Behold the Dreamers

by Mbue, Imbolo

  As he sat in the car with the two hundred dollars in his pocket, he fervently hoped Cindy wouldn’t ask if he’d sent all the money because he would either have to tell her a half-truth or give her a long explanation of how this business of sending money to relatives back home worked and how some relatives had no consideration for those who sent them money because they thought the streets of America were paved with dollar bills.

  Cindy reentered the car twenty minutes later and immediately got on her phone.

  “I’m still speechless, Cheri,” she said. “Completely speechless … My gosh! Mike? Of all people? … Oh, God, I feel so awful for her … Of course she’s in a daze! I’m in a daze. I thought she looked a bit down when I walked in, but to hear this … She doesn’t deserve it! … No! … She’s been nothing but wonderful to him. Thirty years of marriage, and you wake up one day and say you’re in love with someone else? I’d die … Yes, I’d die! … Okay, maybe I wouldn’t die, but I certainly wouldn’t be getting out of bed the next day to meet up with you guys for lunch … Oh my God! Of course! Oh, gosh, that could be me … I feel like it’s going to be me one day, Cher. I’ll wake up one day and Clark will tell me he’s found someone younger and prettier, oh, God! … Yeah, out with the old, in with the new … I don’t care if she’s forty-five, she can’t be more beautiful than June … Me, neither. I’ve never met even one of those skanks who was anything worth writing home about … I mean, some of them … It’s never about the looks. We went to dinner last night with the Steins, and the waitress, she was definitely not that pretty except for a cute accent from some Eastern European place. But you should have seen how Clark was looking at her … Maybe early thirties … Every time she came over, Cher … No, I’m not kidding you … Of course he still does it, right in front of me … Subtle? Not last night; I had to go to the bathroom to gather myself … Yeah, that’s how bad it was. Humiliating … Maybe it was all in my head because I didn’t want to be there, but the way he was talking to her, smiling at her, curious about her tattoo … It was! A big reminder to me, you know … I just don’t know …”

  Fourteen

  PEOPLE HANGING OUT IN BARS MADE NO SENSE TO NENI. WHY WOULD anyone want to stand in a crowded place for hours, screaming at the top of their voice to chat with a friend, when they could sit comfortably in their own home and talk to their friend in a calm voice? Why would they choose to sit in a dark space, consuming drinks that sold at the grocery store for a quarter of the bar’s price? It was an odd way of spending time and money, and a decision like Winston’s was even odder. Winston lived alone in a seven-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom apartment in a doorman building, and yet he was going to celebrate his birthday with some friends in a bar at the Hudson Hotel, across the street from his apartment building.

  “But your apartment can fit at least thirty people,” Neni said to him when he came over and invited her and Jende to join in. “I can come and cook the food for the party.”

  “And who’s going to clean the next morning?” Winston asked her.

  “You have a cleaning lady!”

  “No, I’m not dealing with all that,” he said. “And why are you making all this sisa about going to a bar? Didn’t you like going to drinking spots in Limbe?”

  “Yes, I like drinking spots. So?”

  “So, isn’t it the same thing?”

  “Same thing? Wait, you want to compare American bars to drinking spots in Limbe?”

  “Why not? You go to the place, you order your drink, you find somewhere to sit down and enjoy it—”

  “Please, don’t make me laugh, Winston,” Neni said, laughing. “There’s no comparison, okay? In Limbe you sit outside, it’s warm and sunny. You’re enjoying a nice breeze, listening to makossa in the background, watching people go up and down the street. That is real enjoyment. Not these places where—”

  “How many American bars have you been to?”

  “Why do I have to go to any of them? I see them on TV—that’s enough for me. People act as if things in America have to be better than things everywhere else. America doesn’t have the best of everything, and when it comes to where you can go and enjoy a nice drink, it can never compete with Cameroon. Even if someone wants—”

  “Neni, I’m begging, enough with the too many arguments,” Jende said. “Let’s just go, okay?”

  “Maybe,” she said, pursing her lips.

  “You’ll have a good time, and I’ll have one of those drinks they call Sex on the Beach,” Jende added, winking at her as she rolled her eyes and walked out of the living room.

  On the evening of the party, they arrived an hour late, thanks to Neni changing and unchanging her mind on which blouse to wear so she could look equally sexy and respectable. Winston was standing near the counter with a group of friends when they walked in holding hands, Jende in front, Neni behind. Next to Winston and his friends, two men sat on stools, smiling with their faces so close Neni was convinced she was about to witness her first kiss between two men. The sight of the men reminded her of the instructor—thanks to whom she’d gotten an A-minus final grade in precalculus and ended the semester with a 3.7 GPA—and got her wondering what his boyfriend looked like, and where they were in the adoption process, which the instructor had told her on the last day of class they were ready to begin because he didn’t want to wait until after his graduation anymore, being that he was about to turn forty.

