by Mbue, Imbolo
Thirty-seven
ON CHRISTMAS MORNING THEY ATE FRIED RIPE PLANTAINS AND BEANS but exchanged no gifts since Jende did not want Liomi believing that the giving and receiving of material gifts had anything to do with love. Anyone can go to the shop and buy anything and give to anyone, he told Liomi when the boy asked him for the umpteenth time why he couldn’t get even a little toy truck. The true measure of whether somebody really loves you, he lectured, is what they do for you with their hands and say to you with their mouth and think of you in their heart. Liomi had protested, but on Christmas morning, as on all the previous Christmas mornings of his life, he got no gifts.
In the afternoon they ate rice and chicken stew, like most of the households in Limbe. Neni made chin-chin and cake, too, using the cake recipe she’d relied on in Limbe in the days when she baked over a blistering fire in an iron pot filled with sand. The night before, while the whole family was on the sofa watching It’s a Wonderful Life, Jende had thought about inviting Leah to spend the day with them, since she was probably all alone in her Queens apartment being that she had no husband or children or living parents. He hated to think that Leah would be alone on a day when everyone should be with someone, but he didn’t want to ask too much of Neni, because he was certain that if Leah accepted his invitation, Neni would cook seven different dishes for the American coming to her house, and he knew he would feel bad that she was doing it while also taking care of Liomi and the baby. So he merely called Leah in the morning to wish her a merry Christmas. He told her work was going well, then listened as she told him about her plans to go to Rockefeller Center later in the day, speaking excitedly, as if going to stand in the cold and look at a tree was such a wonderful thing.
For the rest of the day he told Liomi stories and rocked Timba to sleep after her feedings. No one came to visit them the way people did in Limbe, going from house to house, saying, “Happy, happy, oh!,” and yet it was a happy Christmas for him, far happier than his first Christmas in America.
On that day he had lain on his upper-level bunk bed all morning and afternoon in the basement apartment he shared with the Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, the weather outside too cold for a walk, the people on the streets too unknown to celebrate the specialness of the day with. With Winston gone to Aruba to vacation with a woman he was dating, he had no one to eat and laugh with, and reminisce with about the Christmases of his boyhood, which always involved too much eating, too much drinking, and way too much dancing. Lying in the dark room, he had pictured Liomi in the red suit he’d sent for him to wear to celebrate the day; he’d smiled at the thought of his son strolling around town and proudly telling everyone who asked that his clothes were from his papa in America. He imagined Neni taking Liomi to New Town, to wish a happy Christmas to his mother who must have prepared a meal of chicken stew with yams and a side of ndolé, as well as a dish of plantains and nyama ngowa. He yearned to hear their voices, but there was no way for him to talk to them—the telephone lines from the Western world to much of Cameroon were overcrowded and bursting with the voices of those like him, the lonely and nostalgic, calling home to partake in the Christmas merrymaking, if only with their words. Frustrated, he had flung his calling card away and stayed in bed until four o’clock in the afternoon, making only one call, to his friend Arkamo in Phoenix, a call that did nothing to lessen his lonesomeness because Arkamo was having a grand time at a Cameroonian party, thanks to living in a city with a large close-knit Cameroonian community. After a shower and a dinner of Chinese leftovers, he had sat by the window in the common area, wrapped in his twin comforter and looking outside: at the weather so dull; at the people so colorlessly dressed; at the happy day slipping away so quickly and crushing him with longing.
Five days after Christmas, he returned to work, only to find there wasn’t much to do. Clark was at a hotel, Anna told him when he called to ask her why the boss wasn’t picking up his phone; he was going to do most of his work from there, she added. Cindy was taking time off from work (probably since the day of the tabloid story, Jende guessed, since Anna had called him the day after, while he was on his way back from dropping Mighty off at school, and told him that he didn’t need to come to the Sapphire because Cindy would not be needing a ride to her office). The only person who needed to get around that day was Mighty, to his piano lesson and back. All Jende had to do, Anna said, was take Mighty to his teacher’s building on the Upper West Side, hand him over to Stacy, who was meeting him there, and then bring Mighty and Stacy back to the Sapphire an hour later, unless Mighty wanted Stacy to take him to do something else, which was unlikely, since Mighty wanted to do nothing this winter break except sit alone in his bedroom. Jende could go home after that and the rest of the holidays would be equally light because, Anna said, whispering in a frightened voice, there was no way of knowing how long Clark would stay at the hotel or how much longer Cindy would keep herself locked in the apartment now that she wasn’t even going out to do things with friends, being that her drinking was getting worse and poor Mighty now had two parents who— Anna caught herself before she could say too much and said she had to go.
