Excerpt from larger work.
Around midnight, you hear your sister-in-law say your name from the room next door. The walls in her apartment are thin and on any other day you would’ve slept through the conversation taking place on the other side of the partition. But before dinner, you made the mistake of leaving the bedroom window open and summer’s humidity settled over your belongings like a thick, oppressive blanket. When you curled into bed you had no choice but to keep the door slightly ajar, to turn on the fan. The central air tickled the bottoms of your feet and rocked you to sleep.
Now that you’re awake, you’ll want to ignore the fact that your name sounds rancid coming out of Efie’s mouth. Allow those three soft syllables to whirl into the ceiling fan above your head. It’s not your business to understand why her voice is full of malice, yet tonight’s bottles of Guinness only seem to amplify her contempt. In a few hours the sun will begin its ascent along the city’s high rises, into a sky saturated with grey clouds, and Efie will be in her own bed, with her own husband, reveling in a slumber that only a three-day weekend can offer. But—at this very moment—her voice grows sharper, louder, and your desire to sleep fades away.
What now? you wonder. You sit up in bed. Reach for the lamp on the nightstand.
You’re embarrassed by how the warm light illuminates everything around you. In the corner, a basket overflows with unwashed clothes and the smell is shameful. The vanity mirror and table across from your canopy bed is cluttered with open tubes of lipsticks, mascaras, and other samples you’ve assembled from Fashion Fair’s latest collection. Your mother’s only suitcase—the one she let you borrow for this trip, a faded brown travel case with her initials stitched along the firm leather handle—is tossed open in front of the closet mirror, empty. The myriad of silk blouses you bought earlier today are at the foot of your bed, adorned with price tags. Since you’ve run out of space in your closet, you have no choice but to tuck your new purchases into this austere piece of luggage—something you probably should’ve done before going to sleep.
In the dining room, Efie’s incessant babbling continues. It’s only when you get out of bed and press your ear to the wall that you make out the rest of her words.
“…but you married her at the courthouse some time ago,” she is saying. “You know it’s time for both of you to go and start your own home.”
Imagine your husband, the recipient of his sister’s words, with a pensive look in his eyes. He’s probably sitting at the marble table across from her, shuffling a deck of cards. Or maybe he’s stroking his beard, the one already peppered with grey hairs at just a year shy of thirty while Efie rearranges the deck. Although both of them work tedious, full-time jobs, they stay up every night to play at least two rounds of cards after dinner. You never understood this routine—the one where Eddie spends more time with his sister than you before bed—and, for a year, you’ve grown restless watching them scatter cards around only to reassemble them in a matter of minutes. They slapped down their hands with such vigor that you couldn’t help wincing when Efie’s sharp nails abused Eddie’s stubby fingers in the process. So one day you stopped fussing. Left them alone, went to bed. You have no interest in the games the Boakyes played—even though, on the marriage affidavit, you’re officially one of them.
With your ear to the wall, in the middle of Efie’s proclamation, you feel a sharp pain below your belly button, as if something is wringing your insides dry. You double over. Brace yourself against these aches. It’s no worse than when that doctor in Liberia administered those shock paddles against your chest a few years ago, the one that removed clouds from your vision when you were eighteen. The eruptions that you feel now are smaller, but the urge to draw a surgical line along your happy trail to remove this searing sensation grows. Take a deep breath. Remember how these spasms boomeranged inside your body earlier, when all of you sat down to eat fufu with light soup. Efie was already nursing her second beer of the night when she muttered at your pain with sheer sarcasm. “Must be cramps.”
She slid her beer across the table and it clinked against your bowl. “Sometimes you just need a drink. I promise, it’ll help soothe your stomach.”
You shook your head and pushed her drink back in her direction. Efie never believed your sobriety and, ever since you moved in, she’s always found new ways to challenge it. You drank your water instead, hoping that either your husband or her’s would speak up (or at least joke) about Efie’s nonsense. But no. Rex was straining his neck, eager to catch a glimpse of the NBC Nightly News on the TV from the living room. Tom Brokaw’s mellow voice drifted through the alcove, detailing a grim report about the remains of a woman’s body found somewhere along the Hudson. You tapped Eddie’s foot under the table, but he was hunched over his own steaming bowl like a child. His fingers moved like claws as he ripped his fufu apart and dunked it into his pool of peppery soup.
