The Thing Around Your Neck (3 page)

“Nna-Boy, why did they beat you like this?” my mother asked him. She turned to the policeman. “Why did you people do this to my son?”

The man shrugged, a new insolence to his demeanor; it was as if he had been uncertain about Nnamabia’s well-being but now could let himself talk. “You cannot raise your children well, all of you people who feel important because you work in the university. When your children misbehave, you think they should not be punished. You are lucky, madam, very lucky that they released him.”

My father said, “Let’s go.”

He opened the door and Nnamabia climbed in and we drove home. My father did not stop at any of the police checkpoints on the road; once, a policeman gestured threateningly with his gun as we sped past. The only thing my mother said on the silent drive was, Did Nnamabia want us to stop at Ninth Mile and buy some
okpa
? Nnamabia said no. We had arrived in Nsukka when he finally spoke.

“Yesterday the policemen asked the old man if he wanted a free bucket of water. He said yes. So they told him to take his clothes off and parade the corridor. My cell mates were laughing. But some of them said it was wrong to treat an old man like that.” Nnamabia paused, his eyes distant. “I shouted at the policeman. I said the old man was innocent and ill and if they kept him here they would never find his son because he did not even know where his son was. They said I should shut up immediately or they would take me to Cell One. I didn’t care. I didn’t shut up. So they pulled me out and beat me and took me to Cell One.”

Nnamabia stopped there and we asked him nothing else. Instead I imagined him raising his voice, calling the policeman a stupid idiot, a spineless coward, a sadist, a bastard, and I imagined the shock of the policemen, the shock of the chief staring openmouthed, the other cell mates stunned at the audacity of the handsome boy from the university. And I imagined the old man himself looking on with surprised pride and quietly refusing to undress. Nnamabia did not say what had happened to him in Cell One, or what happened in the new site, which seemed to me like where they kept people who would later disappear. It would have been so easy for him, my charming brother, to make a sleek drama of his story, but he did not.

N
kem is staring at the bulging, slanted eyes of the Benin mask on the living room mantel as she learns about her husband’s girlfriend.

“She’s really young. Twenty-one or so,” her friend Ijemamaka is saying on the phone. “Her hair is short and curly—you know, those small tight curls. Not a relaxer. A texturizer, I think. I hear young people like texturizers now. I wouldn’t tell you
sha
, I know men and their ways, but I heard she has moved into your house. This is what happens when you marry a rich man.” Ijemamaka pauses and Nkem hears her suck in her breath—a deliberate, exaggerated sound. “I mean, Obiora is a good man,
of course
,” Ijemamaka continues. “But to bring his girlfriend into your house? No respect. She drives his cars all over Lagos. I saw her myself on Awolowo Road driving the Mazda.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Nkem says. She imagines the way Ijemamaka’s mouth scrunches up, like a sucked-until-limp orange, a mouth wearied from talk.

“I had to tell you. What are friends for? What else could I
do
?” Ijemamaka says, and Nkem wonders if it is glee, that highness in Ijemamaka’s tone, that inflection in “do.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Ijemamaka talks about her visit to Nigeria, how prices have risen since the last time she was back—even
garri
is so expensive now. How so many more children hawk in traffic hold-ups, how erosion has eaten away chunks of the major road to her hometown in Delta State. Nkem clucks and sighs loudly at the appropriate times. She does not remind Ijemamaka that she, too, was back in Nigeria some months ago, at Christmas. She does not tell Ijemamaka that her fingers feel numb, that she wishes Ijemamaka had not called. Finally, before she hangs up, she promises to bring the children up to visit Ijemamaka in New Jersey one of these weekends—a promise she knows she will not keep.

She walks into the kitchen, pours herself a glass of water, and then leaves it on the table, untouched. Back in the living room, she stares at the Benin mask, copper-colored, its abstract features too big. Her neighbors call it “noble”; because of it, the couple two houses down have started collecting African art, and they, too, have settled for good imitations, although they enjoy talking about how impossible it is to find originals.

Nkem imagines the Benin people carving the original masks four hundred years ago. Obiora told her they used the masks at royal ceremonies, placing them on either side of their king to protect him, to ward off evil. Only specially chosen people could be custodians of the mask, the same people who were responsible for bringing the fresh human heads used in burying their king. Nkem imagines the proud young men, muscled, brown skin gleaming with palm kernel oil, graceful loincloths on their waists. She imagines—and this she imagines herself because Obiora did not suggest it happened that way—the proud young men wishing they did not have to behead strangers to bury their king, wishing they could use the masks to protect themselves, too, wishing they had a say.

