Changes by Ama Ata Aidoo Page A

‘a proper wife’. What had discouraged them was his lack of enthusiasm and the fact that they suspected Esi didn’t care one way or another. The purpose of the project had been two-fold: to get him to make more children, ‘because his lady-wife appeared to be very satisfied with only one child,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  a terrible mistake, a dangerous situation.’
    They also wanted to hurt Esi: very badly, if they could. And if she didn’t care one way or another, then there was no point to it, was there? As far as Esi was concerned, his sisters were no better. They used to come and insinuate that their brother was failing in his duties to the family because she had turned his head — with ‘something’.
    â€˜She fried it with the breakfast eggs!’
    â€˜She put it into cakes!’
    And they would whisper and laugh. As far as the sisters were concerned, Oko never had money to spend on them because he was busy wasting his salary on her. When Esi let it be known that in fact she earned more than he did, their new line of attack was that it served him right, marrying a woman who had more money than him. Hiswife could never respect him. It was also around this time that the hints began to drop here and there: about the need for him to get himself an unspoilt young woman, properly brought up, whose eyes have not jumped over her eyebrows with too much education and too much money of her own … No she couldn’t go to them.
    As a result of Esi’s growing uncertainty about the justification of her decision, she was hesitating to tell Opokuya her story. And since any hesitation with communication was itself a new development in their relationship, it too was creating its own nervous tensions in her. If Opokuya was her last hope of getting an understanding at all, then she had better not let go of her. For here, where no one ever made the mistake of thinking that any marriage was strictly the affair of the two people involved, one could never attempt to fight any war in a marriage alone. And if she lost Opokuya too, she would have to fight alone.
    Before Opokuya moved into Accra recently, she and Esi had only once before lived in the same town since they were in secondary school. It was when Esi and Oko were first married and Esi returned with Oko to Kumasi, where he had been teaching. Kubi was then an assistant surveyor, and Opokuya was still a midwife at the Central Hospital. At the time, neither of them had any marital problems to share. Of course Opokuya as usual had sounded as if she had plenty. But then, as some of her colleagues always said unkindly, Opokuya searched for problems to talk about, so that she too would sound just like any other wife. As for Esi, she was then expecting her baby, and was too recently married to be aware of problems even if there had been any.
    After her baby was born, Esi had wanted to return to work. But that had not been easy. She had had to face the difficulty of having to choose between two not so attractive options. She could stay on at Kumasi, but that meant that she would not be working at all, or not meaningfully. It was not every government department that had regional branches. The Department of Urban Statistics was one of those that didn’t. Or she could return to Accra for her regular job: as long as she first convinced Oko that they could still see one another as often as possible at weekends, either she going or he coming. But at the merest hint of that, Oko had made it clear that the subject wasn’t even up for discussion. He made it clear that as far as he was concerned they had done enough of that kind of travelling when they were just friends’. In fact he had thought one reason why theyhad got married was to give themselves the chance to be together properly, no?
    In the end the only option left her, which she had had to take, was to ask to be seconded to the regional census