Call and Response by Gothataone Moeng

Author:Gothataone Moeng [Moeng, Gothataone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

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Outside, the air hung heavy and still. It was one of those days that stretched on and on: the sun early to rise, by midday lulling everything catatonic, slow to set. The jacaranda tree in the backyard had shed all over the pool. Its light-purple flowers stuck to Lebogang’s oldest son as he dipped his body in and out of the water. None of the sisters could swim. The pool was mostly for the benefit of Lebogang’s sons and their friends, who had taken swimming lessons at the private schools they went to.

The sisters’ mother lay prone on the patio. Her feet were bare, her head too. Her blouse was open and fanned out on either side of her. She pressed the flesh of her stomach and chest into the coolness of the tiles. Sedilame lay next to her, gazing at the wisps of clouds above. She wanted to lie out on the lawn and feel the sun on her face. But it was the kind of brutally hot day where the sun shone with a blinding brightness, its rays razors, a certain pressure in the atmosphere that usually portended rain, but the rains had been scant that season.

“Mme, I need you to help me undo my hair,” Sedilame said.

Her mother pushed Sedilame’s head away from her. “It’s too hot.”

She had this tendency, Sedilame did, of needing her mother’s hands on her. To undo her braids or oil her scalp. Even on that day, when she arrived at the house, she had playfully sat on their mother’s lap and laughed at her nephews’ consternation. She knew the embarrassment her family felt on her behalf, that her life had not turned out as her performance at school had led them all to believe. The thick of that shame never left her; she waded in it every day, when she had to tell her mother that she had quit yet another job. She avoided her primary school friends, her relatives from Serowe, the group of students she’d left with for England (most returned, working for Debswana). She avoided her sisters too. It was only because Lebogang had coerced their mother into making the call herself that Sedilame had shown up today.

“Let your sisters do it,” her mother said.

Lebogang sat on a patio chair across from them. She was balancing a tray on her knees, slicing a watermelon, her face knitted in concentration. Boitumelo paced on the brim of the pool, laughing into her cell phone, toe dipped into the water.

“You have the sweetest hands,” Sedilame said. She poked her mother in the stomach. “Mme, I am asking. I am begging you.”

Her mother sat up. “What’s wrong with this girl?”

Boitumelo walked up to the patio and bent down to pull the flaps of her mother’s blouse closed. “Button your shirt, old woman,” she said gently.

“Maybe what we need is someone with some kind of medical training,” Boitumelo said to Lebogang. “Not quite a nurse, but something like that. A professional.”

“Mme is sitting right here,” Sedilame said, staring up at her sister.

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