The birth of a headache began to creep along the edges of your forehead as you turned back to Efie. “It’s just a small thing, but I’m fine.”
“You sure?” Efie snorted. She pointed to your food, which you’d barely touched. “You can’t even stomach your own cooking.” The fish head in your bowl was still intact. Something about the smell that emanated from the porgy was stopping you from bringing the pan-seared meat to your lips.
“I’m fine,” you repeat. “I’m just not too hungry now. Let me save this for later.” You excused yourself from the table, covered your bowl with Saran Wrap, and placed it in the fridge. In the bathroom, you’d contemplate Efie’s remarks when you should’ve been focusing on Eddie’s silence.
Cramps? What are cramps? No. You refuse to acknowledge a word that feels so American in nature. You must admit: Efie’s assimilation after five years away from your village is flawless. Imagine her, your sister-in-law before she became your sister-in-law, boarding her nonstop flight from Kotoka to JFK with a smile so wide it was clear she would never look back. And now here she was, sitting in her fancy apartment, using these American words as if she had known them all her life. Had you been back in Swedru, your mother and every other woman who’d raised you would’ve called these “cramps” what they were: stomach pains. It could’ve been from the spices in the soup. Maybe it was from the micro braids that pinched your throbbing scalp. You don’t concede to Efie’s comment, but you don’t return to the dinner table either.
You wait for the pain in your stomach to subside before inching closer to the bedroom door. When you crack it open a little wider, you’re just in time to hear Eddie grunt.
“You don’t think I’ve been trying?” he asks. “You think we want to stay with you and Rex for the rest of our lives?”
More shuffling. More slapping. An exchange of cards. Teeth kissing.
You know the conversation that’s about to take place before either of them continues. There’s a problem: you and Eddie have been staying in Efie and Rex’s guest room, rent-free, for the past fourteen months. Though Eddie had arrived in Harlem almost two years before you, he never spoke about his inability to find a place of his own. Your hurried, late-night phone calls were always about what you’d do, where you’d go, which one of your other childhood friends in other states you’d see. At times, when Eddie vaguely mentioned that he was staying in Brooklyn or Westchester, you imagined that the sidewalks were full of people hustling and bustling to their destinations. And although your expectation of New York was very much limited to broadcasts and reruns of Coming to America, any part of New York was still across the Atlantic Ocean. Further than anywhere anyone in your family had ever been.
In the days leading up to your departure, you’d turned to your friends after your last Sunday service to brag about Eddie’s plans to marry you. The wedding would happen sometime later—after you settled into your new home and signed the paperwork for your green card. You told them that you’d become a nurse, like your cousin Tiwa (who everyone loved ever since she got that hospital job in Accra), except you would be better than her. After all, Tiwa spent her days cowering to the sick while fending off doctors who frisked their own aides for fun. The obrɔnyi wouldn’t be like that—not to you.
“And before you know it,” you said, “we’ll come back here, buy land, and build a house.”
Your girlfriends had clicked their tongues in response. “Oh yeah?” they said. “Just you wait.”
What they didn’t need to mention was that you’ve all watched your schoolmates leave in the same vein that Efie had, choosing a paper visa and a promise for a better life over selling chin chin on Winneba Junction. Their names were Nana Adjoa, or Ama, or Kuukua, and they were sprawled around parts of Philadelphia or Atlanta, living in town houses and raising children with names like Adelaide or Patricia, who would rather have a mouthful of cavities than stay in a village where the power frequently goes out during Harmattan.
After a ten-hour layover in Amsterdam, your plane skidded along the smooth tarmac on a calm September afternoon. Eddie met you at the airport with a bouquet of chrysanthemums and the colors reminded you of a waning sunset. You were too nervous to tell him that you had refused all your meals when the flight attendants made their rounds, worried that your stomach would empty everything out in that tiny bathroom stall mid-air. Like a ravenous snake, you wrapped yourself around his lean body—the one you’d gone a year without touching—and hoped he would still be in love with yours.
