Read Online The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Helen Oyeyemi
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creatures that she could only feel made their paths through the trees.
After him Aya waited for others who had been turned away and tried to do them the favours they had come to ask of Mama and the other elders. As long as the favours were small, Aya could do them.
One day, Mama caught Aya carefully peeling away a kneeling grandmother’s cloudy-milk cataracts. She brought Aya to her bedroom, where rows and rows of her plainly cut wooden masks watched with thick smiles. The maskshung on brackets that slid through their eyeholes with lighted candles balanced on their flattened planes. The masks bled red and purple silk linings that made puddles where they touched the floor, but Mama stepped over them with graceful economy, drawing her wrapper up over her ankle in the same motion that she used to raise her foot. Mama sat on her tied-cane chair and put Yemaya on her knee; she smilingly accepted sticky showers of guava kisses on both cheeks, but she was not diverted. She said, ‘Aya, I suggest you don’t do as these visitors ask. I think it is like telling lies.’
But Yemaya Saramagua, she wants the visitors.
On the utmost tiptoe with leaf-strewn balcony stone, a pain burnt into each over-stretched arch, Aya tells the trees, ‘It’s not that I’m lonely.’ The trees stoop over the somewherehouse with their heads fused together and they do not listen and they cannot be reached. ‘Not that.’
And the visitors come. They come with beaded collars in her favourite colours layered on their necks like second skins. They come chewing on her name; confident like teeth cracking kola nuts; sure as sure, bitterness bursts and loses its way under the sallow pinch of salt.
Once, a bad woman came.
She came in through the London door and found her way up the basement stairs with so little noise that Aya was startled. The woman was deep yellow and slightly built. An ivory comb with a whorled oval head crawled up her frizzy heap of hair. Someone had made this bad woman come here. She was not willing and she wore no beads; she had broken them because she was afraid. Her shoulders were a bad fit; the tops of them stood higher than was correct, andthey gave her the appearance of constantly trying to achieve flight. For healing she had brought her poorly only son, a wan stick-boy of twelve who she was slowly sickening with pinches of ground glass because she hated him, because she loved him, and he would not obey her or stay by her side when he was well.
The woman, on her knees beside her son
(who met the floor of the somewherehouse without question or effort – it was only then that Aya realised that the previous acts of standing and walking had made no sense to him)
murmured meek pleas. The boy, slumped at the other end of his mother’s arm, did not understand what was happening to him, now or before. When Aya lifted her veil and the boy saw her face, he mewled in panic, coughed. Then, to the stirring of a great tenderness in Aya, the boy mastered himself in ashen silence the way he thought a brave somebody should.
Aya healed him.
She led the boy toward the bath, down the wayward third-floor hallway which threw itself off into a triangular corner after a few narrow and uncertain yards. Aya took the sick boy past the closed door beyond which the Kayodes sang. She held her arms around the boy’s shoulders to keep him from stumbling and bent close to him to ask his name, but the boy’s eyelids slammed shut at the sound of Kayodes’ singing. His face suffered an unconsciously repeated twitch.
Aya pitied the boy less.
She sent a drop of her vanilla essence to the bottom of the deep bath, then rocked back, easy, easy on her heels; the bath steam knotted as her vanilla stung it, the bath steam drank weight and was left tangible.
She stroked a wisp of it and it stayed intact, moved with her, curled under and around her hand.
Air had to be taken in the tiniest sniffs.
The sick boy sat and watched her. The sick boy blinked and
After him Aya waited for others who had been turned away and tried to do them the favours they had come to ask of Mama and the other elders. As long as the favours were small, Aya could do them.
One day, Mama caught Aya carefully peeling away a kneeling grandmother’s cloudy-milk cataracts. She brought Aya to her bedroom, where rows and rows of her plainly cut wooden masks watched with thick smiles. The maskshung on brackets that slid through their eyeholes with lighted candles balanced on their flattened planes. The masks bled red and purple silk linings that made puddles where they touched the floor, but Mama stepped over them with graceful economy, drawing her wrapper up over her ankle in the same motion that she used to raise her foot. Mama sat on her tied-cane chair and put Yemaya on her knee; she smilingly accepted sticky showers of guava kisses on both cheeks, but she was not diverted. She said, ‘Aya, I suggest you don’t do as these visitors ask. I think it is like telling lies.’
But Yemaya Saramagua, she wants the visitors.
On the utmost tiptoe with leaf-strewn balcony stone, a pain burnt into each over-stretched arch, Aya tells the trees, ‘It’s not that I’m lonely.’ The trees stoop over the somewherehouse with their heads fused together and they do not listen and they cannot be reached. ‘Not that.’
And the visitors come. They come with beaded collars in her favourite colours layered on their necks like second skins. They come chewing on her name; confident like teeth cracking kola nuts; sure as sure, bitterness bursts and loses its way under the sallow pinch of salt.
Once, a bad woman came.
She came in through the London door and found her way up the basement stairs with so little noise that Aya was startled. The woman was deep yellow and slightly built. An ivory comb with a whorled oval head crawled up her frizzy heap of hair. Someone had made this bad woman come here. She was not willing and she wore no beads; she had broken them because she was afraid. Her shoulders were a bad fit; the tops of them stood higher than was correct, andthey gave her the appearance of constantly trying to achieve flight. For healing she had brought her poorly only son, a wan stick-boy of twelve who she was slowly sickening with pinches of ground glass because she hated him, because she loved him, and he would not obey her or stay by her side when he was well.
The woman, on her knees beside her son
(who met the floor of the somewherehouse without question or effort – it was only then that Aya realised that the previous acts of standing and walking had made no sense to him)
murmured meek pleas. The boy, slumped at the other end of his mother’s arm, did not understand what was happening to him, now or before. When Aya lifted her veil and the boy saw her face, he mewled in panic, coughed. Then, to the stirring of a great tenderness in Aya, the boy mastered himself in ashen silence the way he thought a brave somebody should.
Aya healed him.
She led the boy toward the bath, down the wayward third-floor hallway which threw itself off into a triangular corner after a few narrow and uncertain yards. Aya took the sick boy past the closed door beyond which the Kayodes sang. She held her arms around the boy’s shoulders to keep him from stumbling and bent close to him to ask his name, but the boy’s eyelids slammed shut at the sound of Kayodes’ singing. His face suffered an unconsciously repeated twitch.
Aya pitied the boy less.
She sent a drop of her vanilla essence to the bottom of the deep bath, then rocked back, easy, easy on her heels; the bath steam knotted as her vanilla stung it, the bath steam drank weight and was left tangible.
She stroked a wisp of it and it stayed intact, moved with her, curled under and around her hand.
Air had to be taken in the tiniest sniffs.
The sick boy sat and watched her. The sick boy blinked and
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