Chimamanda Adichi - The Thing Around Your Neck

“Good morning, baby,” he said, coming back into the room. He handed me the phone. “We have to call your uncle and aunt to tell them we arrived safely. Just for a few minutes; it costs almost a dollar a minute to Nigeria. Dial 011 and then 234 before the number.”

“ Ezi okwu? All that?”

“Yes. International dialing code first and then Nigeria’s country code.”

“Oh,” I said. I punched in the fourteen numbers. The stickiness between my legs itched.

The phone line crackled with static, reaching out across the Atlantic. I knew Uncle Ike and Aunty Ada would sound warm, they would ask what I had eaten, what the weather in America was like. But none of my responses would register; they would ask just to ask. Uncle Ike would probably smile into the phone, the same kind of smile that had loosened his face when he told me that the perfect husband had been found for me. The same smile I had last seen on him months before when the Super Eagles won the soccer gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics.

“A doctor in America,” he had said, beaming. “What could be better? Ofodile’s mother was looking for a wife for him, she was very concerned that he would marry an American. He hadn’t been home in eleven years. I gave her a photo of you. I did not hear from her for a while and I thought they had found someone. But …” Uncle Ike let his voice trail away, let his beaming get wider.

“Yes, Uncle.”

“He will be home in early June,” Aunty Ada had said. “You will have plenty of time to get to know each other before the wedding.”

“Yes, Aunty.” “Plenty of time” was two weeks.

“What have we not done for you? We raise you as our own and then we find you an ezigbo di ! A doctor in America! It is like we won a lottery for you!” Aunty Ada said. She had a few strands of hair growing on her chin and she tugged at one of them as she spoke.

I had thanked them both for everything — finding me a husband, taking me into their home, buying me a new pair of shoes every two years. It was the only way to avoid being called ungrateful. I did not remind them that I wanted to take the JAMB exam again and try for the university, that while going to secondary school I had sold more bread in Aunty Ada’s bakery than all the other bakeries in Enugu sold, that the furniture and floors in the house shone because of me.

“Did you get through?” my new husband asked.

“It’s engaged,” I said. I looked away so that he would not see the relief on my face.

“Busy. Americans say busy, not engaged,” he said. “We’ll try later. Let’s have breakfast.”

For breakfast, he defrosted pancakes from a bright-yellow bag. I watched what buttons he pressed on the white micro wave, carefully memorizing them.

“Boil some water for tea,” he said

“Is there some dried milk?” I asked, taking the kettle to the sink. Rust clung to the sides of the sink like peeling brown paint.

“Americans don’t drink their tea with milk and sugar.”

“ Ezi okwu ? Don’t you drink yours with milk and sugar?”

“No, I got used to the way things are done here a long time ago. You will too, baby.”

I sat before my limp pancakes — they were so much thinner than the chewy slabs I made at home — and bland tea that I feared would not get past my throat. The doorbell rang and he got up. He walked with his hands swinging to his back; I had not really noticed that before, I had not had time to notice.

“I heard you come in last night.” The voice at the door was American, the words flowed fast, ran into each other. Supri-supri, Aunty Ify called it, fast-fast. “When you come back to visit, you will be speaking supri-supri like Americans,” she had said.

“Hi, Shirley. Thanks so much for keeping my mail,” he said.

“Not a problem at all. How did your wedding go? Is your wife here?”

“Yes, come and say hello.”

A woman with hair the color of metal came into the living room. Her body was wrapped in a pink robe knotted at the waist. Judging from the lines that ran across her face, she could have been anything from six decades to eight decades old; I had not seen enough white people to correctly gauge their ages.

“I’m Shirley from 3A. Nice to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand. She had the nasal voice of someone battling a cold.

“You are welcome,” I said.

Shirley paused, as though surprised. “Well, I’ll let you get back to breakfast,” she said. “I’ll come down and visit with you when you’ve settled in.”

Shirley shuffled out. My new husband shut the door. One of the dining table legs was shorter than the rest, and so the table rocked, like a seesaw, when he leaned on it and said, “You should say ‘Hi’ to people here, not ‘You’re welcome.’”

“She’s not my age mate.”

“It doesn’t work that way here. Everybody says hi.”

“ O di mma . Okay.”

“I’m not called Ofodile here, by the way. I go by Dave,” he said, looking down at the pile of envelopes Shirley had given him. Many of them had lines of writing on the envelope itself, above the address, as though the sender had remembered to add something only after the envelope was sealed.

“Dave?” I knew he didn’t have an English name. The invitation cards to our wedding had read Ofodile EmekaUdenwa and Chinaza Agatha Okafor .

“The last name I use here is different, too. Americans have a hard time with Udenwa, so I changed it.”

“What is it?” I was still trying to get used to Udenwa, a name I had known only a few weeks.

“It’s Bell.”

“Bell!” I had heard about a Waturuocha that changed to Waturu in America, a Chikelugo that took the more American-friendly Chikel, but from Udenwa to Bell? “That’s not even close to Udenwa,” I said.

He got up. “You don’t understand how it works in this country. If you want to get anywhere you have to be as mainstream as possible. If not, you will be left by the roadside. You have to use your English name here.”

“I never have, my English name is just something on my birth certificate. I’ve been Chinaza Okafor my whole life.”

“You’ll get used to it, baby,” he said, reaching out to caress my cheek. “You’ll see.”

When he filled out a Social Security number application for me the next day, the name he entered in bold letters was AGATHA BELL.

Our neighborhood was called Flatbush, my new husband told me, as we walked, hot and sweaty, down a noisy street that smelled of fish left out too long before refrigeration. He wanted to show me how to do the grocery shopping and how to use the bus.

“Look around, don’t lower your eyes like that. Look around. You get used to things faster that way,” he said.

I turned my head from side to side so he would see that I was following his advice. Dark restaurant windows promised the BEST CARIBBEAN AND AMERICAN FOOD in lopsided print, a car wash across the street advertised $3.50 washes on a chalkboard nestled among Coke cans and bits of paper. The sidewalk was chipped away at the edges, like something nibbled at by mice.

Inside the air-conditioned bus, he showed me where to pour in the coins, how to press the tape on the wall to signal my stop.

“This is not like Nigeria, where you shout out to the conductor,” he said, sneering, as though he was the one who had invented the superior American system.

Inside Key Food, we walked from aisle to aisle slowly. I was wary when he put a beef pack in the cart. I wished I could touch the meat, to examine its redness, as I often did at Ogbete Market, where the butcher held up fresh-cut slabs buzzing with flies.

“Can we buy those biscuits?” I asked. The blue packets of Burton’s Rich Tea were familiar; I did not want to eat biscuits but I wanted something familiar in the cart.