The Thing Around Your Neck (15 page)

“Back home. I was with him for almost two years.”

The moment was quiet. She picked up a napkin and realized that she had known intuitively, perhaps from the very beginning, but she said, because she thought he expected her to show surprise, “Oh, you’re gay.”

“Somebody once told me that I am the straightest gay person she knew, and I hated myself for liking that.” He was smiling; he looked relieved.

“So tell me about this love.”

The man’s name was Abidemi. Something about the way Chinedu said his name, Abidemi, made her think of gently pressing on a sore muscle, the kind of self-inflicted ache that is satisfying.

He spoke slowly, revising details that she thought made no difference—was it on a Wednesday or Thursday that Abidemi had taken him to a private gay club where they shook hands with a former head of state?—and she thought that this was a story he had not told often in its entirety, perhaps had never told. He talked as she finished her sandwich and sat beside him on the couch and she felt oddly nostalgic about the details of Abidemi: he drank Guinness stout, he sent his driver to buy roast plantains from the roadside hawkers, he went to House on the Rock Pentecostal church, he liked the Lebanese kibbe at Double Four restaurant, he played polo.

Abidemi was a banker, a Big Man’s son who had gone to university in England, the kind of guy who wore leather belts
with elaborate designer logos as buckles. He had been wearing one of those when he came into the Lagos office of the mobile phone company where Chinedu worked in customer service. He had been almost rude, asking if there wasn’t somebody senior he could talk to, but Chinedu did not miss the look they exchanged, the heady thrill he had not felt since his first relationship with a sports prefect in secondary school. Abidemi gave him his card and said, curtly, “Call me.” It was the way Abidemi would run the relationship for the next two years, wanting to know where Chinedu went and what he did, buying him a car without consulting him, so that he was left in the awkward position of explaining to his family and friends how he had suddenly bought a Honda, asking him to come on trips to Calabar and Kaduna with only a day’s notice, sending vicious text messages when Chinedu missed his calls. Still, Chinedu had liked the possessiveness, the vitality of a relationship that consumed them both. Until Abidemi said he was getting married. Her name was Kemi and his parents and hers had known one another a long time. The inevitability of marriage had always been understood between them, unspoken but understood, and perhaps nothing would have changed if Chinedu had not met Kemi, at Abidemi’s parents’ wedding anniversary party. He had not wanted to go to the party—he stayed away from Abidemi’s family events—but Abidemi had insisted, saying he would survive the long evening only if Chinedu was there. Abidemi spoke in a voice lined with what seemed troublingly like laughter when he introduced Chinedu to Kemi as “my very good friend.”

“Chinedu drinks much more than I do,” Abidemi had said to Kemi, with her long weave-on and strapless yellow dress. She sat next to Abidemi, reaching out from time to time to brush something off his shirt, to refill his glass, to place a hand on his
knee, and all the while her whole body was braced and attuned to his, as though ready to spring up and do whatever it took to please him. “You said I will grow a beer belly,
abi
?” Abidemi said, his hand on her thigh. “This man will grow one before me, I’m telling you.”

Chinedu had smiled tightly, a tension headache starting, his rage at Abidemi exploding. As Chinedu told Ukamaka this, how the anger of that evening had “scattered his head,” she noticed how tense he had become.

“You wished you hadn’t met his wife,” Ukamaka said.

“No. I wished he had been conflicted.”

“He must have been.”

“He wasn’t. I watched him that day, the way he was with both of us there, drinking stout and making jokes about me to her and about her to me, and I knew he would go to bed and sleep well at night. If we continued, he would come to me and then go home to her and sleep well every night. I wanted him not to sleep well sometimes.”

“And you ended it?”

“He was angry. He did not understand why I would not do what he wanted.”

“How can a person claim to love you and yet want you to do things that suit only them? Udenna was like that.”

Chinedu squeezed the pillow on his lap. “Ukamaka, not everything is about Udenna.”

“I’m just saying that Abidemi sounds a little bit like Udenna. I guess I just don’t understand that kind of love.”

“Maybe it wasn’t love,” Chinedu said, standing up abruptly from the couch. “Udenna did this to you and Udenna did that to you, but why did you let him? Why did you let him? Have you ever considered that it wasn’t love?”

It was so savagely cold, his tone, that for a moment Ukamaka
felt frightened, then she felt angry and told him to get out of her apartment.

