Americanah

  “It will get better,” Ifemelu said, helplessly. She knew how hollow she sounded. Nothing was familiar. She was unable to comfort Aunty Uju because she did not know how. When Aunty Uju spoke about her friends who had come to America earlier and passed their exams—Nkechi in Maryland had sent her the dining set, Kemi in Indiana bought her the bed, Ozavisa had sent crockery and clothes from Hartford—Ifemelu said, “God bless them,” and the words felt bulky and useless in her mouth.

  She had assumed, from Aunty Uju’s calls home, that things were not too bad, although she realized now that Aunty Uju had always been vague, mentioning “work” and “exam” without details. Or perhaps it was because she had not asked for details, had not expected to understand details. And she thought, watching her, how the old Aunty Uju would never have worn her hair in such scruffy braids. She would never have tolerated the ingrown hair that grew like raisins on her chin, or worn trousers that gathered bulkily between her legs. America had subdued her.

  CHAPTER 10

  That first summer was Ifemelu’s summer of waiting; the real America, she felt, was just around the next corner she would turn. Even the days, sliding one into the other, languorous and limpid, the sun lingering until very late, seemed to be waiting. There was a stripped-down quality to her life, a kindling starkness, without parents and friends and home, the familiar landmarks that made her who she was. And so she waited, writing Obinze long, detailed letters, calling him once in a while—calls kept brief because Aunty Uju said she could not waste the phone card—and spending time with Dike. He was a mere child, but she felt, with him, a kinship close to friendship; they watched his favorite cartoon shows together, Rugrats and Franklin, and they read books together, and she took him out to play with Jane’s children. Jane lived in the next apartment. She and her husband, Marlon, were from Grenada and spoke in a lyrical accent as though just about to break into song. “They are like us; he has a good job and he has ambition and they spank their children,” Aunty Uju had said approvingly.

  Ifemelu and Jane laughed when they discovered how similar their childhoods in Grenada and Nigeria had been, with Enid Blyton books and Anglophile teachers and fathers who worshipped the BBC World Service. She was only a few years older than Ifemelu. “I married very young. Everybody wanted Marlon so how could I say no?” she said, half teasing. They would sit together on the front steps of the building and watch Dike and Jane’s children, Elizabeth and Junior, ride their bicycles to the end of the street and then back, Ifemelu often calling out to Dike not to go any farther, the children shouting, the concrete sidewalks gleaming in the hot sun, and the summer lull disrupted by the occasional rise and fall of loud music from passing cars.

  “Things must still be very strange for you,” Jane said.

  Ifemelu nodded. “Yes.”

  An ice cream van drove into the street, and with it a tinkling melody.

  “You know, this is my tenth year here and I feel as if I’m still settling in,” Jane said. “The hardest thing is raising my kids. Look at Elizabeth, I have to be very careful with her. If you are not careful in this country, your children become what you don’t know. It’s different back home because you can control them. Here, no.” Jane wore an air of harmlessness, with her plain face and jiggly arms, but there was, beneath her ready smile, an icy watchfulness.

  “How old is she? Ten?” Ifemelu asked.

  “Nine and already trying to be a drama queen. We pay good money for her to go to private school because the public schools here are useless. Marlon says we’ll move to the suburbs soon so they can go to better schools. Otherwise she will start behaving like these black Americans.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t worry, you will understand with time,” Jane said, and got up to get some money for the children’s ice cream.

  Ifemelu looked forward to sitting outside with Jane, until the evening Marlon came back from work and told Ifemelu in a hasty whisper, after Jane went in to get some lemonade for the children, “I’ve been thinking about you. I want to talk to you.” She did not tell Jane. Jane would never hold Marlon responsible for anything, her light-skinned, hazel-eyed Marlon whom everyone wanted, and so Ifemelu began to avoid both of them, to design elaborate board games that she and Dike could play indoors.

  Once, she asked Dike what he had done in school before summer, and he said, “Circles.” They would sit on the floor in a circle and share their favorite things.

  She was appalled. “Can you do division?”

  He looked at her strangely. “I’m only in first grade, Coz.”

