The Thing Around Your Neck (16 page)

“I’ll buy a new car after my residency,” he said.

Inside the mall, the floors gleamed, smooth as ice cubes, and
the high-as-the-sky ceiling blinked with tiny ethereal lights. I felt as though I were in a different physical world, on another planet. The people who pushed against us, even the black ones, wore the mark of foreignness, otherness, on their faces.

“We’ll get pizza first,” he said. “It’s one thing you have to like in America.”

We walked up to the pizza stand, to the man wearing a nose ring and a tall white hat.

“Two pepperoni and sausage. Is your combo deal better?” my new husband asked. He sounded different when he spoke to Americans: his
r
was overpronounced and his
t
was under-pronounced. And he smiled, the eager smile of a person who wanted to be liked.

We ate the pizza sitting at a small round table in what he called a “food court.” A sea of people sitting around circular tables, hunched over paper plates of greasy food. Uncle Ike would be horrified at the thought of eating here; he was a titled man and did not even eat at weddings unless he was served in a private room. There was something humiliatingly public, something lacking in dignity, about this place, this open space of too many tables and too much food.

“Do you like the pizza?” my new husband asked. His paper plate was empty.

“The tomatoes are not cooked well.”

“We overcook food back home and that is why we lose all the nutrients. Americans cook things right. See how healthy they all look?”

I nodded, looking around. At the next table, a black woman with a body as wide as a pillow held sideways smiled at me. I smiled back and took another pizza bite, tightening my stomach so it would not eject anything.

We went into Macy’s afterwards. My new husband led the way toward a sliding staircase; its movement was rubbery-smooth and I knew I would fall down the moment I stepped on it.

“
Biko,
don’t they have a lift instead?” I asked. At least I had once ridden in the creaky one in the local government office, the one that quivered for a full minute before the doors rolled open.

“Speak English. There are people behind you,” he whispered, pulling me away, toward a glass counter full of twinkling jewelry. “It’s an elevator, not a lift. Americans say elevator.”

“Okay.”

He led me to the lift (elevator) and we went up to a section lined with rows of weighty-looking coats. He bought me a coat the color of a gloomy day’s sky, puffy with what felt like foam inside its lining. The coat looked big enough for two of me to snugly fit into it.

“Winter is coming,” he said. “It is like being inside a freezer, so you need a warm coat.”

“Thank you.”

“Always best to shop when there is a sale. Sometimes you get the same thing for less than half the price. It’s one of the wonders of America.”

“
Ezi okwu?
” I said, then hastily added, “Really?”

“Let’s take a walk around the mall. There are some other wonders of America here.”

We walked, looking at stores that sold clothes and tools and plates and books and phones, until the bottoms of my feet ached.

Before we left, he led the way to McDonald’s. The restaurant was nestled near the rear of the mall; a yellow and red M the
size of a car stood at its entrance. My husband did not look at the menu board that hovered overhead as he ordered two large Number 2 meals.

“We could go home so I can cook,” I said. “Don’t let your husband eat out too much,” Aunty Ada had said, “or it will push him into the arms of a woman who cooks. Always guard your husband like a guinea fowl’s egg.”

“I like to eat this once in a while,” he said. He held the hamburger with both hands and chewed with a concentration that furrowed his eyebrows, tightened his jaw, and made him look even more unfamiliar.

I made coconut rice on Monday, to make up for the eating out. I wanted to make pepper soup, too, the kind Aunty Ada said softened a man’s heart. But I needed the uziza that the customs officer had seized; pepper soup was just not pepper soup without it. I bought a coconut in the Jamaican store down the street and spent an hour cutting it into tiny bits because there was no grater, and then soaked it in hot water to extract the juice. I had just finished cooking when he came home. He wore what looked like a uniform, a girlish-looking blue top tucked into a pair of blue trousers that was tied at the waist.

“Nno,”
I said. “Did you work well?”

“You have to speak English at home, too, baby. So you can get used to it.” He brushed his lips against my cheek just as the doorbell rang. It was Shirley, her body wrapped in the same pink robe. She twirled the belt at her waist.

