As if to prove her point, Victor came pedaling into the entryway, his voice loud like a fire siren, and struck the wooden front door with such force that from the outside, passersby witnessed a great tremble.
CHAPTER 16
JUST AFTER TWO ON SATURDAYS, WHILE HIS MOTHER BOUGHT GROCERIES, Victor and his father drove through town, stopping at one garage sale after another. They began their afternoons with a stop at a gas station. His father gave him money to purchase the candy of his choice. Then his father leaned back and scanned the classifieds, circling each destination with a felt-tip marker. Victor took the Laffy Taffy, Jujubes, or Skittles and the bill to the cashier; he grinned wickedly when the cashier not only gave him his candy, but also some money in return. Each time, he presented the change to his father in astonishment. His father chuckled and told him he was a clever boy.
The neighborhoods they visited were unlike their own. While the houses in Victor’s neighborhood were tall and thin, with missing siding and cracked walkways, the houses in the garage sale neighborhoods were larger, pristine, with undisturbed yards, garages, wooden fences, and flowery gardens. These neighborhoods were a bore to Victor. At the end of every trip, he gladly returned to the broken holes under porches that led to crawl spaces, to poking sticks at beasts behind chain-link fences, to the misshapen shrubbery that shielded him in hide-and-seek, to tearing through the streets on his red Big Wheel.
In the summer, the yards of each garage sale were identical. Hand-painted signs hung on trees, sometimes with airless balloons collected in a wilted bouquet. Rows of tables were positioned with tennis rackets, dog-eared dime novels, scratched records, and worn shoes. They stopped at garage sale after garage sale, overturning different objects in their hands, flipping switches, poking and prodding. It was on one such journey, Victor suspected, that his father had purchased his Big Wheel.
Victor enjoyed these outings. No one told him to put his hands in his pockets. No one told him he couldn’t try on the roller skates if they were three sizes too big. No one told him he was too small to fling the beads of an abacus, or too big to taste the cool, smooth surface of a snow globe. In fact, the sellers encouraged it, following them with oversolicitous smiles, instructing him to step this way, push that way, to get the full effect. His father seemed to enjoy these trips as much as Victor did, standing importantly in his suit and tie in spite of the heat, in spite of the sweat that dampened his arms. His father picked up one object after another and inquired, in crisp, overpronounced English, “Tell me about this.”
On one such trip, Victor’s suspicions about the Big Wheel were confirmed. A red-haired woman with high-waisted jeans and a baseball cap met them. Victor didn’t notice her at first. Nor did his father, it seemed. But suddenly, abruptly, she was standing at his side. She patted the top of his head. “Victor, do you like your Big Wheel?” she asked.
Although it didn’t occur to Victor to wonder how she knew his name—surely everyone knew Victor Ogbonnaya—he was struck dumb. He didn’t like the way she looked at him. He didn’t like the way his father stood stiffly at his side.
“Victor, answer,” his father said.
Only then did he reply. “Yeah,” he said, “I like it.”
“Victor,” she said, “you’re a big boy now. You look just like your father.”
His father and the lady exchanged a glance that he didn’t understand. She picked up a stuffed bear from a table and handed it to him. “You like this?” she asked. “I’ll buy you this.”
Just then, Victor had had enough of the woman. He wheeled around and knocked the bear free from her hand. The bear was insulting. “I’m a big boy!” he said to her. He thought of his mother, who just that morning had scolded him for wetting his bed, asking him if he was still a baby or if he had decided to be a big boy.
The lady’s face was crimson.
“Victor, behave yourself!” his father said. He jerked Victor with such force that he expected his arm to fall off. He had never been spoken to so sharply by anyone, not even his mother. His eyes screwed up and he howled. But his father didn’t relent. “Take the toy,” his father said.
Victor refused.
“Victor, behave or I will beat you,” his father said in Igbo. And then, “Do not disgrace me.”
Still, Victor refused to submit. When the lady bent to pick up the bear, he kicked it beyond her reach. Tears streamed down his face. He wanted his mother, so he said so. “Mommy!” he wailed.
