As invariably, it is she who seems flawed in their presence, who feels herself strangely too present, exposed, somehow pungent, almost threatening, too much of a woman, exposed for a woman, a dark thing, black swan. While Ling laughs and flits from one thought to the next like some erudite Tinker Bell with ADHD (and with forceps), she Taiwo looms solid and livid, unyielding compared, a thing fallen to earth. She wants now that Ling feel this same sense of weightiness, awkwardness at failing to get her to chat — so abandons the search for a T-shirt to sleep in and lies on her back on her side of the bed fully dressed, yawning loudly and covering her face with her forearm to mean that she’s moments from sleep.
Ling doesn’t notice, her back turned to Taiwo, unfolding small clothes at the foot of the bed. “I don’t think your brother likes me.” She laughs, after a moment.
“Olu’s just like that,” Taiwo mumbles. But smiles. Does this mean that Olu has abandoned the pretense of being in love with his college best friend? Fair enough, only fools rush, but this is excessive: some fifteen years in and no wedding in sight. Her brother never kisses the woman in public nor touches her unthinkingly when putting on coats; all but left her there standing in the driveway on arrival; displays nothing of the clinging that passion begets. Taiwo has long since suspected a cover-up (asexuality, abortion in college, that sort) and imagines that, compelled by the tragedy upon them, the two of them might be at last coming clean.
Instead, Ling says, “Kehinde. He looks at me strangely.”
At the name Taiwo tenses, the age-old reflex, as if her name were spoken and not her twin brother’s. She peels off her forearm to glower at Ling. “What do you mean, strangely?” Without waiting for an answer, “It’s a difficult time for our family—”
“Of course.”
“So if Kehinde looks strange,” as if the words were not English, “it isn’t because he is… looking at… you.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest…”
The suggestions float there between them.
“I’m tired,” says Taiwo, as if this were Ling’s fault. She turns to the window, heart racing from lying, from the surge of aggression that still coats her throat, an old feeling resurfacing: thick, visceral, inexplicable, unnatural that she should feel jealous.
iv
While Olu and Kehinde lie looking at the ceiling.
“Sure is strange,” Olu says, “sleeping like this.”
“Like the old days,” says Kehinde, to say something. Silence. They agree, by soft laughter, to leave it untouched.
• • •
Olu folds his hands on his stomach, eyes open. He is thinking that the smell is familiar, though strange, the thick/sweet combination of sap and humidity and burning and sweat and dark reddish-brown oil. He knew it the moment he alighted the Mercedes and stood in the pebbled drive breathing it in and was seconds from placing it (1997, Accra) when he noticed that Kehinde was staring at Ling.
Staring, not looking, unaware he was staring so squinting, lips pursed as if finding the word, until Olu said, “Shall we,” and picked up a suitcase and, leaving Ling standing there, marched for the door. He’d never seen his brother interact with a woman and had always kind of vaguely thought Kehinde was gay, less so interested in men than uninterested in women, almost womanly himself, like a dancer, the hair. It startled him therefore to find himself threatened, offended, by Kehinde’s reaction to Ling. The feeling, like the smell, was both strange and familiar, an old one, gone rusty and loud with disuse. The last time he felt this they would have been children, he fourteen or fifteen, his brother not ten, when some friend of their parents, more careless than callous, said, “One got the beauty, the other the brains.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed the difference between the reaction of others to Kehinde and to him. They were extraordinarily good-looking, his two younger siblings, and twins; there were two, more extraordinary still. It was perfectly logical the way people ogled, a matter of science, of cause and effect. Causes: the infrequent occurrence in nature of greenish-gold eyes against deeply brown skin and the incidence in America of dizygotic multiples (as opposed to, say, Nigeria where twins were the norm). Effect: thrill of shock, like the trick to a punch line, the eyes zooming in on the sight, unprepared. If anything, he felt that he had to protect them, not least on account of their relative size. To him they seemed frail, not just younger but weaker, thin-wristed and — waisted, his brother the more. Compared to his body, athletic and solid, his brother looked fragile. The opposite of threat.
Then Sadie was born, and the thing sort of shifted. Their father disappeared for four, almost five days. Olu knew where he was — down the street at the Brigham — but couldn’t shake the fear that his father was gone, gone away, called away to some faraway battle, with mothers and children left to fend for themselves. It would have been one thing if Fola were present. He was close to his mother, unusually so. In those days they went every Friday for ice cream, Carvel, on Route 9, just the two of them alone eating Rocky Road sprinkled with fine cookie crumbles, he prattling away on the short ride back home. On weekends, if his father had parties with colleagues, she’d take him for dinner at the Chestnut Hill Mall, leaving Taiwo and Kehinde with the kind Mr. Chalé while they ate clam chowder at Legal’s. He took a quiet pride in their physical resemblance; almost everybody noticed, and she smiled when they did. Furthermore, his father looked awed when he looked at her, and Olu thought he saw a sparkling residue of awe when his father turned to look at him, now and then, a hint of it, in the hospital for instance, when the baby was born.
But Fola was absent. Distraught and distracted. She sat in the nursery for most of the day staring out the one window in a torn wicker rocking chair reclaimed from the porch when the seasons had turned. With heat blasting mercilessly. She didn’t make breakfast. She didn’t prevent them from watching cartoons. She didn’t make dinner. She didn’t make phone calls. Just sat looking out at the slow-falling snow.
Olu served breakfast to himself and his siblings. They looked at him expectantly, nibbling their toast. Four amber eyes throwing sparks at his forehead. They seemed newly strange to him, frightening almost.
“What’s wrong with Mom?” Taiwo asked him.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Are you going to know soon?”
Olu frowned. “I don’t know. She’s scared about the baby.”
“But Dad’s with the baby.”
“I know.” Olu stood but didn’t know where to go. He went to the sink and washed his hands, which weren’t dirty.
“Don’t worry,” said Kehinde. “He’ll save her.”
“I know. That isn’t the question.” They waited for the question. He dried his hands, feeling his eyes well with tears. He used the scratchy dishrag for his face, too, surreptitiously, then hurried from the kitchen, down the hall, out the door.
He stood in the yard in his Brookline High jacket, where the air was too cold for the tears to re-form, watching station wagons headed for the underpass, slowly — the street slick with ice under grayish-brown sludge — but determined, it seemed, to leave Boston for Brookline (where he, too, was bused in for school) up the road. There were less than two miles to that ENTERING BROOKLINE sign, white with black letters in definitive font, and it still seemed like “distance” from this to that zip code: more trees, Carvel Ice Cream, lights hung by the town. Their corner seemed particularly ugly that morning, the trees and the houses alike drained of life with a thin coat of filth overlaying the snow banks, a lone pit bull barking, a bass line somewhere. The odd plastic Santa and halfhearted Christmas lights flung across branches like strings of paste gems only made matters worse. They were futile. It was useless. The grayness defeated all semblance of cheer.