“That smell,” she said, in her phlegm-filled voice. “It’s everywhere, all over the building. What are you cooking?”

“Coconut rice,” I said.

“A recipe from your country?”

“Yes.”

“It smells really good. The problem with us here is we have no culture, no culture at all.” She turned to my new husband, as if she wanted him to agree with her, but he simply smiled. “Would you come take a look at my air conditioner, Dave?” She asked. “It’s acting up again and it’s so hot today.”

“Sure,” my new husband said.

Before they left, Shirley waved at me and said, “Smells
really
good,” and I wanted to invite her to have some rice. My new husband came back half an hour later and ate the fragrant meal I placed before him, even smacking his lips like Uncle Ike sometimes did to show Aunty Ada how pleased he was with her cooking. But the next day, he came back with a
Good
Housekeeping All-American Cookbook
, thick as a Bible.

“I don’t want us to be known as the people who fill the building with smells of foreign food,” he said.

I took the cookbook, ran my hand over the cover, over the picture of something that looked like a flower but was probably food.

“I know you’ll soon master how to cook American food,” he said, gently pulling me close. That night, I thought of the cookbook as he lay heavily on top of me, grunting and rasping. Another thing the arrangers of marriage did not tell you—the struggle to brown beef in oil and dredge skinless chicken in flour. I had always cooked beef in its own juices. Chicken I had always poached with its skin intact. In the following days, I was pleased that my husband left for work at six in the morning and did not come back until eight in the evening so that I had time to throw away pieces of half-cooked, clammy chicken and start again.

The first time I saw Nia, who lived in 2D, I thought she was the kind of woman Aunty Ada would disapprove of. Aunty Ada would call her an
ashawo
, because of the see-through top she wore so that her bra, a mismatched shade, glared through. Or Aunty Ada would base her prostitute judgment on Nia’s lipstick, a shimmery orange, and the eye shadow—similar to the shade of the lipstick—that clung to her heavy lids.

“Hi,” she said when I went down to get the mail. “You’re Dave’s new wife. I’ve been meaning to come over and meet you. I’m Nia.”

“Thanks. I’m Chinaza… Agatha.”

Nia was watching me carefully. “What was the first thing you said?”

“My Nigerian name.”

“It’s an Igbo name, isn’t it?” She pronounced it “E-boo.”

“Yes.”

“What does it mean?”

“God answers prayers.”

“It’s really pretty. You know, Nia is a Swahili name. I changed my name when I was eighteen. I spent three years in Tanzania. It was fucking amazing.”

“Oh,” I said and shook my head; she, a black American, had chosen an African name, while my husband made me change mine to an English one.

“You must be bored to death in that apartment; I know Dave gets back pretty late,” she said. “Come have a Coke with me.”

I hesitated, but Nia was already walking to the stairs. I followed her. Her living room had a spare elegance: a red sofa, a slender potted plant, a huge wooden mask hanging on the wall. She gave me a Diet Coke served in a tall glass with ice, asked how I was adjusting to life in America, offered to show me around Brooklyn.

“It would have to be a Monday, though,” she said. “I don’t work Mondays.”

“What do you do?”

“I own a hair salon.”

“Your hair is beautiful,” I said, and she touched it and said, “Oh, this,” as if she did not think anything of it. It was not just her hair, held up on top of her head in a natural Afro puff, that I found beautiful, though, it was her skin the color of roasted groundnuts, her mysterious and heavy-lidded eyes, her curved hips. She played her music a little too loud, so we had to raise our voices as we spoke.

“You know, my sister’s a manager at Macy’s,” she said. “They’re hiring entry-level salespeople in the women’s department, so if you’re interested I can put in a word for you and you’re pretty much hired. She owes me one.”

Something leaped inside me at the thought, the sudden and new thought, of earning what would be mine. Mine.

“I don’t have my work permit yet,” I said.

“But Dave has filed for you?”

“Yes.”

“It shouldn’t take long; at least you should have it before winter. I have a friend from Haiti who just got hers. So let me know as soon as you do.”

“Thank you.” I wanted to hug Nia. “Thank you.”

