1.
In December, one of those nothing afternoons after Christmas, my younger sister Ruth returns to the holiday house, where I am bored with extended family on the stoep. The guests get up, ready to greet them, while my dad finds chairs for her and David. But she pauses with a funny look on her face, as if she’s remembered a dream or eaten something sweet, and says she’s engaged. Now everyone rises, and I make my own lips follow in a smile. David is bashful behind her, accepting hugs and handshakes. I’d like to ask him why he didn’t tell me he was going to propose, ask my parents if they knew. Of course they knew.
My aunt takes pictures of our family—David now snug among us, Ruth with her hand splayed. There are pictures of us on this stoep as children, holding the Easter eggs we found in the Wild Coast overgrowth of what one might call a garden below. It’s thoughtful of David to propose in Mbotyi, somewhere on those shaggy hills overlooking the sea, and for them to return to celebrate in the house that has been ours for three generations. While it was still part of the old Transkei, my great-grandfather bought the land from a chief for three bottles of sherry—a story my family used to share freely, even humorously. But it’s been gradually left out of our repertoire, like an ivory heirloom we pretend not to own.
Besides the engagement, we’ll remember this holiday as the one with the bedbugs. They only seem to live in the bed where Ruth and I sleep, but somehow they haven’t touched her. As we smile at the camera, I joke that I’ll be the sister in the pictures with bites on her face. My older brother Rory laughs and hits me in the side, then hugs me.
I’ll also remember this holiday as the one when I work on a tan, as responsibly as I can. After three years away, I am trying to re-bond with my country. I read books by local authors, wait for low tide to run the beach back and forth, but feel restless amidst my surroundings—the sounds of speedboats through the mangroves, the screams of city children in the waves. Also, I don’t know what I’ll be doing come January—what paying job my new “meaningful” master’s might get me, what city that job would take me to, the person I could or could not meet there. Ruth’s news disorients me further.
In the evening, after the aunts and uncles and cousins have left, we pick at turkey leftovers in the kitchen. Before we peel off to bed, Ruth suggests we close with a prayer. We all bow our heads, the buzz of the fluorescent light and grasshoppers growing louder in the silence. I hear the tones of my dad—earnest, grateful—and I feel my head become heavy, my closed eyes twitching. Since I was young, following the prayers of others has made me feel sleepy, almost drunk.
2.
It was in a furniture store in Durban Central. We were buying a bunk bed for me and Ruth and were passing the double beds piled with duvets and cushions on show. I asked my mom whether anyone could share a bed when they grew up.
“Only if they’re married,” she’d said.
“Not even a man and a woman who are friends?”
She looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “No, only a husband and wife sleep in the same bed.”
3.
In the house in Mbotyi, Ruth and I have always slept in the second bedroom. It has only a double bed, which we pretend to resent sharing. When we were younger, during blackouts, we’d carry our candles to our night tables, pretending we were Meg and Jo in Little Women, who shared a bed too.
This holiday, David’s been given a mattress to sleep on in my grandfather’s old study next door. Around bedtime each night he and Ruth have gone in, the light on and door ajar. I hear them while I read, talking in warm breaths. When she finally comes to bed, she gets in solemnly, as if entrusted with some important duty.
Tonight she stays with David longer. There’s more silence between them, filled by the sound of clothing scratching against a blanket. I close my book early, fall asleep before she returns.
4.
January comes—a funny month in the Southern Hemisphere. In London, the Christmas lights will have come down and there’ll be a good stretch of cold to help people out of the holiday slump. But, back in Durban, everyone tries to refind their routines as the temperatures climb further into summer.
Ruth enters the year with the knowledge that she now has a partner forever, and I search for jobs from my parents’ house. Family friends welcome me back from my studies, then ask about the wedding plans. I appear gracious, excited, but conscious of my appearance in a way I never used to be—my hair, my skin, my weight. On one visit my aunt asks if they’ve picked a date. It makes me remember a friend’s engagement party from years ago, how her sister had gone around handing out save-the-date magnets. I’d felt sorry for her, the single older one, but at least she was still very pretty. Now I realize that she couldn’t have been older than twenty-four, younger than I am now.
