Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

by Julie Iromuanya

  A sentiment so sudden and hard filled her chest and closed her throat. It was the same pang she had when she saw Job upended at the slaughter. She wanted, now more than ever, to be home. Not in this America. “Aunty,” Ifi said.

  Aunty’s eyes opened slowly.

  “I would like to see Uncle and my cousins.”

  Aunty sat up slowly, cupping the boy’s head in her palm. Her voice was cheery, yet hesitant. “You are such a lucky girl—no mother, no father, sef. And you are in America driving a big car, living in a big man’s house, eating goat meat and stockfish every day of the week while we are eating overripe yam.”

  Aunty placed the boy down on the bed between them and turned her back on Ifi. Even in sleep, he turned away from his mother to join Aunty.

  Ifi tried again. “I am not happy.”

  “What is this talk of happy?” Aunty asked without turning. Then, gently, she added, “You have been in America too long, Mrs. Doctor.”

  Angrily, Ifi said, “He is not a doctor.”

  Now Aunty faced Ifi. “Do you think you are shaming your husband with this nonsense talk? You are his wife. Do you understand?” Ifi did. Aunty had known all along. “You are everything he is. Do not expose yourself. I will never hear you say that again. Do you understand?” Her words were low, yet sharp. “You are Mrs. Doctor.”

  3.

  CHAPTER 15

  ON THE WHOLE, VICTOR WAS CHEERFUL. HOWEVER, HE CAME TO appreciate the fact that his mother’s sole purpose in life was to deny him the delights of the world. His father agreed. When he burst into a mirthless room, roaring at the top of his lungs in imitation of the famed X-Men hero, Wolverine, forks and butter knives attached to each hand, his mother lifted him by his shoulders, held him up to her eye level, and threatened to beat him. His father intervened. “Let the boy play.” Everyone approved.

  For Victor’s fifth birthday, the house was filled entirely with strangers, mostly Nigerian. When he somersaulted into laps, marched through the room tasting the food on their plates, and banged pots and pans during World News, the guests joined in and agreed with his mother:

  “The boy is wild.”

  “The boy is uncontrollable.”

  “The boy must be spanked.”

  “America is spoiling the boy.”

  Still, there was an air of secret pleasure in their tone.

  Victor’s father swept his son’s gifts aside and presented him with a Big Wheel tricycle wrapped in a shiny red bow. At first, Victor wasn’t particularly drawn to the contraption. He didn’t even bother to mount it, suspicious of its look. It didn’t have arms and legs, monster eyes, or claws like his other gifts. It didn’t have bright lights that swirled around or a horn that blared like his fire truck. His father heaved the tricycle in his direction, and it spun and spiraled as if unraveling. Victor heaved it back. This excited him; they shoved the Big Wheel back and forth until he grew restless. He did not grow to love it until months later.

  An ugly old man with trembling lips presided over the celebration. His voice warbled as he made one pronouncement after another during the passing of the kola nut. Victor was supposed to call the man Uncle. Adults filled the room in long gowns of bright prints, swallowing balls of fufu, akra, and garri and drinking palm wine. They boasted of their newly purchased homes, computers, SUVS, and their second and third degrees. They disagreed about politics.

  Most of the women were in the kitchen. Victor’s mother was among them. She had banished Victor from the kitchen. Days before his birthday party, she found Victor in the kitchen, peering into the frozen, lifeless face of the goat that had been butchered for the celebration. Victor’s cheek lay flat against the counter, his tongue waggled out like a goat’s.

  He was well aware that his mother wanted no part in the festivities, yet there she was bent over a pot of soup, flipping through ingredients in the cabinet like fabric swatches. She had wanted to feed Victor ice cream and cake and hot dogs. She’d wanted balloons and streamers and to invite one or two boys from Victor’s school to join in. She had intended to take them to the children’s museum or a movie afterwards. His parents had fought over this as they fought over everything.