That evening I told my new husband about Nia. His eyes were sunken in with fatigue, after so many hours at work, and he said, “Nia?” as though he did not know who I meant, before he added, “She’s okay, but be careful because she can be a bad influence.”

Nia began stopping by to see me after work, drinking from a can of diet soda she brought with her and watching me cook. I turned the air conditioner off and opened the window to let in
the hot air, so that she could smoke. She talked about the women at her hair salon and the men she went out with. She sprinkled her everyday conversation with words like the noun “clitoris” and the verb “fuck.” I liked to listen to her. I liked the way she smiled to show a tooth that was chipped neatly, a perfect triangle missing at the edge. She always left before my new husband came home.

Winter sneaked up on me. One morning I stepped out of the apartment building and gasped. It was as though God was shredding tufts of white tissue and flinging them down. I stood staring at my first snow, at the swirling flakes, for a long, long time before turning to go back into the apartment. I scrubbed the kitchen floor again, cut out more coupons from the Key Food catalog that came in the mail, and then sat by the window, watching God’s shredding become frenzied. Winter had come and I was still unemployed. When my husband came home in the evening, I placed his french fries and fried chicken before him and said, “I thought I would have my work permit by now.”

He ate a few pieces of oily-fried potatoes before responding. We spoke only English now; he did not know that I spoke Igbo to myself while I cooked, that I had taught Nia how to say “I’m hungry” and “See you tomorrow” in Igbo.

“The American woman I married to get a green card is making trouble,” he said, and slowly tore a piece of chicken in two. The area under his eyes was puffy. “Our divorce was almost final, but not completely, before I married you in Nigeria. Just a minor thing, but she found out about it and now she’s threatening to report me to Immigration. She wants more money.”

“You were married before?” I laced my fingers together because they had started to shake.

“Would you pass that, please?” he asked, pointing to the lemonade I had made earlier.

“The jug?”

“Pitcher. Americans say pitcher, not jug.”

I pushed the jug (pitcher) across. The pounding in my head was loud, filling my ears with a fierce liquid. “You were married before?”

“It was just on paper. A lot of our people do that here. It’s business, you pay the woman and both of you do paperwork together but sometimes it goes wrong and either she refuses to divorce you or she decides to blackmail you.”

I pulled the pile of coupons toward me and started to rip them in two, one after the other. “Ofodile, you should have let me know this before now.”

He shrugged. “I was going to tell you.”

“I deserved to know before we got married.” I sank down on the chair opposite him, slowly, as if the chair would crack if I didn’t.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference. Your uncle and aunt had decided. Were you going to say no to people who have taken care of you since your parents died?”

I stared at him in silence, shredding the coupons into smaller and smaller bits; broken-up pictures of detergents and meat packs and paper towels fell to the floor.

“Besides, with the way things are messed up back home, what would you have done?” he asked. “Aren’t people with master’s degrees roaming the streets, jobless?” His voice was flat.

“Why did you marry me?” I asked.

“I wanted a Nigerian wife and my mother said you were a good girl, quiet. She said you might even be a virgin.” He smiled. He looked even more tired when he smiled. “I probably should tell her how wrong she was.”

I threw more coupons on the floor, clasped my hands together, and dug my nails into my skin.

“I was happy when I saw your picture,” he said, smacking his lips. “You were light-skinned. I had to think about my children’s looks. Light-skinned blacks fare better in America.”

I watched him eat the rest of the batter-covered chicken, and I noticed that he did not finish chewing before he took a sip of water.

That evening, while he showered, I put only the clothes he hadn’t bought me, two embroidered boubous and one caftan, all Aunty Ada’s cast-offs, in the plastic suitcase I had brought from Nigeria and went to Nia’s apartment.

Nia made me tea, with milk and sugar, and sat with me at her round dining table that had three tall stools around it.

“If you want to call your family back home, you can call them from here. Stay as long as you want; I’ll get on a payment plan with Bell Atlantic.”

“There’s nobody to talk to at home,” I said, staring at the pear-shaped face of the sculpture on the wooden shelf. It’s hollow eyes stared back at me.