Page 34 of Cursed Daughters
“Mummy!” Eniiyi shouted as she sprang up, disturbing the paper and the sleeping dog. She grabbed Ebun’s leg, hugging it, and gazed up beaming. Ebun looked away from Monife’s eyes.
“How are you, Eni?” she asked as she disentangled herself from the toddler, took off her blazer and laid it on the sofa. Eniiyi wasted no time in telling Ebun everything that had happened in her day, which consisted of drinking juice, falling down, chasing the dog and finding ants. She talked so fast, she ran out of breath. Then Aunty Bunmi pointed to the paper on the floor.
“Let me see what you have drawn.”
“It’s not ready, Gamma.”
“It’s ready. Bring it.”
Ebun was barely paying attention to the exchange. But she did not miss her aunt say, “Don’t pass it to me with your left hand, Eniiyi. What have I told you?”
Ebun raised her head quickly and watched as Eniiyi switched the page from her left hand to her right. How many times had she seen her aunt correct Monife? How long had this been going on?
“You’re trying to change her dominant hand?”
“Before nk?´? I have told her, if she doesn’t improve, her in-laws will chase her from their house.”
“Aunty Bunmi, I hope you are joking.” It must have been something about the tone of her voice. Bunmi opened her mouth and shut it again. Unlike her aunt’s generation, Ebun didn’t consider the left hand to be unclean, and she certainly didn’t want them needlessly traumatising her daughter. “Let her use her left hand.”
“But—”
“But nothing. She is my daughter. And I don’t care what hand she uses to eat, what hand she uses to pass things, or what hand she uses to wipe her ass. I don’t want to hear you correcting her like that again.”
“Ebun. You can’t talk to your aunt in that manner,” her mother snapped.
Ebun dug her fingernails into her palm and took a steadying breath. She muttered a curt apology that satisfied no one. Eniiyi was looking from her mother to her grandmother in confusion. Then she toddled over to her mother and offered her her drawing. She was becoming a master at gauging the moods of the adults around her, and Ebun saw how she was eager to peace-keep where she could.
“Look, Mummy.”
Ebun collected the sheet from her. At first she couldn’t make out what it was she was looking at. A circle with squiggly lines above it and a crooked shape below. Beside it, a near-identical circle and crooked shape but no squiggly lines. Thankfully, there were eyes in the circle and a crescent-shaped smile. She crouched down to Eniiyi’s level.
“And who is this?”
Eniiyi proudly tapped the squiggly-line figure. “This me!”
“And who is this next to you?”
“Also me.”
“There’s two of you?”
“Small me and big me.”
Ebun’s hands shook but she kept holding the paper. Perhaps shewas reading too much into it. She had to be reading too much into it. She looked around. Thankfully, the mothers hadn’t been listening. They were still sulky after her outburst, talking to each other with their shoulders turned performatively away from her.
Ebun straightened up and her mother glanced at her.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? You look—”
“I said I’m fine,” Ebun snapped, but that only increased her mother’s curiosity. She looked at the paper clutched in her hands.
“Let me see the drawing.”
Ebun tore up the drawing before she had truly decided to do so. Eniiyi began to cry.
