What A Man Can Give

It all started on a rainy Sunday morning. My mother was running through the rain, trying to cover herself from it. I was in a purple parasol, looking out at the road. Suddenly a car skidded off the slippery asphalt and thundered towards us with all its headlights blaring at my eyes. My mother said it was at that moment she realized her body grew out to encompass herself and me.

She said she suddenly felt huge with me and the parasol being part of her. She’d never known fear like that before.

“And I will never know fear like that again if you listen to me and do as I say,” she said. My mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner for our small family which consisted of well, both of us.

I have always ever listened to you

“Yes ma,” I said.

“Good, remember your schedule? After dinner, you have two hours to study and thirty minutes to pray. I don’t want to see you fooling around.” She said, twisting to face me and searching my entire body for the opposition.

My mother had made me learn how to rein in my body and virtually shut it up. If my body was a person it would be sitting cross-legged on the floor, with its arms chained to a metal chair, and its mouth gagged with a large piece of rag. Sometimes, I thought that my mother resembled a snake in this regard, staying still and waiting for the tiniest vibration or movement to strike.

You always know where to strike, don’t you mom?

In Africa, discipline can come in two ways. Sharp barbs directed at the tender parts of your mind or sharp smacks directed at the tender parts of your body. My mother used both in excess. After all, I was still only sixteen. Small enough for her to still tower over and give a good smackdown. Yet old enough for guilt to eat me up and insults to hurt my self-esteem.

We were seated at our dining table, our hands clasped in front of us in prayer. My mother wore her white nightgown and the light from the fluorescent lamp touched her just so. She looked like an angel sitting there with her lips moving silently. We were having our individual prayers.

This is the only time she gives me space to think for myself

Do you need to think for yourself?

“You’re just a child Abbey”

My mind cackled with bitter glee. I hated my mom’s continued control over me but what could I do? I opened my eyes and there she was scowling at me. She must have seen me smile for a moment.

She thinks I am making fun of the act

She can think what she pleases

“Let us pray,” my mother said, bowing her head again. I followed suit. “Dear Lord, we thank you for bread enough to fill our bellies. Thank you for your life. The healthy life, the life we have that is free of worries and pain. Thank you, Lord, for showing us that we can survive every day.”

Survive every day without the help of a man

I completed it for her. My mother was forever obsessed with doing things without a man’s help. She would talk about how a woman could be happy without a man obsessively. We had suffered weeks without light once because my mother wanted to do it herself instead of inviting the neighborhood electrician who was very much male. The day she caught me kissing a boy was one of the worst days of my life.

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I was attending Mendel High School at that time. It was a mixed school for children who were extra smart. Most of my classmates were as mean as they were smart. Everyone found reasons to make fun of the girl with colored glasses. I was a rarity, something too strange to them that they desperately wanted to get under my skin.

“Where are my glasses?” I asked one day when I got into class and saw that its compartment was empty. Another child would have searched the whole bag but I was too careful for that. My whole life was prearranged. My bedroom was neat and tidy to a fault. Everything had its place in my bedroom and my backpack so I knew that if it wasn’t there, that meant it was gone.

No one answered me. Forty-something people suddenly turned deaf. I seethe with rage. Our English teacher stepped into the class and everyone began to bring books and pens from their backpacks. I had a smidgen of hope that the person who took my glasses would return it but soon enough the class was settled and no one had handed my property to me.

I hate my life

“Miss Umeh. Why are you standing in the middle of my class?” The teacher queried when he noticed I wasn’t seated. I told myself I would be brave and strong as I explained how someone had stolen my glasses from my bag.

” I can’t see!” I cried. Angry tears spilled down my cheeks. I gulped down the rest of my tears in shame. The class was silent.

“Your glasses,” the teacher said. “Someone took your glasses” he glared at the whole class.

“Are those not your glasses?” Jade asked. She was one of the good ones so I actually turned around to look. My glasses sat there on my notes. The thief had returned it while I wept.

I hate this school

“Sit down Abbey. Let’s go on with our class” Our teacher said. I sat down like a whipped dog. Again they had managed to make me look like a fool.

The day my mother saw me was just like the one I just mentioned. Jordan was the biggest boy in class. So big and tall that rumors said he was allowed into bars without a second thought. Normally he didn’t interfere with my life, I was a much too small bird for his eagle appetites. He and his friends terrorized those bigger and stronger than me.

I had walked out of class that day after the bell. Students were outside the school building, milling around. Most of us were waiting for our parents to come to pick us, the rest were having fun picking on the weaker students. I tried to run but as soon as Jordan’s gang saw me they whooped. I hurried down the steps but I wasn’t fast enough.

