Julie Iromuanya: Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

Job sat licking the remnants of spicy pepper soup from his fingertips as he told Emeka about the blonde, tall-legged American model he had married earlier that afternoon. King Sunny Adé’s Explosion rumbled in the background, and Job shouted to be heard over the lyrics. “I am not lying,” he said. “She even offered to blow job me.”

“You are lying, my friend,” Emeka said with a clap.

A door swung open and closed. It was Emeka’s wife, Gladys, wrapper bound tightly at her armpits and stomach ballooning, pregnant even in shadow. In the five years that Job had known Emeka, he had watched him graduate from bachelor to married man. He had begun, like Job, as a student studying for a bachelor’s degree. Emeka studied engineering. Job studied molecular biology, the degree that was supposed to get him into medical school. Emeka, like Job, had worn wrinkled suits with high collars and wide legs even on the hottest of days.

Five years later, Emeka was in graduate school, the civil engineering program at the University of Nebraska Omaha; Job had failed out of his undergraduate program and was employed as a nurse’s assistant at a local hospital. With his medical background, he earned the certificate quickly. All that mattered was that he worked in a hospital. The experience would help him in medical school, because eventually, he assured himself, he would make it there.

Annually, when his father sent him tuition money, Job stored it in a savings bond. Even as his father’s businesses in Nigeria began their decline, somehow, faithfully, he managed to send Job the money to educate him abroad. His father even bragged to his friends that it was the duty of the old to care for the young, so the young could care for the old one day.

At first Job thought about returning the money. After all, his family needed it. His father would never admit it, but his mother wore less jewelry with every annual visit. But there would be too many questions. What had he been doing in America all this time? How could he possibly have failed his classes? His father’s face would be hard, the look Job saw when Samuel disappointed them all by dying.

There was also no sense in giving Emeka fodder for gossip or his unrelenting, unsolicited advice— You know, my friend, there are three things a man must do in his native land: marry, bury, and retire. America is the stepping-stone. If you cannot make it here, then go home a joke —and so they spent most free evenings in airless rooms, sweating into the yellowed armpits of old linen shirts as they discussed their favorite topic.

“A-ah! A-mer-eeka!”

“A-ah! A-mer-eeka!” Emeka clapped again.

Gladys arched an eyebrow in the direction of the television, where Tom Brokaw spoke in measured syllables. Usually Brokaw elicited their exclamations. She dumped one of the children in Emeka’s lap, a girl, all legs with large wet eyes and a charcoal cotton ball of hair.

But for the globe that Emeka carried for a stomach, he had changed little over the previous five years. The greatest change Job had noticed was in Gladys. In the beginning she wore her hair in neat plaits, a concentric design of endless circles woven together into tight bunches at her nape. Her nails were always a bright red, and her lips were painted to match. She was one of the big-bottomed women whom Job and his school friends would sing at as teenage boys as they hung from the limbs of the trees leading into town. They would promise the women that they would marry them and build them a palace of gold. They would line the streets with American dollars. They would dress the women in diamonds. There she is, Miss America, they would sing.

Gladys would emerge from the wings of any room with two dripping mugs of Sapporo. When Job would lean to sip from his mug, Emeka would always smack Gladys’s bottom swiftly. Huffing at him, she would exclaim and straighten up just as Job looked in their direction. Always there was a look in her eyes that complemented that of Emeka’s, a look that said, This is the American Dream.

That day, Gladys smelled of onions, Similac, and sweat. She swatted an errant fly and turned a fierce look at the girl. “Stay with your father!” Only then could Job make out another child, a baby girl jiggling against Gladys’s backside where she was bound tightly with cloth. Job could never keep count of the multiplying children, all girls. Gladys never joined Job and Emeka like she used to, balanced on one end of the sofa, her voice shrill as she interjected on behalf of one cause or the other.

“Chai! I do not believe it,” Emeka said. His entire body shifted, and the child sprawled from his lap where she had just begun to nod to sleep. At that, the girl howled. Emeka pressed her face to his neck. Her cries were muffled, and his neck slickened with her saliva and mucous. Her cries went unabated. He jostled her, his shoulder jutting in an uneven rhythm.

“I cannot believe it, my friend,” he repeated.

“I am not lying,” Job said with satisfaction.

Suddenly a fan clicked on, and the chopped sound of another daughter’s voice joined it, following the fan as it turned a short arc. Like her father, she was all legs and stomach.

“Turn that off! Can’t you see your father speaking?” Emeka bellowed in disgust. “Go help your mother.” The girl bounded to the kitchen, squealing as she thundered across the room.

“The next one will be a boy,” Job assured him, knowing full well that Gladys and Emeka would never have a boy. In a small way, he relished that certainty.

Just for a second, Emeka glared. Job rested his head on the wooden ridge of the La-Z-Boy in satisfaction.

Emeka’s scorn was quickly replaced with amusement. “Tell me, now, what would I want with a boy?” He lifted the sniffling child’s face to his and blew a wet, airy kiss at her cheek. She shrieked. “Boys, they grow up and leave their fathers. They chase ugly American whores.” He met Job’s eyes with a wink. “These ones will all marry Nigerians. This one will marry a lawyer. You see how she cries and cries? She will win any argument. And that one—” he indicated the door. “That one will marry an engineer. You see how she looks at the fan? She is interested in the way machines work.” He stroked the puff of his daughter’s hair, wet with his sweat and her saliva. He looked into her watery eyes. “Your baby sister will marry a doctor.” He looked back at Job with an avuncular smile. “One day, maybe you will be so fortunate.”

Job frowned, faltering for a moment. “I am a bachelor.” Mustering all the dignity he had, he added, “I am a free man.”

“Yes, you are a free man, a bachelor,” Emeka conceded. “But you are free in the way of Americans.” He twisted his thumb at the storm of rioters on the television. The camera returned to Brokaw, who spoke in his gravelly voice about the scene. The Americans were in New York City’s Central Park, rallying against nuclear weapons. “The Americans are happy with nothing.”

Bruce Springsteen and Linda Ronstadt were among the attendees. “Look at this nonsense,” Emeka said. “The Americans fight against the nuclear weapons they have made and given to other nations.” He jerked a thumb at Springsteen. “This one — I have heard his music, singing of crashing on the highway. What does he know of nuclear weapons? And this one, she should return to her husband and children. She has married the California governor, you know.”

Under his breath, Job retorted, “When you make the rules, you do as you please. That is the golden rule.”

“Ah, yes, the words of a Mobutu. A man like you would say such a thing.”

Job thought of his brother, the one his father had lost in the war, the one they had all lost in the war because of his weakness, the arrogance of a small man. “What kind of nation can be ruled by a small man? Any man can tell you this.”