House Woman
By Adorah Nworah
August 2019
Nna let out a faint gasp at the sight of the woman in the kitchen. He took in everything – the small head, the big eyes, the pursed lips, the slender neck, the ankle beads, the measured steps, and the dull thumping of a heart, his heart, against a spindly cage. He rubbed his eyes and licked the bits of peeling skin on his lips. He wiped the soles of his Oxford mules on the welcome mat at the entrance to the brick-red mansion on a quiet street in Sugar Land, Texas.
The house was a four-bedroom single family residence built in the early nineties. His parents, Agbala and Eke, took great pride in it as it was the only house they’d ever owned in America. Over the years, they’d hacked at its vestigial parts like the glass block wall that once stood in the foyer till the house bore the brassy gleam of modernity.
Standing by the entrance to his parents’ house, Nna wished he’d listened to his mother, Agbala, who often reminded him to comb his hair. As the dusty black Toyota Camry that dropped him at the house began to pull out of the driveway, Nna fished in his pockets for his handy afro pick.
The woman was clad in a thin beach towel that threatened to fall to the ground. He could make out the outline of her buttocks (small, firm). The dull thumping in his chest increased its volume. She was what Agbala – his hurricane of a mother – would fondly call a yellow pawpaw, to be shielded from the sun at all costs.
But she was more than color, she was melody.
She hummed an old Bright Chimezie number, one Agbala often hummed as she chopped bell peppers in the airy open-concept kitchen of the Nwosu family house. But Agbala did not hum the song like the woman in the kitchen. Agbala was not melody.
Nna opened his mouth to introduce himself. A warm draft of stale air tickled his lips as he lowered his eyes to his torso. The Old Navy flannel shirt hung off his body like it didn’t ask to be there. It was not entirely his fault. Fridays were jeans day at his white-shoe law firm in Philadelphia, and the wrinkled shirt was the first thing his eyes, weary from reviewing the organizational structure charts of his clients, had seen that morning.
Nna tore his eyes away from the woman’s buttocks and tiptoed up the stairs with his suitcase, past the ledge in the upstairs hallway with a framed photograph of himself and his parents from his college graduation, past the upper-level living room, past the master bedroom, past the room his mother slept in whenever she got into a fight with his father, and into his bedroom.
His bedroom – cornflower-blue walls, fraying posters of Kobe Bryant, thumbprints from years of his mother’s egusi dinners – smelled of old spice, teenage angst, and balled socks. He pictured his mother Agbala, her hunched back curved like a sickle as she straightened his pillows and sniffed the air for dust. His palms dove past the blur of Bob Marley tees and khakis in his closet and reached for a washed black tee with a blown-up image of the Jonas Brothers. A month ago, he’d woken up in his Philadelphia row house to a call from his mother. He’d ignored the headache forming across his temple as she complained that he lived too far from Sugar Land, and didn’t he know the long distance was taking a toll on her health? He’d refused to concede to her demand that he leave his corporate job in Philadelphia for a boutique oil and gas law firm in Houston. With his mother, it was important to stand one’s ground, trembling knees and all – or risk becoming his father Eke. The poor man sought his wife’s stamp of approval for everything, down to the number of fried plantains he could have with his jollof.
Nna ran his fingers through his afro and his mother’s disapproving face flashed across his eyes. She eyed his hair, the whites of her eyes butter-yellow from too much melanin, or too much glinting at the sun, or too many sleepless nights. He pictured her in that moment, advising him that young Igbo men like himself must keep neat haircuts, not the ya-ya-ya hair of black boys in America, lest they (the ubiquitous powers that be) confuse him for a gangster, or worse, an easy corpse. He would turn the conversation around, announce that his law firm had just adopted a hybrid model that allowed associates to work remotely at their choosing. ‘I’ll be splitting my time between Philadelphia and Sugar Land, Mom. You get to have me to yourself,’ he would say to her, and for a moment, she would forget about his ya-ya-ya hair.
