“Impressive,” she said.
“Besides, there’s your hair. Hers was”—gesturing—“bigger. A cloud. A constellation.”
“An Afro.”
“A world. Yours isn’t”—touching her dreadlocks—“horizontal.”
“You don’t like my white-girl hair?”
“Don’t like your what?”
“My dreadlocks. My white-girl hair.”
Laughing, always laughing, “Aren’t dreadlocks Jamaican? Afrocentric at least? Do people still say that? Afrocentric?”
“Yes. White people.”
“I adore you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Then help me,” he said. “I want to. I want to know you.”
“You can’t. I’m a student. You’re married.”
He was quiet. After a moment, “I know.” He lay down beside her, to face her less squarely. For minutes neither spoke. “What are you thinking?” he asked.
Taiwo was thinking — for the first time in hours, not reacting but thinking—that there had been some mistake, that if casting young women to play the puss/pupil to a professor whose wife was away tasting wine, one should look for a student better suited to scandal (or to the Village or Napa or the Upper East Side), one of the very pretty pill addicts with whom she’d gone to high school, for example, hair tussled, black eyeliner smeared, and not her, an overachiever only playing at temptress, an ex-goody-two-shoes in bad girl footwear. It was a show, the vintage dresses and American Spirits, the rapid-fire wit and implied sex appeal, with learned lines and sharp costumes and dull supporting actors; she was playing at sex but knew nothing of love. There was the Thing That Had Happened in Lagos, and after, the countless encounters with lustful male friends, but not this, never passion (moreover, admiration), the show come to life, manifest, turned to flesh. But what could she say? I don’t know what I’m doing? And how could she answer Dean Rudd when he turned, touched her cheek, found it wet, and said, “Taiwo, don’t cry,” and assorted sweet nothings along the same lines?
She left the bed abruptly and went to the bathroom. She didn’t turn the light on. She stood at the mirror. And here she was: naked and seeking approval, the doer of homework and earner of praise ever desperate to win back her erstwhile Darlingness dazzling the judges, whoever they were. With the body, as always, a stranger post-coitus, the long, lanky limbs and congenital tone, a good body, she’d heard, though she didn’t believe it, or couldn’t quite see it, not least after sex. Now it looked functional, a thing, instrumental. A means to an end, though she didn’t know which. She thought of her sister, who longed for this body. Half laughed at the irony, at how these things worked: that she, Taiwo, had inherited and maintained with no effort the model-esque figure that Sadie so craved — and from Fola, who, frightened by the baby’s low birth weight, had overfed Sadie and babied her sick. (The disorder. Unmentioned. Though all of them saw it. If only she could, she’d have said, “Sadie, here, take my body, I don’t want it. I never even liked it. It’s not like I asked for it.”) Luck of the draw. A cow born in India or Gary, Indiana. Who was to be faulted? The deified cow? And yet she was. Faulted. Was wanted, and faulted, or felt so, and still went on seeking the want. She thought of Dr. Hass in hemp scarf, chunky turquoise. “You don’t have to impress me,” she’d recently said, leaning back in the armchair to lift up the glasses and stare at her client, a strange gentle stare.
“Of course I don’t,” Taiwo had quipped, laughing hoarsely, the sound of the laughter false even to her, in her ears, as she’d shifted, unnerved by the comment, eyes trained out the window. “I already have. You treat me for free, no?”
“I do,” Dr. Hass said. “And why would I do such a thing, do we think? Your unique family background? Your remarkable accomplishments? Your formidable intelligence? Your stunning good looks?”
Taiwo laughed again, but it hurt her to do so. She shrugged, rubbed her elbow. “You got me,” she said. She looked at the clock, built-in bookshelf, O’Keeffe print. Cup of Silver Ginger. Out the window again. A word was taking shape on the tip of her tongue but the tears got there first and she swallowed them both. “Time is up.” Stood.
“I care.” Remained seated.
“I know,” she said, leaving, and meant it.
A fraud.
The word came, belated, and floated before her, a shape in the mirror, a tint to the light. She reached out a finger to touch her reflection, her eyes glowing back at her, strange in the dark (an inheritance, the color, from the Scottish great-grandmother), tracing her lips, conch-shell pink, on the glass. “Taiwo, don’t cry,” she said, softly, in mimicry. She laughed at the sound of it, dropping her hand. What was there to cry about? The same thing as always. The crushing disbelief in the truth of their love.
She returned to the bedroom and stood in the doorway (in armor) and looked at him, noting the flaws. The torso less taut than the arms and the legs with a thinning of hair near the crown of his head. A better cast woman would have asked at this juncture if the man found it strange to be here in this house, in his mother’s old room (albeit remodeled completely, a childhood apartment turned bachelor pad), but it didn’t occur to her, was vaguely familiar, a son in the bed of his mother. Instead, she found her damp purse by the bed where she’d dropped it and went to the windowsill, steel brown, and sat. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Do you mind if I watch?”
She was laughing now, changing the subject, blowing O’s. “Think about it. Barring Rastafarians, the real ones, religious ones, what kind of black girl grows locks? Black girls who go to predominantly white colleges, that’s who. Dreadlocks are black white-girl hair. A Black Power solution to a Bluest Eye problem: the desire to have long, swinging, ponytail hair. The braids take too long after a while, the extensions. But you still need a hairstyle for running in rain. Forget the secret benefit from affirmative action; this is the white woman’s privilege. Wet hair. Not to give a shit about rain on your blowout. I’m serious.”
“You’re gorgeous.”
“You think so?”
“Come here.”
• • •
“Your baby is crying,” says the driver to Taiwo, the Ghanaian way of saying your cell phone is ringing. They’ve turned off the highway and onto the street’s unplowed snow. She says, “Thank you,” and, sighing, picks up. “And to what might I owe this anomaly?”
“It’s Olu.”
“Yes, Olu, I know. I have caller ID.”
He ignores this, saying softly, “You sound like you’re crying.”
She notices her tears and his voice. “So do you.”
“What’s wrong?” they say in unison, then laugh as do siblings suddenly reminded of their siblingness after a fight. “You first,” she says, using the old line, “You’re the oldest.” She hears him laugh harder, a choked sort of sound.
He says, “Remember when we used to have something to tell him, and we’d stand by his study, too afraid to go in, and we’d fight over who should go first, when we entered, and I’d say that you should because you were the girl, and you’d say that I should because I was the oldest, and Kehinde would always just go, while we fought?”