Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

Sleepy Eyes — Jamal — straightened up, his feet together. “I’m sorry, Doctor. .” His voice trailed off. “I brought it back the way it was.”

Mary spoke up again. “I knew it was yours when I saw it parked in the street. I recognized it, and I told him to turn it in and turn hisself in.” Job made a motion to speak, but the rest of her words came out in a rush. “I told him it’s up to you to decide what you do with him. You can turn him in to the police if you like; God only knows he deserves it. But I’m telling you, Doctor, he’s not a bad kid. He’s just—” she hesitated as if struggling for the right word. “He’s stupid. Dumb as rocks.”

Jamal squirmed.

“He wants to fit in with these knuckleheads. He wants to be one of them, but he’s not. He’s smart. Just started junior high, and the dumb kid drops out. I’m taking him back tomorrow, if they’ll have him. But it’s not his fault. His daddy, my brother, Jake, he’s in jail.” She glared at Jamal, as if a thought had suddenly dawned on her. “You think if you lie and steal and beat people up you’ll be there with your daddy? Is that what you want? You think he wants that for you?” She turned her pleading eyes back to Ifi. “And his mother, she don’t know nothing. He could steal her blind, and she wouldn’t know.”

“You give me excuses,” Ifi hurled at her. “My mother and my father — both dead. Do you see me attacking people? Eh? Do you see me stealing from people?”

“You’re right,” Mary said. “You have every reason to be angry. That’s why I told him he could work for it. He fixes stuff — cracks in your windows, tiles. If you give him the materials, he can mend anything. He can even sew. He taught hisself. He’s a smart boy. You got a baby coming — he can put your crib together. He’s even good with kids.” Eyes pleading with Ifi and then Job, she added, “We’re black people, right? It’s the same for all of us here. We gotta help each other out. We’re brothers and sisters.”

“You are not my brother,” Job said, spitting the words into the boy’s face. His grip tightened as he remembered the blows to his face. “‘Go back to Africa,’ is it?”

“I didn’t mean that.” Jamal looked away.

“Yes, go back to Africa.”

“No,” Jamal said.

“What did you mean then, boy?”

“I didn’t mean nothing.” Very faintly, he spoke again. “She’s right. I’m dumb. I’m stupid. I said it ’cause they said it.” As if resigned to his fate, he closed his eyes. His eyes slanted, his tense features relaxed, he looked like a sleeping cat.

With his fingers pressed into the boy’s throat, once more Job thought to himself, I could kill him. A beat pulsed under his thumb where the boy gulped in raspy breaths. Police will not stop me. They will thank me for removing him from the streets. The boy’s breaths had grown raspy and loud, so loud that it was the only sound Job could hear in the room. And then my wife will feel safe in this country once more. And then I will be a man again.

But suddenly a thought occurred to him: There are more.

“Okie,” Job said softly, removing his fingers from the boy’s neck. “He will work.”

“Wait, now.” As the others waited in the living room, Ifi pulled Job into their bedroom. She pushed her weight against the door, and it slammed shut behind her. “I asked them to wait until you returned so that you could call police.”

“No,” Job said sadly, waving his hand.

“Should I have called?”

“Let them go their way.”

“The boy attacked you, and he will go to jail!”

Rather than the flashing bulbs directed at him, Ifi shimmered under the lights. Her clothes torn, her skin ravaged, she wailed as Officer Peete presided. All three of the attackers stood with the cool look of absconding thieves. At this image, something broke inside Job, and the words began to plunk out one by one like raindrops. “Ifi, my dear,” he said, his voice cracking, “there were three. They beat me. They spit on me. They took my wallet and spit on that too. I said to them, ‘We are all black, no? You are my brothers.’ They said, ‘You are not my brother. Go back to Africa.’ Do you see what they did to my face?” He punched a finger at the butterfly bandage.

Ifi gasped.

“Do you think I am trying to help them? I hate him. All of them. God punish them. But I went to police. And you know what police say? They say, ‘They are black like you.’ Like you and me.”

“What?”

“Police, they called me a drug dealer. If he goes to jail, he will be released by tomorrow morning, and he and his gangsters will prowl the streets. Eh? And maybe there will be six next time. And they will come for you.”

“My husband,” she said softly, “why didn’t you tell me about them? Yesterday.” Then her eyes met his, and something in them changed. “Why must you keep secrets from me, oh? I am your wife.”

She knows, he thought to himself. She knew that his real uniform was in the plastic bag. She knew that his real uniform stank of feces and urine. She knew about the nametag that read Job Ogbonnaya, Certified Nurse’s Assistant. She knew that he was not a doctor. She knew that he was nothing. How small I must look to her, he thought. Spat on, beaten by illiterate boys, like the riffraff who shined his shoes in Nigeria. They have taken my car, my house, and now my wife. He felt himself slipping, drowning. All the renewed hope that he had witnessed on Ifi’s first day in America as she stood in the snow was slipping away. Even her boastful letters to Aunty were dissolving, like the potato chip, into nothing.

Flinging his promises into the air, he struggled to rebuild what he realized was on the verge of being lost. “You will go to school, and I will train you to be a nurse, and then we will open a hospital in Nigeria. All in good time.” Clasping her hands in his, he added, “We will buy a house, a big house, for me and you and the baby. We will build a mansion for our retirement in Nigeria.” His head felt light, like a balloon rising. The more he spoke, the bigger the promises, the larger he felt. How could he forget? People rose all the time — Rockefeller, Ford, Hearst, Horatio Alger — but they all started out with dreams, dreams that seemed silly to the rest of the world. But dreams nonetheless. Every journeyman begins with one step. His chuckles made a strange sound, like tears. “This is only temporary,” he said to her through his laughter. “To save money. After this month, we will be out of this ghetto.” Even as Ifi stood silent, her look doubtful, he continued to speak, his hands shaking from the sheer velocity of his dreams, dreams that would seem wild and unrestrained in Nigeria. It will happen, he told himself, because this is America.

THIS WAS THE FIRST OF MANY PLEASURES THAT HE TOOK FROM HER. ON her back, the water to her chest, Ifi allowed her breath to rise through her body in its slow way. Her feet were red, red as they had been back then, after she mixed the boiling water with the cold. She remembered her body sinking lower and lower into the water until it filled the space between her legs, her navel, her breasts. Now, each part was taken over by the baby. Back then, sweat beaded her brow. She tasted it in her lips. Salt stung in her eyes. All after a long day.

Her days began like this:

As the dust-tinged morning light rose, filtering out the dusk, Ifi sat up in her bed. The grit of scattered sand tangled into her sheets, and she felt the familiar scratch against her thighs, her calves, her feet. Before the people of the house rose, goats, chickens, and roosters let out their chatter, rummaging about through the potholed alleyway, shifting through the broken, discarded bits of sandstone that jutted in and out of the streets. Church services blared through megaphones, and the women who heralded the cry ululated ecstatically in response. Sometimes their neighbors simply sat on their narrow stoops, swinging their feet along the heavy, misshapen stones that led the way to their storefront homes.