The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 29

was a dream about her jug of palm oil, which she carried like a baby that day she came for us. I woke up and said her name in the dark, surprised to have remembered it all those years later. At that point I could not remember when last I had been outside. Some weeks prior I went to a store just below Eastern Parkway, one of the only stores of its kind that still existed among the deluge of coffee shops and yoga studios, to buy palm oil and frozen cassava leaf, to make the dish I knew would heal me, the only Liberian dish I made that tasted like Mam’s. When I arrived, a sign informed me that the store had closed indefinitely, and, returning to my apartment, I felt everything I had been avoiding crashing hard into me, tears staining my skin. I have not been able to wash them off for some time.

Before moving there I rid the place of ghosts. I burned sage—the Ol’ Mas say the spirits do not like the odor. I then called Mam and asked her to pray, certain they would listen to her voice, ascending in that musical way it did from my phone speaker, before they obeyed mine.

“I’ve been thinking about that woman,” I told her that late fall.

“What woman?” Mam asked.

“The rebel. From the war. I dreamed about her.”

“Oh,” she said when the silence overstayed. “Have you spoken to K recently?”

“A couple days ago,” I said.

“And you’ve eaten today?”

“I made cereal,” I said. “Her name was Satta, right?”

“Yes,” she said and breathed deeply into the phone. “You will be all right, Tutu.”

And Mam made that sound of married curiosity and indifference, an impossibility, her best invention.

The five or so steps from my bed to the kitchen felt like uphill lunges. I spent too long looking into mirrors, too long sleeping, buried under covers still marked with our collective smell, every moment I was not working. I had made it to my living room that day and I opened the large window where I placed a vase of Mam’s favorite flowers, lilies, now dried and unrecognizable in the escaping sun. The sill was cold when I climbed onto it, and I rested my slippers on the fire escape where children played below as we once did, and the Brooklyn drivers honked in the street while bits of conversations and laughter spilled from their car windows on the backs of words like move and fell and going and tomorrow, and the sirens came toward me from the distance, then disappeared again behind those words, and the new transplants hurried home, as gentrifiers do when it is almost dark and they are still fearful of corners.

I leaned my head against the stile and wondered how I smelled, how I looked, if music would ever sound the same, especially those songs I knew by heart. Wi called shortly after and I almost did not answer the phone because I did not care for the questions.

“How are you?” She asked this while exhaling, her daughters loud in the background.

“I’m fine,” I answered.

“You getting your work done?”

“I am,” I said, fighting the urge to look at my computer desk, the remote office where I spent a few hours a day consulting and freelance writing, then glaring into the orbit while an unedited novel sat idle on a minimized screen.

“Did you get out today?” She sighed again.

“I’m outside now,” I mumbled, staring through the holes beneath my feet, three stories down to the ground below.

“Outside outside, or on your fire escape?”

I did not answer. So she said my name in that way only Mam would. Then there was that familiar litany of consolations, fumbling pauses and attempts to make me laugh, her optimism harsh against my ears. She reprimanded her girls every few minutes and if I were well I would have smiled. She was that good at it.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I just need time.” And I needed my cassava leaf, the way they made it in Lai, spread over parboiled white rice drenched in oil, with shrimp, with dry fish and pepper that wounded my lips, reddened my skin, and those meats that required both hands to eat.

New York. By my midtwenties the transients around me were already collecting AA chips from too many weekends in Chelsea, habits that always felt unnatural to me because I have a low tolerance for pain and hangovers, and because the fundamentalist shadow of Mam and Papa’s early Sunday mornings in Texas, even during my self-proclaimed late-teen rebellion, remained. My habit during those years was love stories. Grand, provoking, almost silly, intoxicating, appropriated from romantic comedies and Old Testament Scripture. I had fallen in love in that city and then out of it too many times to count. And so I fit in perfectly there, in that way wanderers like myself do in refined cities, where most wear love like loose garments.

But he stuck.

We had been together for two years, all of which were long distance. Long-distance relationships begin beautifully, end suddenly, sometimes by accident, and thereafter smoke rises not because all is burned to ashes but because there is always something left in the pipe.

This was the other side of love. Everything infuriated me, everyone was guilty. During the fall after that relationship, the days were long and mornings came too soon. The sun crept toward the body of that girl hidden under blankets, that girl still running, that girl who lay on bare floors with her Ol’ Ma, who lay in New England attics with her new immigrant family, and that girl who lay with her sweetheart on an air mattress that flattened during the night, while he was in college or in med school or unemployed—in those days he could not afford a bed.

The Ol’ Mas did not tell us that you could not throw away love once it was finished. That it would remain on us like blackened scars, underneath blouses and