words set that very kind of thinking into motion.
I watched P.T. set his chair legs back down on the ground and continue his teaching, being careful not to let his eyes fall on Nana. Across the room, Nana also had a smug look on his face. He didn’t go to youth services much after that.
20
Dear God,
Buzz says that Christianity is a cult except that it started so long ago that people didn’t know what cults were yet. He said we’re smarter now than we were back then. Is that true?
Dear God,
Would you show me that you’re real?
21
My apartment smelled like oil, like pepper, like rice and plantains. I set my bag down in the entryway and rushed to the kitchen to find a sight as familiar to me as my own body: my mother cooking.
“You’re up,” I said, and immediately regretted the choked excitement in my voice. I didn’t want to frighten her. I’d seen videos of cornered black mambas, striking before slipping away, faster than a blink. Was my mother capable of the same?
“You don’t have eggs. You don’t have milk. You don’t have flour. What do you eat?” she said. She was wearing a robe she must have found in one of my drawers. Her left breast, deflated from the weight loss and shriveled with age, peeked out through the thin fabric. When we were children, her propensity for nakedness had embarrassed Nana and me no end. Now, I was so happy to see her, all of her, I didn’t care.
“I don’t really cook,” I said.
She sucked her teeth at me and continued working, slicing the plantains, salting the jollof. I heard the sizzle of the oil, and that smell of hot, wet grease was enough to make my mouth water.
“If you had spent time in the kitchen with me, helping me, you would know how to make all of this. You would know how to feed yourself properly.”
I held my breath and counted to three, waiting for the urge to say something mean to pass. “You’re here now. I can learn now.”
She snorted. So, this was how it would go. I watched her lean over the pot of oil. She grabbed a handful of plantains and dropped them in, her hand so low, so close to the oil. The oil sputtered as it swallowed the plantains, and when my mother lifted her hand from the pot, I could see glistening specks from where the oil had spit at her. She wiped the spots with her index finger, touched her finger to her tongue. How many times had she been burned like this? She must have been immune.
“Do you remember that time you put hot oil on Nana’s foot?” I asked from my spot at the counter. I wanted to get up and help her, but I was nervous that she would make fun of me or, worse, tell me how every move I made was wrong. She was right that I had avoided her kitchen my entire childhood, but even now, even with my small sample size of days spent cooking with her, it’s her voice I hear, saying, “You clean as you go, you clean as you go,” whenever I cook.
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t remember? We were having a party at the house and you put oil—”
She sharply turned to face me. She was holding a mesh strainer in her hand, high up in the air like a gavel she could bring down at any moment. I saw panic in her face, panic that covered the blankness that had been there since she’d arrived.
“I never did that,” she said. “I never, never did that.”
I was going to press her but then I looked into her eyes and knew immediately that I had made a mistake. Not in the memory, carried back to me through that smell of hot oil, but in the reminder.
“I’m sorry. I must have dreamed it,” I said, and she brought the gavel down.
* * *
—
My mother rarely threw parties, and when she did, she spent the entire week leading up to them in enough of a cooking/cleaning frenzy to make you wonder if we were hosting royalty. There were a handful of Ghanaians in Alabama who made up the Ghana Association, and many of them had to drive upward of two hours to come to any of the gatherings. My mother, never the life of the party, only went to a meeting if the drive was