The Wives
By Naledi Mashishi
He had left her alone with that woman. Again.
He had said, “I’ll be back in two weeks, Ma,” giving her a kiss on the cheek and that woman a longer kiss on the mouth. He barely glanced back before closing the door behind him. Tension bubbled up in the room like a pot about to spill over. She looked at the wife and saw the irritated expression she wore. Then she shuffled back to her room to pray.
Jesus needed to intervene. She could feel that woman’s curses pounding at the door and prayed to God to send them away. She said the Lord’s prayer loudly. She said it again. A knock came at the door. “Please, Ma,” the wife said. “The baby is sleeping. You’ll wake her up.”
She paused for a moment, then began to sing a hymn even louder. What kind of a person would demand that she praise the Lord softly? This further proved that woman was all wrong for her son.
Ever since the wedding day, she had wondered how her son could marry a woman like that. Where had she gone wrong? She had single-handedly raised him into the intelligent, driven, successful man he was today. She had taken gruelling jobs working over the years first cleaning white people’s homes and then cleaning hotels. When she closed her eyes, she could still see herself in the backroom she had rented for the two of them counting out tips by candlelight to see if she could afford another loaf of bread for him. She had knocked on doors so he could walk through gaining an internship here, a scholarship to a top school there.
When he earned a place at one of the few mixed race schools in the country hundreds of kilometres away, she held back her tears as she packed his bags. She smiled and waved as he boarded the train to school, only to return for term break three months later, and only when she watched the train disappear into the horizon did she let her tears fall. She kept all the letters he sent her from school and prayed over them each night, asking God to ensure his success. After he had finished highschool he was only home for two short months before she saw him off again for university. All the while her heart swelled with pride and ached with longing. At night she comforted herself by whispering that his life would be better than hers ever was. That all of her years of sacrifice would bear him fruit ripe with prosperity.
And in return he had married that woman. A spoiled rich girl with skin so light she could almost pass for white from a distance. A brat from the affluent corner of Soweto who had grown up with a boarding school education, been driven by her father who owned the only car on the street, and had an obnoxious dog that yapped loudly throughout the wedding preparations. That woman filled rooms with her laughter and moved through the world as if she owned it. She drank alcohol, spoke loudly, wore pants, and most egregiously, brought her son into a world of late night parties where they danced to sinful music.
Since he had moved the three of them into one house she had watched how that woman changed. One daughter was born and then another. The wife became more withdrawn, more sullen, more grey. She became convinced that the real reason her son left so often was not for work as he claimed, but because he could sense his wife greying and did not want to risk her draining the colour out of him too.
She watched the way that woman looked at her with contempt. She imagined her whispering into her son’s ear, “let’s send your mother away. We can put her in a home.” But she wouldn’t let that Jezebel win. Just as Jesus had prayed to God for strength to resist the devil, she too would pray to God, asking Him to send her son the strength he needed to resist that woman. She would not let the wife win.
So she prayed. When she left her room for dinner she saw the meal the wife had prepared and huffed. “Did you cook that chicken properly?” she asked. “It looks undercooked to me.”
She sighed. “Don’t worry, Ma. It isn’t undercooked. I made sure.” She raised an eyebrow at the prepared plate of chicken, rice, and vegetables. She ignored it and made herself toasted bread with tea instead. She didn’t trust that woman’s cooking. She grew up a pampered princess. What did she know about cooking? Her son had even had to teach her how to make pap! Imagine a man teaching his wife how to cook? Clearly she could not be trusted with chicken.
That night as she slept it was that woman’s face she saw in her dream. In it, darkness surrounded her. She stretched her fingers in front of her and gasped as they met hard, smooth walls inches from her face. She struggled to breathe in the thinning air. Her hands felt the curves of the walls around her and she realised with horror that she was lying in a coffin. Suddenly her eyes were flooded with light from above. As she blinked she saw the wife looking down on her with an unsettling smile. She began to laugh. She laughed until tears ran down her face and said in a demonic voice, “now you’ll never see your son again!” She shut the lid, leaving her in darkness once again.
She woke in a panic. Her nightdress clung to her back from the sweat. She knew that what she saw wasn’t a dream. It was a vision. God had sent her a clear warning. She had been right not to touch the food. That woman was trying to get rid of her!
In the morning she went to the kitchen. The wife was sitting at the table with the baby in her arms and the toddler biting into pieces of toast. She would often look at the children and wonder how two beings so precious and pure could have come from a woman like that. She often wished she could keep her granddaughters close and get rid of the wife.
