Glory be Mercy (1)

Two men, a fridge, and a narrow entryway. The short, stocky man shouted commands from the bottom end of the LG refrigerator. Move left, more left, lift higher. The object shifted with each grunting acquiescence of his companion, a tall man wearing a stretched-out singlet. From the second-floor balcony across, Glory watched the spectacle, a dance of ants with a large piece of stale bread. The ant hole was too small, but the ants were determined for the bit of food, however hardened and hollow of nourishment, to bring their colony happiness.

If the futility of their attempts annoyed her, the smirk on Mama Twins’ face, the look of a woman oblivious to reason, drew Glory into a wave of bitterness. The woman was foolish to put a sizable appliance in a suffocating room receiving only a few hours of electricity daily. But Mama Twins was calmly pleased, righteously accomplished, as she gestured to the hired hands to complete their impractical task. Glory bent backward in her white plastic chair until her right hand held the roughened banister. From that angle, she could see that the push and pull of the fridge had eroded parts of the cement step in front of Mama Twins’ rooms. She would have preferred if the struggle to fit the fridge—still cradled in its carton—made the woman pause, summon shame for her worldly greed, and acknowledge the ignorance of her purchase. Like a balm on a strained muscle, Glory sought relief from the soreness in her chest. She detested the fridge as a virtuous reward for Mama Twins’ merciless work, day and night, as a second-hand clothes trader, to raise the male child who had bought the gargantuan item. The size of the fridge was testament to the depth of her sacrificial efforts, equal to the magnitude of her son’s success.

Mama Twins turned sharply toward her direction, and Glory shrunk. The chair bounced with her from its lean against the railing. She was among many peeping from the heights of their compound building, but she felt caught in the act of ill-will, as if proving Mama Twins right to call a pastor for fervent prayers over the new belonging. Glory wavered, staring through the open door of her family’s home and into the living room where a wide wooden dining table stood bare except for some of her father’s old textbooks and her copy of Senior Secondary School Physics. She could not expect Mama Twins to know that she sincerely meant no evil. Her proud display had simply arrived during Glory’s hour of self-pity.

Glory left her crouch on the balcony and went inside. The dense air of the afternoon had reached the kitchen at the back of the flat. Dishes from the previous night waited for her alongside a muggy smell of food scraps stuck to culinary surfaces. Light poured in from the living room window and stopped at her feet on the threshold into the kitchen. A nagging at the back of her throat informed Glory that there was something better she could be doing than cleaning up after her family. Although she could not assuredly define what it was, the better thing, the shape of it was distinct enough to generate a reluctance to stand over a sink, to poise over a mop, to reach for corners with a broom. Glory wanted to turn around, enter the hallway behind her, past the second door on the left, and sink into her mattress. She wanted to do the thing her mother called laziness, but which she knew as freeing. To spend the humid afternoon under a slow-moving ceiling fan plotting a future where, in the magnanimity of her daydreams, when she would eventually do something with her days, something that was neither dreary housework nor pitiful studying, it would be something valuable, something real. She would be doing exactly what she was meant to do, a thing that would fit her like skin, never to be taken off, hers alone to wear.

This afternoon, like many afternoons, the unforgiving distance between desire and reality brought upon Glory a choice. She had to choose to prove her mother wrong once more. If the woman returned from her salon and found the dishes untouched, the parlor unswept, and no bed turned over in her matrimonial home, she would entertain digging into Glory along old lines. All too familiar insults would be thorough. They would begin with how Glory was testing her. Testing her patience. Then, her language would pierce inwards to Glory’s actions as evidence of a likely innate ineptitude, additional proof of why Glory was unable to pass exams and finish secondary school with a semblance of success. She would land on how she feared Glory’s life would inevitably unfold if nothing changed. At that bend, it often became about Mercy, Glory’s sister. Mercy, who her mother believed, received shine from the heavens because she behaved properly. Mercy, who compared to Glory, if Glory never did try to behave, to organize her affairs in a manner of seriousness, Glory could expect celestial disapproval. Her mother’s frustration, so apparent it drove her to tears as she verbally lacerated her blood child, was not that Glory was irredeemably doomed. Her mother continuously gave sadaka in her name, passing money she pressed softly on Glory’s forehead in prayer to beggars, to truly believe that Glory’s life was over with each outcome of her indolence. Rather, when hurting Glory also hurt her, what her mother wanted to say was I am afraid for you, my baby. I am so scared that life will eat you up and spit you out if you do not try harder.

