Chimamanda Adichi - The Thing Around Your Neck

I stared at him in silence, shredding the coupons into smaller and smaller bits; broken-up pictures of detergents and meat packs and paper towels fell to the floor.

“Besides, with the way things are messed up back home, what would you have done?” he asked. “Aren’t people with master’s degrees roaming the streets, jobless?” His voice was flat.

“Why did you marry me?” I asked.

“I wanted a Nigerian wife and my mother said you were a good girl, quiet. She said you might even be a virgin.” He smiled. He looked even more tired when he smiled. “I probably should tell her how wrong she was.”

I threw more coupons on the floor, clasped my hands together, and dug my nails into my skin.

“I was happy when I saw your picture,” he said, smacking his lips. “You were light-skinned. I had to think about my children’s looks. Light-skinned blacks fare better in America.”

I watched him eat the rest of the batter-covered chicken, and I noticed that he did not finish chewing before he took a sip of water.

That evening, while he showered, I put only the clothes he hadn’t bought me, two embroidered boubous and one caftan, all Aunty Ada’s cast-offs, in the plastic suitcase I had brought from Nigeria and went to Nia’s apartment.

Nia made me tea, with milk and sugar, and sat with me at her round dining table that had three tall stools around it.

“If you want to call your family back home, you can call them from here. Stay as long as you want; I’ll get on a payment plan with Bell Atlantic.”

“There’s nobody to talk to at home,” I said, staring at the pear-shaped face of the sculpture on the wooden shelf. It’s hollow eyes stared back at me.

“How about your aunt?” Nia asked.

I shook my head. You left your husband? Aunty Ada would shriek. Are you mad? Does one throw away a guinea fowl’s egg? Do you know how many women would offer both eyes for a doctor in America? For any husband at all? And Uncle Ike would bellow about my ingratitude, my stupidity, his fist and face tightening, before dropping the phone.

“He should have told you about the marriage, but it wasn’t a real marriage, Chinaza,” Nia said. “I read a book that says we don’t fall in love, we climb up to love. Maybe if you gave it time—”

“It’s not about that.”

“I know,” Nia said with a sigh. “Just trying to be fucking positive here. Was there someone back home?”

“There was once, but he was too young and he had no money.”

“Sounds really fucked-up.”

I stirred my tea although it did not need stirring. “I wonder why my husband had to find a wife in Nigeria.”

“You never say his name, you never say Dave. Is that a cultural thing?”

“No.” I looked down at the table mat made with waterproof fabric. I wanted to say that it was because I didn’t know his name, because I didn’t know him.

“Did you ever meet the woman he married? Or did you know any of his girlfriends?” I asked.

Nia looked away. The kind of dramatic turning of head that speaks, that intends to speak, volumes. The silence stretched out between us.

“Nia?” I asked finally.

“I fucked him, almost two years ago, when he first moved in. I fucked him and after a week it was over. We never dated. I never saw him date anybody.”

“Oh,” I said, and sipped my tea with milk and sugar.

“I had to be honest with you, get everything out.”

“Yes,” I said. I stood up to look out of the window. The world outside seemed mummified into a sheet of dead whiteness. The sidewalks had piles of snow the height of a six-yearold child.

“You can wait until you get your papers and then leave,” Nia said. “You can apply for benefits while you get your shit together, and then you’ll get a job and find a place and support yourself and start afresh. This is the U.S. of fucking A., for God’s sake.”

Nia came and stood beside me, by the window. She was right, I could not leave yet. I went back across the hall the next evening. I rang the doorbell and he opened the door, stood aside, and let me pass.

It was the last summer you spent in Nigeria, the summer before your parents’ divorce, before your mother swore you would never again set foot in Nigeria to see your father’s family, especially Grandmama. You remember the heat of that summer clearly, even now, eighteen years later — the way Grandmama’s yard felt moistly warm, a yard with so many trees that the telephone wire was tangled in leaves and different branches touched one another and sometimes mangoes appeared on cashew trees and guavas on mango trees. The thick mat of decaying leaves was soggy under your bare feet. In the afternoons, yellow-bellied bees buzzed around your head and your brother Nonso’s and cousin Dozie’s heads, and in the evenings Grandmama let only your brother Nonso climb the trees to shake a loaded branch, although you were a better climber than he was. Fruits would rain down, avocados and cashews and guavas, and you and your cousin Dozie would fill old buckets with them.

It was the summer Grandmama taught Nonso how to pluck the coconuts. The coconut trees were hard to climb, so limb-free and tall, and Grandmama gave Nonso a long stick and showed him how to nudge the padded pods down. She didn’t show you, because she said girls never plucked coconuts. Grandmama cracked the coconuts against a stone, carefully, so the watery milk stayed in the lower piece, a jagged cup. Everybody got a sip of the wind-cooled milk, even the children from down the street who came to play, and Grandmama presided over the sipping ritual to make sure Nonso went first.

It was the summer you asked Grandmama why Nonso sipped first even though Dozie was thirteen, a year older than Nonso, and Grandmama said Nonso was her son’s only son, the one who would carry on the Nnabuisi name, while Dozie was only a nwadiana, her daughter’s son. It was the summer you found the molt of a snake on the lawn, unbroken and sheer like see-through stockings, and Grandmama told you the snake was called the echi eteka, “Tomorrow Is Too Far.” One bite, she said, and it’s over in ten minutes.

It was not the summer you fell in love with your cousin Dozie because that happened a few summers before, when he was ten and you were seven and you both wiggled into the tiny space behind Grandmama’s garage and he tried to fit what you both called his “banana” into what you both called your “tomato” but neither of you was sure which was the right hole. It was, however, the summer you got lice, and you and your cousin Dozie dug through your thick hair to find the tiny black insects and squash them against your fingernails and laugh at the tart sound of their blood-filled bellies bursting; the summer that your hate for your brother Nonso grew so much you felt it squeezing your nostrils and your love for your cousin Dozie ballooned and wrapped around your skin.

It was the summer you watched a mango tree crack into two near-perfect halves during a thunderstorm, when the lightning cut fiery lines through the sky.

It was the summer Nonso died.

Grandmama did not call it summer. Nobody did in Nigeria. It was August, nestled between the rainy season and the harmattan season. It could pour all day, silver rain splashing onto the verandah where you and Nonso and Dozie slapped away mosquitoes and ate roast corn; or the sun would be blinding and you would float in the water tank Grandmama had sawed in half, a makeshift pool. The day Nonso died was mild; there was drizzle in the morning, lukewarm sun in the afternoon, and, in the evening, Nonso’s death. Grandmama screamed at him — at his limp body — saying i laputago m, that he had betrayed her, asking him who would carry on the Nnabuisi name now, who would protect the family lineage.