Chimamanda Adichi - The Thing Around Your Neck

“Coconut rice,” I said.

“A recipe from your country?”

“Yes.”

“It smells really good. The problem with us here is we have no culture, no culture at all.” She turned to my new husband, as if she wanted him to agree with her, but he simply smiled. “Would you come take a look at my air conditioner, Dave?” She asked. “It’s acting up again and it’s so hot today.”

“Sure,” my new husband said.

Before they left, Shirley waved at me and said, “Smells really good,” and I wanted to invite her to have some rice. My new husband came back half an hour later and ate the fragrant meal I placed before him, even smacking his lips like Uncle Ike sometimes did to show Aunty Ada how pleased he was with her cooking. But the next day, he came back with a Good Housekeeping All-American Cookbook , thick as a Bible.

“I don’t want us to be known as the people who fill the building with smells of foreign food,” he said.

I took the cookbook, ran my hand over the cover, over the picture of something that looked like a flower but was probably food.

“I know you’ll soon master how to cook American food,” he said, gently pulling me close. That night, I thought of the cookbook as he lay heavily on top of me, grunting and rasping. Another thing the arrangers of marriage did not tell you — the struggle to brown beef in oil and dredge skinless chicken in flour. I had always cooked beef in its own juices. Chicken I had always poached with its skin intact. In the following days, I was pleased that my husband left for work at six in the morning and did not come back until eight in the evening so that I had time to throw away pieces of half-cooked, clammy chicken and start again.

The first time I saw Nia, who lived in 2D, I thought she was the kind of woman Aunty Ada would disapprove of. Aunty Ada would call her an ashawo , because of the see-through top she wore so that her bra, a mismatched shade, glared through. Or Aunty Ada would base her prostitute judgment on Nia’s lipstick, a shimmery orange, and the eye shadow — similar to the shade of the lipstick — that clung to her heavy lids.

“Hi,” she said when I went down to get the mail. “You’re Dave’s new wife. I’ve been meaning to come over and meet you. I’m Nia.”

“Thanks. I’m Chinaza… Agatha.”

Nia was watching me carefully. “What was the first thing you said?”

“My Nigerian name.”

“It’s an Igbo name, isn’t it?” She pronounced it “E-boo.”

“Yes.”

“What does it mean?”

“God answers prayers.”

“It’s really pretty. You know, Nia is a Swahili name. I changed my name when I was eighteen. I spent three years in Tanzania. It was fucking amazing.”

“Oh,” I said and shook my head; she, a black American, had chosen an African name, while my husband made me change mine to an English one.

“You must be bored to death in that apartment; I know Dave gets back pretty late,” she said. “Come have a Coke with me.”

I hesitated, but Nia was already walking to the stairs. I followed her. Her living room had a spare elegance: a red sofa, a slender potted plant, a huge wooden mask hanging on the wall. She gave me a Diet Coke served in a tall glass with ice, asked how I was adjusting to life in America, offered to show me around Brooklyn.

“It would have to be a Monday, though,” she said. “I don’t work Mondays.”

“What do you do?”

“I own a hair salon.”

“Your hair is beautiful,” I said, and she touched it and said, “Oh, this,” as if she did not think anything of it. It was not just her hair, held up on top of her head in a natural Afro puff, that I found beautiful, though, it was her skin the color of roasted groundnuts, her mysterious and heavy-lidded eyes, her curved hips. She played her music a little too loud, so we had to raise our voices as we spoke.

“You know, my sister’s a manager at Macy’s,” she said. “They’re hiring entry-level salespeople in the women’s department, so if you’re interested I can put in a word for you and you’re pretty much hired. She owes me one.”

Something leaped inside me at the thought, the sudden and new thought, of earning what would be mine. Mine.

“I don’t have my work permit yet,” I said.

“But Dave has filed for you?”

“Yes.”

“It shouldn’t take long; at least you should have it before winter. I have a friend from Haiti who just got hers. So let me know as soon as you do.”

“Thank you.” I wanted to hug Nia. “Thank you.”

That evening I told my new husband about Nia. His eyes were sunken in with fatigue, after so many hours at work, and he said, “Nia?” as though he did not know who I meant, before he added, “She’s okay, but be careful because she can be a bad influence.”

Nia began stopping by to see me after work, drinking from a can of diet soda she brought with her and watching me cook. I turned the air conditioner off and opened the window to let in the hot air, so that she could smoke. She talked about the women at her hair salon and the men she went out with. She sprinkled her everyday conversation with words like the noun “clitoris” and the verb “fuck.” I liked to listen to her. I liked the way she smiled to show a tooth that was chipped neatly, a perfect triangle missing at the edge. She always left before my new husband came home.

Winter sneaked up on me. One morning I stepped out of the apartment building and gasped. It was as though God was shredding tufts of white tissue and flinging them down. I stood staring at my first snow, at the swirling flakes, for a long, long time before turning to go back into the apartment. I scrubbed the kitchen floor again, cut out more coupons from the Key Food catalog that came in the mail, and then sat by the window, watching God’s shredding become frenzied. Winter had come and I was still unemployed. When my husband came home in the evening, I placed his french fries and fried chicken before him and said, “I thought I would have my work permit by now.”

He ate a few pieces of oily-fried potatoes before responding. We spoke only English now; he did not know that I spoke Igbo to myself while I cooked, that I had taught Nia how to say “I’m hungry” and “See you tomorrow” in Igbo.

“The American woman I married to get a green card is making trouble,” he said, and slowly tore a piece of chicken in two. The area under his eyes was puffy. “Our divorce was almost final, but not completely, before I married you in Nigeria. Just a minor thing, but she found out about it and now she’s threatening to report me to Immigration. She wants more money.”

“You were married before?” I laced my fingers together because they had started to shake.

“Would you pass that, please?” he asked, pointing to the lemonade I had made earlier.

“The jug?”

“Pitcher. Americans say pitcher, not jug.”

I pushed the jug (pitcher) across. The pounding in my head was loud, filling my ears with a fierce liquid. “You were married before?”

“It was just on paper. A lot of our people do that here. It’s business, you pay the woman and both of you do paperwork together but sometimes it goes wrong and either she refuses to divorce you or she decides to blackmail you.”

I pulled the pile of coupons toward me and started to rip them in two, one after the other. “Ofodile, you should have let me know this before now.”

He shrugged. “I was going to tell you.”

“I deserved to know before we got married.” I sank down on the chair opposite him, slowly, as if the chair would crack if I didn’t.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference. Your uncle and aunt had decided. Were you going to say no to people who have taken care of you since your parents died?”