Neni smiled at the memories as she sat in the train. She was a teenager back then, but as a middle child she wasn’t allowed to touch the TV—turning it on and off were rights reserved for her father and oldest brother. Nowadays even three-year-olds in Limbe could turn a TV on and off. Every third house in town had CNN, though, funnily, her parents’ house didn’t.
Her father had stopped working at the seaport in ’93, forced out by a Bamileke boss who wanted his tribesman to take Neni’s father’s job. With no warning, he had been transferred to a far less lucrative position at the Treasury Department in Limbe, and six months after that his widowed sister had died, leaving behind three children he had no choice but to take in and raise alongside his five. With the loss of his prestigious job came the loss of some of the power and respect he’d had as a rich man. Folks still greeted him with both hands, but many stopped coming to his house to visit, knowing that upon leaving they wouldn’t receive five or ten thousand CFA francs to “pay taxi.” These days he was retired, living on a meager pension, without much to his name besides an ancient blue Peugeot in the garage of his brick house.
Eighteen
THE EDWARDS SUMMER HOUSE WASN’T MADE OF BRICKS, BUT IT DIDN’T need to be; all the brick houses of New Town, Limbe, put together couldn’t compete with one of its rooms. When Neni had first gone there with Anna to learn her duties, she had tried not to show Anna how awed she was, but Anna must have seen it on her face: Her eyes couldn’t stop roving from the moment they stepped out of the cab in front of the two-story warm gray stone-and-wood-shingled house with meticulously manicured boxwood spheres on both sides of the four-columned portico. It wasn’t only the size that astounded her (why did they need such a big house for only a few months a year? why five bedrooms when there were only two children? didn’t they understand that no matter how much money a person had, they could sleep on only one bed at a time?) but also the profuse elegance. Even on her third day there she was still flabbergasted by the sumptuousness of her surroundings, especially the living room, with its all-white decor and large windows as if to never lose a view of the sky. She was astonished by its spotlessness, which Anna had told her was because Cindy hated dirt even more than she hated cheap things; its plush white carpets and wool rugs, which she almost feared stepping on; and its black chandelier and glass accents, so delicate-looking she dusted with tenderness, worried she would leave a mark.
The afternoon she arrived, Vince had given her a hug and told her to make herself comfortable, though she couldn’t see how she could possibly do so if she was in a constant state of unease about ruining something. She spent all evening of that first day in the kitchen with Mighty, too circumspect to go anywhere besides her bedroom after Vince left for the city (to meditate at Unity; Jende wasn’t exaggerating) and Cindy went out to dinner with friends. Even in those first hours in Southampton, she could tell Mighty would be her only true source of joy there—he reminded her of Liomi, thanks to his abundant eyelashes and the way he never seemed to lack something to laugh or smile about.
“Do you like living in Harlem?” he asked her while she was making his dinner, surprising her with his forwardness, a characteristic untypical of children from Limbe.
“It’s nice,” she said.
“Jende says he doesn’t like it too much.”
“He said that?” Neni said, turning from the stove. “Why would he say that?”
“Because he’s honest,” Mighty said with a laugh, “and honesty’s the best policy, right?”
Even when she wished he wasn’t so inquisitive, she couldn’t deny that he was a token of how normal rich children could be. During their first days together, he amused her with questions about African lions and leopards and what kind of animals she had seen roaming around Limbe, questions she was sure he’d already asked Jende at least a dozen times but which delighted her so much that she made up tales about monkeys stealing her lunch when she was a schoolgirl, and a classmate who used to come to school riding on an elephant. I don’t believe it, Mighty would say to such stories, and Neni would make up an even more incredible one. Babysitting him was by far the most enjoyable part of her job, and the part she was certain she impressed Cindy the most in executing. Every time Cindy walked into a room to see her and Mighty laughing or playing, Neni could sense Cindy’s approval because nothing appeared to matter to the madam more than the happiness of her children, their nonstop possession of every good thing life had to offer. If Mighty was laughing and Vince was smiling, there couldn’t be a happier woman on earth than Cindy Edwards. This desire for their happiness (constantly asking if they needed something; always reminding Neni to make their meals and snacks just the way they liked them; giving Mighty three kisses every time either of them left the house) was followed closely only by her obvious need for a sense of belonging, an utterly desperate need she could never seem to quench.
It was a longing that confounded Neni, because on the day they met, Cindy Edwards appeared to be a woman with no desperate needs. From the moment they shook hands in the portico until Cindy left for her dinner, the madam was enveloped in an air of superiority, standing tall and keeping her shoulders back as she walked in long strides, slowly enunciating every word when she spoke, as if she had the right to take as much of the listener’s time as she wished. She pointed with slender manicured fingers bearing a sole emerald ring, nodding like an omnipotent empress as she took Neni around the house to give her polite but specific instructions on what she must do every morning and how she must do it; as she told her things that Anna might have said but which she needed to reiterate, things like what she couldn’t stand in a housekeeper: dishonesty, poor communication, and not acting with poise when company was around.
And yet, despite this portrait of a self-assured woman, Cindy seemed to have a near obsession with being where everyone was and doing what everyone was doing. Within four days, Neni noticed that she was on the phone with a friend at least once a day, wondering if the friend had gotten an invitation to So-and-So’s cocktail party, or This-and-That’s dinner party, or that upcoming gala or wedding. On the few occasions when her friends apparently told her they’d gotten their invites and she hadn’t gotten hers, she seemed to be in physical pain, her deep sighs and suddenly slumped shoulders and sad voice revealing to Neni that despite the fact that she was telling her friends that it was okay, she wasn’t okay because she was probably wondering why she hadn’t been invited, what she’d done to not be invited, if her social status was intact. This desperation to always be a part of something, always maintain a sense of specialness thanks to the action of others, baffled Neni, but she didn’t call Jende to talk about it because she knew he would say what he always said whenever she said she couldn’t understand why people cared about stupid things like the approval of others: Different things are important to different people.
Five days after her arrival, though, she called him to talk about Cindy, terrified.
“I think Mrs. Edwards is very sick,” she whispered from her room in the basement.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
There was no one else in the house, and Mrs. Edwards looked sick, she told him.
“What kind of sick, Neni? Fever? Headache? Stomachache?”
“No, no, not that kind of sick,” she whispered again.
Where was everybody? he wanted to know. Mr. Edwards was in the city, and Mighty and Vince were at the beach, she informed him. What did it matter where they were? she asked in frustration after replying to the question. Mrs. Edwards did not look well, and she was afraid because she didn’t know what to do. The madam looked like she was very sick, but maybe she wasn’t sick. She needed advice from her husband, not one question after another.