As I sat there playing scrabble with Mohammed

As I sat there playing scrabble with Mohammed

As I sat there playing scrabble with Mohammed at a plastic table, sitting on plastic chairs, I felt quite comfortable. To just sit quietly, minimal talking, playing with words was a perfect Sunday afternoon. Smiler came and joined us for a second game making words like boy, cow and up to my idiom, monkey and quoted. While there were few it was comfortable but then James and a crowd came and I hated it. A young woman was there and she was the one asked to get a chair, the one told she was too thin, the one who was touched in familiar gestures. It made me wonder what these engaged and married men really thought of her. Why were they being so familiar? I felt suspicious and uncomfortable. I felt like they were using her and that she was enjoying it because it made her feel bigger and she knew no other way to behave amongst men. It was acceptance and direction.
Dinner was ready and there was a confusion of whether I was invited to stay, would eat inside or out, would sit with James or eat later with the others and I wondered whether my colleague James really wanted me there at all now he was home and already inside preparing to be handed his dinner by another young girl who had come to the house and cooked the meal for them all. He’s pulled back since the novelty of having a white, female colleague wore off. To be honest my honeymoon period is over too. I am noticing more and more things that I am not happy with and find difficult because they do not so readily exist within my own world at home and so I count them as wrong or poor attitudes – mainly those towards work and women. I am here to work and I am a woman so they do impede on my everyday. It doesn’t make it any easier to sit back and ignore them.
I got up to go, I wanted to run, and asked a young man, Dennis, to accompany me. He is the least threatening and one who I know has a tender heart though he beats his fellow students in the same way he was when he was a junior like them. I like the way he looked after my puppy for a few weeks. He wants to be tough and I am sure he is but he is also malleable and of an age where it’s not so set in stone yet and so that is why I don’t find him very threatening. He has never been anything but kind and sweet to me. I contemplate having an affair with him to satisfy my own needs and because I am getting the feeling it will also satisfy some of his. His family is far away in the capital.
So I left with Dennis and we walked back to my house happy, calm with no threats to my femininity and stance as a woman in my own mind and this new society that I am settling into and then we parted. Whether we have an affair or not I don’t mind so much I just look forward to the opportunity to sit with someone who, as I said, does not feel threatening in any way.