her back to him to open the drink and he grabs her buttocks and smiles, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. Before words her palms strike his cheeks, right first, then left. The man’s lips open as if his teeth have become hot coals.
“Is this how you treat customers here?” the birdlike man asks, gathering himself while a small party of drinkers fixate their eyes on him and Enyinne. The man thinks that mother has taught daughter how to ease her way in a big world. But someone should have told him that not all daughters will live like their mothers.
“In your life never, ever try that with me again,” Enyinne answers with barely controlled anger.
Abandoning peppery broth she carries in small ceramic bowls, her mother begs the birdlike man not to be upset, not to stop coming to her beer parlor. Enyinne tells her what the man has done, but her mother continues to beg the man, to sweeten him not to stay angry, to see that she’s just a girl and not understanding of the ways of women.
Enyinne repeats to her mother what the man did.
Her mother says, “If what you have come to do in my beer parlor is drive away my customers, you better stay at home.”
Enyinne gives her a look that is acid and that’s how affinity quenches between daughter and mother. That night, ambition sits in her belly like an infant in the womb. She writes in her diary, “If I remain poor at twenty-six, it will be my own fault,” and a stewed resentment multiplied by lack sizzles toward her mother. The world before Enyinne expands.
The next year is the year she opens a newspaper wrapping of streetside puffpuff to find a news article that asserts pharmacists make plenty of money. She has to fold the oiled newspaper three-quarters of the way down to see the article.
She gains admission to the University of Lagos to read pharmacy. Her oldest brother has a job at the bank and can afford to pay her school fees.
Enyinne is eighteen when she meets Bankole Macaulay, just a head taller than she is and barrel-chested, with a complexion like nutmeg. Bankole, who can trace his lineage back to one of the founding fathers of the country, the first Nigerian to own a car. Bankole, who plugs her into a new life so that when they enter shops, people address her as madam. He shows her how to be in the world: to cross her legs at the ankles, that salad plates are only for salad. To stand as though a steel rod runs from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet. To keep her skin smooth like peeled egg. To invest in moisturizers.
Two years into their relationship, Enyinne introduces Bankole to her people. Her mother offers him shortbread with orange juice and an ample smile. Enyinne knows she approves of him. The smile on her mother’s face simmers some of the compiled resentment that Enyinne feels toward her. Enyinne wants to say to her mother, “Now, this is how to pick a man.”
Bankole shows Enyinne that a single visa can take her from Brussels to Copenhagen, Prague to Budapest, Madrid to Frankfurt, Lisbon to Athens. Places she has only seen on the internet. Bankole’s family is oddly polite with her for almost three years, except for his uncle, the cement manufacturing industrialist, who says it isn’t a problem that she’s Igbo, but who is her father? Who is her mother? With that, his people brand her a usurper who only wants to guarantee her family a better life through Bankole’s surname. It takes a week for Bankole, with just a spine of starch, and ever the one to please his family, to break up with her, leaving Enyinne in a fetal position on her bed for days. He comes back to her with hands cupped in supplication and filled with proposition. She can keep the Toyota he bought her. She does. She can continue to stay in the off-campus flat he rented for her. She does. Perhaps she could get pregnant so his people will have no choice? She doesn’t. Because what foolishness would it be to open her two eyes and allow her children to be born into a family where they will also be called usurpers? A name Enyinne—taking the turn in her Range Rover onto Bishop Aboyade Cole Street on Victoria Island to pick up her daughter from the American International School—knows her children will never be called. Not with their father, not with their being Chief D.O. Thomas-Okike’s children.
If you have grown up with lack, you will act like Enyinne, who has become an expert in carrying her grief with her so light it doesn’t show to the world. Those years of bread so stale its prices are reduced because it smells like paper and tastes like dust, but that’s all her mother can afford. Those years of wearing slippers for so long they thin out and the heat from the asphalt burns her soles. Those years of washing and wadding up rags to use again, because where does she expect the money for a sanitary pad to fall from? The sky?
