Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

by Julie Iromuanya

  “When will he return?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “When he comes home, what will you do? Will you continue with your potions and prayers?”

  When he comes home? Ifi thought. There was no home. There was nothing. For the first time, it occurred to her that she had no plan. Surely she could not stay in the house with Job when he returned. It could not be just the two of them and the empty spaces that Victor used to fill.

  “The dishes,” Ifi said back to him. “Come tomorrow evening, and I will be ready.”

  The knock came an hour earlier than expected. All the light of the day was gone. In its place was the artificial orange from the porch bulbs along the block. Just the same, Ifi was ready. Everything she would ever need, everything that mattered to her, fit in two small suitcases: In one bag, Victor’s dishes, his Spider-Man cup, his blanket, his sneakers, his toys. In the other, her toothbrush, hair grease, and a few changes of clothes. She would leave the keys in the mailbox for Job. She would never need to see his face again.

  When she opened the door, Ifi immediately glimpsed the cornrowed hair fringed with thick knots of flyaways and knew that it was not Emeka. When he observed her examining his hair so intently, Jamal raked a finger through the space between each braid and nodded almost apologetically. He had, Ifi discovered almost immediately, the look and movements of a man who was used to being watched.

  “Gotta get them redone,” he said. He held his steel box of tools.

  Standing there, she thought of the time many months ago that she and Job had stood in the doorway watching Jamal drive away, the shock of seeing the thirteen-year-old boy suddenly a man. Today, there was no shock. There was only Jamal, aged to eighteen years, standing in front of her with his steel box.

  Had he seen the newspaper? Had he come, like Gladys and other figments of her past, to pay his respects? Ifi searched for the answer in his face, the sleepy eyes, the gaunt frame, the barrel shoulders. Looking at him, she suddenly recalled that day, panting at the bottom of the stairs, the cold outside, and this boy—now a man—holding her up with his slender wrists and big hands.

  “You were there the day he was born,” she said.

  His face softened.

  “And now he is gone.”

  “The kid?”

  “My son, my Victor,” she started again, thinking of Job, thinking of Jamal walking away that day. “My husband would be very angry if my Victor wore his hair like yours.” Would my Victor have grown to be like this man, with his cornrows and low-hanging pants? she wondered. Would he wear his hair low like his father? Or would he attempt to slide his fingers through his hair like the American white boys?

  “I see,” he said with the remnants of a frown on his face.

  In that instant, she knew that he knew about Victor, that in spite of the way they had turned Jamal away, he had come to pay his respects. Knowing this, she explained anyway. “My son,” she said, “a car hit him. He was just playing. But everything is okay now.”

  Jamal nodded. “I’m sorry.” What else could be said? “Sorry about that.” There was a pause, then Jamal widened his stance. Ifi was blocking the door, preventing him from entering.

  “I have found my Victor again.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I do not need any condolence.”

  “Okay. I’ll just fix your wall and then go.”

  Ifi nodded.

  Lifting the metallic toolbox easily, he strolled past her into the entryway. Hardwood flooring, ugly with scars, creaked as he made his way in. “You can do something about that,” he said, pausing. His heel connected with the flooring, the raised rubber of his work boots thudding hollowly. “A little lubricant.”

  Ifi pushed past him into the living room. Old boxes of takeout, tin cans, and dirty plates had accumulated over the past few weeks. Ifi rushed about the room shifting and reshifting the items until the clutter, rather than disappearing, was merely displaced. In each of her movements, she could feel the weight of his gaze.

  “Damn,” Jamal said, “how you do that?” Cold air breathed through the gaping sore in the wall.

  Ifi shifted the weight at her feet. The table, broken into three pieces, remained underneath the hole. Jamal knelt alongside her, clearing the debris.

  “The first time was my Victor. An accident.”

  “A tough kid.”

  “Yes, like you say, a tough kid. He was always bouncing his head on everything, but nothing could break him.”

  Jamal nodded. “Oh yeah. Got two of my own. Girls.”

  Ifi’s eyes widened in shock. “You? But that’s impossible.” What happened to the thirteen-year-old boy? she thought.

