Behold the Dreamers(73)
In the afternoon they ate rice and chicken stew, like most of the households in Limbe. Neni made chin-chin and cake, too, using the cake recipe she’d relied on in Limbe in the days when she baked over a blistering fire in an iron pot filled with sand. The night before, while the whole family was on the sofa watching It’s a Wonderful Life, Jende had thought about inviting Leah to spend the day with them, since she was probably all alone in her Queens apartment being that she had no husband or children or living parents. He hated to think that Leah would be alone on a day when everyone should be with someone, but he didn’t want to ask too much of Neni, because he was certain that if Leah accepted his invitation, Neni would cook seven different dishes for the American coming to her house, and he knew he would feel bad that she was doing it while also taking care of Liomi and the baby. So he merely called Leah in the morning to wish her a merry Christmas. He told her work was going well, then listened as she told him about her plans to go to Rockefeller Center later in the day, speaking excitedly, as if going to stand in the cold and look at a tree was such a wonderful thing.
For the rest of the day he told Liomi stories and rocked Timba to sleep after her feedings. No one came to visit them the way people did in Limbe, going from house to house, saying, “Happy, happy, oh!,” and yet it was a happy Christmas for him, far happier than his first Christmas in America.
On that day he had lain on his upper-level bunk bed all morning and afternoon in the basement apartment he shared with the Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, the weather outside too cold for a walk, the people on the streets too unknown to celebrate the specialness of the day with. With Winston gone to Aruba to vacation with a woman he was dating, he had no one to eat and laugh with, and reminisce with about the Christmases of his boyhood, which always involved too much eating, too much drinking, and way too much dancing. Lying in the dark room, he had pictured Liomi in the red suit he’d sent for him to wear to celebrate the day; he’d smiled at the thought of his son strolling around town and proudly telling everyone who asked that his clothes were from his papa in America. He imagined Neni taking Liomi to New Town, to wish a happy Christmas to his mother who must have prepared a meal of chicken stew with yams and a side of ndolé, as well as a dish of plantains and nyama ngowa. He yearned to hear their voices, but there was no way for him to talk to them—the telephone lines from the Western world to much of Cameroon were overcrowded and bursting with the voices of those like him, the lonely and nostalgic, calling home to partake in the Christmas merrymaking, if only with their words. Frustrated, he had flung his calling card away and stayed in bed until four o’clock in the afternoon, making only one call, to his friend Arkamo in Phoenix, a call that did nothing to lessen his lonesomeness because Arkamo was having a grand time at a Cameroonian party, thanks to living in a city with a large close-knit Cameroonian community. After a shower and a dinner of Chinese leftovers, he had sat by the window in the common area, wrapped in his twin comforter and looking outside: at the weather so dull; at the people so colorlessly dressed; at the happy day slipping away so quickly and crushing him with longing.
Five days after Christmas, he returned to work, only to find there wasn’t much to do. Clark was at a hotel, Anna told him when he called to ask her why the boss wasn’t picking up his phone; he was going to do most of his work from there, she added. Cindy was taking time off from work (probably since the day of the tabloid story, Jende guessed, since Anna had called him the day after, while he was on his way back from dropping Mighty off at school, and told him that he didn’t need to come to the Sapphire because Cindy would not be needing a ride to her office). The only person who needed to get around that day was Mighty, to his piano lesson and back. All Jende had to do, Anna said, was take Mighty to his teacher’s building on the Upper West Side, hand him over to Stacy, who was meeting him there, and then bring Mighty and Stacy back to the Sapphire an hour later, unless Mighty wanted Stacy to take him to do something else, which was unlikely, since Mighty wanted to do nothing this winter break except sit alone in his bedroom. Jende could go home after that and the rest of the holidays would be equally light because, Anna said, whispering in a frightened voice, there was no way of knowing how long Clark would stay at the hotel or how much longer Cindy would keep herself locked in the apartment now that she wasn’t even going out to do things with friends, being that her drinking was getting worse and poor Mighty now had two parents who— Anna caught herself before she could say too much and said she had to go.
“Mighty, my good friend,” Jende said after Mighty had settled in the backseat. “How was your Christmas?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Okay, okay, there is nothing wrong with that. You do not have to tell me, except for one thing—did you get to Skype with Vince?”
“Yeah, Mom called him.”
“How is he?”
Mighty shrugged and did not respond.
“He is having fun over there? Did he tell you some good stories about India?”
“He has dreadlocks.”
“Dreadlocks?” Jende asked, almost laughing at his visualization of Vince with dreadlocks. He liked the look of white people with dreadlocks, but Vince Edwards, son of Clark and Cindy Edwards, with dreadlocks? The look on Cindy’s face must have been worth taking a picture of.
“Yeah,” Mighty said. “He has, like, some funny-looking dreadlocks.”