Everything Good Will Come (25 page)

After work I drove home crying. Niyi took one look at me. “You have to be tougher than this, o-girl,” he said. “You can't let people push you around. Tell them to go to hell if they pressure you.”

“You have no idea,” I said. Bankers were not like lawyers. We were accustomed to waiting for due process. We expected delays. Niyi pulled my nose. “Stop,” I said and slapped his hand away.

He patted my head. “That is what I want to hear.”

I was able to face work the next morning. From then on, Niyi led me through similar rites. Months later, when the company secretary left, I stepped into her position.

At work I consciously tried to imitate him. How he said “no” without moving his head; how his eyes, once locked, wouldn't shift. At home, he had me howling with things he would do and say with that look. He played pieces on my piano and dared to call them jazz. I thought they sounded like a petrified rat scurrying back and forth over the keyboards. He walked around with nothing but Y-fronts on. On more than one occasion, he turned his back and pulled them down; to check. He had hemorrhoids, at least two episodes a year. I told him it said something about his personality, that he had a hidden weakness in his gut. He said I should get used to it, the pesseries and the ointments. I would eventually grow accustomed to this and other marital surprises. I didn't know a man could have his own way of squeezing toothpaste. I didn't know I could come close to lunging across the dining table to throttle a man, because of the way he chewed. Then there were more serious times, when Niyi's brows knotted and I knew that silence would follow. This happened whenever he was reminded of his grudges, against his ex-wife, against their friends who had taken sides and his own family. That I would never get used to.

After he left his father's firm, Niyi's brothers avoided him for fear of offending their father. Only his mother sneaked visits to him. Then his wife left him. The day she found a new boyfriend, their son stopped calling. Now, years later, although they were all on speaking terms, Niyi swore he would never forget each person's role. Whenever he wanted to speak to his son, I was the one to call his ex-wife. He was wary of his father and brothers, and he protected his mother like an egg.

Toro Franco. She was one of those women who swallowed her voice from the day she married. She was a nurse, and yet her husband and sons, all lawyers, thought she couldn't grasp the rudiments of Offer and Acceptance, so she acted like she didn't. She called “precedence” “presidents,” walked around with her underskirt hanging out. Whenever she tried to join in their legal discussions, they teased her, “Mama, look at you. Your Saturday is sticking out of your Sunday.” They laughed as she adjusted her underskirt. If they mentioned the word hungry, she ran into her kitchen and began to boss her house boys around. Soon she would summon me to help. I knew that she watched me botch my kitchen duties, dropping spoons, recoiling from hot handles, slicing my fingers.

“It's hot in here,” I would say.

“Don't worry,” she would say.

“The boys should help.”

“Boys? What can boys do?”

“They know how to tease you.”

“Who else can they tease?”

Once, I tried to trick her into a confession. “Don't you ever feel lonely in here, ma? Isn't the kitchen the loneliest room?” She looked at me as if I'd offered to strip.

“Enough,” she pleaded. “Enough now.”

I continued to stir her stew, imagining her in a mortuary, on a slab, underskirt hanging out, husband and children saying how nice she was.

Everyone said my mother-in-law was nice. I wouldn't believe them until I'd heard a true word pass her lips. Her husband was a man who liked his stews prepared the traditional way, meat fried in thick groundnut oil, and he loved his wife so much he wouldn't eat stews prepared by anyone but her. Forty-five years later, he had bad arteries and her hands were as dry and shriveled as the meat she fried. Francis Abiola Franco, Esquire. The first time we met he asked, “You're Sunny Taiwo's daughter?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Good breeding always shows,” he said.

“I'm a horse?” I asked Niyi later.

“He's a horse,” Niyi said. “An old nag.”

