Like a floating beach ball, Ifi’s belly rose and fell with each breath. A plastic bag was on her lap. My bag! he thought in horror. His plastic bag, with his scrubs, with his uniform, with his nametag. Heat seared Job’s face, but there was no time to think, no time to explain himself, for there, squeezed on the couch alongside Ifi, were two figures: a tall black woman and one of his attackers, Sleepy Eyes. Job drew in a sharp breath. His eyes met the wrinkled plastic bag, rising and falling with each of Ifi’s breaths.
“You!” He charged across the room, lifted the boy by his shoulders, and dragged him to the door. It took everything in his power to keep him from tightening his hands around the boy’s flailing neck. I could kill him, Job thought to himself, and no police will come. I have seen how the law operates in America. All it would take was a small movement, and he could cut off the boy’s airway, and the boy would crumble to the floor before him. “You are not so strong without your friends, eh?”
“Let me go.” Tears dampened the boy’s lashes. “I’m sorry.”
“You see what you have done to my face? You see your work?”
Balancing her weight on a palm at the small of her back, Ifi stood up. “Job, release him.”
Job loosened his grip but remained within inches of the boy’s face, a boy who, in the strange light, looked like a skinny cat. Once again, Job eyed the bag. It was still tied in his careful knot. Maybe, he thought to himself. Maybe she has not even opened it. When he had his chance, he would take the bag. He would tell her it was rubbish, pretend to take it out to the dump, and instead slip it back into the car. He would find another hiding place.
“This is our neighbor, Mary, from across the street, and her nephew, Jamal.”
“My brother’s son,” Mary offered. She was tall, shaped like a pear, with lips red from lipstick. Her hair was flattened where the curls had rested against the wall behind her. Eyes filled with fear, she made no movement toward Job. As if wading in deep waters, her hands wavered out in front of her. “Tell him,” she said to the boy. “Go on, tell him.”
Sleepy Eyes—Jamal—straightened up, his feet together. “I’m sorry, Doctor . . .” His voice trailed off. “I brought it back the way it was.”
Mary spoke up again. “I knew it was yours when I saw it parked in the street. I recognized it, and I told him to turn it in and turn hisself in.” Job made a motion to speak, but the rest of her words came out in a rush. “I told him it’s up to you to decide what you do with him. You can turn him in to the police if you like; God only knows he deserves it. But I’m telling you, Doctor, he’s not a bad kid. He’s just—” she hesitated as if struggling for the right word. “He’s stupid. Dumb as rocks.”
Jamal squirmed.
“He wants to fit in with these knuckleheads. He wants to be one of them, but he’s not. He’s smart. Just started junior high, and the dumb kid drops out. I’m taking him back tomorrow, if they’ll have him. But it’s not his fault. His daddy, my brother, Jake, he’s in jail.” She glared at Jamal, as if a thought had suddenly dawned on her. “You think if you lie and steal and beat people up you’ll be there with your daddy? Is that what you want? You think he wants that for you?” She turned her pleading eyes back to Ifi. “And his mother, she don’t know nothing. He could steal her blind, and she wouldn’t know.”
“You give me excuses,” Ifi hurled at her. “My mother and my father—both dead. Do you see me attacking people? Eh? Do you see me stealing from people?”
“You’re right,” Mary said. “You have every reason to be angry. That’s why I told him he could work for it. He fixes stuff—cracks in your windows, tiles. If you give him the materials, he can mend anything. He can even sew. He taught hisself. He’s a smart boy. You got a baby coming—he can put your crib together. He’s even good with kids.” Eyes pleading with Ifi and then Job, she added, “We’re black people, right? It’s the same for all of us here. We gotta help each other out. We’re brothers and sisters.”
“You are not my brother,” Job said, spitting the words into the boy’s face. His grip tightened as he remembered the blows to his face. “‘Go back to Africa,’ is it?”
“I didn’t mean that.” Jamal looked away.
“Yes, go back to Africa.”
“No,” Jamal said.
“What did you mean then, boy?”
