Story – Page 10 – PurplePretoria

This used to be my fantasy; going home with you, waking up next to you.

But a good wife never longs, never desires. She cooks and cleans until her hands are rubbery and peeling in white patches.

A good wife waits until you come back late in the night, with a happy face, a how was your day and a hot plate of food. If you detect any resentment in the “how” or “day” or how she opened the door, you quiz her out. “Why are you so angry? I almost had an accident on my way home!” … And I’m drunk and its 2:00 a.m.

Once the kraal you reeled her into was closed, you were off to conquer another project, off for another adventure. Your home was in good hands. When you had just met, you had whispered something like, I like you because you are the kind of girl who prays for her man. She was uneasy about it, not sure what it meant, but she does spend most nights awake looking for warmth in the arms of God.

It was supposed to be the beginning of life, finally, successfully off into the sunset, but walls are a cage if you are the only one within them.

A good wife produces beautiful obedient children who love you and take up your name. She always speaks well of you. She is always there for them when they need her, like if they run into a door knob and blood comes gushing out of the side of their head and she knows that she will be there for them but that there will be no one there for her.

A good wife must take care of her own self. You have important work to do. More importantly, your mother and friends need you. If you suspect that she really is sick and in pain, then declare that you are sicker. She must always take care of you, in sickness and in health. You did the chasing and now that she’s yours, her lifelong subservience to you as the accursed helper is your entitlement.

A good wife changes her name, her identity. You are an avalanche. She exists only under your own existence. Her story, her dreams, her self come second to yours.

A good wife wears her ring even though you hate yours, you can’t stand jewellery and besides, everyone knows you are married.

You remind her of when she was growing up. Children, to an African man are a nuisance in his path, an inconvenience – except to add to his manly stature when called upon the council of other men. Such is a wife to the curriculum vitae of her husband- good on paper. If they be bad, then what a loss, and if they be good, well, more accolades for him. His life is neither moved or tampered with, by the miniscule details of their own.

The good wife begins to crack right around the eyes- her expanding waist no longer of interest, she remains intact along paths untamed but no longer explored. She eventually becomes the matron that all good wives are- plump, forever tired, always within a second of delivering a slap to the maid or a neighbour’s child, her haughty laughter growing louder at every wedding.

We hurdle together on any verandah we can find, some with plastic bags on their heads. We are so close that we are content not to breathe, as long as no drop of water touches our skin. It’s worse when it is a taxi– all the air pathways are promptly sealed shut just because a drizzle has began.

And yet, when it rains, it feels like the heat in your clothes when you get back from work and dance care-less-ly in your sitting room because your jaw has been clenched so tightly since morning that you thought it had locked. You’re wet but warm at the same time.

As people whose access to water in secondary school was a privilege, and in some schools, at the height of ingenuity, the authorities turned the water off at the beginning of the term and let the taps loose on the day that we were going back home, being afraid of rain is a paradox.

Every day for three months, we lined our jerrycans in a winding jerrycan jam from the tap at the huge black tank, down the short flight of stairs and into the small compound to receive one drop every second, and yet we take refuge from water.

A girl was literally dragged through the trenches from the dormitory to the staff room for receiving chicken from her parents on visitation day, but we fear rain.

A teacher would rain blows on your back for sleeping in his class until you dropped from your desk – the desk with nails which popped out to scratch your skirt or bum- to the dusty patched cement floor; and we still fear drops of water.

Some people had their hair cut off in a malicious fashion (bigoli) on the day that they sat for their final paper in school, and we still hide from rain.

We were trained for difficulty; for Kony and his child soldiers, by people who lined up for sugar and salt, for systems that did not work, by people who saw their family get lost and were never seen again. We were trained for the ‘third world’- the mice that live under the sewers.

Can we at least dance in the rain?

Category: Story

The good wife

Why do we fear the rain?