Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

by Julie Iromuanya

  He was released into the cold air, a flat, starless night, and told to report to work as usual the next day. Air, sweet with the antiseptic smeared on his chapped hands, filled his nose. He drove through the night, his hand throbbing from the cold. Along the stretch of highway, Job felt the residue of the glare on his face. He felt the grooves of his face deepening into resentment. Too early, he repeated to himself. An impatient child! He hoped it was a girl—if it was a girl, he would at least have the time to make things right before his boy entered the world. A girl could survive on watery, tasteless soup and dry biscuits, but not a boy; a boy who was to be a success needed the proper ingredients.

  Now, in the hospital room, as he looked into his son’s angry face, Job felt the ice in his chest thaw, the grooves in his face fill. His hardened features softened under the boy’s bleary eyes. When he opened his tiny mouth to yawn, Job peered into his son’s throat, at his soft, slippery tongue. Job swallowed back the tears that began to form in his throat. I am a father, he thought to himself, sore, exhausted, but suddenly exhilarated. In the old days, it was thought that you hadn’t reached full adulthood until you had created the life of another, until you had extended the cycle of your name through another. Well, Job had finally reached his manhood. What now? He needed a name for this, the greatest achievement of his life. The child needed a name to reflect the enormity of his birth to a father who loved him so completely that it hurt. His name, Job though triumphantly, will be Victorious Ezeaku Ogbonnaya, the victorious king.

  Three days later, Gladys and Emeka arrived. Job was away at work. Their youngest daughter dumped a crumpled heap of flowers on the nightstand and promptly disappeared, her hand in her father’s in search of crackers and lemonade. Gladys stopped them in the hall, and Ifi could hear the tops of their voices. She could imagine the girl with her hand pressed into her father’s, forgotten. Their voices swelled in and out of the waves of Ifi’s fatigue. They spoke in Igbo.

  “Where are you going?” Gladys.

  “You heard the girl,” Emeka.

  “Aheh, you are leaving without saying good morning to the woman?”

  “Dear, let’s not quarrel like this. In front of the Americans.”

  “We are not quarreling.”

  Ifi ran her hands over her belly, a sagging paunch now. She glared out past the sun into the clear sky, over the tops of cars. In spite of the noise, the boy slept soundly. Right now, at home, Ifi thought, Aunty probably stood over a pot in the kitchen, instructing the housegirl in a halting whisper, telling her to hold the knife in her palm at this angle, not that, when cutting the onions. Her words would be wet, like the sprays of onion that watered the girl’s eyes. Ifi hated the smell of the onions in the girl’s hands. She knew that no amount of washing would rid her of the scent for the rest of the day. If she had any imagination at all, the girl would rub her hands with dirt and leaves. She would sprinkle lemon juice on them, with the hopes that the smell would be gone by the time she took her lover late that night.

  Immediately after delivering the baby, Ifi had phoned Aunty. Every third word the connection broke, and Ifi found herself repeating, again and again, “boy,” “tall,” until they eventually lost the connection all together. She cried until her eyes were swollen. Had Ifi lived in Nigeria, Aunty would not stand over a pot instructing the housegirl. She would be by Ifi’s side. She would be holding the boy, pressing her lips to his forehead, cupping his small head in her palms. There would be uncles, cousins, neighbors, all surrounding Ifi and the boy. Each one would shout their praises about the delicacy of his skin, the pinkness of his cheeks, the tufts of charcoal hair, the size and shape of his large nose. Noise, laughter, and admonishments would fill the air.

  Outside the room, Emeka’s and Gladys’s voices had shrunken almost to a whisper. “Why must you worry me, my queen?” he said, teasingly. “How can I fight with such a face, such a bright face, Miss America?” They sounded like lovers at the end of a rendezvous. Silent, caught in the middle, their daughter had ridden the high tide of their anger and watched it resolve to a tremulous wave. Something about the girl’s calm, childish hum suggested to Ifi that she had been privy to such arguments and resolutions her entire short life. Gladys’s objections had faded to a watered-down silence.

  Alone, Gladys returned to the room, sucking her teeth in shallow, sullen protest. He had won. Emeka’s and the little girl’s footsteps vanished down the hallway. Remembering his voice, Ifi knew that she too could not have said no to him, not to his gentle pleas and his flirtatious chuckles. Why can’t Job be like that?