“I didn’t mean nothing.” Very faintly, he spoke again. “She’s right. I’m dumb. I’m stupid. I said it ’cause they said it.” As if resigned to his fate, he closed his eyes. His eyes slanted, his tense features relaxed, he looked like a sleeping cat.
With his fingers pressed into the boy’s throat, once more Job thought to himself, I could kill him. A beat pulsed under his thumb where the boy gulped in raspy breaths. Police will not stop me. They will thank me for removing him from the streets. The boy’s breaths had grown raspy and loud, so loud that it was the only sound Job could hear in the room. And then my wife will feel safe in this country once more. And then I will be a man again.
But suddenly a thought occurred to him: There are more.
“Okie,” Job said softly, removing his fingers from the boy’s neck. “He will work.”
“Wait, now.” As the others waited in the living room, Ifi pulled Job into their bedroom. She pushed her weight against the door, and it slammed shut behind her. “I asked them to wait until you returned so that you could call police.”
“No,” Job said sadly, waving his hand.
“Should I have called?”
“Let them go their way.”
“The boy attacked you, and he will go to jail!”
Rather than the flashing bulbs directed at him, Ifi shimmered under the lights. Her clothes torn, her skin ravaged, she wailed as Officer Peete presided. All three of the attackers stood with the cool look of absconding thieves. At this image, something broke inside Job, and the words began to plunk out one by one like raindrops. “Ifi, my dear,” he said, his voice cracking, “there were three. They beat me. They spit on me. They took my wallet and spit on that too. I said to them, ‘We are all black, no? You are my brothers.’ They said, ‘You are not my brother. Go back to Africa.’ Do you see what they did to my face?” He punched a finger at the butterfly bandage.
Ifi gasped.
“Do you think I am trying to help them? I hate him. All of them. God punish them. But I went to police. And you know what police say? They say, ‘They are black like you.’ Like you and me.”
“What?”
“Police, they called me a drug dealer. If he goes to jail, he will be released by tomorrow morning, and he and his gangsters will prowl the streets. Eh? And maybe there will be six next time. And they will come for you.”
“My husband,” she said softly, “why didn’t you tell me about them? Yesterday.” Then her eyes met his, and something in them changed. “Why must you keep secrets from me, oh? I am your wife.”
She knows, he thought to himself. She knew that his real uniform was in the plastic bag. She knew that his real uniform stank of feces and urine. She knew about the nametag that read Job Ogbonnaya, Certified Nurse’s Assistant. She knew that he was not a doctor. She knew that he was nothing. How small I must look to her, he thought. Spat on, beaten by illiterate boys, like the riffraff who shined his shoes in Nigeria. They have taken my car, my house, and now my wife. He felt himself slipping, drowning. All the renewed hope that he had witnessed on Ifi’s first day in America as she stood in the snow was slipping away. Even her boastful letters to Aunty were dissolving, like the potato chip, into nothing.
Flinging his promises into the air, he struggled to rebuild what he realized was on the verge of being lost. “You will go to school, and I will train you to be a nurse, and then we will open a hospital in Nigeria. All in good time.” Clasping her hands in his, he added, “We will buy a house, a big house, for me and you and the baby. We will build a mansion for our retirement in Nigeria.” His head felt light, like a balloon rising. The more he spoke, the bigger the promises, the lar
ger he felt. How could he forget? People rose all the time—Rockefeller, Ford, Hearst, Horatio Alger—but they all started out with dreams, dreams that seemed silly to the rest of the world. But dreams nonetheless. Every journeyman begins with one step. His chuckles made a strange sound, like tears. “This is only temporary,” he said to her through his laughter. “To save money. After this month, we will be out of this ghetto.” Even as Ifi stood silent, her look doubtful, he continued to speak, his hands shaking from the sheer velocity of his dreams, dreams that would seem wild and unrestrained in Nigeria. It will happen, he told himself, because this is America.
2.
