Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

“Oh my God!” the young woman said. “You must be Neni!”

Neni nodded, broadening her smile.

“I’m Jenny. Winston’s girlfriend.”

Winston’s girlfriend?

“So glad to finally meet you!” Jenny said, giving Neni a hug.

“I am glad to meet you, too,” Neni said, struggling to enunciate and scream above the hip-hop music blasting into her ears from every direction.

“Are you having a good time?” Jenny shouted, moving closer to her. “Would you like a drink?”

Neni shook her head.

“I’m so glad we finally get to meet!” Jenny shouted again. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Thank you. I am happy to meet you, too.”

“I’ve been telling Winston that we need to hang out, all four of us, but it’s just so tough with everyone’s work schedules. But we’ve got to. Is Jende here?”

Neni nodded and smiled, still thinking: Winston’s girlfriend?

“How do you like New York? Winston tells me you’ve been here for only two years.”

“I love it. Very much. I am very happy to be here.”

“I’d love to go to Cameroon!” Jenny said, smiling and looking upward dreamingly. “Winston doesn’t seem too eager to visit anytime soon but I’m pushing for us to go sometime next year.”

Neni looked at Jenny, grinning and sipping her cocktail, and couldn’t decide whether to laugh or feel sorry for her. What was she thinking? Winston was never going to marry a white woman. He didn’t even bother introducing the ones he slept with to his family, because he changed them the way someone changes underwear. All Neni and Jende knew right now was that he was playing one of the other associates at the firm: Apparently this was her. The poor thing. The way her eyes lit up every time she said his name. She looked no older than twenty-six, but not too young to have noticed that successful Cameroonian men like Winston hardly ever married non-Cameroonian women. They enjoyed every type for as long as they could: white, Filipino, Mexican, Iranian, Chinese, any woman of any color who availed herself out of infatuation or undeniable love or mere curiosity. But when the time came to choose a wife, how many of them married one of those women? Too few. And Winston would never be one of those few. If he couldn’t find a good Bakweri girl, he would marry one from another tribe in the Southwest or Northwest regions (but definitely not from the Bangwa tribe, since his mother hated Bangwas, for whatever reason). He would marry his kind because a man like him needed a woman who understood his heart, shared his values and interests, knew how to give him the things he needed, accepted that his children must be raised in the same manner in which his parents had raised him, and only a woman from his homeland could do that.

“There you are,” someone said from behind them. Neni turned around to see another young woman with a cocktail glass in hand, probably Jenny’s friend. Jenny turned around, too, hugged the other woman, and introduced Neni as Winston’s cousin who just came from Africa. Just came from Africa? Neni thought. She didn’t just come from Africa. She considered correcting Jenny, but, not knowing if it would be polite to do so, instead forced out a smile at Jenny’s friend, who nodded but otherwise barely acknowledged her presence. The friend began telling Jenny a story, and the women veered into another conversation, leaving Neni a smiling spectator to their camaraderie. After ten minutes, unsure of what to do besides continue trying to prove to herself that she could be at ease in a bar, she hurriedly excused herself; the two women hardly paused to say goodbye. She pushed through the crowd, which seemed to have tripled since she and Jende arrived, and inadvertently hit a young man’s drink with her elbow. The drink did not spill, but the young man gave her a look that she was certain meant: What the hell are you doing here, you stupid African woman?

Jende was standing alone where she’d last seen him, sipping a drink through a straw and slowly moving to the hip-hop music in his bright yellow Madiba shirt.

“I’m ready to go,” she said in his ear.

“Why?” he said. “I was wondering where you were. Did you have anything to drink?”

“I don’t want a drink.”

“Is it your nausea? Won’t some Coca-Cola help—?”

“Did I complain to you about my nausea? Let’s go.”

“Ah, Neni. Just thirty more minutes. I’ve only had two Sex on the Beach.”

“Then stay. I’m leaving.”

“You won’t even talk to Winston and wish him happy birthday?”

“I’ll call him tomorrow.”

Outside on Fifty-eighth Street, the air was cool and refreshing, the noise level bearable except for two ambulances rushing to Roosevelt Hospital a block away. Neni turned her face away from the hospital in an attempt to block out the memory of what had happened there a year ago, the afternoon she had rushed with her friend Betty to Labor and Delivery because Betty was cramping heavily. Betty had received an emergency C-section only for the baby to come out stillborn.

“Let’s go sit at Columbus Circle for a little bit,” Jende said, and she quickly agreed, banishing from her mind the image of the lifeless newborn she wished she hadn’t seen. Jende began talking about how great a time he’d had talking to one of Winston’s friends, but she was barely listening. She was noticing something for the first time: She was realizing that most people on the street were walking with someone who looked like them. On both sides of the street, going east and west, she saw people walking with their kind: a white man holding hands with a white woman; a black teenager giggling with other black (or Latino) teenagers; a white mother pushing a stroller alongside another white mother; a black woman chatting with a black woman. She saw a quartet of Asian men in tuxedos, and a group of friends who had different skin colors but were dressed in similar elegant chic styles. Most people were sticking to their own kind. Even in New York City, even in a place of many nations and cultures, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, preferred their kind when it came to those they kept closest. And why shouldn’t they? It was far easier to do so than to spend one’s limited energy trying to blend into a world one was never meant to be a part of. That was what made New York so wonderful: It had a world for everyone. She had her world in Harlem and never again would she try to wriggle her way into a world in midtown, not even for just an hour.

When they got to Columbus Circle, she called Fatou, who told her that Liomi was fine, they could stay out for however long they wanted. So they sat beneath the statue of Christopher Columbus, side by side, hand in hand, surrounded by skateboarders and young lovers and homeless people, looking north as cars came around the circle and went up Central Park West. The spring air was crisper than she would have wished, but not crisp enough to send her rushing into the subway. And even if it had been, she would have stayed in the circle, because it wasn’t every night she got a chance to enjoy the sounds of the city and its millions of lights blinking around her, reminding her that she was still living in her dream. Bubakar had assured them that they could be in the country for many years, which meant they could be in the city for many years. A massive smile involuntarily appeared on her face at the thought, and she moved closer to Jende and leaned against him.

“This is the best place in the whole city,” he said to her. She did not ask why he thought so, because she knew why.

In his first days in America, it was here he came every night to take in the city. It was here he often sat to call her when he got so lonely and homesick that the only balm that worked was the sound of her voice. During those calls, he would ask her how Liomi was doing, what she was wearing, what her plans for the weekend were, and she would tell him everything, leaving him even more wistful for the beauty of her smile, the hearth in his mother’s kitchen, the light breeze at Down Beach, the tightness of Liomi’s hugs, the coarse jokes and laughter of his friends as they drank Guinness at a drinking spot; leaving him craving everything he wished he hadn’t left behind. During those times, he told her, he often wondered if leaving home in search of something as fleeting as fortune was ever worthwhile.