  At first, she sympathized with Gladys—the woman with the husband whom she couldn’t even rejoice in feeling anger toward when he was wrong—until Gladys strolled past Ifi’s bed, smoothing out the front of her skirt, inspecting her painted fingernails, refusing to even glare in her direction. For several long, silent seconds Gladys hunched over the incubator, pressing her lips together sternly, watching the sleeping boy.

  “You had better feed this boy, oh,” Gladys said. “You didn’t eat well during your pregnancy, heh. He is too small.”

  Heat filled Ifi’s cheeks. She searched for a response.

  “Trying to be skinny like the Americans.” Gladys turned to Ifi for the first time. Once more, she examined her cuticles. “Your breasts resemble uncooked dough. How will you feed him? What kind of woman does not know how to prepare for a child? I don’t blame you, sha. You had no one to teach you.”

  Biting back her anger, Ifi turned away. That morning, she hadn’t expected anyone. Once his shift ends, Job will come, she told herself. Tired, sore, and stitched between her legs, she hadn’t bothered with a bra or even a comb. Now, imagining her own heavy, ashy breasts, etched with stretch marks, her eyes couldn’t leave Gladys’s well-formed shape. At her age, after six children, surely a Band-Aid of Spanx, bra, and hose held her body together. Straightened hair, smoothed curls, glossed and shiny from Blue Magic. Fingernails, long arcs, painted red. Face bleached by powder and cream. Ifi tried to imagine Gladys before all of it, when she was nothing but a schoolgirl in Nigeria with low, kinky hair, sandals, and a starched linen uniform. No more or less than any of the other girls in her level. All that is real, Ifi scoffed to herself, remembering that first night at Divine Davinci’s. Gladys’s fur was now draped across the back of a chair, like the one hanging limply in Ifi’s closet at home. Summoning energy, Ifi shouted, “Don’t insult me. Get out!”

  Gladys turned up her nose. Nothing but calm resided in her voice. “You are too good for sisterly teasing?”

  When their eyes met at Gladys’s shaking hands, Gladys spun away. Ifi suddenly remembered Gladys behaving the same way just a month ago, looking away from her dead son in his incubator. She’s in pain, Ifi thought, a wave of pity overwhelming her. Maybe she could understand this woman after all. Maybe there was nothing more to her than bones and a soft heart in a fragile case. Like Ifi, Gladys was just a woman. They were both mothers. No better. No worse. “Will you hold him?” she asked.

  “No,” Gladys said, her voice rising, almost in derision.

  Emeka and the daughter returned. The girl sipped juice from a small white cup. Crumbs powdered her cheeks. He crowded the door, and Ifi caught Gladys’s gaze trained on him. Guilt etched into the fine lines of his face, he shrank in the doorway. Ifi suddenly couldn’t remember the guile of his voice just moments earlier. Instead, he had the look of a boy prepared for a scolding.

  “Hold the boy, now,” he said to Gladys gently, with a hint of irritation.

  “No,” she said, backing away.

  Roughly, Emeka pushed past her to the incubator. He lifted the boy up, his back and shoulders squared to Ifi and Gladys.

  “Put him down,” Gladys said after a moment. Her eyes still contained their hard, scolding expression. “What is wrong with you? Have you forgotten how to hold a child properly?”

  But he just stood there, holding the boy in his arms, staring into his eyes. Their daughter placed the cup on
the nightstand and slipped her fingers into Gladys’s. Limp, forgotten, her hand dangled. All of a sudden, Ifi understood. The girl will never be the son that her mother needs.

  Before they left the room, Ifi knew that as she slept later that night, Gladys’s and Emeka’s bodies would be tied together in a confused embrace. They would be rigid with frustrated desire, with the hopes that another boy would begin to grow in Gladys’s womb. Perhaps they would even hang a watery charm from one of the posts on their bed to ensure that it would happen this time—the thing that had happened so effortlessly for Ifi, the thing that Ifi began to understand had already changed her life in innumerable ways. She would not go to school and train to be a nurse as Job had promised, and they would not open the clinic together. But her son would train to be a doctor. Her son would train and marry the nurse. Her son would open the clinic in Nigeria. Having a child had made her a mother.

