After your shift that day, he was waiting outside, leaning on a pole, asking you to go out with him because your name rhymed with hakuna matata and The Lion King was the only maudlin movie he’d ever liked. You didn’t know what The Lion King was. You looked at him in the bright light and realized that his eyes were the color of extra-virgin olive oil, a greenish gold. Extra-virgin olive oil was the only thing you loved, truly loved, in America.
He was a senior at the state university. He told you how old he was and you asked why he had not graduated yet. This was America, after all, it was not like back home where universities closed so often that people added three years to their normal course of study and lecturers went on strike after strike and were still not paid. He said he had taken time off, a couple of years after high school, to discover himself and travel, mostly to Africa and Asia. You asked him where he ended up finding himself and he laughed. You did not laugh. You did not know that people could simply choose not to go to school, that people could dictate to life. You were used to accepting what life gave, writing down what life dictated.
You said no the following three days, to going out with him, because you didn’t think it was right, because you were uncomfortable with the way he looked in your eyes, the way you laughed so easily at what he said. And then the fourth night, you panicked when he was not standing at the door, after your shift. You prayed for the first time in a long time, and when he came up behind you and said hey, you said yes you would go out with him even before he asked. You were scared he would not ask again.
The next day, he took you to Chang’s and your fortune cookie had two strips of paper. Both of them were blank.
You knew you had become comfortable when you told him the real reason you asked Juan for a different table—Jeopardy! When you watched Jeopardy! on the restaurant TV, you rooted for the following, in this order—women of color, black men, white women, before finally, white men, which meant you never rooted for white men. He laughed and told you he was used to not being rooted for, his mother taught women’s studies.
And you knew you had become close when you told him that your father was really not a schoolteacher in Lagos, that he was a taxi driver. And you told him about that day in Lagos traffic in your father’s car, it was raining and your seat was wet because of the rust-eaten hole in the roof. The traffic was heavy, the traffic was always heavy in Lagos, and when it rained it was chaos. The roads were so badly drained some cars would get stuck in muddy potholes and some of your cousins got paid to push the cars out. The rain and the swampy road—you thought—made your father step on the brakes too late that day. You heard the bump before you felt it. The car your father rammed into was wide, foreign, and dark green, with yellow headlights like the eyes of a cat. Your father started to cry and beg even before he got out of the car and laid himself flat on the road, stopping the traffic. Sorry sir, sorry sir, if you sell me and my family you cannot even buy one tire in your car, he chanted. Sorry sir.
The Big Man seated at the back did not come out, his driver did, examining the damage, looking at your father’s sprawled form from the corner of his eye as though the pleading was a song he was ashamed to admit he liked. Finally, he let your father go. Waved him away. The other cars honked and drivers cursed. When your father came back into the car you refused to look at him because he was just like the pigs that waddled in the marshes around the market. Your father looked like nsi. Shit.
After you told him this, he pursed his lips and held your hand and said he understood. You shook your hand free, annoyed, because he thought the world was, or ought to be, full of people like him. You told him there was nothing to understand, it was just the way it was.
He didn’t eat meat, because he thought it was wrong the way they killed animals, he said they released fear toxins into the animals and the fear toxins made people paranoid. Back home, the meat pieces you ate, when there was meat, were the size of half your finger. But you did not tell him that. You did not tell him either that the dawadawa cubes your mother cooked everything with, because curry and thyme were too expensive, had MSG, was MSG. He said MSG caused cancer, it was the reason he liked Chang’s; Chang didn’t cook with MSG.
Once, at Chang’s, he told the waiter he lived in Shanghai for a year, that he spoke some Mandarin. The waiter warmed up and told him what soup was best and then asked him, “You have girlfriend in Shanghai?” And he smiled and said nothing.
You lost your appetite, the region beneath your breasts felt clogged, inside. That night, you didn’t moan when he was inside you, you bit your lips and pretended that you didn’t come because you knew he would worry. Finally you told him why you were upset, that the Chinese man assumed you could not possibly be his girlfriend, and that he smiled and said nothing. Before he apologized, he gazed at you blankly and you knew that he did not understand.
He bought you presents and when you objected about the cost, he said he had a trust fund, it was okay. His presents mystified you. A fist-sized ball that you shook to watch snow fall on a tiny house, or watch a plastic ballerina in pink spin around. A shiny rock. An expensive scarf hand-painted in Mexico that you could never wear because of the color. Finally you told him, your voice stretched in irony, that Third World presents were always useful. The rock, for instance, would work if you could grind things with it, or wear it. He laughed long and hard, but you did not laugh. You realized that in his life, he could buy presents that were just presents and nothing else, nothing useful. When he started to buy you shoes and clothes and books, you asked him not to, you didn’t want any presents at all.
