The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 51

RAINY

SEASON

NINETEEN

When I tell them the story, I say that 1990 was the year I cried. I tell them all year I looked out of my window in New York City, and I cried because I could no longer hear their voices. I was twenty-eight years old when I left Liberia. When the semester ended in December 1989, I returned to Caldwell while I was on vacation from school, and went back to New York only two short weeks later. I wore only dresses then, country cloth to Ankara. Sometimes, I let the girls wipe the lipstick from my lips with their fingers and rub it across their own. They did that the morning I left, taking turns smearing that serious color. I promised them that I would see them again during the rainy season in June when I was on vacation from school.

I arrived in New York, and the weather was so different from our Liberian dry season that my teeth clattered. I cried during the entire flight, rubbing my fingers against their pictures under the lamp of my window seat. When I tell them the story, I tell them that by the time I landed, my eyes were red and after exiting customs, I ran into a taxi. New Year’s Eve was a few short days away so the streets in Harlem were busy with tourists. I had lived in New York for five months then, with another Fulbright from Japan named Yasuka, and an American woman named Anne, but when I got back to the apartment, they were not there. The silence made it even colder, and it was so cold that night I did not even unpack. I took off my shoes and climbed into bed, covering my body with sheets and blanket to keep warm. When that still felt too cold, and the bite of it reminded me of my sadness, I thought of him—Gus. I thought of my daughters and wondered what they were eating, if Korkor and Torma were helping them with their lessons, if they were happy. My thoughts were not peppered with their memory, they did not peek around the corners of my mind during the day; it was their ever-present memory that was seasoned with my thoughts, so that when I finished deciding whether I would wipe my eyes before falling asleep, or briefly wondered what I would do the following day, they were still there, never leaving my mind.

Ol’ Ma says it takes a special man, a good man, to give his wife a blessing to leave him. That is what Gus did for me. I wanted to study in America, where I imagined everyone lived in buildings as tall as clouds, from Gus’s stories of the few months he moved here shortly after the coup, and he told me I should come. Ol’ Ma said that these special men are clever and confident, so confident that they trust their choice of women, and they would never choose women who would not return to them. So when I received the letter stating that I had won the Fulbright scholarship, Gus, in his specialness, encouraged me to go.

“You are right. You can’t say no to the Fulbright. And at Columbia. In America!” he said, picking me up and dancing around the den, holding me close.

My Ma and Pa threw me a party at their house in Logan Town. I am the youngest of five girls and I have more cousins than I can count, so the house was crowded with familiar faces. Ma was known for her cooking and news spread that I would leave soon. I liked Logan Town most then, when guests filled even the yard around the plum tree. I spoke to Ma in the kitchen that day, stroking her hands as my girls played with the curtains in the corner.

“People are talking,” I told her.

“About what?” Ol’ Ma asked.

“That I have no business going to America when I have a husband and three daughters. They’re saying he makes enough money and there is no need for me to go.”

Ma made a deep sound, the sort of sigh she gave to ward off the enemies of her daughters, no matter how many rivers away.

“It’s a master’s degree, Ma,” I said. “I can come back and do plenty with it. Maybe one day I can even work at the education ministry. Can you imagine?”

My Ma had told me that she was happy that we had all listened to her and gotten jobs and an education, no matter how well our husbands did.

She asked me about Gus and I looked across the house to her sitting room, where he sat with a group of men, holding a Malta. He was the first and only man I had ever loved. We married while we were still at the University of Liberia and started having children right away. First Wi, then Tutu, then K. He was a special man—I knew what Ol’ Ma said was true—and even if I were to tell him that I wanted to move to Russia or to Vietnam or to Iceland, places too far away, if he knew those things would make me happy, he would have said yes.

The airport was busy and loud when he told me goodbye. He did not want me to miss my flight, so he rushed me. He was nervous, and I could tell because he acted the same way when he was