This thread is strictly for posting the stories that would be reviewed in the African book discussion club thread. All discussions should be done in the other thread. Here https://www.nairaland.com/1165652/book-discussion-club-africa/1#13969450

The first story for discussion is 'The thing around your neck by Chimamanda Adichie

The thing around your neck - Chimanda Adichie

You thought everybody in America had a car and a gun, your uncles and aunts thought so too. After you won the American visa lottery, your uncles and aunts and cousins told you, in a month you will have a big car. Soon, a big house. But don't buy a gun like those Americans.

They trooped into the shantytown house in Lagos, standing beside the nail-studded zinc walls because the chairs did not go round, to say goodbye in loud voices and tell you with lowered voices what they wanted you to send them. In comparison to the big car and house (and possibly gun), the things they wanted were minor - handbags and shoes and perfumes and clothes. You said OK, no problem.

Your uncle in America said you could live with him until you got on your feet. He picked you up at the airport and bought you a big hot dog with yellow mustard that nauseated you. Introduction to America, he said with a laugh. He lived in a small white town in Maine, in a house by a lake. He told you that the company he worked for had offered him a few thousand more, plus stocks, because they were trying to look diverse. They included him in every brochure, even those that had nothing to do with engineering. He grinned and said the job was good, was worth living in an all-white town for, even though his wife had to drive an hour to find a hair salon that did black hair. The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give and take. You gave up a lot but gained a lot too.

He showed you how to apply for a cashier's job in the gas station on Main Street and he enrolled you in a community college, where the girls gawked at your hair. Does it stand up when you take the braids out? All of it stands up? How? Why? Do you use a comb?

You smiled tightly when they asked those questions. Your uncle told you to expect it; a mixture of ignorance and arrogance, he called it. Then he told you how the neighbours said, a few months after he moved into his house, that the squirrels had started to disappear. They had heard Africans ate all kinds of wild animals.

You laughed with your uncle and felt at home in his house, his wife called you nwanne, sister, and his two school-age children called you auntie. They spoke Igbo and ate garri for lunch and it was like home. Until your uncle came into the cramped basement where you slept with old boxes and books and pulled your bosoms, as though he were plucking mangoes from a tree, moaning. He wasn't really your uncle; he was a distant cousin of your aunt's husband, not related by blood.

As you packed your bags that night, he sat on your bed and smiled and said you had nowhere to go. If you let him, he would do many things for you. Smart women did it all the time. How did you think those women back home in Lagos with well-paying jobs made it? Even women in New York City?

You locked yourself in the bathroom and the next morning you left, walking the long windy road, smelling the baby fish in the lake. You saw him drive past, he had always dropped you off at Main Street, and he didn't honk. You wondered what he would tell his wife, why you had left. And you remembered what he had said, that America was give and take.

You ended up in Connecticut, in another little town, because it was the last stop of the bus you got on. You walked into the restaurant nearby and said you would work for two dollars less than the other waitresses. The owner, Juan, had inky black hair and smiled to show a bright yellow tooth. He said he had never had a Nigerian employee but all immigrants worked hard. He knew, he'd been there. He'd pay you a dollar less, but under the table, he didn't like all the taxes they were making him pay.

You could not afford to go to school, because now you paid rent for the tiny room with the stained carpet. Besides, the small Connecticut town didn't have a community college and a credit in the state university cost too much. So you went to the public library, you looked up course syllabuses on school websites and read some of the books. Sometimes you sat on the lumpy mattress of your twin bed and thought about home, your parents, your uncles and aunts, your cousins, your friends. The people who never broke a profit from the mangos and akara they hawked, whose houses - zinc sheets precariously held together by nails - fell apart in the rainy season. The people who came out to say goodbye, to rejoice because you won the American visa lottery, to confess their envy. The people who sent their children to the secondary school where teachers gave an A when someone slipped them brown envelopes.

You had never needed to pay for an A, never slipped a brown envelope to a teacher in secondary school. Still, you chose long brown envelopes to send half your month's earnings to your parents; you always used the notes that Juan gave you because those were crisp, unlike the tips. You didn't write a letter. There was nothing to write about.

