flirt with her mother. While Thandi had been weeping in the loo, he had castled their positions. She was now sitting next to his father, who had been strutting around all day in his boxy tuxedo and tinted spectacles, trailed by a cloud of cologne and cognac. Drunk enough to forget their mutual dislike, Ronald started telling her about UNZA, where he had been dean of engineering for twenty years. Thandi suppressed her yawns behind smiles as he regaled her with bureaucratic stories about hirings and firings, bursaries and hierarchies. She wished she were sitting with Agnes, who was chatting softly to her aide, Grace.
The reception moved in slow motion, chewing up the cake, draining the liquor bottles, swallowing time. Thandi stared out at the laughing, chatting, eating, drinking, blinking wedding guests. All dressed up and laid out before her, they seemed like strangers, passengers on a flight. Only when a child waved, or a man raised his beer bottle, or a woman clinked a fork against a glass to make Lee kiss her – which he did with dead eyes and great gusto – did Thandi remember that these were her friends, her family, her people, that she had chosen them to be here with her. All she wanted was to be at home in bed, curled in a ball, alone and quietly bleeding.
2006
Thandi’s wedding-night mishap ought to have made her more adaptable. Instead, as time passed, she grew obsessed with always being prepared. Her life became a matrix of schedules – hers and Lee’s and their son’s. Her dainty handbag transformed into an African mother’s handbag: a repository of unexpected need. Over the years, that leather sack accumulated tissues, nappies, dental floss, condoms, panties, a bra, a clip-on tie, tampons, sugar packets, ketchup packets, lozenges, mints, sweets, toothpicks, an interesting toy, an interesting book, bottles of perfume and of rubbing alcohol, plasters, scissors, and a sachet of sharp and tiny tools – paperclips, safety pins, tacks and staples. As a stewardess, anticipating needs was how Thandi had served people. Now it became how she loved them.
Her son’s mere existence spurred a rage of solicitude in her. Marrying Lee had felt like a concatenation of compromises, with him and with herself. But Joseph was separate from all that, a beautiful accident – her blood pressure had skyrocketed during her pregnancy, and it had been a high-risk birth, an emergency C-section at eight months. The baby was underweight and prone to infection, colicky and mucousy. She stared for hours at his little face, a synopsis of his parents’ storied ones – Lee’s gold undertone, Thandi’s green eyes. Only she could provide what her boy needed. She fed him often, monitored his growth like a nutritionist. She held him tight enough to crush his bones.
By the time he was eight, Joseph had learned that he could get her attention by moving ever so slowly, a milquetoast torpor designed to torture her. He spent most of his time in his room, which he kept meticulously tidy. Thandi would stand in the threshold, her hands cupped in front of her.
‘Need anything, baby?’
Joseph, sprawled out on the bed, wouldn’t even look up from whatever languorous task was at hand – thumbing the pages of a book or the buttons of some toy.
‘Anything at all? Hungry?’ Thandi would reverse her cupped hands, turning them over as if she held an hourglass with grains of patience retracing their path.
After an unbearably long pause, Joseph would raise his head, mouth slack, and shake it. Left. Right. Left. Thandi would turn and walk off so he wouldn’t see her hands jerking open, the hourglass shattering, her patience running out.
‘He’s not that slow, Thunder,’ Lee would say when she complained, chucking her under the chin. ‘You’re just too fast.’
Easy for him to say. Lee spent all his time at work or abroad at conferences or out with his friends. She couldn’t really complain. After he had moved back to Lusaka from Harare and finished his medical residency at UTH, he had set up his own lucrative medical practice. They had moved into a large house in Thorn Park, with a freshly watered garden and two cars. They had a maid and a cook and a gardener and a driver, which Lee seemed to think was enough adult company for his wife. He would waltz in just in time for a meal or a bit of telly, then head straight to bed, belittling her impatience in passing.