Nkem feels an uncomfortable tingle in her left ear. What does it mean to know, really? Is it knowing—her refusal to think concretely about other women? Her refusal to ever consider the possibility?
“Oga Obiora is a good man, madam, and he loves you, he does not use you to play football.” Amaechi takes the pot off the stove and looks steadily at Nkem. Her voice is softer, almost cajoling. “Many women would be jealous, maybe your friend Ijemamaka is jealous. Maybe she is not a true friend. There are things she should not tell you. There are things that are good if you don’t know.”
Nkem runs her hand through her short curly hair, sticky with the texturizer and curl activator she had used earlier. Then she gets up to rinse her hand. She wants to agree with Amaechi, that there are things that are best unknown, but then she is not so sure anymore. Maybe it is not such a bad thing that Ijemamaka told me, she thinks. It no longer matters why Ijemamaka called.
“Check the potatoes,” she says.
. . .
Later that evening, after putting the children to bed, she picks up the kitchen phone and dials the fourteen-digit number. She hardly ever calls Nigeria. Obiora does the calling, because his Worldnet cell phone has good international rates.
“Hello? Good evening.” It is a male voice. Uneducated.
Rural Igbo accent. “This is Madam from America.” “Ah, madam!” The voice changes, warms up. “Good evening, madam.”
“Who is speaking?”
“Uchenna, madam. I am the new houseboy.”
“When did you come?”
“Two weeks now, madam.”
“Is Oga Obiora there?”
“No, madam. Not back from Abuja.”
“Is anybody else there?”
“How, madam?”
“Is anybody else there?”
“Sylvester and Maria, madam.”
Nkem sighs. She knows the steward and cook would be there, of course, it is midnight in Nigeria. But does this new houseboy sound hesitant, this new houseboy that Obiora forgot to mention to her? Is the girl with the curly hair there? Or did she go with Obiora on the business trip to Abuja?
“Is anybody else there?” Nkem asks again.
A pause. “Madam?”
“Is anybody else in that house except for Sylvester and Maria?”
“No, madam. No.”
“Are you sure?”
A longer pause. “Yes, madam.”
“Okay, tell oga Obiora that I called.”
Nkem hangs up quickly. This is what I have become, she thinks. I am spying on my husband with a new houseboy I don’t even know.
“Do you want a small drink?” Amaechi asks, watching her, and Nkem wonders if it is pity, that liquid glint in Amaechi’s slightly slanted eyes. A small drink has been their tradition, hers and Amaechi’s, for some years now, since the day Nkem got her green card. She had opened a bottle of champagne that day and poured for Amaechi and herself, after the children went to bed. “To America!” she’d said, amid Amaechi’s too-loud laughter. She would no longer have to apply for visas to get back into America, no longer have to put up with condescending questions at the American embassy. Because of the crisp plastic card sporting the photo in which she looked sulky. Because she really belonged to this country now, this country of curiosities and crudities, this country where you could drive at night and not fear armed robbers, where restaurants served one person enough food for three.
She does miss home, though, her friends, the cadence of Igbo and Yoruba and pidgin English spoken around her. And when the snow covers the yellow fire hydrant on the street, she misses the Lagos sun that glares down even when it rains. She has sometimes thought about moving back home, but never seriously, never concretely. She goes to a Pilates class twice a week in Philadelphia with her neighbor; she bakes cookies for her children’s classes and hers are always the favorites; she expects banks to have drive-ins. America has grown on her, snaked its roots under her skin. “Yes, a small drink,” she says to Amaechi. “Bring the wine that is in the fridge and two glasses.”
. . .