The Thing Around Your Neck Read online

  Sometimes I drop by to visit my old friend Professor Maduewe. I take walks across the faded field of Freedom Square, with its border of mango trees. Or along Ikejiani Avenue, where the motorcycles speed past, students perched astride, often coming too close to one another as they avoid the potholes. In the rainy season, when I discover a new gully where the rains have eaten at the land, I feel a flush of accomplishment. I read newspapers. I eat well; my househelp, Harrison, comes five days a week and his onugbu soup is unparalleled. I talk to our daughter often, and when my phone goes dead every other week, I hurry to NITEL to bribe somebody to get it repaired. I unearth old, old journals in my dusty, cluttered study. I breathe in deeply the scent of the neem trees that screen my house from Professor Ijere’s––a scent that is supposed to be medicinal, although I am no longer sure what it is said to cure. I do not go to church; I stopped going after Ebere first visited, because I was no longer uncertain. It is our diffidence about the afterlife that leads us to religion. So on Sundays I sit on the verandah and watch the vultures stamp on my roof, and I imagine that they glance down in bemusement.

  “Is it a good life, Daddy?” Nkiru has taken to asking lately on the phone, with that faint, vaguely troubling American accent. It is not good or bad, I tell her, it is simply mine. And that is what matters.

  Another dust whirl, both of us blinking to protect our eyes, made me ask Ikenna to come back to my house with me so that we could sit down and talk properly, but he said he was on his way to Enugu, and when I asked if he would come by later, he made a vague motion with his hands that suggested assent. I know he will not come, though. I will not see him again. I watched him walk away, this dried nut of a man, and I drove home thinking of the lives we might have had and the lives we did have, all of us who went to the Staff Club in those good days before the war. I drove slowly, because of the motorcyclists who respect no rules of the road, and because my eyesight is not as good as it used to be.

  I made a minor scratch as I backed my Mercedes out last week, and so I was careful parking it in the garage. It is twenty-three-years old but runs quite well. I remember how excited Nkiru was when it was shipped back from Germany, where I bought it when I went to receive the Academy of Science prize. It was the newest model. I did not know this, but her fellow teenagers did, and they all came to peer at the speedometer, to ask permission to touch the paneling on the dashboard. Now, of course, everyone drives a Mercedes; they buy them secondhand, rearview mirrors or headlights missing, from Cotonou. Ebere used to mock them, saying our car is old but much better than all those tuke-tuke things people are driving with no seat belts. She still has that sense of humor. Sometimes when she visits, she tickles my testicles, her fingers running over them. She knows very well that my prostate medication has deadened things down there, and she does this only to tease me, to laugh her gently jeering laugh. At her burial, when our grandson read his poem, “Keep Laughing, Grandma,” I thought the title perfect, and the childish words almost brought me to tears, despite my suspicion that Nkiru wrote most of them.

  I looked around the yard as I walked indoors. Harrison does a little gardening, mostly watering in this season. The rosebushes are just stalks, but at least the hardy cherry bushes are a dusty green. I turned the TV on. It was still raining on the screen, although Dr. Otagbu’s son, the bright young man who is reading electronics engineering, came last week to fix it. My satellite channels went off after the last thunderstorm, but I have not yet gone to the satellite office to find somebody to look at it. One can stay some weeks without BBC and CNN anyway, and the programs on NTA are quite good. It was NTA, some days ago, that broadcast an interview with yet another man accused of importing fake drugs––typhoid fever medicine in this case. “My drugs don’t kill people,” he said, helpfully, facing the camera wide-eyed, as if in an appeal to the masses. “It is only that they will not cure your illness.” I turned the TV off because I could no longer bear to see the man’s blubbery lips. But I was not offended, not as egregiously as I would have been if Ebere did not visit. I only hoped that he would not be let free to go off once again to China or India or wherever they go to import expired medicine that will not actually kill people, but will only make sure the illness kills them.

