by Mbue, Imbolo
That evening they attended a classical music concert in St. Nicholas Park and listened as a blind pianist performed a piece so sorrowful it briefly clouded Jende’s eyes. The next afternoon, eager to experience more of what a New York City summer had to offer those unable or unwilling to leave the city, he ditched the money he could be making in the Bronx and took his son for a swim at the public pool in East Harlem.
“Papa, show me how you and Uncle Winston used to swim at Down Beach,” Liomi said, and Jende did, flaunting the backstroke he and his cousin used to do in the waters behind the Botanic Garden. After completing two laps while a giggling Liomi watched, Jende lifted the boy and positioned his back against the water to teach him the strokes. Watching Liomi laughing and flapping his arms in the water, Jende saw, for perhaps the first time, his son not only as a child but also as a man in the making, a young man watching and learning from his father, a boy who wanted to follow in the footsteps of his papa and become a man like him in disposition, if not in possessions. That night they slept together as usual, Liomi’s arm around his father and his head on Jende’s chest. Never much of a praying man, Jende said a lengthy prayer for his boy as they lay, that Liomi would live a long happy life.
Twenty-one
HALFWAY INTO HER STAY IN SOUTHAMPTON, VINCE EDWARDS WALKED into his bedroom, jumped on his newly made bed while she was fluffing his pillows, and asked her to take a guess.
“Guess about what?” she asked.
“Today’s the day,” he said, beaming.
“Day for …?”
“The day I tell them.”
Neni looked confusedly at the face exploding with joy. “Tell who what?” she asked, wondering why Vince assumed she had to know his news.
“Jende didn’t tell you …?”
“Jende didn’t tell me what?”
“Never mind,” he said, standing up and walking out of the room.
Hours later, around five in the evening, Vince and Cindy left to meet Clark for dinner at a restaurant in Montauk. The next morning Neni saw nothing of Vince and very little of Cindy, who declined her breakfast and lunch and spent much of the afternoon on her phone, begging someone to please be reasonable and think about the consequences of his/her actions. When Neni called Jende later that evening to ask what he thought might be going on, Jende asked her to please stay out of other people’s business.
“If you know something, why won’t you tell me?” she asked.
“If I tell you, what will you do with the information besides gossip about it with your friends?”
She hung up determined to find out the story for herself. She couldn’t eavesdrop any further on Cindy, who had left the house to go for an evening walk on the beach, and Mighty could only tell her that his parents and Vince were fighting—his mom wasn’t telling him why, and Vince was back in the city. When Mighty had called Vince to ask why their mom was so upset, Vince had told him they would talk about it as soon as Mighty returned to the city since it was hard explaining certain things over the phone.
Two nights later, though, Neni wouldn’t have to wonder anymore: After making Mighty sautéed salmon and oven fries for dinner—plus puff-puff, which Mighty had asked for after she told him it was what she and her siblings ate in the mornings as they walked to school—playing video games with him, and tucking him in bed, she went to her bedroom to read a chapter in the textbook for the social psychology class she’d signed up for in the fall semester. Engrossed in a chapter on persuasion, she initially didn’t notice the voices escalating in the kitchen. It was only after perhaps three minutes, after the beseechings and accusations appeared to have reached a crescendo, that she realized it was Mr. and Mrs. Edwards shouting in the kitchen after returning home from a wedding.
She got out of bed, tiptoed up the basement stairs, and leaned on the door with her ear pressed against it.
“No!” she heard Clark shout. “You can go back to her and work on your long list of issues if you must, but I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’d rather see your family fall apart?” Cindy shouted back, her voice trembling. “You’d rather that than see a therapist and admit you’ve got problems that are destroying your family?”
“Yeah, let’s focus on my problems, because you don’t have any.”
“I’m not the reason our son is moving to India!” Cindy cried.
“You think Vince is moving to India because of me?”
“He’s moving to India because he’s unhappy, Clark! He’s miserable—”
“Because of me?”
“Because we haven’t succeeded in giving him a happy life! Because all he wants is to feel happy in his own family, and we can’t even give him that. Can’t you see?”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit to what?”
“Bullshit to all your crap about feeling responsible for Vince’s happiness,” Clark shouted, amid the sound of the refrigerator door opening and slamming hard. “He’s a grown man. He’s responsible for his own happiness. I can’t help it if he wants to be an idiot and throw away a perfectly good life. I can’t do anything about it!”
For many seconds they were silent. Neni closed her eyes and shook her head, unsure which of them to feel more sorry for. She imagined Clark was angrily drinking wine or beer straight from the bottle, while Cindy was silently weeping.
“Do you care?” she heard Cindy say, her trembling voice now lower but sadder. “Do you give a shit about how badly you’re hurting us?”
“Right. Sure! Working hard to give my family this life. How awful of me. Doing everything to make sure—”
“You’re not doing everything! You’ve never done everything! Until you understand that family must always come first—”
“There are times when careers must take priority.”
“There has never been a time when this marriage took priority for you. There’s never been a time when this family took priority for you! Not once! That’s why you’re afraid of us going back to therapy—you don’t want to see how selfish and callous you are!”
