Seeds of Plenty (16 page)

SYLVIA

Chapter 24

“You should leave him. He knows,” Ayo said as they lay together under the hazy white mosquito net. The rusty fan was turned off, and she could feel the heat of his body next to hers.

“Winston didn’t say anything. He’s been gone for over a month,” she said.

“He’s waiting for you to say something. It’s your decision,” he paused. “We’re all waiting.”

She was quiet. She wanted to just stay here in his arms for the rest of her life, lying here next to him, it seemed so easy. She imagined a life with Ayo, working side by side at his clinic making a difference, coming home to his father’s house, falling asleep and waking up together. It was the kind of life she had dreamed of as a girl, a unique, meaningful life with someone she loved. How many people had found their calling and their love in the same man?

“Choose happiness, Sylvia,” Ayo whispered. “For both of us.” He turned to kiss her on her neck, the side of her face.

He looked at her, his face just a few inches above her. “What do you say?”

“Yes,” she said. He kissed her, moving his body on top of hers.

***

 

After about six weeks, by mid-October, Winston returned home, and she prepared his favorite dumplings. While he showered, she set the table. She would tell him tonight she was leaving. On the side table, she noticed the half-opened airmail letter written in Chinese. In all their years, Winston had never received any mail from his family in Taiwan. What could this mean? She could barely read Chinese, but she still picked it up and tried to decipher the characters.

Winston appeared in the living room and saw her holding the letter. She turned to him and saw the pain in his face. He was going to throw her out, she thought. It would make things easier if he did.

“My father is very sick,” he said instead. “He might not make it.”

“I’m sorry, Winston.” She put her hand over her mouth.

“I’m going to leave tomorrow for Taiwan to see him.”

He didn’t mention her transgression or maybe he had forgotten; he had much more to worry about than her. She would have to wait to tell him. She had waited four years, she could wait another week.

***

 

When Winston returned from Taiwan ten days later, he looked haggard, jet-lagged, and depressed. His father had passed away, and Winston, the eldest son, had held the banner for the funeral procession through the chaotic streets of Taipei. But since his return home, Sylvia sensed something was not quite right with her husband. The first night, he tossed and turned in their bed.

“Are you alright?” she asked in the dark.

There was a silence.

“He died before I got there.” His voice sounded off-key, it didn’t sound like him at all.

“I’m sorry,” she said, not knowing what else to say.

“I never got to apologize to him.”

“For what?” she ventured, wondering if he would tell her more. She had been married to him for a decade, yet she knew so little about him, what went on inside his mind, his heart.

“My father didn’t want me to go to the West to study for a PhD in chemistry. He wanted me to stay in Taiwan. Study and teach Chinese literature just like him.” The darkness seemed to give anonymity to Winston, to let him speak freely. “I felt like those subjects were useless. They were the reason China fell behind the West. I wanted to go to the West and study science. To me, science is real, concrete, built on facts and numbers. I didn’t trust literature. It’s a thing of the past.”

He paused and then continued, “When I left for the UK, he disowned me. We haven’t spoken since.”

All these years he had been carrying around this burden, a mother lost as a child and now a father who had disowned him. Sylvia felt she understood her husband now just a little bit more. She knew this missed chance to reconcile with his father had taken a toll on Winston. Suddenly, he seemed human and vulnerable to her. She wanted to cross that invisible line in their bed that had separated them for years and hold him, but she remained on her side.

The next day, Winston added his father’s photograph to his mother’s on the makeshift altar in the corner of their living room. It was a black and white picture of a serious-looking old man with a wispy beard. Sylvia watched Winston light fresh incense sticks, bow three times, and place a new bowl of tropical fruit in front of his parents’ photographs. Tears streamed down his face. He had just lost his father. She knew he had never gotten over his mother’s death as a child. And now he must have felt all alone in the world, without family. She was all he had now. How could she leave him now? She felt torn between her two lives.

***

 

Later that afternoon, Lila and Thomas brought their school report cards home and handed them to Winston. He still didn’t seem completely himself. Lila was nine now, and Thomas was seven. The children attended a small correspondence school on the compound run by the wives. Pale wooden rulers with the words
Baltimore, Maryland
came with their textbooks on American history and geography. Her children learned more about George Washington and ancient Greece, both remote and unrelated to them, than they knew about the great Nigerian empires of Benin and Oyo or about China, their own country. This school unknowingly reinforced the concrete wall and broken glass between Africa and them.

But Winston took this school seriously. He sat in the living room studying their report cards, his father’s scrolls of black ink calligraphy and Chinese mountains behind him.

