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Valentine’s Day Story: Fiona, My Fiona By Rudolf Okonkwo

Fate’s own was not only the meaning of my name, Nkechi; it was also the petal of my disposition. But those who named me did not know that.

Fate’s own was not only the meaning of my name, Nkechi; it was also the petal of my disposition. But those who named me did not know that.

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“Nkechi, you’ve staged the last stunt of your teen years here in America,” Daddy said casually. “I am shipping you to Nigeria. There you’ll be cured. ”

My mother sat on her favorite couch sobbing, profusely. “For everyone else, it is the boys that are hard to raise in America,” she murmured. “As for me, I am impeded at both ends. Nwanyi chi ojoo, woman of bad fate.” She swallowed a lump of phlegm. “See me, a nursing hen deprived of its chicks. To make matters worse, I do not know how water entered the stalk of the pumpkin.”

In less troubling situations, Daddy would have calmed her down by saying, “O nu uwa ka anyi no, it comes with life on the earth. On earth we are all prisoners of the sky.” Not this time.

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I didn’t mind Mummy. She had always been overtly dramatic.

But Daddy, a professor of English Literature at York College, in Queens, never was. Soon after he made that statement, he called Sebastian, his brother, in St Louis, Missouri.

I was lucky I attended my senior prom before I was shipped out. Though I got into trouble on that prom night when my parents caught me and my best friend, Fiona, red-handed in the limousine. I was also lucky because I wasn’t shipped to a strict missionary boarding school to complete high school like other kids of African parents who ran into trouble in America. Instead, with my SAT and High School Diploma and thanks to Daddy’s contacts, I went straight to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where I began my freshman’s year in the Department of Theater Arts.

***
Sebastian bumped into Nkemdirim inside my room at Isa Kaita Hall of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, three years later. She was in a foul mood. It was the day she gave up writing. 

Nkem, as I call her, gave up writing immediately she learnt that the literary journal, Okike, rejected her tenth short story, Naked Prodigal. Her friends in the English Department told her she needed to be friendly with the editor for her story to be published. She assumed that their advice meant having an affair with the married professor. “I will rather remain unpublished than involve myself in such an act,” Nkem complained sternly. “When my time comes, I will get published.”

At twenty-two and in her sophomore year just like me, Nkem had not experienced life. Her mother was a petty trader and her father was a carpenter in their village of Ideani. She went to Queen’s College, Enugu, on a scholarship. She lived a protected life, never feeling that she belonged. I met her in my freshman’s year at a meeting of a pro-feminist group called Daughters of Eve.

We were assigned to write a newsletter editorial for our group in support of gay marriage laws passed in South Africa and Massachusetts. In the course of our discussion, Nkem asked me, “Does the gay marriage law passed in Massachusetts mean that you as an American can marry me and then take me to America?”

We became friends thereafter and later roommates. She soon metamorphosed into my new Fiona.

Sebastian came to visit me because I was helping him find a wife at the university. I arranged a meeting with two girls that met his specifications: gregarious, intelligent, and beautiful. Before he bumped into Nkem, he had met a lovely 21 year-old girl named Amaka. Amaka was slender like a cassava plant, but confident like a bulldog in its territory. She was forward in the questions she asked Sebastian about his career in America and his marital history. It was almost an inquisition, he later told me. She wasn’t going to be cowed because he came from America. As he drove her back into campus after a lunch date inside Nsukka town, he knew it was not going to work out between them. “She was more like the wife I divorced three years ago,” he said.

Amaka battered Sebastian’s charm. He lost his enthusiasm about meeting the second girl, deciding instead to reschedule. That was when Nkem entered our room so swiftly that she almost slammed the door on his face as he walked out. At six feet one inch, her presence was as unmistaken as the presence of a baobab tree in a yam farm. With a scowl on her face, she swung her body like a pissed off igede. No eyes, man or woman, could miss her gyrating hips or her full lips red like a gourmet lobster.

“Sorry,” she muttered as she quickly climbed on top of a double decked bed in the room, her feet ripping off the wall posters of Audre Lorde and Gertrude Stein. They fell across, partly resting at the lower end of the wall. 

“Is everything alright?” Sebastian asked.

“Life is not fair,” Nkem murmured, and covered herself with a blanket. 

Sebastian returned to Enugu that same day and to the United States the following week, his mission to find a homegrown girl for a wife all but abandoned. Then one day, while on a weekly telephone conversation with him, he asked a question he said had been nagging him since his last visit.

“Why didn’t you want me to consider your roommate, Nkem?”

At first, I was startled. 

“Who?” I managed to say after a long period of silence.

“Nkem, your roommate,” he repeated.

“You don’t want her,” was the answer that unconsciously came out of me.
“Why?”

I had no reason. Conscious that I might raise suspicion unnecessarily, I calmed down and tried to retrace my steps.

“Frankly, I never thought of her like that,” I said. “I see her just as my roommate. Not a potential wife for my uncle.”

“Is there anything wrong with her being the wife of your uncle?”

“No. Not really,” I lied. If Sebastian was in front of me, he would have noticed how shaky my hands were.

“She is kind of weird, with all her talks about writing,” I continued. “She is not that sociable. Also, you know she is not in the medical field.”

“Ok. Does she have a boyfriend?”

“None that I know of,” I answered after a pause. “Unless you count literature.” 

We left it at that. Days came and passed. Weeks came and passed. I forgot all about it.

