Behold the Dreamers(106)
Fifty-six
HE FOUND OUT ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON: THE JUDGE HAD GRANTED HIS request for voluntary departure.
“You’ve got to leave by the end of September,” Bubakar told him. “September thirtieth, he says. He was going to give you one hundred and twenty days to leave but—”
“It’s no problem, Mr. Bubakar,” Jende said, grinning his Great Rift Valley–wide grin. “I am ready.”
“I don’t know what happened. He changed his mind. You only got ninety days now.”
Jende moved to the edge of the park bench to make room for a man in a purple suit. “Ninety days is fine, Mr. Bubakar,” he said. “Truly, I don’t need any more time.”
“Good. I know it’s too fast but I can’t do anything about it, my brother. I’m sorry.”
“No, please don’t worry for me, Mr. Bubakar. I saw an advertisement for good tickets on Air Maroc. The price was so good, I bought our tickets for the day they gave me the cheapest price. We are leaving in August.”
“Ah? You’re really ready to leave, eh?”
“When you told me last week that you were ninety-nine point nine nine percent sure the judge was going to approve my request, I just started looking for tickets. I even bought a new suitcase yesterday.” He laughed.
“I’m happy to hear you sound so happy, my brother,” Bubakar said. “Some people, when they buy the ticket, they cry until the day they enter the plane.”
“But what can I do, Mr. Bubakar? My people say if God cuts off your fingers, He will teach you how to eat with your toes.”
“Abi, if I was a Christian, I would say amen to that. And how is the madam? Is she as happy to go back home as you are?”
Jende chuckled. “She is not happy,” he said, “but she is packing up.”
“Just make sure she doesn’t spend all your money buying things,” Bubakar warned. “Because women, you have to be careful with them and all the things they say they must have before they go back home. Anything that makes them look good is a necessity.”
“Too late, oh, Mr. Bubakar,” Jende said, laughing. “It’s already too late.”
He’d given Neni more money for shopping than he’d intended; doing so was the only thing that had made her smile in days—him telling her she could spend five hundred dollars buying whatever she wanted to buy. She’d ended up spending eight hundred, buying things not easily found back in Limbe: dollar-store toys for the children so they wouldn’t have to play with mud and sticks; foods in jars and all the sweet cereals Liomi had become accustomed to; clothes for as many years into the future as they would need in order to preserve their American aura.
For herself, she bought beauty creams and anti-aging moisturizers in Chinatown—concoctions she hoped would preserve her beauty and youth for a long time and keep her elevated in looks among the women back home. News had reached her that loose young women were now aplenty in Limbe, good-looking and shameless wolowose women who made wives nervous. Sure, Jende was a man of little lust, never once looking at even the largest cleavage (not in her presence, at least) in all their married life, but she’d also never had to worry about another woman trying to steal him. Why would any woman try to lure him away when there were thousands of men in New York City with more money? But in Limbe, it would no longer be so. The loose young women there would be eager to pounce on him. He would no longer be a poor boy from a caraboat house in New Town but a man who had returned from America with a lot of dollars. Those wolowose girls would be all over him, giggling and exposing their teeth, saying things like Mr. Jende, how noh? You look good, oh! She would have to give him no reason to move his eyes sideways, especially now that she didn’t have the assets those young women had. She would never look like them again, because motherhood had squeezed out the appeal from her breasts and drawn lines of exhaustion on her belly. Her body was no longer a marvel, thus her best weapon in the battle for her husband’s eyes wouldn’t be her nakedness but her glowing spot-and-wrinkle-free face and the clothes and accessories she would put on the body from which she planned to lose five pounds in the coming month.
She had to return to Limbe prepared.
“Don’t forget the girls in you country, they gonno rub fine America cream, too,” Fatou said when Neni went across the street to her apartment to give her a purse she’d bought for her as a belated birthday gift and told her how prepared she was to fight to keep her marriage strong. “They know how to buy cream and spray perfume, too, and look lika America woman.”
“They go near him,” Neni said, “I’ll kill them.”
Fatou looked at Neni’s wide determined eyes and laughed. “I no gonno ever get that kinda problem,” she said. “No woman gonno try to steal my Ousmane. Who want Ousmane, with his leg lika broomstick? No woman. So I keep him.”
Neni laughed. For a minute, in a good friend’s presence, she forgot how fearful she was about her future and laughed. Having a man other women wanted was a curse masquerading as a blessing, she told herself. But it was a source of pride, nonetheless. Jende was going to be somebody in Limbe when they returned. He was going to be a businessman. He would get a nice brick house for them in Sokolo or Batoke or Mile Four, and she would have a maid. Over dinner at Red Lobster on a Sunday evening, while Winston and Maami watched the kids, he had told her all that. “I promise you with all my heart and soul, bébé,” he had said to her. “You will live like a queen in Limbe.”