Everything Good Will Come (5 page)

“My grandma told me,” she said.

We were sitting on her bed. Sheri tucked her tangerine
dress between her legs. I wondered if she knew more than me.

“When you... ” I asked. “I mean, with your husband. Where does it go? Because I don't... ” I was pointing
everywhere, even at the ceiling.

Sheri's eyes were wide. “You haven't seen it? I've seen
mine. Many times.” She stood up and retrieved a cracked
mirror from a drawer. “Look and see.”

“I can't.”

“Look,” she said, handing me the mirror.

“Lock the door.”

“Okay,” she said, heading there.

I dragged my panties down, placed the mirror between
my legs. It looked like a big, fat slug. I squealed as Sheri began
to laugh. We heard loud knocks on the door and I almost
dropped the mirror. “Who's that?” I whispered.

“Me,” she said.

I hobbled to her bed. “You horrible... ”

She rocked back and forth. “You're so funny,
aburo!”

“You horrible girl,” I hissed.

She stopped laughing. “Why?”

“I don't think it's funny. What did you do that for?”

“I'm sorry.”

“Well, sorry is not enough.”

I pulled my panties up, wondering whether I was angry
with her, or what I'd seen between my legs. Sheri barricaded
the door. “You're not going anywhere.”

At first I thought I'd push her aside and walk out, but the
sight of her standing there like a star tickled me.

“All right,” I said. “But this is your last chance, Sherifat,
I'm warning you.”

“Am not fat,” she yelled.

I laughed until I thought my heart would pop. That was
her insecurity: her full name, and her big ears.

“Don't go,” she said. “I like you. You're very English. You
know, high faluting.”

The woman in the photograph by her bedside table was her
grandmother.

“Alhaja,” Sheri said. “She's beautiful.”

Alhaja had an enormous gap between her front teeth and
her cheeks were so plump her eyes were barely visible. There
were many Alhajas in Lagos. This one wasn't the first woman
to go on
hajj
to Mecca, but for women like her, who were powerful within their families and communities, the title
became their name

Sheri did not know her own mother. She died when
Sheri was a baby and Alhaja raised her from then on, even
after her father remarried. She pressed the picture to her
chest and told me of her life in downtown Lagos. She lived in
a house opposite her Alhaja's fabric store. She went to a
school where children didn't care to speak English. After
school, she helped Alhaja in her store and knew how to
measure cloth. I listened, mindful that my life didn't extend
beyond Ikoyi Park. What would it be like to know downtown
as Sheri did, haggle with customers, buy fried yams and
roasted plantains from street hawkers, curse Area Boys and
taxi cabs who drove too close to the curb.

My only trips downtown were to visit the large foreign-owned
stores, like Kelwarams and Leventis, or the crowded
markets with my mother. The streets were crammed with
vehicles, and there were too many people: people buying food
from street hawkers, bumping shoulders, quarreling and
crossing streets. Sometimes masqueraders came out for
Christmas or for some other festival, dancing in their raffia
gowns and ghoulish masks. Sheri knew them all: the ones
who stood on stilts, the ones who looked like stretched out
accordions and flattened to pancakes. It was juju, she said, but
she was not scared. Not even of the
eyo
who dressed in white
sheets like spirits of the day and whipped women who didn't
cover their heads.

Sheri was a Moslem and she didn't know much about
Christianity, except that there was a book in the Bible and if
you read it, you could go mad. I asked why Moslems didn't eat
pork. “It's a filthy beast,” she said, scratching her hair. I told
her about my own life, how my brother died and my mother
was strict.

“That church sounds scary,” she said.

“I'm telling you, if my mother ever catches you in our house, she'll send you home.”

“Why?”

I pointed at her pink mouth. “It's bad, you know.”

She sucked her teeth. “It's not bad. Anyway, you think
my father allows me to wear lipstick? I wait until he's gone out
and put it on.”

“What happens when he comes back?”

“I rub it off. Simple. You want some?”

I didn't hesitate. As I rubbed the lipstick on my lips I
mumbled, “Your stepmothers, won't they tell?”

“I kneel for them, help them in the kitchen. They won't
tell.”

“What about the one with the gold tooth?”

“She's wicked, but she's nice.”

I showed her my lips. “Does it fit?”

“It fits,” she said. “And guess what?”

“What?”

“You've just kissed me.”

I slapped my forehead. She was forward, this girl, and the
way she acted with the other children. She really didn't do
much, except to make sure she was noticed. I was impressed
by the way she'd conned Akanni into staying up late for her
uncle's party. Sheri got away with whatever she did and said.
Even when she insulted someone, her stepmothers would
barely scold her. “Ah, this one. She's such a terrible one.”

They summoned her to act as a disc jockey. She
changed the records as if she was handling dirty plates: The
Beatles, Sunny Adé, Jackson Five, James Brown. Most of
the records were scratched. Akanni arrived during, “Say it
loud, I'm black and proud.” He skidded from one end of the
room to the other and fell on the floor overcome as the real
James Brown. We placed a hand towel on his back and
coaxed him up. By the time “If I had the wings of a dove”
came on, I was singing out loud myself, and was almost
tearful from the words.