  “What should we do?” Jende whispered in her ear as they stood by the door, unsure of how to navigate the room packed with patrons sipping beer and swirling cocktails. She shrugged—how was she supposed to know what to do in a place like this? With no choice but to wait for Winston to come get them, they remained by the door, waving intermittently at him and hoping he would see them, which he did only after one of his friends waved back at them. Winston put up a finger and mouthed something but seemed unable to extricate himself from his friends, so Jende and Neni continued standing by the exit, hands linked like adjacent trees with interlocked branches, awkwardly shifting their feet and looking at the drinkers despite knowing they wouldn’t be seeing a familiar face in the roomful of good-looking, young white people.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” Neni whispered in Jende’s ear, and rushed for the ladies’ room before he had a chance to respond. In front of the mirror, she noticed that her face was getting sweaty, certainly not from the heat in the air-conditioned room. What was she going to do or say to those people out there for two hours? She’d never been invited to a party with mostly white people, and even if she had, she would not have attended. She was only doing this for Winston, but maybe she should have stayed home and cooked him some fufu and eru for his birthday gift. This place wasn’t her kind of place; the people out there weren’t her kind of people. Winston had friends of all races, she knew, but she had no idea he had so many white friends—she didn’t have a single non-African friend and hadn’t even come close to being friends with a white person. It was one thing to be in the same class with them, work for them, smile at them on the bus; it was a whole other thing to laugh and chat with them for hours, making sure she enunciated every word so they wouldn’t say her accent was too difficult to understand. No way could she spend time with a white woman and be herself the way she was with Betty or Fatou. What would they talk about? Laugh about? Besides, she hated it when she said something and they smiled or nodded and she could tell they had no idea what she’d just said. And the people in the bar, they looked like that kind—they were mostly associates at the firm where Winston worked, so she had to be careful not to embarrass him. Nothing shamed her more than black people embarrassing themselves in front of white people by behaving the way white people expect them to behave. That was the one reason why she had such a hard time understanding African-Americans—they embarrassed themselves in front of white people left and right and didn’t seem to care.

  She pulled a tissue from her purse, dabbed the sweat and oil off her face. She reapplied her dark purple lipstick, wh
ich needed no reapplication. This should be a good exercise, she thought as she walked back into the bar, pulling down her red halter blouse to cover the top of her jeans, which was annoyingly bunching up beneath her belt and overlapping belly. She was glad Jende had talked her out of wearing high heels—her legs were shaky enough on the two-inch cowgirl boots into which she’d tucked her jeans. Shaky or not, though, she had to make herself at ease and act as if she went to places like this every night. After she becomes a pharmacist, she might have to attend lots of parties with white people. Hopefully, her accent will no longer be as strong as one of her professors has said it is; maybe she’ll learn to speak with an American accent by then. But for tonight she would try to speak as slowly as she could and then smile. No one would ask her to repeat herself three times if she just smiled.

  For perhaps a minute after reentering the bar, she couldn’t see Jende or Winston, so she stood by herself, looking around the room at friends and co-workers and couples whispering into ears or conversing at the top of voices. Then she saw Jende by the door, chatting with someone, probably one of Winston’s friends whom he’d met during the month he lived with Winston when he first came to America.

  She was trying to decide whether to join Jende or order a glass of soda on Winston’s tab when a young white woman with curly dark hair appeared in front of her, a cocktail glass in hand, smiling as if she’d just seen something incredibly special.

  “Oh my God!” the young woman said. “You must be Neni!”

  Neni nodded, broadening her smile.

  “I’m Jenny. Winston’s girlfriend.”

  Winston’s girlfriend?

  “So glad to finally meet you!” Jenny said, giving Neni a hug.

  “I am glad to meet you, too,” Neni said, struggling to enunciate and scream above the hip-hop music blasting into her ears from every direction.

  “Are you having a good time?” Jenny shouted, moving closer to her. “Would you like a drink?”

  Neni shook her head.

  “I’m so glad we finally get to meet!” Jenny shouted again. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “Thank you. I am happy to meet you, too.”

  “I’ve been telling Winston that we need to hang out, all four of us, but it’s just so tough with everyone’s work schedules. But we’ve got to. Is Jende here?”

  Neni nodded and smiled, still thinking: Winston’s girlfriend?

  “How do you like New York? Winston tells me you’ve been here for only two years.”

  “I love it. Very much. I am very happy to be here.”

  “I’d love to go to Cameroon!” Jenny said, smiling and looking upward dreamingly. “Winston doesn’t seem too eager to visit anytime soon but I’m pushing for us to go sometime next year.”

  Neni looked at Jenny, grinning and sipping her cocktail, and couldn’t decide whether to laugh or feel sorry for her. What was she thinking? Winston was never going to marry a white woman. He didn’t even bother introducing the ones he slept with to his family, because he changed them the way someone changes underwear. All Neni and Jende knew right now was that he was playing one of the other associates at the firm: Apparently this was her. The poor thing. The way her eyes lit up every time she said his name. She looked no older than twenty-six, but not too young to have noticed that successful Cameroonian men like Winston hardly ever married non-Cameroonian women. They enjoyed every type for as long as they could: white, Filipino, Mexican, Iranian, Chinese, any woman of any color who availed herself out of infatuation or undeniable love or mere curiosity. But when the time came to choose a wife, how many of them married one of those women? Too few. And Winston would never be one of those few. If he couldn’t find a good Bakweri girl, he would marry one from another tribe in the Southwest or Northwest regions (but definitely not from the Bangwa tribe, since his mother hated Bangwas, for whatever reason). He would marry his kind because a man like him needed a woman who understood his heart, shared his values and interests, knew how to give him the things he needed, accepted that his children must be raised in the same manner in which his parents had raised him, and only a woman from his homeland could do that.

