PIECES OF ME

The reflection in the bathroom mirror is not mine. It’s lined with scratches and scabs from dried up chickenpox. I run a shaky finger over the tick-sized scab burrowed into my cheek. The resulting scar will remind me of last night’s fight with Dantago. All I had to do, as papa handed me the living-room key, was to make sure Dantago didn’t leave the house until he got home from the retreat. Staying indoors would have been easier if she didn’t need to smoke. Now, Papa’s voice in my head reprimands me for fighting with my elder sister.

My stomach churns the two gallons of water Dantago had me drink and I am drowsy from the pills I took last night. The bitter liquid from my gut clogs my throat as I lower myself onto the toilet bowl to pee. Taking a bunch of iron supplements and a few painkillers is not an effective suicide method at all, it occurs to me as I still remember her words, “my life would be better if you were dead.”

                   Papa will dismiss my suicide attempt as silly melodrama, or perhaps he’ll show me a passage about hell and emphasize that it’s a real place where people who commit suicide go. He’ll refer to the teenage girl who committed suicide because she didn’t want to do the dishes. See, I don’t want to die; I only need to nearly die, but each time I blink I see molten human faces with gaping mouths, screaming in a lake of fire.

Someone knocks.

“Keni, are you okay in there?”

“Yes, I am… I’m done.” I croak with a mouth bitter as dandelion greens.

Dressed, I stagger to the door and pull it open. The hinges squeal. Dantago stands just beyond the doorway, a wrinkle on her forehead. Blonde and black ombre tresses are splayed across her head like Medusa’s snakes. I relax when I notice how the warmth has returned to her gaze. This is the way I know her, warm with worry in her eyes from the time she came into my life.

I was six to her thirteen. Every day from when Papa told me I had a sister from another mother who’d come to live with us, I’d wait for a knock on the door, imagining what she’d look like. We’d play with our home-made ragdolls, and picture books, and we’d circle all definitive articles in every magazine we’d find. I’m fourteen now, and things are different. We fight and I’m tired.

 “How do you feel?” she asks.

When she speaks, I feel like I will unravel. She offers me her hand to which I flinch. Underneath her overgrown nails is dead human flesh. I run fingers over the scratches on my face.

“I feel fine,” I say and look away as if she’s still dangerous--as if she’ll gnaw and scratch. Instead, her arms swing open.

“Want a hug?”

 I sink into her softness and she presses me into an even deeper embrace. My arms hang limp along my sides. I start heaving against the swelling of her belly, and she rubs my back. The bitter taste in my throat is now a breathy groan.

“Aww… don’t scare me like that ever again, Keni, okay?”

Her soft blouse shifts against my cheek as I nod. A tear filters from my lashes. Dantago wipes it away. Her hand smells of stale cigarette smoke. She started the habit in the eleventh grade, at a new school where all the kids smoked to break rules. In the year 2000, when Dantago was in the twelfth grade, I overheard her tell Papa she didn’t need to study. She’d get rich like Bill Gates without finishing college. Before then, she wanted to be a lecturer and own a laptop, and much earlier she wanted to do housework, because that’s the job her mother did, and Papa laughed.

I hold my breath until she removes her hand from my face.

“I’m sorry,” she apologizes for what she thinks she has done. I know she doesn’t remember anything from last night just like the one evening she told me she found herself in Babylon, but that her boyfriend’s dog had followed her into the informal settlement nobody with sense visits at night. Now, she knows I was trying to make her wish come true, by dying. I do not point out the bloody flesh beneath her fingernails. I just let her hold me, as my mind drifts to the afternoon she had her first episode.

A headache that lasted for two days, had her bedridden and no Paracetamol could get rid of it. Papa prayed as we sat by her bedside. She lay so still I thought she was dead. I brought my face close to hers, to hear her exhale, reminded of all the times she played dead to freak me out. Papa placed a cool wet cloth over her forehead. Dantago soon woke up, but she wasn’t quite herself. I saw a coldness in her eyes that I’d never seen before. She spoke with a slur and an almost childlike demeanor. 

“What are you staring at?” she said to me. I sensed anger and instantly moved my face away.

“Aaaw, Dantago, don’t be like that,” Papa responded, “your sister is worried about you. She loves you. Can’t you see?”

