Heck, if I had been Nelson, I probably would have just sung and betrayed them all the first week they had me hitting stones at the quarry in Robben Island. Like, yes. Call me shallow, but I do cherish my soft hands and good food and bubbles. Or a good whisky. So, ja.
So, anyway, 1990. Daddy goes back to where the sanctions have been lifted, but he and my mother agree that we should stay in Zimbabwe because it’s all so uncertain even though Mandela is free. And besides, he doesn’t have a job yet and where will we stay and where will Owami go to school and such.
Stay until elections and Owami can do her Os and her As. But, of course, come home to vote if all is okay. It’s then when Daddy has left that I learn how to kiss and it’s nice, you know? No. I don’t kiss a boy. Because, I mean, I would get pregnant, duh.
Tinashe.
My bestie from primary and now at Girls’ High School with me. We do sleepovers at her home or at mine and in both cases, as our bedrooms only have one bed, we share a bed.
She whispers, “I wonder what kissing a boy is like?”
“It looks yucky,” I say. “Imagine swapping saliva with someone. You don’t know when they last brushed their teeth. But I wish I could try.”
“Well, I brushed my teeth and so did you.”
And so we kiss and something is happening to me and it seems to be happening to Tinashe too as we kiss so we decide to take some small mirrors and cover ourselves with the duvet and look at ourselves except we still call them our wee-wees even though we know the biological term because we are in form two and are studying science and part of it is human biology but vagina just seems like a heavy word, you know?
“Girls, are you still awake?” Tinashe’s mother asks from outside the door.
We guiltily pull down our nighties and put the small mirrors between us and pretend to sleep with our backs to each other.
Because Tinashe and I talk about everything, we shall later discuss this and ask each other, “Are we lesbians?”
We decide of course not, because we were just practising kissing with each other so that when we finally have boyfriends, who will become our husbands, who are the men to whom we will gift our purity, our virginity, we can at least know how to kiss, right? So whenever we have sleepovers, we continue practising for our future boyfriends who will become our husbands by kissing each other and caressing each other and it’s nice. Very nice.
At 18, we both finally have boyfriends. She, a string of them. She is enjoying herself. Her older sister has secretly taken her to one of her doctor friends to get the depo shot. Me, I got a boyfriend too. Just the one guy. Of course, we are going to get married.
I’m kak scared of my mother and daddy so we always do everything but sex. Because if I were to get pregnant, it would be my fault. Why didn’t my mother and aunts tell me that the clitoris is God’s gift to woman? Because shame, First-Boyfriend-Who-Will-Become-Husband is skilled in that department.
Then Wits happens. Then I, now in my first year of business studies, tell him, now doing his master’s in mathematics at University of Zimbabwe, that I am ready for sex. And I have got my depo shot and a whole box of condoms and I have got incense and candles and strawberries and everything that Hollywood has told me I need. And we kiss, and we caress and I go down on him and he goes down on me but he is all very perfunctory about it all as though he is rushing to the end goal and he slips on a condom like the experienced guy that he obviously is without breaking the kiss but he rushes to the end goal and here is what happens.
I open my eyes wide and nothing happens.
No stars fall from the sky.
There is no basketball dunking.
I mean nada. Nicht. Qha. Hapana. And he rolls off me. He is done.
I want to cry. I am about to cry. That’s it? I stand up and say I need to go to the bathroom. First-Boyfriend-Who-Becomes-Husband says, “Did you come?” I nod my head. A lie. And he, this man who didn’t make me come, says, “You didn’t bleed.”
Is this guy calling me a slut? This person had an A in A-level biology, and he really still thinks only the penis can break a hymen?
“I’m going to the toilet,” I mumble. I lock the door of the toilet of my studio, and I cry. I look at the mirror as I cry because pretty-crying is a thing and I mouth to myself, “It’s a lie. It’s all a lie. Kid ’n Play, Tisha Campbell, Molly Ringwald, John Cusack and his trenchcoat. Eddie Murphy, Halle Berry and Robin Givens. All of them lied. Sex is not great.”
Except, First-Boyfriend-Who-Becomes-Husband and I have, in fact, been having sex prior. As did Tinashe and I, come to think of it. It just wasn’t penetrative sex. And not all sex is supposed to be.
So I blame my mother and aunts for not making me realise what a glorious thing my body is and how beautiful sex is. And nywee nywee nywee, it’s unfeminist to blame my mother and aunts and my kids would probably cancel me except they can’t since they too always talk about how “Gogo is too much” so I said what I said. I blame them. But I mostly blame my mother and aunts for the advice they give me a few years later when First-Boyfriend-Who-Becomes-Husband and I are getting married.
Love Marry Kill is published by Kwela Books.