“Mighty, my good friend,” Jende said after Mighty had settled in the backseat. “How was your Christmas?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Okay, okay, there is nothing wrong with that. You do not have to tell me, except for one thing—did you get to Skype with Vince?”
“Yeah, Mom called him.”
“How is he?”
Mighty shrugged and did not respond.
“He is having fun over there? Did he tell you some good stories about India?”
“He has dreadlocks.”
“Dreadlocks?” Jende asked, almost laughing at his visualization of Vince with dreadlocks. He liked the look of white people with dreadlocks, but Vince Edwards, son of Clark and Cindy Edwards, with dreadlocks? The look on Cindy’s face must have been worth taking a picture of.
“Yeah,” Mighty said. “He has, like, some funny-looking dreadlocks.”
“Really? Did he look good with it? I’m sure he still looks very handsome, right?”
“I don’t know.”
Jende decided it was best to leave Mighty alone. He clearly did not want to talk, and attempts to cheer him up seemed to be making him only sadder.
“They fought in the kitchen last night,” Mighty said suddenly, after minutes of silence.
“Who? Your mommy and daddy?”
Mighty nodded.
“Oh, Mighty, I am so sorry to hear. But remember what I told you about married people fighting? Your mommy and daddy fighting does not mean anything bad. Married people like to fight sometimes. They even shout and scream at each other, but it does not mean anything, okay?”
Mighty did not respond. Jende heard him sniffle and hoped he wasn’t crying again—the child had cried enough.
“I heard my mom crying, throwing stuff at the wall … I think it was glasses and plates, they were breaking. My dad was shouting for her to please stop it … but she was …” He pulled a tissue from the pack of tissues Jende was offering him and blew his nose.
“Your parents are going to be friends again soon, Mighty,” Jende said, not only to convince Mighty but to convince himself, too.
“She was saying, ‘I don’t ever wanna see his face again.’ She was telling my dad that he had to get rid of him, get rid of him right now, or else …”
“Get rid of who?”
“I don’t know, but she was screaming it over and over. And my dad was saying, ‘I won’t do it,’ and my mom was screaming that he had to, otherwise she was going to do something …”
“I’m so sorry to hear all this, Mighty. But your mommy, she was just angry, right?”
“She was very angry. She was crying and screaming so loud.”
Jende inhaled and exhaled.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Mighty went on. “I covered my head with my pillow but—”
“They did not say the name of t
his person?”
Mighty shook his head. “But I think it was Vince.”
“Vince?”
“Yeah, my mom was really upset about the dreadlocks. She said he looked like a hooligan.”
“No, Mighty,” Jende said, laughing lightly. “There is no way your mommy will ask your daddy to get rid of Vince. Your mommy loves you and Vince a lot—”
“They’re going to get a divorce!”
“No, please don’t say that,” Jende said, holding the steering wheel with one hand and reaching behind to rub Mighty’s leg with the other. “Do not say these kinds of things and make yourself angry. They will be happy again. It is just how grown people are. They will be friends again.”
“No, they won’t! They’re getting divorced!”
“Please do not make yourself sad worrying about things that will never happen,” Jende said as he struggled to drive with one hand. “Everything will be all right, Mighty … Everything will be all right … Everybody will be all right … Please wipe your eyes.”
When they got to the building on Eighty-ninth Street and Columbus, Stacy came out to get Mighty. Jende watched as the boy forced a smile and told Stacy that yes, he was super-excited about the piece the teacher had planned for the day.