“Hey Abbey” Jordan’s voice sounded behind me. He was out of breath from running. Soon he was standing in front of me. “Hey,” he said again. He was standing dangerously close. My hand itched to push him away.

“Jordan,” I said. Readying myself for a fight. He reached out and pulled me to him. There was so much force in his arm, I hadn’t been expecting it. I barrelled straight into him and before I could do so much as a gasp, his mouth was on mine. I gagged. I tried to struggle but he was too strong. People were hooting and laughing all around us.

What the hell is he doing?!

My mind scattered in many pieces from the sensation of someone kissing me for the first time. Then suddenly there was a stampede around us. Jordan pushed me away, I stumbled and nearly fell. Painfully, I regained my footing and looked up. My mother was charging towards us, she looked enraged.

Oh, God.

My first instinct was to run but I didn’t dare. Jordan did not escape from my mother’s wrath. He was stupid, he thought he could get past my mother. She shot out her left foot and his body kissed the ground. Students roared with laughter but it was not as loud as the roaring in my head. My head throbbed as she dragged me by my ear towards the car like a sack of foodstuff.

“No daughter of mine would bring me disgrace” she cried as we went. She slammed me into the backseat and I lay there, my body quivering with the force of my pain.

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***

Dear Diary,

I am watching tiny pinpricks of light dance on dark surfaces in my room. Should tiny lights be able to do that? It gives new meaning to the word “relevance” especially for someone like me who would be blind if not for a pair of colored glasses. Someone like me. I sometimes wonder how it would be to have someone like me around.

Perhaps a sibling or even a far away neighbor. There was a blind girl down the street last month. I think I noticed someone walking with a stick pushed out in front of them on Wednesday. I should pay more attention.

Like that is possible

Is it weird that I try not to stare too much at people just so they wouldn’t stare so much at me and say oh! Your glasses are pretty and then try to snatch it off my face. People in this neighborhood are as uncouth as anything I’ve ever seen. It is a horrible thing for me, having to grapple in the air trying to reclaim my glasses because I’m blind.

I’m blind. I told that to the last girl who took it and she giggled until she stopped. I am blind without my glasses. She became very quiet when she realized I wasn’t joking. Then she carefully placed the glasses in my hands, the wariness of her touch almost making up for her rash behavior. Why do people touch me without permission?

Because I look pretty? A boy squeezed my hand on the bus on Thursday morning and winked. Did he think I looked pretty? I do not do much makeup on my face. Trying to hide. Always trying to hide. Besides, heavy makeup is for married women with red and angry bruises and mine have waxed blue and cold inside of me.

My mother hugged me last two years ago when I fell in the shower. I have felt no other human touch since then. I have been comfortable with my body to myself but Thursday came and ruined everything. I now want to know why people touch me and why they don’t. My mother touched me because she feared losing the only person she has. Am I that?

My mother’s prized possession? Do I fancy myself? What am I to my mother?

I canceled out the last line. I did not want to know the answer. I covered my dairy and tapped the corner of my bed. A compartment shoots out of the otherwise flat paneling and I place the dairy gently in it.

I looked around my room, nothing was out of place. The brown cabinet that contained my old novels. The pink dressing table and the small wardrobe faced me. The paintings on the wall of birds and nature landscapes. My headboard was behind me, together with the biggest artwork in my room.

It was a painting of a woman weeping until her tears grew into a river. My mom hated it but I had convinced her to keep it because it was the only thing I could see in my room without putting on my glasses. In the complete darkness, I always got from pulling off my glasses, the many neon colors of the artwork would shine through and act as some sort of lamb soi could see enough of my room to not hurt myself.

A twig hit my window and my senses sharpened. I knew it was a twig because I knew the sound of twigs hitting the glass, I knew a lot of sounds, perks of being almost blind most of the time and blind during bad days. I got up quietly from my bed and went to stand by the window. Outside, the moon shone and the grounds were empty.

Thwack! Another twig hit the window. I jumped out of the way as though it was supposed to hit me.

What the hell?

I opened the window and looked outside, the darkness was spreading fast. That day was going to be the beginning of my love for the nights. I took off my glasses. There was no point, the darkness was with me after all. Always. The breeze sighed against my hair. Tiny pinpricks of feeling on my face, on the soft part of my neck. A torch flashed on below me and stayed on for some minutes but I didn’t see.

***

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Dear Diary,

The life spent with my mom has been a never-ending lesson on how to depend on yourself as a woman. How to be self-sufficient. Sometimes I feel so weak. I read novels where the female heroines are the best at what they do despite their many weaknesses like not being pretty enough or not being born to aristocratic families. I sit and wonder why my mother picked those particular novels for me. Does she think I am not pretty enough?

