His Only Wife Read online

  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.”

  “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.

&nbs
p; “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.

  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 marr
iage. 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.

  She had given me a new electric sewing machine on the day of my graduation from Sister Lizzie’s sewing shop. She had also attended the celebration and had been there when my mother, aunts, and cousins spilled powder on me—from head to toe so that I looked like a careless baker—and formed a singing and white-handkerchief-waving procession that followed me from Sister Lizzie’s shop to our house where my mother served some finger food and drinks. Aunty had promised me an overlock machine and a button-making machine once I set up the kiosk. The gesture had brought me to tears. How many people would do such a thing for someone they weren’t even related to? This last thought had propelled me to my feet. I joined my mother indoors. What kind of person was I for even second-guessing Aunty, for thinking that anything she planned could go badly for me, for putting myself before her, before my mother? How could I throw away the opportunity to give my mother a better life after all that she had suffered?