The Newlyweds

by Nell Freudenberger

  She loved the idea of the snooze button, temptingly larger than all the others, but she could never use it. Now she got up and fixed George’s Chex and banana (he did not like eggs so early in the morning) and poured his Tropicana orange juice. George had his breakfast in his bathrobe, and then he changed into his khakis and shirt: short-sleeved now that the weather was finally warm again. She was disappointed to find that he didn’t need to wear a tie; she’d been under the impression that every American man wore a tie to work, unless his job was in a restaurant or a shop.

  She felt lucky to have gotten a job that had nothing to do with food. She’d called her parents as soon as she heard:

  “A bookstore,” she told her father. “Books and CDs and all types of media.”

  “She’s in charge of selling books,” she heard her father say, and then her mother grabbed the phone and wanted to know her salary.

  “Seven dollars and fifteen cents per hour,” she said, and even her parents knew that wasn’t much, but they converted it—521 taka per hour—almost twice what she’d been making as an English tutor at home. Amina knew that as soon as her mother hung up the phone, she would call her sister, Amina’s Devil Aunt, to tell her about the bookstore. The conversations were shorter when Amina called home because phone cards were so much more expensive in Rochester.

  “Good luck,” George said as he dropped her off in front of the shopping mall on the first day. She was wearing the black trousers she’d had tailored at home, along with a gray cardigan sweater Jessica had given her (because it made Jessica’s hips look “a mile wide”). Amina knew she was pretty: she’d never liked her nose, but since arriving in America she’d begun to appreciate her eyes, large and heavily lashed, and the fullness of her lips. When her curls were kept under control, people here admired them. Her skin was clear, and she’d never felt the need for makeup. Even her Devil Aunt had often praised Amina’s figure, slightly disparaging her own daughter Ghaniyah, who had smaller breasts and a thicker waist. This morning she had looked in the mirror and found herself somber and unfeminine, but at breakfast her husband had smiled and said that she looked great—that she was turning into a real Rochesterian.

  George had given her his watch so that she could be sure of the time, but even with the strap as short as they could make it, the watch was as loose as a bangle. It was good to arrive five minutes early, but twenty minutes made you seem desperate. Amina knew the way her English could sabotage her when she was intimidated, and so she walked slowly past the shops—Linens ’n Things, OfficeMax, Bare Necessities—as if she were interested in their contents, practicing an introduction in her head. Hi (not “hello”) I’m (not “I am”) Amina. I’m a new sales associate. I’m starting today. Is Carl in, please?

  She was standing in front of Old Navy when she realized it was 7:54. Where was MediaWorks? She’d been so focused on using up the time that she’d forgotten to locate her destination. She looked up into the cavern of stores, but there were so many of them. Why had she assumed she would just come upon it?

  She approached one of the janitors outside a restaurant. “MediaWorks?”

  The janitor looked at her blankly and shook his head. “No English.” He pointed to the sign next to the escalator, and Amina went to stand in front of it, but with little hope. She was good with maps, but these color-coded, floating rectangles were foreign to her, tiny black numbers running like spiders around their edges. She could find Old Navy, number 12, but what was 12 doing next to number 3? Where was Jo-Ann Fabrics, which was just on the other side of the escalators, but represented by no rectangle she could see?

  It was like a nightmare. She had a physical sensation of panic; if she’d had to describe it, she would’ve said it was in her stomach—although it was more like a lightness in her sexual organ, a feeling that sometimes came upon her at surprising moments (unfortunately not when she was doing that with George). She could hear her mother’s voice, Inshallah, but it wasn’t God’s presence she felt. It was her mother’s, hovering beside her just as she had every day Amina visited the British Council, traveling all the way there and back with her by rickshaw so that Amina wouldn’t have to go alone.

  Amma, she thought, where are you?