Before Dantago started to change, she taught me how to protect my maidenhood by frowning. In the open market, I frowned the way Dantago had taught me to. That frown warded off “friendly” greetings from over-aged men. I swatted hands that came at my undeveloped breasts like houseflies. Dantago fought fiercely to protect what she thought I still had. Virginity.

I discovered by overhearing an argument Dantago and Papa had one morning that her mother’s boyfriends often had their way with her. She was eighteen when she sobbed and asked Papa where he’d been the first eleven years of her life. I could hear the hurt in her voice. She didn’t go into details, but I remember Papa going silent the moment she uttered the word “molested.” I knew then we had that in common, but how could I bring myself to tell her? How had she dealt with that knowledge all those years? These are all questions I can never ask her without context.

After Dantago’s embrace, I am intact. I am still that girl who survived the reservation, that girl who doesn’t cry. Dantago’s eyes radiate the warmth I’m used to.

“It’s okay to cry,” she says. I nod. There’s a potato in my throat. I swallow to stop myself from telling her, her words aren’t the only reason I want to die.  I want to tell Dantago that, unlike Papa I do not believe she is possessed by a demon. However, I stand befuddled at the personality that pummeled me last night. I cannot reconcile that Dantago with the one who’s hugging me. The Dantago whose nicotine hands wiped a tear off my cheek, will look at her own bloody nails and ask me why she has blood under them. She’ll eye my face and ask me what happened. The Dantago who in her changed state, according to Papa, almost bashed my brains in with a sledgehammer while I slept, and this warm-eyed, genteel person are not one and the same. I can’t trust either. Whatever I tell the good Dantago, the bad one will know, and she will not keep it to herself.

Dantago caresses my arm, and I remember the afternoon she kissed my cheek while I lay in her bed. She thought me asleep, but I was awake, and her hand on my arm felt like it feels now: the warmth penetrating my skin. She said I was pure and that she wished she was pure like me. Her words made me feel complete like a virgin. I wanted to wake up that instant to tell Dantago that I knew about her, and that the same thing had happened to me on the reservation. I wanted to tell her my secret, but I couldn’t.

                   I can tell her now, but the other Dantago hides in her head and gathers intel for Papa. The bad Dantago once grabbed the school notebook where I had doodled my name and the boy next door’s with little hearts and dragon scales adorning the ruled page. She told Papa I was lusting after Rodger. Lust? I didn’t want to hear that word. It reminded me of the preaching at church, and how the pastor’s wife told us, the young girls that, virginity was the pearl of our womanhood. Our husbands will one day love us even more, knowing that we were untouched, she’d said, and I’d prayed and prayed to God that I didn’t mean to lose my virginity that young, and that he should fix whatever was altered, so that my future husband wouldn’t know. I’d never tell anyone ever.

“What do you want to do with that boy?” Papa scolded.

“She wants to sleep with him!” the bad Dantago chimed in.

“No, I… I,” I tried to defend myself. I glared at Dantago. Her eyes were hard. She smirked and nodded satisfied. I just clamped my teeth together, swallowed hard while peeling my cuticles and sweating at the temples.

“You know that boy is epileptic. Do you want epileptic children?” Papa asked me.

I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t say anything. I wanted the earth to swallow me.

“Keni, the wheelie-bin is full. Don’t you want to empty it into the big orange cannister up the street?” Dantago asks me. Her voice is gentle, and I accept.

I walk up the street, pulling the bin. In the yard adjacent to our house, an aunty pegs dripping clothes onto a sagging line.

“Moro, Ousie Hannah,” I greet her.

“Moro,” she greets back.

I pass by some kids kicking a ball made of plastic shopping bags. It’s early morning and their legs are ashy.

 The black wheels of the green bin rumble as I drag it up the hill on the dirt road. I feel my arms tingle from the vibration. I get to the big orange canister and pause when I see the boy from primary school, Simeon. He’s dark and shiny with a massive nose. He looks at my face and I see every muscle in his twitch.

“People are becoming ugly,” he says. I glare at him. There’s no way I can lift the bin to empty it. I do not remember if Simeon helps me, or if some strangers do. Perhaps I just empty the bin next to the orange canister.

I walk home and the wheelie-bin follows me like a faithful dog on a leash. Simeon’s words echo in my head. “People are becoming ugly—People are becoming ugly.”