“I had a vision last night,” she said. The wife looked up, staring for a moment at the wall. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and finally looked at her.
“About what, Ma?” she asked through gritted teeth.
“About you,” she lifted a finger. “You want me dead-”
“Now, Ma-”
“I was lying in a coffin and you lifted the lid and laughed at me. You wanted me dead and I know what that means. You want me gone don’t you? Don’t you?”
The wife denied it loudly, furiously, but she knew better. She had heard it whispered through the corridors at church. “You always need to watch out for the wives,” her peers warned one another. “You think you know your son but you’ll see how much he changes once he gets married. You’ll be amazed at how she manipulates him to do her bidding. The wives are the worst. The worst.”
When her son returned she collapsed into his arms crying, “your wife wants to get rid of me! I saw it in a vision! You mustn’t let her! You mustn’t!”
She heard them arguing that night. “Whatever you are doing to upset Ma, you need to stop!” he said.
“I’m not doing anything!” The wife yelled. “Your mother is paranoid and you’re always taking her side! If you were here more you’d know how bad she can be! She isn’t well! I’m telling you, she isn’t well!”
She heard them arguing and thought, “that woman really is prepared to do anything to get rid of me. Even lie! Don’t let her win, my son. Don’t let her win.”
One day the wife packed three bags, one for herself and one for each child. She saw that woman’s father roll into the driveway in his fancy BMW, get out, and help her pack the bags into the boot. Her son stood in the doorway watching after her and his children. She watched the divorce penetrate his skin, drawing lines on his face and turning black hairs grey.
She had expected him to come back to her now. That woman had returned to her parents in Soweto leaving behind a chasm between her and her son. He barely spoke. He had retreated into a secret place, one where she could not reach him. He said little of the divorce and nothing of his feelings. She tried to reassure him it was for the best.
“If she was the right woman for you she would have never left,” she said. “Don’t worry, my son. God will send you a good, Christian woman who will treat you the way you deserve.”
But his work trips became more frequent. He found another house for himself. “The girls are getting bigger,” he had explained. “I need a home with more space and a garden for the weekends I have them. But don’t worry Ma, I’ll visit you as often as I can.”
And to his credit he did. But it wasn’t enough. She spent more time pacing her home alone with no grandchildren to keep her company. She had never had so much room to herself before. She began to feel suffocated by her own loneliness. She would look out the window and see a younger version of herself, belly swollen from pregnancy, sitting at a table and holding a letter from the love of her life. She watched herself open the letter, read it, and drop the pages, letting them fall and shatter her heart upon impact with the floor. The only man she had ever truly loved and the father of her unborn child was getting married. To someone else. She felt the emptiness of abandonment. The way her grief turned her veins into stone. When her son left she felt them harden again and only when he returned did she feel them thaw.
She heard whispering voices ricocheting through the hallway. One day he’ll leave and he won’t come back they said. He will show you that you have raised his father.
She shook the voices away. They were wrong. Was he not working to provide a good life for his daughters? Was he not providing a good life for her? He was the one who had plucked her out of her backroom in Soweto and placed her in a quiet suburban home as beautiful as the ones she once cleaned. Because of him she had an uninterrupted supply of electricity and a fridge that was always stocked with food. He put her on his medical aid so she never had to pay for a doctor or medication again. Whenever he was in the city he dutifully took her to church on Sundays and when he wasn’t he paid a driver to take her wherever she needed to go. How could she complain? What was there to complain about? So the voices became softer. Their words stung less. Her son was taking care of her and his children. And most importantly, he always returned home.
And then one day the earth fell out from under her.
She watched out the window as his sleek car pulled into the driveway. She waved as he stepped out and realised with shock that he was not alone. A head with long, shiny dark hair emerged from his car. The head turned and revealed a lovely oval face that couldn’t yet have been thirty.
She watched stone-faced as he came to the door with this new woman, this latest usurper. She looked as if she had been plucked from a page of a fashion magazine. She gave a dazzling smile, flashing bright, straight teeth. In a soothing radio host voice she said, “Dumela, Mama. O kae?”
She looked from the woman to her son wondering what was the meaning of this. She stepped aside to allow him in and the usurper followed behind him. She saw a light in his eyes that had dimmed after his divorce. She watched in near silence as the new woman flitted about her house like an exotic bird. And she talked. And talked. And talked. If everyone were assigned daily quotas for the words they used, this new woman would have exhausted the quotas for all three of them in the space of an afternoon.