My family and I were only spectators at weddings until my brother Rory got married two years ago. Then, we sat at the main table above the other guests, and I felt like a cast member in a show we were putting on for the first time. The music stopped at midnight, and the MC directed everyone to send off the couple. Ruth and I found ourselves at the end of the tunnel we all made. As Rory and his wife ran under our arms and into the car, we watched after them, sharing the weight of a story that had ended. It was hard knowing that our family car or a Christmas morning could no longer contain just the five of us. But the pain felt right—like growing pains, an expansion.
The pain feels different this time. I think about how, each morning in Mbotyi, Ruth took a camping chair to a far corner of the stoep. She stared out beyond her open Bible and had what I assume were long chats with God. She still managed to escape dish duty and sulked when she was losing in Monopoly, things I’d expect her to grow out of before finding herself married. But maybe everything seems conquerable through a promise from God, perhaps delivered to David in a moment in church when he realized he wanted all of Ruth.
They’ve started attending marriage preparation classes. The girls in Ruth’s house-share have created a vision board for her in their kitchen, both as a sort of planner for the wedding and for the readying of her soul. There are cutouts of things from bridal magazines and lines from worship songs with words like “surrender” and “blessed.” I eye out the updates on my visits, wondering if I dare make fun of them to Ruth—the choice of flowy font, a picture of a woman with open palms. It’s on one of these visits that Ruth tells me she’s invited Grace to be a third bridesmaid, in addition to me and her best friend, Crystal.
“Why?” I ask. Grace is five years older than Ruth, two years older than me. “Are you that close?”
“I think Grace would be a good idea as a sort of mentor person,” she says, “being married.”
I picture Grace, two rows ahead of me in church, her husband’s hand resting on her back. When everyone shakes hands at The Sign of Peace, they usually kiss. Faithful enough to be rewarded with lifetime love, Grace is an obvious choice.
5.
By February, I’m still on the job search. My studies now seem vague and impractical when I scan the requirements on the listings. And the jobs that I might have the skills for—copywriting, market research—don’t seem to serve any greater good. I get restless, download a dating app. I set a generous radius and match with Paul from Pietermaritzburg.
He makes the effort to drive into Durban on the first date. We get a coffee, settle on a bench in Mitchell Park. I tell him about my time in London and play down the second master’s I’ve just completed, all the while relishing his impressed nods. After a ski season in the States, he’s found himself in the backwaters of KwaZulu-Natal, and we strike up a snobbish affinity—that traveling has made us more broad-thinking and restless than our peers, while carefully acknowledging the aspects of our race and class that have allowed us to feel these things.
“He’s going to cook dinner for me,” I tell Ruth, when she asks how the date went.
“Where, in Pietermaritzburg?” she asks. “Should you be traveling home so late?”
I shrug, let her read into my silence. I’ll tell my parents that I’m sleeping at a friend’s. Ruth’s brow quivers and I know she is wondering whether to question my plan. I am snatching something from her, creating my own shortcuts.
6.
The bridesmaids agree to share a gift for the hen party. We decide on matching nightgowns for the couple.
“And I’ll add some practical things,” says Grace.
I buy the gowns from a high-end chain that Ruth and I usually only browse on Instagram. As I watch the shop attendant wrapping them in tissue paper, I remember the games Ruth would make me play when we were young, if I was feeling kind.
Ruth wants the hen party, like the wedding, at our house in Mbotyi. Grace and Crystal seem reluctant; I am ambivalent—impressed that Ruth is making her friends brave the five-hour drive, the dirt roads alone, but less thrilled by the idea of a group of white girls wandering the place in showy sashes and flower wreaths.
We arrive in May, a week before the wedding. Ruth and I take the second bedroom as always, and let Grace and Crystal share the master bedroom. The others set up Christmas beds in the lounge.
