Behold the Dreamers (28 page)

H
E
KNEW
IT
WAS
OVER
THE
MOMENT
HE
WALKED
OUT
OF
THE
DOCTOR'S
office.

That night, after work, he asked Neni to sit down at the dinette.

He took her hand and looked deep into her eyes. “Neni,” he began.

“What's wrong? What did the doctor say?”

“Neni,” he called her name again.

“Jende, please—”

“I'm ready to go back home,” he said.

“Home where? What do you mean by ‘go back home'?”

He took a deep breath and was silent for several seconds. “Home to Limbe,” he said to his wife. “I want to go back to Limbe.”

She pulled her hand from his and shifted backward in her chair, as if he'd just revealed that he had a vile contagious disease. “What's the meaning of all this?” she asked. Her voice was angry.

“I don't want to stay in this country anymore.”

“You want us to pack up our things and go back to Limbe? Is that what you're saying?”

He nodded, looking into her eyes as if pleading for mercy.

She looked into his eyes, eyes that seemed like they belonged to a sick man. When he tried to take her hand into his again, she shifted farther away from him and put them behind her back.

“You want to return to Limbe?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Why are you talking like this, Jende? What's the meaning of all this?”

“I don't like what my life has become in this country. I don't know how long I can continue living like this, Neni. The suffering in Limbe was bad, but this one here right now … it's more than I can take.”

Neni Jonga stared at her husband as if wanting to feel sympathy but capable of feeling only irritation. “Is it something the doctor said?” she asked. “Is it because of your back?”

“No … I mean, it's not only because of my back. It's everything, Neni. Have you not seen how unhappy I've been?”

“Of course,
bébé
. I've seen how you've been unhappy. But your father died, and you have been in mourning. Anyone who loves their father the way you loved your father would be unhappy.”

“But it's not only my father's death. It's everything that's happened. I lost my job. My
papier
situation. This work, work, work, all the time. For what? For a little money? How much suffering can a man take in this world, eh? How much longer …” His voice broke at the end of his question, but he cleared his throat to push it out.

“You know we can get through anything, Jends,” Neni said, taking his hand. “We have been through so much. You know we will be okay, right?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don't know if I will be okay. I am trying really hard, but I don't know if my life will get better in this country. How long will I keep on washing dishes?”

“Only until you get your
papier
.”

“That's not true,” he said with a sad shake of his head. “
Papier
is not everything. In America today, having documents is not enough. Look at how many people with papers are struggling. Look at how even some Americans are suffering. They were born in this country. They have American passports, and yet they are sleeping on the street, going to bed hungry, losing their jobs and houses every day in this … this economic crisis.”

Timba started whimpering in the bedroom. They stopped talking, looking past each other as they waited for her to put herself back to sleep. She did.

“Having papers in this country is not everything,” Jende continued. “What do you think is going to change with my life if I get papers tomorrow?”

“You will get a better job, won't you?”

“What better job? I have no education that anyone can call a real education. What will I do? Go to work at Pathmark? Spend ten years weighing shrimp like Tunde?”

“But
bébé,
working at Pathmark is a good job. You know that. Tunde has a very good job. He has benefits, all kind of insurance. He even has a retirement plan—that's what Olu told me. And on top of that he buys food for his family on a discount. How is that not a good job?”

Jende looked at Neni and chuckled, a cheerless chuckle followed by another shake of his head. Maybe she thought it was such a good life her friend Olu had because her husband worked at the Pathmark seafood counter, but he didn't think Tunde was so happy with his life. How could he possibly be, spending all those days of the week around seafood, coming home at the end of the day smelling like fish.

“So you think Tunde and Olu have such a good life, eh?”

“I think they manage well, and we can, too, if you get your
papier
and get a job like that.”

“And how long do you think I can take care of my family with the kind of money Pathmark will pay me? Eh, Neni? How am I going to send you to pharmacy school with that kind of money? How are we going to send Liomi to college? Or be able to ever move out of this place full of cockroaches?”