The first weeks you wanted to write though, because you had stories to tell. You wanted to write about the surprising openness of people in America, how eagerly they told you about their mother fighting cancer, about their sister-in-law's premature baby - things people should hide, should reveal only to the family members who wished them well. You wanted to write about the way people left so much food on their plates and crumpled a few dollar bills down, as though it was an offering, expiation for the wasted food. You wanted to write about the child who started to cry and pull at her blonde hair and instead of the parents making her shut up, they pleaded with her and then they all got up and left.

You wanted to write about the rich Americans who wore shabby clothes and tattered sneakers, who looked like the nightwatchmen in front of the large compounds in Lagos. You wanted to write about the poor people who were fat and the rich people who were thin. And you wanted to write that everybody in America di
***d not have a big house and car, though you still weren't sure about the guns because they might have them inside their bags and pockets.

It wasn't just your parents you wanted to write to, it was your friends and cousins and aunts and uncles. But you could never afford enough perfume and clothes and handbags to go around and still pay your rent on the waitressing job, so you wrote to nobody.

Nobody knew where you were because you told no one. Sometimes you felt invisible and tried to walk through the wall of your room into the hallway and when you bumped into the wall, it left bruises on your arms. Once, Juan asked if you had a man that hit you because he would take care of him and you laughed a mysterious laugh. At nights, something wrapped itself around your neck, something that very nearly choked you before you woke up.

Some people thought you were from Jamaica because they thought that every black person with an accent was Jamaican. Or some who guessed that you were African asked if you knew so and so from Kenya or so and so from Zimbabwe because they thought Africa was a country where everyone knew everyone else.

So when he asked you, in the dimness of the restaurant after you recited the daily specials, what African country you were from, you said Nigeria and expected him to ask if you knew a friend he had made in Senegal or Botswana. But he asked if you were Yoruba or Igbo, because you didn't have a Fulani face. You were surprised - you thought he must be a professor of anthropology, a little young but who was to say? Igbo, you said. He asked your name and said Akunna was pretty. He did not ask what it meant, fortunately, because you were sick of how people said, Father's Wealth? You mean, like, your father will actually sell you to a husband?

He had been to Ghana and Kenya and Tanzania, he had read about all the other African countries, their histories, their complexities. You wanted to feel disdain, to show it as you brought his order, because white people who liked Africa too much and who liked Africa too little were the same - condescending. But he didn't act like he knew too much, didn't shake his head in the superior way a professor back in the Maine community college once did as he talked about Angola, didn't show any condescension. He came in the next day and sat at the same table and when you asked if the chicken was OK, he asked you something about Lagos. He came in the third day and talked for so long - asking you often if you didn't think Mobutu and Idi Amin were similar - you had to tell him it was against restaurant policy. He brushed your hand when you placed the coffee down. The fourth day, you told Juan you didn't want that table anymore.

After your shift that day, he was waiting outside, leaning by a pole, asking you to go out with him because your name rhymed with hakuna matata and The Lion King was the only maudlin movie he'd ever liked. You didn't know what The Lion King was. You looked at him in the bright light and realised that his eyes were the colour of extra virgin olive oil, a greenish gold. Extra virgin olive oil was the only thing you loved, truly loved, in America.

He was a senior at the state university. He told you how old he was and you asked why he had not graduated yet. This was America, after all, it was not like back home where universities closed so often that people added three years to their normal course of study and lecturers went on strike after strike and were still not paid. He said he had taken time off, a couple of years after high school, to discover himself and travel, mostly to Africa and Asia. You asked him where he ended up finding himself and he laughed. You did not laugh. You did not know that people could simply choose not to go to school, that people could dictate to life. You were used to accepting what life gave, writing down what life dictated.

You said no the following three days, to going out with him, because you didn't think it was right, because you were uncomfortable with the way he looked into your eyes, the way you laughed so easily at what he said. And then the fourth night, you panicked when he was not standing at the door after your shift. You prayed for the first time in a long time and when he came up behind you and said, hey, you said yes you would go out with him even before he asked.

The next day, he took you to Chang's and your fortune cookie had two strips of paper. Both were blank.

You knew you had become comfortable with him when you told him the real reason you asked Juan for a different table - Jeopardy. When you watched Jeopardy on the restaurant TV, you rooted for the following, in this order: women of colour, black men, white women, before finally, white men, which meant you never rooted for white men. He laughed and told you he was used to not being rooted for, his mother taught women's studies.

