The Thing Around Your Neck Read online

  “Did you get through?” my new husband asked.

  “It’s engaged,” I said. I looked away so that he would not see the relief on my face.

  “Busy. Americans say busy, not engaged,” he said. “We’ll try later. Let’s have breakfast.”

  For breakfast, he defrosted pancakes from a bright-yellow bag. I watched what buttons he pressed on the white micro wave, carefully memorizing them.

  “Boil some water for tea,” he said

  “Is there some dried milk?” I asked, taking the kettle to the sink. Rust clung to the sides of the sink like peeling brown paint.

  “Americans don’t drink their tea with milk and sugar.”

  “Ezi okwu? Don’t you drink yours with milk and sugar?”

  “No, I got used to the way things are done here a long time ago. You will too, baby.”

  I sat before my limp pancakes—they were so much thinner than the chewy slabs I made at home—and bland tea that I feared would not get past my throat. The doorbell rang and he got up. He walked with his hands swinging to his back; I had not really noticed that before, I had not had time to notice.

  “I heard you come in last night.” The voice at the door was American, the words flowed fast, ran into each other. Supri-supri, Aunty Ify called it, fast-fast. “When you come back to visit, you will be speaking supri-supri like Americans,” she had said.

  “Hi, Shirley. Thanks so much for keeping my mail,” he said.

  “Not a problem at all. How did your wedding go? Is your wife here?”

  “Yes, come and say hello.”

  A woman with hair the color of metal came into the living room. Her body was wrapped in a pink robe knotted at the waist. Judging from the lines that ran across her face, she could have been anything from six decades to eight decades old; I had not seen enough white people to correctly gauge their ages.

  “I’m Shirley from 3A. Nice to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand. She had the nasal voice of someone battling a cold.

  “You are welcome,” I said.

  Shirley paused, as though surprised. “Well, I’ll let you get back to breakfast,” she said. “I’ll come down and visit with you when you’ve settled in.”

  Shirley shuffled out. My new husband shut the door. One of the dining table legs was shorter than the rest, and so the table rocked, like a seesaw, when he leaned on it and said, “You should say ‘Hi’ to people here, not ‘You’re welcome.’”

  “She’s not my age mate.”

  “It doesn’t work that way here. Everybody says hi.”

  “O di mma. Okay.”

  “I’m not called Ofodile here, by the way. I go by Dave,” he said, looking down at the pile of envelopes Shirley had given him. Many of them had lines of writing on the envelope itself, above the address, as though the sender had remembered to add something only after the envelope was sealed.

  “Dave?” I knew he didn’t have an English name. The invitation cards to our wedding had read Ofodile Emeka Udenwa and Chinaza Agatha Okafor.

  “The last name I use here is different, too. Americans have a hard time with Udenwa, so I changed it.”

  “What is it?” I was still trying to get used to Udenwa, a name I had known only a few weeks.

  “It’s Bell.”

  “Bell!” I had heard about a Waturuocha that changed to Waturu in America, a Chikelugo that took the more American-friendly Chikel, but from Udenwa to Bell? “That’s not even close to Udenwa,” I said.

  He got up. “You don’t understand how it works in this country. If you want to get anywhere you have to be as mainstream as possible. If not, you will be left by the roadside. You have to use your English name here.”

  “I never have, my English name is just something on my birth certificate. I’ve been Chinaza Okafor my whole life.”

  “You’ll get used to it, baby,” he said, reaching out to caress my cheek. “You’ll see.”

  When he filled out a Social Security number application for me the next day, the name he entered in bold letters was AGATHA BELL.

  Our neighborhood was called Flatbush, my new husband told me, as we walked, hot and sweaty, down a noisy street that smelled of fish left out too long before refrigeration. He wanted to show me how to do the grocery shopping and how to use the bus.

  “Look around, don’t lower your eyes like that. Look around. You get used to things faster that way,” he said.

