Behold the Dreamers (25 page)

“You must think I'm stupid if you expect me to believe that.”

“Believe it or not, it's the truth, Mrs. Edwards.”

“Blackmailing … blackmailing …” Cindy said, shaking her head and wagging her finger at Neni. “It's a crime … you'll pay for this … I'll make you pay for this …”

For what seemed like a thousand seconds the women stared at each other: brown eyes next to hazel eyes, round cheeks next to hollow cheeks, face of determination next to face of defeat.

Cindy turned her face away first. “What are you going to do with the picture?” she asked, looking at the skyline outside, panic fully taking over her speech for the first time that afternoon.

Neni shrugged. “I don't yet know, madam,” she said, smirking again. “But a person I met, he works for a website that writes news about people in the Hamptons. He told me they are always looking for good pictures of women like you.”

“You filthy bitch!”

Neni grinned. The lie had worked. This was precisely where she wanted Cindy. “I wish you, too, a good day, madam,” she said, picking up her purse. She stood up and straightened her red turtleneck.

“Sit down,” Cindy ordered.

“I'm sorry, madam. I need to go cook dinner for my family.”

“I said sit down!”

Neni sat down.

“How much do you want?”

Neni looked Cindy straight in her eyes, let out a short laugh, and said nothing.

“I said name your price.”

“You should know better than me, madam, how much this kind of thing should cost.”

“Wow,” Cindy said, shaking her head again. “Wow. I'm very disappointed in you, Neni. I'm appalled, and so, so disappointed.”

Neni Jonga would not be fooled again. A courage she never knew she possessed had fully taken root. She shrugged and pulled her purse closer to her chest.

“After all Clark and I have done for you and Jende? This is how you repay us?”

Neni turned her face away and fidgeted as if getting ready to stand up again. Cindy stood up, hurried out of the room, and returned a minute later with a check.

Without looking at the sum on the check, Neni shook her head. “Cash, madam,” she said.

“I don't keep large amounts of cash at home.”

“That's not what I heard, madam. I heard rich people keep a lot of cash in their house, in case something bad happens to the banks.”

“Don't make assumptions about me based on what you've read.”

Neni scoffed and smiled. She was enjoying this more than she'd thought she would. “Then I'll wait for you to go to the bank. Or we can go together.”

She saw Cindy's fist clench and for a second thought the woman was going to break her jawbone, or ask Anna to call 911 again. Instead, Cindy turned around and returned minutes later with a paper bag.

“I'm only giving you this,” Cindy said as she handed over the bag, “because of the goodness of my heart. Because I know how badly you need it, and I wouldn't want your children to suffer because of you and your husband's stupidity. But if I ever see you again, I promise you, you will end up in jail. You can choose to believe it or not, but I'll make sure you go to jail, and I won't give a shit. Now hand me the picture and get the hell out of my house.”

Neni took out the SIM card from her cell phone, handed the phone to Cindy, and walked out of the Edwardses' apartment.

A
FTER
SHE'D
PUT
THE
CHILDREN
TO
BED,
SHE
COUNTED
THE
MONEY
IN
the bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror, and smiled: Nothing like starting the day agonizing over money and ending it triumphant beyond her imagination. She opened the medicine cabinet, took out her red lipstick and applied it, puckered her lips, smiled again, sprayed perfume on her neck, and walked out to the living room, where Jende was watching a Nets game.

“What is this?” he asked, after she placed the brown paper bag next to him on the sofa.

“Guess,” she said.

“You went shopping again, eh?” he said, still watching the Nets about to lose.

She shook her head and sat down next to him. She couldn't stop smiling. At any other time she would have been happy to play a guessing game, but she couldn't hold back the good news today. She leaned close to him and whispered in his ear, “It's money!”

“Eh?”

“I showed Mrs. Edwards the picture. She gave me ten thousand dollars!”

“You did what!”

“Ten thousand dollars,
bébé
!”

She started laughing, tickled by the look of shock on his face; by the way his mouth, nose, and eyes had all opened up in disbelief.

He did not laugh with her. He opened the bag and peeked into it. He looked at her, and the bag, and her again. “What did you do, Neni?” he asked for the second time.