Looking at her old pictures when she was my age, I wouldn’t be surprised if she thought so. She was the star girl, the love of her father and brothers until she came home pregnant one day and they kicked her out. My mother told me last year as we painted the outside of our house that if she had had a boy child she would have put him up for adoption and then she laughed and continued painting. She left me wondering if she really meant it or was just saying it to make me feel better or wanted.

I met a man on the train. A 20-year-old man. I knew because I spied his college documents as the train flung me towards him. 20.07.1986. He didn’t see me looking or trying not to fall into him. He did not notice me staring at his hand wrapped around the pole in a manner that seemed obscene to my silly mind. I have never been so fascinated with a man’s fingers.

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How they curled around the cold iron. How their length made them look dependable and fragile at the same time. Perhaps those were the things I admired in a man, strength and fragility. The same things I longed to celebrate in this man at the prime of manhood. A person who is strong in the way I am weak and fragile in the way I am hardened. These simple things I want from him, a chance to know myself.

I could pretend that I wanted him just for the opportunity to see myself through a man’s eyes but I would be lying. Denying the gradual tilt of my belly any time he is near, I am struck dumb in his presence. What a creature with the power to stop my mind from working while making my heart beat faster.

I could be corny and say he has the fingers of an artist. Fingers that look sensual and dangerous. Sensual because you could be tickled just thinking of how they would feel on some parts of your body and dangerous because I have been having this dream of someone strangling me and putting me in a body bag. A dream made more terrifying by the fact that I was put in there without my colored glasses.

Who would be so evil and heartless to want to ensure that I would be blind again in the afterlife? Forget my mom’s beliefs of Christianity and God giving us perfect bodies when we get to heaven. Or the fact that I should hate her for letting me lose my perfect eyes in that accident. Perhaps I should hate her. My purple perambulator had a covering after all. She could have covered me up. Perhaps she wanted me to see the world.

The young man stays across the street. I know because we walked back home together. Him, locked in his world, me trying to break in without causing too much damage. By that, I mean soundlessly, without going up to him to say hi. Things as mundane as a handshake, yes, I saw you on the train. Then we would laugh at the irony of meeting someone without that person meeting you.

I hope he likes impossible things

I like his hands

I am going out of my mind being locked in this mental room for ten years. I can almost smell the mold from the curtains, the dampness of the floors from tears and the moisture tiredness carries along with it. Reality seems farther away from me every day. I dream of walking over to his side of the street and ringing his doorbell. Wondering what he would see when he opens the door. Would he see a blind girl with strange colored glasses or a woman who is now ready to live her life?

“Abbey” my mom called softly from my bedroom door. I froze and hugged the book to myself. “Meet me in the living room”

I nodded and she left. I hid the dairy in its place and put on my flip flops. In the living room, my mom was sitting with her laptop on her laps.

“Come over here,” she said. A soft smile on her face.

I walked over to her and looked into the computer, there were pictures of kids with their names underneath. It took me a while to realize they were up for adoption.

“What do you think?” She asked as the pink cursor flitted from one kid to another. She sounded hopeful.

My eyes landed on a little boy with curly hair and bright eyes. His lower lip was pursed in a way that reminded me of myself. He was male and I was gambling when I rubbed his face on the computer and said “This one”

“I thought so too,” my mother said. She squeezed my hand.

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***

Dear Diary

We have been seeing therapists, I and mom. The doctors say I have clinical depression and I have been taking drugs and going for sessions where strangers ask me questions like how do you feel now? What do you think was the most profound experience in your childhood? Do you feel bad about your eyes? Do you think your mom is guilty of making you lose a chance at a normal life?

I answer yes to all the questions. I do not say that all I want is to go home and curl up on my bed. Sometimes while sitting in those chairs and listening to those therapists talk to me and my mom I imagine myself walking down the street over to his house. What would we talk about? He would ask me about my glasses and I’d tell him all about the accident that happened when I was a year old and all the living I had missed since then.

I steal my mom’s car key.

The streets are damp because it has just rained and everywhere smells of flowers and milk. My shoes make a small impression on the wet tarmac as I cross over into the other side of the street. I am officially out of my mind with the pills, the doctors and thinking about him.

The house stands tall and more imposing than I used to think it was, standing across the road. All the flowers are blooming. I push open the front gate and step into the grounds. The door is white. I realize again that I don’t know his name. I could have spied his name too but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Names are sacred.

What is your name? He asks

“Abbey” I answer

He begins to think of monasteries and places of silence and holiness. I ring the doorbell and wait. From my vantage point I can see the brown small house I and my mother have lived in all these years. There is a For Sale sign right in front of me. I gasp and turn around. I press the doorbell and it rings again but no one answers. I can not believe I was too late and he left. My knuckles grow white on the banister and I rest my head on the door as the first tears fall.

“Hello. Are you looking for someone?” A male voice asks behind me.