Jende got back in the car after Mighty and Stacy had left, and called Winston, who, thankfully, picked up his phone on the first ring even though he had barely picked it up since the day he went to Houston to visit Maami.
“Ah, Bo, you and your worries,” Winston said after Jende told him about Cindy wanting to get rid of someone. “She could be talking about ten different people. Maybe she was talking about—”
“It has to be me,” Jende said, shaking his head in disbelief. “There is no other man who works for her. Anna is a woman, Stacy is a woman, her assistant is a woman. Everyone except me.”
“Then maybe it wasn’t someone who works for her. Women like her, they have all kinds of people who do different kinds of things for them. Doctors who take care of their wrinkles, people who do their hair, people who do their decorations—”
“You really think she would be screaming in the middle of the night to tell her husband to get rid of the person who does her decorations? Ah, Bo …”
“Okay, okay, fine. I just don’t want you to worry, that’s all. You cannot hear a story from a little child and start shaking like a leaf, eh? Don’t do this to yourself. You keep acting like this and tomorrow a heart attack will hit you, let me warn you. You don’t know anything. You don’t even know if the child heard correctly, eh?”
“Without this job, what will I do? My whole body is shaking. What am I going to do if they—”
“Hey, what is all this sisa for? Eh? Listen, if you’re so afraid, I can call Frank and ask him. If Cindy wants Clark to fire you, Clark will not hide it from Frank. And I can ask Frank to help you convince Clark.”
“Yes, please, that’ll be the best idea. He’s the one who helped me get the job. And he likes me … Please do that. Every time I drive him and Mr. Edwards together, he is nice to me.”
“So there’s nothing for you to worry about. I’ll call him tomorrow, okay?”
“I don’t know how to thank you, Bo.”
“Give me your firstborn son to be my servant,” Winston said, forcing Jende to laugh.
After he got off the phone, Jende leaned his head against the headrest, closed his eyes, and told himself to think of only good things. His father had always told him that: Even when things are bad, think of only good things. And Jende had done that as often as he could during his darkest days—while in prison after impregnating Neni; after his daughter had died late one night and Neni’s father had ordered her buried first thing in the morning, denying him the chance to say goodbye; after Neni’s father had denied his request to marry her for what seemed like the hundredth time; after he’d gotten a call from one of Neni’s sisters, seven months after he arrived in America, telling him that Neni and Liomi had been involved in a bus accident on their way to visit Neni’s aunt in Muyuka. In those moments he had done only what was in his power and thought of the countless number of good things that had happened in his past, and the many good things that were highly certain to happen in his future.
He’d done it when he felt powerless, like during those four months he’d spent in prison in Buea, waiting for his father to borrow enough money to convince Neni’s father to request his release. Everything about prison had been far more horrendous than he’d imagined: the cold mountain air, which made his skin itch and had him shivering from evening to morning; the inadequate portions of barely palatable food; the dormitories packed end to end with snoring men every night; the easily transmittable diseases, like the dysentery he’d caught, which had lasted two weeks and kept him writhing all day from stomach cramps and a high fever. It was during the nights of his illness that he thought about his life, about what he would do with it once he was released. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than to leave Cameroon, move to a country where decent young men weren’t thrown into prison for minor crimes but were instead given opportunities to make something of their lives. When he finally got out of prison—after his father had given Neni’s father enough money to cover Neni’s maternity bills and the child’s expenses for the first year of life, and after Pa Jonga had promised that Jende would stay away from Neni indefinitely—Jende returned to Limbe, determined to start saving money to leave the country. He got a job at the Limbe Urban Council, thanks to his friend Bosco, who worked there, and began putting away as much as he could every month for a future with Neni. For a year after his release, though, Neni wanted little to do with him, first because of her father’s threat to kick her out if she continued wasting her life on Jende, and later because of her grief over the dead baby. Jende finally won her back—thanks to his bimonthly hand-delivered love letters splattered with words like “indefatigable” and “pulchritudinous”—but his dreams of a life for them in America always seemed farther than the nearest star when he compared his savings to the cost of an airline ticket. It was only thanks to Winston’s job as a Wall Street lawyer, more than a decade later, that he was able to get the funds to journey to America to start a new life.
