Julie Iromuanya: Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

For the first time, the storekeeper pulled away from the cash register and gave her attention to the pair. “Ah, lady of fashion,” she said. Up until then, she had been curtained behind paintings across the room, her eyes idly following the couple as she leafed through a magazine. “You must buy the earrings and bracelet too, or it will not be complete.”

Without complaint, Job purchased the jewelry and handed it to Ifi, mentally subtracting the cost from the wad of bills tucked away in his briefcase. When they left the gift shop, both knew that they would be heading to the empty room, the large bed tauntingly illustrating its sole purpose.

Ifi followed Job inside. Hot, stale air had settled for too long. Their bed had been remade, each pillow set delicately. The clothes Ifi had thrown about the room were neatly folded in their suitcases. Even the magazine was packed away as if the morning had never happened, as if Job and Ifi were entering for the first time.

Ifi set her handbag down and sat on the bed, the tiny package in her hands.

“Will you not try them?” Job asked.

Ifi wordlessly unraveled the necklace, earrings, and bracelet. She slipped the earrings and bracelet on without trouble, but when it came to the necklace, she struggled. Her back and shoulders relaxed under Job’s hands as he tried his fingers over the clasp. Finally he managed to connect it. He stepped back, swollen with the small success. It was beautiful.

When Ifi rose to make her way to the bathroom mirror, she could not move her neck. The clasp had caught on her hair. Job tried to pull it free, but Ifi swung her arms wildly as if swatting a mosquito. “Leave me!” she yelled. “Leave me, oh!”

Job yanked harder at the clasp. Suddenly the necklace exploded, shells flying in every direction.

Ifi collapsed to her knees and began to pick up the shells. Impossible. She would be on her knees all night, like the boy in the restaurant.

“Leave it,” Job said. “I will buy another.” Ifi ignored him, silent tears spreading down her cheeks.

When the lights went out again with a sudden whoosh, Job was relieved. In the darkness, Ifi continued to feel her way to each shell. Job opened and shut drawers in search of matches or a lighter. In the bottom drawer of the bathroom sink, his fingers finally closed over a box of matches, slightly damp with the scent of cleaning fluids. He tried each match until he finally found one that worked and struck it. From there, he could just make out a raw, half-eaten candle, which he lit.

With a backwards swipe, Job erased the perspiration from his face. He decided that he would return her to her people and go back to America alone. His family could begin the process again, inquiring into the reputation of each prospective family, sending him snapshots of stoic women, their heads draped in wigs, coolly gazing past the flash of the camera.

She should have been prettier, he told himself. After all, his family had made a point of forgiving her poverty; her good name would do. She was tall by his family’s standards. Lean in a way that made wrappers and dresses appear ill fitting and silly. Still, her thinness was ideal for the blue jeans that American women wore. His father, who had never visited America but had watched every videocassette he had mailed him, had reminded Job of this. His grandmother had insisted her small buttocks would grow with the birth of their first child. She is still just a child herself, she had explained. Ifi’s legs were bony and ridged at the knees, her face taut with strain around her eyes, as if she squinted furiously at everything. She was also not as light skinned as his mother would have preferred, and her hair was not ideal. But, Job reminded himself, she wasn’t ugly.

Job sank down onto the toilet, striking his foot against Ifi’s bag and knocking the few articles of clothing, makeup, perfume, and jewelry loose. He began to place each item back in the bag, using the flickering light of the candle as a guide. Women with all their tools. Men didn’t have it as easy. If a woman was fat, thin, too dark, too light, too short, too tall, there was always something she could do about it. His sisters, Jenny and Florence, had used lightening creams for years, wearing tall heels to compensate for their short frames and even slipping cotton balls into their bras. When they went to their rooms at night, they were his plain sisters with ashy skin and acne, but when they reemerged, they were something new.

His fingers ran along a pearl necklace in Ifi’s bag. He’d sent it to her many months before. He remembered the awkwardness of picking it out at Wal-Mart, the saleslady watching him closely as he gazed into the glass case. Now, he lifted it against his hairy chest and clasped the ends behind his neck. Success. Why hadn’t he been able to get it right when it mattered?

With the pearls around his neck, he remembered the feeling he had the first time he wore a stethoscope. Strangely, it was just like this, the same satisfaction. A small smile grew on his face as he listened for his heartbeat once more. He was a boy the first time he’d heard this sound — the wonder, the amazement at a device that could track the rapid sound of his own music. His brother, Samuel, had smiled when Job asked if a small ear was in the tool.

After the funeral, when Job was going through his brother’s things in the room they’d shared, he found the stethoscope again. Job fingered and played with it, listening to the sound for a long time, enthralled. His mother came in then and saw him on his knees with his dead brother’s things scattered around him on the floor. She beat him, asking what he was thinking, playing with his brother’s belongings. “Samuel will be angry. Hurry, put it away!” she had said, as if Samuel was among the living, as if he was still fighting for Biafra.

After the beating was over, and Job wept silently at his sister’s side, his father called him over. Job’s mother was turned away, her face set in a frown. His father had the box of Samuel’s things. “Choose what you like,” he said to Job, “and then I must never see you playing in this box, you hear?”

At first, Job didn’t know what to do. He saw his mother with the look she made when she tasted something spoiled, so he waited, but he heard nothing. After a while, she turned to face him. Only then did he take the box. He went through it, lifting each object out slowly, examining it, deciding on its weight, its smell, its usefulness. Since the stethoscope was the start of all the trouble, he wanted nothing to do with it. Instead, he took a jazz record. He had never heard it play, but he knew one day he would have the money to buy a music machine of his own. He also took a cricket ball and mallet. He would practice until he was better than all of his agemates. Samuel’s trousers were too long, but he took them anyway, and his brother’s hat, which he tipped forward on his head, like his brother had. The brim dangled over his eyes. A smile twitched on his mother’s lips, loosening the scowl, so he put on his brother’s pants, adjusting his hips so that the waist gapped around his narrow body. Like the trunk of an elephant, the trouser legs bagged at his feet. His mother laughed and pulled him into her arms for a tight hug, her eyes wet with tears when she released him.

“He is not finished,” his father had said. He pushed the box back toward Job. All that remained was the stethoscope. Job wanted nothing to do with it. “Take it,” his father had said. Job shook his head furiously. His father reached for him and put it around Job’s neck. He put the ear tips in Job’s ears and then, kneeling before him, he placed the chestpiece to his own chest. Job heard no sound, so he adjusted the chest piece until he found the sound of his father’s heartbeat, a dull, raspy thudding.