Winston scanned Lila’s report card briefly, a long line of satisfactory B’s. He didn’t say anything, just a nod, a half-smile—mandatory acknowledgement, received and reviewed. Then he took Thomas’ report card. Winston frowned in disappointment. The rounded curves of one solitary “B” tripped up the perfect symmetry of a straight line of A’s.

“Thomas, you can do better,” Winston said, becoming emotional. “We’re from a family of scholars. Your grandfather got top scores in the official examinations in China. I expect you to excel, I got all A’s, perfect scores when I was a boy.” His voice wavered at the mention of his father.

“Yes, Baba,” Thomas said, looking down to hide his tears.

Of course, Winston had nothing to say about Lila’s report card. She received neither praise nor disappointment. She was getting used to his distracted mood—downcast eyes, praises unsung, and the heavy, sagging space in place of the words left unsaid in her relationship with her father.

After Winston retreated to his study, Sylvia went over to comfort her children and take them in her arms. She held onto them tightly, she couldn’t let go. Thomas was only seven, he was in second grade, how could Winston be so harsh? Lila squeezed her brother’s little hand as if to say everything would be okay. Thomas stopped crying. As a typical younger sibling, Sylvia knew he adored his older sister. Ever since he was a toddler, he followed his sister everywhere, holding a crocodile skin handbag just like Lila. He used to sit opposite her, reading the same book upside down.

The children escaped to the kitchen, a place where Winston rarely ventured. They helped Patience prepare the sweet fried plantain, which Sylvia served with salty Chinese food.

“Eh, Patience, my stomach is worrying me, I don’t feel like dinner,” Lila began.

“Me too,” Thomas chimed in.

“Don’t worry, eh? I’m sure your stomach go be okay for food,” Patience said

“Why does my father not like me?” Lila asked.

“Your fatha loves you, but you are a son, and you are a daughta. It is different with girls and boys. A fatha is different with his daughtas and sons.”

The children spoke to Patience in the local
pidgeon
English with a mix of Patience’s Cote d’Ivoire patois.

“But eh, why, why are we different?” Lila asked.

“Dat is the way, dat is the way God intended,
comprend
?” Patience said. “But you have each other, eh? Brotha and sista.”

Thomas and Lila looked each other, comforted by Patience’s words.

Sylvia observed them from the kitchen doorway. It reminded her of the closeness she felt to her eldest brother. As children, her brother took care of her, sharing the pocket money their father had only given to the boys. During the hot summers in the alleyways of Hong Kong, her brother bought her shaved ice with red bean sauce from the street vendors. Her brother had been her only family. She understood that powerful feeling her own children felt, she couldn’t tear them apart. If she left Winston, he would keep Thomas, his son. There would be no question. That was custom in Chinese culture, the children belonged to the father, not the mother. But could she willingly separate her children and break their close bond? Could Sylvia be apart from Thomas and leave him with his strict, absent father?

 

Chapter 25

The next day, Sylvia drove to Ayo’s old house in town. But he was not at home, and his steward said he was at the market near the University of Ibadan. She didn’t know what she was going to say, the words hadn’t taken shape in her mind yet, but she had a vague feeling of what she needed to do. She sat in her car in the usual traffic on Oyo road. The vendors pushing their wares through the window, the smell of exhaust, the heat—all of it made her feel sick to her stomach.

She looked for Ayo at the busy market. She ran through women dressed in lace, children in rags, hanging dried fish and barrels of rubber slippers. She saw Ayo at a tailor stall. The tailor sat behind a black Singer sewing machine wearing an
agbada
and a brand new pair of red Nike tennis shoes. Behind him, colorful
agbadas
hung from rusty nails on the wooden walls of makeshift stall.

As she approached Ayo, he saw her face and seemed to know what she was about to say. He led her away from his tailor and stopped in front of an albino boy’s lamp stall, neat rows of little paraffin lamps, each made from a used light bulb.

“I don’t know if can,” Sylvia said, looking up at her lover.

Ayo closed his eyes briefly as if in pain.

“I’m not sure what a happy ending is,” she continued. “If I leave you, Winston would keep Thomas. I don’t think I could bear being apart from my child. I can’t separate my children from each other either. I can’t make my family unhappy, just for my own happiness.” And would she even be happy, separated from her son? She had spent so many years guarding her children from danger, how could she now willingly hurt them?

Ayo didn’t answer, his face darkened. He of all people understood sacrifice, she knew, it was his whole life.

“We’ve had our love. We will always have that,” she said softly.

“You’re already speaking in past tense.” There was so much pain in his voice; it hurt her to hear it.