  “There you are,” someone said from behind them. Neni turned around to see another young woman with a cocktail glass in hand, probably Jenny’s friend. Jenny turned around, too, hugged the other woman, and introduced Neni as Winston’s cousin who just came from Africa. Just came from Africa? Neni thought. She didn’t just come from Africa. She considered correcting Jenny, but, not knowing if it would be polite to do so, instead forced out a smile at Jenny’s friend, who nodded but otherwise barely acknowledged her presence. The friend began telling Jenny a story, and the women veered into another conversation, leaving Neni a smiling spectator to their camaraderie. After ten minutes, unsure of what to do besides continue trying to prove to herself that she could be at ease in a bar, she hurriedly excused herself; the two women hardly paused to say goodbye. She pushed through the crowd, which seemed to have tripled since she and Jende arrived, and inadvertently hit a young man’s drink with her elbow. The drink did not spill, but the young man gave her a look that she was certain meant: What the hell are you doing here, you stupid African woman?

  Jende was standing alone where she’d last seen him, sipping a drink through a straw and slowly moving to the hip-hop music in his bright yellow Madiba shirt.

  “I’m ready to go,” she said in his ear.

  “Why?” he said. “I was wondering where you were. Did you have anything to drink?”

  “I don’t want a drink.”

  “Is it your nausea? Won’t some Coca-Cola help—?”

  “Did I complain to you about my nausea? Let’s go.”

  “Ah, Neni. Just thirty more minutes. I’ve only had two Sex on the Beach.”

  “Then stay. I’m leaving.”

  “You won’t even talk to Winston and wish him happy birthday?”

  “I’ll call him tomorrow.”

  Outside on Fifty-eighth Street, the air was cool and refreshing, the noise level bearable except for two ambulances rushing to Roosevelt Hospital a block away. Neni turned her face away from the hospital in an attempt to block out the memory of what had happened there a year ago, the afternoon she had rushed with her friend Betty to Labor and Delivery because Betty was cramping heavily. Betty had received an emergency C-section only for the baby to come out stillborn.

  “Let’s go sit at Columbus Circle for a little bit,” Jende said, and she quickly agreed, banishing from her mind the image of the lifeless newborn she wished she hadn’t seen. Jende began talking about how great a time he’d had talking to one of Winston’s friends, but she was barely listening. She was noticing something for the first time: She was realizing that most people on the street were walking with someone who looked like them. On both sides of the street, going east and west, she saw people walking with their kind: a white man holding hands with a white woman; a black teenager giggling with other black (or Latino) teenagers; a white mother pushing a stroller alongside another white mother; a black woman chatting with a black woman. She saw a quartet of Asian men in tuxedos, and a group of friends who had different skin colors but were dressed in similar elegant chic styles. Most people were sticking to their own kind. Even in New York City, even in a place of many nations and cultures, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, preferred their kind when it came to those they kept closest. And why shouldn’t they? It was far easier to do so than to spend one’s limited energy trying to blend into a world one was never meant to be a part of. That was what made New York so wonderful: It had a world for everyone. She had her world in Harlem and never again would she try to wriggle her way into a world in midtown, not even for just an hour.

  When they got to Columbus Circle, she called Fatou, who told her that Liomi was fine, they could stay out for however long they wanted. So they sat beneath the statue of Christopher Columbus, side by side, hand in hand, surrounded by skateboarders and young lovers and homeless people,
looking north as cars came around the circle and went up Central Park West. The spring air was crisper than she would have wished, but not crisp enough to send her rushing into the subway. And even if it had been, she would have stayed in the circle, because it wasn’t every night she got a chance to enjoy the sounds of the city and its millions of lights blinking around her, reminding her that she was still living in her dream. Bubakar had assured them that they could be in the country for many years, which meant they could be in the city for many years. A massive smile involuntarily appeared on her face at the thought, and she moved closer to Jende and leaned against him.

  “This is the best place in the whole city,” he said to her. She did not ask why he thought so, because she knew why.

  In his first days in America, it was here he came every night to take in the city. It was here he often sat to call her when he got so lonely and homesick that the only balm that worked was the sound of her voice. During those calls, he would ask her how Liomi was doing, what she was wearing, what her plans for the weekend were, and she would tell him everything, leaving him even more wistful for the beauty of her smile, the hearth in his mother’s kitchen, the light breeze at Down Beach, the tightness of Liomi’s hugs, the coarse jokes and laughter of his friends as they drank Guinness at a drinking spot; leaving him craving everything he wished he hadn’t left behind. During those times, he told her, he often wondered if leaving home in search of something as fleeting as fortune was ever worthwhile.

  “You know what I’m realizing now?” he said to her.