Elodie is the woman I chose. She sits, cross legged, on the rough carpeted floor of my flat in the South End. She has her hair in thick Shuku plaits; the braids run up and are twisted atop of her head in a fuzzy orange knot. She eats Quaker oats with coconut milk, almond butter, seeds, and honey from a turquoise ceramic bowl, black dots scattered all around it like frenzied ants. She looks at me, making her eyes big; she is pouting. The shapes her mouth makes, let me tell you, it makes it difficult to deny her. Bits of oatmeal fall on her freckled chin. Elodie is covered in freckles; her creator was quite heavy handed with them. Sometimes I pretend to lick them right off her skin. She smells like vanilla and bright citrus, and she is looking at me, asking to meet my mother who is visiting from Lagos tomorrow. Yeah, yeah for sure. I lie. I cannot say yes to this, but I suppose that it’s not entirely a lie; she will meet my mother, but she will be my friend, my coworker whose dogs I look after when she’s away visiting her parents in Martinique. My mother will not meet her. When I make Elodie come, when we fuck she comes the same way she laughs, big and belly deep. She won’t laugh like that when my mother is around, I cannot allow that. Yeah, for sure, for sure.
On Saturday morning we bake banana bread with sprouted buckwheat flour and half a dozen overripe bananas. The bananas spent the last week in the refrigerator browning and softening in their own sweetness. Elodie mashes them with a fork in a large white ceramic bowl; she breaks three large white eggs into the mush and whisks with a large wooden spoon. Some of the wet mixture splatters onto her indigo dyed Adire dress. Its funny about the dress, because she spent a small fortune on it, from a high end designer outlet store in the gentrified North End. Maybe, I should say gentrifying; I don’t know. It's still in the process of being stripped of the unwanteds and replaced with gastropubs and microbreweries and nicnac shops with objects designed to appear worn and previously owned, yet that smell brand new, with price tags able to cover a decent portion of the previous resident’s rent. But Elodie smiles at me in that dress; with the bowl in her hands, she smiles big. It is what it is, she says. Resistance is futile, she jokes. I’m not sure if she means the inevitable mess of the banana bread batter or something else.