Liberating as it was, though, the new life had come with its share of new pains. It had wrought new forms of helplessness he hadn’t considered, like the dread and despair he’d experienced when Neni and Liomi were both in the hospital after the bus accident. Although their injuries were not critical (a black eye and swollen face for Liomi; a sprained neck and broken wrist, plus cuts and bruises, for Neni), he couldn’t stop thinking that he might have gotten a different kind of call from Neni’s sister, a call not to inform him of their injuries and ask for money for their hospital bills but to tell him that they were dead and ask for money for their funeral expenses. The thought of them dying while he was stuck in America had turned his blood icy, so as often as he could, he had told himself to think of good things and good things only.
Which was what he was now doing in the car with his eyes closed. He thought about Mr. and Mrs. Edwards reconciling and being happy again, the way Vince had told him they were back when they lived in Alexandria, Virginia, before his father began working eighty hours a week at Lehman and traveling four, five times a month, and before his mother stopped smiling as much as she used to, except when she was with her sons or her friends or when she was at an event where she felt compelled to pretend to the world that she was a happy woman in a happy marriage. Jende was not sure the Edwardses’ marriage would ever return to those happy days long gone, when there was less money and more togetherness and Vince was an only child, but that was okay, because some marriages did not need to be happy. They needed only to be sufficiently comfortable, and he hoped the Edwardses would at least find that.
He thought of Vince in India and wished him success in his pursuit of Truth and Oneness. He hoped the family would be together again one day and he would continue driving them for years. He loved his
job, and if God willed, he would be happy to do it for as long as he lived in New York. There were hard days, but Mr. Edwards was a good man, the boys were good boys, and Mrs. Edwards, even when she acted as if the whole world had let her down, was a good woman.
His phone rang as he was opening his eyes. He looked at his caller ID. It was Mr. Edwards. He smiled. He had just thought of him and now he was calling—that meant Mr. Edwards was going to live a long life.
“How was your Christmas?” Clark asked him.
“Very good, sir. I hope you had a good one, too, sir?”
“Good enough,” Clark said. He paused, then cleared his throat. “Are you waiting for Mighty?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right. Listen, do me a favor, will you? After you’ve dropped off Mighty, can you come down to the office?”
“You are at the office now, sir?”
“Yeah, just got in, I took a cab. I didn’t want to take you away from Mighty.”
“I understand, sir. I will come down the moment I drop Mighty at home.”
“Good, great. And … can you park the car and come upstairs? I need … we need to talk.”
Thirty-eight
HE FOUND HIMSELF IN MIDTOWN NOT KNOWING HOW HE GOT THERE. HE might have run a couple of red lights without realizing, changed lanes without signaling, stayed too close to the car ahead of him. He might have driven on the curb and he wouldn’t have noticed, because he certainly didn’t notice any of the thousands of people on Broadway. He was that dazed.
When he got to the garage he pulled out his briefcase from beneath his seat and held it on his lap for a full minute. Owning the briefcase and carrying it every day to work—that was one of his greatest career prides. It made him feel accomplished, like he was a sort of big man himself, not just a little man driving a big man around. Two months after he began working for the Edwardses, he had gone shopping for the perfect briefcase and found this one in a store on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, a black faux-leather rectangular box with a nickel-plated handle. It looked like the ones the white-collar workers at Limbe Urban Council used to take to work, the ones he’d admired as their bearers strode into offices while he remained outside, cleaning streets and emptying garbage cans. With his own briefcase, he’d become a white-collar professional, too. Every morning, before leaving for work, he packed his lunch inside the box, next to his dictionary, a map of the city, a handkerchief, a pack of tissues, pens, and old newspaper and magazine articles he hoped to read. On the downtown subway, dressed in his suit and clip-on tie, he held it firmly, looking no different from the accountants and engineers and financial advisors sitting next to him.