  To Victor, adulthood was equated with displeasure and disagreeableness. Instead of feeling frightened during the fights, Victor was merely annoyed that the attention was drawn away from him. Although nearly every one of his parents’ fights began with the boy, he suspected they were fighting about something that had nothing to do with him. He thought this unfair and rivaled for the attention that was due to him. He banged louder on pots and pans. He cut holes into the living room couches and didn’t bother to flip them over to disguise his artistry. He marked up the walls with his crayons. He pushed food around on his plate, chewed it up, and spat it out.

  Each time, without fail, his mother raced around the table, grasping him in her fingers, holding him to her eye level. She threatened, “I will break your head!” Or, “I will send you to Nigeria!”

  When the threats were issued, he was freshly wounded. He wailed as loudly as he could.

  His father always emerged from the wings. “Are you raising a girl?” he would ask his mother.

  With this, his mother couldn’t argue. After more threats, she set him down and turned her fury on his father.

  Of all the threats his mother had issued, the most perplexing of all was the threat to send Victor to Nigeria. He had mixed feelings. On the one hand, his father spoke so joyously of his days there as a child, running as freely as he wanted, climbing trees, playing with goats and chickens, swimming in rivers, surrounded by adoring adults and children. His father shared these delights with him as they nibbled moi moi, or when his father secretly allowed him a sip of palm wine, which he sucked down so quickly he came up choking and gasping for air. No one in Nigeria would make him put away his toys. After all, there were houseboys and housegirls for that.

  On the other hand, his mother told him that in Nigeria, there would be no pizza or chicken nuggets. There would be fufu and jollof rice, which he liked well enough, but nothing could take the place of pizza. The children would make fun of the way he spoke. He would have to leave his Big Wheel behind. Worst of all, he would be beaten if he misbehaved. Of one thing Victor was certain: anything that evoked any pleasure in the world was considered naughty. Because of this, he would be beaten by neighbors, family friends, schoolteachers. In his mind, Victor imagined a long line of men and women with his mother’s arms and fingers grasping him by the shoulders, flipping him upside down, beating him with the soles of their slippers, beating him with switches from trees, beating him with belts, beating him with whatever they could grasp.

  When he was six, Victor’s mother ran away with him. It was night, and he woke with her face so close to his that he could smell the stockfish on her breath. Victor was too groggy to put up any fight. She must have known this, because she wrapped him in her arms and hugged him to her chest. She pushed her lips to his forehead in a dry kiss. He was completely defenseless.

  They were in the cab before he realized that he was in his shoes. Over his pajamas, he was wearing his winter coat, mittens, and hat. The pajamas were cotton and too thick to comfortably wear underneath the coat. Sweat dampened his arms, legs, and throat. He began to itch. In a futile attempt to free himself, Victor kicked and beat his arms. His mother, anticipating this, had buttoned and zipped him in so securely that his efforts were in vain. Victor cried and wailed. In his despair, he wanted his favorite item in the universe. “Big Wheel!” he shrieked.

  She hadn’t thought of that.

  At first, the cabdriver just glanced at him in the rearview mirror. When the crying became a choking, spitting fury, the driver said, “Make him stop.”

  “I am paying,” his mother said in return. But something about her tone told Victor that the driver was winning. “I will buy you candy if you are good,” she said to Victor.

  When the car finally stopped, they were in front of a brick two-story building. A
pink light flickered outside. The cabdriver dropped them off in front without bothering to bring their luggage to the door. His mother grudgingly paid the tip anyway. Victor flung himself on the sidewalk, screaming, kicking, and punching.

  “There is a swimming pool,” she said to him. “You will eat pizza and ice cream for breakfast.”

  Eventually, a crowd surrounded them. His mother shielded her eyes. She attempted to collect their luggage, to collect him, to smile, to speak to him in hushed Igbo, which she rarely spoke. They looked at his mother as if she was stealing him. He felt taken.

  “Your Big Wheel is inside,” she said to him. Victor gazed at his mother suspiciously through the tears. If she had his Big Wheel, she would not allow him to play with it while he cried. Is it hidden somewhere as a surprise? he wondered. He decided to believe her and sucked back his tears; his cries diminished to a whimper.

