How she loved New York City. She still couldn’t believe she was here. Couldn’t believe she was walking around shopping for Gucci, no longer a jobless, unwed mother, sitting in her father’s house in Limbe, sunrise to sunset, dry season to rainy season, waiting for Jende to rescue her.
It didn’t seem like eighteen months already, perhaps because she still remembered much about the day she and Liomi arrived at JFK. She still remembered how Jende had stood at the terminal waiting for them, dressed in a red shirt and blue clip-on tie, a bouquet of yellow hydrangeas in his hands. She still remembered how they had embraced and held each other for almost a minute in silence, their eyes tightly shut to banish the agony of the past two years in which he had worked three jobs to save the money needed for her student visa, Liomi’s visitor visa, and their airline tickets. She remembered how Liomi had joined in their embrace, grabbing both of their legs before Jende had paused from holding her to pick him up. She remembered how the apartment—which Jende had recently found after almost two years of sharing a two-bedroom basement apartment with six Puerto Rican men in the Bronx—was that night filled with Jende’s laughter and her voice delighting him with stories from back home, alongside Liomi’s squeals as father and son roughhoused and tickled each other on the carpet. She remembered how they had moved Liomi from their bed to the cot in the middle of the night so they could lie side by side, do all the things they had promised to do to each other in emails and phone calls and text messages. And she still clearly remembered lying in bed next to Jende after they were done, listening to the sounds of America outside the window, the chatter and laughter of African-American men and women on the streets of Harlem, and telling herself: I am in America, I am truly in America.
She could never forget that day.
Or the day, two weeks after their arrival, when they were married at city hall with Liomi as their ring bearer and Jende’s cousin Winston as their witness. On that day in May 2006, she finally became a respectable woman, a woman declared worthy of love and protection.
Limbe was now some faraway town, a place she had loved less with every new day Jende was not there. Without him to go for a walk on the beach with, go dancing with, or sit with at a drinking spot and enjoy a cold Malta Guinness on a hot Sunday afternoon, the town was no longer her beloved hometown but a desolate place she couldn’t wait to get out of. In every phone call during the time they were apart she had reminded him of this, of her inability to stop daydreaming about the day she would leave Limbe and be with him in America.
“I dream, too, bébé,” he always said to her. “Day and night I dream all kinds of dreams.”
On the day she and Liomi got their visas, she had gone to bed with their passports under her pillow. On the night they left Cameroon, she felt nothing. As the bus her father had rented to drive them—and the two dozen family and friends who came along to escort them—pulled out from in front of their house to begin the two-hour trip to Douala International Airport, she had smiled and waved at the neighbors and extended-family members who had gathered on the front lawn to enviously bid them farewell. She had taken a panoramic mental photograph of them, knowing she wouldn’t be missing them for too long, wishing them the same happiness she knew she was going to find in America.
A year and a half later now and New York City was her home, a place with all the pleasures she desired. She woke up next to the man she loved and turned her face to see their child. For the first time in her life, she had a job, as a home health aide through an agency that paid her in cash, since she had no working papers. She was a matriculated student for the first time in sixteen years, studying chemistry at Borough of Manhattan Community College, never worrying about her tuition because she knew Jende would always pay the three-thousand-dollars-a-semester fee without grumbling, unlike her father, who unceasingly complained about his financial headaches and delivered a lecture about CFA francs not growing on mango trees whenever one of his eight children asked for money for school fees or new uniforms. For the first time in much too long, she didn’t wake up in the morning with no plans except to clean the house, go to the market, cook for her parents and siblings, take care of Liomi, meet with her friends and listen to them bash their mothers-in-law, go to bed and look forward to more of the same the next day because her life was going neither forward nor backward. And for the very first time in her life, she had a dream besides marriage and motherhood: to become a pharmacist like the ones everyone respected in Limbe because they handed out health and happiness in pill bottles. To achieve this dream, she had to do well in school, and she was doing just that—maintaining a B-plus average. Three days a week she went to school and, after classes, walked the school’s hallways with her bulky algebra, chemistry, biology, and philosophy textbooks, glowing because she was growing into a learned woman. As often as she could, she sat in the library to do her homework, or went to office hours to hound professors for advice on what she needed to do to get better grades so she could get into a great pharmacy school. She was going to make herself proud, make Jende proud of his wife, make Liomi proud of his mother. She’d waited too long to become something, and now, at thirty-three, she finally had, or was close enough to having, everything she’d ever wanted in life.
Three
HE WAS ON WHITE PLAINS ROAD WHEN THE CALL CAME IN. FOUR MINUTES later, he closed his flip phone and laughed. He pounded the steering wheel and laughed even louder: jubilant, bemused, incredulous. If he had been driving in New Town, Limbe, he would have gotten out of the car and hugged someone on the street, telling them, Bo, you won’t even believe the news I just got. In New Town, he would have known at least one person on the street with whom to share his good news, but here, on these streets of old brick houses and faded lawns in the Bronx, he knew no one he could run to and repeat what Clark’s secretary had just told him. There was a young black man walking with headphones on, banging his head to some kind of good music; three teenage Asian girls covering their mouths and giggling, none of them with a school bag; a woman rushing somewhere, pushing a fat baby in a pink umbrella stroller. There was an African man, too, but judging from his dark angular face and flowing grand boubou, he had to be Senegalese or Burkinabé or from one of the other French-speaking West African countries. Jende could not run out to him just because they were both West Africans—he needed to rejoice with someone who knew his name and his story.
“Oh, Papa God, Jends,” Neni said when he called her with the news. “I cannot believe it! Can you?”
He smiled and shook his head, knowing her question needed no response—she was merely as happy as he was. From the sounds coming alongside her voice, he could tell she was dancing, jumping, skipping around the apartment like a child bearing a handful of sweets.
“Did she say exactly how much they’re going to pay you?”
“Thirty-five thousand.”
“Mamami, eh! Papa God, oh! I’m dancing right now, Jends. I’m doing gymnastics, oh!”
She wanted to stay on the phone, rejoice together for at least ten more minutes, but she had to leave for her chemistry class. He kept on smiling after she hung up, amused by her joy, which flowed mightier than Victoria Falls.
He called his cousin Winston next.
“Congrats, my man,” Winston said. “Wonders shall never end.”
“I’m telling you,” Jende said.
“So, you, this bush boy from New Town, Limbe, you’re going to drive a Wall Street exec, eh? You’ll now be driving a shiny Lexus, instead of that chakara Hyundai?”
Jende laughed. “I don’t know how to thank you,” he said. “I just can’t even begin to—”