She had begun, before that day, to notice strange things about Chinedu. He never asked her up to his apartment, and once, after he told her which apartment was his, she looked at the mailbox and was surprised that it did not have his last name on it; the building superintendent was very strict about all the names of renters being on the mailbox. He did not ever seem to go to campus; the only time she asked him why, he had said something deliberately vague, which told her he did not want to talk about it, and she let it go because she suspected that he had academic problems, perhaps was grappling with a dissertation that was going nowhere. And so, a week after she asked him to get out of her apartment, a week of not speaking to him, she went up and knocked on his door, and when he opened it and looked at her warily, she asked, “Are you working on a dissertation?”

“I’m busy,” he said, shortly, and closed the door in her face.

She stood there for a while before going back to her apartment. She would never speak to him again, she told herself; he was a crude and rude person from the bush. But Sunday came and she had become used to driving him to his church in Lawrenceville before going to hers on Nassau Street. She hoped he would knock on her door and yet knew that he would not. She felt a sudden fear that he would ask somebody else on his floor to drop him off at church, and because she felt her fear becoming a panic, she went up and knocked on his door. It took him a while to open. He looked drawn and tired; his face was unwashed and ashy.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That question about whether you are working on a dissertation was just my stupid way of saying I’m sorry.”

“Next time if you want to say you’re sorry just say you’re sorry.”

“Do you want me to drop you off at church?”

“No.” He gestured for her to come in. The apartment was sparsely furnished with a couch, a table, and a TV; books were piled one on top of the other along the walls.

“Look, Ukamaka, I have to tell you what’s happening. Sit down.”

She sat down. A cartoon show was on TV, a Bible open facedown on the table, a cup of what looked like coffee next to it.

“I am out of status. My visa expired three years ago. This apartment belongs to a friend. He is in Peru for a semester and he said I should come and stay while I try to sort myself out.”

“You’re not here at Princeton?”

“I never said I was.” He turned away and closed the Bible. “I’m going to get a deportation notice from Immigration anytime soon. Nobody at home knows my real situation. I haven’t been able to send them much since I lost my construction job. My boss was a nice man and was paying me under the table but he said he did not want trouble now that they are talking about raiding workplaces.”

“Have you tried finding a lawyer?” she asked.

“A lawyer for what? I don’t have a case.” He was biting his lower lip, and she had not seen him look so unattractive before, with his flaking facial skin and his shadowed eyes. She would not ask for more details because she knew he was unwilling to tell her more.

“You look terrible. You haven’t eaten much since I last
saw you,” she said, thinking of all the weeks that she had spent talking about Udenna while Chinedu worried about being deported.

“I’m fasting.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to drop you off at church?”

“It’s too late anyway.”

“Come with me to my church then.”

“You know I don’t like the Catholic Church, all that unnecessary kneeling and standing and worshiping idols.”

“Just this once. I’ll go to yours with you next week.”

Finally he got up and washed his face and changed into a clean sweater. They walked to the car in silence. She had never thought to tell him about her shivering as he prayed on that first day, but because she longed now for a significant gesture that would show him that he was not alone; that she understood what it must be like to feel so uncertain of a future, to lack control about what would happen to him tomorrow—because she did not, in fact, know what else to say—she told him about the shivering.

“It was strange,” she said. “Maybe it was just my suppressed anxiety about Udenna.”

“It was a sign from God,” Chinedu said firmly.

“What was the point of my shivering as a sign from God?”

“You have to stop thinking that God is a person. God is God.”

“Your faith, it’s almost like fighting.” She looked at him. “Why can’t God reveal himself in an unambiguous way and clear things up once and for all? What’s the point of God being a puzzle?”

“Because it is the nature of God. If you understand the basic idea of God’s nature being different from human nature, then it will make sense,” Chinedu said, and opened the door to climb
out of the car. What a luxury to have a faith like his, Ukamaka thought, so uncritical, so forceful, so impatient. And yet there was something about it that was exceedingly fragile; it was as if Chinedu could conceive of faith only in extremes, as if an acknowledgment of a middle ground would mean the risk of losing everything.

“I see what you mean,” she said, although she did not see at all, although it was answers like his that, years back, had made her decide to stop going to church, and kept her away until the Sunday Udenna used “staid” in an ice-cream shop on Nassau Street.

Outside the gray stone church, Father Patrick was greeting people, his hair a gleaming silver in the late morning light.

“I’m bringing a new person into the dungeon of Catholicism, Father P.,” Ukamaka said.

“There’s always room in the dungeon,” Father Patrick said, warmly shaking Chinedu’s hand, saying welcome.