Sylvia looked at her lover in the white light of the harsh African sun. She remembered the day she had first met him at this same market, nine years ago when Lila was a baby. She wanted to reach out and touch his face, but she feared someone would notice. There were too many compound servants shopping at the market, people they didn’t know but who knew them. This crowd of strangers was somehow a silent witness to the end of their relationship. It was because of them that she could even say these things to him. He couldn’t touch her, take her into his arms, and convince her otherwise. Alone in a room with him, she knew she couldn’t be so strong, but she had to find that strength somewhere.

She turned and walked away quickly, losing herself in the crowd. She didn’t look back fearing she would change her mind. She thought she was doing the right thing, but she felt like she was closing up, the reverse bloom of a flower in fast-motion, petals closing up into a tiny knot. Tiny wrinkles started to appear around her eyes, barely noticeable, but there.

***

 

That night, well past midnight, Ayo came to her house and knocked on the door. She knew he might come. She had waited for him in the living room while Winston slept in the bedroom. Sylvia opened the door. She could smell beer in Ayo’s breath. She had never seen him like this. He grabbed her and started kissing her roughly, pushing her against the kitchen counter. She wanted to give in to him, and it took all her will power to push him away.

“Don’t,” she said. “Not like this.”

He let her go. They stood apart in the kitchen, separated by the white beam of moonlight coming across the tiled floor. They did not speak. His eyes were full of sorrow. She wanted to take him in her arms, go back on her decision. She felt caught between her lover and her family. She heard the rustle of the mango trees outside the kitchen window, the sound made her think of flying and farewells.

“Please go,” she pleaded, fearing Winston would wake up.

Ayo punched his fist through the kitchen window in anger and frustration. When she heard the glass shatter, she felt like he had punctured her heart and his too. The broken glass cut his hand. His blood dripped onto the white tile floor where they had once made love. She couldn’t erase that image in her mind. She grabbed a kitchen towel and wrapped it around his bleeding hand to stop the blood. He looked up at her, but she avoided his gaze. Instead, she turned and opened the door, signaling him to leave. He did not protest but walked slowly out the door.

After he left, she cleaned her lover’s blood off the kitchen floor, her own tears washing it away. She called the compound maintenance to come and fix the window, saying a robber had broken the window. Then she went into Winston’s study and wrote on the yellow legal pad on his desk:
I have left him. I am here for you and the children.
She hoped he would forgive her.

***

 

The next day, Winston didn’t say anything. But she knew he found the note; it was scrunched up in a ball in the trashcan next to his desk. She cooked all his favorite dishes for dinner,
niu ro mien
beef noodles, dumplings, and spicy
ma po tofu
. A feast, this was her apology to him, which he accepted by devouring her dishes. He still didn’t say anything, but she could tell by the softened expression on his face, he was appreciative in his silent way. Later that night, she touched him, and he was more than willing.

In the middle of January 1983, a few months later, she enrolled in the Nursing School at the University of Ibadan. As she walked into her first class at the age of thirty-two, she hoped she could start over. For the next six months, she spent her mornings at school and her evenings doing the required homework. She missed Ayo, this she couldn’t deny. But what hurt the most was that by the summer of that year, he seemed to have moved on and taken up with the new American woman, Donna. Young love flows like water, but water that has flowed away cannot be brought back. So went a local Nigerian saying.

Donna—single, young, looking to have sex and adventure with a local flavor, wasted no time singling out Ayo, attractive and charming. Sylvia had to endure this long-legged brunette in a short white tennis skirt chase after the ball opposite Ayo. She felt Ayo lost no time either. Did he not care about her feelings? He probably was not used to women discarding him. His ego had been bruised and hurt by her, and this was why he readily accepted Donna’s advances. It felt like a betrayal to her even though she was the one who had left him. He was entitled to move on with his life, it was what she wanted for him, but still it was more than she could bear. One night, Sylvia saw Ayo and Donna leave the clubhouse together, drunk on local Star beers. She felt like someone losing a game of mahjong. She had thrown the woman next to her the winning tile. She was not shrewd enough at the game. She would have to pay double for this. Except the stakes were not plastic colored chips, but love.

Images of Ayo’s hands running over the athletic body of that American woman tormented her. She heard Donna leaned on Ayo as her tour guide for the “local scene.” She asked him to take her to the tin-roof shantytown bars packed full of perspiring locals dancing to highlife music under red light bulbs. Donna, fearless and full of adventure, drank the local homemade brew of fermented grains rumored to be spiked with fuel and the accidental ingredients of dirty water—rotting rats or underwear.

Sylvia supposed Ayo was glad to fulfill these new roles. It must have been easier for him, dealing with Donna, non-emotional, just in it for the sex. But he never took Donna to his father’s old house in town, this much she heard through Patience and her robust network.