She was pregnant when she first came to America with Obiora. The house Obiora rented, and would later buy, smelled fresh, like green tea, and the short driveway was thick with gravel. We live in a lovely suburb near Philadelphia, she told her friends in Lagos on the phone. She sent them pictures of herself and Obiora near the Liberty Bell, proudly scrawled
very important in
American history
behind the pictures, and enclosed glossy pamphlets featuring a balding Benjamin Franklin.

Her neighbors on Cherrywood Lane, all white and pale-haired and lean, came over and introduced themselves, asked if she needed help with anything—getting a driver’s license, a phone, a maintenance person. She did not mind that her accent, her foreignness, made her seem helpless to them. She liked them and their lives. Lives Obiora often called “plastic.” Yet she knew he, too, wanted the children to be like their neighbors’, the kind of children who sniffed at food that had fallen on the dirt, saying it was “spoiled.” In her life, her childhood, you snatched the food up, whatever it was, and ate it.

Obiora stayed the first few months, so the neighbors didn’t start to ask about him until later. Where was her husband? Was something wrong? Nkem said everything was fine. He lived in Nigeria
and
America; they had two homes. She saw the doubt in their eyes, knew they were thinking of other couples with second homes in places like Florida and Montreal, couples who inhabited each home at the same time, together.

Obiora laughed when she told him how curious the neighbors were about them. He said
oyibo
people were like that. If you did something in a different way, they would think you were abnormal, as though their way was the only possible way.
And although Nkem knew many Nigerian couples who lived together, all year, she said nothing.

Nkem runs a hand over the rounded metal of the Benin mask’s nose. One of the best imitations, Obiora had said when he bought it a few years ago. He told her how the British had stolen the original masks in the late 1800s during what they called the Punitive Expedition; how the British had a way of using words like “expedition” and “pacification” for killing and stealing. The masks—thousands, Obiora said—were regarded as “war booty” and were now displayed in museums all over the world.

Nkem picks up the mask and presses her face to it; it is cold, heavy, lifeless. Yet when Obiora talks about it—and all the rest—he makes them seem breathing, warm. Last year, when he brought the Nok terra-cotta that sits on the table in the hallway, he told her the ancient Nok people had used the originals for ancestor worship, placing them in shrines, offering them food morsels. And the British had carted most of those away, too, telling the people (newly Christianized and stupidly blinded, Obiora said) that the sculptures were heathen. We never appreciate what we have, Obiora always ended by saying, before repeating the story of the foolish head of state who had gone to the National Museum in Lagos and forced the curator to give him a four-hundred-year-old bust, which he then gave to the British queen as a present. Sometimes Nkem doubts Obiora’s facts, but she listens, because of how passionately he speaks, because of how his eyes glisten as though he is about to cry.

She wonders what he will bring next week; she has come to look forward to the art pieces, touching them, imagining the
originals, imagining the lives behind them. Next week, when her children will once again say “Daddy” to someone real, not a telephone voice; when she will wake up at night to hear snoring beside her; when she will see another used towel in the bathroom.

Nkem checks the time on the cable decoder. She has an hour before she has to pick up the children. Through the drapes that her housegirl, Amaechi, has so carefully parted, the sun spills a rectangle of yellow light onto the glass center table. She sits at the edge of the leather sofa and looks around the living room, remembers the delivery man from Ethan Interiors who changed the lampshade the other day. “You got a great house, ma’am,” he’d said, with that curious American smile that meant he believed he, too, could have something like it someday. It is one of the things she has come to love about America, the abundance of unreasonable hope.

At first, when she had come to America to have the baby, she had been proudly excited because she had married into the coveted league, the Rich Nigerian Men Who Sent Their Wives to America to Have Their Babies league. Then the house they rented was put up for sale. A good price, Obiora said, before telling her they would buy. She liked it when he said “we,” as though she really had a say in it. And she liked that she had become part of yet another league, the Rich Nigerian Men Who Owned Houses in America league.

They never decided that she would stay with the children—Okey was born three years after Adanna. It just happened. She stayed back at first, after Adanna, to take a number of computer courses because Obiora said it was a good idea. Then Obiora registered Adanna in preschool, when Nkem was pregnant with Okey. Then he found a good private elementary school
and told her they were lucky it was so close. Only a fifteen-minute drive to take Adanna there. She had never imagined that her children would go to school, sit side by side with white children whose parents owned mansions on lonely hills, never imagined this life. So she said nothing.

Obiora visited almost every month, the first two years, and she and the children went home at Christmas. Then, when he finally got the huge government contract, he decided he would visit only in the summer. For two months. He couldn’t travel that often anymore, he didn’t want to risk losing those government contracts. They kept coming, too, those contracts. He got listed as one of Fifty Influential Nigerian Businessmen and sent her the photocopied pages from
Newswatch
, and she kept them clipped together in a file.

