My mother didn’t have people she could turn to. She had family, of course. Everyone has relatives somewhere. But she didn’t have immediate family. Both her parents were long gone and her two sisters had died of something mysterious many years before. The aunt who had raised her now lived in the north with her son. I knew that even though we were surrounded by a large family, we had nobody.
It was Mawusi’s mother, Daavi Christy, who stepped in and offered to take us in. For close to a year, my mother and I shared a room with Daavi Christy, Mawusi, and her two younger brothers, Godsway and Godfred. Our mothers shared the only bed in the room while the rest of us slept on mattresses on the floor. The boys, already unhappy about having to share the room with their mother and sister, had stuck out their lips for the first few days and when that hadn’t made us move out, they had repeatedly crisscrossed the room and stepped on me each time they did. Simultaneous knocks on their heads, delivered by Daavi Christy, had put an end to their protest.
It was during that time that Mawusi and I became best friends. We would place our mattresses side by side in the center of the room, in line with the open shutters where there was some hope of a breeze, and talk deep into the night, after our mothers and her brothers had fallen asleep. We came up with answers to questions that we didn’t dare ask any adult: Mawusi’s newest half-brother was born with a crooked leg because his mother kicked a goat when she was pregnant. Tɔgã Pious had slapped one of Mawusi’s teenage half-sisters and then sent her away to live with our relatives in Kpando because she had been caught grinding a Guinness bottle with the intention of drinking the glassy solution to force out the baby in her belly. Tɔgã Pious was planning to build a bathroom with a flush toilet for himself; the rest of us would have to keep queuing at the public latrine at the bottom of our street. The woman who sold neatly cut squares of newspaper at the public latrine was a witch. In fact, she was queen of the witches. She had an open sore on her upper arm that wouldn’t heal because her witch friends licked it in homage when they had their evil meetings in the highest treetops at midnight. “Make sure you don’t touch her hand when you pay for your paper,” we warned each other worriedly. We both suffered from severe stomach pains that year due to our attempts to defy nature and avoid going to the public latrine.
We had even more to talk about when my mother transferred me to the public primary school that Mawusi attended. I was fortunate to get a spot in her class and in the morning stream for that first term. Mawusi made the move easier. Still, it took me a while to adjust to the challenges of state-funded education: sitting three to a desk meant for two; teachers who mangled their tenses and articles so badly that the headmaster didn’t complain when lessons were delivered in Eυe instead of English; hours spent weeding teachers’ yards and cultivating their farms and gardens in lieu of class; and the abandon with which the teachers wielded their canes. The slightest infraction, and a cane would land on my back with a force and speed that would leave my eyes smarting and finger-sized red welts on my pale skin. It was a far cry from the private school my father had paid for when he was alive. But I didn’t complain because I knew to do so would only remind my mother of what we had lost.
Although we had never been rich, we had always been comfortable, definitely more comfortable than most of our relatives, neighbors, and friends. This is why the reversal in our fortunes was so hard on my mother. Indeed, she had become increasingly despondent as a result of the change in our circumstances. Although grateful to Daavi Christy for taking us in, she disliked having to depend on her because it reminded her of how far we had fallen. Just a few weeks before, we had been in the middle class but now poverty was aggressively nipping at our heels. No one could have predicted this!
“I should have paid more attention to what your father was doing with our money,” my mother had lamented to me during a trip to Asigãme, the Big Market, where she had been unable to afford most of what we needed: beef, rice, milk, margarine, milo. She had always known that my father spent a great deal of money on his brothers and their families. But because we were always well provided for, she had never harped on the issue. She had only demanded that he begin building a house on a piece of land that had belonged to her parents and was now hers. But all my father had done was pay for one hundred cement blocks to be deposited on the land. If only she had pressured him to build that house. If only she had insisted that he save a portion of his salary. If only she had treated her cake and meat pie business as more than a hobby, she wouldn’t be sharing a bed with Daavi Christy and I wouldn’t be sleeping on a mattress on the floor. She repeated these regrets to me like a children’s story so that I too began to share them, to wish that I had not participated in the squandering of this money with trips to Accra to buy patent leather shoes with shiny buckles, and poufy dresses trimmed with lace. I regretted my packed lunches that could feed me and two other classmates and the superfluous pocket money that had accompanied those lunches. So much wasted, and now my poor mother had been reduced to eating from another woman’s pot.
Mawusi, also exhausted from the wedding planning and execution, came by the Monday after my wedding and squeezed in beside me on my twin bed. It reminded me of the nights we spent on student mattresses on her mother’s bedroom floor. How things had changed! I think we were both still in disbelief at my new position: wife of Elikem Ganyo. Nonetheless, my worries and fears were never far away and spilled out as soon as she made herself comfortable.
“I know I’ve said it many times before but it’s strange being married to a man I don’t know. What if we don’t get along? What if we are wrong for each other? What will I do then?”
“But you know him, we all know him.”
“Not the way a wife knows her husband. He could be nice in public and a monster in private. A lot of people are like that!”
“That’s true, but if you think about it, every marriage is a gamble, even if you’ve known the person your entire life. That’s why there are so many divorces. But I really don’t think you should worry about this. I’ve never heard anyone in this town speak ill of your husband, people have only nice things to say about him. Even my father who doesn’t say anything nice about anyone!”
“Hmmm. My husband?”
“Ah, why are you saying it like that? Isn’t he your husband?”
“We don’t have a marriage certificate. I don’t even know if I’m a ‘Mrs.’ ”
“But you don’t need a marriage certificate to be married. Many people only do the traditional wedding, they don’t bother to register it. Yet they live together as husband and wife and everyone knows that they are husband and wife.”
“Everyone minus the law.”
“If it bothers you so much then go and register your marriage when your husband returns.”
“Look, I’m already tired with all this marriage business—church marriage, marriage in the registrar’s office, traditional marriage. I feel like I need to read a book to understand it all. In fact, there’s something I was thinking about before you came. Is there a limit to how many wives a man is allowed in a traditional marriage?”
“Limit? I don’t think so. Actually, I don’t know. But that is irrelevant here.”