She aces her exams, coming out the best graduating student because she’s smart like that. But if only the oiled newspaper used to wrap her puffpuff hadn’t been torn halfway through, she would have seen that to get the best paying pharmacy jobs she’d have to leave Nigeria, unless she knows someone. She does not. One after the other, all her formal shoe heels become lopsided from walking the uneven streets. Of course graduating the best student doesn’t mean job offers will be pouring into her palms.
On one of those days she’s using an umbrella to shade her face instead of her hand, bus-waiting on a Victoria Island street, she’s offered a ride by Shinkafi, dark as moor-pepper and with deep-set eyes. He’s twenty-eight to her twenty-four and has never had to wait too long for anything. He knows what he wants, like he wants to marry her, like he wants to open a medicine dispensary for her in the heart of Victoria Island so she doesn’t have to work for anyone. Like he wants her to take up a Hausa name upon marriage. Like he will have to marry more women after her, because it’s expected of him and he welcomes it. But somebody should have told Shinkafi that those who grow up with lack are cautious, lest they lose themselves in competition the way salt dissolves in water. It’s Shinkafi whose engagement ring she returns after he makes the case for other wives.
So Enyinne, with her hand on the steering wheel of her Range Rover, touching the diamond ring on her wedding finger, is driving to pick up her daughter from the American International School. The American International School that prides itself on its understanding by design framework that translates to thousands of dollars in school fees, which can only be afforded by pupils who are children of cabinet ministers and diplomats and captains of industries.
The men in Enyinne’s life—starting with her own father who died like a mosquito, down to Bankole, Shinkafi, and the others she’s slept with for comeup—may think that they have relieved Enyinne of her better parts. But women who give all of themselves are women like Enyinne’s mother, and Enyinne is not her mother. Enyinne gives just enough for each man to think himself the salt in her life. A dollop of praise, a pinch of tenderness, a dab of love, a sprinkle of wit, a slice of sly—all are kneaded into a dough of restraint. Women like Enyinne always reserve some of their womanhood because tomorrow harbors the unknown. What tomorrow harbors is just two years younger than her father, had he been alive, with squinty eyes, a strong nose, and golden-complexioned. What tomorrow harbors is Chief D.O. Thomas-Okike, with an unassailable need for a young woman. If Enyinne were a diviner, she would see that what her tomorrow harbors is Chief’s today.
If I want him enough I can have him, Enyinne thinks, and it sends a thrill through her. In his persuasion to husband her, Chief begs, he woos, he carrots. The second comes as more rewarding, the kind of thing that softens Enyinne’s heart. He buys her a car and has a driver in waiting the moment she spritzes her perfume, he pays for her overseas trips, he pays for an apartment in her name at 1004 Estates. It is in that apartment where he proposes with a diamond ring. She accepts his proposal and the pretty diamond ring first, before being hit with the realization that they’re both on her bed with the whiff of after-sex and she’s plucking gray hairs off his chest. He’s not down on one knee with an upward gaze as she’s dreamed her suitor would be. Chief D.O. Thomas-Okike on his knee, shall we be serious? But it’s the diamond ring—which the sunlight strikes as Enyinne steps out of her car in stonewash skinny-fit jeans paired with a loose white shirt featuring bold brass buttons, her strides as if she’s stroking the ground, opening her arms to her running daughter’s embrace, knowing well that stares follow her every move—the ring that continues to catch the sun, forcing other mothers beside sleek cars to flash Pan Am smiles at her.
Truth be told, there are men and then there is Chief. To have Chief is one thing, to keep Chief is another—and this thought alters Enyinne’s choice, flushes down the once pressing need to have a salaried career, when being with Chief can set her up with a flourishing business of her own, when being with Chief is assurance that she doesn’t have to worry about money. She must do everything to keep herself titillating. A life of skin lightened by idleness and expensive creams, of salon-honed hair that holds onto the scent of wild fruits. In short: a carpet-to-heels-to-car type of life. She marries Chief and moves into the family home after he drives away his third wife—that slut of a woman was messing around with small-small Lagos boys anyway. This was said as fact, for in Lagos word travels fast about these boy toys with nothing to offer but good looks and chiseled bodies and sexual climaxes. But what are those compared to the security of a future without dolor?