  I turned my head from side to side so he would see that I was following his advice. Dark restaurant windows promised the BEST CARIBBEAN AND AMERICAN FOOD in lopsided print, a car wash across the street advertised $3.50 washes on a chalkboard nestled among Coke cans and bits of paper. The sidewalk was chipped away at the edges, like something nibbled at by mice.

  Inside the air-conditioned bus, he showed me where to pour in the coins, how to press the tape on the wall to signal my stop.

  “This is not like Nigeria, where you shout out to the conductor,” he said, sneering, as though he was the one who had invented the superior American system.

  Inside Key Food, we walked from aisle to aisle slowly. I was wary when he put a beef pack in the cart. I wished I could touch the meat, to examine its redness, as I often did at Ogbete Market, where the butcher held up fresh-cut slabs buzzing with flies.

  “Can we buy those biscuits?” I asked. The blue packets of Burton’s Rich Tea were familiar; I did not want to eat biscuits but I wanted something familiar in the cart.

  “Cookies. Americans call them cookies,” he said.

  I reached out for the biscuits (cookies).

  “Get the store brand. They’re cheaper, but still the same thing,” he said, pointing at a white packet.

  “Okay,” I said. I no longer wanted the biscuits, but I put the store brand in the cart and stared at the blue packet on the shelf, at the familiar grain-embossed Burton’s logo, until we left the aisle.

  “When I become an Attending, we will stop buying store brands, but for now we have to; these things may seem cheap but they add up,” he said.

  “When you become a Consultant?”

  “Yes, but it’s called an Attending here, an Attending Physician.”

  The arrangers of marriage only told you that doctors made a lot of money in America. They did not add that before doctors started to make a lot of money, they had to do an internship and a residency program, which my new husband had not completed. My new husband had told me this during our short in-flight conversation, right after we took off from Lagos, before he fell asleep.

  “Interns are paid twenty-eight thousand a year but work about eighty hours a week. It’s like three dollars an hour,” he had said. “Can you believe it? Three dollars an hour!”

  I did not know if three dollars an hour was very good or very bad—I was leaning toward very good—until he added that even high school students working part-time made much more.

  “Also when I become an Attending, we will not live in a neighborhood like this,” my new husband said. He stopped to let a woman with her child tucked into her shopping cart pass by. “See how they have bars so you can’t take the shopping carts out? In the good neighborhoods, they don’t have them. You can take your shopping cart all the way to your car.”

  “Oh,” I said. What did it matter that you could or could not take the carts out? The point was, there were carts.

  “Look at the people who shop here; they are the ones who immigrate and continue to act as if they are back in their countries.” He gestured, dismissively, toward a woman and her two children, who were speaking Spanish. “They will never move forward unless they adapt to America. They will always be doomed to supermarkets like this.”

  I murmured something to show I was listening. I thought about the open market in Enugu, the traders who sweet-talked you into stopping at their zinc-covered sheds, who were prepared to bargain all day to add one single kobo to the price. They wrapped what you bought in plastic bags when they had them, and when they did not have them, they laughed and offered
you worn newspapers.

  My new husband took me to the mall; he wanted to show me as much as he could before he started work on Monday. His car rattled as he drove, as though there were many parts that had come loose—a sound similar to shaking a tin full of nails. It stalled at a traffic light and he turned the key a few times before it started.

  “I’ll buy a new car after my residency,” he said.

  Inside the mall, the floors gleamed, smooth as ice cubes, and the high-as-the-sky ceiling blinked with tiny ethereal lights. I felt as though I were in a different physical world, on another planet. The people who pushed against us, even the black ones, wore the mark of foreignness, otherness, on their faces.

  “We’ll get pizza first,” he said. “It’s one thing you have to like in America.”

  We walked up to the pizza stand, to the man wearing a nose ring and a tall white hat.