  I wonder why it never came up, throughout the years after the war, that Ikenna Okoro did not die. True, we did sometimes hear stories of men who had been thought dead and who walked into their compounds months, even years, after January 1970; I can only imagine the quantity of sand thrown on broken men by family members suspended between disbelief and hope. But we hardly talked about the war. When we did, it was with an implacable vagueness, as if what mattered were not that we had crouched in muddy bunkers during air raids after which we buried corpses with bits of pink on their charred skin, not that we had eaten cassava peels and watched our children’s bellies swell from malnutrition, but that we had survived. It was a tacit agreement among all of us, the survivors of Biafra. Even Ebere and I, who had debated our first child’s name, Zik, for months, agreed very quickly on Nkiruka: what is ahead is better.

  I am sitting now in my study, where I marked my students’ papers and helped Nkiru with her secondary school mathematics assignments. The armchair leather is worn. The pastel paint above the bookshelves is peeling. The telephone is on my desk, on a fat phone book. Perhaps it will ring and Nkiru will tell me something about our grandson, how well he did in school today, which will make me smile even though I believe American teachers are not circumspect enough and too easily award an A. If it does not ring soon, then I will take a bath and go to bed and, in the still darkness of my room, listen for the sound of doors opening and closing.

  ON MONDAY OF LAST WEEK

  Since Monday of last week, Kamara had begun to stand in front of mirrors. She would turn from side to side, examining her lumpy middle and imagining it flat as a book cover, and then she would close her eyes and imagine Tracy caressing it with those paint-stained fingers. She did so now in front of the bathroom mirror after she flushed.

  Josh was standing by the door when she came out. Tracy’s seven-year-old son. He had his mother’s thick, unarched eyebrows, like straight lines drawn above his eyes.

  “Pee-pee or a poopy?” he asked in his mock baby voice.

  “Pee-pee.” She walked into the kitchen, where the gray venetian blinds cast strips of shadow over the counter, where they had been practicing all afternoon for his Read-A-Thon competition. “Have you finished your juiced spinach?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He was watching her. He knew—he had to know—that the only reason she went into the bathroom each time she handed him the glass of green juice was to give him a chance to pour it away. It had started the first day Josh tasted it, made a face, and said, “Ugh. I hate it.”

  “Your dad says you’ll have to drink it every day before dinner,” Kamara had said. “It’s only half a glass, it would take a minute to pour it away,” she added, and then turned to go to the bathroom. That was all. When she came out the glass was empty, as it was now, placed beside the sink.

  “I’ll cook your dinner so you will be all set for Zany Brainy when your dad comes back, okay?” she said. American expressions like “all set’” still felt clunky in her mouth, but she used them for Josh.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Do you want a fish fillet or chicken with your rice pilaf?”

  “Chicken.”

  She opened the refrigerator. The top shelf was stacked with plastic bottles of juiced organic spinach. Cans of herbal tea had filled that space two weeks ago, when Neil was reading Herbal Drinks for Children, and before that, it was soy beverages, and before that, protein shakes for growing bones. The juiced spinach would go soon, Kamara knew, because when she arrived this afternoon, the first thing she noticed was that A Complete Guide to Juicing Vegetables was no longer on the counter; Neil must have put it in the drawer over the weekend.

  Kamara brought out a package of organic chicken strips. “Why don’t you lie down fo
r a bit and watch a movie, Josh,” she said. He liked to sit in the kitchen and watch her cook, but he looked so tired. The four other Read-A-Thon finalists were probably as tired as he was, their mouths aching from rolling long, unfamiliar words on their tongues, their bodies tense with the thought of the competition tomorrow.

  Kamara watched Josh slot in a Rugrats DVD and lie down on the couch, a slight child with olive skin and tangled curls. “Half-caste” was what they had called children like him back in Nigeria, and the word had meant an automatic cool, light-skinned good looks, trips abroad to visit white grandparents. Kamara had always resented the glamour of half-castes. But in America, “half-caste” was a bad word. Kamara learned this when she first called about the babysitting job advertised in the the Philadelphia City Paper: generous pay, close to transportation, car not required. Neil had sounded surprised that she was Nigerian.