The church was dim, full of echoes and mysteries and the faint scent of candles. They sat side by side in the middle row, next to a woman holding a baby.

“Did you like him?” Ukamaka whispered.

“The priest? He seemed okay.”

“I mean like like.”

“Oh, Jehova God! Of course not.”

She had made him smile. “You are not going to be deported, Chinedu. We will find a way. We will.” She squeezed his hand and knew he was amused by her stressing of the “we.”

He leaned close. “You know, I had a crush on Thomas Sankara, too.”

“No!” Laughter was bubbling up in her chest.

“I didn’t even know that there was a country called Burkina Faso in West Africa until my teacher in secondary school talked
about him and brought in a picture. I will never forget how crazy in love I fell with a newspaper photograph.”

“Don’t tell me Abidemi sort of looks like him.”

“Actually he does.”

At first they stifled their laughter and then they let it out, joyously leaning against each other, while next to them, the woman holding the baby watched.

The choir had begun to sing. It was one of those Sundays when the priest blessed the congregation with holy water at the beginning of Mass, and Father Patrick was walking up and down, flicking water on the people with something that looked like a big saltshaker. Ukamaka watched him and thought how much more subdued Catholic Masses were in America; how in Nigeria it would have been a vibrant green branch from a mango tree that the priest would dip in a bucket of holy water held by a hurrying, sweating Mass-server; how he would have stridden up and down, splashing and swirling, holy water raining down; how the people would have been drenched; and how, smiling and making the sign of the cross, they would have felt blessed.

M
y new husband carried the suitcase out of the taxi and led the way into the brownstone, up a flight of brooding stairs, down an airless hallway with frayed carpeting, and stopped at a door. The number 2B, unevenly fashioned from yellowish metal, was plastered on it.

“We’re here,” he said. He had used the word “house” when he told me about our home. I had imagined a smooth driveway snaking between cucumber-colored lawns, a door leading into a hallway, walls with sedate paintings. A house like those of the white newlyweds in the American films that NTA showed on Saturday nights.

He turned on the light in the living room, where a beige couch sat alone in the middle, slanted, as though dropped there by accident. The room was hot; old, musty smells hung heavy in the air.

“I’ll show you around,” he said.

The smaller bedroom had a bare mattress lodged in one corner. The bigger bedroom had a bed and dresser, and a phone on the carpeted floor. Still, both rooms lacked a sense of space, as
though the walls had become uncomfortable with each other, with so little between them.

“Now that you’re here, we’ll get more furniture. I didn’t need that much when I was alone,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. I felt light-headed. The ten-hour flight from Lagos to New York and the interminable wait while the American customs officer raked through my suitcase had left me woozy, stuffed my head full of cotton wool. The officer had examined my foodstuffs as if they were spiders, her gloved fingers poking at the waterproof bags of ground
egusi
and dried
onugbu
leaves and
uziza
seeds, until she seized my
uziza
seeds. She feared I would grow them on American soil. It didn’t matter that the seeds had been sun-dried for weeks and were as hard as a bicycle helmet.

“Ike agwum,”
I said, placing my handbag down on the bedroom floor.

“Yes, I’m exhausted, too,” he said. “We should get to bed.”

In the bed with sheets that felt soft, I curled up tight like Uncle Ike’s fist when he is angry and hoped that no wifely duties would be required of me. I relaxed moments later when I heard my new husband’s measured snoring. It started like a deep rumble in his throat, then ended on a high pitch, a sound like a lewd whistle. They did not warn you about things like this when they arranged your marriage. No mention of offensive snoring, no mention of houses that turned out to be furniture-challenged flats.

My husband woke me up by settling his heavy body on top of mine. His chest flattened my breasts.

“Good morning,” I said, opening sleep-crusted eyes. He grunted, a sound that might have been a response to my greeting or part of the ritual he was performing. He raised himself to pull my nightdress up above my waist.

“Wait—” I said, so that I could take the nightdress off, so it would not seem so hasty. But he had crushed his mouth down on mine. Another thing the arrangers of marriage failed to mention—mouths that told the story of sleep, that felt clammy like old chewing gum, that smelled like the rubbish dumps at Ogbete Market. His breathing rasped as he moved, as if his nostrils were too narrow for the air that had to be let out. When he finally stopped thrusting, he rested his entire weight on me, even the weight of his legs. I did not move until he climbed off me to go into the bathroom. I pulled my nightdress down, straightened it over my hips.

