“Is there some dried milk?” I asked, taking the kettle to the sink. Rust clung to the sides of the sink like peeling brown paint.
“Americans don’t drink their tea with milk and sugar.”
“Ezi okwu? Don’t you drink yours with milk and sugar?”
“No, I got used to the way things are done here a long time ago. You will too, baby.”
I sat before my limp pancakes—they were so much thinner than the chewy slabs I made at home—and bland tea that I feared would not get past my throat. The doorbell rang and he got up. He walked with his hands swinging to his back; I had not really noticed that before, I had not had time to notice.
“I heard you come in last night.” The voice at the door was American, the words flowed fast, ran into each other. Supri-supri, Aunty Ify called it, fast-fast. “When you come back to visit, you will be speaking supri-supri like Americans,” she had said.
“Hi, Shirley. Thanks so much for keeping my mail,” he said.
“Not a problem at all. How did your wedding go? Is your wife here?”
“Yes, come and say hello.”
A woman with hair the color of metal came into the living room. Her body was wrapped in a pink robe knotted at the waist. Judging from the lines that ran across her face, she could have been anything from six decades to eight decades old; I had not seen enough white people to correctly gauge their ages.
“I’m Shirley from 3A. Nice to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand. She had the nasal voice of someone battling a cold.
“You are welcome,” I said.
Shirley paused, as though surprised. “Well, I’ll let you get back to breakfast,” she said. “I’ll come down and visit with you when you’ve settled in.”
Shirley shuffled out. My new husband shut the door. One of the dining table legs was shorter than the rest, and so the table rocked, like a seesaw, when he leaned on it and said, “You should say ‘Hi’ to people here, not ‘You’re welcome.’”
“She’s not my age mate.”
“It doesn’t work that way here. Everybody says hi.”
“O di mma. Okay.”
“I’m not called Ofodile here, by the way. I go by Dave,” he said, looking down at the pile of envelopes Shirley had given him. Many of them had lines of writing on the envelope itself, above the address, as though the sender had remembered to add something only after the envelope was sealed.
“Dave?” I knew he didn’t have an English name. The invitation cards to our wedding had read Ofodile Emeka Udenwa and Chinaza Agatha Okafor.
“The last name I use here is different, too. Americans have a hard time with Udenwa, so I changed it.”
“What is it?” I was still trying to get used to Udenwa, a name I had known only a few weeks.
“It’s Bell.”
“Bell!” I had heard about a Waturuocha that changed to Waturu in America, a Chikelugo that took the more American-friendly Chikel, but from Udenwa to Bell? “That’s not even close to Udenwa,” I said.
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.