  “Yeah. They with they mother now. I take these jobs on the side to get ahead of the bills.”

  Something about the way he said this, “got two of my own,” stayed with her. Girls with floppy braids wrapped in clips and streamers, pretty girls with their father’s sleepy eyes, their mother’s lips, their father’s broad shoulders. Ifi smiled to herself, thinking of the strangeness.

  Away, hidden from sight like a dirty magazine, Ifi had stowed the mangled Big Wheel in a box. While Jamal waited, she climbed the stairs to the small storage closet and retrieved the box. She set it down in front of him.

  Nothing but a sharp intake of breath revealed that he even saw it.

  “His father is too easy with him,” Ifi said.

  Jamal turned away, knelt at the floor, and produced some measuring tape.

  “How can a boy play all the time?” she implored.

  “Shouldn’t take too long,” he said. “Sheetrock, spackle. Not as bad as it looks.”

  “It is not fun and games every time,” she insisted.

  “No,” Jamal said, turning to her, “but it should be, right?” He grinned a smile that was so generous that it spilled across his face.

  The dare was to answer that smile with a glare. Ifi succeeded. “My son would still be alive if his father behaved like a father.”

  Jamal’s smile fell away like broken glass. Now he was ugly, very ugly. His was a face meant only for smiling. Somehow, he must have known this. Immediately, the edges of the smile broadened his face once more. Without it weakening, he said, “We get some sheetrock, cut it around, put some backing in there, and it be fixed.”

  “A father should behave like a father, eh?” Ifi asked, refusing to let it die.

  A zipping sound as the measuring tape retracted. Jamal placed it back in the metallic box. “I can come back later.”

  “No.” Various metal tools clinked against one another. Ifi’s fingers closed over the tape measure. She could not be alone now in this house without her Victor, even without Job. “Please, I will leave you. Just fix it.” Tears spilled down her face. She rolled forward on her haunches. “We must fix the hole, or this house will fall.”

  Jamal hooked a finger into a belt loop. His eyes rested on the hole. He couldn’t look at her. “Come on,” he said gently. “It won’t fall. It’s just a little hole.” He picked at a spot on his face, the smile returning uneasily.

  “I did this,” Ifi said. “I should’ve watched him more closely.”

  Still staring into the hole, he talked to himself. “These holes are easy to fix. Just spackle, paint, a cutout of sheetrock just the right size.” A pause. “Where is he anyway?” Jamal asked. “Your man.”

  “Nigeria.” And suddenly she was seeing Job, his potbelly, the thick eyebrows, his perplexed smile. She had already considered the ways that she had seduced him. But how had he seduced her? Yes, there must have been seduction somewhere. After all, he was ugly to her then. Now, his face was neither ugly nor handsome. She had seen his eyes encrusted with flakes, the skin around his face marked from the nicks of a shave. But none of this had deterred the familiarity of his closeness as they lay in bed.

  His seduction, she decided, began with the first stories Aunty had told her, the promises of a future. Nearly thirty and unmarried. Practically unheard of on her r
oad. Before Job, Ifi had been wasting with age. She cooked, cleaned, rinsed the feces, and wiped the noses of each of her cousins as they came into the world. And then she went to bed and did it all over again the next day. Each night, she prayed that her actions, her labor without complaint, would unburden Aunty, secretly knowing that her hard work would never be enough. At first, Ifi realized, Job had seduced her through the dreams he made possible.

  Still, in his face, she thought, even in her anger or sadness, she would always see her son, his large face, soft lips, and the roundness of his features. This is why, Ifi realized just then, I will not leave Job. She could not leave Job. She could not leave this house. To leave him would be to leave Victor, and then there would truly be nothing.

  The phone rang.

  Ifi answered it.

  An articulate puff of breath, a forced exhalation of air.

  “Job,” Ifi said in response, “come home.” She hung up without another word.

  Tears began to quake her shoulders. “I did this,” she said again.

  Jamal looked away. He waited until this second round of tears had subsided. “It’ll be fixed in no time.” He unfurled the tape measure again and handed one end of it to Ifi. Firmly, he said, “Take this.”

