By Lechi Eke
Chioma stood at the kitchen sink washing the fresh catfish for her husband’s peppersoup while her younger sister, Ulari, stood by marveling at the speed with which she washed the fresh fish, rubbing half a lemon on each piece of the ten plus pieces. Ulari watched with amazement the slimy substance on the fish lose its grips on the slippery pieces of fish. Done, Chioma placed the fish in a medium sized pot and poured water that covered the pieces of fish in the pot and carried it to the two-burner kerosene stove. She lit the burners with a long broomstick which she used to transfer flame from a burning matchstick, and placed the pot of fish on one burner and measured five cups of rice out of the half bag of rice leaning on her kitchen wall into a pot containing water and lifted the pot unto the second burner. Then she quickly added spices into the fish pot: nchuanwu or scent-leaves, Maggi star, ground black pepper, peppersoup powder, salt and ground crayfish to the fish. She then covered it and stood over it for a while.
“Won’t you sit down?” Ulari asked. “Let’s go to the living-room…”
“No, the fish will overcook. My husband and his friends love it not too cooked. I’ve to watch it,” Chioma said.
“He’s bringing his friends?”
Chioma nodded.
“And you’ll serve?”
Chioma nodded again.
“And washed the plates?”
Her sister ignored her making a great show of checking the peppersoup. Soon, she brought it down, and placed a small kettle of water on the burner. “It’s for my baby, to make his food. He has a huge appetite.”
“Mma said it that boys eat a lot,” Ulari said conversationally.
“This one beats them all.”
“Why don’t you use gas cooker? Is it not faster and less messy?” Ulari asked, grimacing at the sight of blackened pots and kettle in her sister’s kitchen and the soot seen here and there.
“Kerosene is cheaper,” Chioma said as she moved to the refrigerator.
“That’s not true,” Ulari said.
Their mother had calculated how much she spent on gas and on kerosene at different times and found out that gas was cheaper.
“It’s cheaper in the short run and not in the long run. They don’t retail gas but they retail kero. When I run out of gas sometimes I may not have the three thousand or two five for gas but I can easily buy a gallon of kero with three or four hundred naira or even a bottle for less so family life won’t be grounded.”
Ulari rolled her eyes. Family life, is that all she thinks about with her 2.1 in Chemistry?
Chioma knew that her younger sister thought her stupid. She even felt a bit stupid and passé as she carried a slightly bulky colourless cellophane bag from the freezer to the sink. Ulari watched her pour the content into a plastic basin and washed quickly: red tomatoes, tatashe, red pepper and onions then she cut them randomly and loaded them into an electric blender which she connected to a vent and pressed a button. The two sisters listened to the sound of the blender and watched it reduce the stew ingredients to a puree. Chioma would let the engine run for a while then she would switch it off.
“I wish you could hire a cook,” the younger sister said.
“My husband won’t eat another woman’s food,” Chioma said with some pride.
“Great, what was he eating before he met you or he thinks you a maid?”
Ulari sounded angry. Chioma smiled.
“You’ve just done what the preacher said no one should do to us.”
“What preacher?”
“The one who wedded us, you know he warned our relations not to instigate us to be dissatisfied with ourselves.”
Ulari grunted.
“But you don’t get paid, you’re always broke.”
Chioma did not reply but sent Ulari on an errand.
“Please, help me check my baby. I think he’s awake, I can hear him whimpering.”
On the bedroom wall were timetables: Food Timetable, House-cleaning timetable, laundry, de-worming, change of toothbrushes, barbing for the boys, and coiffeur for mum. Ulari shuddered at the sight of home chores so monotonous so humdrum. As she bent over the cot to pick the gurgling baby, her sister came in and grabbed him and Ulari smelled her. She smelled like a woman.
“You’ve not had your bath?”
“Hmm –hmm,” she mumbled as the baby tried to stick his fingers into her mouth.
She said she had more time on weekends when her two child-maids were at home. They moved back to the kitchen. Thirty minutes later being persuaded by Ulari, Chioma had had her bath, combed her hair and changed into something terrible. They sat down to Chioma’s first meal for the day and Ulari’s second and the baby’s third.
“You know I’ve never sat down to be served by anyone all my life. Even when I wasn’t married, Mma preferred me to do chores. Now it’s from the bedroom to the kitchen to the bathroom to bath the children then back to the kitchen to prepare breakfast and pack lunch boxes then to cleaning; wash clothes, make lunch while worrying about supper. My life is all about shop-cook-serve-wash-clean. Sometimes really, I feel like running away,” Chioma said.
But she was thinking how different it would have been if she wore skirt-suits and stilettos and designer handbags and worked in air-conditioned office and had no children and no husband that smother her with kisses. She and her husband had agreed that she would be a-stay-at-home mum to raise the children before she ventured into the labour market. But she was always broke because her husband told her, ‘You don’t need an allowance, there’s food in the house. Whatever you need let me know and I’d buy it for you.’ Ulari has cried that the arrangement was unfair to her, while their eldest sister, Ugo, thought her a fool. How could any wise woman accept such an arrangement? But their church marriage counselors insisted that they should be allowed to make their own mistakes.
“But you wouldn’t want to quit?” Ulari asked hopefully.
“They don’t quit marriage, it’s for a lifetime. Besides where would I have gotten this lovely fellow?” Chioma. said tickling her baby’s chubby cheeks and smiling like one who enjoyed her horrible situation in life!
Ulari looking at her sister spied her husband beaming with smiles, telling his friends and brothers:
“See, I’ve got me a love-slave who’d be serving us and taking care of my house. In the night she would warm my bed. I’ll keep her subservient forever with love.
Ulari felt dissatisfaction. Once she expressed this sentiment and her mum had shouted at her to keep quiet.
“The words wife and maid seem to be synonymous,” Ulari observed.
“When you grow up, you’ll see the difference,” Chioma replied. This left Ulari thinking.
When she snapped out of her reverie Ulari went to bath her face in the bathrooms. She was somehow unsettled, distressed if she would admit it. She needed to talk to someone in order to release tension. Something terrible was happening, something outside her scheme of things. Something that could make a determined girl, lose her determination. Ulari didn’t want to get married; she even had no desire to yoke with a guy. She wanted to be an achiever, in a wide variety of things, but one of them, not marriage. Suddenly, she felt something suffocating closing in on her from all sides, something in a human form- a tall dark man in a military uniform. She sprang up from her bed to go seek counsel.
Downstairs, she waited for her American call to go through. Soon the telephone began to ring – one long whirr sound followed by one short one. Her mind wandered to the wonders of the world as she waited for her sister Grace to pick it. The telephone she decided must take a pride of place among the wonders of the modern world and somebody invented it! America was at the tip of her long slim light chocolate brown fingers because of someone’s invention. The kinetic energy within her bubbled and she feared that marriage would quench the fire. She tried to visualise her sister’s apartment. It came across as nothing short of a palace. People this part of the world believe that your life was made when you lived in America. She imagined her sister in the lap of luxury. No one picked the call. She could not figure out what time of day it was in America.
Culled from The Girls are not to Blame by Lechi Eke