“Ten thousand dollars,
bébé
!” she said for the third time, incredulous still at how much Cindy had believed the picture to be worth.

“Are you crazy?”

“Wait, is that anger on your face?”

She couldn't believe him. She'd imagined his reaction wouldn't be one of pure joy, but she hadn't thought it would be this bad. He was looking at her as if she was a thief, as if she had done something disgraceful when she'd just gotten them ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars they needed and deserved!

“What exactly did you do?” he asked.

She told him what she'd said to Cindy Edwards.

“How dare you!” he said, pushing her hand away from his knee.

“How dare me?”

“Yes, how dare you! What gives you the right to treat her like that? I mean … how could you, Neni? After everything they did for us?”

“What about what we did for them!” she said, grabbing the paper bag and standing up. “Were we not good to them, too? Why is it that they and their problems are more important than us and our problems? I kept her secret, and what does she do for me? She has her husband fire you!”

“You don't know that!”

“You don't know women like her, Jende. You don't know how they think they're better than people like us. How they think they can do anything they want to people like us.”

“Mr. Edwards did what he had to do! I don't like what he did to me but he has every right to do what he needs to do!”

“Oh, so you think I don't have that right, too?”

“That doesn't mean you should have done something like this to her,” he said. “We're not those kind of people! How could you even have gone there without asking me first?”

“Because I know what you would have said!”

“Yes! I would have said it because I want nothing to do with this kind of wickedness.”

“Wickedness, eh?”

“Yes, it's wicked, and I don't like it. No one has any right to be wicked to another person.”

“Oh, so now I'm a wicked person? So you married a wicked woman, didn't you?”

He sighed and turned his face away.

“Just tell me what you think of me, Jende. You think I'm a wicked woman, eh? Just because I do something to help us, you think—”

“You didn't have to do something like this!”

“She thought she could use us, stupid African people who don't know how to stand up for themselves. She thinks we're not as smart as she is; she thinks she can—”

“This has nothing to do with being African!”

“Yes, it does! People with money, they think their money can do anything in this world. They can hire you when they like, fire you when they like, it means nothing to them.”

“What are you talking about? That woman was good to us!”

“So you don't want the money?” she said, shaking the paper bag.

He turned off the TV and went into the bathroom. She heard water splashing and figured he was washing his face—he sometimes did that when he didn't know what else to say.

She sat down on the sofa, livid and humiliated. How could he see her as one of those kinds of people when all she was doing was trying to help their situation? And now she was wicked? She was a bad person for being a good mother and wife?

He returned to the living room and sat down next to her.

She turned away from him.

“I didn't mean to get so angry,” he said, moving closer to her.

“Don't touch me,” she said.

“Let's try and calm down and start the conversation all over again, okay?”

“I said, ‘Don't touch me.' Don't even dare touch me right now.”

He shifted away from her and for a few seconds neither of them spoke.

“I don't like what you did,” he said, calmly.

“If you don't want the money, you don't have to take it!” she said, standing up and jiggling the bag in his face. “I'll open up a bank account and use it for myself only.”

“Please sit down, Neni.”

“Tomorrow morning I'll go to the bank and open a new account and—”

He reached forward and pulled the bag from her hands. She lunged at him to take it back, but he pulled 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.”

W
ITH
HER
GROCERY
BUDGET
ONLY
TWO-THIRDS
OF
WHAT
IT
USED
TO
BE
before Jende stopped working for the Edwardses, shopping at Pathmark became a tedious 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 1000 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 price in New York to be the same as in Limbe, but she found it difficult not 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 products 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.

How much for this bunch plantains? a buyer would ask.

Give me three thousand, my sister, the seller would say.

Three thousand? Why? I give you seven hundred.

No, my sister, seven hundred no correct; I beg give me one thousand eight hundred.

No, I go give you nine fifty. If you no want, I go leave am.

Okay, okay, take am; I di only give you for this price because I don ready for go house.

Eh, see you, cunning man.

No be cunning, my sister, na true. I no go make any profit today, but how man go do?