  “You speak such good English,” he said, and it annoyed her, his surprise, his assumption that English was somehow his personal property. And because of this, although Tobechi had warned her not to mention her education, she told Neil that she had a master’s degree, that she had recently arrived in America to join her husband and wanted to earn a little money babysitting while waiting for her green card application to be processed so that she could get a proper work permit.

  “Well, I need somebody who can commit until the end of Josh’s school term,” Neil said.

  “No problem,” Kamara said hastily. She really should not have said that she had a master’s degree.

  “Maybe you could teach Josh a Nigerian language? He already has French lessons two times a week after school. He goes to an advanced program at Temple Beth Hillel, where they have entrance exams for four-year-olds. He’s very quiet, very sweet, a great kid, but I’m concerned that there aren’t any biracial kids like him at school or in the neighborhood.”

  “Biracial?” Kamara asked.

  Neil’s cough was delicate. “My wife is African-American and I’m white, Jewish.”

  “Oh, he’s a half-caste.”

  There was a pause and Neil’s voice came back, thicker. “Please don’t say that word.”

  His tone made Kamara say “Sorry,” although she was not sure what she was apologizing for. The tone, too, made her certain that she had lost her opportunity for the job, and so she was surprised when he gave her the address and asked if they could meet the following day. He was tall and long-jawed. There was a smooth, almost soothing quality to his speech that she supposed came from his being a lawyer. He interviewed her in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, asking about her references and her life in Nigeria, telling her that Josh was being raised to know both his Jewish and African-American backgrounds, all the while smoothing the silver sticker on the phone that said NO TO GUNS. Kamara wondered where the child’s mother was. Perhaps Neil had killed her and stuffed her in a trunk; Kamara had spent the past months watching Court TV and had learned how crazy these Americans were. But the longer she listened to Neil talk, the more certain she was that he could not kill an ant. She sensed a fragility in him, a collection of anxieties. He told her that he was worried that Josh was having a hard time with being different from the other children in his school, that Josh might be unhappy, that Josh didn’t see enough of him, that Josh was an only child, that Josh would have issues about childhood when he was older, that Josh would be depressed. Halfway through, Kamara wanted to cut him short and ask, “Why are you worrying about things that have not happened?” She didn’t, though, because she was not sure she had the job. And when he did offer her the job—after school until six thirty, twelve dollars an hour paid in cash—she still said nothing, because all he seemed to need, desperately need, was her listening and it did not take much to listen.

  Neil told her that his method of discipline was reason-based. He would never smack Josh, because he did not believe in abuse as discipline. “If you make Josh see why a particular behavior is wrong, he’ll stop it,” Neil said.

  Smacking is discipline, Kamara wanted to say, and abuse is a different thing. Abuse was the sort of thing Americans she heard about on the news did, putting out cigarettes on their children’s skin. But she said what Tobechi had asked her to say: “I feel the same way about smacking. And of course I will use only the discipline method you approve of.”

  “Josh has a healthy diet,” Neil went on. “We do very little high-fructose corn syrup, bleached flour, or trans fat. I’ll write it all out for you.”

  “Okay.” She was not sure what the things he had mentioned were.

  Before she left, she asked, “What of his mother?”

  “Tracy is an artist. She spends a lot of time in the basement for now. She’s working on a big thing, a commission. She has a deadline….” His voice trailed off.

  “Oh.” Kamara looked at him, puzzled, wondering if there was something distinctly American she was supposed to understand from what he had said, something to explain why the boy’s mother was not there to meet her.

  “Josh isn’t allowed in the basement for now, so you can’t go down there, either. Call me if there are any problems. I have the numbers on the fridge. Tracy doesn’t come up until the evenings. Scooters delivers soup and a sandwich to her every day and she’s pretty self-sufficient down there.” Neil paused. “You have to make sure you don’t bother her for anything whatsoever.”