  A girl stepped onto the escalator. She was about Amina’s age, skinny, with very white skin and straight black hair. She was wearing heavy black eye makeup and drinking from an enormous fast-food cup of soda. Black rubber bracelets snaked around one arm, and as the girl rose in Amina’s direction, she could make out an elaborate bit of Chinese writing peeking out of the collar of the girl’s red polo shirt. She did not look friendly, but it was 7:58 (by George’s watch), and Amina had already resolved to ask for help. The girl saw her looking and frowned; she was stepping off the escalator before Amina recognized the miracle. She had doubted, and God had sent this girl—across whose right breast, in bright yellow letters, was spelled the name MEDIAWORKS.

  “Excuse me! MediaWorks?”

  “Doesn’t open till nine.” She was wearing a name tag that said, LISA, GREECE. Amina had never met a Greek person before, but the badge gave her confidence. Lisa was an immigrant, but she was white; therefore the job was a good one. She hoped that a similar badge had already been prepared for her: AMINA, BANGLADESH.

  “Hello,” Amina said. “I am new sales associate. Carl—”

  “Oh, Carl,” the girl said. Her voice was pleasant and ordinary, and immediately Amina hoped that she might make a friend. She imagined George’s surprise, to see her hopping out of the car in the morning, waving to a girl with a Chinese letter tattooed on her neck.

  “I’m Lisa. You can come with me.”

  “Thank you so much!” Lisa looked at her strangely, and Amina struggled to calm herself. She was not going to be late after all. “Have you been working at MediaWorks very long?”

  “My whole freakin’ life. It feels that way, anyway. Don’t worry—it’s all inventory at the beginning, but after a while they put you on the floor. I’m not sure which is worse, though—the customers are so stupid. It’s like, they want to exchange movies they’ve already watched.”

  They were approaching MediaWorks, which was right across the atrium, one floor above where she’d been standing. Amina couldn’t believe she’d missed it. Her heartbeat was doing its trick again, traveling all over her body as if it were on vacation. Slow down, she instructed it. You only got one chance to begin your first American job, and Amina wanted to be proud of the way she had behaved.

  “How many shifts did they give you?”

  “Three,” Amina said.

  Lisa shook her head. “You’ll get more. They’re just testing you. Even Ethan gets more than that, and he’s a disaster. Personally I think they hired you so they could fire him, as soon as they’re sure you’ll work out. Last week he asked me to cover the beginning of his shift so he could go out and buy Plan B for his girlfriend. I mean, seriously? That’s totally TMI.”

  Amina smiled and nodded at Lisa, but her ignorance was clear. “Hey, where are you from, anyway?”

  “Dhaka, Bangladesh,” Amina said, and when Lisa looked blank: “It’s near India—and China. Excuse me, but what does that say?” Lisa touched her neck. “This?”

  A man’s voice called out from inside the store. “Lisa—get in here!”

  “It was supposed to be ‘fire,’ but the guy fucked it up and did the one next to it in the book. So now it’s ‘love,’ and I can’t afford a freakin’ do-over.”

  “Lisa! Do you get paid to hang out with your friends?”

  “The wonderful Carl,” Lisa said. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

  “ ‘Love’ is nice,” Amina said, as she followed Lisa into the store.

  15She and George had practiced taking the bus from the South Town Plaza, and in the afternoons, it stopped near enough to Skytop Lane that she could walk home on her own. It was a cloudy but temperate autumn day, nearly fifteen degrees—no matter how long Amina lived here, she thought her brain would never re
calibrate to Fahrenheit—and she lingered on the way home, taking pleasure in having completed her first day without any obvious errors and examining the unfamiliar plantings in other people’s front yards. When she came through the back door, her father was shouting into the answering machine. He spoke English in his messages, with great effort:

  How is day one! Your amma is fine! I am fine! How is George? Please you are calling us soon, using the card!

  Amina dropped her bag and got to the phone just in time. “Abba, Abba—I’m here.”

