Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

Outside the room, Emeka’s and Gladys’s voices had shrunken almost to a whisper. “Why must you worry me, my queen?” he said, teasingly. “How can I fight with such a face, such a bright face, Miss America?” They sounded like lovers at the end of a rendezvous. Silent, caught in the middle, their daughter had ridden the high tide of their anger and watched it resolve to a tremulous wave. Something about the girl’s calm, childish hum suggested to Ifi that she had been privy to such arguments and resolutions her entire short life. Gladys’s objections had faded to a watered-down silence.

Alone, Gladys returned to the room, sucking her teeth in shallow, sullen protest. He had won. Emeka’s and the little girl’s footsteps vanished down the hallway. Remembering his voice, Ifi knew that she too could not have said no to him, not to his gentle pleas and his flirtatious chuckles. Why can’t Job be like that?

At first, she sympathized with Gladys — the woman with the husband whom she couldn’t even rejoice in feeling anger toward when he was wrong — until Gladys strolled past Ifi’s bed, smoothing out the front of her skirt, inspecting her painted fingernails, refusing to even glare in her direction. For several long, silent seconds Gladys hunched over the incubator, pressing her lips together sternly, watching the sleeping boy.

“You had better feed this boy, oh,” Gladys said. “You didn’t eat well during your pregnancy, heh. He is too small.”

Heat filled Ifi’s cheeks. She searched for a response.

“Trying to be skinny like the Americans.” Gladys turned to Ifi for the first time. Once more, she examined her cuticles. “Your breasts resemble uncooked dough. How will you feed him? What kind of woman does not know how to prepare for a child? I don’t blame you, sha. You had no one to teach you.”

Biting back her anger, Ifi turned away. That morning, she hadn’t expected anyone. Once his shift ends, Job will come, she told herself. Tired, sore, and stitched between her legs, she hadn’t bothered with a bra or even a comb. Now, imagining her own heavy, ashy breasts, etched with stretch marks, her eyes couldn’t leave Gladys’s well-formed shape. At her age, after six children, surely a Band-Aid of Spanx, bra, and hose held her body together. Straightened hair, smoothed curls, glossed and shiny from Blue Magic. Fingernails, long arcs, painted red. Face bleached by powder and cream. Ifi tried to imagine Gladys before all of it, when she was nothing but a schoolgirl in Nigeria with low, kinky hair, sandals, and a starched linen uniform. No more or less than any of the other girls in her level. All that is real, Ifi scoffed to herself, remembering that first night at Divine Davinci’s. Gladys’s fur was now draped across the back of a chair, like the one hanging limply in Ifi’s closet at home. Summoning energy, Ifi shouted, “Don’t insult me. Get out!”

Gladys turned up her nose. Nothing but calm resided in her voice. “You are too good for sisterly teasing?”

When their eyes met at Gladys’s shaking hands, Gladys spun away. Ifi suddenly remembered Gladys behaving the same way just a month ago, looking away from her dead son in his incubator. She’s in pain, Ifi thought, a wave of pity overwhelming her. Maybe she could understand this woman after all. Maybe there was nothing more to her than bones and a soft heart in a fragile case. Like Ifi, Gladys was just a woman. They were both mothers. No better. No worse. “Will you hold him?” she asked.

“No,” Gladys said, her voice rising, almost in derision.

Emeka and the daughter returned. The girl sipped juice from a small white cup. Crumbs powdered her cheeks. He crowded the door, and Ifi caught Gladys’s gaze trained on him. Guilt etched into the fine lines of his face, he shrank in the doorway. Ifi suddenly couldn’t remember the guile of his voice just moments earlier. Instead, he had the look of a boy prepared for a scolding.

“Hold the boy, now,” he said to Gladys gently, with a hint of irritation.

“No,” she said, backing away.

Roughly, Emeka pushed past her to the incubator. He lifted the boy up, his back and shoulders squared to Ifi and Gladys.

“Put him down,” Gladys said after a moment. Her eyes still contained their hard, scolding expression. “What is wrong with you? Have you forgotten how to hold a child properly?”

But he just stood there, holding the boy in his arms, staring into his eyes. Their daughter placed the cup on the nightstand and slipped her fingers into Gladys’s. Limp, forgotten, her hand dangled. All of a sudden, Ifi understood. The girl will never be the son that her mother needs.

Before they left the room, Ifi knew that as she slept later that night, Gladys’s and Emeka’s bodies would be tied together in a confused embrace. They would be rigid with frustrated desire, with the hopes that another boy would begin to grow in Gladys’s womb. Perhaps they would even hang a watery charm from one of the posts on their bed to ensure that it would happen this time — the thing that had happened so effortlessly for Ifi, the thing that Ifi began to understand had already changed her life in innumerable ways. She would not go to school and train to be a nurse as Job had promised, and they would not open the clinic together. But her son would train to be a doctor. Her son would train and marry the nurse. Her son would open the clinic in Nigeria. Having a child had made her a mother.

HIS CRYING AND SHOUTING WAS SO LOUD, SO ANGRY, THAT IT NEARLY escaped Job that the front door was slightly ajar. With the boy drooping in Ifi’s arms, Job pushed her back into the hallway, and she waited while he surveyed the apartment. Everything seemed just as it had been when he left that afternoon to check Ifi out of the hospital. Several emptied cans, coated to the rim with the congealing juices of pinto beans, straddled the countertops and the cool stovetop burners. Job swept the cans into the trash bin. A crumpled heap of newspapers, turned to the finance section, was spread over the living room couch and floor. His towels, still damp from his shower, hung from the bar in the bathroom. Then he let out a sharp gasp.

A crib. Gladys and Emeka’s. He’d seen it before in their nursery, a room whose walls had changed from blue to pink so many times that Job had lost count. What is it doing here? Why is it assembled? he thought. Perfectly assembled, erected, and squeezed into the tight space between the back wall and the bed that Ifi and Job shared. Clean sheets were spread over the bed. Even the mobile of plastic and glittering stars hung over the bed. For a moment, Job surveyed the bed, his mouth agape. How can it be?

Calmly, he ran his fingers over the dark chestnut frame. Nicks caught against his fingertips. He engaged and disengaged the side rail, and it moved up and down smoothly. Who could have done such a thing? He tried to play the events of his featureless day in his mind. Arriving home from his night shift at the hospital exhausted, showering, eating the tins of beans before leaving for his shift at the meatpacking plant. From there, like he had on the day of his son’s birth, Job had made his way directly to the hospital, this time to pick up Ifi and the boy.

“Chineke!” Oh my God, Ifi said, now standing next to him.

All of a sudden, saliva and mucous erupted from each orifice of their son’s little red face. His balled fists punched awkwardly at the air just ahead of his nose. Job gazed at the boy. An ugly baby. But never mind it. After all, he will one day be a man.

“I told you to wait outside,” Job said. Then he changed his mind. Over the boy’s shouts, he explained, “I left the door open. I’ll have to remember next time.” No sense in frightening Ifi. No sense in letting her know that Emeka had a hand in this, because surely he did — always flashing his money around, always acting like he was Job’s chief.