“Hey, Job.” The lady let out a dry laugh. “It’s okay. We’ll pick something else out that’s just right for a big boy.” When she winked at Victor, he regarded her with distrust. Finally, she began to back away and replaced the teddy bear on the table.
It seemed like it was over. She said good-bye to his father. They hesitantly hugged, bumping shoulders as they leaned into one another. She turned to Victor. Victor whipped away from her.
“Victor.” His father’s voice was low.
“No,” Victor said. His father pulled Victor’s arms apart and forced them around the lady, who was stock still in the captive embrace. She smelled of cigarettes and strawberry shampoo.
Victor was utterly humiliated. He shrank into himself. Nothing, not even the woman’s plaintive glance, not even the candy she offered, could make him smile again for the rest of the outing. When they returned home, his mother asked what was wrong. Victor’s father told her that Victor had fallen and bumped his head.
After the garage sale fiasco the outings stopped, and Victor endured long, tedious summer afternoons watching Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner while his father snored on the couch. Inevitably, Victor stopped the sound through his father’s nose with his fingertips until his father woke up, sputtering and choking, looking every which way for his assailant before pulling Victor into a bear hug. It was the only thing that seemed to make his mother laugh before heading to her job at the motel in the afternoons.
In late summer, the grasses of the various parks throughout town were beaten flat and browned from the scalding Nebraska summer heat. Nonetheless, knobby-kneed men in mesh shorts and worn polos frequented the parks. Caravans arrived in the early evenings during the time between an early shift’s end and a late shift’s beginning. The men ran themselves ragged after soccer balls while dodging holes in the ground. Along the side of the fields, their wives were spread out on blankets, feeding their children curried rice, burritos, or greasy plantains from plastic Tupperware containers covered in foil.
In his earliest days in America, when Job was still a university student and he and Emeka were still friendly, they would shout and holler along the sidelines, teasing the losing team until one scrunch-faced defender would charge the sideline and demand that they join the game. Emeka always announced that he was too old. How could young men shame themselves by demanding that an old man with four daughters—one already grown—should run among them? Because he was just that, they always relented, focusing their attention instead on Job. From then on, he had tried his best to avoid the humiliation of running the field by not coming altogether. At his ripe age, as a father, Job could finally join the older men resting along the benches, sharing cigarettes, sipping from sacks of beer, and placing bets they would never be forced to pay.
One evening, Victor announced that he would play for the Super Eagles when he grew up. The ripple of pleasure that spread through the crowd of Nigerians filled Job with such pride that he made a point to purchase cleats, shin guards, and a small jersey. From then on, to the nods of onlookers, Victor stylishly paraded the fields, kicking and elbowing past the little boys in their miniature soccer game. Victor wasn’t exactly good, but the key, he had discovered, was to elbow, push, and pull the other players around, preventing them from scoring.
Only the mothers complained, confirming Victor’s certainty about the purpose of all mothers. He was neither resentful of nor charmed by this affirmation. He unquestioningly acknowledged this fact, as he accepted the fact that the sky was blue. At once he became the
most hated child on the field by mothers and fathers alike. Mothers were straightforward in their contempt, attempting to revive their whimpering boys. To save face, fathers declined to intervene, sometimes siding with Victor, insisting that a scraped knee or a bloodied nose was the cost of a hard-fought game before reluctantly shoving their trembling sons back into battle.
Job felt the need to apologize to Cheryl for Victor’s behavior at the garage sale. His chance came one evening when Cheryl agreed to meet them at the soccer field. As Cheryl looked on, Victor huffed up and down the field, elbowing and knocking little boys out of his way. Although the crowd was primarily international, with representatives of India, Malaysia, Kenya, Brazil, and Nigeria, there were a few pink-faced, jeans-wearing American wives and girlfriends sprinkled throughout the crowd. Among them, Cheryl sat on a blanket with potato chips, slices of fruit, cold cuts, and juice boxes.
