Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

“I’m happy to hear you sound so happy, my brother,” Bubakar said. “Some people, when they buy the ticket, they cry until the day they enter the plane.”

“But what can I do, Mr. Bubakar? My people say if God cuts off your fingers, He will teach you how to eat with your toes.”

“ Abi, if I was a Christian, I would say amen to that. And how is the madam? Is she as happy to go back home as you are?”

Jende chuckled. “She is not happy,” he said, “but she is packing up.”

“Just make sure she doesn’t spend all your money buying things,” Bubakar warned. “Because women, you have to be careful with them and all the things they say they must have before they go back home. Anything that makes them look good is a necessity.”

“Too late, oh, Mr. Bubakar,” Jende said, laughing. “It’s already too late.”

He’d given Neni more money for shopping than he’d intended; doing so was the only thing that had made her smile in days — him telling her she could spend five hundred dollars buying whatever she wanted to buy. She’d ended up spending eight hundred, buying things not easily found back in Limbe: dollar-store toys for the children so they wouldn’t have to play with mud and sticks; foods in jars and all the sweet cereals Liomi had become accustomed to; clothes for as many years into the future as they would need in order to preserve their American aura.

For herself, she bought beauty creams and anti-aging moisturizers in Chinatown — concoctions she hoped would preserve her beauty and youth for a long time and keep her elevated in looks among the women back home. News had reached her that loose young women were now aplenty in Limbe, good-looking and shameless wolowose women who made wives nervous. Sure, Jende was a man of little lust, never once looking at even the largest cleavage (not in her presence, at least) in all their married life, but she’d also never had to worry about another woman trying to steal him. Why would any woman try to lure him away when there were thousands of men in New York City with more money? But in Limbe, it would no longer be so. The loose young women there would be eager to pounce on him. He would no longer be a poor boy from a caraboat house in New Town but a man who had returned from America with a lot of dollars. Those wolowose girls would be all over him, giggling and exposing their teeth, saying things like Mr. Jende, how noh? You look good, oh! She would have to give him no reason to move his eyes sideways, especially now that she didn’t have the assets those young women had. She would never look like them again, because motherhood had squeezed out the appeal from her breasts and drawn lines of exhaustion on her belly. Her body was no longer a marvel, thus her best weapon in the battle for her husband’s eyes wouldn’t be her nakedness but her glowing spot-and-wrinkle-free face and the clothes and accessories she would put on the body from which she planned to lose five pounds in the coming month.

She had to return to Limbe prepared.

“Don’t forget the girls in you country, they gonno rub fine America cream, too,” Fatou said when Neni went across the street to her apartment to give her a purse she’d bought for her as a belated birthday gift and told her how prepared she was to fight to keep her marriage strong. “They know how to buy cream and spray perfume, too, and look lika America woman.”

“They go near him,” Neni said, “I’ll kill them.”

Fatou looked at Neni’s wide determined eyes and laughed. “I no gonno ever get that kinda problem,” she said. “No woman gonno try to steal my Ousmane. Who want Ousmane, with his leg lika broomstick? No woman. So I keep him.”

Neni laughed. For a minute, in a good friend’s presence, she forgot how fearful she was about her future and laughed. Having a man other women wanted was a curse masquerading as a blessing, she told herself. But it was a source of pride, nonetheless. Jende was going to be somebody in Limbe when they returned. He was going to be a businessman. He would get a nice brick house for them in Sokolo or Batoke or Mile Four, and she would have a maid. Over dinner at Red Lobster on a Sunday evening, while Winston and Maami watched the kids, he had told her all that. “I promise you with all my heart and soul, bébé, ” he had said to her. “You will live like a queen in Limbe.”

She had fidgeted with her food, unwilling to look into his eyes. “What can I do now?” she said to him. “We have to go whether I want it or not.”

“Yes, bébé, but I want you to come back happy. I don’t want you to come back crying the way you’ve been crying. I don’t like to see you cry like this, eh? I don’t like it at all.” He pursed his lips and made a childish sad face, which made her laugh.

“I love New York so much, Jends,” she said. “I’m so happy here. I just don’t … I don’t even know how to …”

He took her hands and kissed them the way he had seen the leading men do in movies. After paying for their food they walked to Times Square, one of his favorite places in the city. Before Neni came to America, Times Square was his second substitute best friend — after Columbus Circle — a place that never failed to remind him of what he’d left behind. Being there was like being at Half Mile Junction in Limbe, where billboards for Ovaltine and Guinness towered above dusty streets; cabdrivers honked and swore at impudent pedestrians; drinking spots stayed open virtually all night, every weekend; voluptuous prostitutes cursed loudly at tightfisted patrons; and the noise never died.

At the center of the square, right at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second, Jende and Neni stood side by side and held on to the moment. There would be no Times Square in Limbe, Neni thought. No billboards flashing things she wished she had the money to buy. There’d be no McDonald’s where she could enjoy her beloved McNuggets. No people of too many colors, speaking too many languages, running around to thousands of fun places. There would be no pharmacy career. No condo in Yonkers or Mount Vernon or New Rochelle.

She buried her face in his shoulder and begged herself to be happy.

IN LIMBE, THE TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS NENI HAD TAKEN FROM CINDY, plus the eight thousand dollars they’d saved (five thousand from diligently putting away approximately three hundred and fifty dollars every month during the fourteen months Jende had worked for the Edwardses; three thousand from the four weeks Neni had worked for Cindy), would make them millionaires many times over. Even after buying their airline tickets and making all the necessary purchases, they would have enough money for Jende to become one of the richest men in New Town.

With the new exchange rate at six hundred CFA francs to a dollar, he would be returning home with close to ten million CFA francs, enough to restart their life in a beautiful rental with a garage for his car and a maid so his wife could feel like a queen. He would have enough to start a business, which would enable him to someday build a spacious brick house and send Liomi to Baptist High School, Buea, the boarding school Winston had attended because his late father came from a wealthy Banso clan, the school Jende could not attend because Pa Jonga could not afford it.

Without any treatment, his back stopped aching.

A month before he was to leave, Winston called with an idea: Would Jende be willing to manage the construction of a new hotel Winston and one of his friends were building at Seme Beach and then become the hotel manager when it was completed?

“We’ll talk about salary, Bo,” Winston said. “We’ll pay you good money, more than what you used to make as a laborer at Limbe Urban Council.”