Behold the Dreamers(3)
“Do you have any questions for me?” Clark asked, moving the résumé to a pile of papers on the left side of his desk.
“No, Mr. Edwards. You have told me what I need to know very well, sir.”
“I’ve got one more interview tomorrow morning, then I’ll make my decision. You’ll hear from me, maybe later tomorrow. My secretary will call you.”
“Thank you so much, sir. You are very kind.”
Clark stood up.
Jende quickly pushed back his chair and stood up, too. He straightened his tie, which over the course of the interview had become as tilted as a willowy tree in a wild storm.
“By the way,” Clark said, looking at the tie, “if you hope to further your career, you’ll get a better suit. Black, blue, or gray. And a real tie.”
“Not a problem at all, sir,” Jende replied. “I can find a new suit, sir. I surely can.”
He nodded and smiled awkwardly, revealing his crowded teeth and promptly shutting his mouth. Clark, without smiling back, offered a hand, which Jende took with both of his and shook with great care, his head bowed. Thank you so much in advance, sir, he wanted to say again. I will be the best chauffeur ever if you give me this job, he almost said.
He didn’t say it; he had to keep his desperation from bursting through the thin layer of dignity it had been wrapped in throughout the interview. Clark smiled and patted him on the arm.
Two
“ONE AND A HALF YEARS TODAY,” NENI SAID TO FATOU AS THEY WALKED through Chinatown looking for make-believe Gucci and Versace bags. “That’s how long it’s been since I came to America.”
“One and half years?” Fatou said, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. “You count half-years, too? And you say it, no shame.” She laughed. “Lemme tell you something. When you in America vingt-quatre ans, and you still poor, you no gonno count no more. You no gonno even say no more. No. You gonno shame to say anything, I tell you.”
Neni chuckled as she picked up a Gucci tote so determined to pass as real it glimmered. “You’re ashamed to tell people you have been here for twenty-four years?”
“No, I no shame. Why I shame? I tell people I just come here. They hear me talk, they say ah, she don’t know English. She musto just come from Africa.”
The Chinese store owner rushed toward them. Take the bag for sixty dollars, he said to Neni. Why? Neni asked, contorting her face. I give you twenty. The man shook his head. Neni and Fatou started walking away. Forty, forty, the man shouted at them as they pushed through a throng of European tourists. Okay, come take for thirty, he shouted. They went back and bought it for twenty-five.
“Now you look lika Angeli Joeli,” Fatou said as Neni walked with the bag on her arm, her curly weave flowing behind her.
“Really?” Neni said, tossing her hair.
“What you mean, really? You wanno look lika Angeli Joeli, no?”
Neni threw her head back and giggled.
How she loved New York City. She still couldn’t believe she was here. Couldn’t believe she was walking around shopping for Gucci, no longer a jobless, unwed mother, sitting in her father’s house in Limbe, sunrise to sunset, dry season to rainy season, waiting for Jende to rescue her.
It didn’t seem like eighteen months already, perhaps because she still remembered much about the day she and Liomi arrived at JFK. She still remembered how Jende had stood at the terminal waiting for them, dressed in a red shirt and blue clip-on tie, a bouquet of yellow hydrangeas in his hands. She still remembered how they had embraced and held each other for almost a minute in silence, their eyes tightly shut to banish the agony of the past two years in which he had worked three jobs to save the money needed for her student visa, Liomi’s visitor visa, and their airline tickets. She remembered how Liomi had joined in their embrace, grabbing both of their legs before Jende had paused from holding her to pick him up. She remembered how the apartment—which Jende had recently found after almost two years of sharing a two-bedroom basement apartment with six Puerto Rican men in the Bronx—was that night filled with Jende’s laughter and her voice delighting him with stories from back home, alongside Liomi’s squeals as father and son roughhoused and tickled each other on the carpet. She remembered how they had moved Liomi from their bed to the cot in the middle of the night so they could lie side by side, do all the things they had promised to do to each other in emails and phone calls and text messages. And she still clearly remembered lying in bed next to Jende after they were done, listening to the sounds of America outside the window, the chatter and laughter of African-American men and women on the streets of Harlem, and telling herself: I am in America, I am truly in America.
She could never forget that day.
Or the day, two weeks after their arrival, when they were married at city hall with Liomi as their ring bearer and Jende’s cousin Winston as their witness. On that day in May 2006, she finally became a respectable woman, a woman declared worthy of love and protection.
Limbe was now some faraway town, a place she had loved less with every new day Jende was not there. Without him to go for a walk on the beach with, go dancing with, or sit with at a drinking spot and enjoy a cold Malta Guinness on a hot Sunday afternoon, the town was no longer her beloved hometown but a desolate place she couldn’t wait to get out of. In every phone call during the time they were apart she had reminded him of this, of her inability to stop daydreaming about the day she would leave Limbe and be with him in America.