“But …” She shook her head. “You would make a bad woman, however you looked. I would not want to see you as a woman.”
“You will, though, sooner or later. Let me show you how to fasten that.”
It became almost possible to forget that he was not a woman now. He dressed her carefully in the stifling layers of clothing, stepped back to give her a quick critical glance, then commented that Isaac had a good eye. The clothing fit almost perfectly. Anyanwu suspected that Isaac had used more than his eyes to learn the dimensions of her body. The boy had lifted her, even tossed her into the air many times without his hand coming near her. But who knew what he could measure and remember with his strange ability? She felt her face go hot. Who knew, indeed. She decided not to allow the boy to use his ability on her so freely any longer.
Doro cut off some of her hair and combed the rest with a wooden comb clearly purchased somewhere near her own country. She had seen Doro’s smaller white man’s comb made of bone. She found herself giggling like the young girl she appeared to be at the thought of Doro combing her hair.
“Can you braid it for me?” she asked him. “Surely you should be able to do that, too.”
“Of course I can,” he said. He took her face between his hands, looked at her, tilted her head to see her from a slightly different angle. “But I will not,” he decided. “You look better with it loose and combed this way. I used to live with an island tribe who wore their hair this way.” He hesitated. “What do you do with your hair when you change? Does it change, too?”
“No, I take it into myself. Other creatures have other kinds of hair. I feed on my hair, nails, any other parts of my body that I cannot use. Then later, I re-create them. You have seen me growing hair.”
“I did not know whether you were growing it or it was … somehow the same hair.” He handed her his small mirror. “Here, look at yourself.”
She took it eagerly, lovingly. Since the first time he had shown it to her, she had wanted such a glass of her own. He had promised to buy her one.
Now she saw that he had cut and combed her hair into a softly rounded black cloud around her head. “It would be better braided,” she said. “A woman of the age I seem to be would braid her hair.”
“Another time.” He glanced at two small bits of gold jewelry. “Either Isaac has not looked at your ears, or he thinks it would be no trouble for you to create small holes to attach these earrings. Can you?”
She looked at the earrings, at the pins meant to fasten them to her ears. Already she wore a necklace of gold and small jewels. It was the only thing she had on that she liked. Now she liked the earrings as well. “Touch where the holes should be,” she said.
He clasped each of her earlobes in the proper placesthen jerked his hands away in surprise.
“What is the matter?” she asked, surprised herself.
“Nothing. I … I suppose it’s just that I’ve never touched you before while you were changing. The texture of your flesh is … different.”
“Is not the texture of clay different when it is pliable and when it has set?”
“… yes.”
She laughed. “Touch me now. The strangeness is gone.”
He obeyed hesitantly and seemed to find what he felt more familiar this time. “It was not unpleasant before,” he said. “Only unexpected.”
“But not truly unfamiliar,” she said. She looked off to one side, not meeting his eyes, smiling.
“But it is. I’ve never …” He stopped and began to interpret the look on her face. “What are you saying, woman? What have you been doing?”
She laughed again. “Only giving you pleasure. You have told me how well I please you.” She lifted her head. “Once I married a man who had seven wives. When he had married me, though, he did not go as often to the others.”
Slowly, his expression of disbelief dissolved into amusement. He stepped closer to her with the earrings and began to attach them through the small new holes in her earlobes. “Someday,” he murmured, vaguely preoccupied, “we will both change. I will become a woman and find out whether you make an especially talented man.”
“No!” She jerked away from him, then cried out in pain and surprise when her sudden movement caused him to hurt her ear. She doused the pain quickly and repaired the slight injury. “We will not do such a thing!”
He gave her a smile of gentle condescension, picked up the earring from where it had fallen, and put it on her ear.
“Doro, we will not do it!”
“All right,” he said agreeably. “It was only a suggestion. You might enjoy it.”
“No!”
He shrugged.
“It would be a vile thing,” she whispered. “Surely an abomination.”
“All right,” he repeated.
She looked to see whether he was still smiling, and he was. For an instant, she wondered herself what such a switch might be like. She knew she could become an adequate man, but could this strange being ever be truly womanly? What if …? No!
“I will show Isaac the clothing,” she said coldly.
He nodded. “Go.” And the smile never left his face.
There was, in Isaac’s eyes when Anyanwu stepped before him in the strange clothing, a look that warned her of another kind of abomination. The boy was open and easy to accept as a young stepson. Anyanwu was aware, however, that he would have preferred another relationship. In a less confined environment, she would have avoided him. On the ship, she had done the easy thing, the pleasurable thing, and accepted his company. Doro often had no time for her, and the slaves, who knew her power now, were afraid of her. All of them, even Okoye and Udenkwo, treated her with great formality and respect, and they avoided her as best they could. Doro’s other sons were forbidden to her and it would not have been proper for her to spend time with other members of the crew. She had few wifely duties aboard. She did not cook or clean. She had no baby to tend. There were no markets to go toshe missed the crowding and the companionship of the markets very much. During several of her marriages, she had been a great trader. The produce of her garden and the pottery and tools she created were always very fine. Her goats and fowls were always fat.
Now there was nothing. Not even sickness to heal or gods to call upon. Both the slaves and the crew seemed remarkably healthy. She had seen no diseases but what Doro called seasickness among the slaves, and that was nothing. In her boredom, Anyanwu accepted Isaac’s companionship. But now she could see that it was time to stop. It was wrong to torment the boy. She was pleased, though, to realize that he saw beauty in her even now, smothered as she was in so much cloth. She had feared that to eyes other than Doro’s she would look ridiculous.
“Thank you for these things,” she said softly in English.
“They make you even more beautiful,” he told her.
“I am like a prisoner. All bound.”
“You’ll get used to it. Now you can be a real lady.”
Anyanwu turned that over in her mind. “Real lady?” she said, frowning. “What was I before?”
Isaac’s face went red. “I mean you look like a New York lady.”
His embarrassment told her that he had said something wrong, something insulting. She had thought she was misunderstanding his English. Now she realized she had understood all too well.
“Tell me what I was before, Isaac,” she insisted. “And tell me the word you used before: Civilization. What is civilization?”
He sighed, met her eyes after a moment of gazing past her at the main mast. “Before, you were Anyanwu,” he said, “mother of I-don’t-know-how-many children, priestess to your people, respected and valued woman of your town. But to the people here, you would be a savage, almost an animal if they saw you wearing only your cloth. Civilization is the way one’s own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.” He smiled tentatively. “You’re already a chameleon, Anyanwu. You understand what I’m saying.”