The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [9]
Obiora laughed when she told him how curious the neighbors were about them. He said oyibo people were like that. If you did something in a different way, they would think you were abnormal, as though their way was the only possible way. And although Nkem knew many Nigerian couples who lived together, all year, she said nothing.
Nkem runs a hand over the rounded metal of the Benin mask’s nose. One of the best imitations, Obiora had said when he bought it a few years ago. He told her how the British had stolen the original masks in the late 1800s during what they called the Punitive Expedition; how the British had a way of using words like “expedition” and “pacification” for killing and stealing. The masks—thousands, Obiora said—were regarded as “war booty” and were now displayed in museums all over the world.
Nkem picks up the mask and presses her face to it; it is cold, heavy, lifeless. Yet when Obiora talks about it—and all the rest—he makes them seem breathing, warm. Last year, when he brought the Nok terra-cotta that sits on the table in the hallway, he told her the ancient Nok people had used the originals for ancestor worship, placing them in shrines, offering them food morsels. And the British had carted most of those away, too, telling the people (newly Christianized and stupidly blinded, Obiora said) that the sculptures were heathen. We never appreciate what we have, Obiora always ended by saying, before repeating the story of the foolish head of state who had gone to the National Museum in Lagos and forced the curator to give him a four-hundred-year-old bust, which he then gave to the British queen as a present. Sometimes Nkem doubts Obiora’s facts, but she listens, because of how passionately he speaks, because of how his eyes glisten as though he is about to cry.
She wonders what he will bring next week; she has come to look forward to the art pieces, touching them, imagining the originals, imagining the lives behind them. Next week, when her children will once again say “Daddy” to someone real, not a telephone voice; when she will wake up at night to hear snoring beside her; when she will see another used towel in the bathroom.
Nkem checks the time on the cable decoder. She has an hour before she has to pick up the children. Through the drapes that her housegirl, Amaechi, has so carefully parted, the sun spills a rectangle of yellow light onto the glass center table. She sits at the edge of the leather sofa and looks around the living room, remembers the delivery man from Ethan Interiors who changed the lampshade the other day. “You got a great house, ma’am,” he’d said, with that curious American smile that meant he believed he, too, could have something like it someday. It is one of the things she has come to love about America, the abundance of unreasonable hope.
At first, when she had come to America to have the baby, she had been proudly excited because she had married into the coveted league, the Rich Nigerian Men Who Sent Their Wives to America to Have Their Babies league. Then the house they rented was put up for sale. A good price, Obiora said, before telling her they would buy. She liked it when he said “we,” as though she really had a say in it. And she liked that she had become part of yet another league, the Rich Nigerian Men Who Owned Houses in America league.
They never decided that she would stay with the children—Okey was born three years after Adanna. It just happened. She stayed back at first, after Adanna, to take a number of computer courses because Obiora said it was a good idea. Then Obiora registered Adanna in preschool, when Nkem was pregnant with Okey. Then he found a good private elementary school and told her they were lucky it was so close. Only a fifteen-minute drive to take Adanna there. She had never imagined that her children would go to school, sit side by side with white children whose parents