CHAPTER 8
THIS WAS THE FIRST OF MANY PLEASURES THAT HE TOOK FROM HER. ON her back, the water to her chest, Ifi allowed her breath to rise through her body in its slow way. Her feet were red, red as they had been back then, after she mixed the boiling water with the cold. She remembered her body sinking lower and lower into the water until it filled the space between her legs, her navel, her breasts. Now, each part was taken over by the baby. Back then, sweat beaded her brow. She tasted it in her lips. Salt stung in her eyes. All after a long day.
Her days began like this:
As the dust-tinged morning light rose, filtering out the dusk, Ifi sat up in her bed. The grit of scattered sand tangled into her sheets, and she felt the familiar scratch against her thighs, her calves, her feet. Before the people of the house rose, goats, chickens, and roosters let out their chatter, rummaging about through the potholed alleyway, shifting through the broken, discarded bits of sandstone that jutted in and out of the streets. Church services blared through megaphones, and the women who heralded the cry ululated ecstatically in response. Sometimes their neighbors simply sat on their narrow stoops, swinging their feet along the heavy, misshapen stones that led the way to their storefront homes.
The man who arrived with the water each day, filling a large drum, had a face stretched thin from the many smiles he offered to Ifi every morning. Each day he would propose to her, stooping so low that his knees nearly touched the ground, offering his hand in marriage.
“You are old enough to be my father’s father,” Ifi would chastise, and the old man would swing his head in dismay, knocking his chest and proclaiming the strength in his powerful legs. Then, gingerly, he would right himself, the pain shooting up the backs of his legs and his spine until it registered in his face. But he would sift his stretched-thin face into a serious gaze, only broken by the flirtatious wink that filled his eyes with lashes.
After he left each morning, Ifi filled a pot with water and set it on the stove. And when it was warm, she poured some into a bucket and the rest into an old oversized coffee flask to keep it warm for the rest of the family.
But her day only truly began in the moments that would follow, as she sank into the bathtub, alone. Before the morning had passed, Ifi would have cleared the sticks and twigs surrounding the house. After, she soaped away the lime and rust-colored mold along the walkway. Inside, she swept the red sand all along the tile floors, scattering the debris out into the street. Next, breakfast was to be prepared, the family fed, dishes washed. Darkness or light. Nepa did not discriminate. Light could be taken at any moment of the day or night. By the dancing flame of kerosene, Ifi would finish her chores in earnest.
On the day the motley crew arrived, boys and men—some lanky, some stocky, some dark, some pallid—Ifi watched from her window in dismay. Ashy, red, bare feet and jeans rolled to their ankles were the only features they shared in common. They were loud, raucous, rapping quickly in pidgin. And they worked from dusk till dawn each day, arriving just as Ifi rose every morning to do her chores and leaving as Ifi, finally, exhausted and spent, sank to sleep.
No one told Ifi what they came to do, or whom they came to work for. But through the curtains in her window, she could see the progress of their task, beginning with the deep hole they bored into the ground with a loud sandblasting drill that pierced the hard, stony earth. Then came the pipes: long metal structures fitted deep inside the hole.
One day they did not arrive, and Ifi knew their task was complete.
Ifi’s uncle stood in the kitchen over the sink and turned the old, rusted tap, and water came spewing out into his palm. He slapped his thigh and Aunty danced. Ifi’s cousins spilled into the doorway, watching with big eyes until their mother’s shrill cheer and gyrations gave their cue. Then suddenly they were all dancing their way to the sink, cupping their hands below the tepid water released from the tap.
After that, the entire neighborhood no longer called her Ifi; she became “Mrs. Doctor.”
Ifi’s mornings changed. No flirtation from the old man delivering the water barrel. The tepid water did not need to be heated when it came from the showerhead. Instead, Ifi stood angling her head forward into the burst of water at the strongest part of the stream.
Thousands of miles from her past, Ifi lay in the tub, her large belly separating the curtain of water, when there was a knock at the door. Quickly she dried her body, tied the wrapper to her chest, and checked the small peephole. The criminal, Jamal. Ifi jerked with a start, and then she fumed. What can he want? she thought. She returned to the bathroom and finished dressing, but the knocking continued. Exasperated, she stumbled back to the door. Chain still in place, she opened the door a crack, just enough for her lips to make an audible sound through the door. “What do you want? Get away.”
