“A Friend” by Rasheeda Saka was selected by Joyland as a finalist in the 2021 Open Border Fiction Prize.
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I am not so old nor very tired but these days my daughter Tiwa tries to be the best best friend I’ve apparently never had, and she might be right for all she has read in her big big books and seen in this even bigger world but God has been my witness and I still feel on the edge of something that is not an endpoint despite the past few years: so what I am trying to say is that I am not so ready to go live with my daughter anytime soon and Tiwa, unlike my son Obi, has not been such a bad friend to me, so far. I’ve been twice widowed and live alone but, no, I will not move: much to my children’s surprise, the neighborhood has not changed significantly and most of the people I met when I first moved here twenty-two years ago with my second husband are still the same people who invite me to their adult children’s (and their children’s) celebrations. I am still the secretary of the elementary school most of them attended, and at sixty-eight, I find them politely, lovingly, and predictably irky; often, it exhausts me to walk from my home to the school (though I am grateful I can still walk): so much passing small talk with young parents, so many breathless smiles, my knees aching all the way. But summer is here, so whenever I see the little kids running about the lawns, I take special care to catch the air-kisses they blow to me. Recently I’ve heard some of them call me “The Slant Lady”; they are not the ones who send me kisses. My birthday was last spring, a couple of days after I had a second stroke, and Mrs. Shirley’s daughter left a bouquet of fresh flowers and sliced pineapple at my door. Shirley, one of my oldest friends in the neighborhood, passed on a couple years ago.
Every few days, when Tiwa does not feel sapped by her workday, she stops by my home for a light dinner and tea. I say light because afterwards, she drives west for twenty-nine minutes to return to her family for the main course. This suits me: I prefer not to feel weighed down by food. Sometimes, when her husband is working overtime at the hospital, she brings my grandson Teju over, and we eat dinner together. Then, I don’t feel so weighed down but lighter. Teju, at just six years old, greets me reluctantly as if I am not the person who tended to him the first couple years of his sickly life, but I understand: I have become a stranger and I am also partly responsible for his early suffering. Tiwa has told me many times that sickle cell is not a big problem for him anymore; if only that could have also been the case for my first husband, Tomi, Teju’s grandfather, may he continue to rest in peace.
In any case, sometimes Tiwa brings books, which she thinks will soothe me though often they make me feel agitated, just as when I was a girl. My own father has been an ancestor since I was twenty-eight years old, four years before Tiwa and Obi were born, but I know he and Tiwa would have been good friends. They are alike in most ways. Tiwa hands me her underlined, dog-eared copy of a Zadie Smith novel in the same delicate way my father gave me a novel by Achebe or Orwell or Emecheta, as if to say be patient and be open because we know you are stubborn. She works at the George Peabody Library as its africana archivist and he was a literature professor at the University of Nsukka. Before the war came, and after the war left, but never during the war, I called my father a revolutionary, and I sometimes call Teju the same thing because he looks a bit like him, though it irritates Tiwa and her husband, who says I should stay out of political talks and goings-on. Once Teju himself, glancing at his mother for courage, said I should call him “Superman” or “Captain America.” My mind wanders when Teju shows me long clips of them but now I call him my revolutionary Superman.
My daughter doesn’t know that a couple weeks before my second stroke I’d been trying to read all her old books, which she left in an aged cardboard box labeled COLLEGE FAVES in the basement. They are mostly from the late nineteenth-century, and I fall asleep after reading about twenty pages: it is usually the best sleep I’ve ever had. I discovered the box the day before I received a call from Lolade’s brother. He told me Lolade was scheduled to have major surgery and needed my help. “After all these years, and after one husband, she doesn’t have any people there,” he said in a reproachful, apologetic way. “Look at me, I’m calling from Ibadan to make arrangements when you two live in the same place.” He clicked his tongue and I remained silent; we’d been talking for only a couple minutes but I wondered if I could say “I’m sorry, wrong number” and hang up. I hadn’t heard from her in over ten years after we reconnected on Facebook. She lived outside of Arlington. We had agreed to meet, and I drove two hours through traffic to dine at a buffet for an hour. After that, she never reached out or returned my calls. I got Obi to block her for me. On the phone, Lolade’s brother made requests he seemed amazingly uncertain about: he asked if I could go see her off to the hospital, or if I could even let her stay at my place to heal. “No people to look after her,” he repeated. “Nobody.” He clicked his tongue.
