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"We say kedu, not keda" Ola
The man stared at her and she stared back and thought how beautiful he would have been if he had been a woman, with that perfectly shiny near-black skin.
"Are you Igbo?" he asked.
"Yes."
"But you have the face of Fulani people." He sounded accusing.
Ola
The man mumbled something that sounded like sorry before he turned away and began to look through his briefcase. When she handed the newspaper to him, he seemed reluctant to take it back, and although she glanced at him from time to time, his eyes did not meet hers again until they landed in Lagos. If only he knew that his prejudice had filled her with possibility. She did not have to be the wounded woman whose man had slept with a village girl. She could be a Fulani woman on a plane deriding Igbo people with a good-looking stranger. She could be a woman taking charge of her own life. She could be anything.
As they got up to leave, she looked at him and smiled but kept herself from saying thank you because she wanted to leave him with both his surprise and his remorse intact.
Ola
"Master looks like somebody that is crying every day, mah," Ugwu said to her in English.
"Put my blender in a carton," she said. My blender sounded strange; it had always been the blender, unmarked by her ownership.
"Yes, mah." Ugwu went to the kitchen and came back with a carton. He held it tentatively. "Mah, please forgive Master."
Ola
"Yes, mah." Ugwu turned to the door.
"Do the guests still come in the evenings?" Ola
"It's not like before when you were around, mah."
"But they still come?"
"Yes."
"And your master still plays te
"Yes."
"Good." She did not mean that. She had wanted to hear that Odenigbo could no longer bear to live the life that had been theirs.
When he visited her, she tried not to feel disappointment at how normal he looked. She stood at the door and gave noncommittal answers, resentful of his effortless volubility, of how casually he said, "You know I will never love another woman, nkem," as if he was certain that, with time, everything would be the same again. She resented, too, the romantic attention of other men. The single men took to stopping by her flat, the married ones to bumping into her outside her department. Their courting upset her because it-and they-assumed that her relationship with Odenigbo was permanently over. "I am not interested," she told them, and even as she said it, she hoped that it would not get back to Odenigbo because she did not want him to think she was pining. And she did not pine: she added new material to her lectures, cooked long meals, read new books, bought new records. She became secretary of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and after they donated food to the villages she wrote the minutes of their meetings in a notebook. She cultivated zi
Edna had a quiet laugh. She taught music and played jazz records a little too loudly and cooked tender pork chops and talked often about the man who had left her a week before their wedding in Montgomery and the uncle who had been lynched when she was a child. "You know what always amazed me?" she would ask Ola
She would laugh her quiet laugh and pat her hair, which had the greasy shine of hot-pressing. At first, they did not talk about Odenigbo. It was refreshing for Ola
Ola
Edna raised her eyebrows, mouthing but not singing Billie Holiday's words.
"I don't think love has a reason," Ola
"Sure it does."
"I think love comes first and then the reasons follow. When I am with him, I feel that I don't need anything else." Ola
Edna was watching her. "You can't keep lying to yourself that you're okay."
"I'm not lying to myself," Ola
"I'm not the best person to talk to about men, but you need to talk this through with somebody," Edna said. "Maybe the priest, as payback for all those St. Vincent de Paul charity trips you've made?"
Edna laughed and Ola
"I don't go to the staff club because I don't want to see him. I've lost my interest in te
Father Damian tugged at his collar, adjusted his glasses, and rubbed his nose, and she wondered if he was thinking of something, anything, to do since he had no answers for her.
"I didn't see you in church last Sunday," he said finally.
Ola
"You think I need to go to church more often?" she asked.
"Yes."
Ola
"I also think that you should forgive Odenigbo," he said, and pulled at his collar as though it was choking him. For a moment Ola
"Okay." She got up. "Thank you."
"It's not for him, you know. It's for you."
"What?" He was still sitting, so she looked down to meet his eyes.
"Don't see it as forgiving him. See it as allowing yourself to be happy. What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?"
Ola
Odenigbo arrived very early, before she had had breakfast. She knew that something was wrong even before she unlocked the door and saw his somber face.
"What is it?" she asked, and felt a sharp horror at the hope that sneaked into her mind: that his mother had died.