As a parting gift Sheri gave me a romance novel titled
Jacaranda Cove.
The picture was barely visible and most of
the pages were dog-eared. “Take this and read,” she said. I
slipped it under my arm and wiped my lips clean. My one
thought was to return home before my mother arrived. I'd
disobeyed her too much. If she found out, I would be
punished for life.

Our house seemed darker when I arrived, though the curtains
in the living room were not drawn. My father once explained
the darkness was due to the position of the windows to the
sun. Our living room reminded me of an empty hotel lounge.
The curtains were made of a gold damask, and the chairs were
a deep red velvet. A piano stood by the sliding doors to the
veranda.

The house was designed by two Englishmen with the
help of an architect my father knew. They lived together for
years, and everyone knew about them, he said. Then they
moved to Nairobi and he bought the house from them. The
two men living together; the Bakare house full of children;
grandparents, parents, teachers, now Akanni, and of all
people, Bisi. The whole world was full of sex, I thought,
running away from my footsteps. In my bedroom, I read the
first page of Sheri's book, then the last. It described a man and
woman kissing and how their hearts beat faster. I read it again
and searched the book for more passages like that, then I
marked each of them to read later.

My father arrived soon afterward and challenged me to a
game of
ayo
. He always won, but today he explained the
secret of the game. “You'd better listen, because I'm tired of
defeating you. First, you choose which bowl you want to land
in. Then you choose which bowl will get you there.”

He shook the beads in his fist and plopped them, one by
one, into the six bowls carved into the wooden slate. I'd
always thought the trick was to pick the fullest bowl.

“Work it out backward?” I asked.

“Exactly,” he said, scooping beads from the bowl.

“Daddy,” I said. “I wasn't watching.”

He slapped the table. “Next time you will.”

“Cheater.”

We were on our fifth round when my mother returned
from church. I waved to her as she walked through the front
door. I didn't get up to greet her as I normally would. I was
winning the game and thought that if I moved, I would lose
my good fortune.

“Heh, heh, I'm beating you,” I said, wriggling in my chair.

“Only because I let you,” my father said.

I scooped the beads from a bowl and raised my hand. My
mother walked through the veranda door.

“Enitan? Who gave this to you?”

She grabbed my ear and shoved Sheri's book under my
nose.

“Who? Answer me now.”

“For God's sake,” my father said.

Her fingers were like iron clamps. The
ayo
beads tumbled
out of my hand, down to the floor. Sheri from next door, I said.
My mother pulled me to my feet by my ear as I explained. Sheri
handed it to me through the fence. The wide gap in the fence.
Yes, it was wide enough. I had not read the book.

“Let me see,” my father said.

My mother flung the book on the table. “I go to her
suitcase, find this... this... If I ever catch you talking to that
girl again, there will be trouble in this house, you hear me?”

She released my ear. I dropped back into my seat. My ear
was hot, and heavy.

My father slammed the book down. “What is this? She
can't make friends anymore?”

My mother rounded on him. “You continue to divide this
child and me.”

“You're her mother, not her juror.”

“I am not raising a delinquent. You look for evil and you
will find it.”

My father shook his head. “Arin, you can quote the
whole Bible if you want.”

“I am not here to discuss myself.”

“Sleep in that church of yours.”

“I am not here to discuss myself.”

“It will not give you peace of mind.”

“Get up when I'm talking to you, Enitan,” my mother
said. “Up. Up.”

“Sit,” my father said.

“Up,” my mother said.

“Sit,” my father said.

My mother patted her chest. “She will listen to me.”

I shut my eyes and imagined I was on the balcony with
Sheri. We were laughing and the sun had warmed my ear.
Their voices faded. I heard only one voice; it was my father's.
“Don't mind her,” he said. “It's that church of hers. They've
turned her head.”

He shook my shoulders. I kept my eyes shut. I was tired,
enough to sleep.

“Come on,” he said. “Let's play.”

“No,” I said.

“You're leading.”

“I don't care.”

Soon I heard his footsteps on the veranda. I stayed there
until my ear stopped throbbing.

I spoke to neither parent for the rest of that evening. My
father knocked on my door before I went to bed.

“You're still sulking?” he asked.

“I'm not sulking,” I said.

“When I was a boy, I had no room to lock myself in.”

“You had no door.”

“Yes, I did. What are you saying?”

“You lived in a village.”

“Town,” he said.

I shrugged. It was village life outside Lagos, where he
grew up. He got up early in the mornings to fetch water from
a well, walked to school and studied by oil lamp. My father
said his growth was stunted because food never got to him. If
a Baptist priest hadn't converted his mother to Christianity
and taken him as a ward, I would never have been born
thinking the world owed me something.

He pointed. “Is this the famous suitcase?”

He was pretending that nothing had happened.

“Yes.”

“I have something for it.”

He retrieved a rectangular case from his pocket and
handed it to me.