As is eventually destined to happen to all Goliaths, the Davids of the world—boys who nightly limped home swollen, bruised, and teary—launched an attack on Victor. In a wall they united, breaking one way, cutting that way, forcing their bodies into steely alignment each time Victor neared, knocking him to the ground, tripping him, elbowing. The onslaught happened from all sides and was thoroughly unexpected. In stubborn denial, Victor refused to acknowledge their blows, offering them a dull smile. Until then, he had assumed that the object of the game was for the other boys to fall. Not him. At one point, the great giant was knocked to the ground so viciously that groans issued from the crowd. Even the adult soccer game paused.
Job didn’t interfere. How can I? he thought. This is the duty of a mother. But Ifi was at work, at the motel. She had never even seen the soccer field. And the mothers along the sideline, ever vigilant, were suddenly distracted by the babies in their laps, the runny noses of younger children, the articles of trash.
Cheryl charged onto the field. Victor was limp with cries. She smothered him in the embrace he earlier denied her and carried him back to her blanket, where she fed him browning apple slices coated in peanut butter and raisins, where she burst open a juice box and encouraged him to sip.
He felt tricked. But there were no friendly faces in the crowd, not even his father’s, and so he allowed Cheryl to hold him, to speak to him.
“Is it true that you’re a smart boy?” she asked. “Have you been playing with your Big Wheel?”
Although Job had seen Cheryl’s subtle tenderness the nights and early mornings they had spent together—tucking extra pillows behind his back, running her fingers through the knots in his hair—her reaction to Victor was unexpected. For days afterwards, he lay awake in bed, thinking the moment over. It seemed strange seeing her there, his little boy paralyzed in her arms. The picture should have been a great comfort to him; frankly, it was not. He
hadn’t even wanted Cheryl to take part in these outings in the first place, but after the garage sales, she began to insist on the soccer field too. She wanted to see the boy. Just get to know another part of you. For the most part, it had never bothered Job. After all, Victor was too young to understand such “friendships.” But to see his Victor in her arms like this was suddenly disturbing.
From that day forward, he didn’t call things off exactly, but he answered the look in Cheryl’s eyes less and less each time they were together. Now, something was different. What, he did not know.
For the first time, as they lay awake in bed together one morning after his shift, Cheryl lighting a cigarette, Job asked her why she had not made good on her efforts to stop smoking. “In Nigeria,” he said, “smoking is for men.”
Cheryl didn’t even bother to put the cigarette away. He expected her to argue with him, to tell him that in America women were equal to men or something to that effect, to say she was not his slave. But she stared numbly at him. He never saw her smoke another cigarette again, yet he could smell the scent on her now, pungent as ever. That she had taken to smoking in secret, just before and after his arrivals, he was certain.
Scalding afternoons made up the days leading into August. The living room fan, draped in a misted towel, circulated stagnant air about the room day and night. Job worked the night shift at the hospital and slept through the mornings and afternoons, rising just as Ifi left for alternating late afternoon and evening shifts at the motel, where she vacuumed rooms, emptied trash bins of condoms and beer bottles, and replaced semen-stained sheets. Few nights were shared by the two. In the event that they did share a night together, the sex was in the dark. Neither bothered to shower before or after, so their musky bodies joined together in a mingling of scents: onions from dinner, vomit from the boy, urine from a patient at the hospital, stale cigarettes from the motel. It was over just as quickly as it began, and the two retreated to their sides of the bed before falling into heavy slumber.
One night, after the boy had gone to bed, Ifi and Job were lumped on the couches in the living room watching television when they heard a scraping outside.
Ifi’s eyes opened in alarm. Job raised his finger to his lips and went out the back door. Ifi followed. At night, the backyard was a frayed forest. Bushes were tangled and unkempt. Half-grown grass caught at the backs of their ankles. In the distance, they could see the outline of the full-bodied moon. Ifi clung to Job. He told her to go inside but leaned into her anyway. Then they saw its eyes, large and shining. The raccoon flipped into the air, letting out a squeal, which incidentally was identical to the one that Job issued as well. The suddenness of the two sounds, and their similarity, made Ifi laugh. Then Job laughed. And when they saw that the overturned trash cans and scattered refuse were not the boy’s handiwork after all, in a small way, they rejoiced.
