I knew about the other woman when I accepted Aunty’s marriage proposal. It was just another day in October and I had been at TɔgãPious’s house with Mawusi when my mother called and told me to come home. I immediately knew it was important. She was stingy with her phone credits and usually only texted me. I returned to find her sitting on a low stool on the verandah with her legs stretched out in front of her.
“Sit down,” she said, pointing to a stool beside her.
“What is wrong?”
“I said sit down.”
I sat.
“What I’m going to tell you will not leave this house,” she said, looking down at her feet.
“What?” I asked, alarmed.
“Nobody should hear what I’m going to tell you, not even Mawusi.”
“Okay, nobody will hear.”
She pulled my hand into her lap, held it there, and told me about a conversation she had had with Aunty less than an hour before. There was a long silence when she finished talking. I could tell she was waiting for me to speak.
“Did you hear me?” she snapped, clearly irritated at my silence.
“He wants to marry me?”
“He will want to marry you. His mother is sending her driver over this evening to come for some of your photos. He will want to marry you.”
“How about his wife?”
“That woman, that terror, is not his wife.”
“Fine. But he doesn’t even know me.”
“He will get to know you.”
“When, before or after he marries me?”
She sucked her teeth and flung my hand out of her lap. “You are not a child so stop talking like a child. This is Elikem Ganyo we are talking about. The man whose verandah we are sitting on, whose store I work in. The man whose mother bought you an electric sewing machine. It doesn’t matter whether he knows you or not, he will treat you well. I am your mother; why would I send you somewhere to suffer? I only want what is best for you,” she said while wagging a finger in my face.
I eyed her, surprised at the force with which she spoke. Over the years, she and I had become more like friends than mother and daughter. There was nothing in her life that she didn’t share with me and there was almost nothing that I didn’t tell her. I found the finger-wagging and sternness to be annoying and a bit hurtful. I stood up and leaned on a column in a corner of the verandah, my arms folded.
“Ma, I don’t know him; what if I don’t like him?” I said in a low voice.
She sighed with her whole torso and then locked eyes with me. “Afi, don’t forget who you are. You are not an actress and this is not a romance film. This is not one of those telenovelas you and Mawusi have been watching. This is real life. This is our life. You will get to know him and like him. That is how it is. If you don’t believe me you can go and ask any married woman you know. Ask any woman if she loved her husband before she got married, or even if she loves him now.” She stood up slowly, as though in pain. “We are not ingrates and we are not foolish people. And remember what I told you, no one should hear about this until everything is finalized; not everyone who smiles with you wishes you well,” she said before sliding her feet out of her slippers at the doorway and entering the house.
I remained on the verandah, seated on the banister, long after she had retired. The last thing I expected was a marriage proposal. It had been four months since my boyfriend had decided that he could only be happy with two women in his life and I just didn’t want that. To be honest, it wasn’t the cheating that drove me away; I didn’t like him enough to care. But then the other girl had threatened to come to my house and cause a scene if I didn’t leave her man alone, even though I started seeing the fool well before she came along. The last thing I needed was some idiot coming to reveal to my mother that I had a boyfriend.
Even though we shared a lot, I did not discuss my love life with my mother. I knew that she would disapprove. Despite my age (twenty-one), my mother would find it disrespectful for me to openly have a romantic relationship when I wasn’t sure that it was going to lead to marriage. She wasn’t like Daavi Christy who had, on more than one occasion, invited Mawusi’s boyfriend, Yao, to their house to eat. My mother was old-fashioned and her place in the Women’s Guild made it worse. She worried about what other women in the association would say about her. She never learned about Michael (or so I chose to believe), the man I had dated since my first year of secondary school. I was sixteen and he twenty-four when we first met in Kpando. It was my first time away from home, and in a boarding school. The government had recently posted him to the local health center where he was an accountant. He was not the first man to want me, there was a long list, but he wasn’t like the idiots who would follow me and make up poems about my buttocks as they walked behind me down the street. The age difference did not bother me. It was not unusual for some girls, especially when in boarding school and away from the policing of parents, to date older men who would drive to the school during weekend visiting hours and claim to be uncles and older brothers. At least it was better than dating the teachers, especially the national service personnel, who relentlessly pursued us with the promise of good grades. Anyway, I quickly fell in love with Michael and looked forward to his visits. I had become more daring in my final year and would scale the school’s fence after lights-out to spend the night at his house and would return in the morning and join the stream of day students entering the campus gates. Michael had been very generous. School would have been so much more difficult without him. He had supplemented the meager gari and shito that my mother packed in my chop box so that even on the last day of the semester, one could still find powdered milk, milo, cornflakes, and cream crackers in my box. I’d ended things with him after I graduated. My failure to pass the mathematics and science portions of the West African Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination, twice, and to make the grades to enter one of the public universities had taken a toll on our relationship.
But as I sat on the banister that evening, long after my mother had gone inside, I knew that marriage to Eli would be nothing like what I had with Michael; in fact, one can’t compare a secondary school boyfriend to a husband. But one of the things that worried me was that Aunty had proposed an arranged marriage. Although I knew little about arranged marriages, I knew that I didn’t want one. I didn’t know of any young woman who had gotten married this way. Even my parents didn’t have an arranged marriage. The thought of marrying a man whom I barely knew, even if he was Eli Ganyo, was frightening. How would I fit into his jet-setting life? What could I possibly have in common with such a man? What would we talk about? How would I fit in with his family and rich friends? What would it be like to live in his house? What would it feel like to undress in front of him, to have his hands on my body? As I sat on the verandah, slapping at the mosquitoes that were landing on my legs, I thought of a hundred things that could go wrong. But the longer I sat there, the more I also realized that many things could go right. I could fall in love with him and he with me. We could have children and build a home like that in which I had spent my earliest childhood. He could take care of my mother and give her the kind of life that she had had with my father. I could have a future that many women in Ho couldn’t even dream of: fashion school, a proper boutique. And on top of all of this, I could repay Aunty for everything she had done for us.