“I just want you to give me sons,” Chief says, buttering up Enyinne, so that she rethinks polygamy as a sustainable path to my children will not live like I did. A year into their marriage, Chief takes her to events where she proves to have a way with eye-catching detailed outfits, always photo-op friendly. She favors fabrics bought overseas. Dresses snatched at the waist to reveal her slimness. Her weakness—for Capucines handbags, for skirts several inches above her knees—reveals itself. Socialites compliment how beautiful she always looks within Chief’s hearing.
She will have her daughter first. The girl is born in Surrey because Enyinne is filled by the need to do away with the head of every leviathan that her daughter may confront in life. And what easier passage than to acquire British citizenship by birth because Chief, having been a British citizen since the ’70s, can easily grant the infant his. When her son is born, euphoria cements Enyinne’s place in Chief’s heart. He buys a flat in London in the boy’s name. A townhouse just outside Washington, DC, also in the boy’s name. There are other choice properties in Lagos, which Enyinne buys by herself, also in the boy’s name. Enyinne owns Chief’s heart. But his insatiable desire for young women, as Enyinne soon finds out, has not ended with her.
Driving back home with her two children, all she’s thinking about is the young thing Chief has been spotted with. She is twelve years younger that Enyinne’s thirty-three. She knows that Chief has this girl’s name saved in his phone as King, although her name is Sylvia. Enyinne stretches her workouts longer now that she’s going against that Sylvia-girl who has no idea what happens to a belly when a woman pushes out a child.
She could share her worries about Sylvia with a would-be counsel in her orbit perhaps, but a life like Enyinne’s allows almost no intimacies. She has no friends, except, of course if you’re counting just the hello and hi and I beg your pardon given to acquaintances, the tight smiles flashed at soirees to fellow young wives of billionaires, wives who are also eaten by bouts of melancholy yet brandish gleaming fronts complete with electric pink lips and gold chokers. What is happening to Enyinne is what happens to a mother raising children whose only cares are whether the milk in their cereal is lukewarm or cold. Whether they will go to Disneyland in America or France. Whether Mommy will drive the Mercedes or the Jaguar, the BMW or the Range Rover. Whether Mommy will remember to buckle their seatbelts.
Enyinne knows that Chief houses this Sylvia in one of his many properties in Ikeja. Enyinne knows that he has never paid for her to go abroad and has tried not to be seen with her, meeting only in guesthouses. These are Enyinne’s small victories, but the ultimate triumph is to remain Chief’s final bus stop. Time after time, what people of this world have shown is that they do not understand sheer desperation. Can an army of ants not take down a herd of the mightiest buffalos?
If this fledging relationship continues, Chief could marry Sylvia. With Chief’s older children scattered around the world already assured of their inheritance from his vast wealth, this would be another woman to bear children, which could mean that Enyinne’s own children’s needs will be shortchanged. Enyinne knows she has to show that Sylvia-girl what it feels like to have something and watch a nonentity chip at it. She heads towards Mainland Ikeja. “An entire duplex on Herbert Macaulay Crescent for such a gutter-girl,” Enyinne mutters.
She has planned it like this: she will crack open the car windows, her children will want to know where she’s going, she will hand them each two packs of ribena to distract them. She will have to instruct her daughter, “Sweetheart, watch your brother while I quickly check something.” Both children will nod without looking up at her, their eyes fixated on their ribena. A double beep will confirm her car is locked. She will enter the compound through the unlatched gate, a property she had been to when she was Chief’s paramour. Always never latched. She will knock once, perhaps more if there’s a delay, before the door will open. Sylvia will have the typical near-accusing look of, “Who are you? What are you doing here?” or maybe she will not. The person standing there will be younger, with pebbles of desperation for eyes and a plastic sheen to her skin. Enyinne has seen many of her pictures on the internet.
Enyinne will say, “I have a message for you.”
