Way back then, while Rachel could pull words out of thin air to mean what she pleased, and Ruth May was inventing her own, Adah and I were trying to puzzle out how everything you thought you knew means something different in Africa. We worried over nzolo-it means dearly beloved; or a white grub used for fish bait; or a special fetish against dysentery; or little potatoes. Nzole is the double-sized pagne that wraps around two people at once. Finally I see how these things are related. In a marriage ceremony, husband and wife stand tightly bound by their nzole and hold one another to be the most precious: nzolani.As precious as the first potatoes of the season, small and sweet like Georgia peanuts. Precious as the fattest grubs turned up from the soil, which catch the largest fish. And the fetish most treasured by mothers, against dysentery, contains a particle of all the things invoked by the word nzolo: you must dig and dry the grub and potatoes, bind them with a thread from your wedding cloth, and have them blessed in a fire by the ttganga doctor. Only by life’s best things are your children protected-this much I surely believe. Each of my peanut-brown babies I call my nzolani, and said it with the taste of fish and fire and new potatoes in my mouth. There is no other possibility now.

“Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place. Especially here” I say this frequently, while I’m boiling diapers in the kitchen house and having my imaginary arguments with an absent Rachel. (Which are not so different from arguments with Rachel in person.) She reminds me once again of the Communist threat. I walk outside to dump the water and wave at my neighbor, who’s boiling peanuts in a hubcap. Both of us cower at the sound of tires. It might be the black Mercedes of the casque-bleus, Mobutu’s deputies come to take our measly harvest to help finance another palace. And then it comes to me suddenly, from childhood, my first stammering definition of communism to Anatole: Thej do not fear the Lord, and they think everybody should have the same kind of house.

From where I’m standing, sister, it’s hard to fathom the threat.

I live in a tiny house piled high with boys, potatoes, fetishes and books of science, a wedding cloth, a disintegrating map of the world, an ancient leather suitcase of memories-a growing accumulation of past crowding out our ever-narrowing future. And our waiting is almost over. It’s taken ten years and seems like a miracle, but the Americans are losing in Angola. Their land mines are still all over the country, they take off the leg or the arm of a child every day, and I know what could happen to us if we travel those roads. But in my dreams I still have hope, and in life, no safe retreat. If I have to hop all the way on one foot, damn it, I’ll find a place I can claim as home.

Rachel Price THE EQUATORIAL

I AM FOREVER GETTING COMPLIMENTS on my spotless complexion, but let me tell you a little secret. It takes more work than anything in this world to keep yourself well preserved.

Jeez oh man, nothing like turning fifty to make you feel a hundred years old. Not that I was about to put candles on a cake and burn the place down. I got through that day without telling a soul. Now I’ve closed the bar and here I sit with my Lucky Strike and my sandal hanging off my toe and I can always look back on it as just one more day like any other. But it sure gives you something to compensate upon.

Did I ever think I would wind up here getting old? Not on your life. But here I am. I’ve walked off more marriages and close calls than you can shake a stick at, but never got out of the Dark Continent. I have settled down here and gotten to be such a stick-in-the-mud I don’t even like to go out! Last week I was forced to drive down to Brazzaville for the liquor order because I honestly could not find a driver trustworthy to come back with the liquor and car in one piece, but there was a flood on the way and two trees across the road, and when I finally got back here I kissed the floor of the bar. I did, I swear. Mostly I kissed it for still being there, since I still expect every plank of this place to be carried off by my own help during my absence. But so far, so good.

At least I can say that I’m a person who can look around and see what she’s accomplished in this world. Not to boast, hut I have created my own domain. I call the shots. There may be a few little faults in the plumbing and minor discrepancies among the staff, but I’m very confident of my service. I have a little sign in every room telling guests they are expected to complain at the office between the hours of nine and eleven A.M. daily. And do I hear a peep? No. I run a tight ship. That is one thing I have to be proud of. And number two, I’m making a killing. Three, there’s no time to get lonely. Like I said, same old face in the mirror, fifty years old and she doesn’t look a day over ninety. Ha, ha.

Do I ever think about the life I missed in the good old U.S.A.?

Practically every day, would be my answer. Oh, goodness, the parties, the cars, the music-the whole carefree American way of life. I’ve missed being a part of something you could really believe in. When we finally got TV here, for a long while they ran Dick Clark and the American Bandstand every afternoon at four o’clock. I’d lock up the bar, make myself a double Singapore Sling, settle down “with a paper fan and practically swoon with grief. I know how to do those hairstyles. I really could have been something in America.

Then why not go back? Well, now it’s too late, of course. I have responsibilities. First there was one husband and then another to tie me down, and then the Equatorial, which isn’t just a hotel, it’s like running a whole little country, where everybody wants to run off with a piece for themselves the minute you turn your back. The very idea of my things being scattered over hill and down dale through the jungle, my expensive French pressure cooker all charred to tarnation boiling manioc over some stinky fire, and my nice chrome countertops ending up as the roof of somebody’s shack? No thank you! I can’t bear the thought. You make something, seems like, and spend the rest of your days toiling so it won’t go all unraveled. One thing leads to another, then you’re mired in.

Years ago, when things first started going sour with Axelroot, that was probably when I should have gone home. I didn’t have anything invested in Africa yet but a little old apartment boudoir decorated to the best of my abilities in blush pink. Right then I could have tried to talk him into moving back to Texas, where he supposedly had some kind of ties, according to his passport, which turned out to be almost entirely false. Better yet, I could have gone by myself. Hell’s bells! I could have sashayed out the door without so much as a howdy-do, since technically speaking we were only married in the Biblical sense. Even back then I knew some gentlemen in high places that could have helped me scrounge up the plane fare, and then before you could say Jack Robinson Crusoe I’d have been back in Bethlehem, sharing a shack with Mother and Adah with my tail between my legs. Oh, sure, I’d have to hear them say I told you so about Axelroot. But I have swallowed my pride before, that’s for sure. I’ve done it so many times I am practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.

I had my bags packed more than once. But when push came to shove I was always afraid. Of “what? Well, it’s hard to explain. Scared I wouldn’t be able to fit back in is the long and short of it. I “was only nineteen or twenty at that time. My high school friends would still have been “whining over boyfriends and fighting for carhop jobs at the A amp;W Their idea of a dog-eat-dog world was Beauty School. And now here comes Rachel “with stained hair and one dead sister and a whole darn marriage behind her already, not to mention hell and high water. Not to mention the Congo. My long tramp through the mud left me tuckered out and just too worldly- wise to go along with the teen scene.