He heard the clinking china. The wooden ladle striking the sides of an aluminum pot. The pretty woman’s small feet on the kitchen parquet. Was she a guest? An intruder? Dare he ask? He looked at himself in the cast-iron mirror that leaned against his closet. He nodded approvingly at the big arms, the slim waist, and the toned legs – the result of one too many leg days at the gym a block away from his row house in Philadelphia.
He grabbed a wide-tooth comb from his dresser and ran it through his hair. Then cologne. A breath mint. He wanted to impress, and not just a little.
The woman’s back was still turned to Nna when he returned to the kitchen, her towel slipping down her torso to reveal a lacy marigold bra as she bustled around the cooker. She stood in front of one of his mother’s aluminum pots, the ladle in her right hand and a mitten in her left. There was a greying birthmark, the shape of a heart, on her upper left arm. He opened his mouth to speak but the words at the tip of his tongue sounded dirty and unfinished.
She raised a slender forearm to her lips and licked stew off her palm. Nna wished he was the stew, or that she would teach him to cook stew. She made it look simple. She was simplicity itself, all florals, and mittens, and diced onions, her tight curls neatly tucked behind her ears.
She reached for a serving bowl and her curious eyes connected with the cusp of his lips. He saw her. He saw the mole to the left of her upper lip, the hardness of her jaw, the crook in her nose and the widening of her eyes. She gasped.
‘Ikemefuna,’ the woman said, matter-of-fact. Her voice was musical, each syllable stretched thin like an octave.
‘Excuse me?’
‘That’s my name.’ She grinned.
Nna stared at the smatter of brown freckles above her cheeks, then at her lips, red and pulsing. She smelled of onions and the first spurt of blood from a gash on skin. Standing before the woman in that kitchen, he was painfully aware of his many imperfections. The penis that sometimes reeked of rancid cheese. The gap teeth. The lisp that slipped into his otherwise impeccable intonation (bachelor’s at St. John’s, Law school at NYU) when he pronounced words like sleep.
‘I am Nnaemeka,’ Nna announced, extending a hand. ‘I don’t think we have met.’
‘We haven’t,’ she replied.
‘But your parents speak highly of you.’
She ignored the outstretched palm and threw her arms around his neck. He felt the softness of her flesh and inhaled it.
‘Our parents were neighbors in Lagos many years ago,’ she continued. A smile danced along the edges of her lips. ‘Yours were smart enough to move to the United States. Mine are still in the same medium-housing flat on the Lagos mainland.’
‘I don’t remember anything from my Lagos days,’ Nna said apologetically. His parents rarely mentioned Lagos. When they did, it was in the abstract.
‘Not surprising,’ Ikemefuna murmured, stirring the thick red broth in the pot on the cooker.
‘How long are you here for?’
‘Who knows,’ she replied with a flourish as she scooped spoonfuls of smoldering red porridge and threw it into a serving bowl. ‘Your parents have been such gracious hosts.’
It was confirmed then. She was staying with his parents, sleeping in their guest room, traipsing their hallways, always accessible, present. She was his present.
‘You’re smiling.’
‘You make me smile,’ he replied without thought.
Again, Nna thought of his imperfections as he sat at the kitchen table. He slid his tongue across his gap teeth. He shook off the heavy blanket of his inadequacy and muted his thumping heart.
‘Extra spicy porridge yam,’ Ikemefuna said with a wink as she slid the serving bowl across the industrial kitchen table and towards him. ‘Your mother says it’s your favorite. Is that right?’
‘My mother is always right.’
He sat down at the table and quickly gulped forkfuls of porridge yam, stealing glances at the woman as she bustled around the kitchen, washing pots, and wiping countertops.
‘This is the best porridge yam I’ve ever had,’ he said. ‘You must teach me to cook it like you do.
‘If I teach you, I’d have to kill you,’ Ikemefuna smiled. Then she shook her head and laughed. ‘It’s an old family recipe that my grandmother passed to my mother, who in turn passed it to me. I’m a little possessive.’
