by Mbue, Imbolo
She was certain she’d gotten her fill, thanks to the ample leftovers at the end of all three parties, but she was nonetheless glad when Anna called and asked if she could come help out at a brunch Cindy and her friends were having in Manhattan.
“Are they going to use the same chefs from the Hamptons?” she asked Anna.
“No,” Anna said. “This one is just brunch. Two chefs from here and no servers. So me and you, we going to serve and clean after. The other girl who works for Cindy’s friend used to work with me every year, but she quit last week, so Cindy tell me to call you.”
“All those people for just the two of us to serve and clean after?”
“No worry, not too many people. Just her and the five friends and their husbands and some children. Cindy says one hundred dollars for you, only three hours. It’s fair, no?”
Neni agreed it was beyond fair, and arrived at June’s apartment on West End Avenue the next Sunday afternoon. There were no more than six children there, and Mighty, thankfully, was one of them. He ran to her when he saw her entering the apartment and hugged her so tightly that Neni had to remind him he wasn’t her only baby, she had another baby growing inside her.
“How were your last days in the Hamptons?” she asked him in the kitchen as she and Anna waited for the chefs to hand them the first appetizers.
“Boring,” Mighty said.
“You did not have any fun after I left?”
“Not really.”
“But now I feel bad, Mighty,” Neni said, inflating her cheeks to make a funny sad face. “Your mom really wanted me to take off my last two days, but next time I will stay if that is what Mr. Mighty demands.”
“I’ll demand!” Mighty said.
“Yes, sir. Or maybe you’ll come with me to Harlem instead. That way we can continue making puff-puff for breakfast in the morning and playing soccer on the beach in the evening. Do you want that instead, Mr. Mighty?”
“Really? It’ll be so cool to go to Harlem … but, hold on, there’s no beach in Harlem.”
“Then we will … I will—”
“We’ll watch stupid movies, and I’ll beat you at Playstation and arm wrestling every time!” Mighty said, laughing, a twinkle in his hazel eyes.
“You should never be proud that you beat a woman,” Neni said, contorting her face to feign indignation as she picked up a tray of appetizers. “Come, everyone is going to start eating.”
As she walked the appetizers around the room before setting the leftovers on the table, she smiled and nodded at Cindy’s friends, all of whom she’d met in the Hamptons. They had been kind and polite to her: offering her advice on the benefits of prenatal yoga and telling her where the best yoga studios in the city were (thank you so much for the information, madam, she always said); reminding her it was okay for her to call them by their first names (something she could never do, being that it was a mark of disrespect in Limbe); complimenting her smooth skin and lovely smile (your skin is so smooth and beautiful, too, madam; you have a lovely smile, too, madam); wondering how long it took her to get her braids done (only eight hours, madam). Their friendliness had surprised her—she’d expected indifference from them, these kinds of women who walked around with authentic Gucci and Versace bags and talked about spas and vacations and the opera. Based on movies she’d seen, in which rich white people ate and drank and laughed with nary a glance at the maids and servers running around them, she’d imagined that women who owned summer houses in the Hamptons wouldn’t have anything to say to her, besides ordering her around, of course. After she’d met no fewer than four of them, all of whom had smiled at her and asked how far along she was in her pregnancy, she’d spoken about this unexpected congeniality with Betty, and she and Betty had agreed that the women’s behavior was likely due to the fact that it wasn’t every day they met a beautiful pregnant Cameroonian woman from Harlem. Such women couldn’t possibly be kind and polite to every housekeeper, they surmised. Cindy, on that Sunday afternoon, was the kindest and politest of them all, reminding Neni to do only the easiest work and make sure she didn’t overexert herself. Watching Cindy chatting with her friends and laughing with her head thrown back, Neni had to convince herself that the strange episodes in the Hamptons had indeed happened.
“We have to talk about Cindy,” Anna whispered in her ear in the kitchen.
“What?” Neni quickly asked. “What is wrong with her?”