And you knew you had become close when you told him that your father was really not a schoolteacher in Lagos, that he was a taxi driver. And you told him about that day in Lagos traffic in your father's car, it was raining and your seat was wet because of the rust-eaten hole in the roof. The traffic was heavy, the traffic was always heavy in Lagos, and when it rained it was chaos. The roads were so badly drained some cars would get stuck in muddy potholes and some of your cousins got paid to push the cars out. The rain and the swampy road - you thought - made your father step on the brakes too late that day. You heard the bump before you felt it. The car your father rammed into was wide, foreign and dark green, with yellow headlights like the eyes of a cat. Your father started to cry and beg even before he got out of the car and laid himself flat on the road, stopping the traffic. Sorry sir, sorry sir, if you sell me and my family you cannot even buy one tyre in your car, he chanted. Sorry sir.

The big man seated at the back did not come out, his driver did, examining the damage, looking at your father's sprawled form from the corner of his eye as though the pleading was a song he was ashamed to admit he liked. Finally, he let your father go. Waved him away. The other cars honked and drivers cursed. When your father got back in the car, you refused to look at him because he was just like the pigs that waddled in the marshes around the market. Your father looked like nsi. poo.

After you told him this, he held your hand and said he understood. You shook your hand free, annoyed, because he thought the world was, or ought to be, full of people like him. You told him there was nothing to understand, it was just the way it was.

He didn't eat meat, because he thought it was wrong the way they killed animals, he said they released fear toxins into the animals and the fear toxins made people paranoid. Back home, the meat pieces you ate, when there was meat, were the size of half your finger. But you did not tell him that. You did not tell him either that the dawadawa cubes your mother cooked everything with, because curry and thyme were too expensive, had MSG, were MSG. He said MSG caused cancer, it was the reason he liked Chang's; Chang didn't cook with MSG.

Once, at Chang's, he told the waiter he had lived in Shanghai for a year, that he spoke some Mandarin. The waiter warmed up and told him what soup was best and then asked him, you have girlfriend in Shanghai? And he smiled and said nothing.

You lost your appetite, the region beneath your bosoms felt clogged, inside. That night, you didn't moan when he was inside you, you bit your lips and pretended that you didn't come because you knew he would worry. Finally you told him why you were upset, that the Chinese man assumed you could not possibly be his girlfriend, and that he had smiled and said nothing. Before he apologised, he gazed at you blankly and you knew that he did not understand.

He bought you presents and when you objected about the cost, he said he had a trust fund, it was OK. His presents mystified you. A fist-sized ball that you shook to watch snow fall on a tiny house, or watch a plastic ballerina in pink spin around. A shiny rock. An expensive scarf hand-painted in Mexico that you could never wear because of the colour. Finally you told him, your voice stretched in irony, that in the third world presents should be useful. The rock, for instance, would work if you could grind things with it, or wear it. He laughed long and hard, but you did not laugh. You realised that in his life, he could buy presents that were just presents and nothing else. When he started to buy you shoes and clothes and books, you asked him not to, you didn't want any presents at all.

Still, you did not fight. Not really. You argued and then you made up and made love and ran your hands through each other's hair, his soft and yellow like the swinging tassels of growing corncobs, yours dark and bouncy like the filling of a pillow. You felt safe in his arms, the same safeness you felt back home, in the shantytown house of zinc, the same safeness you felt when he got too much sun and his skin turned the colour of a ripe watermelon and you kissed portions of his back before you rubbed lotion on it. He found the African store in the Hartford Yellow Pages and drove you there. The store owner, a Ghanaian, asked him if he was African, like the white Kenyans or South Africans and he laughed and said yes, but he'd been in America for a long time, had missed the food of his childhood. He didn't tell the store owner that he was just joking. You cooked for him; he liked jollof rice but after he ate garri and onugbu soup, he threw up in your sink. You didn't mind, though, because now you could cook onugbu soup with meat.

The thing that wrapped itself around your neck, that nearly always choked you before you fell asleep, started to loosen, to let go.

You knew by people's reactions that you were abnormal - the way the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice. The old white women who muttered and glared at him, the black men who shook their heads at you, the black women whose eyes bemoaned your lack of self-esteem. Or the black women who smiled swift secret solidarity smiles, the black men who tried too hard to forgive you, saying a too obvious hi to him, the white women who said, what a good looking pair, too loudly, as if to prove their own tolerance to themselves.