“What do you want from me, Cindy?” Clark shouted so loud Neni thought the walls vibrated. “Tell me what you want from me!”
“I just … I want,” Cindy wept, “I want you … I want us … I want the boys to be happy, Clark … That’s all I want … for us to be … for my family to be …”
Neni heard footsteps walking away, and she could tell it was Clark Edwards leaving his wife to cry alone in the kitchen. She heard a thump and a wail, and pictured Cindy slipping from against the counter to the floor. She imagined her sitting alone, crying on the cold kitchen floor.
Neni pulled her head away from the door and leaned against the railing. Should she do something? Would it be appropriate? What could she do besides go to the kitchen and see how she could help Cindy?
She opened the door gently and silently stepped into the kitchen, afraid of startling Cindy, who was sitting where Neni imagined she would be sitting. She was moaning softly with her head bowed, so lost in her misery that she didn’t notice Neni walking toward her. Only when Neni stooped close to her did she lift her red tear-stained face, look Neni in her eyes, and begin weeping again.
“I’m sorry, madam,” Neni whispered. “I’m just … I only want to see what I can do to make you feel better.”
Cindy, with her head bowed again, nodded and sniffled. Neni stood up, her hand supporting her belly, and grabbed the box of tissues on the kitchen island. She sat down next to Cindy and offered her a tissue, which Cindy took, blew her nose with, and began crying in.
“I hope you and Mr. Edwards are going to solve everything soon, madam.”
“He thinks … he thinks he has the right,” Cindy whimpered, slightly above a whisper. “Everyone … they all think they’ve got the right to treat me as they wish.”
Neni nodded, struggling to ignore the smell of alcohol spilling out of Cindy’s mouth alongside her words. Her throat sounded parched, and her words stumbled in a slur, eviden
ce to Neni that the madam had drunk more glasses of wine than she could handle.
“Can I get you some water, madam?” Neni asked.
Cindy shook her head and asked for a glass of wine, which Neni quickly got and returned to her position on the floor.
The madam took a sip, crying as she swallowed. “Every single person … they believe they can treat me … however … anyhow …”
Neni nodded again, the box of tissues in her hands.
“First it was my father … he thought he had the right, you know?” Cindy said. “Drag my mother into that abandoned house … force her … do it to her by force … don’t give a shit about … not care for a second about what would happen to the child …”
She sniffled, took another sip of the wine, and wept.
“And the government … our government,” she moaned, slurring, tears running down her cheeks, snot running down her nose. “They had the right, too. Force my mother to carry the child of a stranger. Force her to give birth to the child because … because … I don’t know why!”
Neni’s throat tightened at the sight of the devastated woman in pearls, confused, though, as she was about which child Cindy was talking about.
“I hated her … but can you blame her? She thought she had the right, too … it was her right. To beat me, and curse at me, and call me fat … because every time she looked at me, she was reminded … I was a reminder … of what he’d done to her … But why? What did I do? It’s never the child’s fault … never the fault of an innocent …”
Neni looked away as Cindy picked up the wineglass from the floor and took a long sip. The realization of who the child was had come on so suddenly that her eyebrows had risen, and her eyes had widened, and she’d had to restrain herself from cupping her mouth. She kept her face turned away, hoping Cindy hadn’t seen the look on it, and not wanting to stare too hard at the wet pitiful mess the madam had become. What was she supposed to say to Cindy now? She couldn’t give her a hug to express what she wanted to say without words, so she had to say something. But what could she say to a drunken confession about the unbearable yoke of a life conceived in violence? What could she say about things she’d never pondered?
“And now Clark has the right, too,” Cindy went on, looking blankly ahead as her voice quivered. “He’s got every … single right to love me far less than he loves his work. He’s got every right to toss me aside, pick me up when it suits him … And Vince …” She pulled out another tissue, pressed her face into it, and began bawling hysterically. “Now Vince, too! He thinks … he’s got every right to abandon me even … though I’ve been a perfectly good mother … even though I never abandoned my mother … even after all those years of …”
Her shoulders shook and Neni, uncertain still of the best thing to do, put the tissue box on the floor and warily moved a hand to Cindy’s right shoulder and began rubbing it. Cindy’s cries grew louder as Neni rubbed gently, simultaneously thinking about what else she could do to help the madam. She had to call someone to come over as soon as possible. But who? Not Clark. Not Vince. Maybe Cheri or June—their numbers were on the refrigerator. But what would she give as a reason for calling at midnight? Tell them that a highly intoxicated Cindy couldn’t stop crying? Tell them she didn’t know what to say or do to make Cindy feel better?
“I am so sorry, madam,” Neni whispered. “I am so sorry for what your father did.”
Cindy continued crying, her shoulders quaking in accordance with her sounds.
“Did the police catch him, madam?”
Cindy shook her head.
“Maybe … maybe you could search for him, madam? Maybe if—”
“I walk down the street … every day I’m looking … looking at any man who looks like me … I’m wondering, could that be him? My mother told me I must have his hideous face because I don’t look anything like her … I walk around with this face, the face of a monster … and no one knows. No one knows how much it hurts! Vince has no idea how much it hurts!”
