Maame by Jessica George
For Dad
Chapter One
In African culture—Wait, no, I don’t want to be presumptuous or in any way nationalistic enough to assume certain Ghanaian customs run true in other African countries. I might in fact just be speaking of what passes as practice in my family, but regardless of who the mores belong to, I was raised to keep family matters private. So if my dad has his own bedroom or my mum goes abroad for inexplicable lengths of time, it’s common knowledge within our household that we keep that business, and all matters like it, to ourselves. “They just won’t understand, you know? We’re Ghanaian, so we do things differently.”
Growing up, school dynamics, books, and shows on TV told me that best friends tell each other everything. It was almost the sole requirement, but I had to bend this rule, knowing the pieces of information I withheld meant I could never truly qualify as anyone’s best friend, not when no one really knew me.
Even now, none of my friends—helpfully, I don’t have many—know that every weekday I start the morning the same way. I wake up five minutes before my alarm and wait for it to go off at 6:00 A.M. I blink away any sticky traces of the night and tread silently downstairs, past my dad’s bedroom—now relocated to the ground floor—and into the kitchen. I close the door to restrict traveling noise and pour myself a bowl of cornflakes, eating a spoonful at a time as I move around the kitchen.
It’s a small, functional area with a gas stove (in desperate need of cleaning, but I assign that task to tomorrow evening), an oven with a missing grill door, a tall fridge, a smaller freezer filled with various unidentified let-me-not-waste-this food pieces (sorting through assigned to Saturday afternoon) and a washing machine that dances out from under the countertop when it’s on, but when empty is just light enough to push back with the weight of my body. Said countertops are a white-speckled dark gray with a dull sheen I think is meant to trick you into believing it’s marble.
I take a container of lunch from the batch I made on Sunday for myself, then cook pasta for Dad’s lunch and leave it covered in the microwave. The rice I make for his dinner goes on a shelf in the cold oven. I cut up oranges for both our snacks—Should I save the strawberries for tomorrow? I tap my nails on the kitchen counter, considering the expiry date. Nah, go for it—and leave Dad’s in a covered bowl, packing mine into another container.
None of my friends know it’s when I’m out of the shower that I hear Dad’s carer, Dawoud, come in. Today he’s on the phone, likely to his wife in Yemen where he’s from—he told me about her once. She’s supposedly very beautiful.
Dawoud is a bit of a giant, well over six feet and only a little round in the middle, with gray hair on his head and several strands escaping from his ears. A smoker in his sixties, he has a loud but hoarse voice. My dad’s fifty-seven, has never smoked, and stopped drinking years ago. Age is a terrifyingly inconsistent beast.
I cream my skin and pull out my Tuesday dress, navy, short-sleeved, loose-fitting, and below my knees, because no one in the office wears jeans. I tune in to a prayer channel Mum likes to randomly quiz me on, whilst pulling on black tights and inserting two gold studs that were passed down to me into my ears. I set a reminder to call Dr. Appong, my dad’s GP for the last three years, at lunch for Dad’s swollen feet, and look through my emails to find that we don’t qualify for a council tax reduction.
Downstairs, Dawoud is in the kitchen making toast, and tomorrow will be porridge because the two meals alternate on weekdays. I walk into the living room and tell Dad, “I’ll make you pancakes on Saturday.”
“Oh, goody,” he says smiling, but he won’t remember the pancakes until I feed them to him on Saturday morning. That’s how his Parkinson’s works. He can remember constant, repetitive things, like mine and Dawoud’s presence, but short-term details won’t sit in his brain for very long. They literally go through one ear, settle long enough for him to reply, then go out the other. Some days his medication will assist, but other days I think the meds are too busy tackling his swollen joints or his shaking hands, his high-blood pressure or his difficulty speaking, to lend a hand.
I have a picture of my parents taken in September 1984 and in it Dad is tall and handsome with an Afro and a silver chunky bracelet he still wears to this day. Whenever I look at that photo, I think of my last day at college, eight years ago. My year were having a party thrown in a bar, our equivalent of a prom, I guess. I didn’t end up going even though I was asked. By Connor … no, Charlie, the quiet guy in my maths class that I had no idea even liked me. I did say yes; I bought a dress, but then I had to cancel on the day. Poor Charlie. An hour before I texted him to say I couldn’t make it, my dad received his diagnosis: Parkinson’s disease.
We’d all been quick to blame the aging process for his “clumsiness” or short-term memory. I mean, we’ve all put our keys down and then declared them missing two minutes later, so who were we to judge? But then one evening, Dad got lost.
I was back from school and the only one at home when he called the landline.
“Madeleine? Maddie,” he said. “I think … I don’t know where I am.”
It wasn’t what he said that made me grip the phone tighter; we live in London: easy to get lost, but easy to find your way back. No, it was the fear in Dad’s voice that got to me. Over the course of my life, Dad had shown himself to be many things, but afraid was never one of them.