Tiwa thought all of it was a terrible idea, and so did Obi. “If they want you to help foot the bill, they should just say that,” Obi said. “You don’t even know her like that.” I am not so surprised by many things nowadays but being reminded in instances like these, that my children think they know more about my life than I do, sometimes makes me chuckle. They are still auditioning to become adults even though they are adults. Short-sighted conclusions are pronounced as holy wisdoms: judgemental dismissiveness is considered maturity. They still have a lot to learn and I know that I cannot guide them. Obi is still the same boy who, on his first day of school, cried and cried until the teacher called me, asking if I could pick him up. And when he was eight years old, even after Tomi’s funeral, he kept asking when daddy would come home. I remember seeing in his room, crumpled on his college prep book, a handwritten draft of an essay in which he wrote about a “war-torn Nigeria” and “famine and disease and child soldiers” and “when my mother talks about the war, I can tell she leaves stuff out, and I ask and prod but am met with silence, defeated, sorry, and empathetic at the loss of her childhood.” I crumpled the paper again for him, then decided to smooth it out. He never mentioned the essay to me and from time to time I find myself thinking of that woman who is supposed to be me—quiet, timid, lonely. After Obi moved out of our home, which I still like to think is our home and not just mine, he visited me once every week and said little. He has a steady job as an engineer but as far as I know he is single and lives with friends. I’ve had my worries over the years but am grateful that both my children didn’t move far away or pursue careers that would take them farther than I could reach.
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There was a phone call and it was very short: Lolade sounded timid and I could barely hear her, but in the span of three minutes I wrote down her address, her surgery date, and the name of the hospital, as well as the doctor to call if anything went wrong. “Thank you for doing this, my sister. I appreciate you,” she said. And I said, “Okay, now. Bye, God bless.” I still had the final say, so when Tiwa didn’t protest my decision, Obi agreed to pick her up and returned a week later with Lolade in the passenger’s seat. It was late March and the cold, clear-sky days of winter had begun to wane. I only needed to take one Vitamin D supplement per day instead of two. I started reading another book about two young lovers who couldn’t be together and when eventually they were, all their children died. Lolade’s surgery had been a success and she was already on her feet, waving away Obi, who tried to offer his arm. Her pace was slow. I glimpsed what looked like drainage tubes, hanging from her neck, half-full of a red fluid. She was carrying an unzipped heavy coat and wearing an oversized brown t-shirt with wavy black sweatpants and fuzzy slippers. She was much much bigger than I last remembered. Obi followed with a duffle bag and carry-on suitcase. They both groaned and sighed—Lolade winced many times—as they shuffled along.
“Long time,” Lolade said, when she was settled on the living room couch. “Ahhh, I’m tired.”
“No problem,” I said.
“Smells nice in here,” she said, though she wrinkled her nose.
“I’m heading out, Ma,” Obi said. He spoke hesitantly, his eyes on Lolade. “Be good. Sorry I can’t stay for dinner but I’ll be back.”
“I’ll be here,” I said, and Obi was expressionless. I thought he would smile and pull me into a hug, as he usually does. It is always a treat to watch how easily he slips into warmth. Instead, he pinched my cheeks softly and left. I stood on the porch. Shirley’s little granddaughter was running about and blew an air-kiss to Obi, who was walking to the driver’s side of his car. He stumbled back then jumped, extending his arm and outstretching his fingers, catching the kiss. “Whew!” he exclaimed. “Why is your love so hard to get?” I always forget the name of this little girl but I remember she was often nearby during my evening talks with Shirley; it is a shame that I can only remember the names of bad kids. She was just a baby then but I could never forget her big big smile. She giggled now. “It’s not,” she said. “You just need to keep trying!” Obi laughed and got into his car. Before returning inside, I offered a small wave but the little girl didn’t notice me.