  “Two pepperoni and sausage. Is your combo deal better?” my new husband asked. He sounded different when he spoke to Americans: his r was overpronounced and his t was under-pronounced. And he smiled, the eager smile of a person who wanted to be liked.

  We ate the pizza sitting at a small round table in what he called a “food court.” A sea of people sitting around circular tables, hunched over paper plates of greasy food. Uncle Ike would be horrified at the thought of eating here; he was a titled man and did not even eat at weddings unless he was served in a private room. There was something humiliatingly public, something lacking in dignity, about this place, this open space of too many tables and too much food.

  “Do you like the pizza?” my new husband asked. His paper plate was empty.

  “The tomatoes are not cooked well.”

  “We overcook food back home and that is why we lose all the nutrients. Americans cook things right. See how healthy they all look?”

  I nodded, looking around. At the next table, a black woman with a body as wide as a pillow held sideways smiled at me. I smiled back and took another pizza bite, tightening my stomach so it would not eject anything.

  We went into Macy’s afterwards. My new husband led the way toward a sliding staircase; its movement was rubbery-smooth and I knew I would fall down the moment I stepped on it.

  “Biko, don’t they have a lift instead?” I asked. At least I had once ridden in the creaky one in the local government office, the one that quivered for a full minute before the doors rolled open.

  “Speak English. There are people behind you,” he whispered, pulling me away, toward a glass counter full of twinkling jewelry. “It’s an elevator, not a lift. Americans say elevator.”

  “Okay.”

  He led me to the lift (elevator) and we went up to a section lined with rows of weighty-looking coats. He bought me a coat the color of a gloomy day’s sky, puffy with what felt like foam inside its lining. The coat looked big enough for two of me to snugly fit into it.

  “Winter is coming,” he said. “It is like being inside a freezer, so you need a warm coat.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Always best to shop when there is a sale. Sometimes you get the same thing for less than half the price. It’s one of the wonders of America.”

  “Ezi okwu?” I said, then hastily added, “Really?”

  “Let’s take a walk around the mall. There are some other wonders of America here.”

  We walked, looking at stores that sold clothes and tools and plates and books and phones, until the bottoms of my feet ached.

  Before we left, he led the way to McDonald’s. The restaurant was nestled near the rear of the mall; a yellow and red M the size of a car stood at its entrance. My husband did not look at the menu board that hovered overhead as he ordered two large Number 2 meals.

  “We could go home so I can cook,” I said. “Don’t let your husband eat out too much,” Aunty Ada had said, “or it will push him into the arms of a woman who cooks. Always guard your husband like a guinea fowl’s egg.”

  “I like to eat this once in a while,” he said. He held the hamburger with both hands and chewed with a concentration that furrowed his eyebrows, tightened his jaw, and made him look even more unfamiliar.

  I made coconut rice on Monday, to make up for the eating out. I wanted to make pepper soup, too, the kind Aunty Ada said softened a man’s heart. But I needed the uziza that the customs officer had seized; pepper soup was just not pepper soup without it. I bought a coconut in the Jamaican store down the street and spent an hour cutting it into tiny bits because there was no grater, and then soaked it in hot water to extract the juice. I had just finished cooking when he came home. He wore what looked like a uniform, a girlish-looking blue top tucked into a pair of blue trousers that was tied at the waist.

  “Nno,” I said. “Did you work well?”

  “You have to speak English at home, too, baby. So you can get used to it.” He brushed his lips against my cheek just as the doorbell rang. It was Shirley, her body wrapped in the same pink robe. She twirled the belt at her waist.

  “That smell,” she said, in her phlegm-filled voice. “It’s everywhere, all over the building. What are you cooking?”

  “Coconut rice,” I said.

  “A recipe from your country?”

  “Yes.”

  “It smells really good. The problem with us here is we have no culture, no culture at all.” She turned to my new husband, as if she wanted him to agree with her, but he simply smiled. “Would you come take a look at my air conditioner, Dave?” She asked. “It’s acting up again and it’s so hot today.”

