Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

“I hope you and Mr. Edwards are going to solve everything soon, madam.”

“He thinks … he thinks he has the right,” Cindy whimpered, slightly above a whisper. “Everyone … they all think they’ve got the right to treat me as they wish.”

Neni nodded, struggling to ignore the smell of alcohol spilling out of Cindy’s mouth alongside her words. Her throat sounded parched, and her words stumbled in a slur, evidence to Neni that the madam had drunk more glasses of wine than she could handle.

“Can I get you some water, madam?” Neni asked.

Cindy shook her head and asked for a glass of wine, which Neni quickly got and returned to her position on the floor.

The madam took a sip, crying as she swallowed. “Every single person … they believe they can treat me … however … anyhow …”

Neni nodded again, the box of tissues in her hands.

“First it was my father … he thought he had the right, you know?” Cindy said. “Drag my mother into that abandoned house … force her … do it to her by force … don’t give a shit about … not care for a second about what would happen to the child …”

She sniffled, took another sip of the wine, and wept.

“And the government … our government,” she moaned, slurring, tears running down her cheeks, snot running down her nose. “They had the right, too. Force my mother to carry the child of a stranger. Force her to give birth to the child because … because … I don’t know why!”

Neni’s throat tightened at the sight of the devastated woman in pearls, confused, though, as she was about which child Cindy was talking about.

“I hated her … but can you blame her? She thought she had the right, too … it was her right. To beat me, and curse at me, and call me fat … because every time she looked at me, she was reminded … I was a reminder … of what he’d done to her … But why? What did I do? It’s never the child’s fault … never the fault of an innocent …”

Neni looked away as Cindy picked up the wineglass from the floor and took a long sip. The realization of who the child was had come on so suddenly that her eyebrows had risen, and her eyes had widened, and she’d had to restrain herself from cupping her mouth. She kept her face turned away, hoping Cindy hadn’t seen the look on it, and not wanting to stare too hard at the wet pitiful mess the madam had become. What was she supposed to say to Cindy now? She couldn’t give her a hug to express what she wanted to say without words, so she had to say something. But what could she say to a drunken confession about the unbearable yoke of a life conceived in violence? What could she say about things she’d never pondered?

“And now Clark has the right, too,” Cindy went on, looking blankly ahead as her voice quivered. “He’s got every … single right to love me far less than he loves his work. He’s got every right to toss me aside, pick me up when it suits him … And Vince …” She pulled out another tissue, pressed her face into it, and began bawling hysterically. “Now Vince, too! He thinks … he’s got every right to abandon me even … though I’ve been a perfectly good mother … even though I never abandoned my mother … even after all those years of …”

Her shoulders shook and Neni, uncertain still of the best thing to do, put the tissue box on the floor and warily moved a hand to Cindy’s right shoulder and began rubbing it. Cindy’s cries grew louder as Neni rubbed gently, simultaneously thinking about what else she could do to help the madam. She had to call someone to come over as soon as possible. But who? Not Clark. Not Vince. Maybe Cheri or June — their numbers were on the refrigerator. But what would she give as a reason for calling at midnight? Tell them that a highly intoxicated Cindy couldn’t stop crying? Tell them she didn’t know what to say or do to make Cindy feel better?

“I am so sorry, madam,” Neni whispered. “I am so sorry for what your father did.”

Cindy continued crying, her shoulders quaking in accordance with her sounds.

“Did the police catch him, madam?”

Cindy shook her head.

“Maybe … maybe you could search for him, madam? Maybe if—”

“I walk down the street … every day I’m looking … looking at any man who looks like me … I’m wondering, could that be him? My mother told me I must have his hideous face because I don’t look anything like her … I walk around with this face, the face of a monster … and no one knows. No one knows how much it hurts! Vince has no idea how much it hurts!”

“I am sorry about Vince, too, madam,” Neni said.

Cindy picked up her glass of wine and gulped down the remainder. Neni continued rubbing her shoulder as they sat in silence, the only noise in the kitchen the sound of high-end electrical appliances. The kitchen floor had grown warm underneath them.

“I don’t want him to move to India,” Cindy said, a firmness slowly appearing in her voice. “But supporting him, that’s not what’s so hard for me to do. I can muster the strength to support my child even if it’s not what I want. But his hurtfulness to me … how he thinks he’s suddenly so righteous because he’s found spirituality, that’s what hurts me the most. I said to him, if what you care about is people, changing the world, what about getting a job at the Lehman Brothers Foundation? Clark could help him do that, but oh, no, what a ridiculous idea! He asked me, do I really think the goal of the Lehman Foundation is to make the world a better place? Do I know what Lehman Brothers does? Do I care about how corporations are destroying the world? I’ve tried to understand this anger … I can’t. What does he have against being wealthy? Why should good hardworking people feel bad about their money just because other people don’t have as much money? Once we were friends … my son and I, we were good friends. He found the Truth, and now I am naïve, closed-minded, materialistic, lost. The only way I can see the light is to first lose my ego.”

Cindy sighed and tilted her head as if trying to stretch out an intolerable pain in her neck. “I told him, fine, go … go search for this Truth and Oneness … I want you to be happy. But instead of going all the way to India what about a retreat center somewhere in America … maybe someplace I heard about in New Mexico? Surely the Truth has to be present in America, too? Maybe go to a grad school somewhere near a retreat center? I just … I can’t bear the thought of him being so far away. If anything happened to him, it would … it would kill me.”

SHE RETURNED FROM THE HAMPTONS WITH FAR MORE DESIGNER CLOTHES than she’d ever imagined having; shoes and accessories, too. Cindy had told her to take as much as she wanted from the storage space in the attic because whatever she didn’t take was going to charity, so Neni had cheerfully obliged, taking an old Louis Vuitton carry-on suitcase with a broken zipper, jam-packing it like roasted peanuts in a liquor bottle, and tying it shut with one of her blouses. Walking through Penn Station and the streets of Harlem, she had needed to stop at least a dozen times to rest from the weight of the Louis Vuitton on her right shoulder, the big brown paper bag full of Liomi’s clothes and toys on her left shoulder, her rolling luggage in one hand, and more clothes and toys for Liomi in the other.

“Did you have to suffer like that just for some free clothes?” Jende asked later that night, laughing, after she told him how difficult it had been managing all the bags while the baby kicked nonstop.

“What do you mean, ‘just for some free clothes’?” she said. “This is not just any free clothes, bébé. You know how much these things cost?”