We walk to the beach. The sun is behind banks of consistent gray clouds. I’m the only one swimming; the rest walk the bay in little groups. Since being home, I’ve taken every opportunity to swim in the sea, to find meaning in the natural beauty here, pretending it’s neutral, pure.
The next day, we gather on the stoep with champagne and snacks. Despite my advising her that no one really cares to sit and watch, Ruth unwraps her gifts. She gasps at the nightgowns. While she holds hers up, I spy some pharmacy items nestled in the paper.
“You can open those later,” Grace says, “some handy things for the honeymoon.”
When the others get up to refill their plates, my eyes drift to the pile of new lingerie among the other gifts. More underwear than I could dream of. I push away the thought of Ruth waking up, walking around in her nightgown, somehow older, somehow older than me.
In the evening we walk to the restaurant at the backpackers’ hostel—past the sparsely stocked spaza shop, a group of local children calling us for sweets, a cow pulling at the roadside grass. My grandfather used to say that this place, like most of the former Transkei, attracts a certain kind of person. He obviously didn’t mean the Xhosa people who lived here, but the visitors with free spirits who craved remote places. He also meant they were white and owned four-by-fours. During apartheid, the government and developers left this area alone, disinterested in its stubborn terrain. Most would say that not much has changed—the roads turn to mud when the rain comes, the land is still resistant. The region seems ringed by a blessing or curse.
We reach the backpackers’ to find it surprisingly full. A group of hikers are checking in at the reception, their calves flecked with mud, their unclipped backpacks piled on an old couch by the counter. In the restaurant area, there’s a table outside that might have space. I ask the guy at the edge of it, who raises his eyes dreamily from the rolling paper in his fingers. When we’re seated, I look around at the other guests. Most of them are barefoot, a little unraveled round the edges, especially compared to our own party, which has arrived in closed shoes and makeup. A staff member comes to ask what we want to drink. We order the same quarts of beer that the people next to us are drinking, an unvoiced pact to try and fit in.
It’s sometime after supper when I see the girl in white. She’s at the campfire, kneeling oddly and talking to the other people in the way a salesperson would—her shoulders open, a cock to her head. Crystal sees me looking at her.
“She spoke to me earlier,” she whispers. “She says she’s training to be a sangoma.”
There’s a rope around the girl’s waist. Her dress looks like it’s made from a stiff cotton, cut just above the knee, making the outfit look chic, almost.
“I didn’t know there could be white sangomas,” I say.
“Her mom told me it can happen to anyone—the ancestors call you,” Crystal says. “She’s visiting from Cape Town.”
Crystal turns her head to a group of middle-aged people eating supper. The two women sip white wine, the man has a whiskey.
“The brown-haired one.”
The woman is tanned, wears a knit jersey and tennis shoes. She reminds me of the mothers of girls I knew at school, who never worked and drove them to extracurricular activities in their SUVs.
“Her daughter was having all these dreams and headaches until they figured out she was being called.”
“To do what?” I ask, impatient with Crystal’s wide eyes, her breathy tone.
“To be a healer. She’s living in a hut somewhere with a real sangoma while she trains. Her mom said the headaches stopped—just like that. As soon as she agreed to come here.”
I almost roll my eyes. I can imagine the woman relaying this to her tennis friends in Cape Town, who are fascinated with her daughter’s surprising vocation. A white person assured by the higher powers that she belongs in this country, has a role to play. Proof, by extension, that they all must too.
I look back toward the campfire. The girl is around Ruth’s age. Her eyes wear the same mesmerized look of people on drugs at festivals, except she is engaged in what looks like a very lucid explanation of her calling.
“She’s been going round to all the tables,” Crystal says. “Sometimes she gives people things from that brown pouch round her waist—herbs or something.”
I turn back to our own table, hoping she doesn’t approach me. If she’s supposed to be in training, what is she doing fraternizing among all the tourists at the backpackers’, with its burger special and cheap beer? I don’t believe that her calling is real, that she really understands the sacrifices she’d need to make. Although, maybe this is the point of faith.