  “I have not come here to bother anybody,” Kamara said, a little coldly, because he suddenly seemed to be speaking to her as people spoke to housegirls back in Nigeria. She should not have allowed Tobechi to persuade her to take this common job of wiping the buttocks of a stranger’s child, she should not have listened when he told her that these rich white people on the Main Line did not know what to do with their money. But even as she walked to the train station nursing her scratched dignity, she knew that she had not really needed to be persuaded. She wanted the job, any job; she wanted a reason to leave the apartment every day.

  And now three months had passed. Three months of babysitting Josh. Three months of listening to Neil’s worries, of carrying out Neil’s anxiety-driven instructions, of developing a pitying affection for Neil. Three months of not seeing Tracy. At first Kamara was curious about this woman with long dreadlocks and skin the color of peanut butter who was barefoot in the wedding photo on the shelf in the den. Kamara wondered if and when Tracy left the basement. Sometimes she heard sounds from down there, a door slamming shut or faint strains of classical music. She wondered whether Tracy ever saw her child. When she tried to get Josh to talk about his mother, he said, “Mommy’s very busy with her work. She’ll get mad if we bother her,” and because he kept his face carefully neutral, she held back from asking him more. She helped him with homework and played cards with him and watched DVDs with him and told him about the crickets she used to catch as a child and basked in the attentive pleasure with which he listened to her. Tracy’s existence had become inconsequential, a background reality like the wheezing on the phone line when Kamara called her mother in Nigeria. Until Monday of last week.

  That day, Josh was in the bathroom and Kamara was sitting at the kitchen table looking through his homework when she heard a sound behind her. She turned, thinking it was Josh, but Tracy appeared, curvy in leggings and a tight sweater, smiling, squinting, pushing away long dreadlocks from her face with paint-stained fingers. It was a strange moment. Their eyes held and suddenly Kamara wanted to lose weight and wear makeup again. A fellow woman who has the same thing that you have? her friend Chinwe would say if she ever told her. Tufia! What kind of foolishness is that? Kamara had been saying this to herself, too, since Monday of last week. She said this even as she stopped eating fried plantains and had her hair braided in the Senegalese place on South Street and began to sift through piles of mascara in the beauty supply store. Saying those words to herself changed nothing, because what had happened in the kitchen that afternoon was a flowering of extravagant hope, because what now propelled her life was the thought that Tracy
would come upstairs again.

  Kamara put the chicken strips in the oven. Neil added three dollars an hour for the days when he did not come home on time and she cooked Josh’s dinner. It amused her, how “cooking dinner” was made to sound like difficult work when it was really a sanitized string of actions: opening cartons and bags and placing things in the oven and microwave. Neil should have seen the kerosene stove she had used back home with its thick gusts of smoke. The oven beeped. She arranged the chicken strips around the small mound of rice on Josh’s plate.

  “Josh,” she called. “Dinner is ready. Would you like frozen yogurt for dessert?”

  “Yes.” Josh grinned and she thought about the curve of his lips being exactly like that of Tracy’s. She hit her toe against the edge of the counter. She had begun to bump into things too often since Monday of last week.

  “Are you okay?” Josh asked.

  She rubbed her toe. “I’m fine.”

  “Wait, Kamara,” Josh knelt down on the floor and kissed her foot. “There. That’ll make it go away.”

  She looked down at his little head lowered before her, his hair in helpless curls, and she wanted to hug him very close.

  “Thank you, Josh.”

  The phone rang. She knew it was Neil.

  “Hi, Kamara. Is everything okay?”

  “Everything is fine.”

  “How’s Josh? Is he scared about tomorrow? Is he nervous?”

  “He’s fine. We just finished the practice.”

  “Great.” A pause. “Can I say a quick hi?”

  “He’s in the bathroom.” Kamara lowered her voice, watching Josh turn off the DVD player in the den.