The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2003

counselor,” she would say. “Explaining’s your job.” “It’s not my job to look like a fool,” he would retort. Again and again Ellen had soothed him with the obvi- ous. The Nigerian press was notorious for getting things wrong. Any reader who mattered would chuckle and dis- miss the offending garble. Et cetera. Jim refused to be comforted. He could not or would not roll with the punches. After a year in Nigeria, his blood pressure was planing at dangerous levels. He had become insufferable to live with, too. Patience had never been Jim’s strong point. Now he was so stressed from work he couldn’t relax anywhere. He was also complaining of neglect. Calling home to clarify plans for an evening engagement, he’d find she wasn’t there. The maid would take his message. He didn’t like it. Ellen admitted her days were monopolized by the million things still to be done if she and Patti were going to open their high-fashion venture on schedule. The legal complications of setting up a partnership between a diplomat’s wife and a Nigerian national had almost doomed the enterprise. Finding a good but affordable location had been harder than they expected. They racked their brains for a name that would entice chic young women as well as monied matriarchs. Now they were on the brink of realizing their vision. Ellen loved Patti’s new take on traditional textiles. Patti was fascinat- ed by Ellen’s uninhibited trade bead jewelry. The jewelry-making idea had popped into Ellen’s head as a way to fill long, empty days. With servants to cook, wash, clean and shop for her, she’d been function- less once she had livened up their government-provided, government-furnished house with Nigerian artifacts. She was busy now, and happy. She had no intention of staying home all day. E llen felt her eyes tracking the motion of the reporter’s ballpoint. Men are raised to be self-cen- tered, she thought. Jim was falling into a Marianas Trench of self-pity. Otherwise he’d give her credit for thriving at a post most Foreign Service families shunned or, if they had to, endured. Hating Nigeria, despising Nigerians, these reluctant recruits maintained calendars on which they crossed off the days that brought them closer to pack-out time. Ellen was flourishing in Lagos. She didn’t doubt the megacity had its share of violent crime, but her gamble on the decency of ordinary people had paid off, a point she made at embassy functions. For Jim’s sake, she was diplomatic, of course, and she couldn’t really fault the women whose cautious nature turned fearful under a barrage of negative reports. The boutique, she hoped, would be a window on a world into which they might eventually tiptoe. This interview with a reporter from the leading Lagos daily promised city-wide, free publicity for the boutique’s opening, and Ellen had set the scene carefully. Motioned to a chair covered in crazy-quilt akwete cloth, the reporter faced a wall on which Ellen had stretched a length of Calibari plaid to evoke its resemblance to op- art. Ellen poured coffee from a brown glazed pot she had bought from a potter in Oshogbo. Most important, she wore one of Patti’s creations, a body-loving sheath with a slit sneaking up between two of the tightly woven aso-oke strips normally intended for a Yoruba woman’s imposing traditional wrapper. A torrent of old glass beads, her own creation, swirled about her neck and cas- caded into cleavage. Deferring the moment of truth, Ellen had asked the maid to answer the door and conduct the reporter to the living room. Shaking hands, Ellen had felt a nudge of panic. What if she froze like a hopeless dummy? She and Patti had brainstormed the fashion points she need- ed to inject, and Ellen had gone to sleep full of confi- dence, but breakfast with Jim had drained it all away. They had eaten on the terrace, by the pool, as usual. Red plantain and common banana trees swept the silvery sky of early morning. Hibiscus, lantana and bougainvillea sprawled over walls so high she often forgot there were neighbors within hearing distance. Copycat splotches of F O C U S J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 17 Patricia Sharpe was an FSO with USIA from 1978 until the agency’s consolidation with State in 1999. She served as public affairs officer, branch public affairs officer, information officer or cultural affairs officer in Medan, Colombo, Dar Es Salaam, Lagos, Freetown, Santo Domingo, Karachi and Calcutta. She retired from the State Department in 2001. Before joining USIA she was (among other things) an assistant pro- fessor of English at Pennsylvania State University, from which she holds a Ph.D. in American literature. She was a Fulbright Professor of American Literature at Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan, and an American Institute of Indian Studies Hindi grantee at Delhi University in New Delhi, India.