  “She’s there!” her father shouted, and then her mother grabbed the phone and started asking questions. Amina explained about Lisa and the Chinese tattoo and Carl, whom Lisa hated but who wasn’t actually that bad. She explained about inventory, which she had done for seven hours, earning $50.05 (minus $13.95 for her MediaWorks polo shirt). She told her mother how Lisa loved Diet Pepsi, and how she’d bought two more large cups of it during the day, along with chow mein from the food court. Amina had brought leftover prawn curry in a Tupperware and so she’d had to explain about Tupperware, and promise to bring some for her mother the first time she went home to visit. Her mother repeated to her father the prices of the polo shirt and Lisa’s lunch, and then her father took back his phone.

  “Your amma doesn’t want to tell you,” he said, and Amina could hear her mother arguing in the background. “We went to the doctor, and she is fine.” Her father switched to English: “Only it is hard for her to keep the weight on, no matter how much shondesh she eats.” This was a joke, because her mother loved that particular sweet, especially the very soft, pure white Satkhira shondesh with its crunchy grains of sugar that they stopped to buy every time they visited her grandmother. “I try to make her eat bananas, but she only likes the village type. And now she has seen fitness exercises on television, and is practicing them every day.”

  “The clean air in Rochester will improve her appetite,” Amina promised, without much conviction. It was a discouraging time to talk about their plan. Of course the plan was for the future, and her parents had always understood that it depended upon George. Before she’d left home, Amina had e-mailed George to ask about old people in America. A lot of the things she’d heard about America had turned out not to be true: teenagers did not have sex in public; the majority of black people were not criminals (George had several black colleagues at TCE); and although most American women had jobs, there were also some like Annie Snyder who stayed at home with their children. Amina had wondered if the perversely named old-age “homes” would turn out to be a similar sort of myth, but George had confirmed their existence. If an old person stayed in his own home, sometimes a person would be hired by the family members to care for him.

  “A servant, you mean.”

  “We say nurse. Or ‘caretaker.’ But most people can’t afford that. Most old people wind up in homes.” George had agreed with her that it was very sad, the way that Americans shut up their parents and grandparents even when there was nothing wrong with them, and Amina had reported that attitude back to her parents.

  Amina’s mother had been excited when they read on the Internet about the cost of babysitting in America: think of the money Amina and George would save if she looked after her grandchildren for free. Her father could take care of the yard, and if her mother did the cooking and the shopping, Amina would have time to work more hours. It all made perfect sense in Desh, especially when George told Amina that there were three bedrooms in his house.

  What she hadn’t understood until George had explained it was that Americans didn’t like to live with anybody besides their spouses and their children. George’s own mother, Eileen, was sixty-six years old, perfectly healthy, and soon after the wedding had startled Amina by acquiring a boyfriend named Bob. If she eventually couldn’t manage to live in her house in Brighton, George had promised to help her find an apartment somewhere in Pittsford. He and Amina would help her, he said, but Amina shouldn’t worry that his mother would ever want to move in with them—even though they had those two extra bedrooms upstairs. “She’s too independent for that,” he had told her, as if this unnatural refusal made him proud. They had still never discussed her own parents directly, and she cherished the hope that George might feel differently about a pair of older people who had no interest in being “independent” but just wanted to be near their only child. She and George didn’t disagree very often, but when they did it was always because of “cultural differences”—a phrase so useful in forestalling arguments that she felt sorry for those couples who couldn’t employ it.

  “Don’t worry,” her father said. “The cool weather is coming. I’m going to take her to the village and fatten her up. Shondesh and bananas, shondesh and bananas, morning, noon, and night.”

  “I miss you so much,” she told her mother, when she got on the phone to say good-bye. “I missed you at my job today.”

  “English, English!” her mother insisted. “I am practicing.”

  And so Amina had to keep it simple. “Four bananas per day,” she instructed her mother. “Four bananas and five plates of shondesh.”