“Ma’am, I come to fix your crib.”
“What crib? It’s fine,” she said.
“But I got to,” Jamal said.
“No, it’s fine. No trouble.”
“Yeah, but he told me. And my aunty did too.”
“My husband will not call police. Go.”
“Please, I got to,” he said again. “I got to do it.” His voice stammered.
Dumb, calculated, Ifi thought to herself.
“You think I am a fool?” she asked. A cold gust of breeze slipped through the doorway. All Ifi could see of the hallway was his tall, lanky frame, but she felt certain that his friends were hiding in the hall, waiting. “You think I am an idiot, because I am a woman. Because I am from Africa. I will come and open this door for you to steal again and beat me?” Ifi slammed the door, and when the knocks began again, she turned on the television, loud. Still, it did not block out the noise.
“I will call police,” she yelled.
Finally the knocks stopped.
Suddenly cold, she sank into the couch, drawing her wrapper tightly around her body. And then she paced. Ifi dumped the hardened leftover fufu in the kitchen drain and flipped the switch for the disposal. Job had not been eating. Night and day he was gone, and when he came home, he stank of pig. Often, he disappeared into the shower for what seemed like hours and reemerged with his skin pruney from the water. Later, Ifi would find pig remains in the shower’s drain. When she asked questions, he always explained that he had taken on more patients at the hospital. Why must my husband keep secrets? In spite of the fact that she knew about the contents in his bag, he had begun, once more, to leave each night in the white coat, carrying the briefcase and stethoscope. What can I say? she had thought to herself. Reluctantly Ifi had resumed the task of laundering the lab coat and pants before setting them out for him each day.
As she paced in the kitchen, Ifi scrambled to unfurl the truth in his words to no avail. Lies, boldfaced lies. What troubled her the most was the certainty of the words as they tumbled from Job’s mouth. Everything he has told me, she realized, is a lie. He had stood before her, one lie after another escaping him, as the criminal and his aunt sat only feet away in the other room. Now, she wondered, How can he do it so effortlessly? How can he speak with such certainty about what we both know to be false?
For a moment, her mind slipped to her letters to Aunty, letters that described, with great facility, her imaginary mansion. Ifi pushed the guilt from her mind, reminding herself that Job’s lies were much more insidious. His lies could determine the outcome
of their future, while she was only shielding Aunty from the ugly reality of life in America. In a way, she was also protecting Aunty’s dream, defending her from the humiliation of finding out that she had failed at securing Ifi a suitable marriage. With this certainty, Ifi’s thoughts returned to Job’s lies. There will be no nurse, no clinic, no doctor, she said to herself, and we will always live in this apartment of holes.
Akra soup had congealed into a green paste with a yellowed edge, a nauseating smell that nearly brought her to her knees. Ifi flipped the entire pot over the garbage disposal, letting the chunks of meat fill the drain. With a crimson palm she smacked the pot’s bottom until the remains filled the sink. The garbage disposal chewed and swallowed the soup with a satisfied gurgle. Suddenly, Ifi fell forward, emptying her stomach of its contents. She was alone, cold, and miserable; the pregnancy had been hard on her. In silent agony, Ifi cradled the base of her stomach.
Once this boy enters the world, everything will change. She had to believe it. Somehow she had to shake off the feelings of self-pity. After all, she had been lucky to come to America. Rinsing her mouth with water, she thought, When this child comes, we will be a family. There would be voices, warmth, friends, laughter, stories, And then, I will finally be Mrs. Doctor.
A hard thought forced Ifi to her haunches. She gasped with the weight of it. He could have died. Lies and all, criminals could have killed Job, and then there would have been no one. To be alone in this place, of all places. Without friends, sef. Without her own people, only Gladys and Emeka, Chai! For the first time, Ifi imagined the years that Job had spent alone in America. His odd mannerisms—the way he adjusted his glasses simply by jerking the features of his face; the grinding of his teeth; his cleanliness, even as they lived in such a sty—all suddenly had a source of explanation. Looking around the room, she mused, Anyone could become silly in such a place, alone.
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