Behold the Dreamers(84)
He reached forward and pulled the bag from her hands. She lunged at him to take it back, but he dragged her down to the sofa and made her sit next to him. She tried to stand up and get away from him, but he held her down.
“I’m sorry, bébé,” he whispered in her ear. “I’m just … I’m so shocked. I mean, I still don’t even know what to say.”
She scoffed and pursed her lips.
“You just did something …” He shook his head. “You surprise me all the time, but you just took it to a whole other level today. In short, I didn’t know what kind of woman I married till this night.”
“Eh, really? What kind of woman is that? A wicked woman, eh?”
“No,” he replied. “A strong woman. I never knew you could do the kind of thing you just told me.”
She half-rolled her eyes.
“But please, don’t ever do it again. I’m begging you, bébé. Never, ever again. I don’t care why you think you need to do it, don’t ever do it.”
“You want the money or not?” she said, smiling and enjoying the new look on his face.
“I don’t know … I’m just not comfortable, Neni.”
“You’re not comfortable—”
“But ten kolo in our hands?” he said.
“So you’re getting happy now, eh?”
“Ten thousand dollars!”
She laughed and kissed him.
Together they did a recount of the money, feeling each of the crisp hundred-dollar bills. “We won’t spend any of it,” he said to her. “We’ll add it to the savings and act as if we don’t even have it. God forbid, worse comes to worst one day, we’ll use it then.”
She nodded.
“Wonders shall never end, eh?” he said.
“Wonders shall never end,” she said. “Not while the sun goes up and down.”
“But were you not afraid? What if she had called the police?”
Neni Jonga shrugged, looked at her husband, and smiled. “That’s the difference between me and you,” she said. “You would have been thinking about it too much, wondering whether you should do it or not. Me, I knew it’s what I had to do.”
Forty-three
WITH HER GROCERY BUDGET ONLY TWO THIRDS OF WHAT IT USED TO BE before Jende stopped working for the Edwardses, shopping at Pathmark became a taxing experience, nothing like in the days when she first came to America, the times when she used to rush through the store excitedly, thinking, Mamami eh, so much food! So many choices! All in one place! The only thing she hated about grocery shopping back then was the prices—they made no sense. Three plantains for two dollars? Why? Two dollars in Cameroon was approximately 1,000 CFA francs, and for that amount, as recently as in the early 2000s, a woman could buy groceries to feed her family three good meals. She could buy a pile of cocoyams for 400 CFA francs, smoked fish for 250, vegetables for 100, about six ounces of palm oil for 100, crayfish and spices with the rest of the money, go home and make a large pot of portor-portor coco that would feed her family of four lunch and dinner, and there’d still be a little left over for the children to eat the following morning before going to school. If the woman was smart she would make the food extra-spicy, so the children would have a sip of water with every bite, get full faster, and the food would last longer.
It seemed illogical to Neni that the same amount of money in America could buy only three plantains, which wasn’t enough to feed Jende alone for one day. She hadn’t expected the prices in New York to be the same as in Limbe, but she found it difficult not to be bothered whenever she bought a pound of shrimp for the equivalent of 5,000 CFA francs—the monthly rent for a room with a shared outdoor bathroom and toilet for all the residents in a caraboat building. You have to stop comparing prices, Jende advised her whenever she brought up the issue. You keep on comparing prices like that, he’d say, you’ll never buy anything in America. The best thing to do in this country, whenever you enter a store, is to ignore the exchange rate, ignore the advertisements, ignore what everyone else is eating and drinking and talking about these days, and buy only the things you need. She began doing so and, after perhaps her tenth visit to Pathmark, she stopped thinking about the exchange rate and learned how to plan meals around what was on sale.
In those first weeks in New York, she always walked the thirteen street blocks north and three avenue blocks west to get to the store. Pushing her shopping cart with one hand and holding Liomi with the other—both of them wearing matching floral spring jackets Jende had bought before their arrival—they walked leisurely whenever the weather allowed so she could take in as much of Harlem as possible: the brownstones with black railings; satisfied patrons admiring their hairdos in beauty parlors; friendly old men, nodding hello; happy Harlemites, smiling at her. Jende had warned her to be careful walking northward because there was talk of gangs and shootings in the housing projects around 145th, but because she never saw anyone with a gun, she walked without worries, going past young and old chatting on street corners.
At Pathmark, even after her first visit, she was impressed with the American way of shopping: the queues at checkout, everyone calmly awaiting their turn; the orderly aisles with prices next to products so shoppers could easily do a comparison for the best value; the superfluous transparency of food manufacturers, who not only attractively packaged products from cornflakes to tea to canned meats but also provided information on what was and wasn’t in the food, some manufacturers going as far as supplying details on what the product could and couldn’t do to a body. No matter what time of day she went, regardless of how many people were in the store, she found the shopping experience fascinating and weirdly serene, almost unlike what a market shopping experience should be, completely unlike the Limbe market. Which was why she missed the exuberance and disorderliness of her hometown’s open-air market. As much as she loved Pathmark, shopping there made her wish she could be back in the midst of the spectacle that happened on Tuesdays and Fridays in her hometown. Those were the days when the stalls that were only half full on other days filled up with smoked fish and crayfish on one end, plantains and cocoyams and vegetables on another end, and with secondhand clothes from Douala next to the flesh of cows slaughtered that morning. She missed the early-morning rush to get the freshest produce and the pushing and shoving of married women determined to pick the best okrika clothes for their husbands and children. She missed the pleas from traders asking shoppers to choose them over competitors and the cunning bargaining that ensued between buyers and sellers.