“Then we'll go to Phoenix. That's what you've always wanted, right?”

“I'm not moving to Phoenix! You think Phoenix is going to have something better for us? I was sitting here feeling jealous of Arkamo because he has that nice four-bedroom house over there, only to find out two days ago that he lost his house. The department store where he was working closed down, he doesn't have a job, he cannot pay the bank, the bank takes back the house. You know where he and his family are living now? In his sister's basement, which has no windows! Is that what you want for us, Neni? To end up in a basement in Phoenix?”

Neni sighed and shook her head. “Okay,
bébé,
” she said. “Then we'll stay in New York. Maybe you could go back to working as a driver. Maybe we can find you another job like the one you had with Mr. Edwards?”

“You're talking nonsense.”

“I'm only saying that—”

“You think it's easy to get a job like that? You think it's easy for someone like me to get a good job like that? Were you not here when I sent out one hundred résumés for all those chauffeur jobs on the Internet and no one called me back? You know I only got the job with Mr. Edwards because Mr. Dawson likes Winston very much and he trusted Winston to recommend someone good. I got the job only because of Winston, not because of myself. Okay? So stop talking like someone who has no sense.”

She could tell she had incensed him. She tried to rub his shoulder to atone for whatever she had said to infuriate him, but he pulled away and stood up.

“Please,
bébé,
” she said, looking up at him. “We're going to be fine, right?”

He walked out of the room without responding and went into the kitchen. When she went to join him, she found him opening and shutting drawers and cabinets.

“
Bébé,
what are you looking for?”

“You need to know something, Neni,” he said, turning to face her. “You need to know that much of what has happened to get us here is because of Winston. You understand? If Winston didn't offer to pay the rest of Bubakar's fees, you know we would not have as much money saved right now. We will have nothing if it wasn't for my cousin paying for almost all of Bubakar and my immigration fees, helping me find a good job, helping me find this apartment! But if things start to get too bad for us in this country, you have a student visa, I have the government trying to deport me, you need to stay in school to keep your student visa, we start running out of money, one of us gets seriously sick, who are we going to turn to? Winston is going to have a child. He's going to get married. Have more children. His little sisters are finishing Buea University next year and then he has to bring them over here. We will no longer have Winston to turn to left and right. And even if we could, I am a man! I cannot continue waiting for my cousin to rescue me all the time.”

“But no one knows how God works. Maybe, one way or another, you can get another job driving someone else, eh?”

“You're not listening to me, Neni. You're not listening! Forget about how God works, okay? Because even if I try again to look for a job as a driver, do you really think a big man on Wall Street will hire some African man from the street just like that? With this kind of economy, all kinds of people are looking for a job like that. Even some of those people who used to wear suits to work on Wall Street are now looking for jobs as drivers. Nothing is easy anymore. How do you think I'm ever going to get another job that pays thirty-five thousand dollars?”

“Maybe you can—”

“Maybe I can do what?”

“There are other things—”

“Why are you arguing with me? Is it that you don't believe me? You should have been with me last week when I saw this man who used to drive another executive at Lehman Brothers. We used to sit together outside the building sometimes; he was a fresh round man. I saw him downtown: The man looked like he had his last good meal a year ago. He has not been able to find another job. He says too many people want to be chauffeurs now. Even people who used to be police and people with fine college degrees, they want to be chauffeurs. Everyone is losing jobs everywhere and looking for new jobs, anything to pay bills. So you tell me—if he, an American, a white man with papers, cannot get a new chauffeur job then what about me? They say the country will get better, but you know what? I don't know if I can stay here until that happens. I don't know if I can continue suffering like this just because I want to live in America.”

S
HE
WOULD
NOT
BE
LEAVING.
N
EVER.
S
HE
WOULD
NOT
BE
RETURNING
TO
Limbe.