  “When I was your age I could do simple division.”

  The conviction lodged in her head, that American children learned nothing in elementary school, and it hardened when he told her that his teacher sometimes gave out homework coupons; if you got a homework coupon, then you could skip one day of homework. Circles, homework coupons, what foolishness would she next hear? And so she began to teach him mathematics—she called it “maths” and he called it “math” and so they agreed not to shorten the word. She could not think, now, of that summer without thinking of long division, of Dike’s brows furrowed in confusion as they sat side by side at the dining table, of her swings from bribing him to shouting at him. Okay, try it one more time and you can have ice cream. You’re not going to play unless you get them all right. Later, when he was older, he would say that he found mathematics easy because of her summer of torturing him. “You must mean summer of tutoring,” she would say in what became a familiar joke that, like comfort food, they would reach for from time to time.

  It was, also, her summer of eating. She enjoyed the unfamiliar—the McDonald’s hamburgers with the brief tart crunch of pickles, a new taste that she liked on one day and disliked on the next, the wraps Aunty Uju brought home, wet with piquant dressing, and the bologna and pepperoni that left a film of salt in her mouth. She was disoriented by the blandness of fruits, as though Nature had forgotten to sprinkle some seasoning on the oranges and the bananas, but she liked to look at them, and to touch them; because bananas were so big, so evenly yellow, she forgave them their tastelessness. Once, Dike said, “Why are you doing that? Eating a banana with peanuts?”

  “That’s what we do in Nigeria. Do you want to try?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I don’t think I like Nigeria, Coz.”

  Ice cream was, fortunately, a taste unchanged. She scooped straight from the buy-one-get-one-free giant tubs in the freezer, globs of vanilla and chocolate, while staring at the television. She followed shows she had watched in Nigeria—The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, A Different World—and discovered new shows she had not known—Friends, The Simpsons—but it was the commercials that captivated her. She ached for the lives they showed, lives full of bliss, where all problems had sparkling solutions in shampoos and cars and packaged foods, and in her mind they became the real America, the America she would only see when she moved to school in the autumn. At first, the evening news puzzled her, a litany of fires and shootings, because she was used to NTA news, where self-important army officers cut ribbons or gave speeches. But as she watched day after day, images of men being hauled off in handcuffs, distraught families in front of charred, smoldering houses, the wreckage of cars crashed in police chases, blurred videos of armed robberies in shops, her puzzlement ripened to worry. She panicked when there was a sound by the window, when Dike went too far down the street on his bicycle. She stopped taking out the trash after dark, because a man with a gun might be lurking outside. Aunty Uju said, laughing shortly, “If you keep watching television, you will think these things happen all the time. Do you know how much crime happens in Nigeria? Is it because we don’t report it like they do here?”

  CHAPTER 11

  Aunty Uju came home dry-faced and tense, the streets dark and Dike already in bed, to ask “Do I have mail? Do I have mail?” the question always repeated, her entire being at a perilous edge, about to tip over. Some nights, she would talk on the phone for
a long time, her voice hushed, as though she were protecting something from the world’s prying gaze. Finally, she told Ifemelu about Bartholomew. “He is an accountant, divorced, and he is looking to settle down. He is from Eziowelle, very near us.”

  Ifemelu, floored by Aunty Uju’s words, could only say, “Oh, okay,” and nothing else. “What does he do?” and “Where is he from?” were the questions her own mother would ask, but when had it started to matter to Aunty Uju that a man was from a hometown close to theirs?

  One Saturday, Bartholomew visited from Massachusetts. Aunty Uju cooked peppered gizzards, powdered her face, and stood by the living room window, waiting to see his car pull in. Dike watched her, playing halfheartedly with his action figures, confused but also excited because he could sense her expectation. When the doorbell rang, she told Dike, urgently, “Behave well!”

  Bartholomew wore khaki trousers pulled up high on his belly, and spoke with an American accent filled with holes, mangling words until they were impossible to understand. Ifemelu sensed, from his demeanor, a deprived rural upbringing that he tried to compensate for with his American affectation, his gonnas and wannas.

