Love – Page 6 – 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.

Chocolate fudge and Vanilla ice cream. That is what I ate the first time he left. I went straight from the bus park – the human-car-bodaboda-bicycle-wheelbarrow-vendor-bus wild misalignment that is downtown Old Kampala to the neat crowds of Café J that was now almost empty as they prepared to close.

I had paid the parking ticket at the bus park on the way out, too expensive for the twelve minutes I had spent there. I left him in his seat, on the fifth row on the right on a cushion with peeping brown foam out of its tattered red covers. It was coming to 8:00 p.m., on the usual heady Kampala night- especially in this part of the city where everyone was always sweating and moving, where the whistles from the mugged men wrestling heavy cargo on their shoulders reached you two seconds before they swiped by you, almost taking your head with them. He was on his way, on an overnight bus to Kenya- indefinitely.

Indefinitely– a vague word that was always used in the same sentence as suspension. The first time I had heard the word was on a Monday assembly as I stood in a uniformed column of children listening to the authorities speak. They were reading a list of names of students who had been indefinitely suspended. “What did it mean?,” we whispered. “How long would they be sent home? “

Now, I knew what it meant. It meant that there was no period of time to wait for. There were no time limits – an undefined amount of time.

As I maneuvered out of the park, I had narrowly missed being flattened by a heavy towering bus swinging from one side of the road to another. The driver, completely unaware of the small white car underneath him, had rolled his small black steering wheel strenuously from the left and then to the right, attempting a pinpoint turn on a one lane road as he entered the same ragged sky-blue metallic gate I was just driving out of.

I rarely ate cake, then; and certainly not cake and ice cream! My four years away had included a vow of loneliness and food restrictions to cater for a derailed sense of identity. Looking out of my window, within those four walls, I silently chose the company back home over the overbearing alone-ness in this new world.

There was a feeling of emptiness only the rush of sweetness could suspend. In the cool neon lights reflecting on the black marble table, sugar quickly filled the spaces in my heart. I had done this before. I could do it again.

Tag: Love

The good wife

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