People, I think, only judge the external. He doesn’t know my battles. “People are becoming ugly?!” I should have told him to go and visit his mirror at home if he wanted to see ugly. Ugly my ass. I suck my teeth; my eyes are fixed on the street. The wheelie-bin sounds louder than the dogs barking from behind closed gates.

                   When I realized what I had lost, I didn’t have stretchmarks or breasts, and I didn’t have scars on my face. Nobody understands why I hardly smile. They see a stuck-up girl who thinks her vagina is made of gold. A girl who thinks her virginity is worth diamonds. “Your eggs will break!” they say, when I refuse their advances.  Who on earth told them when a girl loses her virginity, eggs break?”

When I get home from emptying our bin, Dantago is in the kitchen making stiff porridge with cornmeal and she’s frying up some onions.

“I made pap,” she says. I join her in the kitchen after washing my hands, and we serve ourselves. I sprinkle some salt onto the onions and oil on my plate. We eat this way when there’s nothing else to eat. The nausea dissipates, and I start feeling like myself again.

Dantago scoops up a handful of stiff porridge with her long nails. She makes little balls which she dips into the onion mixture before she eats. I wonder if my skin is still lodged underneath her nails. Can she can taste my blood in her mouth?

Dantago’s nails have been long for the longest time. She never used those nails on me; she used them for me. When she was fourteen and I was seven, she used those very nails to point at a diagram in a Biology textbook. In the diagram, a baby was coming out of a woman’s birth canal. My eyes popped out.

“Babies come from there?!” I questioned, holding my mouth.

All the while, I’d thought Dantago and I both were in Papa’s belly. That Papa puked Dantago out first and then seven years later, me. I’d always ask Papa where I came from. He never told me. My theory was Dantago and Papa’s comedy for years. I told Papa how babies came into the world later that day.

“Why did you tell her that?!” Papa asked Dantago, who sat on the couch stifling laughter.

The next year, teachers taught puberty at school. They said that a girl’s period could come at any time. I observed my panties every day. I thought that perhaps my mother would turn up when I got my first period. She’d give me ‘the talk.’

My mother would not come, and since Dantago will have died, Papa would give me the talk, after seeing my male friend. I was twenty-one and he would say,  “don’t give him the soft things.”

I was eight years old the year I packed sanitary pads in my suitcase. I didn’t want to be caught flatfooted when my menses arrived. I was to spend Christmas at Omutiuanduko, my mother’s reservation. Dantago found the pads.

“Keni, why did you pack pads?” she asked, laughter glazing each word.

“What if I get my period while at the reservation?” I asked and she started crackling.  Her eyes were two little arrows pointing at each other. She held her belly and my face flushed. Why was she laughing? Did she not know that some people got their period early?

“Papa, Papa, look at what I found in Keni’s suitcase.” Dantago called, waving the packet of sanitary pads at Papa. “She, she thinks, ha, ha, she’ll get her period at the reservation.”

Papa’s eyes disappeared into the folds of his aged skin. Then I heard one burst of laughter. The rest of his laughter was silent, and his tears started flowing. I only saw his chest tremble, as he was breathless laughing.

“Oh, Keni. It is not time yet,” Papa said between breaths, “you still have at least four years before it comes.”

“Oh.” I said and scratched the mini braids which Dantago had done on my hair.

My mother came to pick me up with her new boyfriend and we went to the reservation. I have this memory of myself on the reservation, naked, my lady parts hidden behind a loin cloth hanging like a tiny curtain. In this memory, my grandmother says that I’m too young to wear a t-shirt, that t-shirts make girl’s breasts grow too soon. I looked at my young breasts, the size of grapes and I watched them disappear in the scorching sun. Maybe I didn’t have breasts at all. Maybe I imagined them. I remember another girl my age. Her grandmother beat her breasts in with orthopedic shoes. If I remember correctly, the little lump inside became flat.

At the reservation, the wattle and daub walls of my grandmother’s two-roomed hut scratched white lines onto my back. My mother had left with her boyfriend. I didn’t notice her leave; I was too busy observing my body change. I arched an arm over my head, my neck bent like a flamingo scratching herself under the wings. I observed one armpit then the next. There were fluffy gold-colored hairs, less than those on a kiwifruit.