  By morning, Victor’s father had arrived. Striped under the slanted rays of light that spread through the window blinds, he hugged Victor to his chest. Victor felt each inhale of his father’s staggered breaths. He tasted his father’s sweat through the suit and tie he wore to work. His fingers clasped around the tubes of the stethoscope that dangled from his father’s pocket. His father headed to the car, leaving his mother to collect the unopened suitcases and store them in the car’s trunk. Victor sat alongside his father in the front seat. The whole way home, his mother wept. Her cries were a steady, uninterrupted moan, wet with her tears.

  The boy had inadvertently become Job and Ifi’s battlefield. Nearly a year earlier, when Victor first enrolled in kindergarten, his parents had battled over whether to place him in the local public school or to send him to private school. Although they were not Catholic, his father had insisted that Victor should attend the Catholic school, where the fitted and ironed uniforms reminded him of the refined boys’ academies in Nigeria. Most importantly, the boy would be away from the influences of hoodlums, namely the black Americans and Mexican Americans at whom he still shuddered.

  Ifi had insisted that Victor should attend the neighborhood public school. After all, it was free and just a few short blocks from their newly purchased home. She wouldn’t have to worry over washing and mending uniforms. This freedom from restriction that she had observed over her few years in the country was what she considered quintessentially American.

  Job had nearly won the battle when a local Nigerian teenager was on the news for attempted murder. He blamed it on the influence of black Americans. Ifi’s arguments were entirely useless. In defeat, she starched and ironed Victor’s clothes, lotioned his face, and wiped his nose so that the three could visit Sacred Heart Catholic Academy. They sat along a long, noisy corridor and watched as boys and girls of various sizes tramped up and down the stairs to their classrooms.

  The first surprise was that the school was coed; however, Job dismissed the disappointment. Eventually, they would have a daughter. It would be easier to have them take the same bus to school each morning. The second surprise was that the children were loud and rambunctious, not at all disciplined and scholastic like the boys on the glossy pages of the school catalogue. But the final and most damning surprise was the cost. Even Ifi had counted on an installment or good faith plan. Surely good Christians couldn’t turn potential parishioners away. They had already agreed to join the Catholic Church for the promised discount.

  At the end of the afternoon they drove home, accompanied by the sound of the car’s engine knocking. The next morning, Victor was enrolled in the neighborhood public school. As a compromise, whenever Victor went out to play, Job stood out on the porch, eyeing the neighborhood boys if they approached until they knew to leave Victor unharmed.

  The house was the first purchase Ifi and Job made together—well, not exactly. Just the same, like the boy, the action further solidified them as a unit, not the two strangers who met alone for the first time on the day of their arranged honeymoon. On the day they were to move in, as they drove up to the house, Ifi burst into tears. It was nothing like what she had expected of her first home. She had expected a garage, a picket fence, and a porch overlooking the neighborhood. She had expected, by then, to be a nurse. Instead, what she saw was a haunted aberration with peeling siding and cracked walkways; the windows were agape, like cavernous mouths.

  Haven’t I been in America long enough to realize that anything is possible, but things take time? she asked herself later that day. Isn’t it so that real estate is a financial investment that will make us millionaires, like Ed McMahon? Then and only then would her dreams finally come true.

  In her own way, Ifi grew to love the house. Like the boy, the house gave her a sense of use. Although she continued to send money home to her uncle and cousins, now that Aunty was gone and a new woman had replaced her, it wasn’t the same. Although Job had begun to build their retirement home in Nigeria almost as soon as they married, the house in America became the focus of her dreams. It was her claim to America and all that was American. She could fill her kitchen with shiny appliances, watch American talk shows, and order hamburgers and french fries.

