Behold the Dreamers

by Mbue, Imbolo

  “You’re going to stay home with the baby for a few months,” he said again, the finality of his decision evident in his tone. “Babies need to start their lives in the hands of their mother, and I want you to enjoy the baby while you’re recovering from the pregnancy.”

  “Nobody needs to recover from pregnancy! And I can’t take off two whole semesters!”

  “I’ve already decided.”

  “I don’t want to! You know I can’t!”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “I can’t! You know I’m going to fall out of status and lose my visa, and then what?”

  She wasn’t going to fall out of status, he told her. He’d already discussed the matter with Bubakar, who was going to help them do what they needed to do so the international students’ office at BMCC would approve her for a medical leave of absence.

  I can’t believe you’re doing this to me, she cried as he continued clicking the channel buttons on the remote control, unable to find anything interesting to watch and unmoved by her tears. Why can’t I at least take the minimum number of classes I need for my visa, like I’m doing now? Why are you always acting as if you own me?

  Having anticipated her reaction, he ignored her, making it clear he’d thought about the matter for days and wasn’t going to change his mind. Ultimately, she grew quiet and went to bed defeated, because there was nothing she could do. He had brought her to America. He paid her tuition. He was her protector and advocate. He made decisions for their family. Sometimes he conferred with her about his decisions. Most times he did what he deemed best. Always she had no choice but to obey. That was what he expected of her.

  As her feet grew wider and her belly longer, her complaints to her friends about his behavior multiplied—there were too many things he wanted her to do or not do for both her and the child’s well-being. He insisted she eat the salmon and sardine dinners he made for her, she said, because he’d read in one of Mrs. Edwards’s discarded magazines that they were good for pregnant women and that fetuses whose mothers ate oily fishes grew up to be intelligent adults. He wanted her to please wash her lettuce well before making salad, because what if there were harmful germs on the leaves? She couldn’t wear heels anymore for fear he was going to dive into a tirade about how she might hurt herself and the baby, and was it worth risking an unborn child’s life just so she could look good? It was as if she had become an egg that might break at any minute. And you gonno complain about that why? Fatou said to her. Betty and Olu, another friend from school, said the same thing. Why are you making noise when he’s only looking out for you, they said. You said you suffered the last two times when you were pregnant and gave birth while living in your father’s house, Betty reminded her, and now that your husband is treating you like a queen so you don’t suffer again, you’re grumbling? If you like a hard life so much, come and take my life and I’ll take yours for the next few months.

  Eventually, shamefully, she decided to defer to his wisdom, knowing that few women (rich women included) had the privilege of being married to an overly protective man who not only did everything he could to ensure his wife’s comfort but also spent hours wiping the dust-covered walls of their apartment and killing the roaches that sprinted from one end of the living room to the other like track-and-field athletes, all so he could protect the health of his unborn child. Though she could neither understand nor appreciate his decision about her taking two semesters off, she slowly allowed herself to feel no guilt about being a housewife in a city full of independent women, and not being, at least for a while, a successful career woman like Oprah or Martha Stewart. She decided to enjoy the unwanted privilege of sitting at home all day watching too many hours of talk shows and sitcoms and breaking news, which was what she was doing on the Monday morning the news came up on CNN.

  “Jende,” she called from the living room. “Jende, oh!”

  “Eh?” he replied, running out of the bedroom, where he was folding the clean clothes he’d just brought back from the laundromat. Her panicked voice made him nervous; every time she called his name like that, he feared it had to do with the baby.

  “Watch,” she said, pointing to the TV. “Something about Lehman Brothers. Is that not where Mr. Edwards works?”

  Yes, it was, he said, not yet panicking, not wanting to think that the news had anything to do with what Leah had been dreading. He heard a journalist say that the collapse was a massive earthquake that would reverberate across the world for months to come. He heard another journalist talk about the catastrophic fall in stock prices and the possibility of a recession. A former employee of Lehman Brothers was interviewed. She hadn’t seen this coming, she said. People were suspicious but no one thought it was really going to come to this. They’d been told just today that it was over. She had no idea what she was going to do. No one knew what they were going to do now.

