The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [11]
She comes out and stands by the bathroom as Amaechi cleans up the hair, reverently brushing the brown strands into a dustpan, as though they are potent. Nkem wishes she had not snapped. The madam/housegirl line has blurred in the years she has had Amaechi. It is what America does to you, she thinks. It forces egalitarianism on you. You have nobody to talk to, really, except for your toddlers, so you turn to your housegirl. And before you know it, she is your friend. Your equal.
“I had a difficult day,” Nkem says, after a while. “I’m sorry.”
“I know, madam, I see it in your face,” Amaechi says, and smiles.
The phone rings and Nkem knows it is Obiora. Nobody else calls this late.
“Darling, kedu?” he says. “Sorry, I couldn’t call earlier. I just got back from Abuja, the meeting with the minister. My flight was delayed until midnight. It’s almost two a.m. now. Can you believe that?”
Nkem makes a sympathetic sound.
“Adanna and Okey kwanu?” he asks.
“They are fine. Asleep.”
“Are you sick? Are you okay?” he asks. “You sound strange.”
“I’m all right.” She knows she should tell him about the children’s day, she usually does when he calls too late to talk to them. But her tongue feels bloated, too heavy to let the words roll out.
“How was the weather today?” he asks.
“Warming up.”
“It better finish warming up before I come,” he says, and laughs. “I booked my flight today. I can’t wait to see you all.”
“Do you—?” she starts to say, but he cuts her off.
“Darling, I have to go. I have a call coming in, it’s the minister’s personal assistant calling at this time! I love you.”
“I love you,” she says, although the phone is already dead. She tries to visualize Obiora, but she can’t because she is not sure if he is at home, in his car, somewhere else. And then she wonders if he is alone, or if he is with the girl with the short curly hair. Her mind wanders to the bedroom in Nigeria, hers and Obiora’s, that still feels like a hotel room every Christmas. Does this girl clutch her pillow in sleep? Do this girl’s moans bounce off the vanity mirror? Does this girl walk to the bathroom on tiptoe as she herself had done as a single girl when her married boyfriend brought her to his house for a wife-away weekend?
She dated married men before Obiora—what single girl in Lagos hadn’t? Ikenna, a businessman, had paid her father’s hospital bills after the hernia surgery. Tunji, a retired army general, had fixed the roof of her parents’ home and bought them the first real sofas they had ever owned. She would have considered being his fourth wife—he was a Muslim and could have proposed—so that he would help her with her younger siblings’ education. She was the ada, after all, and it shamed her, even more than it frustrated her, that she could not do any of the things expected of the First Daughter, that her parents still struggled on the parched farm, that her siblings still hawked loaves of bread at the motor park. But Tunji did not propose. There were other men after him, men who praised her baby skin, men who gave her fleeting handouts, men who never proposed because she had gone to secretarial school, not a university. Because despite her perfect face she still mixed up her English tenses; because she was still, essentially, a Bush Girl.
Then she met Obiora on a rainy day when he walked into the reception area of the advertising agency and she smiled and said, “Good morning, sir. Can I help you?” And he said, “Yes, please make the rain stop.” Mermaid Eyes, he called her that first day. He did not ask her to meet him at a private guesthouse, like all the other men, but instead took her to dinner at the vibrantly public Lagoon restaurant, where anybody could have seen them. He asked about her family.