  Tears made their way past her eyelids. Gradually, she straightened up. With the other end, he measured out the length and width of the hole and wrote down some numbers on a scrap of paper. Carefully, he cut out a pattern on a block of cardboard paper. He pointed out a sheetrock saw and a glue gun to Ifi, and she obliged, lifting each object out of the toolbox and handing them to him. He instructed her on the necessity of taking precise measurements and cutting even lines.

  Together they worked, squatting low in front of the hole, their backs to the empty room. Together they paused to the scrape of the saw biting through the drywall. They worked with such intensity, such intimacy, that when the phone rang, the sound was merely an embodied whisper in the room.

  CHAPTER 20

  “PLAY SOMETHING FROM AFRICA.” CHERYL BENT BEFORE THE RECORD player—a treasure from one of Job’s garage sale expeditions. In fact, she saw it first. She asked the owner to plug it in and show them how it worked. Now, in one hand, she gripped a can of Budweiser. In the other, she clasped a record, yet another yard sale find. It wobbled and rippled under her shaky hand. She was drunk, or maybe pretending. Job wouldn’t put it past her. There are worse things she’s done, he thought. She’s a bad pretender, like me. A Catholic schoolgirl with parents in the grave, a deaf-mute criminal brother. What will she be tomorrow? he wondered.

  When Job and Ifi said nothing, stood there instead, clutching the empty suitcases that Job had returned with after sharing his shirts and shoes with his various relatives, Cheryl shrugged her shoulders and placed the record on the player.

  Fela. “Zombie.” Perfect. First the racing bass line with the low hum of the drums and then the horns. She didn’t know how to move to it. She tried anyway, a stiff, forced jerking right then left. She rocked forward and backwards on her toes. Snapping her fingers was difficult with the beer in her hand, so she set it down. Can sweat left a wet print on the edge of the player. Job resisted the impulse to rush to the kitchen, find a coaster, and place it beneath the beer. At the garage sale, the man had said the record player was one of a kind. They don’t make ’em like this anymore. It’s got the real sound. Not that fake digital shit.

  Not that fake digital shit. That’s what he had said to Ifi when he brought it home, when he moved the eight-track player, another find, to make room for it on the table. All the while Ifi had stood with her arms crossed in front of her chest. When the Fela record came, she gave in. He could hear her playing the record in the morning, in the evening while Victor wailed for hours. As soon as he woke, Victor began the wail with the horns. After a while, they couldn’t tell if he was crying or simply singing along.

  A long song. Ten minutes, maybe twelve. Will she tire before the song has ended? Or will someone intervene? Someone had to. He looked to Ifi, but there was nothing but a pitying expression on her face, the same look she had when he first walked through the glassy doors at Eppley Airfield. He had been looking for the shuttle, his eyes squinting out past the median dividing the cabs from the cars coming and going. He hadn’t expected to see her there, twirling the car keys. She rarely drove—only to work, the grocery store, and the hardware store. And when she did, she came and went straight to her destination, no stops along the way. Every day in America she had complained about driving. It would’ve been easier for a doctor’s wife in Nigeria, she always said, where she could find some boy to drive her places. Still, there she was, looking thinner, ashier, in a printed skirt that came to her ankles like a wrapper, dangling the car keys. Her hair was neat, the flyaways in her plaits brushed from her face. She had put herself together. For him.

  He felt pleased. Then he remembered the phone call, his father and his sisters all looking in on him with hard, confident glares as they dropped him off at the Port Harcourt airport. “Docta,” the driver had said, taking his bags from him. And no one had corrected the boy. No one, not even Job—at first. They were all okay with it, the pretending. But Job couldn’t do it anymore. He couldn’t do the dance anymore, not for them, not for anyone. Maybe that was why Ifi had revealed his secret to his father.

  As the boy had set his bags on the curb, Job leaned in and whispered to the boy so only he could hear. There was one bag left, the short, black briefcase containing the stethoscope. Job pushed it into the boy’s arms. “I am no doctor,” he had said. It sounded right in his ears. He was finally owning up, doing what the Americans on the talk shows Ifi craved did, spilling their guts to the world with no shame. He said it all. He confessed. “I am a nurse’s aide, and I am a meatpacker. I am no more a father. I am not even a first son.”