Lolade and I were alone, truly alone, for the first time since we were young young women. I warmed up some rice and beans Tiwa had cooked the night before and when I set it on the table, Lolade lifted her body a bit to peek at it, then exhaled herself onto the couch.
“Not now dear,” she said. “Thank you though.”
I began to eat beside her. Funny how my mind works. Even before my second stroke, I couldn’t remember simple facts about my girlhood, but sitting there in the living room I saw two twelve-year-old girls at the other end of the couch. They smelled of sweat and cane sugar. One was bedridden, after drinking still water near a ground well to impress a forgettable child and the other, staying with her father’s mother for what she thought was a season but became longer because of the war, was tasked with feeding her, scooping her vomit, and catching her shit in a bucket because the sick girl was too weak to move, too heavy to be carried, and too poor to have a mother home during the day.
Lolade’s eyes were closed but after every few spoonfuls of rice I ate she turned to look at me and smiled, her gap-toothed grin flashing all her grace. When we were girls in secondary school, everyone said the gap was Lolade’s most charming feature, even though Funmi, a girl a year below us, who had a limp and scars over her face, arms, and legs from an okada accident, had the same-looking teeth and the boys and girls taunted her. Lolade was the one who told me, those years ago when we met at the buffet in Virginia, that Funmi, after being jilted by a newly-wed man from Ikeja, had taken to the highest window of her compound. She was wearing yellow: they said she looked like a bird.
Lolade cleared her throat and turned her head. “More pillows?” I asked. “Why don’t we go to your room so you can rest properly?” She shook her head and said, “I’m okay, I’m okay.” She then scratched her hair, which was in fuzzy cornrows, tapered off unevenly at her shoulders. Her cheeks were inflamed and riddled with pitted acne scars. Without her pencil-thin eyebrows, she looked weak. Suddenly, the time when my biggest questions in life were why my mother told me never to call Lolade an arrogant oyinbo again and why Lolade had never met her father made me more aware of our age.
I picked at my bowl. I hadn’t eaten all day, and saliva flooded my mouth every time I took a bite.
“You sound different,” Lolade said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your voice,” she said. “The way you talk. The way you look—too skinny. Been in America for too long.” She sighed. It would be no use to mention I had to relearn how to speak after my first stroke. I was fifty-eight years old. The elementary school sent me a get well card with the children’s shaky signatures. I stuck it on the side of my fridge.
“Well,” I said. “We are all different now.”
“Not me,” she said.
I looked at her drainage tubes. She was still wincing.
“Yes,” I said. “Not you.”
A moment passed and Lolade reached for her plate, then paused, remembering to fold her hands together, lower her head, and begin a prayer.
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It has been three months since Lolade left and I had my second stroke. My face hasn’t returned and one of the neighborhood children knocked on my door the other day with her mother behind her, apologizing for calling me the Slant Lady. When Tiwa came by today, we didn’t have dinner since I wasn’t hungry but drank tea. She handed me a novel written by a “nationally-acclaimed” Igbo writer about the war, and I’m sure it’s exciting but I decided to use the book as a coaster, which made Tiwa smile. Her eyes kept fluttering and had it been any other day, she would have gone home and I would have sat on my porch and gone without reading because it is warm and warm days should be enjoyed without sad stories. But we were on the porch together. I only wished Obi could have stopped by.
“When is Lolade coming back?” Tiwa asked, after studying me. “I still have more questions to ask her.”
“Why do you keep bringing this up every time you see me?” I asked.
“Because you haven’t answered me,” she said. “Obi and I think it’s time you come live with me.”
“Don’t start. I already told you I feel fine. We’ve come to an understanding.”
“Which is?”
The sprinklers were on and sputtering near us. I waited for it to pass.