  He glanced at Dike, and said, almost indifferently, “Oh, yes, your boy. How are you doing?”

  “Good,” Dike mumbled.

  It irked Ifemelu that Bartholomew was not interested in the son of the woman he was courting, and did not bother to pretend that he was. He was jarringly unsuited for, and unworthy of, Aunty Uju. A more intelligent man would have realized this and tempered himself, but not Bartholomew. He behaved grandiosely, like a special prize that Aunty Uju was fortunate to have, and Aunty Uju humored him. Before he tasted the gizzards, he said, “Let me see if this is any good.”

  Aunty Uju laughed and in her laughter was a certain assent, because his words “Let me see if this is any good” were about her being a good cook, and therefore a good wife. She had slipped into the rituals, smiling a smile that promised to be demure to him but not to the world, lunging to pick up his fork when it slipped from his hand, serving him more beer. Quietly, Dike watched from the dining table, his toys untouched. Bartholomew ate gizzards and drank beer. He talked about Nigerian politics with the fervid enthusiasm of a person who followed it from afar, who read and reread articles on the Internet. “Kudirat’s death will not be in vain, it will only galvanize the democratic movement in a way that even her life did not! I just wrote an article about this issue online in Nigerian Village.” Aunty Uju nodded while he talked, agreeing with everything he said. Often, silence gaped between them. They watched television, a drama, predictable and filled with brightly shot scenes, one of which featured a young girl in a short dress.

  “A girl in Nigeria will never wear that kind of dress,” Bartholomew said. “Look at that. This country has no moral compass.”

  Ifemelu should not have spoken, but there was something about Bartholomew that made silence impossible, the exaggerated caricature that he was, with his back-shaft haircut unchanged since he came to America thirty years ago and his false, overheated moralities. He was one of those people who, in his village back home, would be called “lost.” He went to America and got lost, his people would say. He went to America and refused to come back.

  “Girls in Nigeria wear dresses much shorter than that o,” Ifemelu said. “In secondary school, some of us changed in our friends’ houses so our parents wouldn’t know.”

  Aunty Uju turned to her, eyes narrow with warning. Bartholomew looked at her and shrugged, as though she was not worth responding to. Dislike simmered between them. For the rest of the afternoon, he ignored her. He would, in the future, often ignore her. Later, she read his online posts on Nigerian Village, all of them sour-toned and strident, under the moniker “Igbo Massachusetts Accountant,” and it surprised her how profusely he wrote, how actively he pursued airless arguments.

  He had not been back to Nigeria in years and perhaps he needed the consolation of those online groups, where small observations flared and blazed into attacks, personal insults flung back and forth. Ifemelu imagined the writers, Nigerians in bleak houses in America, their lives deadened by work, nursing their careful savings throughout the year so that they could visit home in December for a week, when they would arrive bearing suitcases of shoes and clothes and cheap watches, and see, in the eyes of their relatives, brightly burnished images of themselves. Afterwards they would return to America to fight on the Internet over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here and there, and at least online they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential they had become.

  Nigerian women came to America and became wild, Igbo Massachusetts Accountant wrote in one post; it was an unpleasant truth but one that had to be said. What else accounted for the high divorce rates among Nigerians in America and the low rates among Nigerians in Nigeria? Delta Mermaid replied that women simply had laws protecting them in America and the divorce rates would be just as high if those laws were in Nigeria. Igbo Massachusetts Accountant’s rejoinder: “You have been brainwashed by the West. You should be ashamed to call yourself a Nigerian.” In response to Eze Houston, who wrote that Nigerian men were cynical when they went back to Nigeria looking for nurses and doctors to marry, only so that the new wives would earn money for them back in America, Igbo Massachusetts Accountant wrote, “What is wrong with a man wanting financial security from his wife? Don’t women want the same thing?”

  After he left that Saturday, Aunty Uju asked Ifemelu, “What did you think?”

  “He uses bleaching creams.”

  “What?”

  “Couldn’t you see? His face is a funny color. He must be using the cheap ones with no sunscreen. What kind of man bleaches his skin, biko?”