Still, you did not fight. Not really. You argued and then you made up and made love and ran your hands through each other’s hair, his soft and yellow like the swinging tassels of growing corncobs, yours dark and bouncy like the filling of a pillow. You felt safe in his arms, the same safeness you felt back home, in the shantytown house of zinc, the same safeness you felt when he got too much sun and his skin turned the color of a ripe watermelon and you kissed portions of his back before you rubbed lotion on it. He found the African store in the Hartford Yellow Pages and drove you there. The store owner, a Ghanaian, asked him if he was African, like the white Kenyans or South Africans, and he laughed and said yes, but he’d been in America for a long time, had missed the food of his childhood. He didn’t tell the store owner that he was just joking. You cooked for him; he liked jollof rice, but after he ate garri and onugbu soup, he threw up in your sink. You didn’t mind, though, because now you could cook onugbu soup with meat.
The thing that wrapped itself around your neck, that nearly always choked you before you fell asleep, started to loosen, to let go.
You knew by people’s reactions that you were abnormal—the way the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice. The old white women who muttered and glared at him, the black men who shook their heads at you, the black women whose pitiful eyes bemoaned your lack of self-esteem, your self-loathing. Or the black women who smiled swift secret solidarity smiles, the black men who tried too hard to forgive you, saying a too-obvious hi to him, the white women who said, “What a good-looking pair,” too brightly, too loudly, as though to prove their own tolerance to themselves.
But his parents were different; they almost made you think it was all normal. His mother told you that he had never brought a girl to meet them, except for his high school prom date, and he smiled stiffly and held your hand. The tablecloth shielded your clasped hands. He squeezed your hand and you squeezed back and wondered why he was so stiff, why his extra-virgin olive-colored eyes darkened as he spoke to his parents. His mother asked if those were real cowries strung through your dreadlocks and if you’d read Simone de Beauvoir and Nawal El Saadawi. His father asked how similar Indian food was to Nigerian food and teased you about paying when the check came. You looked at them and felt grateful that they did not examine you like an exotic trophy, an ivory tusk.
He told you about his issues with his parents later, how they portioned ou
t love like a birthday cake, how they would give him a bigger slice if only he’d go to law school. You wanted to sympathize. But instead you were angry.
You were angrier when he told you he had refused to go up to Canada with them for a week or two, to their summer cottage in the Quebec countryside. They had even asked him to bring you. He showed you pictures of the cottage, and you wondered why it was called a cottage because the buildings that big around your neighborhood back home were banks and churches. You dropped a glass and it shattered on the hardwood of his apartment floor and he asked what was wrong and you said nothing, although you thought a lot was wrong. Your worlds were wrong.
Later, in the shower, you started to cry, you watched the water dilute your tears and you didn’t know why you were crying.
You wrote home finally, when the thing around your neck had almost completely let go. Almost. A short letter to your parents and brothers and sisters, slipped in between the crisp dollar bills, and you included your address. You got a reply only days later, by courier. Your mother wrote the letter herself—you knew from the spidery penmanship, from the misspelled words.
Your father was dead; he had slumped over the steering wheel of his taxi. Five months now, she wrote. They had used some of the money you sent to give him a nice funeral. They killed a goat for the guests and buried him in a real coffin, not just planks of wood.
You curled up in bed, pressed your knees tight to your chest, and cried. He held you while you cried, smoothed your hair, and offered to go with you, back home to Nigeria. You said no, you needed to go alone. He asked if you would come back and you reminded him that you had a green card and you would lose it if you did not come back in one year. He said you knew what he meant, would you come back, come back?
You turned away and said nothing, and when he drove you to the airport, you hugged him tight, clutching at the muscles of his back, until your ribs hurt. And you said thank you.
Aimee Bender
I met Adam at the bookstore. He was in the section marked Biography/History, and he was looking, extensively, at a book about some historical event no one’s ever heard of. The only way I knew it was a historical event was because the cover was in black and white and had a photo on it of a tank. But it wasn’t a World War II book; World War II has its own section, two tall bookshelves over.
I myself was aiming for the art books, because my friend Terrie had just had a life-changing experience from looking at a photograph of a clown. She’d spent her childhood terrified of clowns, but when she saw this photo, in a friend’s coffee-table book, she experienced a 180-degree shift—one of those rare moments when the other side becomes clear as anything and we can no longer understand why it was so hard to get before.
“Clowns are desperate,” she’d told me, with wonder in her voice. “That’s why they’re so scary.”
It hadn’t occurred to me either, and I wanted to see if she was right. I too had had the experience of a childhood clown doll that one day had transformed from delightful toy-friend into the diabolical engineer of my nightmares. It had to be sold at the neighbor’s garage sale, because I refused to sell it at my own. Someone bought it for seventy-five cents—some kid too young to feel the fear yet—and I threw the cursed coins into the outdoor trash, observing as the other neighborhood kids spotted and retrieved them. Let them spend it, I thought, from the safety of my bedroom. It will only bring them grief.
They used the quarters to buy ice cream.
Story of my life.
I found the art book Terrie had been talking about and flipped toward the photo of the clown, which, according to the table of contents, was on page 32. As I skipped through those shiny pages, pages that smelled like a hair salon, Adam turned and held up the war book. “Do you know this photo?” he asked me, tapping the cover.
“Oh,” I said. “Is that World War I?”
He shook his head, and his hair was very light brown, almost colorless, and as it shifted, it caught no light.
“Korean War,” he said. “A photo from then.”
“Mmm.”
