Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

“We have to talk about Cindy,” Anna whispered in her ear in the kitchen.

“What?” Neni quickly asked. “What is wrong with her?”

Anna pulled her by the arm to the far end of the kitchen, away from the chefs and the guests entering and exiting with plates of egg-white omelets and glasses of smoothies.

“She got problems,” Anna whispered.

“Problems?”

“You don’t see no problems in the Hamptons?”

Neni opened her mouth but said nothing.

“You see something in the Hamptons, no?” Anna said, nodding rapidly. “You see it?”

“I don’t know …,” Neni said, confused by the direction of the conversation.

“I come in the morning for work and she is smelling alcohol,” Anna whispered, waving her hand in front of her face as if to disperse an invisible smell.

“Yes,” Neni said, “she likes wine.”

The housekeeper shook her head. “This is not liking wine. This is problem.”

“But—”

“Last week I look in the garbage, three empty bottles of wine. Mighty do not drink wine. Clark is not home. I see him one, two times every week.”

“Maybe—”

“Can someone please refill the punch for the kids and get some more napkins?” one of the chefs called out. Anna gestured for Neni to stay put while she took care of it.

“To be honest,” Neni whispered when Anna returned, “I saw it in the Hamptons, too.”

“Ah! I know I’m not crazy.”

“I didn’t know a woman can drink like that.”

“This family has problems. Big problems.”

“She wasn’t like this before?”

“No. Before, she drink like normal person — little here, little there. Twenty-two years I work for them and I see no problems like this. But always they have other problems. They eating dinner, not too much talking. You don’t see them fight too many times, you don’t see them happy too many times.”

“You think he knows?” Neni asked, looking over her shoulder.

Anna shook her head. “He don’t know anything. No one knows. See how she looks out there. How can people know if they don’t see the bottles?”

Neni sighed. She wanted to tell Anna about the pills but thought it would be no use further upsetting her. The alcohol was bad enough. “Maybe one day she’ll just stop,” she said.

“One day people don’t stop drinking,” Anna quickly replied. “They drink and drink and drink.”

“But we cannot do anything.”

“No, don’t talk like that,” the housekeeper said, shaking her head so vigorously the two clumps of hair that made up her bangs swung away from her forehead. “We cannot say we cannot do anything, because something happen to her, then what about us? A man in my town, he drink until one day he die. If she die, who will write me check? Or your husband check?”

Neni almost burst out laughing, half at Anna’s reasoning and half at the way she was so terribly and unnecessarily afraid. Lots of people in Limbe drank seven days a week and she’d never heard of alcohol killing any of them. One of her uncles was even known as the best drunkard in Bonjo — he serenaded the whole neighborhood to Eboa Lotin tunes on his best drunken days — and yet he was still living on in Limbe.

“You think it’s little thing,” Anna said, “but I know people lose the job because the family got big problem. My friend with family in Tribeca, she lose her job last month—”

“Oh, Papa God,” Neni gasped, moving her hand to her chest. “You’re scaring me now.”

“I know Cindy for many years,” Anna went on. “Ever since her mother die four years—”

“You knew her mother?”

“Yes, I know her. She come to the house four, five times. Bad woman. Bad, bad woman. You see the way she talk to Cindy, angry with her, nothing make her happy.”

“No wonder …”

“But Cindy’s sister, the child of the mother’s husband who die long ago, the mother always nice to her. When they come together, everything the bad woman say to the sister is sweetie this, sweetie that. But with Cindy …” Anna shook her head.

“I’d cut that kind of person out of my life, if it was me.”

“No, Cindy goes to see her for Mother’s Day every year, until the bad woman dies.”

“Why?”

“Why you ask me? I don’t know why. And this Mother’s Day, Mighty comes to me, telling me he’s sad because his family no longer go to Virginia for Mother’s Day, because he wants to see his cousins there. I want to shout at him and say you want to go back to Virginia for what? Cindy’s sister, ever since their mother died, I never see her again in the house. Cindy, she has no family now, except for the boys and Clark.”

“But she has a lot of friends.”

“Friends is family?” Anna said. “Friends is not family.”

Out in the living room Cindy was laughing, perhaps amused by a story a friend was telling. How could anyone have so much happiness and unhappiness skillfully wrapped up together? Neni wondered.

“We got to tell Clark about the alcohol,” Anna said.

“No, we cannot!”

“Dessert is ready to be served,” the second chef called out. Neni hurried to take out the desserts while Anna cleared the entrées.

“We don’t have to be the ones to tell him,” Neni said after they’d returned to their corner. “He’ll find out. Maybe you can leave the empty wine bottles on the table for him to see.”

“How he’s going to see when he’s not home? And she will know that I’m trying to do something if I just go take bottle out of trash can and put on the table. You have to be the one to tell him first.”

“Me!”

“We do it together. If I alone I tell him, he will not think it is serious problem. But if you tell him, too, he knows it’s serious. Just tell him somebody was drinking too much wine in Hamptons. You don’t know who. He is smart man, he will know.”

“And he will tell her, and she will know it’s me!”

“No man is stupid like that. After you tell him, next week I, too, I’ll tell him the same thing about some person drinking the wine in the apartment. Then he’ll know it’s really true. He can do what he wants to do. We know our hands are clean.”

Neni walked to the kitchen island, picked up a bottle of water, and gulped down half of it. Maybe Anna was right, she thought. Maybe they had to do the right thing and warn Clark. But she didn’t think it was ever right to get involved in other people’s marriages, marriage already being complicated and full of woes as it was. But Anna had made a good point: Clark was working all the time and would never know the extent of what his wife was going through. The whole time Neni was in the Hamptons, she’d seen him in person only on the days of the cocktail parties, where he and Cindy had acted as if they slept in the same bed every night. At the first cocktail party, which was to celebrate Cindy’s fiftieth birthday, they had floated around the pool hand in hand, smiling and hugging guests in the warm candlelit evening as a string quartet played on. Cindy, in an orange backless dress and blow-dried hair, looked like Gwyneth Paltrow that night, maybe even more beautiful and certainly not much older. Toward the end of the party, they had stood with their arms around each other, flanked on either side by their handsome sons, as Cindy’s friends toasted her, speaking of what a wonderful and selfless friend she was. Cheri tearfully told of the evening she’d called Cindy crying because her mother had fallen at her nursing home in Stamford and needed surgery the next day and Cheri couldn’t be there because she was stuck at work in San Francisco. As an only child, Cheri told the guests, it was hard, really hard, but on that day Cindy made it easy for her. Cindy offered to be there for her mother and took a five A.M. train from Grand Central to Stamford. She stayed at the hospital until the three-hour surgery was over and Cheri’s mother was comfortably settled in her room. Cindy wasn’t just her best friend, Cheri said, choking back tears, Cindy was her sister. The guests, tanned and clad in designer labels, smiled and clapped as Cheri walked over to Cindy and the friends held each other in a prolonged hug. Clark asked everyone to raise their glasses. There wasn’t much he could add to what Cindy’s friends had said, he said, except that it was all true, Cindy was a gem, and my, was she the hottest thirty-five-year-old or what? Everyone laughed, including Vince, who hadn’t been smiling much all evening. To Cindy, they cheered. To Cindy!