  Aunty Uju shrugged, as though she had not noticed the greenish-yellow tone of the man’s face, worse at his temples.

  “He’s not bad. He has a good job.” She paused. “I’m not getting any younger. I want Dike to have a brother or a sister.”

  “In Nigeria, a man like him would not even have the courage to talk to you.”

  “We are not in Nigeria, Ifem.”

  Before Aunty Uju went into the bedroom, tottering under her many anxieties, she said, “Please just pray that it will work.”

  Ifemelu did not pray, but even if she did, she could not bear praying for Aunty Uju to be with Bartholomew. It saddened her that Aunty Uju had settled merely for what was familiar.

  BECAUSE OF OBINZE, Manhattan intimidated Ifemelu. The first time she took the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, her palms sweaty, she walked the streets, watching, absorbing. A sylphlike woman running in high heels, her short dress floating behind her, until she tripped and almost fell, a pudgy man coughing and spitting on the curb, a girl dressed all in black raising a hand for the taxis that sliced past. The endless skyscrapers taunted the sky, but there was dirt on the building windows. The dazzling imperfection of it all calmed her. “It’s wonderful but it’s not heaven,” she told Obinze. She could not wait until he, too, saw Manhattan. She imagined them both walking hand in hand, like the American couples she saw, lingering at a shop window, pausing to read menus taped on restaurant doors, stopping at a food cart to buy cold bottles of iced tea. “Soon,” he said in his letter. They said “soon” to each other often, and “soon” gave their plan the weight of something real.

  FINALLY, Aunty Uju’s result came. Ifemelu brought in the envelope from the mailbox, so slight, so ordinary, United States Medical Licensing Examination printed on it in even script, and held it in her hand for a long time, willing it to be good news. She raised it up as soon as Aunty Uju walked indoors. Aunty Uju gasped. “Is it thick? Is it thick?” she asked.

  “What? Gini?” Ifemelu asked.

  “Is it thick?” Aunty Uju asked again, letting her handbag slip to the floor and moving forward, her hand outstretched, her face savage with hope. She took the envelope and shouted, “I made it!” and then opened it to make sure, peering at the thin sheet of
paper. “If you fail, they send you a thick envelope so that you can reregister.”

  “Aunty! I knew it! Congratulations!” Ifemelu said.

  Aunty Uju hugged her, both of them leaning into each other, hearing each other’s breathing, and it brought to Ifemelu a warm memory of Lagos.

  “Where’s Dike?” Aunty Uju asked, as though he was not already in bed when she came home from her second job. She went into the kitchen, stood under the bright ceiling light and looked, again, at the result, her eyes wet. “So I will be a family physician in this America,” she said, almost in a whisper. She opened a can of Coke and left it undrunk.

  Later, she said, “I have to take my braids out for my interviews and relax my hair. Kemi told me that I shouldn’t wear braids to the interview. If you have braids, they will think you are unprofessional.”

  “So there are no doctors with braided hair in America?” Ifemelu asked.

  “I have told you what they told me. You are in a country that is not your own. You do what you have to do if you want to succeed.”

  There it was again, the strange naïveté with which Aunty Uju had covered herself like a blanket. Sometimes, while having a conversation, it would occur to Ifemelu that Aunty Uju had deliberately left behind something of herself, something essential, in a distant and forgotten place. Obinze said it was the exaggerated gratitude that came with immigrant insecurity. Obinze, so like him to have an explanation. Obinze, who anchored her through that summer of waiting—his steady voice over the phone, his long letters in blue airmail envelopes—and who understood, as summer was ending, the new gnawing in her stomach. She wanted to start school, to find the real America, and yet there was that gnawing in her stomach, an anxiety, and a new, aching nostalgia for the Brooklyn summer that had become familiar: children on bicycles, sinewy black men in tight white tank tops, ice cream vans tinkling, loud music from roofless cars, sun shining into night, and things rotting and smelling in the humid heat. She did not want to leave Dike—the mere thought brought a sense of treasure already lost—and yet she wanted to leave Aunty Uju’s apartment, and begin a life in which she alone determined the margins.