  CHAPTER 9

  HIS CRYING AND SHOUTING WAS SO LOUD, SO ANGRY, THAT IT NEARLY escaped Job that the front door was slightly ajar. With the boy drooping in Ifi’s arms, Job pushed her back into the hallway, and she waited while he surveyed the apartment. Everything seemed just as it had been when he left that afternoon to check Ifi out of the hospital. Several emptied cans, coated to the rim with the congealing juices of pinto beans, straddled the countertops and the cool stovetop burners. Job swept the cans into the trash bin. A crumpled heap of newspapers, turned to the finance section, was spread over the living room couch and floor. His towels, still damp from his shower, hung from the bar in the bathroom. Then he let out a sharp gasp.

  A crib. Gladys and Emeka’s. He’d seen it before in their nursery, a room whose walls had changed from blue to pink so many times that Job had lost count. What is it doing here? Why is it assembled? he thought. Perfectly assembled, erected, and squeezed into the tight space between the back wall and the bed that Ifi and Job shared. Clean sheets were spread over the bed. Even the mobile of plastic and glittering stars hung over the bed. For a moment, Job surveyed the bed, his mouth agape. How can it be?

  Calmly, he ran his fingers over the dark chestnut frame. Nicks caught against his fingertips. He engaged and disengaged the side rail, and it moved up and down smoothly. Who could have done such a thing? He tried to play the events of his featureless day in his mind. Arriving home from his night shift at the hospital exhausted, showering, eating the tins of beans before leaving for his shift at the meatpacking plant. From there, like he had on the day of his son’s birth, Job had made his way directly to the hospital, this time to pick up Ifi and the boy.

  “Chineke!” Oh my God, Ifi said, now standing next to him.

  All of a sudden, saliva and mucous erupted from each orifice of their son’s little red face. His balled fists punched awkwardly at the air just ahead of his nose. Job gazed at the boy. An ugly baby. But never mind it. After all, he will one day be a man.

  “I told you to wait outside,” Job said. Then he changed his mind. Over the boy’s shouts, he explained, “I left the door open. I’ll have to remember next time.” No sense in frightening Ifi. No sense in letting her know that Emeka had a hand in this, because surely he did—always flashing his money around, always acting like he was Job’s chief.

  Just slightly, Job turned away from Ifi and the boy, who dangled precariously from Ifi’s grasping arms. Weaving in and out, the boy flexed his back in abrupt spastic motions. Like a fish trying to jump free of its bowl.

  Cocking his head to the side, with his shoulder thrust to the crib, Job blinked away his fears and the shame of Emeka’s hand in his home. He shrugged casually, the way he’d seen Americans do it. He had to pretend. She cannot know about Emeka. “How do you like it?”

  “You did this? Yes, it’s good,” she said slowly. Ifi placed the baby into Job’s arms. Back and forth Job weaved, gripping the boy at his sides as he tried to slip away. She fingered the wooden railing. She punched the buttons on the mobile, and the intimate chime of bells sounded as it slowly rotated. Job pushed the boy up over his shoulder, and the boy wet it with his saliva and furious sucks. A sprinkle of lights—soft oranges, blues, and pinks—swirled overhead. Job lifted the boy’s face to the eddying lights. At first, the boy offered nothing but hasty, shrill shouts mixed with a choking cough. Then he stopped. Amazed, silent, they watched together, father and son. Job breathed a sigh of relief.

  Somehow Emeka had managed to find their address. Probably at the hospital while Job was away. Maybe it was on an intake form. Emeka had come over, that sly fellow, and put the crib together. Then he left the door wide open to show Job that he could come and go as he pleased in Job’s home, and he could not stop him. He would have to pay Emeka for assembling the crib and thank him, act like it was his own idea, to rob Emeka of whatever satisfaction he had felt as a result of his intrusion into his home. Job fumed.

  Ifi placed the boy in the crib. His large wet eyes continued to stare at the mobile. Curling to his side, he shoved a plump finger into his mouth. Furiously, he sucked.

  “He’s hungry,” Job said.

  “Yes, he is.” A smile. Cocking his head, she fed him, overlooking the crib with continued awe. In minutes he was asleep, a reservoir of breast milk captured in his pitted cheeks. Job ran his fingers along the boy’s mouth, and the saliva shined against his finger. For the first time, it seemed, Ifi noticed Job’s hand. After setting the boy in the crib, she placed Job’s hand in hers. Carefully, she examined the warped flesh, oozing with pus that was held together by frayed stitching.

  “What happened to you?”

  “On the day he was born,” he said simply. “It happened then.”

