“Why?”
“Because it’s clear that your husband isn’t the type of man to go around accumulating wives. Didn’t his mother herself have to find you for him and arrange this whole thing? Don’t waste your time imagining problems for yourself. Tell me, what are you going to do when you get to Accra?” She was so close that I could count the tiny bumps that had formed around her hairline when the hairdresser braided her hair too tightly. We even looked alike; she was a browner version of me, dimples and all.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not just going to sit in a house in Accra.”
“Me? Sit in a house?” I wanted to attend a fashion school in Accra and learn to design and sew the kind of outfits that my new sister-in-law, Yaya, wore. I wanted to have my own store, built with cement—not a wooden kiosk—with a huge display window in the front and apprentices who worked for me. I wanted to experience a world outside of Ho, a world away from sewing the same three styles (for people who never remembered to bring money when they picked up their items) on our verandah, because I was still saving up to buy a kiosk, which, before Eli came into the picture, I had intended to mount on cement blocks beside our house.
Mawusi smiled when she heard my plans. “I can be your PR person,” she said. We both had the same gap in our front teeth.
I laughed. “A seamstress with a PR person?”
“Not a seamstress, a designer! Don’t you know that all those big designers in Accra have publicists?”
We interlinked our arms like we used to when we whispered about the boys we liked in school. This was all so exciting! Exciting and nerve-wracking. But we couldn’t spend the entire day in bed giggling like children. I had to visit my uncle’s houses, and the houses of several elders, to inform them that I was about to leave for Accra. I also had to pack for the trip. I managed to get out of bed and into the bathroom while Mawusi waited in my room. I heard my mother speaking to someone when I walked out of the bathroom; it was Yaya. The youngest of the Ganyo children, Yaya was slightly older than me, and had come to pay me a visit.
“Your sister is here,” my mother called from the verandah before ushering the glamorous woman into my room. She held aside the doorway curtain for Yaya to enter, all the while disregarding my nakedness, which I was awkwardly covering with a cloth. Mawusi immediately excused herself and went to the sitting room. I had never had a problem being naked around other women, especially after three years of bathing in doorless bathroom stalls and changing in a dorm room with fourteen other girls. But there was something about Yaya that made me deeply aware of myself, of my words, my movements, my appearance. Maybe it was simply because she was Aunty’s daughter. Or because of how she carefully chose her words. Or maybe it was because she had a degree from a South African university and had her clothes made by the First Lady’s seamstress (this last bit of information came courtesy of Mawusi). Whatever it was, it made me feel like a child standing before a woman. A woman clad in a hip-hugging jean skirt and a red blouse that dipped low enough to show the top halves of her breasts.
“How are you feeling?” she asked kindly while seating herself on the edge of my unmade bed. I immediately felt that light but forceful thing inside me—I liked to believe that it was my spirit—shrink in embarrassment.
“I’m fine,” I said, clutching both ends of my cloth, which I had knotted above my right breast. I didn’t want to sit beside her so I propped my hip against a table, which held most of what I owned, including my chop box and trunk from boarding school. “You are the ones who worked yesterday,” I said in Eυe, not knowing a comparable English greeting that would suitably express what I was required to say to her.
“It was nothing,” she said in English, “besides, it was all you.”
“Thank you,” I said, not sure if that was the right response or if a response was even required. I pulled my cloth higher and she tried to take in my small room without moving her head, so that her eyes looked like they were slow-marching. I didn’t even want to imagine what she was thinking about it all: the almost-transparent gecko frozen in a corner of the ceiling; the gray cement of the floor; the mismatched and faded curtains; the piece of tie-and-dye fabric that served as my bed sheet; my manual sewing machine on a low table behind the door; the odds and ends, including a portmanteau from the sixties and a new set of aluminum cooking pots, which my mother had stacked on the large table; my shoes, most of them secondhand, proudly lined up in three rows at the foot of my bed.
“You know,” she began carefully, “Fo Eli has several houses in Accra.”
I nodded even though I didn’t fully comprehend. I knew that she was speaking about more than the number of houses that her brother owned. I wanted to ask her which one of them I would be living in but couldn’t bring myself to speak up.
“That woman,” she said, speaking hesitantly, and then stopped to inspect the rhinestones on my wedding shoes, which I had placed at my bedside. “That woman,” she continued, finally lifting up her eyes to meet mine “has caused my mother so much pain. She has tried to rip our family apart. For what? What have we done to her? Do you know she prevented Eli from attending my mother’s seventieth birthday party?” Her voice was hard but her eyes were moist. She swiped a manicured hand across her eyes and stood up abruptly. “I will see you in Accra,” she said with a wide smile, before stretching out her arms to hug me. I stepped into her embrace with one hand still clutching the knot in my cloth. I spread myself out on the bed when she left, instantly tired all over again.
“What did she say?” Mawusi asked. She had come back into my room as soon as Yaya left.
“To be honest, I’m not even sure. I think she wanted to talk about her brother and the woman, but she didn’t say much.”
“That woman!” my cousin said, shaking her head.
“That woman,” I repeated.
“Don’t worry, you will free your husband from her.”
“Amen.”
Mawusi made me feel confident, at least temporarily, that I would succeed in extracting Eli from the woman’s clutches. She’d always been able to reassure me, and it seemed like she had become wiser since she went to the university, so that now I valued her opinion even more than I had before. She was in her third year at the University of Cape Coast where she was studying for a degree in communications. I had envied her when she first began the university and I was stuck in Ho, apprenticing in Sister Lizzie’s sewing shop. But here I was now, married to Aunty’s son, Elikem Ganyo! She was helping me to comb the tangles out of my flowing hair, a product of a factory in Guangzhou, China. Our mothers’ experiences had taught us a lot about marriage. She and I liked to argue about which of our mothers despised Tɔgã Pious more. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard Daavi Christy, Mawusi’s mother, and the youngest of my uncle’s wives, complain about him.
“I have never seen a man like this in my life! A man who is so stingy and heartless,” she had told my mother when Tɔgã Pious refused to let us move into my father’s apartment in our family house after my father died.
“All men are the same, they only know how to love themselves and to sit on women,” she’d told us when Tɔgã Pious had refused to pay Mawusi’s university tuition so that Daavi Christy was forced to sell all of her good cloths and beads for Mawusi to go to school. My mother had looked on disapprovingly as Daavi Christy gave us her opinion of men. Even though she detested Tɔgã Pious, she knew that every man was not like my uncle. She had been married to one such man. More than anything, I wanted to be as fortunate as she had been.