For years she had stayed in her father's house doing nothing but housework, first too grief-stricken and shamed to return to school after dropping out and then losing her daughter; later—when she was ready to return, four years after the baby's death—unable to do so because her father didn't think it was worthwhile paying for an almost-twenty-year-old to attend secondary school. He had suggested she apprentice as a seamstress, which she was opposed to because, she told him, she'd never imagined herself sitting at a sewing machine five days a week. Fine then, he'd said to her, stay at home and imagine yourself doing nothing for the rest of your life. It was only when Liomi was one year old that he finally agreed to pay for her to attend evening computer classes, after she'd convinced him that acquiring basic computer skills might help her get an office job. After the year of classes, though, she'd been unable to get a job because there were too few jobs in Limbe, never mind one for a young woman who hadn't made it as far as high school. She had been bored and frustrated at home, unable to have any sort of independence because she was financially dependent on her parents, unable to marry Jende because her father wouldn't let her marry a council laborer and unable to do anything about it because both she and Jende believed it wrong to defy a parent and marry against his or her wishes.

By her late twenties, all she could think about was America.

It wasn't that she thought life in America had no ills—she'd watched enough episodes of
Dallas
and
Dynasty
to know that the country had its share of vicious people—but, rather, because shows like
The Fresh Prince of Bel Air
and
The Cosby Show
had shown her that there was a place in the world where blacks had the same chance at prosperity as whites. The African-Americans she saw on TV in Cameroon were happy and successful, well educated and respectable, and she'd come to believe that if they could flourish in America, surely she could, too. America gave everyone, black or white, an equal opportunity to be whatever they wished to be. Even after she'd seen the movies
Boyz n the Hood
and
Do the Right Thing,
she couldn't be swayed or convinced that the kind of black life depicted represented anything but a very small percentage of black life, just like Americans probably understood that the images they saw of war and starvation in Africa were but a very small percentage of African life. None of the folks from Limbe who had emigrated to America sent home pictures of a life like the ones in those movies. Every picture she'd seen of Cameroonians in America was a portrait of bliss: children laughing in snow; couples smiling at a mall; families posing in front a nice house with a nice car nearby. America, to her, was synonymous with happiness.

Which was why, on the day Jende shared with her Winston's offer to buy him a ticket so he could move to America and eventually bring her and Liomi over, she had wept as she composed a five-paragraph email of gratitude to Winston. She began watching American movies not only for leisure but also as advance preparation, envisioning a future in New York where she would finish her education, own a home, raise a happy family. Though she'd been surprised to learn upon arrival that not many blacks lived like the ones in the sitcoms, and virtually no one, black or white, had a butler like the family in
The Fresh Prince,
the realization had done little to change her impression of what was possible in America. America might be flawed, but it was still a beautiful country. She could still become far more than she would have become in Limbe. In spite of her daily hardships, she could still send pictures to her friends in Limbe and say, look at me, look at me and my children, we're finally on our way.

But now, after coming so far for so long, with only two semesters left at BMCC before she could transfer to a pharmacy school, Jende wanted her to return home. He wanted to drag her back to Limbe. Never.

“But what you gonno do?” Fatou asked as she braided Neni's hair.

“I don't know … I really don't know.”

Fatou turned Neni around by the shoulders and pressed her head down so she could finish a cornrow. “Marriage,” Fatou said, “is a thing you want. But when you gonno get it, it bring you all the thing you no want.”

Neni scoffed. Fatou couldn't stop herself from making up a new proverb on the spot; she could never prevent herself from being a one-woman book of odd opinions.

“No matter what woman in this country do,” she went on, “we African woman musto stand behind the husband and be following them and say yes, yes. That what we African woman musto do. We no gonno say to husband, no, I no gonno do it.”

“So you do everything Ousmane asks you to do, eh?”

“Yes. I do. Everything he want, I do. Why you think we got seven childrens?”

“Because Ousmane said so?”

“What you think? What woman no crazy wanno suffer like that seven time in one life?”

Neni laughed, but the afternoon would be one of the few times she would laugh about her plight with a friend. Most times she would shake her head in bewilderment, which was what she did two days later, when Betty stopped by to drop off her children before heading to her second job at a Lower East Side nursing home.