Such was the sentiment that compelled Ifi to suggest a family outing the next day as they ate toast with runny eggs for breakfast. Job acquiesced. By Sunday of the following week, Ifi, Job, and Victor were sweating in a hot open-air tent, divided by pens of stinking hogs and sheep at the 4-H exhibit of the Lancaster County Fair. A week before the commencement of every school year, a parade of tents was positioned alongside the abandoned fields and hollowed-out buildings of Zonta. A beer garden, concerts of howling country singers, a dubiously erected Ferris wheel, and the usual pageantry of horses and apple-cheeked schoolgirls in drooping sashes rounded out the stale days of the retreating summer.
Ifi had the day off. Though she had lived in America for nearly six years, this would be her first time attending. Shaking off the disappointment of the sandhill cranes all those years before, she took in the sights with forced vigor and appreciation, finding herself slipping in and out of Aunty’s platitudes. “Never count the eggs that might hatch,” she warned Victor as they overlooked a small-game exhibition.
At the 4-H exhibit, a small African boy about Victor’s age trotted out a limping calf and carefully mounted wooden stairs to a stage. Three other children, small, bowlegged, and uncertain, marched along with a scowling sheep, hog, and chicken. They stuttered and spat prepared speeches into the microphone. An announcer followed, haltingly shouting and proclaiming them all winners before pinning each child with identical blue ribbons. In the tight, packed crowd, parents beamed from the sidelines. An array of camera flashes lit up the crowded tent.
“What kind of competition is it that everyone is the winner?” Ifi asked Job.
“Nonsense,” he replied.
Still eyeing the blue ribbons, Ifi turned to Victor. “You see, that boy is smaller than you.” Victor’s mouth was full of cotton candy. To no one in particular, Ifi said, “My son can do better.” And she could see it: just like the other American children, her Victor would stand in a cowboy hat and boots, proudly looming over a bleating sheep as he was presented with a ribbon. Ifi and Job would beam from the sidelines like the other parents, lighting the sky with their cameras. By then, she decided, the holes in their house would be repaired. There would even be a white picket fence. She turned to Victor. “Next year will be you.” She took Job’s hand. “Anything is possible.”
Under the sun’s glare, Job frowned. He had the bloated look of flayed dough. It was the heat.
“You were right, you know,” she explained. “I didn’t believe you then. When I first came to this country, I saw the cold and snow and empty fields. But there is more.” What vanity! she thought of herself. Coming to America with the glitter of golden streets and diamonds like apples in trees. How wrong she had been. All it took was hard work and pluck. Hadn’t Job known all along? Hadn’t he tried to make her understand? They did not own their clinic, but they did have a home of their own and a son. Amazing! she thought.
A little girl in a yellow dress skipped past them. At the same instant, Ifi and Job both recalled that silly night, bucking and sweating under the Port Harcourt heat. They remembered the darkness and then the sudden light. Ifi remembered Job, swollen and pitiful in her yellow dress, with crooked lipstick on his teeth.
“Mr. Doctor,” she said, a tease to her voice.
“Mrs. Doctor,” he said back. “Do you still have that yellow dress?”
Ifi’s head said no, but her eyes said yes. “I have had to repair that dress because it cannot fit properly.” A deliberate pause. “A big, fat woman with large buttocks damaged it.”
Job quipped an American saying he had heard many times before. “No, no, not fat, big boned.”
Another pause. “Big bones? I don’t understand,” she said.
“Nothing,” he said, shaking off his failed attempt at humor. “Nothing.”
“Tell me now,” Ifi said, her tone taking on irritation. “What is this talk of big bones?”
“I am saying that I am not fat. It is only that my bones are big,” he said.
Her eyes flicked dubiously to that thunderous belly of his, not so subtly disguised under his dampened shirt.
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