  The boy’s face had squeezed up in confusion, then protest. He forced the bag forward, back into Job’s arms. There wasn’t enough English in him to piece together the meaning of Job’s words. Or it was merely his disbelief. The boy tried harder. He clutched at Job’s other bags. He rearranged them. He wiped away the dust that had settled on them. Instead of merely setting them at the curb, he raced ahead to the airport entrance, lugging all the bags, including the briefcase, with difficulty. He believed he had done something wrong, that he was being scolded.

  Job handed the briefcase back to the boy. Before the boy could force it back into his arms, he held it there, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a wad of Naira. He paid the boy a hefty tip—even bigger than anything the boy would’ve expected from a doctor—and from the car, his father looked on in approval. The boy said, “Thankee, Docta.” A low bow.

  A sick joke, Job thought then as he did now. He couldn’t go along with it. He couldn’t. Not anymore. Once again, he had reached out to the boy. He grasped him around his collar and shouted into his ear, “No doctor! No doctor!” Twice. Just like that, so the boy could understand.

  Still, the boy had arranged his face into a smile. He clutched the notes close to his body, protecting them from Job, bowing as he backed away. “Thankee, Docta.”

  He could promise them all, like he had promised Ifi, that he would become a doctor, that he would build their hospital, that it was only a matter of time. They just needed to give him time. But they wouldn’t hear any of it. Would they?

  No, they would hear it, he thought. That was the problem. They would believe it. No protest. No questions. They would go along with it. His father would even sell his car, release the driver, so that he could fund the expense one more time. All Job needed to do was say that the imaginary clinic needed another financial backer. He could make up a story about the stock market in America. He could tell them any lie, and his father and mother would willingly oblige. Because they had to. Because they must go on believing in him.

  But Job was tired. Only then did he know that he couldn’t come back to Nigeria again. That was what Ifi had said after her aunty died. I can’t go back. Th
en he understood. Then he understood what it meant for her to fix the house, to make the boy hamburgers and tater tots. She was trying to make America home.

  On the ride through the Nebraska highways and streets, he had begun to forgive her. We are in the same place, aren’t we? Two who no longer belonged there, but would never fully belong here: foreign Americans.

  But they could have more children. Their offspring would grow up to speak unaccented American English. They would never know of police roadblocks, poor water, or power outages. Their children would marry well and wire funds to their family in Nigeria. He had to make this work. They could pay the mortgage, sell the house, and move somewhere brand new, maybe California. They would buy another house with the profits. They could be housekeepers, nurse’s aides, meatpackers, fruit pickers, whatever the world needed, just to make things work, to leave a piece of space behind for their progeny, to send money to the village for their retirement. And their children would have it better. And they’d take care of Job and Ifi in their old age. And these would be the stories he and Ifi would keep to themselves, of how they had scraped and groveled to build their own palace. But they would never lie.

  In spite of his grand plans, there was a problem: Cheryl. She had worked herself up into a sweat. Complexion raw, the freckles seemed to bounce from her face to her arms and back in her jagged movements. Whatever he did now would matter. It would affect the course of everything.

  At Eppley, Ifi had handed him the keys. At first she had said nothing but “Welcome.” Then she began with a list of household entreaties: the utilities, the maintenance, and the cable. That was it, as if nothing had changed between them.

  He had almost expected her to start in on the boy.

  Do you know what your son has done today?

  What is it?

  Let me tell you what that boy has done today.

  Tell me now.

  Satan has visited that boy . . .

  But he said nothing in return, and it was like old times. Sitting there in the car with Ifi, Job felt, for once, that everything would be okay, that they could start over. He took her hand in his. Flat, empty fields spun by as they split off of Interstate 480 onto 80. They could have another child, a girl even. They would hang Victor’s picture on the wall, and his rambunctious eyes would light up every room. They would tell the rest of their children stories about their brother. He would be their Samuel.