‘Some things are worth dying for.’
‘Esau agrees with you.’
‘Esau?’
‘You know? The biblical glutton.’
Nna shook his head with amusement. He was not a Christian and neither were his parents. Save for a pair of crusty Ala figurines flanking the flat screen TV in the living room, the Sugar Land house bore no signs of organized religion. Through the years, Nna had fallen into a lazy agnosticism, a default contentment with not knowing.
When he raised his head from his empty plate, Ikemefuna was already stretching an arm from behind him to clear the kitchen table. He turned to hold her by her waist and sighed with relief when she threw her arms around his neck and pressed her chest to his torso so that the bulb of her nose rubbed against his clavicle. She was small in his arms, malleable, like playdough.
‘You should visit Lagos during the festive months,’ she whispered. ‘You’d fall in love with your people.’
‘Promise?’
‘When I was much younger, I spent Christmas as a member of a twelve-person Atilogwu group in Enugu. We’d paint our faces with nzu and wear heavy glass beads around our necks. We walked from compound to compound, dancing till the soles of our feet bled and our pouches brimmed with naira notes.’
‘So you’re quite the free spirit?’
‘My mother says I have an impatient chi. It’s always desiring the next adventure.’
‘An impatient chi?’
‘It’s the god in you. We all have one,’ she insisted. ‘Anyway, I spent last Christmas as one of Fela’s wives in a sold-out Lagos musical.’
Nna listened to the beautiful woman’s tales about palm-wine fueled mornings at a shrine in Ketu, all-nighter dress rehearsals, and broken English, a build-your-own English with jagged edges that matched the sharp tongues of Lagosians, those ones Ikemefuna called his people. He pictured Ikemefuna among those people, his people, dancing with vigor in a tiny rapa, her breasts peeking out the top of a bright red ankara.
He listened some more.
She was the only child of her parents. They’d adopted her when she was a few weeks old.
She had a strictly black nail polish policy, except on first dates (chrome white).
She created a new Spotify playlist on her birthdays – an ode to the preceding year.
And he noticed some more.
Her single dimple was on her left cheek.
She planted her hands on her hips to keep stable when she giggled.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he whispered. There. He’d said the words. ‘You must get that a lot.’
‘I do, but the mouths that sing my praises are often disappointing.’ She chuckled. ‘Sweaty vulcanizers, traders with invasive hands, and – do my father’s balding friends count?’
‘I can’t believe your boyfriend doesn’t write haikus in your name at the crack of dawn.’
Ikemefuna smiled at him. She cupped his left ear in her palms and pressed her lips to it. He pulled her closer to him. He loved her weight on him, melting into him.
‘Nna, I don’t think I introduced myself properly,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘My name is Ikemefuna Nwosu, and I am your wife.’
Excerpt from “House Woman” copyright © 2024 by Adorah Nworah. Published by The Borough Press.
About the book: One day in Lagos, young dancer Ikemefuna is put on a plane to Houston to meet her new husband, Nna. Promises are made to her – about her education, about the man she will marry, about her freedom. None of them are kept.
A few months later, self-professed feminist Nna finds a beautiful woman cooking in his parents’ kitchen. They tell him Ikemefuna is his wife, there to give them the grandson they’ve been waiting for. She appears obedient, malleable.
But she is no ordinary wife.
In the Texas heat, patience runs on short supply and the atmosphere in the house becomes increasingly strained, increasingly violent. Desperation makes people do strange things…
House Woman is a chilling new domestic literary thriller, perfect for fans of My Sister, the Serial Killer and Lullaby.
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Adorah Nworah is an Igbo writer from South-East Nigeria. Her stories have been published in AFREADA and adda magazine. Her short stories, “The Bride” and “Broken English” made the shortlist for the 2019 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and the longlist for the 2018 Short Story Day Africa Prize respectively. She lives in Philadelphia, where she practices real estate finance law.
You can read our interview with Adorah Nworah here
