Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

AFTER SHE’D PUT THE CHILDREN TO BED, SHE COUNTED THE MONEY IN the bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror, and smiled: Nothing like starting the day agonizing over money and ending it triumphant beyond her imagination. She opened the medicine cabinet, took out her red lipstick and applied it, puckered her lips, smiled again, sprayed perfume on her neck, and walked out to the living room, where Jende was watching a Nets game.

“What is this?” he asked, after she placed the brown paper bag next to him on the sofa.

“Guess,” she said.

“You went shopping again, eh?” he said, still watching the Nets about to lose.

She shook her head and sat down next to him. She couldn’t stop smiling. At any other time she would have been happy to play a guessing game, but she couldn’t hold back the good news today. She leaned close to him and whispered in his ear, “It’s money!”

“Eh?”

“I showed Mrs. Edwards the picture. She gave me ten thousand dollars!”

“You did what!”

“Ten thousand dollars, bébé !”

She started laughing, tickled by the look of shock on his face; by the way his mouth, nose, and eyes had all opened up in disbelief.

He did not laugh with her. He opened the bag and peeked into it. He looked at her, and the bag, and her again. “What did you do, Neni?” he asked for the second time.

“Ten thousand dollars, bébé !” she said for the third time, incredulous still at how much Cindy had believed the picture to be worth.

“Are you crazy?”

“Wait, is that anger on your face?”

She couldn’t believe him. She’d imagined his reaction wouldn’t be one of pure joy, but she hadn’t thought it would be this bad. He was looking at her as if she was a thief, as if she had done something disgraceful when she’d just gotten them ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars they needed and deserved!

“What exactly did you do?” he asked.

She told him what she’d said to Cindy Edwards.

“How dare you!” he said, pushing her hand away from his knee.

“How dare me?”

“Yes, how dare you! What gives you the right to treat her like that? I mean … how could you, Neni? After everything they did for us?”

“What about what we did for them!” she said, grabbing the paper bag and standing up. “Were we not good to them, too? Why is it that they and their problems are more important than us and our problems? I kept her secret, and what does she do for me? She has her husband fire you!”

“You don’t know that!”

“You don’t know women like her, Jende. You don’t know how they think they’re better than people like us. How they think they can do anything they want to people like us.”

“Mr. Edwards did what he had to do! I don’t like what he did to me but he has every right to do what he needs to do!”

“Oh, so you think I don’t have that right, too?”

“That doesn’t mean you should have done something like this to her,” he said. “We’re not those kind of people! How could you even have gone there without asking me first?”

“Because I know what you would have said!”

“Yes! I would have said it because I want nothing to do with this kind of wickedness.”

“Wickedness, eh?”

“Yes, it’s wicked, and I don’t like it. No one has any right to be wicked to another person.”

“Oh, so now I’m a wicked person? So you married a wicked woman, didn’t you?”

He sighed and turned his face away.

“Just tell me what you think of me, Jende. You think I’m a wicked woman, eh? Just because I do something to help us, you think—”

“You didn’t have to do something like this!”

“She thought she could use us, stupid African people who don’t know how to stand up for themselves. She thinks we’re not as smart as she is; she thinks she can—”

“This has nothing to do with being African!”

“Yes, it does! People with money, they think their money can do anything in this world. They can hire you when they like, fire you when they like, it means nothing to them.”

“What are you talking about? That woman was good to us!”

“So you don’t want the money?” she said, shaking the paper bag.

He turned off the TV and went into the bathroom. She heard water splashing and figured he was washing his face — he sometimes did that when he didn’t know what else to say.

She sat down on the sofa, livid and humiliated. How could he see her as one of those kinds of people when all she was doing was trying to help their situation? And now she was wicked? She was a bad person for being a good mother and wife?

He returned to the living room and sat down next to her.

She turned away from him.

“I didn’t mean to get so angry,” he said, moving closer to her.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

“Let’s try and calm down and start the conversation all over again, okay?”

“I said, ‘Don’t touch me.’ Don’t even dare touch me right now.”

He shifted away from her and for a few seconds neither of them spoke.

“I don’t like what you did,” he said, calmly.

“If you don’t want the money, you don’t have to take it!” she said, standing up and jiggling the bag in his face. “I’ll open up a bank account and use it for myself only.”

“Please sit down, Neni.”

“Tomorrow morning I’ll go to the bank and open a new account and—”

He reached forward and pulled the bag from her hands. She lunged at him to take it back, but he dragged her down to the sofa and made her sit next to him. She tried to stand up and get away from him, but he held her down.

“I’m sorry, bébé, ” he whispered in her ear. “I’m just … I’m so shocked. I mean, I still don’t even know what to say.”

She scoffed and pursed her lips.

“You just did something …” He shook his head. “You surprise me all the time, but you just took it to a whole other level today. In short, I didn’t know what kind of woman I married till this night.”

“Eh, really? What kind of woman is that? A wicked woman, eh?”

“No,” he replied. “A strong woman. I never knew you could do the kind of thing you just told me.”

She half-rolled her eyes.

“But please, don’t ever do it again. I’m begging you, bébé . Never, ever again. I don’t care why you think you need to do it, don’t ever do it.”

“You want the money or not?” she said, smiling and enjoying the new look on his face.

“I don’t know … I’m just not comfortable, Neni.”

“You’re not comfortable—”

“But ten kolo in our hands?” he said.

“So you’re getting happy now, eh?”

“Ten thousand dollars!”

She laughed and kissed him.

Together they did a recount of the money, feeling each of the crisp hundred-dollar bills. “We won’t spend any of it,” he said to her. “We’ll add it to the savings and act as if we don’t even have it. God forbid, worse comes to worst one day, we’ll use it then.”

She nodded.

“Wonders shall never end, eh?” he said.

“Wonders shall never end,” she said. “Not while the sun goes up and down.”

“But were you not afraid? What if she had called the police?”

Neni Jonga shrugged, looked at her husband, and smiled. “That’s the difference between me and you,” she said. “You would have been thinking about it too much, wondering whether you should do it or not. Me, I knew it’s what I had to do.”

WITH HER GROCERY BUDGET ONLY TWO THIRDS OF WHAT IT USED TO BE before Jende stopped working for the Edwardses, shopping at Pathmark became a taxing experience, nothing like in the days when she first came to America, the times when she used to rush through the store excitedly, thinking, Mamami eh, so much food! So many choices! All in one place! The only thing she hated about grocery shopping back then was the prices — they made no sense. Three plantains for two dollars? Why? Two dollars in Cameroon was approximately 1,00 °CFA francs, and for that amount, as recently as in the early 2000s, a woman could buy groceries to feed her family three good meals. She could buy a pile of cocoyams for 40 °CFA francs, smoked fish for 250, vegetables for 100, about six ounces of palm oil for 100, crayfish and spices with the rest of the money, go home and make a large pot of portor-portor coco that would feed her family of four lunch and dinner, and there’d still be a little left over for the children to eat the following morning before going to school. If the woman was smart she would make the food extra-spicy, so the children would have a sip of water with every bite, get full faster, and the food would last longer.