The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [69]
He got up. “You don’t understand how it works in this country. If you want to get anywhere you have to be as mainstream as possible. If not, you will be left by the roadside. You have to use your English name here.”
“I never have, my English name is just something on my birth certificate. I’ve been Chinaza Okafor my whole life.”
“You’ll get used to it, baby,” he said, reaching out to caress my cheek. “You’ll see.”
When he filled out a Social Security number application for me the next day, the name he entered in bold letters was AGATHA BELL.
Our neighborhood was called Flatbush, my new husband told me, as we walked, hot and sweaty, down a noisy street that smelled of fish left out too long before refrigeration. He wanted to show me how to do the grocery shopping and how to use the bus.
“Look around, don’t lower your eyes like that. Look around. You get used to things faster that way,” he said.
I turned my head from side to side so he would see that I was following his advice. Dark restaurant windows promised the BEST CARIBBEAN AND AMERICAN FOOD in lopsided print, a car wash across the street advertised $3.50 washes on a chalkboard nestled among Coke cans and bits of paper. The sidewalk was chipped away at the edges, like something nibbled at by mice.
Inside the air-conditioned bus, he showed me where to pour in the coins, how to press the tape on the wall to signal my stop.
“This is not like Nigeria, where you shout out to the conductor,” he said, sneering, as though he was the one who had invented the superior American system.
Inside Key Food, we walked from aisle to aisle slowly. I was wary when he put a beef pack in the cart. I wished I could touch the meat, to examine its redness, as I often did at Ogbete Market, where the butcher held up fresh-cut slabs buzzing with flies.
“Can we buy those biscuits?” I asked. The blue packets of Burton’s Rich Tea were familiar; I did not want to eat biscuits but I wanted something familiar in the cart.
“Cookies. Americans call them cookies,” he said.
I reached out for the biscuits (cookies).
“Get the store brand. They’re cheaper, but still the same thing,” he said, pointing at a white packet.
“Okay,” I said. I no longer wanted the biscuits, but I put the store brand in the cart and stared at the blue packet on the shelf, at the familiar grain-embossed Burton’s logo, until we left the aisle.
“When I become an Attending, we will stop buying store brands, but for now we have to; these things may seem cheap but they add up,” he said.
“When you become a Consultant?”
“Yes, but it’s called an Attending here, an Attending Physician.”
The arrangers of marriage only told you that doctors made a lot of money in America. They did not add that before doctors started to make a lot of money, they had to do an internship and a residency program, which my new husband had not completed. My new husband had told me this during our short in-flight conversation, right after we took off from Lagos, before he fell asleep.
“Interns are paid twenty-eight thousand a year but work about eighty hours a week. It’s like three dollars an hour,” he had said. “Can you believe it? Three dollars an hour!”
I did not know if three dollars an hour was very good or very bad—I was leaning toward very good—until he added that even high school students working part-time made much more.
“Also when I become an Attending, we will not live in a neighborhood like this,” my new husband said. He stopped to let a woman with her child tucked into her shopping cart pass by. “See how they have bars so you can’t take the shopping carts out? In the good neighborhoods, they don’t have them. You can take your shopping cart all the way to your car.”
“Oh,” I said. What did it matter that you could or could not take the carts out? The point was, there were carts.
“Look at the people who shop here; they are the ones who immigrate and continue to act as if they are back in their countries.