“I am sorry about Vince, too, madam,” Neni said.
Cindy picked up her glass of wine and gulped down the remainder. Neni continued rubbing her shoulder as they sat in silence, the only noise in the kitchen the sound of high-end electrical appliances. The kitchen floor had grown warm underneath them.
“I don’t want him to move to India,” Cindy said, a firmness slowly appearing in her voice. “But supporting him, that’s not what’s so hard for me to do. I can muster the strength to support my child even if it’s not what I want. But his hurtfulness to me … how he thinks he’s suddenly so righteous because he’s found spirituality, that’s what hurts me the most. I said to him, if what you care about is people, changing the world, what about getting a job at the Lehman Brothers Foundation? Clark could help him do that, but oh, no, what a ridiculous idea! He asked me, do I really think the goal of the Lehman Foundation is to make the world a better place? Do I know what Lehman Brothers does? Do I care about how corporations are destroying the world? I’ve tried to understand this anger … I can’t. What does he have against being wealthy? Why should good hardworking people feel bad about their money just because other people don’t have as much money? Once we were friends … my son and I, we were good friends. He found the Truth, and now I am naïve, closed-minded, materialistic, lost. The only way I can see the light is to first lose my ego.”
Cindy sighed and tilted her head as if trying to stretch out an intolerable pain in her neck. “I told him, fine, go … go search for this Truth and Oneness … I want you to be happy. But instead of going all the way to India what about a retreat center somewhere in America … maybe someplace I heard about in New Mexico? Surely the Truth has to be present in America, too? Maybe go to a grad school somewhere near a retreat center? I just … I can’t bear the thought of him being so far away. If anything happened to him, it would … it would kill me.”
Twenty-two
SHE RETURNED FROM THE HAMPTONS WITH FAR MORE DESIGNER CLOTHES than she’d ever imagined having; shoes and accessories, too. Cindy had told her to take as much as she wanted from the storage space in the attic because whatever she didn’t take was going to charity, so Neni had cheerfully obliged, taking an old Louis Vuitton carry-on suitcase with a broken zipper, jam-packing it like roasted peanuts in a liquor bottle, and tying it shut with one of her blouses. Walking through Penn Station and the streets of Harlem, she had needed to stop at least a dozen times to rest from the weight of the Louis Vuitton on her right shoulder, the big brown paper bag full of Liomi’s clothes and toys on her left shoulder, her rolling luggage in one hand, and more clothes and toys for Liomi in the other.
“Did you have to suffer like that just for some free clothes?” Jende asked later that night, laughing, after she told him how difficult it had been managing all the bags while the baby kicked nonstop.
“What do you mean, ‘just for some free clothes’?” she said. “This is not just any free clothes, bébé. You know how much these things cost?”
Jende laughed her off, saying he didn’t care. Clothes were clothes, he said, no matter how much they cost or whose name was printed on them. But Betty did not laugh her off—Betty understood that there was an undeniable difference between the styles and auras of Gucci and Tommy Hilfiger; unlike Jende, she knew that all labeled clothes were not created equal, even if they were made from the same fabric by the same machine.
“You walk down the street wearing this Valentino blouse!” Betty exclaimed, looking at the label of a white silk blouse when she visited days after Neni’s return.
“Can you imagine?” Neni said.
“But you can’t wear this just to walk down the street.”
“Never in this lifetime. Something like this? I don’t even know where I’ll wear it to. Maybe a wedding. Or maybe I’ll save it and they’ll bury me in it when I die.”
“Then let me wear it for you now, eh?” Betty said, laughing and placing the blouse against her chest. “I’ll rock it with a lea
ther skirt and high-heel boots and then bring it back as soon as I hear you’re dead so you can—”
“I beg, give me back my blouse, crazy woman!” Neni said, laughing and grabbing the blouse from Betty’s hands. She stood in front of the full-length mirror on the bedroom door, put the blouse against her chest, and felt its fine silk and delicate buttons.
“That woman must have really liked you, eh?” Betty said.
“Like me why?”
“To give you all these things.”
Neni shrugged and knelt down next to the Louis Vuitton suitcase to repack the things they’d taken out to admire. “She didn’t like me nothing,” she said as she refolded the dresses and blouses. “I did what she wanted me to do, she paid me with money and clothes.”
“But still …”
“It’s not like she’s ever going to wear them. You should have seen her closets. I never knew anyone can have that many clothes and shoes in one house.”
“I would have taken one or two pairs of shoes.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Neni retorted, scoffing at Betty’s bluff.
“Yes, I would,” Betty insisted, widening her eyes and laughing. “Maybe some Calvin Klein and DKNY jeans, too, if I can force this mountain buttocks into it. How would she know she lost it if she has so many things?”
“She wouldn’t ever know. How can anyone know if one of their fifty pairs of shoes gets lost? And I’m not just saying fifty. I swear to you, Betty, I stood in the shoe closet and counted. Fifty!”
“Plus another fifty or one hundred in her apartment in Manhattan.”
“I’m sure.”
“And she’s still so unhappy,” Betty said with a sigh. “Money truly is nothing.”