7.
God has never made me convicted about something, sure of the path before me. Instead, I’ve felt like a bystander that witnesses the faith of others. I wonder if they pray more, somehow believe better. And that this rewards them with a clear vocation, prophetic dreams, strong intentions.
Paul and I have continued to see each other, but the distance between Durban and Pietermaritzburg is an excuse for not making our visits more regular. We like each other, which comes from a shared understanding of going about the world: with tolerance, independence, a tendency not to lose ourselves in things. Halfway through our meetups, he usually takes my hand and starts to stroke it. I know it’s more for the touch of someone than any particular affection for me.
Sometimes this has led to me staying over at his. Sometimes at the dinner table back home, when my family starts to discuss the wedding or bow their heads in prayer, I take my thoughts to my nights with Paul—the brand-new feeling of a stranger’s bed.
8.
At her makeup trial, the beautician gave Ruth a tip: that when she does Ruth’s face on the day, they should be alone and silent. It will be the only time Ruth will have to herself.
I doubt Ruth will take the advice—she’d want me for company at least. But when the day arrives, one of the last hot days in Mbotyi, she closes the door of our bedroom to be alone. The photographer is given access; I see evidence from the pictures after. There’s a typical shot in black and white: Ruth’s lashes lifting to be painted, her pupils far away. In another picture, I am reminded how young she is, perhaps by how the hairpiece makes her look like a princess.
She was stressed, she tells me later, once we’re allowed into the room to help her dress. The feeling is bittersweet, less certain than she anticipated. Her head on my mom’s lap the night before, she’d wondered what would change—if she could still claim her youngest place in the family, falter into dodging the dishes, her sulks. A part of me wants to console her, but another objects to the role she wants to keep. Ruth, who’ll share a bed with her husband, who’ll leave me to sleep in the second bedroom alone.
We’ve created an aisle that starts at the top of the stoep, where the bridal party will descend to the guests in the garden, and David at its edge.
I’m the final bridesmaid to make my way down. I’m reminded of school prize-giving, a careful walk to collect my award. I smile for the entire ceremony, so no picture can show anything other than joy.
When it’s over, Ruth is given to the guests. The only moment we share is just before her speech, as she leans in close to me at the table and pleads for an anxiety pill she left in our bedroom. I linger for a second, reminded that she still needs me, before I jump up.
She leaves just before midnight. The dance floor fizzles shortly after, exhausted by the joy of the sober crowd.
9.
I’m woken by the cicadas early in the morning, the bedroom fully light and hot. My head and legs feel heavy, as if I really have had a long night of drinking and the alcohol is sitting in my veins. I find myself in thoughts of half sleeping, allowing them to escape from me, to become their own entities, entire scenes. The sangoma-in-training approaches my table at the backpackers’ and begins to defend her calling. How the spirits have no skin color, how all she could do was surrender. I am jealous, and then drowsy, wishing she would stop talking.
It’s 8:45 when I wake up again. I lie in the center of the bed, let my limbs stretch to each side. I think of what I’d like to do once we’ve cleaned up. I feel the expectation of a holiday, the restlessness that has followed me since I returned home. Maybe I should run to the beach and have a swim. And I wonder if the sangoma wasn’t trying to convince me about anything but rather asking what I’m still doing here. Then I think about Paul, that I haven’t replied to the message he sent two days ago.
The night before the wedding, as Ruth and I lay in this bed, she asked about him. She was trying to sound casual, to hide her confusion about the relationship’s lack of momentum. Ruth believes in the importance of guarding one’s heart, hers having never been broken. As we lay there, I knew any answer I gave wouldn’t make sense to her. I know she thinks I’m involving myself with someone who has no real intentions. But I don’t know if I have intentions either—for him, for returning here, returning home. If only that’s what faith could be—unfolding, unsure. I turned away and said good night. I waited for her breathing to deepen in the dark.
Megan Tennant is a writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She holds master’s degrees in creative writing from the University of Cape Town and in London studies from Queen Mary University of London.