But his parents were different; they almost made you think it was all normal. His mother told you that he had never brought a girl to meet them, except for his high school prom date and he smiled stiffly and held your hand. The tablecloth shielded your clasped hands. He squeezed your hand and you squeezed back and wondered why he was so stiff, why his extra virgin olive oil eyes darkened as he spoke to his parents. His mother asked if those were real cowries strung through your braids and if you'd read Simone de Beauvoir and Nawal El Saadawi. His father asked how similar Indian food was to Nigerian food and teased you about paying when the check came. You looked at them and felt grateful that they did not examine you like an exotic trophy, an ivory tusk.

He told you about his issues with his parents later, how they portioned out love like a birthday cake, how they would give him a bigger slice if only he'd go to law school. You wanted to sympathise. But instead you were angry.

You were angrier when he told you he had refused to go up to Canada with them for a week or two, to their summer cottage in the Quebec countryside. They had even asked him to bring you. He showed you pictures of the cottage and you wondered why it was called a cottage because the buildings that big around your neighbourhood back home were banks and churches. You dropped a glass and it shattered on the hardwood of his apartment floor and he asked what was wrong and you said nothing, although you thought a lot was wrong. Your worlds were wrong.

Later, in the shower, you started to cry, you watched the water dilute your tears and you didn't know why you were crying.

You wrote home finally, when the thing around your neck had almost completely let go. Almost. A short letter to your parents and brothers and sisters, slipped in between the crisp dollar bills, and you included your address. You got a reply only days later, by courier. Your mother wrote the letter herself, you knew from the spidery penmanship, from the misspelled words.

Your father was dead; he had slumped over the steering wheel of his taxi. It had happened five months ago, she wrote. They had used some of the money you sent to give him a nice funeral. They killed a goat for the guests and buried him in a real coffin, not just planks of wood.

You curled up in bed, pressed your knees tight to your chest and cried. He held you while you cried, smoothed your hair, and offered to go with you, back home to Nigeria. You said no, you needed to go alone. He asked if you would come back and you reminded him that you had a green card and you would lose it if you did not come back in one year. He said you knew what he meant. Would you come back, come back?

You turned away and said nothing and when he drove you to the airport, you hugged him tight, clutching at the muscles of his back, until your ribs hurt. And you said thank you.

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=5973

Reading guide
The Thing Around Your Neck:

• Grade the story as great, bad or average and state your reasons for this.

• When "your" uncle says that "America was give-and-take", what did you think he meant?

• What is "the thing around your neck"? What finally loosens it?

• Do you think "you" (the protgonist) will return to him (Her boyfriend)?

Jesus Christ this story seems legit! I must read this book!

@breathing, from thw synopsis I'd say the story is very good espcially the isolation felt by people abroad to live up to imagined expectations.

America is give and take might have meant he was subtly telling of the 'rent' she would have to pay under his roof. It could also be a metaphor for America's true eat-or-be-eaten nature.

Fear is the thing around her neck. She was too afraid to move forward and too caught in a constant state of pessimism about her present. All through the story She keeps running to a safety zone, comfortable in her fear and when She felt the boyfriend could no longer provide that safe, like a mouse She scampered away


Nope, she's too timid for the Western world, her fear of it overrides her love for him.

ℓ☺ℓ Parnassuss, too timid for the Western world? Interesting opinions. Anyway, this link is meant only for posting the stories to be discussed, the discussion takes place here https://www.nairaland.com/1165652/book-discussion-club-africa/1#13969450, please copy and paste your reply there cuz I'd like to know what makes you call her timid.

2nd Story for discussion
My Mother, the Crazy African

Amanda Ngozi Adichie

I hate having an accent. I hate it when people ask me to repeat things sometimes and I can hear them laughing inside because I am not American. Now I reply Father's Igbo with English. I would do it with Mother too, but I don't think she will go for that just yet.

When people ask where I am from, Mother wants me to say Nigeria. The first time I said Philadelphia, she said, "say Nigeria." The second time she slapped the back of my head and asked, in Igbo, "is something wrong with your head?"

By then I had started school and I told her, Americans don't do it that way. You are from where you are born, or where you live, or where you intend to live for a long time. Take Cathy for example. She is from Chicago because she was born there. Her brother is from here, Philadelphia, because he was born in Jefferson Hospital. But their Father, who was born in Atlanta, is now from Philadelphia because he lives here.

