Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

Jende laughed her off, saying he didn’t care. Clothes were clothes, he said, no matter how much they cost or whose name was printed on them. But Betty did not laugh her off — Betty understood that there was an undeniable difference between the styles and auras of Gucci and Tommy Hilfiger; unlike Jende, she knew that all labeled clothes were not created equal, even if they were made from the same fabric by the same machine.

“You walk down the street wearing this Valentino blouse!” Betty exclaimed, looking at the label of a white silk blouse when she visited days after Neni’s return.

“Can you imagine?” Neni said.

“But you can’t wear this just to walk down the street.”

“Never in this lifetime. Something like this? I don’t even know where I’ll wear it to. Maybe a wedding. Or maybe I’ll save it and they’ll bury me in it when I die.”

“Then let me wear it for you now, eh?” Betty said, laughing and placing the blouse against her chest. “I’ll rock it with a leather skirt and high-heel boots and then bring it back as soon as I hear you’re dead so you can—”

“I beg, give me back my blouse, crazy woman!” Neni said, laughing and grabbing the blouse from Betty’s hands. She stood in front of the full-length mirror on the bedroom door, put the blouse against her chest, and felt its fine silk and delicate buttons.

“That woman must have really liked you, eh?” Betty said.

“Like me why?”

“To give you all these things.”

Neni shrugged and knelt down next to the Louis Vuitton suitcase to repack the things they’d taken out to admire. “She didn’t like me nothing,” she said as she refolded the dresses and blouses. “I did what she wanted me to do, she paid me with money and clothes.”

“But still …”

“It’s not like she’s ever going to wear them. You should have seen her closets. I never knew anyone can have that many clothes and shoes in one house.”

“I would have taken one or two pairs of shoes.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Neni retorted, scoffing at Betty’s bluff.

“Yes, I would,” Betty insisted, widening her eyes and laughing. “Maybe some Calvin Klein and DKNY jeans, too, if I can force this mountain buttocks into it. How would she know she lost it if she has so many things?”

“She wouldn’t ever know. How can anyone know if one of their fifty pairs of shoes gets lost? And I’m not just saying fifty. I swear to you, Betty, I stood in the shoe closet and counted. Fifty!”

“Plus another fifty or one hundred in her apartment in Manhattan.”

“I’m sure.”

“And she’s still so unhappy,” Betty said with a sigh. “Money truly is nothing.”

“She has her own kind of suffering that we can never understand,” Neni said, rising from the floor to sit next to Betty on the bed. “And she is trying her best to cover it, which is not easy—”

“Your father was a rapist, you don’t know his name, you don’t know his face. What kind of money is going to help you with that kind of problem? You don’t even know if he is black or white or Spanish.”

“Ah, Betty, don’t take it too far. Her father has to be a white man.”

“You’re saying that because you know the man?”

“The woman is a white woman!”

“That’s what you think, eh? I can take you to the Internet right now and show you on Google. All these white people, they all thought they were white, and then one day they find out that someone was black; their father, their grandfather—”

“Ah, whatever. I don’t think something like that is what’s going to bother her the most.”

“But it would bother me. If I find out one day that I’m not one hundred percent black …” Betty turned her lips downward, shook her head, and Neni laughed.

“You don’t have to ever worry about that,” Neni said. “With your charcoal skin and mountain buttocks, there’s no way there can be anything inside you except African blood.”

“Jealousy is going to kill you,” Betty shot back, laughing as she leaned sideways and tapped her buttocks to emphasize the beauty of their size. “But seriously,” she said, “I don’t know what I would do if my father—”

“I don’t know what I would do, too. I would be afraid that I’m a curse, because it’s a curse, right? You are a bastard, and on top of that, everyone knows your father was some rapist.”

“ Kai! No wonder the woman drinks. Did you see her looking like that again?”

“Like that day? No, thank Papa God. But I saw an empty medicine bottle in the guest bathroom garbage. Same one like the one from that day.”

“It was for painkillers, right?”

Neni shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“It had to be for painkillers. I was reading about it in my pharmacology class—”

“Eh, now that you’ve taken one little pharmacology class you think you know everything about drugs. Why don’t you just go ahead and open a pharmacy?”

“Ah, don’t be hating, girl,” Betty said in her fake American accent. “You can take the class when you’re ready. But I swear, it must have been something like that, some kind of painkiller.”

“Because why?”

“What do you mean, ‘Because why?’ Aren’t you the one who told me what she looked like when you found her with the medicine and the wine? I’ve taken painkillers, I know how those things can—”

“No,” Neni said, shaking her head. “I was thinking that, too, that maybe it was bad drugs, but—”

“But what?”

“But what if she was sick?”

“Sick of what? If she was only sick, why was she begging you not to tell anyone?”

“I don’t know; the whole thing about that woman just confuses me.”

“Then why are you arguing with me? I can show you the chapter in my textbook. She’s taking the painkiller, then adding the wine … These women, they start taking the pills for some pain in their body, and then it makes them feel good, so they take more, and then more—”

“But I’ve taken Tylenol,” Neni said with a laugh, “and I didn’t feel anything special.”

“Tylenol is not the same kind of thing, you country woman,” Betty said, laughing, too, and then instantly developing a somber tone. “I’m talking about prescription painkillers for some really bad pain, the kind I had when … They gave me some last year at Roosevelt. Vicodin and—”

“That was the name on the bottle! Vicodin. Wait, I’m not sure if it was—”

“It must have been,” Betty said, standing up to fold the Burberry scarf and Ralph Lauren maxi dress Neni had given her from Cindy’s things. “I felt better every time I took it. Even with everything I was feeling …”

“But you wouldn’t have eaten it like candy, the way it looks like Mrs. Edwards is swallowing them.”

“Is that what you think? Don’t be so sure, oh. The hospital only let me have a ten-day supply, but if I had a way, I would have gotten more. Maybe for another week. That thing made me feel so much better, but this country, doctors are too afraid of addiction. Mrs. Edwards, she must know someone who is giving it to her, maybe a friend who is a doctor, or a pharmacist. Or sometimes they buy it from other people … I just wonder how many she is taking a day.”

EVERY TIME CLARK WAS IN THE CAR — MORNING, AFTERNOON, EVENING — he was shouting at someone, arguing about something, giving orders on what had to be done as soon as possible. He seemed angry, frustrated, confused, resigned. This place is a mess, Leah told Jende whenever they were on the phone. He’s going crazy, he’s yelling at me and making me crazy, they’re all going crazy, I swear it’s like some kind of crazy shit is eating everyone up. Jende told her he was truly sorry to hear how bad it was for her and assured her repeatedly that he knew nothing more than what she already knew from the memos Tom was sending to Lehman employees, memos in which he told them that the company was going through a bit of a tough stretch but they should be back on top in no time. Leah’s circumstances saddened Jende, the fact that she was clinging to a job that made her miserable because she was still five years away from receiving Social Security. It bothered him that she couldn’t quit her job even though her blood pressure was rising and her hair was falling out and she was getting only three hours of sleep a night, but it wasn’t his place to tell her anything about what Clark was saying. Or doing. He couldn’t tell her that Clark was sometimes sleeping in the office, or going to the Chelsea Hotel some evenings for appointments that often lasted no more than an hour. He couldn’t tell her that after these appointments he usually drove the boss back to the office, where Clark probably continued working for more hours, his stress having been eased. His duty, he always reminded himself, was to protect Clark, not Leah.