“Tell him you're not going,” Betty said in the kitchen while the children fought over the remote control in the living room. “What does he mean life is too hard here? If life was not hard for us back home why did we leave our countries and come here?”

“He thinks it's better for a person to suffer in their own country than to suffer somewhere else.”

“Ha! Please, don't make me laugh. He really thinks suffering in Cameroon is better than suffering in America?”

Neni shrugged.

“You'll regret it if you go back home, I'm telling you right now,” Betty said. “Why are you guys acting like little children? Life is hard everywhere. You know that maybe it will get better one day. Maybe it will not get better. Nobody knows tomorrow. But we keep on trying.”

“You know how hard things have been. Ever since he lost his—”

“What about the money you got from Mrs. Edwards?”

“Ssshh,” Neni said. She looked out of the kitchen to make sure Liomi wasn't nearby. “Jende says we cannot use the money,” she whispered. “He's hidden it in a separate bank account and says we'll only touch it when worse comes to worst.”

“Why does he get to decide how to spend the money?”

“Ah, Betty, there's no reason to put it like that.”

With her mouth half open and her nose flared, Betty looked at Neni, moving her eyes slowly up Neni's face, from chin to forehead and back down, twice.

“Neni?” she said, cocking her head.

“Eh?”

“Did you march to that woman's house that day and earn that money for yourself?”

Neni nodded.

“Is that money Jende's money or both of your money?”

“It's both—”

“Then tell your husband it's your money, too, and you want to use it to stay!”

“What kind of talk is that?” Neni said. “You think I'm an American woman? I cannot just tell my husband how I want something to be.”

“Why not?”

“You don't know what kind of man Jende is. He's a good man, but he's still a man.”

“So you're going to go back to Cameroon?”

“I don't want to go!”

“Then don't go! Tell him you want to stay in America and keep trying. There are one million things you have to do before you start thinking about packing your things—you get your papers first and you go from there. I've told you if you need to borrow money for your tuition I know people who can help you out. I'll make some calls tomorrow, maybe even tonight I'll start calling people. Just … don't even think about this going home nonsense anymore. Tell Jende you're not going anywhere. That you want to stay here and keep trying!”

Neni looked at Betty and her gap tooth that divided her mouth into two equally beautiful halves. The woman knew all about trying. Thirty-one years in this country and Betty was still trying, and Neni couldn't understand why. Betty had come here as child with her parents and gotten her papers through them. She had been a citizen for over a decade, and yet here she was, in her early forties, working two jobs as a certified nursing assistant at nursing homes, stuck in nursing school. Neni couldn't understand how that was possible. If she were a citizen, she would be a pharmacist in no more than five years. A pharmacist with a nice SUV and a home in Yonkers or Mount Vernon or maybe even New Rochelle.

That evening she sat at the desktop for almost two hours, searching for advice on Google. “How to convince husband.” “How to get what you want.” “Husband wants to move back home.” She found no advice remotely relevant to her situation.

Later, as she stood in front of the mirror staring at her face before applying her exfoliating mask, she promised herself she would fight Jende till the end. She had to.

It wasn't only that she loved New York City and the times it had given her and the times it held in store for her. It wasn't just because she was hopeful that she would one day become a pharmacist, and a successful one at that. It was hardly only about what she would leave behind, things she could never find in her hometown, things like horse-drawn carriages on city streets, and gigantic lighted Christmas trees in squares and plazas, and pretty parks where musicians played for free beside polychromatic foliage. It wasn't merely for what she was leaving behind. No. It was mostly for what her children would be deprived of, and for where they would all be returning to: Limbe. It was for the boundless opportunities they would be denied, the kind of future she was almost denied in her father's house. She was going to fight for her children, and for herself, because no one journeyed far away from home to return without a fortune amassed or dream achieved. She needed to fight so she and her children would never become objects of ridicule the way she'd been when she'd gotten pregnant and dropped out of school.

“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.”