“Good morning, baby,” he said, coming back into the room. He handed me the phone. “We have to call your uncle and aunt to tell them we arrived safely. Just for a few minutes; it costs almost a dollar a minute to Nigeria. Dial 011 and then 234 before the number.”

“
Ezi okwu?
All that?”

“Yes. International dialing code first and then Nigeria’s country code.”

“Oh,” I said. I punched in the fourteen numbers. The stickiness between my legs itched.

The phone line crackled with static, reaching out across the Atlantic. I knew Uncle Ike and Aunty Ada would sound warm, they would ask what I had eaten, what the weather in America was like. But none of my responses would register; they would ask just to ask. Uncle Ike would probably smile into the phone, the same kind of smile that had loosened his face when he told me that the perfect husband had been found for me. The same smile I had last seen on him months before when the Super Eagles won the soccer gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics.

“A doctor in America,” he had said, beaming. “What could be better? Ofodile’s mother was looking for a wife for him, she
was very concerned that he would marry an American. He hadn’t been home in eleven years. I gave her a photo of you. I did not hear from her for a while and I thought they had found someone. But …” Uncle Ike let his voice trail away, let his beaming get wider.

“Yes, Uncle.”

“He will be home in early June,” Aunty Ada had said. “You will have plenty of time to get to know each other before the wedding.”

“Yes, Aunty.” “Plenty of time” was two weeks.

“What have we not done for you? We raise you as our own and then we find you an
ezigbo di
! A doctor in America! It is like we won a lottery for you!” Aunty Ada said. She had a few strands of hair growing on her chin and she tugged at one of them as she spoke.

I had thanked them both for everything—finding me a husband, taking me into their home, buying me a new pair of shoes every two years. It was the only way to avoid being called ungrateful. I did not remind them that I wanted to take the JAMB exam again and try for the university, that while going to secondary school I had sold more bread in Aunty Ada’s bakery than all the other bakeries in Enugu sold, that the furniture and floors in the house shone because of me.

“Did you get through?” my new husband asked.

“It’s engaged,” I said. I looked away so that he would not see the relief on my face.

“Busy. Americans say busy, not engaged,” he said. “We’ll try later. Let’s have breakfast.”

For breakfast, he defrosted pancakes from a bright-yellow bag. I watched what buttons he pressed on the white micro wave, carefully memorizing them.

“Boil some water for tea,” he said

“Is there some dried milk?” I asked, taking the kettle to the sink. Rust clung to the sides of the sink like peeling brown paint.

“Americans don’t drink their tea with milk and sugar.”

“
Ezi okwu
? Don’t you drink yours with milk and sugar?”

“No, I got used to the way things are done here a long time ago. You will too, baby.”

I sat before my limp pancakes—they were so much thinner than the chewy slabs I made at home—and bland tea that I feared would not get past my throat. The doorbell rang and he got up. He walked with his hands swinging to his back; I had not really noticed that before, I had not had time to notice.

“I heard you come in last night.” The voice at the door was American, the words flowed fast, ran into each other.
Supri-supri,
Aunty Ify called it, fast-fast. “When you come back to visit, you will be speaking
supri-supri
like Americans,” she had said.

“Hi, Shirley. Thanks so much for keeping my mail,” he said.

“Not a problem at all. How did your wedding go? Is your wife here?”

“Yes, come and say hello.”

A woman with hair the color of metal came into the living room. Her body was wrapped in a pink robe knotted at the waist. Judging from the lines that ran across her face, she could have been anything from six decades to eight decades old; I had not seen enough white people to correctly gauge their ages.

“I’m Shirley from 3A. Nice to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand. She had the nasal voice of someone battling a cold.

“You are welcome,” I said.

Shirley paused, as though surprised. “Well, I’ll let you get
back to breakfast,” she said. “I’ll come down and visit with you when you’ve settled in.”

Shirley shuffled out. My new husband shut the door. One of the dining table legs was shorter than the rest, and so the table rocked, like a seesaw, when he leaned on it and said, “You should say ‘Hi’ to people here, not ‘You’re welcome.’”

“She’s not my age mate.”

“It doesn’t work that way here. Everybody says hi.”

“
O di mma
. Okay.”

“I’m not called Ofodile here, by the way. I go by Dave,” he said, looking down at the pile of envelopes Shirley had given him. Many of them had lines of writing on the envelope itself, above the address, as though the sender had remembered to add something only after the envelope was sealed.

“Dave?” I knew he didn’t have an English name. The invitation cards to our wedding had read
Ofodile
Emeka
Udenwa and
Chinaza Agatha
Okafor
.