“We are both older ladies,” I said finally. And after taking a sip from my tea, I added: “Obi was supposed to pick her up a week ago but hasn’t been answering my calls.”
“Don’t mind him,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
“No,” I said. “I can wait.”
“He saw your first and second stroke,” Tiwa said. “And is just scared is all. He plans to see you soon though. I spoke with him. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried,” I said. “I’ll wait for him. I can wait.”
“Okay,” she said. “But if you stay with me, Lolade can always visit. I do want to see her.”
“She is coming soon,” I said. “Be patient.”
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If there’s one particular person—besides God—that we each must wait for in this life, for any and all reasons, mine is Lolade. I’ve waited for her without even knowing or realizing it. There have been other friends and other good friends and other nice people but they have moved, died, returned home. After the death of my second husband, I’ve preferred to live a quiet life. Loss tires me. My elders used to say grief is more a friend than a stranger. And I’ve seen shadows, heard echoes, caught snatches of her scent since I left Lagos at twenty-five. She came to the airport with me that day and I walked through one passage while she stayed behind the gate. I haven’t done things without her prompt. She stopped calling so I stopped calling. Then almost twenty years later, she sent me a friend request so I accepted it and sent her a message. We saw each other once, like she had always talked about doing when we’re in university, then she disappeared, stopped answering my calls and messages. I blocked her; then had my first stroke and unblocked her, choosing to follow her life occasionally, whenever the impulse inspired me. I’ve grown to like the stillness of my memories; they are slowly returning to me. And now I am waiting for her again. And yes, I will wait.
I still remember the last thing she said to me at the airport all those years ago. It came back to me the other day as I finished reading another sad novel: “Don’t rush. I will keep seeing you around, my sister.”
That night, after my conversation with Tiwa, a thought occurred to me before I fell asleep: if I ever see Lolade again, because I know her patterns and know what this silence means, what will she say about my own face?
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Every day I helped Lolade drain her tubes. After a week of being together, she put her hands up when I moved to follow her into the bathroom. We didn’t talk much during those early days. She was in a lot of pain. But that evening, as I served myself a ladle-full of asaro, she said, “I’m going to ask you something. You can lie to the carpet, the TV remote, this house, but don’t lie to me.”
I laughed. “What do you want to hear?”
“See, now I know you’ll lie.” Then: “Why did you remarry this old man?” She pointed at my wedding photo hanging by the TV. She chuckled to herself. “For this house?”
“I would’ve picked someone with better taste if it was for a house,” I said. “Don’t you want to remarry?”
“But he’s so old.” She grimaced.
“He was not so old,” I said, through a mouth-full of asaro. Yes, he was in his sixties and I was in my forties, a fresh widow, when we got together. But no, he actually wasn’t so old. He would have turned eighty-nine by the end of this year. In fact, every year we were together, it felt he was getting younger and at first I’d been happy for him—whereas I was only a child during the war, he had been conscripted against his will. Then, he began to wet the bed and yell and break things for no reason. And then one day, he wet himself for the last time. “He didn’t say much,” I added.
“So you like—?” She gestured, zipping her mouth shut.
I smacked my lips. “He could be thoughtful.”
“The kids don’t say much about him.”
“The kids don’t say much about anyone,” I said. “And not to you anyway. They don’t know you.”
“Tiwa is trying to,” she said.
“What about your husband anyway?”
“What husband?” she said. “Gone. Became a big rat to be with smaller rats.”
I had heard rumors before the dinner in Virginia.
“Oh yes,” I said. “Second family.”
“First family now,” she corrected. “If you already knew, why ask?”
I shrugged, as I chewed. “Things can change.”
Lolade stared at me, then grinned. “Wow, Ebun. You are still mean after all these years.”
“You are talking about yourself,” I said. “You see mean things in everyone because you are mean.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “You haven’t asked about children yet.”
For the last few days, she began to draw in her eyebrows. I rebraided her hair tightly, which made her face taut and more youthful.
“Exactly,” I said, hoping that by acknowledging that fact, we could move onto something else. Of course I knew not to ask about children. I’ve known this since our days at university.
