Millions

My friend, her name is Emily, had her grandparents die. They left her a silo in Texas, a coastal house on rocky pastures in Massachusetts Bay. Blue lace china they got on their European honeymoon. A dowry. A college education. One hundred thousand dollars in stocks and bonds.

This is her inheritance.

My grandmother, sitting across from me now, has just made a rather cruel comment about my weight. She doesn’t understand why this time last year I could not will myself out of bed. She doesn’t understand what the sunlight has to do with my mood. She doesn’t understand why I shrink when she comes near me, in this packed family hall, why I do not take her gently offered hand. She doesn’t understand why I don’t believe that anything she has is gently offered (I know it was not acquired that way — she has been through more than I will ever be).

She shakes her head at my stomach when I walk into a room. Sitting across from me now, she proclaims rather loudly that she thought I had stopped all that eating. Though she says it in broken English, maybe that should blunt the blow. The next instant, she will look at me with century-old concern and ask if school isn’t treating me too harshly. She will put a hand to my forehead if I so much as shiver. Sitting across from me now, worry lines older than I am drawn on her forehead. She will clap with unmitigated glee when my mother tells her I am graduating, although she has no concept of International Relations. She will hold my chin in her hands and pray for me, sitting across from me now, and that is as close to feeling God as I will ever be. She will love me, with a love so potent she has no choice but to ask when I got so big and fat and afraid. She’s talked to God about me, you see.

Every night, like a soldier, she gets on her knees, humble, and she talks to God about me.

When my grandmother dies all I will be left is the truth that if you lick enough salt, the pepper you have rubbed into your eye will lose its sting. That if you rub earwax on a boil, it will vanish. That there are special creams (maybe only she has them in the world) for when your thighs start to rub together at thirteen. I will be left with four different ways to fry plantain, and the right way to eat pounded yam so the mound is not desecrated there, on the plate. I will be left the right way to wash a pot, the long way to boil white rice. Her sadness, so thick it starts to slur.

I will be given her skirts (they won’t fit), her favourite stories (they won’t fit), her endless need to pray (it won’t fit).

I will be bequeathed parables; I will remember them in someone else’s language.

From grandma, I will inherit an inability to eat without guilt.

I will inherit parcels and bundles of pain, different kinds of passed down and carried over shame.

No hundreds or thousands or dollars.

In stocks or bonds.

I will inherit guilt, motherhood, and a responsibility to all the branches of this wizened family tree.

She leaves me embarrassed, ashamed, aware of everything that lives in the unholy dark.

She leaves me that restoration which can only happen once there is a reckoning.

When Emily asks me how much she left to me, I will miss her ruthlessness, my grandmother.

I will miss her cruelty (this is what they called her, this is what they meant to say, this is why I could not love her, this is why I loved her), my grandmother.

I will miss the soft underbelly of her fleshy arms.

Then I will ask Emily if anyone ever begged a God on bended knee for her sake,

and I will answer,

millions.

For this is my inheritance.

By Oluwarimike Abiodun-Oni