He was one of those Senior Advocates of Nigeria, though he was now out of touch with the Law, and with reality. He asked his sons to dial if he needed to make a phone call. He sat in the back seat of his car, always, even when one of his sons was driving. He stopped speaking to me after I challenged him on a point of law. I disagreed with him just for the sake of it. I didn't care much for him, but my brothers-in- law, I loved. They would all troop into my house, all four of them looking like Niyi with the same dark skin and thin nose, and I would kiss each of them feeling a rush of libido and motherliness as they greeted me, “Enitan of Africa!” “
Obirin Meta!
Three times a girl!” “
Alaiye Baba!
Master of the earth!” It was like welcoming my husband four times over. I didn't even mind sitting with them as they scratched their groins and christened women's parts: her foward, her backward, her assets, her giblets. About Sheri: “She's, em, very talented. Hyuh-Hyuh-Hyuh.”

I knew. They were petrified of women, though they denied it. “Who? Who's scared of chicks?” they asked.

“Sneaking,” I said. “Lying. Lying on your last breath. Then you cannot even face somebody to say a relationship is over? That is petrified.”

“If you say so. Hyuh-Hyuh-Hyuh,” scratch, scratch, scratch.

Sometimes they brought girlfriends who disappeared by the next visit. Sometimes they played hide-and-seek games with their girlfriends. I once asked, “Are you boys waiting to marry your mother, or what?”

“Of course,” they answered, including Niyi.

“Well, em,” I said. “Don't you think you should drop your standards a little?”

“No,” they said, except Niyi.

Niyi bullied his brothers the same way he bullied me, but he could easily become vexed in the middle of our playing. Then he would call me aside and warn, “Better watch what you're saying. Next thing they'll be calling me woman wrapper.” Wrapper was the cloth women tied around their waists. Woman wrapper was a weak man, controlled by his woman. I thought he was paranoid. I said it was too bad. He was the very person who had encouraged me to be strong at work. He was asking me to fly within specified perimeters. I would have shouting fits about this and he would remain totally silent. He said he wasn't used to arguing that way. “In our family,” he said, “we don't raise our voices.”

The Francos were one of those Lagos families, descendants of freed slaves from Brazil, who once formed the cream of Lagos society. They considered themselves well-bred because their great-grandfather, Papa Franco, was educated in England. In his time, Papa Franco acquired a huge estate which survived the slum clearance that wiped out most of the Brazilian Quarter in Lagos. Some of the buildings now looked as if a giant fist had come down from heaven and punched them into the ground. Those that remained standing were rickety with tall shutters and wrought iron balconies. Nothing had been done to improve the drainage system: gutters and pit latrines dating back to colonial times. They were occupied mostly by street traders and market people.

Papa Franco's only son, Niyi's grandfather, had twenty-six children by three different women who died before him and there had been several documented court cases over his estate. Each faction of Franco occupied separate pews in the Catholic church they attended. Their church reminded me of my mother's: the incense, white robes, and chants. When the collection tray passed, they gave very little. Oil wealth hadn't touched their palms and civil service wages were paltry. The Franco men tilted their noses heavenward, the women fanned their cleavages laden with gold and coral beads, their clothes reeked of camphor balls. They had the pride and lack of ambition of a generation that wealth would skip, and ignored each other because they thought it was common to quarrel openly. That was how they settled differences: Aunty Doyin, The Pretty One, locked herself in a room until her father allowed her to marry a Protestant; Niyi's father stopped speaking to him for a year after he left Franco and Partners; Niyi, himself, would ignore me for days.

The first time this happened, we'd argued over drinks. Drinks. His brothers were visiting and I had just returned from work. As usual, he asked, “Enitan can you get these animals something?”

Niyi claimed he was totally inept inside kitchens. His favorite trick was to feign panic attacks by the door, clutching his throat and keeling over. Normally I humored him, because we had house help, but this evening, I only wanted to stop trembling from the lack of sugar in my blood. I'd spent the day fending off the treasury guys.

“You have hands,” I said.

“My friend,” he said. “Show some respect.”

“Go to hell,” I said.