The apartment wasn’t ready, Eddie said as you both searched for your mother’s suitcase at baggage claim. He didn’t meet your eyes when he quietly murmured, “Not yet.”
Eddie drove you straight through midtown in his new green Volvo, pointing to the Empire State Building and, a few blocks away, the Chrysler Building. From the passenger seat, you leaned out of the window to take photos of the monstrous buildings with your disposable camera. Eddie squeezed into a parking spot across from a building with revolving glass doors and ushered you into Rex and Efie’s top-floor apartment. After all those late-night, international phone calls, Eddie had neglected to mention that he was still living out of the two lackluster suitcases he first came to the country with, in his sister’s guest room.
It would be temporary, he promised.
A year and two months later, you are still here.
In the dining room, you hear Eddie clear his throat. “I’m already picking up night shifts when I can, and I have some money saved up, even with the car payments coming out every month. You know, she—” you cringe at your husband’s inflection “—still doesn’t have working papers. And it wouldn’t matter anyway because she’s not satisfied with any plain job. Sylvia wants to stay at home, you know. Be a wife. Take care of the kids.”
Scoff. You’d made that joke after browsing for jobs in the newspaper one afternoon. The qualifications for something as simple as a part-time home aide were rigorous, laughable. CPR training. Five dollars an hour. Two or more years in a nursing home. Sexagenarian specialist. This last requirement sounded erotic and when Eddie confessed to not knowing what a sexagenarian was, Rex had laughed from his armchair, “That’s what they call someone like me, give or take a few years.”
Everything from a job to an apartment felt more difficult than you’d expected. The impossibilities stretched in front of you as if you were driving through a tunnel riddled with potholes. The sheet of paper where you scribbled your previous roles in loopy cursive—two of which were positions that you held as a Youth Coordinator at your church back home—felt amateur and useless. You’d tucked the newspaper away. “Awurade. I would rather stay home and take care of our kids than bathe someone as old as Grandpa Rex,” you whispered.
Eddie rubbed your feet in response but kept his gaze on the president from Texas who was doing press about the severe unemployment crisis. He would’ve picked up on your exasperation had his attention been on your own crisis—not the world’s. Did he really think that you’d decided to leave your village, cross an ocean, and clean up after three fully grown adults like a loyal house girl just so that you can stay indoors for the rest of your life?
“Oh, but why do you sound so surprised?” Efie asks. “We’ve known her since she was a small girl and she’s been lazy and foolish then, too.” You imagine Efie shooting your husband an icy look over her cards with her arms crossed, feet firm on the ground. Her scowls are sharp, strong enough to get a dog to stop barking at an unfamiliar face. Her eyes—a deep, fictitious hazel—are manufactured lenses that she pops into her pupils every morning after her shower. Against her dark skin, you wonder if she knows that she wakes up every morning choosing to look like a witch. And, in this moment, when you are only a few steps away from her, you have half the mind to interrupt her game and tell her so.
Remember who you are. You are your mother’s child, but you are not your mother. She, a meek woman, would’ve bowed and accepted the venom stretched thin in Efie’s words. She would’ve made excuses, and you can hear her voice right now. Don’t mind her. But who does Efie think she is, speaking about you as though you don’t have a family? You’ve been a respectful—no, perfect—house guest. For the past year, you’ve been preparing dinner and clearing the dishes and scrubbing toilets and taking out smelly bags of trash at all hours of the day. If anything, you should be the one sitting in the dining room, allowing your irritation to leak from your lips with each sip of Guinness. Were you the one who asked to live here, under the gaze of a woman who watched her younger brother as if she carried him around for nine months and birthed him herself?
The pain in your stomach is now nearly gone. Make yourself erect, remove the head tie from around your braids, and reach for the doorknob. The door creaks when you tug it open, loud enough for the conversation in the dining room to stop. All you have to do is round the corner of the corridor to come out of hiding, but something tells you to stay put.