She found the new woman’s energy suspicious. She was sure that if her son left the two of them alone, the new woman’s smile would crumble and her true colours would come shining through. She fixated on that smile. It was too white. Unnaturally white. A shade of white that suggested cosmetic procedures. And that hair was certainly a wig. A church friend of hers often complained about the cost of her daughter’s wigs and she wondered how much that wig - which moved at the slightest tilt of the head - had cost.
After an eternity, the new woman said her goodbyes and her son drove her home. She waited impatiently for him to come back. She would tell him the truth. There was something off about this new woman and her intuition hadn’t failed her yet. That hair, that smile, the manicured nails and her youth all screamed a kept woman looking for a new keeper. And her son was the target.
He soon returned and sat across from her. “So Ma,” he began. “What did you think of her?”
She turned up her nose. “She seems very glamorous. And I’m not sure about these glamorous women. The stories I’ve heard.”
“She’s not like that at all, Ma,” he insisted. “She’s a wonderful, kind-hearted person. And the girls love her! She gets along so well with them. You’ll get to know her better because I...well, I’ve asked her to marry me.”
“You’ve done what?” she asked in outrage. How could he want to marry a woman like that? That woman would suck him dry and then bat her no doubt synthetic eyelashes at the next man with fat pockets! But he was insistent. Wedding plans were already underway. He was informing her but had no intention of asking for her permission.
That night she had another dream and knew immediately by its vivid colours that it was another vision. In it, the new woman had red nails the length and shape of talons. The woman dipped her talons into her son’s pockets and took out wads of R100 notes while he watched on, enamoured with her. He became thinner while she became larger with each wad she took, breaking out into a smile that showed unnaturally white fangs.
She woke up panting. She felt utterly powerless to do anything. There was a time her son listened to her visions. When a vision could successfully stop him from going on a much anticipated night out. But one day he began to sigh when she mentioned them. He began to roll his eyes, say “yes Ma”, and do whatever she warned him against doing anyway.
At that moment a memory came back to her. Of the same conversation nearly ten years before when he still had the self-congratulatory youthful glow of a recent graduation. “Ma, we’re getting married,” he’d said of a different woman. The first woman. And then another vision. Her son waved to her from the window of a train taking him to the other side of the country. But this time he was a grown man. And he was not coming back.
So she bent her head and prayed.
A few weeks later the first wife came. She had brought the girls who lugged overnight bags with them into the house. It was their school holidays and they had come to spend the weekend with her. She had already stocked a cupboard with their favourite treats in anticipation.
She hugged them both tightly, warmly, and once they’d run off to watch cartoons on television she set her eyes on the first wife. She noticed how fresh faced and pretty she looked. How simple but elegant her clothing was.
“Have you heard?” she asked the first wife.
“Yes I have, Ma. I’ve met her. She seems nice. And the girls really like her.”
“Eish, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t trust her.”
It occurred to her then that the two of them were on the outside looking in. In a twist of irony the first wife had become her confidante. Here was the woman who had chosen her son before he became a successful businessman whose black and white face smiled out the pages of the weekly newspaper. Even during the divorce, the first wife had fought for the girls rather than money. Here was a woman who wore her feelings on her face and not behind an artificial white smile. It had irritated her once, watching this woman who could not contain her feelings. But now she preferred the honesty. And even now, years after she had walked out of her marriage she ensured that her girls were still in their father and grandmother’s lives. Her ability to stand in that doorway and drop off her girls after everything showed how strong her character was. How much integrity she had.
“Really, Ma, I think you need to give her a chance. She doesn’t seem like a bad person. You might even like her.”
But she didn’t want to. Would the other woman, this new woman, have done the same as the first one under similar conditions? Would this new woman conspire to oust her so she could have her son all to herself? Maybe, just maybe, she had been wrong about the first woman. Maybe she had been a good match for her son after all.
Naledi Mashishi is an author and researcher based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her debut novel Invisible Strings (2021) has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Literary Awards 2022. In 2019, she received the Casa Lorde Writing Residency hosted by Blackbird Books Eunice Ngododo Own Voices Initiative.
- All rights to this story remain with the author. Please do not repost or reproduce this material without permission.
Did you enjoy this story? Drop a comment below!