  16She showed George her badge as soon as he came in the door. “It says ‘Pittsford’—as if they think I was born here.” Carl knew where she was born—she’d had to give him a photocopy of her green card—but she thought someone else was probably in charge of making the badges. It was possible that this person couldn’t spell “Bangladesh” or, like Lisa, had never even heard of it.

  “It doesn’t make a difference where you were born,” George said. “It’s where you live now that counts.”

  She was making a chicken pulao, even though there was leftover curry in the refrigerator. She wanted to show George that things wouldn’t change now that she was working, and so she had decided to make something fresh. The curry would last for days in their enormous GE refrigerator, and you never had to worry about the current going out.

  “Lisa is my colleague, and her badge says ‘Greece.’ But I think she’s been living in Rochester for some time.”

  George laughed out loud—a rare thing. “Do you know where Greece is?”

  Amina was offended, and she added too much paprika to the rice. “Of course. Underneath Italy, in the Aegean Sea.” By the time Amina was seven, she could find every country on the tablecloth. (The cloth didn’t have every country in the world, because it had been made from outdated maps; for example, Bangladesh was missing, still one wing of bright green Pakistan.) One day she’d come home from school to find that her father had covered all of the country names with thin, white tape; after that, she’d had to do it from memory.

  “Nope,” George said. “Let me show you.” He went out to the garage to get the Rand McNally StreetFinder, and put it down in the least convenient place, right where she was slicing the vegetables. She was still irritated as he flipped through the pages, but it turned out he was right: in the top, left-hand corner of the map, bisected by highway 390, was a town called Greece.

  “You’d probably meet some Bengali people if we lived there.”

  “There are Bengalis in Lisa’s neighborhood?” She had seen a lot of Indians at Wegmans, and once on the sidewalk near Home Depot she had passed an old woman in a sari and sweater, speaking Bangla into a cell phone, but she’d never actually been introduced to anyone who wasn’t white.

  “There are more immigrants there than in Pittsford.”

  “How much does an apartment cost there?”

  “Depends. You know that.”

  “An apartment for your mother, when she gets old.”

  “She’d want to be here, or in Brighton.”

  “But if she wanted to live in Greece.”

  George shook his head and tugged playfully at her braid. She plaited her hair at home now because he’d said he liked it, although she hadn’t worn it that way for years. “Little Miss Curious. Maybe eight hundred dollars a month, if it was just one bedroom. My mother might want two.”

  As George revealed these
facts, Amina stored them up, so that she wouldn’t have to ask again. She knew that together they would pay 25 percent of their income in taxes each year, and that some of this money was deducted from her paychecks in advance. The rest was called her take-home pay. If she continued sending half of this to Bangladesh (my “send-home pay,” she joked to George), it would take years to save enough so that her parents could rent their own apartment in Rochester. If she had to pay their rent, she would never be able to contribute anything toward the cost of college, nor would she be able to cut down her hours once they had a child without relying heavily on George for her parents’ maintenance.

  They had been eating in silence for several minutes when Amina remembered the other question she’d wanted to ask.

  “It’s an expression,” George said. “You can figure it out—it just means a second plan you come up with in case the first one doesn’t work out.”

  “Is there any other kind of Plan B? A kind you can buy at a store?”

  George looked up from his plate. “Oh my God, Amina. Are you—?” Her husband didn’t finish his sentence, and she didn’t know how to do it for him. Something she’d said had drained what little color there was from his skin.

  “You are?”

  “I am—what?”

  “Pregnant?” It came out as a whisper. “But why would you want to—”

  “Want to?”

  “Use Plan B!” George exclaimed. “I thought we said we wanted a child.”

  “We do,” Amina said.

  “But when did you miss your period?”

  “I had it three weeks ago.”

  “So why do you think you’re pregnant? Did you take a test?”

  “I don’t think I am.”

  George managed to look both relieved and exasperated at once. “Then why are you asking about Plan B?”