“Sorry, ma, sorry, ma,” you started hearing as soon as you entered the room, and that was when you saw her standing by your wardrobe shirtless; your clothes scattered around her feet like petals — her first transgression.
Nearer to the end, you’d wonder if Mama Lateef had also been right about this other thing: whether girls like Joy were quick to forget. And whether or not she had been right, it would already be too late. By the time Joy would commit her second transgression, you’d had your child, a pretty boy who would grow up to cause the women of the world much trouble. You had him a few minutes past one a.m. in May; a boy with his umbilical wrapped around his neck, a boy the unique circumstances of whose birth would compel you to give him the oriki “Aina,” long before it was decided that Sesan would be his first name. And though you never told Yinka, you had thought that the baby would never make it, that he’d enter the world as a pool of blood. It was what the woman in your dreams had told you, the one who pestered you every night until you told her a story. And so many did you tell her — folktales, urban myths from your childhood, the salacious love stories that colored your secondary school years, and awful summaries of your book club readings — until you believed you had run out of stories. And then she reminded you that you had one more: the story about your son, how he never makes it out of the maternity ward, how he dies before being born because nothing survives women like you.
You blamed the book Joys of Motherhood for your nightmares, for it was while reading it that the nightmares began. And you were not alone: so strong a hold did the novel take on your book club that, thenceforth, the discussions were sober and somber, as though a wreath of clouds had appeared around your group. Things may have worsened when Jumoke, who gave birth — as she had predicted — before the club could discuss the novel, lost her baby to pneumonia less than a day after arriving home from the hospital. Nneka called you to break the news and not in her usual way, not katikati, but delicately. And the next evening, Bola called you to say book club meetings had been temporarily suspended and, before ending the call, warned you about your girl.
“Some of those girls are bad luck,” she said. Hers, for instance, had been telling Peju, Bola’s husband, things. “And Jumoke,” she added, “confronted her house girl in a dream before losing her child.”
You would ask Bola to calm down, to be reasonable, not expecting the deluge of confessions that followed.
She asked, “Are you alone? Do you have time to talk?”
You would leave your bedroom and respond, “Bola, you’re scaring me.” And during the rest of the phone call that seemed your longest yet, you would learn not only of Bola’s husband’s impotence, but also of the many things women do to remain women.
Joy’s second transgression took its time before it occurred, and when it happened, it didn’t catch you off guard. Rather, it left you feeling the girl had intended for you to discover that particular offense easily. And there was motive: only a few days after you had given birth, Joy came to you requesting permission to leave school for good. She had felt it would be better (for her mostly) if, instead of going to school, she trained to be a seamstress, learned a trade among people her age. She had found a seamstress who was willing to train her and you knew this woman, Rasheeda, whose studio was right across the street. Rasheeda had sewn every aṣọ-ẹbi you had bought since you and Yinka started living in Surulere.
It was June when Joy came to you with her plan: she promised she’d stay in school until the term ended in July; the last thing she wanted was to seem ungrateful or for Mama Lateef to brand her a waste, an oniranu, should you take Joy’s suggestion the wrong way and send her back to the old woman. Joy was shocked when you barely looked at her and said no; when you told her you were, as a matter of fact, relieved she no longer wanted to go to school because you needed her at home to watch the baby. She nodded when you told her you would be returning to work very soon, and replied, “Yes, ma, okay, ma.”
It took you until Christmas that year, your second Christmas with Joy, to realize the following changes the girl had undergone: first was her English, which no longer had gaps and creases but was smooth enough for Yinka to notice and even ask you about it. But you dismissed it then as nothing important. She was learning from television, you had explained to Yinka. Now that she stayed at home with the baby, she spent a great deal of time watching films, mostly Nigerian, sometimes Indian, and it was only natural that she pick up a few phrases. If her reading had improved too, it was because the Indian films required she be able to understand the subtitles.
After her English, you started noticing the way she smelled: like you. That is, like you after your usual spritz of Terry Mugler’s Angel, one on each side of your neck. It violated you, the thought of her creeping over your belongings (once, you could accept as an error, but again and again?); it made you ransack your dressing table, counting your creams, perfume bottles, and lotions, but none, it appeared, was missing. And locking your bedroom had no impact. Still, sometimes you felt your wigs had been tampered with; sometimes your clothes (bras especially) felt warm, ill-fitting, as though someone else had been in them. And then, the crown of all changes was how Joy no longer buried her laughter in your presence but sounded ebullient. How her laughter bloomed, percolated, and spread bold colors. How even from your bedroom upstairs, you could hear her. And always it stunned you to find her downstairs, with Yinka at the root of her laughter.
You suspected whatever it was between Joy and Yinka began on Christmas Eve that December, the year everything changed. Yinka, who had been the branch manager of a bank in Ikeja, had called you one evening the first week of that very month, claiming he was on his way home.
“Why?” you had asked. It was too early; you hadn’t even started cooking; was he feeling well? He had been complaining to you about migraines; was he driving? Could he make sure he was careful? The worst things happen around the end of the year. Yinka would explain that he was fired that morning (no, you’d respond); his bank (no), which had just been acquired by a bigger bank, was (no, no, no, no) restructuring; many banks, you knew, had been restructuring since 2005. The banks were too small in terms of how much money they held as capital, Yinka had told you back then, and because he didn’t want to bore you with the details, papapa, he had summarized that the Nationwide Recapitalization Program would be good for everyone.
“Trust me,” he had said. As he wept over the phone, you remembered how smug he had been telling you about Nigerian banks that year, how proud he was because he believed in his bank, and how proud you were of him because nobody needed to tell you that your Yinka was an astute banker, one of the best.
Even when, months before you hired Joy, he told you that a much bigger bank was planning to acquire his bank, when he confessed that he feared they’d let him go if the acquisition fell through, you had told him, “Let you of all people go, kẹ? Those are fears of sheep and I married a leopard. Ko possible. End of story.”
But not only was it possible, it happened. Yinka was fired that December. And Yinka wilted in unemployment, he shriveled, might as well have swallowed himself — in other words, o ru. You had decided to put your savings into retail and had made the final payment for a store on Bode Thomas, where you would sell children’s clothes imported from the US, and the months that followed were the most difficult yet. In those months, you felt the entire weight of your marriage shift toward your side. Sometimes, as you lay together at night, you would ask Yinka how things were going, whether things were going to be better, wanting him to say yes. But Yinka would never respond. All you knew was that he was looking for a job, and that he was getting tired of it. You would face your side of the bedroom, your back against his, and sigh.