Then Sebastian called one rainy day in May. This time he insisted on talking to Nkem who was seated at the end of my bed, dressed just in her underpants, massaging my feet. She does this when the other roommate of ours travel. Otherwise, we wait until we can pay for a hotel room behind Zik’s flat. Sebastian told her his mind. We awkwardly discussed it afterwards. I told Nkem all I knew about Sebastian, his real age, which was twice Nkem’s age, his ex-wives, his six children from the white woman and the African nurse.

“Without his frequent visits home, his houses, car shipping businesses and relationships with my aunts, my Daddy would not have had the confidence to send me home,” I told Nkem.

“Death thereby kills as if it was directed,” Nkem concluded as we agreed that she would go ahead with Sebastian’s proposal as long as it ultimately gets her to America.

“But no sex,” I warned. “Not until you get to America.”
***

We were in our final year when Sebastian flew in for the traditional marriage. He was excited about marrying the most unlikely wife. Having abandoned the search for a pharmacy graduate or a doctor for a sociologist, he was proud of himself that for the first time he had overcome his selfishness. He married his first wife because she came from a wealthy family and the second because she was a nurse.

My Mummy also came for the marriage ceremony. It was the first time my mother and I were united in Nigeria. In the past, I was the one visiting my parents in America during the holidays.

“You’ve earned your passage to America,” Mummy said, “When you graduate, you can return to the U.S. on a permanent basis,” she added. 

I did not respond. I pretended I was lost in the festivity.

“Tell me you’ve found an interesting young man that will throw this kind of wedding party for us?” Mummy asked, with a chuckle on her face. She looked strange to me after three years of living apart. The bond of motherhood had broken down. Even the bulge of resentment had metamorphosed into a benign cyst of indifference. In many ways, she was just a woman who paid my school fees.

“It is in your final year that you must grab a man,” she continued even when I did not show any enthusiasm for a discussion. “After you graduate, men begin to think of you as washed up.”

Decorated dance troupes took the stage. They raised dust, flipped themselves in the air, in impressive acrobatic display. Men ate and drank themselves to a state of stupor. I listened to the small talk, some deep and some jovial. I looked to see if in all the ceremonies they had a part that could contain me but I did not see any. It was all choreographed sequences with no room for deviation. Nkem seemed comfortable fully dressed in her traditional lace and wrapper, long hair scarf, with ekete round her waist; sparkling gold bracelets dangled around her neck and wrists.

I watched closely as she knelt down and received a cup of palm wine for what was billed as the climax of the event. With cup in hand, she walked around in search of her husband-to-be. In teasing moves, she approached men other than Sebastian as if she was going to pass the drink to them and thereby identify them as her chosen one.

As she made her rounds of young men, people chuckled.

Then she came near me and pretended she was handing the drink to me.

“Mba. No,” sneered a man sitting beside us.

“Alu, Abomination,” exclaimed another behind. The gathering rose with a deafening whoa.

Mummy frowned at that unplanned skit. “It is not funny,” she muttered. “You don’t pick your eyes with the same object you use to pick your ears.” But it was funny to Sebastian for he was never told the real reason why I was shipped to Nigeria. It was a family secret not even he was aware of.

“Do you plan to stay here for postgraduate studies?” asked Mummy when Nkem and Sebastian were lost in the dance of the maiden spirit. “Your Daddy and I will come back home and teach at one of our universities here if you are staying. You know, when a farmer encounters something larger than the farm, he sells the barn.”

I rolled my eyes. When she bopped her way into the dance court to spray money on Sebastian and Nkem, I said to myself, “After Youth Service, I shall return to the States.”
***

Numerous Nnokwa people in the New York tri-city area came to J.F.K airport to welcome Nkem. Sebastian flew down from St. Louis. He planned to spend three days in New York before flying home to Missouri.

At the Arrival Lounge of Virgin Atlantic airline half a dozen of my people had lined up. I saw my Daddy and Mummy on the front roll, waiting. Everyone had a wide smile on their faces. I sat inside a news agent’s, wearing my traditional baggy khaki pants, a big T-shirt that hid my breasts and a face-cap. On the front of my T-shirt was written, Against Conformity. On the back was Free to Love Anyone I choose. Seven years ago when I rejected pretty-girl-Barbie-outfits and started dressing this way, it drove Mummy crazy. That was when Sebastian began to call me a tomboy.

As passengers trickled out, into the waiting area, Nnokwa people’s eyes were focused on every young black women walking down. I sneaked out of the news agent’s store and found my way to the front row, carefully hiding my eyes behind dark glasses. As I was supposed to be in Akure, Ondo State, for my National Youth Service, there was little chance I could be spotted.

And then, Nkem emerged in her pretty low cut African dress, strapless on one shoulder; she walked with long strides, swinging her hips. Her bright colors gave her up amongst the group of passenger flocking out. In quick succession, Sebastian and I stepped out from the gathered crowd. But because I had a longer stride, I got to Nkem first. Upon seeing me, she dropped her luggage on the floor and gave me a warm embrace. I raised my heels up, lifted my head gently up and she gave me a passionate kiss on the lips.

Sebastian froze. And so did friends and family that had gathered. I removed my glasses and they all squawked, whoa! Mummy’s scream pierced through the lobby before she fainted.

***
This short story was first published in The International Resource Network in Africa- Outliers Vol. 1, No. 1 2008 as “Prisoners of the Sky”

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