“Is Sylvia asleep?” Efie asks. Then her voice shifts in your direction and she’s suddenly calling for you. “Sylvia!”
Eddie shushes her. “She’s not feeling well, Efie. Come on. Why are you trying to wake her up? And stop talking about her like that.” You pause on the threshold, one foot in the room, the other outside of it. He continues. “I’m not saying she’s lazy. She just needs to find her…how do they say it? Her niche? Yes, niche. She needs some more time, that’s all. I think she’s still adjusting to the city.”
“It’s been more than a year.”
“And why not, eh? It hasn’t been that long. If you hadn’t met Rex, would you not have been the same way?”
Your husband is right and Efie’s silence confirms his ethos. A few months after her arrival, Efie met Rex through a friend, and the two got married almost immediately. “He’s a tenured professor at Columbia,” she boasted when she introduced him to you. The reverence across her face made you understand that tenure was an exclusive club and this tall Nigerian man with broad shoulders and a head full of robust grey locs was a pious member. Over the next few days, you understood that tenure awarded Rex this nice apartment in what they called the Upper West Side. It was tenure that allowed him to teach two classes a week, assign no take-home work, and still have time to stroll around Central Park every day. When the four of you had celebrated his 55th birthday with a lavish rooftop party last month, your envy towards Efie and her tenured husband peaked. You couldn’t take your eyes off them—this couple that shined like a pair of new leather shoes in their wealth, their success.
Rex waltzed around the room as if he had no attachments to his first wife back home, his Yoruba, or his kids—who, Eddie revealed, were well into their adulthood. Whenever Rex laughed, you noticed how his lips expanded and exposed even the smallest gaps in the back of his mouth. In a three-button tuxedo jacket, a crisp white shirt, and suede pants that you had ironed hours earlier, he had the authority of a man who commanded attention. Next to him, Efie shimmered in a floor-length navy-blue dress and an expensive pendant glistened in the center of her chest. She held onto champagne flutes until she couldn’t anymore. All night long, Rex’s white colleagues basked in the couple’s godlike presence, and you couldn’t help but sit in the seat furthest away from them, wearing one of Efie’s modest dresses from Macy’s.
You didn’t want to tell Eddie that his sister was an ashawo—but didn’t he already know? Wasn’t Efie’s silence obvious? Who else would spend the rest of their life with someone they barely knew, someone who had family in another country, if not for money? Remember how embarrassed you felt on that first afternoon following Eddie past the doorman, through the immaculate lobby, and into an elevator where the walls had been replaced by mirrors. You’d avoided your reflection, unable to look at yourself in your old clothes, even as Eddie covered your face with soft kisses. The elevator cruised to the top floor and you gripped your mother’s suitcase tighter, as if you wanted to manifest her protection through her initials. Eddie unlocked the door with a copy of his own key and asked you to take your shoes off by the doormat that screamed, home sweet home!
He escorted you around the empty apartment as if it were his own, pointing out everything from the stainless-steel appliances in the kitchen to the pearlescent gold and white wallpapers in each room. He opened door after door, giving you a peek into each of the three bedrooms, and the bathrooms, and the laundry room where there was a washing machine sleek with a platinum finish. You tiptoed over the plush cream carpets and around the extravagant furniture, fearful that your weight would imprint you in this foreign place. Eddie pointed to the hardwood frames that held different pictures of Rex during his university days, Efie during her secondary school days.
Your husband looked too comfortable; this place did not belong to either of you and you wanted to remind him. But instead, you noticed his taut muscles underneath his polo shirt, the shiny jheri curls that sprung out in different directions on his head. He had aged in this new city, but he was still yours. You pulled him onto the loveseat mid-sentence and removed his shirt.
You were the one who got comfortable.
Now, Efie snorts. She insults her brother in your first language, and it’s one of the few times you’ve heard her remember where she came from. “Kwasia. Eddie-o, all I’m saying is that you need to pay more attention to your wife.”
“Why?”
“Can’t you see that she’s pregnant?”
“What?”
Your palms prickle with sweat as you quickly back away from their conversation and tiptoe into the spacious bathroom that connects both of your bedrooms from opposite ends. If you stand in the silence long enough, you can hear Rex’s soft snores reach a crescendo on the other side of the door.