“I’m barely a woman now,” she said.
“At least you’ve been happy.”
“You read all those books and this is what you say to me?”
“I’ll read to you these days,” I said. “And you’ll see.”
She laughed and we continued to eat. As I gathered our bowls, she pointed at the portraits of my first and second husbands. “They look cute together,” she said.
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Tiwa met Lolade several times when she stayed with me for those few weeks. Even though she was busy organizing her work projects for an annual review, she had so many questions—questions about her childhood that made me uncomfortable but Lolade answered them gleefully, in a ramble that made me think she was one of those people without someone to talk to on a day by day basis. It made me sad, and I wanted Tiwa to understand that not all history needs to be recorded, that we can just be, and be happy because of it, and that perhaps some things should be forgotten. By the end of Lolade’s third week in my home, the draining tubes around her neck collected drops of clear liquid. She was due for another check-up and they would be removed and then she would return home.
“You can always stay here,” I said a couple days before she would leave. We were in Obi’s bedroom. The thought had been running through my head for days. I moved to smooth the same pillow that had been on Obi’s bed since we moved here, which I now find myself laying on, in his absence.
“That sounds nice,” she said. “Would make things easy but give me some time. Money stuff.”
The following days I couldn’t seem to focus on anything. I wanted to read to Lolade but the words on the page were blurry in a way my glasses couldn’t fix. We mostly sat in a gentle quiet. I asked if we could go on a walk but she said she was too tired.
The morning she was leaving, we were sitting in the living room with Obi, waiting for Tiwa. It was late afternoon and even though my sleep had been okay, my head was heavy. Lolade was sitting next to me and patted me on the arm. She decided to tell us a story: “There were two girls born eight hours apart on a Saturday, one was the daughter of the sun and the other the daughter of the moon. Since they were children, they each heard whispers about the other. One day, soon after their tenth birthday, they decided they wanted to meet. But the sun had one request for the moon…”
At first I thought Lolade was trying to push me off the couch, in a way that was part of the story, but then I tried to move my left arm and couldn’t, and then my head was in Lolade’s lap, which smelled like baby powder and hand soap. And I knew what was happening to me, and I was frightened. Obi shouted something. I lost my sense of smell shortly after. It’s still hard to remember what came next. Lolade still left. A few days later, I celebrated my birthday in the hospital with my kids and a nurse, who made one of those high school interns read a passage to me every other day for my one-week stay. Obi has only seen me once since I returned home.
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These days, Tiwa comes to visit every evening with Teju and she hasn’t explained why that is so but I am not complaining. In the past few days, she has stopped mentioning Lolade, who has yet to return my calls, and has begun asking me to live with her. I cannot tell her that the three weeks I spent living with her were the longest of my life. I went on walks and recognized no one.
The three of us were moving to sit on the porch when I brought out one of her books. She raised her eyebrow.
“You like it?” she asked. “Seriously?”
“Why are you so surprised?” I asked. “It’s not so bad. Teju should try.”
He wrinkled his brow. “I don’t want to.”
Tiwa shook her head. Then she took the book, testing its weight in her palms. “Glad they’ve been keeping you company.”
“Bring me happier stories,” I said. “Where are the happy stories?”
“They are there,” my daughter said. “You need to read again.”
I don’t disagree. And I am not so tired so I will go back though there’s still more I want to see and do. I give it a try:
Ebun and Lolade are young women again. It is early May, a Thursday evening, just after they’ve finished taking uni exams. And they are walking off campus, hand in hand, under an umbrella, towards a small shop at the end of the market, next to that of an old woman who sells headwraps and the man who talks of his daughter in the UK and sells peppered meats and meat pies. The shop has rosary beads displayed on red, moth-eaten velvet at the front and a hair-braiding salon near the back; wisps of Kanekalon hair are strewn everywhere. There is a back room, where Lolade will follow through on a decision she herself will try to look at with indifference. But before then, they walk around the store, still hand in hand, each applying more pressure than the other until they know they must let go.