Chimamanda Adichi - The Thing Around Your Neck

“Cookies. Americans call them cookies,” he said.

I reached out for the biscuits (cookies).

“Get the store brand. They’re cheaper, but still the same thing,” he said, pointing at a white packet.

“Okay,” I said. I no longer wanted the biscuits, but I put the store brand in the cart and stared at the blue packet on the shelf, at the familiar grain-embossed Burton’s logo, until we left the aisle.

“When I become an Attending, we will stop buying store brands, but for now we have to; these things may seem cheap but they add up,” he said.

“When you become a Consultant?”

“Yes, but it’s called an Attending here, an Attending Physician.”

The arrangers of marriage only told you that doctors made a lot of money in America. They did not add that before doctors started to make a lot of money, they had to do an internship and a residency program, which my new husband had not completed. My new husband had told me this during our short in-flight conversation, right after we took off from Lagos, before he fell asleep.

“Interns are paid twenty-eight thousand a year but work about eighty hours a week. It’s like three dollars an hour,” he had said. “Can you believe it? Three dollars an hour!”

I did not know if three dollars an hour was very good or very bad — I was leaning toward very good — until he added that even high school students working part-time made much more.

“Also when I become an Attending, we will not live in a neighborhood like this,” my new husband said. He stopped to let a woman with her child tucked into her shopping cart pass by. “See how they have bars so you can’t take the shopping carts out? In the good neighborhoods, they don’t have them. You can take your shopping cart all the way to your car.”

“Oh,” I said. What did it matter that you could or could not take the carts out? The point was, there were carts.

“Look at the people who shop here; they are the ones who immigrate and continue to act as if they are back in their countries.” He gestured, dismissively, toward a woman and her two children, who were speaking Spanish. “They will never move forward unless they adapt to America. They will always be doomed to supermarkets like this.”

I murmured something to show I was listening. I thought about the open market in Enugu, the traders who sweet-talked you into stopping at their zinc-covered sheds, who were prepared to bargain all day to add one single kobo to the price. They wrapped what you bought in plastic bags when they had them, and when they did not have them, they laughed and offered you worn newspapers.

My new husband took me to the mall; he wanted to show me as much as he could before he started work on Monday. His car rattled as he drove, as though there were many parts that had come loose — a sound similar to shaking a tin full of nails. It stalled at a traffic light and he turned the key a few times before it started.

“I’ll buy a new car after my residency,” he said.

Inside the mall, the floors gleamed, smooth as ice cubes, and the high-as-the-sky ceiling blinked with tiny ethereal lights. I felt as though I were in a different physical world, on another planet. The people who pushed against us, even the black ones, wore the mark of foreignness, otherness, on their faces.

“We’ll get pizza first,” he said. “It’s one thing you have to like in America.”

We walked up to the pizza stand, to the man wearing a nose ring and a tall white hat.

“Two pepperoni and sausage. Is your combo deal better?” my new husband asked. He sounded different when he spoke to Americans: his r was overpronounced and his t was under-pronounced. And he smiled, the eager smile of a person who wanted to be liked.

We ate the pizza sitting at a small round table in what he called a “food court.” A sea of people sitting around circular tables, hunched over paper plates of greasy food. Uncle Ike would be horrified at the thought of eating here; he was a titled man and did not even eat at weddings unless he was served in a private room. There was something humiliatingly public, something lacking in dignity, about this place, this open space of too many tables and too much food.

“Do you like the pizza?” my new husband asked. His paper plate was empty.

“The tomatoes are not cooked well.”

“We overcook food back home and that is why we lose all the nutrients. Americans cook things right. See how healthy they all look?”

I nodded, looking around. At the next table, a black woman with a body as wide as a pillow held sideways smiled at me. I smiled back and took another pizza bite, tightening my stomach so it would not eject anything.

We went into Macy’s afterwards. My new husband led the way toward a sliding staircase; its movement was rubbery-smooth and I knew I would fall down the moment I stepped on it.

“ Biko, don’t they have a lift instead?” I asked. At least I had once ridden in the creaky one in the local government office, the one that quivered for a full minute before the doors rolled open.

“Speak English. There are people behind you,” he whispered, pulling me away, toward a glass counter full of twinkling jewelry. “It’s an elevator, not a lift. Americans say elevator.”

“Okay.”

He led me to the lift (elevator) and we went up to a section lined with rows of weighty-looking coats. He bought me a coat the color of a gloomy day’s sky, puffy with what felt like foam inside its lining. The coat looked big enough for two of me to snugly fit into it.

“Winter is coming,” he said. “It is like being inside a freezer, so you need a warm coat.”

“Thank you.”

“Always best to shop when there is a sale. Sometimes you get the same thing for less than half the price. It’s one of the wonders of America.”

“ Ezi okwu? ” I said, then hastily added, “Really?”

“Let’s take a walk around the mall. There are some other wonders of America here.”

We walked, looking at stores that sold clothes and tools and plates and books and phones, until the bottoms of my feet ached.

Before we left, he led the way to McDonald’s. The restaurant was nestled near the rear of the mall; a yellow and red M the size of a car stood at its entrance. My husband did not look at the menu board that hovered overhead as he ordered two large Number 2 meals.

“We could go home so I can cook,” I said. “Don’t let your husband eat out too much,” Aunty Ada had said, “or it will push him into the arms of a woman who cooks. Always guard your husband like a guinea fowl’s egg.”

“I like to eat this once in a while,” he said. He held the hamburger with both hands and chewed with a concentration that furrowed his eyebrows, tightened his jaw, and made him look even more unfamiliar.

I made coconut rice on Monday, to make up for the eating out. I wanted to make pepper soup, too, the kind Aunty Ada said softened a man’s heart. But I needed the uziza that the customs officer had seized; pepper soup was just not pepper soup without it. I bought a coconut in the Jamaican store down the street and spent an hour cutting it into tiny bits because there was no grater, and then soaked it in hot water to extract the juice. I had just finished cooking when he came home. He wore what looked like a uniform, a girlish-looking blue top tucked into a pair of blue trousers that was tied at the waist.

“Nno,” I said. “Did you work well?”

“You have to speak English at home, too, baby. So you can get used to it.” He brushed his lips against my cheek just as the doorbell rang. It was Shirley, her body wrapped in the same pink robe. She twirled the belt at her waist.

“That smell,” she said, in her phlegm-filled voice. “It’s everywhere, all over the building. What are you cooking?”