Anna pulled her by the arm to the far end of the kitchen, away from the chefs and the guests entering and exiting with plates of egg-white omelets and glasses of smoothies.
“She got problems,” Anna whispered.
“Problems?”
“You don’t see no problems in the Hamptons?”
Neni opened her mouth but said nothing.
“You see something in the Hamptons, no?” Anna said, nodding rapidly. “You see it?”
“I don’t know …,” Neni said, confused by the direction of the conversation.
“I come in the morning for work and she is smelling alcohol,” Anna whispered, waving her hand in front of her face as if to disperse an invisible smell.
“Yes,” Neni said, “she likes wine.”
The housekeeper shook her head. “This is not liking wine. This is problem.”
“But—”
“Last week I look in the garbage, three empty bottles of wine. Mighty do not drink wine. Clark is not home. I see him one, two times every week.”
“Maybe—”
“Can someone please refill the punch for the kids and get some more napkins?” one of the chefs called out. Anna gestured for Neni to stay put while she took care of it.
“To be honest,” Neni whispered when Anna returned, “I saw it in the Hamptons, too.”
“Ah! I know I’m not crazy.”
“I didn’t know a woman can drink like that.”
“This family has problems. Big problems.”
“She wasn’t like this before?”
“No. Before, she drink like normal person—little here, little there. Twenty-two years I work for them and I see no problems like this. But always they have other problems. They eating dinner, not too much talking. You don’t see them fight too many times, you don’t see them happy too many times.”
“You think he knows?” Neni asked, looking over her shoulder.
Anna shook her head. “He don’t know anything. No one knows. See how she looks out there. How can people know if they don’t see the bottles?”
Neni sighed. She wanted to tell Anna about the pills but thought it would be no use further upsetting her. The alcohol was bad enough. “Maybe one day she’ll just stop,” she said.
“One day people don’t stop drinking,” Anna quickly replied. “They drink and drink and drink.”
“But we cannot do anything.”
“No, don’t talk like that,” the housekeeper said, shaking her head so vigorously the two clumps of hair that made up her bangs swung away from her forehead. “We cannot say we cannot do anything, because something happen to her, then what about us? A man in my town, he drink until one day he die. If she die, who will write me check? Or your husband check?”
Neni almost burst out laughing, half at Anna’s reasoning and half at the way she was so terribly and unnecessarily afraid. Lots of people in Limbe drank seven days a week and she’d never heard of alcohol killing any of them. One of her uncles was even known as the best drunkard in Bonjo—he serenaded the whole neighborhood to Eboa Lotin tunes on his best drunken days—and yet he was still living on in Limbe.
“You think it’s little thing,” Anna said, “but I know people lose the job because the family got big problem. My friend with family in Tribeca, she lose her job last month—”
“Oh, Papa God,” Neni gasped, moving her hand to her chest. “You’re scaring me now.”
“I know Cindy for many years,” Anna went on. “Ever since her mother die four years—”
“You knew her mother?”
“Y
es, I know her. She come to the house four, five times. Bad woman. Bad, bad woman. You see the way she talk to Cindy, angry with her, nothing make her happy.”
“No wonder …”
“But Cindy’s sister, the child of the mother’s husband who die long ago, the mother always nice to her. When they come together, everything the bad woman say to the sister is sweetie this, sweetie that. But with Cindy …” Anna shook her head.
“I’d cut that kind of person out of my life, if it was me.”
“No, Cindy goes to see her for Mother’s Day every year, until the bad woman dies.”
“Why?”
“Why you ask me? I don’t know why. And this Mother’s Day, Mighty comes to me, telling me he’s sad because his family no longer go to Virginia for Mother’s Day, because he wants to see his cousins there. I want to shout at him and say you want to go back to Virginia for what? Cindy’s sister, ever since their mother died, I never see her again in the house. Cindy, she has no family now, except for the boys and Clark.”
“But she has a lot of friends.”
“Friends is family?” Anna said. “Friends is not family.”