  “Sure,” my new husband said.

  Before they left, Shirley waved at me and said, “Smells really good,” and I wanted to invite her to have some rice. My new husband came back half an hour later and ate the fragrant meal I placed before him, even smacking his lips like Uncle Ike sometimes did to show Aunty Ada how pleased he was with her cooking. But the next day, he came back with a Good Housekeeping All-American Cookbook, thick as a Bible.

  “I don’t want us to be known as the people who fill the building with smells of foreign food,” he said.

  I took the cookbook, ran my hand over the cover, over the picture of something that looked like a flower but was probably food.

  “I know you’ll soon master how to cook American food,” he said, gently pulling me close. That night, I thought of the cookbook as he lay heavily on top of me, grunting and rasping. Another thing the arrangers of marriage did not tell you—the struggle to brown beef in oil and dredge skinless chicken in flour. I had always cooked beef in its own juices. Chicken I had always poached with its skin intact. In the following days, I was pleased that my husband left for work at six in the morning and did not come back until eight in the evening so that I had time to throw away pieces of half-cooked, clammy chicken and start again.

  . . .

  The first time I saw Nia, who lived in 2D, I thought she was the kind of woman Aunty Ada would disapprove of. Aunty Ada would call her an ashawo, because of the see-through top she wore so that her bra, a mismatched shade, glared through. Or Aunty Ada would base her prostitute judgment on Nia’s lipstick, a shimmery orange, and the eye shadow—similar to the shade of the lipstick—that clung to her heavy lids.

  “Hi,” she said when I went down to get the mail. “You’re Dave’s new wife. I’ve been meaning to come over and meet you. I’m Nia.”

  “Thanks. I’m Chinaza… Agatha.”

  Nia was watching me carefully. “What was the first thing you said?”

  “My Nigerian name.”

  “It’s an Igbo name, isn’t it?” She pronounced it “E-boo.”

  “Yes.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “God answers prayers.”

  “It’s really pretty. You know, Nia is a Swahili name. I changed my name when I was eighteen. I spent three years in Tanzania. It was fucking amazing.”

  “Oh,” I said and shook my head; she, a black American, had chosen an African name, while my husband made me change mine to an English
one.

  “You must be bored to death in that apartment; I know Dave gets back pretty late,” she said. “Come have a Coke with me.”

  I hesitated, but Nia was already walking to the stairs. I followed her. Her living room had a spare elegance: a red sofa, a slender potted plant, a huge wooden mask hanging on the wall. She gave me a Diet Coke served in a tall glass with ice, asked how I was adjusting to life in America, offered to show me around Brooklyn.

  “It would have to be a Monday, though,” she said. “I don’t work Mondays.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I own a hair salon.”

  “Your hair is beautiful,” I said, and she touched it and said, “Oh, this,” as if she did not think anything of it. It was not just her hair, held up on top of her head in a natural Afro puff, that I found beautiful, though, it was her skin the color of roasted groundnuts, her mysterious and heavy-lidded eyes, her curved hips. She played her music a little too loud, so we had to raise our voices as we spoke.

  “You know, my sister’s a manager at Macy’s,” she said. “They’re hiring entry-level salespeople in the women’s department, so if you’re interested I can put in a word for you and you’re pretty much hired. She owes me one.”

  Something leaped inside me at the thought, the sudden and new thought, of earning what would be mine. Mine.

  “I don’t have my work permit yet,” I said.

  “But Dave has filed for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “It shouldn’t take long; at least you should have it before winter. I have a friend from Haiti who just got hers. So let me know as soon as you do.”

  “Thank you.” I wanted to hug Nia. “Thank you.”

  That evening I told my new husband about Nia. His eyes were sunken in with fatigue, after so many hours at work, and he said, “Nia?” as though he did not know who I meant, before he added, “She’s okay, but be careful because she can be a bad influence.”