  Like any new homeowner, Ifi threw herself into improvement projects. Some of the first repairs in order were a result of Victor’s roughness. He shoved objects into open drains, pried at loose tiling in the kitchen, burrowed his little fingers into the gaping holes in the walls. At first, Ifi attempted the repairs on her own, plastering open holes, resealing lifting tiles, plunging drains. She looked on in satisfaction after the tasks were completed and looked on in dissatisfaction when sealed holes sank, when tiles began to curl once again, when ankle-length water rose in the shower. Of all the damaged areas of the home, the one that irked her the most was the giant, cavernous hole in the living room. It stared at them like a gaping mouth, with ragged bits of plaster for protruding teeth. Of late, Victor had taken to slipping his little hands and even his face into the hole. Each week it seemed to grow larger and larger, a hungry maw observing the family in mockery.

  Ifi flipped through the pages of classified ads looking for plumbers, electricians, and carpenters to hire, anyone who knew a thing about a house. But when she called, the men who answered the phone were confused by her accent. They asked, “Excuse me?” “Come again?” They convinced themselves, as well as Ifi, that she surely couldn’t afford their services. She nearly gave up on her search, but standing in the checkout lane at the grocery one day, Ifi found a handmade flyer for a handyman: FIX ANYTHING. GOOD PRICE. On a lark, Ifi called the number, and a woman’s buttery voice answered. She took Ifi’s particulars and said she would dispatch the handyman.

  A week later, a tall young man with slanted eyes and a taut jaw arrived. He carried a steel box with his tools. His jeans were baggy at the waist. His hair was neatly braided in rows. He looked to be about eighteen.

  Job answered the door. In the background, Victor hollered and slammed his toys like the wrestlers on TV. Ifi sliced fresh okra into her palm.

  With still eyes, he stared Job down. “Hey,” the man said carefully. “I got another job at three, so we have to see what I can do till then.”

  Job frowned. “You have the wrong house.”

  The man had a slip of paper in his pocket. He retrieved it and matched it with the numbers over the porch.

  “You have made a mistake,” Job said. Heat rose. He began to perspire. “Sorry,” he said to the man. “I will help you find your friends.”

  When Ifi saw Job standing stock still in the doorway, she crowded into the door next to him. “Hello?” she asked.

  Again that strange look on his face. “Listen, I’m supposed to be here until three, but then I have to get going,” he said again.

  Ifi smiled at him. Still, she said the words that Job had been searching for during the entire exchange. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  He peered into Ifi’s face thoughtfully. “Mary said,” he began, but then stopped himself.

  Immediately, the stern expression on Ifi’s face relaxed. “J
amal!” she exclaimed.

  Slowly, he nodded.

  “The boy, Jamal? You have grown, oh. You are a man.”

  His face broke into a crooked smile, and his eyes slanted on his face.

  Ifi turned to Job. “Jamal is here to fix our house.”

  Job’s face deepened into a smile. “Oh, I see,” he said. “Thank you for coming, but we have found someone else.” Not an ounce of recognition was on his face. He reached into his pocket and produced a twenty-dollar bill. “Here, for your trouble.”

  Jamal shrugged, took the twenty, and drove away. Ifi did not stop him. Ifi did not remind Job of the teenage boy with the slanted eyes, of the night the boy had lifted her down the stairs as she went into labor. She did not remind him of the crib the boy pieced together for them the night she gave birth to their first son. Still, Jamal did not leave her mind.

  Instead, as Job asked, “What were you thinking, bringing akatta into our home? Have you not learned anything?” Ifi only listened.

  “Do you know,” Job said to her, “if I had not paid him for no work at all, that man would come with his friends at night to rob and beat us?”

  Ifi called him a racist. She told him she did not see color. In America, everyone is equal, she thought. She said all the things she had heard on television and read in newspapers. She added, “How can you discriminate a man who is your color?”

  But then, inevitably, the fight turned to the boy. In the first place, the boy was responsible for all the repairs the house needed. He rode that clunky red thing his father had insisted on buying him in the house. Because his mother was not watchful, he banged into walls. He overturned trashcans. He circled the kitchen, leaving skid marks and curling tiles underfoot.