Out in the living room Cindy was laughing, perhaps amused by a story a friend was telling. How could anyone have so much happiness and unhappiness skillfully wrapped up together? Neni wondered.
“We got to tell Clark about the alcohol,” Anna said.
“No, we cannot!”
“Dessert is ready to be served,” the second chef called out. Neni hurried to take out the desserts while Anna cleared the entrées.
“We don’t have to be the ones to tell him,” Neni said after they’d returned to their corner. “He’ll find out. Maybe you can leave the empty wine bottles on the table for him to see.”
“How he’s going to see when he’s not home? And she will know that I’m trying to do something if I just go take bottle out of trash can and put on the table. You have to be the one to tell him first.”
“Me!”
“We do it together. If I alone I tell him, he will not think it is serious problem. But if you tell him, too, he knows it’s serious. Just tell him somebody was drinking too much wine in Hamptons. You don’t know who. He is smart man, he will know.”
“And he will tell her, and she will know it’s me!”
“No man is stupid like that. After you tell him, next week I, too, I’ll tell him the same thing about some person drinking the wine in the apartment. Then he’ll know it’s really true. He can do what he wants to do. We know our hands are clean.”
Neni walked to the kitchen island, picked up a bottle of water, and gulped down half of it. Maybe Anna was right, she thought. Maybe they had to do the right thing and warn Clark. But she didn’t think it was ever right to get involved in other people’s marriages, marriage already being complicated and full of woes as it was. But Anna had made a good point: Clark was working all the time and would never know the extent of what his wife was going through. The whole time Neni was in the Hamptons, she’d seen him in person only on the days of the cocktail parties, where he and Cindy had acted as if they slept in the same bed every night. At the first cocktail party, which was to celebrate Cindy’s fiftieth birthday, they had floated around the pool hand in hand, smiling and hugging guests in the warm candlelit evening as a string quartet played on. Cindy, in an orange backless dress and blow-dried hair, looked like Gwyneth Paltrow that night, maybe even more beautiful and certainly not much older. Toward the end of the party, they had stood with their arms around each other, flanked on either side by their handsome sons, as Cindy’s friends toasted her, speaking of what a wonderful and selfless friend she was. Cheri tearfully told of the evening she’d called Cindy crying because her mother had fallen at her nursing home in Stamford and needed surgery the next day and Cheri couldn’t be there because she was stuck at work in San Francisco. As an only child, Cheri told the guests, it was hard, really hard, but on that day Cindy made it easy for her. Cindy offered to be there for her mother and took a five A.M. train from Grand Central to Stamford. She stayed at the hospital until the three-hour surgery was over and Cheri’s mother was comfortably settled in her room. Cindy wasn’t just her best friend, Cheri said, choking back tears, Cindy was her sister. The guests, tanned and clad in designer labels, smiled and clapped as Cheri walked over to Cindy and the friends held each other in a prolonged hug. Clark asked everyone to raise their glasses. There wasn’t much he could add to what Cindy’s friends had said, he said, except that it was all true, Cindy was a gem, and my, was she the hottest thirty-five-year-old or what? Everyone laughed, including Vince, who hadn’t been smiling much all evening. To Cindy, they cheered. To Cindy!
Neni couldn’t tell if Clark had spent that night there, but she knew that the next morning he was gone, as was Cindy’s ceaseless smile from the evening before. When Neni asked Mighty during lunch where his father was, Mighty, without looking up from his plate, had said only one word: work. He had finished his lunch in silence and, as Neni was clearing his plate, muttered, “I hope he loses his job.” Neni had shaken her head, unable to decipher Clark Edwards. Why was he always working? How could anyone love work that much? Working nonstop made no sense whatsoever, especially when a man had such a nice family at home. Clark had to know what he was doing to his family and why he was doing it … but still, it would be good for him to know how unhappy his wife was, because that had to be the reason she was drinking excessively. Neni’s mother had told her that unhappiness was the only reason people drank too much, and that it was the reason her uncle drank too much, though no one could understand how he could be so unhappy when he had two wives and eleven children.
