The next morning, Mina
felt her husband nudging her awake and groggily, she rolled over from her
stomach to her back.
“We need to talk,” Baridi
said, as he got up from the bed. Walking to the light switch beside the bedroom
door, he flipped it and the room became bright.
“Can’t it wait?” Mina
responded with the beginnings of a frown on her face. Looking at the wall clock
in their room, she continued, “I need to sleep for two more hours before I have
to get ready for work.”
Coming over to her side of
the bed, Baridi sat and looking at his wife, said: “I’m sorry that I’m waking
you now but I think that this is the best time for us to talk. I’m sure the
week would be very busy for both of us as we have to go to work. I don’t think
it’s in our best interests to start the week fighting with each other when we
might not have the time to make up till the weekend.”
“Baridi, we could have
talked about this last night but you blew me off, remember?”
“I’m sorry about that,
okay. I just hate it when I can’t explain how I feel about anything without you
jumping at me.”
Mina sat up. “I wasn’t
jumping at you. I was angry because I had seen you stare at me like you didn’t
like what you were looking at and I wanted to be sure that I had only
misunderstood you. Yet, you completely denied ever looking at me in such a
manner and insisted that I had been imagining things. The only thing that would
make me agree to stay awake for any discussion is if you were to be honest
about what that was all about.”
Baridi was silent for a while.
He sighed deeply. ‘I’ve been awake for about thirty minutes thinking about the
events of last night and I finally admitted to myself that you may have seen
such a look on my face.” At the raised eyebrow Mina directed his way, he held
up his right hand and said, “Please wait a minute, let me finish. Whatever look
there had been on my face then, it hadn’t been intentional. That was probably
why I didn’t know what you were on about last night.”
“And what was it about?”
“Babe, this is hard to
talk about because you get so defensive anytime I try to discuss it.”
“What are you talking
about?”
“Last night, when you
walked in front of me, you looked familiar but you didn’t look like my Mina.”
At Mina’s look of
confusion, Baridi said: “Babe, since you had Sotonye, you’ve changed so much.
You look completely different from the lady I met, fell in love with and
married.”
Trying to inject some
humour into a discussion he already knew would get tense, Baridi smiled and
added: “You’re the lawyer so you have a better understanding about contracts
than I do but this feels like a breach of contract to me.”
Not in the least bit
amused, Mina asked quietly: “How exactly do you mean?”
“Quit beating about the bush, abeg. You’re saying that I’m fat now, right?”
Rubbing both hands down his face, Baridi said, “This is exactly the reason I don’t talk about this with you. You get all defensive about it. I’m trying to have a reasonable conversation with you and…”
“What’s so reasonable about a conversation aimed at putting me down, Baridi?” Mina said, cutting him off. “Have you looked at yourself lately in a mirror? That little pouch on your belly certainly wasn’t there when I met you, fell in love with you and agreed to marry you, was it? I may have pregnancy as an excuse for how I look now. What’s your excuse?”
“Now, you’re being ridiculous, Mina,” Baridi said dismissively, self-consciously rubbing his belly. “Who’s talking about me, anyway?”
“I’m talking about you, Baridi. You’ve dished out these overt and subtle insults about my body for too long for me not to take a good look at yours. You had the semblance of a flat tummy way back in the day. Where is it now? When I shopped for you after Sotonye’s birth, I noticed that you’ve gone up a size. Why is that? You talk to me about a breach of contract.
Didn’t you have a full head of hair on the day we got married? What’s with the receding hairline that you now camouflage by going clean-shaven? Why exactly do you think you can get away with any changes in your appearance and I can’t?”
To be continued
By Olaedo
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