Americans don't care about that nonsense of being from your ancestral village, where your forefathers owned land, where you can trace your lineage back hundreds of years. So you trace your lineage back, so what?

I still say I am from Philadelphia when Mother is not there. (I will only say Nigeria when someone says something about my accent and then I always add, but I live in Philadelphia with my family.)

Just like I call myself Lin when Mother isn't there. She likes to go on and on, how Ralindu is a beautiful Igbo name, how it means so much to her too, that name, Choose Life, because of what she went through, because of my brothers who died as babies. And I am sorry, don't get me wrong, but a name like Ralindu and an accent are too much for me right now, especially now that Matt and I are together.

When my friends call, Mother goes, "Lin?" for a second, as though she doesn't know who that is. You would think she hasn't been here three whole years (sometimes I tell people six years) the ways she acts.

She still likes to end observations with 'America!' Like at restaurants, "see how much food these people are wasting, America!" Or at the store, "see how much they have marked down the prices from last week, America!"

It's a lot better now though. She no longer crosses herself, shivering, whenever a murder is reported on the news. She no longer peers at Father's written directions as she drives to the grocery store or mall. She still has the directions in Father's precise hand in the glove compartment though. She still clutches the wheels tight, and glances often at the rear view mirror for police cars. And I have taken to saying, Mother, the American police do not just stop you. You have to do something wrong first, like speed.

I admit, I was awed too when we first came. I looked at the house and I understood why Father did not want to send for us right after he finished his residency, why he chose to work for three years, a regular job as well as moonlighting. I liked to go outside then and just stare at the house, at the elegance of the stone exterior, at the way the lawn wrapped around it like a blanket dyed the color of unripe mangoes. And inside, I liked the curving stairs in the hallway, the gleaming banister, the quaint marble fireplace that made me feel as though I was on the set of a foreign film. I even liked the clump-clump-clump sound the hardwood floors made when I walked in my shoes unlike the silent cement floors back home.

The sound of the wood floors bother me now, when Father has some of his colleagues from the hospital over, and I am in the basement. Father doesn't ask Mother to get a little something together for his guests anymore, he has people deliver small trays of cheese and fruit. They used to fight about that, Father telling her white people did not care about moi-moi and chin-chin, the things she wanted to make, and Mother telling him, in Igbo, to be proud of who he was and offer it to them first and see if they don't like it. Now, they fight about how Mother behaves at the get-togethers.

You have to talk to them more, Father says. Make them feel like they are welcome. Stop speaking to me in Igbo when they are here.

And Mother will screech, So now I cannot speak my language in my own house? Tell me, do they change their behavior when you go to their house?

They are not real fights, not like Cathy's parents' who end with shattered glass that Cathy cleans up before school so her little sister won't see. Mother will still wake up early to lay out Father's shirt on his bed, to make his breakfast, to put his lunch in a container. Father could cook when he was alone - he lived alone in America for almost seven years - but now suddenly he can't cook. He can't even cover a pot after himself, no, he can't even help himself to food from a pot. Mother is horrified when he so much as goes close to the stovetop.

"You cooked well, Chika," Father says in Igbo, after every meal. Mother smiles and I know she is plotting what soup to cook next, what new vegetable to try.

All her meals have a Nigerian base, but she likes to experiment and she has learned to improvise for the things that are not in the African store. Baking potatoes for ede. Spinach for ugu. She even figured out how to make farina cereal so it had the consistency of fufu, before Father taught her the way to the African store where there is cassava flour. She no longer refuses to buy frozen pizza and fries, but she still grunts when I eat them, still says that they suck blood, such bad food. Each day she cooks a new soup, which is almost every day, she makes me eat it. She watches as I mold the fufu into reluctant balls and dip them in the chunky soup, she even watches my throat while I swallow, as if to see the balls go down and stay down.

I think she likes it when the people I call our accidental guests come, because they are always over-enthusiastic about her cooking. They are always Nigerians, always new to America. They look up names in the phone book, looking for Nigerians. The Igbo ones tell Father how refreshing it was to see Eze, an Igbo name, after streams of the Yoruba Adebisis and Ademolas. But of course, they add while wolfing down Mother's fried plantains, in America every Nigerian is your brother.