He shelved the book. “They told me it was a good read, but I just read a page and it was so dull,” he said, and then he stepped closer. Aside from that colorless hair, he had a wide open face, sort of big-featured, with a big nose and big eyes and teeth. Likeable. The kind of face you could immediately trust, even against better judgment.
I held my finger before page 32. I didn’t want to look at the clown first off. It seemed too intimate, even if I was just looking with myself. So I was looking, then, instead, at a washed-up movie star wearing sequins in some kind of aquarium tank emptied of water. I guess they were trying to work with the phrase “washed up,” but the star didn’t seem aware of that because she was grinning in the tank like it was all funny and fun. Maybe the whole book should’ve been titled Desperation.
“What are you looking at?” he asked, peering over my shoulder.
“Art photos,” I said.
“Wait, wasn’t she in that cop movie?”
We stared at her together, in that tank. “Was she?” I asked. She had giant breasts, ornamented by magenta sequins. I found her painful, so I turned the page to have something to do, and there was the clown, with its big nose and scary mouth makeup and scary eyes and red costume. And I could see what she meant, Terrie. Right off, I got what she was saying. It was trying so hard. That was part of what was so menacing, was its enormous effort to amuse. You kind of wanted to hurt the clown, before it smothered you into total suffocation.
“Do you think it looks desperate?” I asked him.
He squinted and stared at the photo for at least a minute. “Why do they do the eyes like that?” he said at last. “I mean, the star-shaped thing? Is that clown protocol?”
We ended up at the Greek coffee place next door, and he bought no biography and before we left the store, I flipped through the rest of the photo book to see if the others were desperate too, but they weren’t, not in the same way. They were just pictures of other shiny figures that looked good in bright colors, like Vegas acrobatic performers at Rite Aid, or a tomato farmer in his garden reading Newsweek. Only pages 30–32 were terrifying.
Adam got up to get the coffees while I looked out at the cars driving by on Sunset. It was raining a little, and watching the windshield wipers made me feel more settled. The air smelled like city, like damp city.
“They told me that was the definitive book on Korea,” he said, returning with the coffees. “I’m disappointed.”
I felt attractive, talking to him. Next to those big features of his, I could feel myself as delicate. When the conversation waned, I sipped from my bitter little Greek coffee and told him that my friend Terrie was having surgery the following day. That she was young, still, but they’d found problematic shapes in her bronchitis X-ray. “Lumpy shapes,” I said, “inside her lungs.”
He stirred his coffee and nodded with appropriate solemnity. He seemed more measured, now that he was caffeinated.
The cars whisked by.
“You know,” I said, “I just lied. That’s not true.”
“About Debby?”
I reached out and touched his arm. “I didn’t know what to say,” I said, and his arm was warm, “so I made up Terrie’s lumps. That’s awful of me.”
He leaned in then, and he didn’t kiss me but it was too close for regular. We spent a few minutes there, blinking together, breathing the coffee-scented air. Who knew what would happen? He had that trustworthy face, a face I didn’t trust, simply because I’d trusted it so swiftly.
We agreed to meet the following afternoon at the beach in Santa Monica, and the directions we gave each other were complicated enough, were distinct enough, so neither could possibly get lost. Of course I was early because I’m always early, and I didn’t head over to the water just yet, instead wandering past the snack bar, reading the names of foods listed in black plastic stick-on letters: Chili dog. Onion rings. Popsicle. Words I love to see in black plast
ic stick-on, words that conveyed summer to me, on this cloudy November afternoon. I hadn’t called Terrie the night before, because I’d sold her out for flirting; it seemed I’d cursed her, and although I was fairly certain I had no cursing abilities, it was not in the spirit of good friendship—and this I knew. But I had not been flirted with in many months, and this man had not rejected the reeking desperation of either the clown or the old star, and asking for sympathy about a dying friend was the first tool that appeared from my own personal flirting toolbox. Sometimes my capacity for smallness is surprising, even to myself.
Adam was already at the beach when I walked over, and he had a picnic basket in his hands. He’d set up a blowzy checkered blanket, whose corners picked up with the wind, and when I walked across the sand, bumpy and difficult to traverse, he smiled at me with those wide-open eyes. For a few minutes we chitchatted, and at one point he threw his hands into the air and exclaimed some things, about nothing, really, just showing a sense of spirit. I felt the love, spreading roots in my chest, making it so easy to smile; the way the promise of love loosens and eases the muscles of the face, and how the onset of pain had tightened them before, into tense lines and grit. How good it felt, to let go of grit for a second! We settled onto the blanket and he opened a small bottle of champagne and we toasted and the water waves crashed, and other than a homeless man way to the left and two teenagers trying to get tan on the right, we were alone. I reached out a hand and touched his colorless hair, and he turned his face to my palm. Then he reached into the picnic basket and pulled out two plates, two checkered napkins, and two forks.
“Wow,” I said. “You go all out.”
As he removed the plastic food containers, he told me he used to be a chef, that he used to own his own restaurant. He told me the name of it, and how he’d gotten a great review last year in the LA Weekly, saying he had a knack for unusual flavor combinations.
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