Nkem sighs, runs her hand through her hair. It feels too thick, too old. She has planned to get a relaxer touch-up tomorrow, have her hair set in a flip that would rest around her neck the way Obiora likes. And she has planned, on Friday, to wax her pubic hair into a thin line, the way Obiora likes. She walks out into the hallway, up the wide stairs, then back downstairs and into the kitchen. She used to walk like this throughout the house in Lagos, every day of the three weeks she and the children spent at Christmas. She would smell Obiora’s closet, run her hand over his cologne bottles, and push suspicions from her mind. One Christmas Eve, the phone rang and the caller hung up when Nkem answered. Obiora laughed and said, “Some young prankster.” And Nkem told herself that it probably was a young prankster, or better yet, a sincere wrong number.

Nkem walks back upstairs and into the bathroom, smells the pungent Lysol that Amaechi has just used to clean the tiles. She stares at her face in the mirror; her right eye looks smaller than the left. “Mermaid eyes,” Obiora calls them. He thinks that mermaids, not angels, are the most beautiful creatures. Her face has always made people talk—how perfectly oval it is, how flawless the dark skin—but Obiora’s calling her eyes mermaid eyes used to make her feel newly beautiful, as though the compliment gave her another set of eyes.

She picks up the scissors, the one she uses to cut Adanna’s ribbons into neater bits, and raises it to her head. She pulls up clumps of hair and cuts close to the scalp, leaving hair about the length of her thumbnail, just enough to tighten into curls with a texturizer. She watches the hair float down, like brown cotton wisps falling on the white sink. She cuts more. Tufts of hair float down, like scorched wings of moths. She wades in further. More hair falls. Some gets into her eyes and itches. She sneezes. She smells the Pink Oil moisturizer she smoothed on this morning and thinks about the Nigerian woman she met once—Ifeyinwa or Ifeoma, she cannot remember now—at a wedding in Delaware, whose husband lived in Nigeria, too, and who had short hair, although hers was natural, no relaxer or texturizer.

The woman had complained, saying “our men,” familiarly, as though Nkem’s husband and hers were somehow related to each other. Our men like to keep us here, she had told Nkem. They visit for business and vacations, they leave us and the children with big houses and cars, they get us housegirls from Nigeria who we don’t have to pay any outrageous American wages, and they say business is better in Nigeria and all that. But you know why they won’t move here, even if business were better here? Because America does not recognize Big
Men. Nobody says “Sir! Sir!” to them in America. Nobody rushes to dust their seats before they sit down.

Nkem had asked the woman if she planned to move back and the woman turned, her eyes round, as though Nkem had just betrayed her. But how can I live in Nigeria again? she said. When you’ve been here so long, you’re not the same, you’re not like the people there. How can my children blend in? And Nkem, although she disliked the woman’s severely shaved eyebrows, had understood.

Nkem lays the scissors down and calls Amaechi to clean up the hair.

“Madam!” Amaechi screams. “
Chim o!
Why did you cut your hair? What happened?”

“Does something have to happen before I cut my hair? Clean up the hair!”

Nkem walks into her room. She stares at the paisley cover pulled sleek across the king-size bed. Even Amaechi’s efficient hands can’t hide the flatness on one side of the bed, the fact that it is used only two months of the year. Obiora’s mail is in a neat pile on his nightstand, credit card preapprovals, flyers from LensCrafters. The people who matter know he really lives in Nigeria.

She comes out and stands by the bathroom as Amaechi cleans up the hair, reverently brushing the brown strands into a dustpan, as though they are potent. Nkem wishes she had not snapped. The madam/housegirl line has blurred in the years she has had Amaechi. It is what America does to you, she thinks. It forces egalitarianism on you. You have nobody to talk to, really, except for your toddlers, so you turn to your housegirl. And before you know it, she is your friend. Your equal.

“I had a difficult day,” Nkem says, after a while. “I’m sorry.”

“I know, madam, I see it in your face,” Amaechi says, and smiles.

The phone rings and Nkem knows it is Obiora. Nobody else calls this late.

“Darling,
kedu
?” he says. “Sorry, I couldn’t call earlier. I just got back from Abuja, the meeting with the minister. My flight was delayed until midnight. It’s almost two a.m. now. Can you believe that?”

Nkem makes a sympathetic sound.

“Adanna and Okey
kwanu
?” he asks.

“They are fine. Asleep.”

“Are you sick? Are you okay?” he asks. “You sound strange.”

“I’m all right.” She knows she should tell him about the children’s day, she usually does when he calls too late to talk to them. But her tongue feels bloated, too heavy to let the words roll out.

“How was the weather today?” he asks.

“Warming up.”

“It better finish warming up before I come,” he says, and laughs. “I booked my flight today. I can’t wait to see you all.”