Her mother’s cuts would reach a crescendo, a mawkish mix of instilling fear and inducing shame, with the invocation of a tumultuous life long before Mercy and Glory. She had lost her parents, Glory’s grandparents, so young. She was left, alone and female, to care for herself and her siblings on the streets of Bamenda, in a time Glory could never imagine from the comforts of their current life. Until Glory’s father found and rescued her from misery. Glory’s missteps on days she does not choose to prove her mother wrong, to apply herself and complete her responsibilities, would also be a matter of her mother’s legacy. An unkempt house with a daughter of Glory’s age at home is a mother’s failure. Shame on her that all she could do for the man who gave her the status of wife and salon owner was to provide him with only one praiseworthy child in Mercy. Her mother needed Glory to try harder, to want more, be more, get more, do more because it would mean she had done her duty to Glory’s father.

The warmth of the tap water made her palms soften and the fist around her heart unclench. Long aware of the distressed blues of their mother-daughter relationship, one the firm shepherd and the other the unruly sheep, Glory chose to act on the dishes the day Mama Twins got a new fridge for the same reason she often did anything for her family: sorrowed by the realization that her life was not just hers. It was also a life that had to accommodate an unfolding agreement between those who brought her into the world.

She began washing the ceramic plates, preferring the ease of soaping and rinsing them. Then the plastic plates, first hers, then Junior’s, then Charles’. She was old enough, seventeen years and three months, to graduate to using her mother’s mismatched China, but she stuck with the heat-deformed smaller plastic plates. She held onto them like she was holding on to being young, agile, and with a willingness to risk a burnt tongue from eating hot food too fast. It mattered less that the amount of food she needed was growing and that the plastic plates were more suitable for Junior and Charles, who, at nine and ten, required only a single serving of semo and vegetable soup to reach satisfaction. Glory did not mind shrinking her bodily needs to accommodate her ornamental desires. She did not mind using something too small for her age, a discovery she ought to share with her mother, her father, and even Mama Twins to release the bitterness flavoring her saliva. But she could not understand herself, much less express why she found accomplishment and even treasure in collapsing her childhood memories into symbols through those inferior plates. The plain white flatness of the adult plates, despite their prized position in the short list of her family’s possessions, promised no sense of adoration for Glory during the mundane act of eating. She just knew she would not be pleased, duly satisfied with the meal, if she switched to using them like she knew she would not enjoy being Mercy.

Less than thirty minutes in, foamy water reached the overflow level marker of the sink, spilled into the cabinet below, and onto the floor where she stood. Glory submerged one hand in the cluttered sink, navigating past aluminum pots, through the clanging of spoons and forks, and around a sharp knife to reach the sink drain. She lifted clumps of food waste into her palm and paused in that position, waiting for the water to empty itself. The sink was too small for the kitchen, the kitchen was too small for the flat, and the flat was too small for the family. Perhaps this nascent sense of suffocation drove their collective ambition, and Glory was supposed to let her awareness of it sweep her into the future. She could succumb to becoming Mercy, who scored high enough on JAMB to place her into the faculty of medicine at ABU. She could attempt to conjure the intelligence and composure of her sister, shepherd herself into studying tenaciously, paying attention to the topics of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, and care about becoming someone worthy of her parent’s approval. She could, she could, until she would not because the promise of something else, a poet’s promise of sweeter, dusted her most intimate silences.

Every day, she wished she could name it, declare it to her mother mid-insult, say this is who I am going to become, and let the strength of declaration free her from who they demanded her to be. But until she found conviction in her cup filled to the brim with aspiration, aspiration to be somewhere else doing what she is yet to know but believes exists, Glory had to keep deciding which days to risk a fight and which days to concede; when to permit herself to relax into cushions, and when to be directed by maternal shame and fear. She had to decide every day if to try to be more like Mercy or more like herself, a person wrapping arms around an inkling, driving towards another kind of living, a wilderness, an anxiety that there was no glory in chasing school, that happiness had to look different. Even better, that happiness was doing something far beyond what getting a new fridge could accomplish.