Call and Response

Temo had never kept his girlfriends from me, even back when he had many of them. So many women those years I first moved to the city, all fast talking and sophisticated, all light skinned with long straight hair, so different from me that I began to see that he did not conceive of women who looked like me as beautiful.

I exulted in this elusiveness, imagining myself a shape-shifting trickster, legible only as I wanted.

Some of the men we knew declared their love to us in English, the language a deception, a second skin they donned and shed as they wished. We fell in love with these guys, swept up in the slipperiness of their words, their declarations. We were in love. We thought we were in love. We felt sure it was love, this time.

I knew that a congregation of aproned women would already be working at the fire at the back of the yard, boiling beetroots and potatoes, peeling and slicing and cubing cabbages and carrots for the salads for the coming crowds. I knew that the women would soon break into their songs, celebratory and caustic—The cakes are delicious, but marriage is

had never minded obeying my mother, doing everything she wanted—sweeping the yard, cleaning the house, making tea, watering the peach and mango trees, doing my own laundry, going to the store for fatcakes and paraffin and meat—but since the patient had come, all the buying of forgotten necessities went to Tebogo. It was her pocket now that jingled

It made me angry, that she required this of me, as if she were still my aunt Lydia. Before she was the patient, my aunt Lydia never looked like this, pitiful and vulnerable as though she were a newly hatched chicken. Before, she had her own car.

When Aunt Lydia was at our home, Mama became somebody else—somebody softened into girlishness, who called her sister “girl,” whose lips and teeth darkened from sipping red wine, who gently teased Papa into shyness by greeting him when he came into the room with “Hello, my husband, hello, my man, hello, sweetheart.” I kept still during those times,