Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“‘You’re angry because I ordered a mimosa? I don’t understand.’
‘Pointing out something to you is not being angry.’
‘I like mimosas. I don’t have to perform whatever you think Paris is supposed to be, just because you want to impress some French woman.’
‘Okay, that’s patronizing classist shit.’
‘How?’ For a moment, I wondered if I was wrong, but didn’t know how I was wrong. He made me out my to anger. ‘How?’
He walked away and I heard the click as he locked the bedroom door. He locked the door to fend me off, to keep away this person darkly guilty of ordering a mimosa in Paris. I slept on the thin sofa and awoke early in a kind of cold light. While he silently made coffee, I looked online for flights to Washington, D.C.” p. 57
“For some months her parents were estranged. Her father did not visit; he sent his driver to pick Zikora up on weekends, and bring her to his tennis club, where they drank Chapman and he told her jokes but said nothing about moving out of their house.” p. 142
“She smiled and smiled. She slipped in and out of the parlor, and each time reappeared with a new source of enchantment for Zikora: a tube of Smarties, a small bag of chin-chin, a cup of Ribena.” p. 139
“It is a drowsy Sunday and Hauwa stops by after dropping her children off on a playdate. She brings me a bag of plantain chips, the fancy kind she orders in small packs tied with gold string.” p. 266
“Everyone enjoyed some jollof rice on their plates, and I am satisfied to see that the peppered turkey and stewed goat meat are more popular than Phillippe’s French chicken that smells too strongly of mustard.” p. 253
“I was skulking by the front door, and next to me was a cluster of benches with villagers who had wandered in for Christmas rice. Two women, shoveling jollof rice into their mouths with plastic spoons, were watching my mother.” p. 39
“I sat with them and listened as they stared at the cash in their hands. I want to go to Anam and buy plantains. I have been pricing another dryer for my salon. I will buy hand grinder so that I can now do my beans myself. I will buy electric sewing machine.” p. 319
“They had dinner at Chia’s house, and Kwame ate two helpings of Kadiatou’s fonio and groundnut sauce, saying he remembered eating groundnut sauce as a child in Ghana.” p. 218
“I desperately wanted her to like me. I brought bottles of wine when we visited. I sprang up to help her serve puff-puff and meat pies.” p. 69
“‘What’s the point of fufu?’ she would ask me each time I saw her after that, and we would both laugh. She introduced me to sweet potato pie. She raised four children in a White town in Georgia and kept them home from school on Martin Luther King Day every year, even though Georgia did not recognize the holiday.” p. 355
“Hauwa was texting her driver to ask him to buy shortbread biscuits. ‘I have to send him a picture or you can be sure he will come back with bread,’ she said, not the funniest thing but Omelogor laughed a proud laugh, as if to say, ‘Look how funny Hauwa is.” p. 378
“It jarred to hear Omelogor say ‘died’ and ‘death’; she rarely spoke of symptoms or numbers of dead. She talked of resealing cartons of Indomie noodles with strong Sellotape before leaving them a the gate of a motherless baby’s home; or of the surge, since lockdown, of web traffic on her website, For Men Only, more unique visitors from more countries, many asking her to make video and finally reveal herself.” p. 8