“Are you getting armpit hair?” my grandmother asked. She had been watching me from beneath the Mopane tree in front of the hut.

“No, just itchy,” I lied and elbowed my bent knees. Heat waves danced where the shade didn’t reach.

“Nambera,” my grandmother instructed, her eyes fixed on my exposed labia. So, I stood up and adjusted the loin napkin. This time, I sat with my legs stretched out. The shade shifted, and the sun burned.

I’ve told Papa and Dantago how each time a kid on the reservation punched, scratched, or kicked me, they’d remind me of my mother’s absence, but what I never told them were the things that happened at night when my uncle moistened his penis with saliva and killed who I would be. Nobody said anything when I didn’t seem alright. When I couldn’t pee right, when I felt abdominal pain, nobody asked me if I was okay. My mother wasn’t there, and I wanted her. Dantago was a child away in Windhoek. What could she have done for me?

 Four years later, as Papa foretold, my period came. I was off the reservation. Papa waited in the car as Dantago, and I got dressed for church. I was in the bathroom staring at a red dot on my flowery panties.

I went to our bedroom and Dantago was there, fastening a doekie on her head.

“There is something red on my panties,” I told her. I knew what the red stuff was but that’s the sentence everyone who got their period before me used.

“Really? Let me see?” Dantago smiled. Her eyes were too wide.

I pulled down my panties, revealing the peach fuzz on my mons pubis. Then I pointed to the little red dot. It was the size of a sesame seed, out of place, next to a red petal.

Dantago crouched and her long dress touched the floor. She nodded.

“Yes, you got your period now.” She tucked her lips in--a futile attempt at suppressing her excitement.

“Don’t tell Papa,” I begged, remembering the sanitary pad incident.

“I won’t tell, promise,” then she reached for a packet of pads, from her suitcase. We had no closet. This is happening, I thought. I finally had a period, but what if it was just a factory flaw in the panties’ design?

“Okay the sticky side goes on the panty; the wings go around like this…” She explained pointing at the tacky underside of a scented pad with a long-nailed pointer.

I already knew how to use pads. I had watched her use them and I also knew how to put on a bra, and how to take it off without removing the shirt.  She’d pull a bra out of her t-shirt sleeve like a magic trick, and I’d watch her gasping. I would do the same once my breasts are big enough to fit into her bras. Those were the years when Dantago was Dantago.

Dantago points at a lump of porridge on my plate.

“Are you going to eat that?”

“No, you can have it.”

When a pregnant woman asks you for anything you must give her. I know this rule and Dantago takes advantage of it. I know that after she eats like this, she will want to smoke, and there’s no way I can prevent that from happening. Last night has taught me not to interfere with Dantago’s desires.

“Will you go and wash our plates please? I want to go and look for a gwaai,[1]” she says.

“Okay,” I say and take the plates to the kitchen. Oh, that poor baby will come out addicted to cigarettes and beer. When I return from the kitchen, Dantago is gone. Papa is still at the church retreat.

                   When Papa returns from church later that evening, he notices the scratches on my face. Dantago is not home. His eyes are two brown balls of glossy worry. I do not know if he is worried about Dantago, or if he’s worried about my fading beauty. He places his Bible on the couch, and he shakes his head then lets out a faint whistle.

“Sss, this chickenpox makes you look like you were fighting,” he remarks. 

I do not tell him how difficult a task it was to keep Dantago indoors during her changed state, neither do I tell him of my attempt at suicide.

The year I turn twenty-one, and get the talk from Papa, a truck will run over Dantago’s torso on the crossroad up my street, and Dantago will be gone because of a raptured aorta. She’s been gone before that truck came and I want to know, so I ask Papa one day over a phone call what Dantago’s official diagnosis was

Though he’ll tell me Schizophrenia, Papa will maintain demons had possessed Dantago. A part of me recoils at the thought of “demonic oppression.” If demons look like the mirror reflection of a disheveled-haired woman in her late twenties with eyes the color of rubies, at two in the morning, then perhaps Papa is right. If demons mean a wet pillow, and relationships that never seem to work, and sex that doesn’t feel right, then perhaps Papa is right. I touch my cheek. It’s not a scab but a dip left from the scooped out skin. Years have passed, and I remember. I always do.

[1] Afrikaans slang for a “cigarette”