“The last name I use here is different, too. Americans have a hard time with Udenwa, so I changed it.”

“What is it?” I was still trying to get used to Udenwa, a name I had known only a few weeks.

“It’s Bell.”

“Bell!” I had heard about a Waturuocha that changed to Waturu in America, a Chikelugo that took the more American-friendly Chikel, but from Udenwa to Bell? “That’s not even close to Udenwa,” I said.

He got up. “You don’t understand how it works in this country. If you want to get anywhere you have to be as mainstream as possible. If not, you will be left by the roadside. You have to use your English name here.”

“I never have, my English name is just something on my birth certificate. I’ve been Chinaza Okafor my whole life.”

“You’ll get used to it, baby,” he said, reaching out to caress my cheek. “You’ll see.”

When he filled out a Social Security number application for me the next day, the name he entered in bold letters was
AGATHA BELL
.

Our neighborhood was called Flatbush, my new husband told me, as we walked, hot and sweaty, down a noisy street that smelled of fish left out too long before refrigeration. He wanted to show me how to do the grocery shopping and how to use the bus.

“Look around, don’t lower your eyes like that. Look around. You get used to things faster that way,” he said.

I turned my head from side to side so he would see that I was following his advice. Dark restaurant windows promised the
BEST CARIBBEAN AND AMERICAN FOOD
in lopsided print, a car wash across the street advertised $3.50 washes on a chalkboard nestled among Coke cans and bits of paper. The sidewalk was chipped away at the edges, like something nibbled at by mice.

Inside the air-conditioned bus, he showed me where to pour in the coins, how to press the tape on the wall to signal my stop.

“This is not like Nigeria, where you shout out to the conductor,” he said, sneering, as though he was the one who had invented the superior American system.

Inside Key Food, we walked from aisle to aisle slowly. I was wary when he put a beef pack in the cart. I wished I could touch the meat, to examine its redness, as I often did at Ogbete Market, where the butcher held up fresh-cut slabs buzzing with flies.

“Can we buy those biscuits?” I asked. The blue packets of Burton’s Rich Tea were familiar; I did not want to eat biscuits but I wanted something familiar in the cart.

“Cookies. Americans call them cookies,” he said.

I reached out for the biscuits (cookies).

“Get the store brand. They’re cheaper, but still the same thing,” he said, pointing at a white packet.

“Okay,” I said. I no longer wanted the biscuits, but I put the store brand in the cart and stared at the blue packet on the shelf, at the familiar grain-embossed Burton’s logo, until we left the aisle.

“When I become an Attending, we will stop buying store brands, but for now we have to; these things may seem cheap but they add up,” he said.

“When you become a Consultant?”

“Yes, but it’s called an Attending here, an Attending Physician.”

The arrangers of marriage only told you that doctors made a lot of money in America. They did not add that before doctors started to make a lot of money, they had to do an internship and a residency program, which my new husband had not completed. My new husband had told me this during our short in-flight conversation, right after we took off from Lagos, before he fell asleep.

“Interns are paid twenty-eight thousand a year but work about eighty hours a week. It’s like three dollars an hour,” he had said. “Can you believe it? Three dollars an hour!”

I did not know if three dollars an hour was very good or very bad—I was leaning toward very good—until he added that even high school students working part-time made much more.

“Also when I become an Attending, we will not live in a neighborhood like this,” my new husband said. He stopped to let a woman with her child tucked into her shopping cart pass by. “See how they have bars so you can’t take the shopping carts out? In the good neighborhoods, they don’t have them. You can take your shopping cart all the way to your car.”

“Oh,” I said. What did it matter that you could or could not take the carts out? The point was, there
were
carts.

“Look at the people who shop here; they are the ones who immigrate and continue to act as if they are back in their countries.” He gestured, dismissively, toward a woman and her two children, who were speaking Spanish. “They will never move forward unless they adapt to America. They will always be doomed to supermarkets like this.”

I murmured something to show I was listening. I thought about the open market in Enugu, the traders who sweet-talked you into stopping at their zinc-covered sheds, who were prepared to bargain all day to add one single kobo to the price. They wrapped what you bought in plastic bags when they had them, and when they did not have them, they laughed and offered you worn newspapers.

My new husband took me to the mall; he wanted to show me as much as he could before he started work on Monday. His car rattled as he drove, as though there were many parts that had come loose—a sound similar to shaking a tin full of nails. It stalled at a traffic light and he turned the key a few times before it started.