  “What happened?”

  “It will scar and heal, and each time I look at it, I will remember the day my son was born.” He knew that he wasn’t answering her questions, but she mustn’t know about the factory.

  In acquiescence, she said, “It’s infected.” By now she understood that if he did not answer her question immediately, he never would.

  Holding his damaged hand, she led him to the bathroom. While their son slept for the first time in his new home, Ifi and Job retreated to the sink, where she cleaned his wound.

  When he arrived at Emeka’s that night, the pockets of Job’s white lab coat were filled with twenty-dollar bills. His shift at the hospital would begin in exactly one hour, at eleven. By his estimation, the business would be done quickly and efficiently, with plenty of time for Job to get to work. Emeka and Gladys lived on a suburban cul-de-sac, a street that curved just beyond the entrance, with skinny ash trees lightly salted with snow. As Job pulled up, he could make out a stooped figure, with a flat shovel in hand, scooping snow to the sides of the wide driveway. Working only from old-fashioned incandescent street lamps overhead, it was Emeka. Only then did Job realize that Emeka’s was the single home on the entire block without cleared sidewalks. Footprints of various sizes were scattered along the walkway. When Job parked and stepped out of the car, he placed his feet in footsteps large enough to hold his own.

  Before Job had a chance to speak, Emeka said, “Exercise is good for the soul, my man.” Wind had chapped his large lips. Aside from a shaggy, lopsided hat and a pair of down mittens, Emeka wore khakis and sneakers filled with the snow that he had beaten into the shovel. Splitting into laughter, he tugged at his shirt and revealed his hard, round gut. “This is all muscle and fufu. My six-pack.” He threw a glance back at the house, a mischievous one. “I need all the exercise I can get to keep up with activities at home, you know?” Heaving a second shovel at Job, he added, “Take it.”

  Both Job and Emeka peered up just then; Gladys had stopped in an upstairs window. Her figure checked the glare that was just beginning on Job’s face. Before she disappeared from view, her eyes met Job’s and then steadied on Emeka. After a moment, another face appeared in the window: Emeka’s youngest daughter. With her mother’s petulance, she eyed them.

  Job leaned the shovel against one shoe. “I see,” he said with false joviality.
When Emeka didn’t greet him properly, when he didn’t ask why Job was visiting at such an hour, he finally spoke again. “I did not come for this.” Still, he couldn’t find the words to accuse his friend of breaking into his home and erecting the crib, like a dog urinating on his territory. Snow patched beneath his shovel as if he had not even shoveled. Shiny concrete glowed under Emeka’s hand. No matter how hard Job shoveled, he found the same patches of snow caught underneath his shovel. Hot lights left Job’s lips tart with the taste of sweat. He peeled back his winter coat, standing in his white lab coat. With vigor, he pushed the shovel harder, swinging his freed arms. His shovel was scooped. I have the wrong type of shovel, he thought.

  Free of his winter coat, Job reached into the pockets of his lab coat. Casually, one hand still directing the shovel, he dumped the wad of twenty-dollar bills on the snow between them. Each bill refused to separate; they landed in a clump. Wind and snow stirred the bent bills.

  “I like to make my hands dirty,” Emeka said, ignoring the money. “You know, the Americans have this one right. In Nigeria, I would pay a small boy to do this chore for me. But here, I am using my muscles.” He let in a deep gasp of breath, and from the side, Job could make out a slight twitch as Emeka’s jaw tightened.

  Remembering the glossy Sears and Roebuck ads folded in with his morning newspaper, Job said, “Buy a snowblower.” He beamed. “I’m thinking of replacing my own this year.”

  When Emeka didn’t reply, Job looked up. Instead of meeting Emeka’s eyes, he spread his gaze all along the dead lane. His eyes escaped to the hulking houses, the manicured lawns, the exaggerated outlines of fresh-cut Christmas trees in the dimly lit windows. For the first time, Job noticed that Emeka’s was the smallest house on the street, boxed in between two large, gleaming mansions.

  Emeka’s front door opened. A long-legged girl with crooked braids burst out, her hands precariously grasping two large, steaming mugs. Each mug heaved one way and the other, and the liquid stained the white snow a dirty yellow as she descended the stairs two at a time. Just before she made it to them, the girl let out a squeal. “Money!” she shrieked. The mugs slipped from her grasp and tumbled into the snow.