Ah, Limbe market. She missed the joy of walking away knowing she had negotiated a good deal for a bag of rice. There was no haggling in Pathmark. The owners stated the prices and no one dared challenge them. It was as if they were a supreme deity, which was a pity, because if she could bargain she would find a way to make her new grocery budget work. Her family now had to eat a lot of chicken gizzards and save drumsticks for special occasions. Liomi would soon have to start eating
puff-puff
for breakfast, instead of Honey Nut Cheerios, and Jende would need to start drinking less Mountain Dew and more water. As for herself, she would have to hold on tightly to the memories of the shrimp she'd had in the Hamptons, because until good money started coming in again, there would be no shrimp dinners, not even on Sundays and holidays.

Thinking of shrimp as she walked through the store made her think of Anna and the brunch they had worked together. Cindy had told them that they could take home the leftovers, and Anna had let her take all the food, including the bacon-wrapped shrimp, which she, Jende, and Liomi had rapturously finished off that evening. It was also thanks to Anna that she'd had such a successful experience working for the Edwardses—Anna had called her back every time she'd left a message saying she didn't know how to execute an order Cindy had given. Thinking of all this made Neni wish she and Anna would have become friends, but she knew it was no longer possible—any chance of a friendship blossoming had ended the last time they spoke.

“What you do to Cindy last night?” Anna had said without prelude when she called just before six o'clock the morning after Neni left the Edwards apartment. She appeared to be on the train, on her way to work.

“Anna?” Neni whispered groggily, rising from the bed to go to the living room so as not to awaken her children.

“I say, what you do to Cindy yesterday?” Anna repeated. “I want to know.”

Neni sat on the sofa, her hands on her left breast, which was heavy and painful from too much milk, thanks to Timba starting to sleep through the night at two months old. “I don't understand what you want to know,” she said to Anna.

“I want to know why you come to the house yesterday, what you say to Cindy, why she scream for me to call 911. I try to call you after you leave, but I only get your voice message.”

“I had to get home to my children,” Neni said.

“Okay, you with your children now. So tell me what happen with you and Cindy.”

Neni took a deep breath and shook her head. The audacity of Anna, calling at six in the morning to interrogate her. “You know what, Anna?” she said, looking at the bedroom door to make sure it was closed. “I don't like to say this to people, because I don't like it when other people say it to me, but it is not your business.”

“Yes, it is my business,” Anna quickly replied.

“How is it your business what happens between me and Mrs. Edwards? I have my relationship with her, you have your own relationship—”

“If someone come to this house and do something to any of this people, it concern me. I work for them, I make sure I do everything I can so they happy. You come here last night, you leave, you know what happen after?”

“What?”

“I want to know what you do to her,” Anna said again.

“We had an agreement about something, and I only went to remind her of the agreement.”

“Agreement for what?”

“Anna, please—”

“You leave this house and the woman lock herself in bathroom and cry alone for two hours!” Anna said, her voice rising slightly in the train. “I try to go to her, she shout at me to leave her alone. She say the F-word to me! Over and over she say F to me, F to we all. Leave her alone. What I do? Maybe she thinks what you did to her was me and you who did it together?”

“I don't—”

“I call Stacy, beg her to take Mighty somewhere after hockey so he don't see his mother like this. I don't want him to hear Cindy crying in the bathroom because you do something to her.”

“Please don't make it as if it's my fault, okay?”

“Oh, so it's not your fault?”

“It's not anyone's fault!”

“You know she got problems,” Anna said, each word coming out angrier than the preceding one. “You know how many problems she got—”

“Wait, you think I don't have problems, too? Do you know how many problems I have?”

“So you come yesterday for Cindy to solve your problems? That why I see you smile as you leave? Because you make the woman cry after she solve—”

“I did not come for anyone to solve my problems! If I have things that I'm not happy with, I find a way to make them better. I solve my own problems!”

“You think because—”

“I don't think anything!” Neni said. “If Mrs. Edwards is not happy with her life, let her solve her own problems. I am tired of people wanting me to care about them more than I care about myself and my family.”

“Nobody asks you to not care for yourself!”

“Yes, you and Mrs. Edwards do. That is what you called me this morning to say. To make me feel bad because Mrs. Edwards has big problems and I should worry about her.”

“I only want to know—”

“I'm sorry, Anna, but if Mrs. Edwards wants to change her life then let her go find a way to be happy. And I hope she finds a way to be happy very soon, because I feel really sorry for her.”