  Neni placed her hand on her chest. “Does it mean Mr. Edwards has no job now?” she asked.

  Neither of them asked the next question—did it mean Jende would have no job, too? The fear within them could not let loose the words. Similar questions would burrow into the minds of many in New York City in the coming weeks. Many would be convinced that the plague that had descended on the homes of former Lehman employees was only a few blocks from theirs. Restaurateurs, artists, private tutors, magazine publishers, foundation directors, limousine drivers, nannies, housekeepers, employment agencies, virtually everyone who stood along the path where money flowed to and from the Street fretted and panicked that day. For some, the fears were justified: Their bread and wine would indeed disappear, along with the billions of dollars that vanished the day Lehman died.

  “I have to call Mr. Edwards,” Jende said, hurriedly picking up his cell phone from the dinette table.

  Clark did not answer his cell phone, but Cindy did when he called the house number. “You still have a job,” she said to him.

  “Oh, thank you, madam. Thank you so much!”

  “Nothing’s changing,” she said. “Clark’s going to call you to let you know when to come back to work,” she added, before quickly getting off the phone to take another call.

  Jende placed the cell phone on the table and sat down next to Neni. He was dizzy, grateful but stunned. It had just dawned on him how tightly his fate was linked to another man’s. What if something ever happened to Mr. Edwards? His work permit was set to expire in March and he might not be able to renew it again, depending on how his court case went. Without working papers, he would never be able to get another job that paid as much. How would he take care of a wife and two children? How many restaurant dishwashing jobs would he have to do for cash?

  “Please let’s not think like that,” Neni said. “You have a job for now, eh? As long as we have Mr. Edwards, we have a job. Are we not better off today than all those people walking out of Lehman? Look at them. I just feel so sorry for them. But then, we don’t know what’s on the road coming for us, too. We just don’t know. So let’s only be happy that today we were spared.”

  Twenty-seven

  NEITHER OF THEM SAID MUCH TO THE OTHER ON THE FIRST DAY THEY spent together after Lehman fell. There wasn’t much to say and there was certainly too little time to say it, with Clark sighing and hammering on his laptop as if the keys were obstinate. He seemed to have gotten older by ten years in seven days—a deep crease suddenly evident on his forehead—and Jende couldn’t stop wondering why the man was doing this to himself, why, with all the money he’d made, he couldn’t pick up and go live a quiet stress-free life somewhere far away from New York City. That’s what he would do if he were in Mr. Edwards’s position. By the time he was close to being a millionaire, he would give suffering a firm handshake and tell it goodbye. Why should a man intentionally live his life with one kind of anxiety followed by another? But men like Clark Edwards did not think like that, it appeared. It didn’t seem to be about the money anymore. His life on Wall Street, as suffocating as it was, appeared to be what was giving him ai
r.

  “I am very sorry, sir,” Jende finally forced himself to say, ten minutes after they’d been in the car together, as they drove to Clark’s new workplace at Barclays, the British giant that had swallowed up Lehman after it was declared legally dead.

  “Thanks,” Clark said without looking up from his laptop.

  “I hope everyone will be okay, sir.”

  “Eventually.”

  Jende knew what the curt response meant: Stop talking. So he did precisely that. He kept his eyes on the road and drove in silence for the rest of the week—from the Sapphire apartment building on the Upper East Side to Barclays in Midtown East, or the Lehman-turned-Barclays office tower on Seventh Avenue; from a meeting with ex–Lehman executives to a meeting with Barclays executives; from a lunch with Treasury officials in Washington, D.C., to a dinner with lawyers at a Long Island steak house. Clark said little to him except for quick greetings, or orders to hurry up, or reminders to return by a certain time after picking up Cindy or dropping off Mighty. Once, he barked at Jende to cut around another car, but most days he sweated in the backseat, mumbling to himself when he wasn’t on the phone, moving from one end of the seat to the other, speaking in rushed, anxious tones to various people, flipping through piles of papers, opening and closing his laptop, opening and closing The Wall Street Journal, scribbling on his notepad. Jende understood nothing of what he heard him say—after months of educating himself with the Journal, he’d come to understand the concept of buying low and selling high, but the things Clark was talking about these days, things like derivatives and regulations, ratings and overrated junk, were indecipherable. The only things decipherable in his voice were misery and exhaustion.

