Behold the Dreamers(97)
“How are all those people in town going to look at us?” she said to Jende a few days later, before he left for work. “Look at them, they will say. America don pass them.”
“So that’s what’s bothering you, eh?” was his response. “You want to spend the rest of your life living like this because you’re afraid people will laugh at you?”
“No!” she replied, pointing in his face as he put on his jacket. “That’s not what’s bothering me. You’re what’s bothering me!”
Betty called minutes after he left. “Now I understand why some women choose to marry other women,” she said before Neni had a chance to talk about her own morning.
“What happened?” Neni asked disinterestedly, wishing she hadn’t picked up the phone.
“I go to Macy’s and buy one dress on sale, and Alphonse acts as if all I do is shop.”
“What has that got to do with marrying a woman?”
“What woman is going to make another woman feel bad for buying a dress that makes her feel good? I’m not going to wear an old dress to go to a wedding where people are going to take my picture and put it on Facebook. Next thing you know people will be commenting on my picture ‘Betty looks so old, she looks so fat.’ These days you have to be careful about—”
“Betty, please, I have to go to the store—”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
Neni ignored the question.
“Is it Jende?”
“Who else?” Neni said. “I don’t know what else I can say to him.”
Betty grunted disapprovingly once, then twice. “You know,” she said, “I’ve heard a lot of crazy things in my life, but I’ve never heard of anyone leaving America to go back to their poor country.”
“He thinks he knows something the rest of us don’t know.”
“What did he say when you mentioned the divorce?”
“I haven’t spoken to him about it.”
“You still haven’t said anything! This whole time—”
“Please, I don’t need you to make me feel bad, too, okay? I’m begging you. I’ve been thinking about it …”
“You cannot just sit there thinking about it.”
“I’m not just sitting there thinking about it! I’ll talk to him about it; not today—he’s coming back home from work too late.”
“When are you going to ask him then? You know the longer you wait—”
“Nothing is going to change in a few days.”
“So you’re going to wait till next year?”
“I said I’ll talk to him.”
Fifty-one
A TOPIC LIKE THIS HAD TO BE APPROACHED WITH UTMOST CARE. NOT TOO seriously. Not too lightly. It had to be brought up with just enough finesse so it wouldn’t become a fight. Which was why she waited until he was in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. She entered while he was lining his toothbrush with Colgate, from one end of the bristles to the other, the way he always did it, even back in Limbe where a tube of toothpaste sometimes cost as much as a pile of cocoyams.
She sat on the toilet seat and watched him turn on the faucet and wet the toothbrush. “I was thinking,” she began, looking at his face in the mirror.
He put the toothbrush in his mouth and began brushing, intensely scrubbing his molars.
“It’s just that, I was … Betty, she has a cousin … she says he can … he has citizenship.”
He spat out the white foam. “So?” he said, not bothering to turn around.
“He can help us, bébé. With papier.”
He put the toothbrush back in his mouth and continued brushing: up, left, right, down. His eyes in the mirror were the reddest she’d ever seen them. “If you’re trying to say what I think you’re about to say,” he said, his mouth half full of foam, “shut up right now.”
“But … please hear me out, bébé. Please. Betty asked him and he said he can do it for us.”
With his mouth half-open, a thin trail of foam pouring out, he turned around to look at her. She turned her face away.
“The money from Mrs. Edwards,” she said, “we should use it to pay him.”
He lifted the faucet handle, scooped water into his mouth and swished, then spat out the foamy water and began washing his face, splashing as far as the mirror above and the trash can below. When he was done, he pulled the towel hanging on the shower door and covered his face, breathing in and out through it.
“We divorce, I marry him. I get papier through him, then me and him divorce and me and you marry back, but the whole time we continue living …”
As if he’d heard something unbelievably stunning, he abruptly pulled the towel off his face, which seemed to have grown blacker than his hair. He turned around to face her. “Those screws in your head holding your brain together,” he said, poking his temple with his index finger, “they’ve gotten loose, right?”
“We don’t have to go back to Cameroon, Jends,” she said, her voice so laden with despair it sank with every word.
He dropped the towel on the floor and opened the door. “If you ever open your mouth and suggest this kind of nonsense to me again—”