In my 29 years no man ever told me to show respect. No man ever needed to. I had seen how women respected men and ended up shouldering burdens like one of those people who carried firewood on their heads, with their necks as high as church spires and foreheads crushed. Too many women, I thought, ended up treating domestic frustrations like mild cases of indigestion: shift-shift, prod-prod and then nothing. As far back as my grandmother's generation we'd been getting degrees and holding careers. My mother's generation were the pioneer professionals. We, their daughters, were expected to continue. We had no choice in the present recession. But there was a saying, and I'd only ever heard it said by other women, that books were not edible.

It was an overload of duties, I thought, sometimes self-imposed. And the expectation of subordination bothered me most. How could I defer to a man whose naked buttocks I'd seen? touched? Obey him without choking on my humility, like a fish bone down my throat. Then whoever plucked it out would say, “Look. It's her humility. She choked on it. Now she's dead.” This may have been my redemption, since my husband needed a wife he could at least pity. Later that night, he called me aside to say, “Why did you have to say that in front of my brothers?”

“Well, why can't you ever get them drinks for once?” I answered, “Why can't you go to the kitchen? What will happen if you go? Will a snake bite your leg?”

He did not speak to me for two weeks and I contemplated leaving him for that alone—he could at least have remembered his age, even though I deliberately bumped him and poked my tongue behind his back. But no one I knew had left a man because he sulked, and I wanted a family, and I'd seen how Niyi grieved for his. I knew him down to his breath in the mornings. When we were not quarreling, I liked to watch him writhing to one whiskey- voiced woman or the other, like the one he called Sarah Vaughn. I could not tell one scat from another, but she said just about everything I wasn't prepared to, using ten words:

Sometimes I love you
Sometimes I hate you
But when I hate you
It's becau-au-au-ause I love you

I got pregnant and shortly after had a miscarriage. I was at work when I felt the first contraction. By the time I arrived home, it was too late, I'd passed a blood clot. I cried until I soaked my pillow. Nothing is worse than the loss of a child, even if the child is never born. If a child dies in your care, people understand that you feel responsible. If a child dies within you, they immediately try to absolve you: it is God's way, there is to be no mourning. You never understand why.

I got pregnant again. This time, the baby grew out of my womb and could have killed me had it not been for one smart doctor. I had to have an emergency operation. The doctor told us my chances of having a child after that were reduced. “But keep trying,” he said. A year later, we still were. Niyi's relations began to press, “Is everything all right?” They looked at my stomach before looking at my face. Some scolded me outright. “What are you waiting for?” My mother invited me to her vigils; my father offered to send me overseas to see other doctors. I asked why they harassed women this way. We were greater than our wombs, greater than the sum of our body parts. “For God's sake,” my father said solemnly. “I'm not playing here.”

Sheri suggested I tried fertility drugs. Didn't I know? Everyone was taking them. They were? I asked. “Of course,” she said. “One year and nothing is happening? Six months, even.”

“Six months!”

She began to name a few women. One who didn't have children. Another who had two, but both were girls. One who did it to trap a man. Where did they get the drugs? I asked. “Doctors,” she said. Infertility specialists? I asked. Um, she didn't know, but they treated infertility all the same. Where did the doctors find these drugs? Black market, she said.

Multiple births, laparoscopies, drug cycles. She gave me details, asked if I wanted a telephone number. I only wanted to be left alone, I said. At least my husband had a son of his own. No one could accuse me of ending the Franco lineage.

I never once doubted that I would become a mother. Not once. I just didn't know when it would happen, and I didn't want to be a guinea pig until then. Two more years passed and Niyi and I were still trying. I finally agreed to see a gynecologist who specialized in infertility. He made the appointment and I stuffed my head under a pillow as he spoke to the receptionist, but he refused to use a fake name. “It's not a VD clinic,” he said. We arrived and saw the number of cars parked on the street, walked in and I saw that some of the women were as old as my mother. I was one of the few with a man by her side. The doctor arrived an hour later, chin up, stomach forward. He grunted in response to our greetings. I ducked a little, like the other women. Didn't even know why.