  “You should have seen him the night it happened,” Cindy said to Cheri as Jende drove them to Stamford to visit Cheri’s mother. “I’ve never seen him that scared.”

  “Of course he would be,” Cheri said. “Everything he worked for just went down the drain. And Lehman, of all companies? I was speechless!”

  “You, me, and the whole world.”

  “For some reason these things keep happening when I’m out of the country. 9/11, I was out. Oklahoma City, I was out. This one I was out.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” Cindy said. “Sometimes it’s better to be far away from the center of the madness.”

  “No,” Cheri said. “I’d rather be home. There’s nothing pleasant about running across Florence so you can get back to your hotel room and stare at the TV, watching what’s happening in your country. I’d rather be home and go to sleep scared in my own bed.”

  “I guess.”

  “I tried to call you the moment I landed last night.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, I wasn’t in a talking mood. But I sent you a text. Didn’t you see it?”

  “No, I didn’t see any text. If you hadn’t called this morning, I would have taken the train alone. I figured you’d probably changed your mind, with everything that’s going on.”

  “Oh, no, I need this,” Cindy said. “I need to get out of the city. It’s just too much.”

  “It is.”

  “I would have left yesterday for a long weekend alone but Mighty and I have a movie-and-dinner date on Saturday, and I need to help him prepare for his youth orchestra audition. Besides, I promised your mom I was going to come back. I need to get my mind off myself for a little bit. It’s just been awful. Clark has been so hard to be around.”

  “He must have looked like crap when it happened,” Cheri said, and Cindy nodded.

  Clark had returned home early from work two nights before, she told Cheri, around nine o’clock. He took off his shirt and sat on the edge of the bed with his head bowed, his bare back humped like that of a man waiting for a load to descend. He did not move or speak, not even when she came in, said hello, and climbed into bed. She had an early-morning appointment for a mammogram and needed a good rest, so she wasn’t in the mood for small talk, which was why she hadn’t asked him why he was just sitting there like that, somber and mute and motionless. Instead, she had picked up The New Yorker—she hadn’t had a chance to read the profile of Obama—and flipped it open.

  Lehman is going to file for bankruptcy, he’d said abruptly, his head still bowed. She’d gasped, dropping the magazine and covering her mouth with her hand. She sat up in the bed, staring at the back of his head. You heard me right, he said without turning to face her. They’d done everything. The company couldn’t be saved. The announcement would be coming within days. They were still trying to fight it, hold on to it, but … He shook his head.

  “The poor thing,” Cheri said.

  “I had no idea what to do or say to him,” Cindy went on.

  All she could do was gasp again, as it sunk in. She looked at her hands—she hadn’t realized they were shivering. A thousand questions were rushing through her mind: How much were they going to lose? What were they going to do if they lost too much? What was going to happen to his career? Was he okay? What was he feeling? How was this possible? Was there a chance the Fed would make a last-minute decision to intervene and prevent the bankruptcy? They intervened with BS, didn’t they? She wanted to move close and hold him so they could be together in their fear, but she couldn’t be certain he wanted or needed any of it, so she slid to the edge of the bed and sat beside him.

  “Did you know any of this?” Cheri asked. “That it was this bad?”

  Not really, Cindy said. She had known of the struggles at Lehman but not in detail, certainly not how close it was to its end. He had told her only that the company was treading perilous waters, and asked her to understand when he had to cancel plans in order to work. But how was she to know that the times he did it over the summer were any different from all the other times when she’d had to cancel dinner plans and postpone vacations and attend parties alone because he had to work?

  “That’s the danger of dealing with workaholics,” Cheri said. “It’s hard to trust them.”

  “Welcome to my life,” Cindy said mournfully. “Or whatever’s left of it.”

