Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

Scalding afternoons made up the days leading into August. The living room fan, draped in a misted towel, circulated stagnant air about the room day and night. Job worked the night shift at the hospital and slept through the mornings and afternoons, rising just as Ifi left for alternating late afternoon and evening shifts at the motel, where she vacuumed rooms, emptied trash bins of condoms and beer bottles, and replaced semen-stained sheets. Few nights were shared by the two. In the event that they did share a night together, the sex was in the dark. Neither bothered to shower before or after, so their musky bodies joined together in a mingling of scents: onions from dinner, vomit from the boy, urine from a patient at the hospital, stale cigarettes from the motel. It was over just as quickly as it began, and the two retreated to their sides of the bed before falling into heavy slumber.

One night, after the boy had gone to bed, Ifi and Job were lumped on the couches in the living room watching television when they heard a scraping outside.

Ifi’s eyes opened in alarm. Job raised his finger to his lips and went out the back door. Ifi followed. At night, the backyard was a frayed forest. Bushes were tangled and unkempt. Half-grown grass caught at the backs of their ankles. In the distance, they could see the outline of the full-bodied moon. Ifi clung to Job. He told her to go inside but leaned into her anyway. Then they saw its eyes, large and shining. The raccoon flipped into the air, letting out a squeal, which incidentally was identical to the one that Job issued as well. The suddenness of the two sounds, and their similarity, made Ifi laugh. Then Job laughed. And when they saw that the overturned trash cans and scattered refuse were not the boy’s handiwork after all, in a small way, they rejoiced.

Such was the sentiment that compelled Ifi to suggest a family outing the next day as they ate toast with runny eggs for breakfast. Job acquiesced. By Sunday of the following week, Ifi, Job, and Victor were sweating in a hot open-air tent, divided by pens of stinking hogs and sheep at the 4-H exhibit of the Lancaster County Fair. A week before the commencement of every school year, a parade of tents was positioned alongside the abandoned fields and hollowed-out buildings of Zonta. A beer garden, concerts of howling country singers, a dubiously erected Ferris wheel, and the usual pageantry of horses and apple-cheeked schoolgirls in drooping sashes rounded out the stale days of the retreating summer.

Ifi had the day off. Though she had lived in America for nearly six years, this would be her first time attending. Shaking off the disappointment of the sandhill cranes all those years before, she took in the sights with forced vigor and appreciation, finding herself slipping in and out of Aunty’s platitudes. “Never count the eggs that might hatch,” she warned Victor as they overlooked a small-game exhibition.

At the 4-H exhibit, a small African boy about Victor’s age trotted out a limping calf and carefully mounted wooden stairs to a stage. Three other children, small, bowlegged, and uncertain, marched along with a scowling sheep, hog, and chicken. They stuttered and spat prepared speeches into the microphone. An announcer followed, haltingly shouting and proclaiming them all winners before pinning each child with identical blue ribbons. In the tight, packed crowd, parents beamed from the sidelines. An array of camera flashes lit up the crowded tent.

“What kind of competition is it that everyone is the winner?” Ifi asked Job.

“Nonsense,” he replied.

Still eyeing the blue ribbons, Ifi turned to Victor. “You see, that boy is smaller than you.” Victor’s mouth was full of cotton candy. To no one in particular, Ifi said, “My son can do better.” And she could see it: just like the other American children, her Victor would stand in a cowboy hat and boots, proudly looming over a bleating sheep as he was presented with a ribbon. Ifi and Job would beam from the sidelines like the other parents, lighting the sky with their cameras. By then, she decided, the holes in their house would be repaired. There would even be a white picket fence. She turned to Victor. “Next year will be you.” She took Job’s hand. “Anything is possible.”

Under the sun’s glare, Job frowned. He had the bloated look of flayed dough. It was the heat.

“You were right, you know,” she explained. “I didn’t believe you then. When I first came to this country, I saw the cold and snow and empty fields. But there is more.” What vanity! she thought of herself. Coming to America with the glitter of golden streets and diamonds like apples in trees. How wrong she had been. All it took was hard work and pluck. Hadn’t Job known all along? Hadn’t he tried to make her understand? They did not own their clinic, but they did have a home of their own and a son. Amazing! she thought.

A little girl in a yellow dress skipped past them. At the same instant, Ifi and Job both recalled that silly night, bucking and sweating under the Port Harcourt heat. They remembered the darkness and then the sudden light. Ifi remembered Job, swollen and pitiful in her yellow dress, with crooked lipstick on his teeth.

“Mr. Doctor,” she said, a tease to her voice.

“Mrs. Doctor,” he said back. “Do you still have that yellow dress?”

Ifi’s head said no, but her eyes said yes. “I have had to repair that dress because it cannot fit properly.” A deliberate pause. “A big, fat woman with large buttocks damaged it.”

Job quipped an American saying he had heard many times before. “No, no, not fat, big boned.”

Another pause. “Big bones? I don’t understand,” she said.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking off his failed attempt at humor. “Nothing.”

“Tell me now,” Ifi said, her tone taking on irritation. “What is this talk of big bones?”

“I am saying that I am not fat. It is only that my bones are big,” he said.

Her eyes flicked dubiously to that thunderous belly of his, not so subtly disguised under his dampened shirt.

“Come now, it is an American joke.”

“Oh, yes-yes,” Ifi said back uncertainly. And then she laughed hard and suddenly, imagining bones thick enough to fill up her husband’s round belly. Job, caught up in the sound of her perplexed laughter, joined in.

Just three hours remained until Job had to leave for his weekend shift at the hospital, so they moved along the various stalls and exhibits in haste, stopping only to pose for pictures in front of a clown, a cutout, and a glittery poster. Victor’s fingers and mouth were sticky purple from cotton candy, and he made the usual menace of himself, stuffing his fingers through the gaps in the fencing to grasp at a swinging tail or ear. Twice they had been warned by one of the bulldog-faced attendants to contain him. On Victor’s third move in the direction of a surly pig, Ifi grasped his sticky palms, only letting go after she had dragged him far from the tent. A row of portapotties was next to the tents, and Job disappeared into one while she and Victor waited outside.

Facing them was one of the winners of a blue ribbon, the African boy. In one hand, an ice cream cone dripped; in the other, the hand of a girl with her back to them. Tall, with gangly legs, she fanned herself from the heat while flirting with a merchant, a teenage boy. Before Ifi could stop him, Victor scrambled at the boy, swiftly exchanging his dissolving cotton candy for the boy’s ice cream cone. At first, it looked as if the boy would cry or fight or yell.

Ifi moved to grab Victor’s hand. “What is wrong with you, eh?”

Another merchant, a grown man dressed head to toe in a striped uniform, admonished, “Hey now, hey now. Brothers shouldn’t fight. Gotta look out for each other.” It was enough to stop the two small boys from getting into a fistfight. The other boy took an uncertain bite at the cotton candy, shrugged his shoulders, and continued to eat without another thought. Victor licked furiously at the dripping cone he had claimed as his.