When Mother makes me come out to greet them, I speak English to their Igbo, thinking that they should not be here, that they are here only because of the accident of our being Nigerian. They usually stay only a few days until they figure out what to do, Father is adamant about that. And until they go, I never speak Igbo to them.

Cathy likes to come over to meet them. She is fascinated by them. She talks to them, asks them about their lives in Nigeria. Those people love to talk about victimhood - how they suffered at the hands of soldiers, bosses, husbands, in-laws. Cathy has too much sympathy in my opinion, once she even gave a resume to her Mother who gave it to someone else who employed the Nigerian. Cathy is cool. She is the only person I can really talk to, but sometimes I think she shouldn't spend so much time with our accidental guests because she starts to sound like Mother, without the scolding tone, when she says things like, You should be proud of your accent and your country. I say yes, I'm proud of America. I'm American even if I still only have a green card.

She says it about Matt too. How I shouldn't try too hard to be American for him because if he was real, he'd like me anyway (this because I used to make her say words so I would practice and get the right American inflections. I wish Nigeria hadn't been a British colony, its so hard to lose the way they stress their words on the wrong syllables). Please. I have seen Matt laugh at the Indian boy with the name that nobody can pronounce. The poor kid's accent is so thick he can't even say his name audibly - at least that's one person I'm better than. Matt doesn't even know my name is Ralindu. He knows my parents are from Africa and thinks Africa is a country, and that's about it. It was the sparkling stud in his left ear that struck me at first. Now it is everything about him, even the way he walks, throwing his legs way in front of his body.

It took a while before he noticed me. Cathy helped, she'd walk boldly up to him and ask him to sit with us at lunch. One day she asked, 'Lin is hot isn't she?' And he said yes. She doesn't like him though. But then, Cathy and I don't like the same things, its what makes our friendship so real.

Mother used to be cautious about Cathy. She'd say, "Ngwa, don't stay too long at their house. Don't eat there either. They might think that we have no food of our own." She really thought Americans have the same stupid hang-ups people back home have. You did not visit people all the time unless they reciprocated, unless it would seem as though you were not gracious. You did not eat at people's homes multiple times if they had not eaten at yours. Please.

She even made me stop going over for a month or so, about two years ago. It was our first summer here. My school had a family cook-out. Father was on call so Mother and I went alone. I wondered if Mother used the dark saucers on her face she calls eyes, couldn't she see that Americans wore shorts and T-shirts in the summer? She wore a stiff dress, blue with white wide lapels. She stood with the other mothers, all chic in shorts and T-shirts, and looked like the clueless woman who overdressed for the barbecue. I avoided her most of the time. There were a number of black mothers there, so any of them could have been my mother.

At dinner that evening, I told her, "Cathy's Mother asked me to call her Miriam." She looked up, a question in her eyes. "Miriam is her first name," I said. Then I plunged in quickly, "I think Cathy should call you Chika." Mother continued to chew a chunk of meat from her soup silently. Then she looked up. Dark eyes blazed across the table, Igbo words burst out. "Do you want me to slap the teeth out of your mouth? Since when have little children called their elders by their first name?" I said sorry and looked down to mold my fufu extra-carefully. Looking her in the eyes usually prompted her to follow up on her threats.

I couldn't go to Cathy's for a month after that but Mother let Cathy come over. Cathy would join Mother and me in the kitchen, and sometimes she and Mother would talk for hours without me. Now Cathy doesn't say Hi to Mother, she says Good Afternoon or Good Morning because Mother told her that is how Nigerian children greet adults. Also, she doesn't call Mother Mrs. Eze, she calls her Aunty.

She thinks a lot of things about Mother are great. Like the way she walks. Regal. Or the way she speaks. Melodious. (Mother doesn't even make an effort to say things the American way. She still says boot instead of trunk for Gods sake.)

Or Mother hugging me when I got my period. Such a warm thing to do. Her Mother simply said oh and they went out and bought pads and panties. When Mother hugged me though, two years ago, pressing me close as though I won a big race, I didn't think it was a warm gesture at all. I wanted to push her away, she smelled sour, like onugbu soup.

She said what a blessing it was, how I would bear children some day, how I had to keep my legs closed together so I didn't bring shame on her. I knew she would call Nigeria later and tell my aunts and Mama Nnukwu and then they would talk about the strong children I would bear someday, the good husband I would find.