  “Everything’s going to be all right, Cindy. We’ll be all right. Sean has to constantly remind me, too. He says I have to stop checking our portfolios twenty times a day, but I can’t help it. I woke up every morning in Florence panicking about losing everything. Of course, I call Sean to talk and he’s sleeping. I have no idea how he still sleeps so peacefully at night. I don’t think I’ve slept more than four hours any night all week.”

  Cindy did not immediately respond; she seemed lost in a maze of a hundred thoughts. “I wish I had Sean’s calmness,” she finally said. “Nothing ever seems to unravel him.”

  “Yeah, but you won’t believe what he suggested to me yesterday,” Cheri said.

  “What?”

  “He thinks maybe we should get rid of Rosa for a few months, to save.”

  “Are you kidding me? Was he serious?”

  Cheri laughed. “Incredible,” she said. “I didn’t even deign to respond when he said it.”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what we need now, right?” Cindy said. “To be cooking and cleaning and doing laundry while we’re losing money and sleep. That would be wonderful!”

  The women laughed together.

  “But it’s scary how bad this could get,” Cheri said, her tone turning serious as their laughter ebbed. “When people start talking about flying coach and selling vacation homes …”

  “It’s scary, but Anna’s not going anywhere, no matter how bad it gets or what everyone else starts doing to survive. I don’t know what I would ever do without her.”

  “Rosa’s not going anywhere, either. I guess we just have to be hopeful that everything’s going to be all right, as ugly as it seems.”

  Cindy agreed. That was what Clark had said, too, she said. When she’d asked him that night if the impending bankruptcy was going to hurt the economy, he’d said that yes, he believed the economy was going to get really bad; everything was about to change, one way o
r another, for everyone in the country, at least for some time. When a powerful house like Lehman falls, he’d told her, people start questioning if indeed there is power in the other houses. There was going to be panic in the market. Portfolios losing up to half of their values. Lots of crazy stuff that could destroy the investments and livelihood of millions of good, innocent people. It could be very bad. But they were going to be okay. The likes of them were going to lose money in the short term but they were going to be okay, sooner rather than later, unlike those poor devils on the streets.

  “I hope he’s right,” Cheri said. “And I really hope he’s going to be okay soon.”

  “I don’t know,” Cindy said, after a pause. “We haven’t spoken much since that night—he’s so stressed out and short-fused I’m almost afraid of saying anything. I went three days without seeing him last week.”

  “He’s got to be very busy transitioning to Barclays.”

  “I know … that’s what he says. But … you never know. I hope it’s only that and not also because …”

  “Come on, Cindy.”

  “It’s at times like this, Cher,” Cindy whispered. “This is when they start turning to those …” She cut herself short, perhaps realizing Jende might be listening, which he was, intently.

  “You’ve got to stop doing this to yourself,” Cheri said. “Everything’s going to be fine. He’s not the only one dealing with the crisis. We’re not the only ones. There’s a long road ahead, but everyone’s going to be all right. Clark will be all right.”

  Jende smiled to himself when Cheri said this, hoping so, too, fervently wishing Mr. Edwards would find his way out of the despondency he’d been enveloped in for months.

  The previous night, after work, Clark had called his friend Frank to ponder if it was time for him to get away from the Street. It wasn’t worthwhile anymore, he’d said, and he was getting tired of the bullshit that came with everything else. He’d never cared about what people thought of him but, all of a sudden, he did—he was watching those assholes on MSNBC and agreeing with them, and the fact that the whole country had turned against the likes of him was completely justifiable. He couldn’t help but feel somewhat responsible for the shit that was happening, he told Frank, not because he had personally done anything to hurt anyone but because he was part of the system, and no matter how much he hated to admit it or how much he wished Lehman hadn’t lost its principles or how badly he wished there was more conscience on the Street, he was part of it, and because of his involvement in lots of bullshit he didn’t even agree with, however small his involvement had been, this had happened. He wasn’t sure about a future at Barclays; it wasn’t anything about the bank, it was him. Maybe he was just getting old. Maybe he was beginning to question the meaning of his life. Why was he all of a sudden sounding like Vince?