You get on your knees, rummage through the cabinet underneath the sink. Feel around for the familiar box you’d picked up from the pharmacy a few nights ago, the one you had thrown behind a heap of carefully stacked toilet tissues. Your hands flutter desperately in the empty space. There’s no sign of the box that holds the pregnancy test.
How could you be so careless? And when did Efie look through your things, steal your secret, and cradle it like a weapon? The stick in the small box confirmed what Efie knew, what you didn’t want to believe. You thought it was a bug. Then, your monthly cycle didn’t cycle. And when the two faint lines appeared across the screen, you shoved the box under the sink, ashamed. What about getting a job? Going to nursing school? Moving into your own place? A baby was not part of the plan. Not at twenty-three. Not yet.
You had pushed pregnancy away. It wasn’t possible. Whenever Eddie kissed the back of your neck and curled into your backside, you had a routine. Slide the rubber down his shaft. Pinch the tip. Lay on your back. Watch him sweat. Then he’d collapse on top of you, relieved to be released, and you’d both go to sleep. The test had to be false. You wanted to schedule an appointment in a few weeks, somehow, so you resolved not to tell Eddie. These aches inside of your belly—if you prayed to God hard enough—were only stomach pains.
You return to your position behind the bedroom door, hoping to catch your husband’s response. The calm silence in the living room stretches for a beat too long. There’s no more shuffling, no exchanging of cards. You crack the door open wider and it creaks. Eddie’s voice is so low that you barely make out his next words. “Did she tell you that?”
“No, she didn’t tell me, but I know. Trust me I know.”
“How?”
“Watch her, Eddie. Come on, pay attention. She’s been having some symptoms that makes her look sluggish, like she hasn’t been getting enough sleep. Just now, she couldn’t even touch her fufu. Why do you think she went to the bedroom? You’re the one who sleeps next to her, don’t you see it?”
You shake your head at Efie’s audacity. Of course, she wouldn’t admit to finding the test. She knows you’re listening.
The sound of a chair abruptly scraping against the floorboard makes you close the door with a noticeable thud and rush back to bed. You turn off the lamp and bridge the scarf around your head. Seconds later the door opens and Eddie’s tall frame lingers there. He flips the overhead light switch and looks around the room.
You tug the bedsheet over your body so that it dips between your curves. You feel the heat on your cheeks, the scarf halfway off your head. You even forgot to turn off the bathroom light where the contents underneath the sink are still sprawled out on the floor. Everything about you flashes red, the color of guilt.
Eddie is staring at you through kind eyes, but the beer makes him unstable. One hand keeps him steady, and the other hand is full of the cards he hasn’t dealt.
“Ready to sleep?” you ask, feigning a sleepy voice. Don’t meet his gaze.
His voice is low. “Ɛ te sɛn?”
“I’m fine.”
Eddie nods slowly and shuts the door behind him. For a minute, he stands in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips and looks around. A deep sigh escapes from his lips, as if he knows the inevitable will happen. Maybe it’s the idea of squeezing a bassinet into the corner, or maybe it’s the thought of finding somewhere to put baby clothes. Whatever it is, he doesn’t say anything; he just starts cleaning. You watch him replace the items underneath the sink cabinet in the bathroom and fold your blouses into your mother’s suitcase. He rearranges your makeup into a drawer organizer, then carefully pushes the pile of laundry deeper into the hamper so that everything fits.
When he’s done, your husband strips down to his plaid boxers, turns off the light, and closes the space between the two of you. It will be well, he whispers. You move away from his embrace and squeeze your eyes shut. Tears threaten to spill from the corner of your eyes. It’s just a bug, you tell him, something that’s been making you not feel too well.
Eddie tries again. This time he wraps his arms around you until you slip into a restless darkness.
Contributor Notes
Kukuwa Ashun is a progeny of Ghanaian immigrants. A 2021 Kweli Writing Fellow, Kukuwa holds a BA in Creative Writing from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from New York University. She is working on a novel and collection of short stories in Brooklyn.