“Go talk to him now,” Anna whispered to Neni. “After dessert, everyone start to leave.”
Neni nodded and began walking toward the living room. She wasn’t going to tell Mr. Edwards anything about the pills. That had to be Cindy’s deepest secret, and she had to keep the promise she made. She was going to say only what Anna had told her to say. Tell Mr. Edwards about the wine. Nothing more and nothing less.
But then, as she was about to enter the living room, she remembered something: Jende. She turned around and went back to Anna. “Jende will kill me,” she said.
“For what?”
“For putting my mouth in their business. He never stops warning me to just do my work and leave, and never say anything that doesn’t concern me.”
“Then don’t tell him nothing. This is only me and you. Go.”
Clark was standing alone by the window, looking outside either at traffic on West End or kayakers on the Hudson River.
Neni picked up a tray of scones and walked toward him. “Hi, Mr. Edwards,” she said. “Sorry I did not say good morning to you yet.”
“Hi, Neni,” Clark said. “Thanks for helping out.” He looked down at the scones. “I’m going to pass on that, thanks.”
“Should I bring you another kind of dessert?”
He shook his head. Two weeks since she’d last seen him and he appeared to be a different man: His hair seemed to have gone thinner, his face was unshaven, and he looked as if he needed a hug, a cozy bed, and at least fifteen hours blocked out to do nothing but sleep. He turned his face back to the window and continued looking outside.
Neni stood with the tray, staring at the blank white wall to the left of the window, unsure of how to say what she wanted to say. Cindy was at the other end of the room, chatting on the sofa with two of her friends; the husbands were thumbing their BlackBerrys and iPhones; the children were in another room—the timing and setting for her to tell Clark was ideal.
“Er … Mr. Edwards, I, er …,” she began.
“Yeah,” Clark said, still looking out the window.
“I was … I just needed to ask you a question.”
“Sure,” he said, without turning around to face her.
“It’s just that … er … I have always wanted to know … are you related to John Edwards?”
Clark turn
ed around, chuckling. “No, not that I know of. But that’s funny. You’re the first person to ask me that.”
“I just think that maybe he looks like you a little bit,” Neni said, rubbing her elbow against her belly at the spot where the baby was kicking her, perhaps for being so boneheaded.
“That’s funny,” Clark said, before suggesting that she go offer the scones to others in case they were interested in trying them. Neni nodded and ran back to the kitchen.
“How did it go?” Anna asked her.
Neni shook her head and buried her face against the refrigerator.
“You don’t tell him?”
She shook her head again.
“Well,” Anna said, “we tried.”
Twenty-five
SHE SPENT THE DAY CLEANING THE APARTMENT, SHOPPING FOR GROCERIES, and preparing a five-course farewell dinner for Vince. All afternoon she stayed in the kitchen, making egusi stew with smoked turkey, garri and okra soup, fried ripe plantains and beans, jollof rice with chicken gizzard, and ekwang, which took two hours to make because she had to peel the cocoyams, grate them, tightly and painstakingly wrap teaspoons of the grated cocoyam into spinach leaves, then simmer in a pot with palm oil, dried fish, crayfish, salt, pepper, maggi, and bush onions, for an hour. She would have preferred if Jende had given her more time to prepare, but he’d told her only the night before that Vince was coming over. He had asked Clark, while dropping him off at home, if it was okay for him and Neni to have Vince over for a little dinner, just to wish him well and have him eat some Cameroonian food, which he’d said he’d love to try, and Clark had said he had no objection if Vince was interested. He and Cindy were taking Vince and Mighty out to dinner on Sunday but it was unlikely it was going to be a festive farewell dinner, so Vince might as well go somewhere where there would be more merrymaking. When Jende had called Vince to invite him, Vince had said sure, he would actually be free for a couple of hours in the evening, so he would be down for some sweet Cameroonian food, thanks man.