“From who?” Sylvia will ask, with a raised brow like that of a woman who doesn’t yet know her place, and they will soon be staring at each other. This may be when Sylvia notices Enyinne’s gloved hands. Hands that she will glove after she gives her children their ribena. Hands that she will glove before taking the container she bought at Obalende under-the-bridge and kept in her Range Rover trunk waiting for today. And by the time Sylvia notices those hands, it will be too late because Enyinne will have splashed the liquid on her face and tossed the container at her feet. As Enyinne has been told, the liquid will eat at Sylvia’s skin, doing away with the layered superficiality of beauty. It will pick her face clean of even flesh. It will burn as it works to reach her bones. Sylvia will scream as her face and hair melt, but the screams of a melting face will be muffled, Enyinne thinks to herself. There will be no relief in Sylvia’s maddening frenzy, for Enyinne knows from reading Chief’s text messages that Sylvia lives alone in the duplex in Ikeja. The face, melting as it should, will be the last vision Enyinne has of her: a mumbling woman with layers of dissolving skin that look raw, like uncooked chicken.
But to orchestrate all of this that she has planned, Enyinne must get to the duplex in Ikeja first. It’s almost two and traffic headed toward Ikeja is starting to build. Hawkers take advantage and start to shove their wares at the backseat window, which is where every big man in Lagos should sit. But it’s Enyinne’s children who sit there, with now-empty packs of ribena. For the boy, the disappearing acts of hawkers lock his attention, the chase the hawkers give when the car gathers momentum before another crawl and the plastering of wares onto windows. His sister busies herself lamenting about Ms. Royster who cut PE class time because some people were being too rough.
A lane opens and Enyinne jerks into it and turns onto the right shoulder, then onto Willoughby Street, which is just two streets away from Chief’s duplex on Hebert Macaulay Crescent. Glad to be out of the snail-paced Ikeja traffic, still with the voice of her daughter badgering, “Just tell me, Mommy, is it right what Ms. Royster did? Is it?” There’s a snapping sound and a gush of sudden warm Lagos breeze as Enyinne swerves to avoid a pothole.
“He fell! He fell!” her daughter yells. Enyinne steps hard on the brake. She turns off the ignition. Her son is not in the car. Enyinne opens her door and runs back toward the shoulder, her block-heeled sandals hampering her speed.
A crowd has gathered in amazement at this child just vomited by a car. There’s a small stream of blood running down his face. Enyinne wails. She cannot identify its source. The women among the crowd are the first accusers, their barbed words shooting judgement. What kind of careless mother is she, allowing her child to throw himself out of a car? Wait, is she really the mother? Accusations and theories fly.
“Na my pikin,” Enyinne says in a shrill voice. Which is when the boy recognizes her. “Mommy you forgot to tell me to put back my seatbelt.” She kneels and pulls him to her bosom by his scapular. With his face angled to his right, she finds the source of his bleeding: the jagged edges where the erosion-eaten tarred street has left a deep slice on the top of his head. Instinct has her taking off her shirt and wadding it into a bundle and pressing it to the wound to try to control the now profuse bleeding. Those years of wadding up washed pieces of rag every month coming back to her. Her hands tremble. The crowd swells. The shirt soaks.
Such a careless woman, it’s only too much money that makes her forget to watch her own child. She’s one of those women that house-girls do everything for. May God help the poor boy. More accusations and theories. Enyinne tries to rise with the boy in her arms, almost stumbles, regains her balance and jogs toward her Range Rover, the boy’s head nestled in the cup of her palms covered by her shirt that has turned a frightening red. She calls out to him, begging him to stay with her in a voice so hoarse no one hears. In the car, his sister is red-faced and it’s a wet face, shocked first at the sight of her mother in her bra, then of her brother crowned with a rag dripping red. A man offers to drive them to the hospital. Enyinne sees the faint smile on her son’s face and knows that he can hear her, but time is stretching thin for the boy. She continues to call his name, to remind him that Mommy is here. The man behind the steering wheel makes a maddening rush onto the road. Enyinne watches her son’s half-smile melt away as he blacks out.
“Dial your father’s number,” she says to her daughter. The boy cannot die. The delicateness her children have known must remain. She fingers her diamond ring with her thumb, the assurance of its stone wraps her in a cushioned comfort, and that’s all she can do to stop herself from weeping.
First published in the Winter/Spring 2020 issue of The Southampton Review.