* * *


Matt is coming over today, we are writing a paper together. Mother has been walking up and down the house. In Nigeria, girls make friends with girls and boys make friend with boys. With a girl and a boy, it is not just friends, It is something more. I tell Mother its different in America and she says she knows. She places a plate of fresh-fried chin-chin on the dining table, where Matt and I will work. When she goes back upstairs, I take the chin-chin into the kitchen. I can imagine Matt's face as he says, what the hell is that? Mother comes out and puts the chin-chin back. "It is for your guest," she says.

The phone rings and I pray that it will keep her long. The doorbell rings, and there is Matt, earring glittering, holding a folder.

Matt and I study for a while. Mother comes in and when he says hi, she stares at him, pauses then says, "How are you?" She asks if we are almost done, in Igbo, and I before I say yes, I pause for a long moment so Matt won't think I understand Igbo so easily. Mother goes upstairs and shuts her door.

"Lets go to your room, and listen to a CD," Matt says, after a while. "My rooms a mess," I say instead of "My mom would never let a boy in my room." "Lets go to the couch then. I'm tired." We sit on the couch and he puts a hand under my T-shirt. I hold his hand. "Just through my shirt."

"Come on," he says. His breathing is as urgent as his voice. I let go and his hand snakes under my shirt, encloses a breast sheathed in a nylon bra. Then, quickly, it weaves its way to my back and unhooks my bra. Matt is good, even I cannot unhook my bra that quickly with one hand. His hand snakes back and encloses the bare breast. I moan, because it feels good and I know that is what I am supposed to do. In the movies, the women's faces always turn rapt right about this point.

He's frenetic now, like he has a malaria fever. He pushes me back, pulls my shirt up so it bunches around my neck, takes my bra off. I feel a sudden coolness on my exposed upper body. Sticky warm moistness on my breast. I once read a book where a man sucked his wife's breast so hard he left nothing for the baby. Matt is sucking like that man.

Then I hear a door open. I grab Matt's head up and pull my shirt on in the space of a second. My bra, startling white against the tan leather furniture, is blinking at me. I shove it behind the sofa just as Mother walks in.

"Isn't it time for your guest to leave?" she asks in Igbo.

I am afraid to look at Matt, I am afraid he will have milk on his lips. "He was just leaving," I say, in English. Mother continues to stand there. I say to Matt, "I guess you better get going." He is standing, picking up papers from the table. "Yeah. Good night."

Mother stands motionless, looking at us both.

"He was talking to you, Mother. He said goodnight."

She nods, arms folded, staring. Suddenly a burst of Igbo words. Was I crazy to have a boy stay that long? She thought I had good sense! When did we leave the dining table and come to the couch? Why were we sitting so close?

Matt shuffles to the door as she talks. His sneaker laces have come undone and flap as he walks. "See you later," he says at the door.

Mother finds the bra behind the couch almost immediately She stares at it for a long time before she asks me to go to my room. She comes up a moment later. Her lips are clenched tight.

"Yipu efe gi," she says. Take your clothes off. I watch her, surprised, but I slowly UnCloth. "Everything," she says when she sees that I still have my panties on. "Sit on the bed, spread your legs."

My heart beats wildly in my ears. I settle on the bed, spread-eagled. She comes closer, kneels before me, and I see what she is holding. Ose Nsukka, the hot, twisted peppers that Mama Nnukwu sends dried from Nigeria, in little bottles that originally held curry or thyme. "Mother! No!"

"Do you see this pepper?" She asks. "Do you see it? This is what they do to girls who are promiscuous, this is what they do to girls who do not use the brain in their heads, but the one between their legs."

She brings the pepper so close that I pee right there, and feel the warm wetness on the mattress. But she doesn't put it in.

She is shouting in Igbo. I watch her, the way her charcoal eyes gleam with tears, and I wish I was Cathy. Cathy's Mom apologizes after she punishes Cathy. She asks Cathy to go to her room, she grounds Cathy for a few hours or at most, a day.

The next day, Matt says, laughing, "Your mom weirded me out last night. She's a crazy ass African!"

My lips feel too stiff to laugh. He is looking at some other girl as we talk.

http://webdelsol.com/InPosse/adichie_anthology.htm

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