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.” He gestured, dismissively, toward a woman and her two children, who were speaking Spanish. “They will never move forward unless they adapt to America. They will always be doomed to supermarkets like this.”
I murmured something to show I was listening. I thought about the open market in Enugu, the traders who sweet-talked you into stopping at their zinc-covered sheds, who were prepared to bargain all day to add one single kobo to the price. They wrapped what you bought in plastic bags when they had them, and when they did not have them, they laughed and offered
you worn newspapers.
My new husband took me to the mall; he wanted to show me as much as he could before he started work on Monday. His car rattled as he drove, as though there were many parts that had come loose—a sound similar to shaking a tin full of nails. It stalled at a traffic light and he turned the key a few times before it started.
“I’ll buy a new car after my residency,” he said.
Inside the mall, the floors gleamed, smooth as ice cubes, and the high-as-the-sky ceiling blinked with tiny ethereal lights. I felt as though I were in a different physical world, on another planet. The people who pushed against us, even the black ones, wore the mark of foreignness, otherness, on their faces.
“We’ll get pizza first,” he said. “It’s one thing you have to like in America.”
We walked up to the pizza stand, to the man wearing a nose ring and a tall white hat.
“Two pepperoni and sausage. Is your combo deal better?” my new husband asked. He sounded different when he spoke to Americans: his r was overpronounced and his t was under-pronounced. And he smiled, the eager smile of a person who wanted to be liked.
We ate the pizza sitting at a small round table in what he called a “food court.” A sea of people sitting around circular tables, hunched over paper plates of greasy food. Uncle Ike would be horrified at the thought of eating here; he was a titled man and did not even eat at weddings unless he was served in a private room. There was something humiliatingly public, something lacking in dignity, about this place, this open space of too many tables and too much food.
“Do you like the pizza?” my new husband asked. His paper plate was empty.
“The tomatoes are not cooked well.”
“We overcook food back home and that is why we lose all the nutrients. Americans cook things right. See how healthy they all look?”
I nodded, looking around. At the next table, a black woman with a body as wide as a pillow held sideways smiled at me. I smiled back and took another pizza bite, tightening my stomach so it would not eject anything.