“No, she isn’t.” Ifemelu paused. “You know, you can just say ‘black.’ Not every black person is beautiful.”
Kimberly was taken aback, something wordless spread on her face and then she smiled, and Ifemelu would think of it as the moment they became, truly, friends. But on that first day, she liked Kimberly, her breakable beauty, her purplish eyes full of the expression Obinze often used to describe the people he liked: obi ocha. A clean heart. Kimberly asked Ifemelu questions about her experience with children, listening carefully as though what she wanted to hear was what might be left unsaid.
“She doesn’t have CPR certification, Kim,” Laura said. She turned to Ifemelu. “Are you willing to take the course? It’s very important if you are going to have children in your care.”
“I’m willing to.”
“Ginika said you left Nigeria because college professors are always on strike there?” Kimberly asked.
“Yes.”
Laura nodded knowingly. “Horrible, what’s going on in African countries.”
“How are you finding the U.S. so far?” Kimberly asked.
Ifemelu told her about the vertigo she had felt the first time she went to the supermarket; in the cereal aisle, she had wanted to get corn flakes, which she was used to eating back home, but suddenly confronted by a hundred different cereal boxes, in a swirl of colors and images, she had fought dizziness. She told this story because she thought it was funny; it appealed harmlessly to the American ego.
Laura laughed. “I can see how you’d be dizzy!”
“Yes, we’re really about excess in this country,” Kimberly said. “I’m sure back home you ate a lot of wonderful organic food and vegetables, but you’re going to see it’s different here.”
“Kim, if she was eating all of this wonderful organic food in Nigeria, why would she come to the U.S.?” Laura asked. As children, Laura must have played the role of the big sister who exposed the stupidity of the little sister, always with kindness and good cheer, and preferably in the company of adult relatives.
“Well, even if they had very little food, I’m just saying it was probably all organic vegetables, none of the Frankenfood we have here,” Kimberly said. Ifemelu sensed, between them, the presence of spiky thorns floating in the air.
“You haven’t told her about television,” Laura said. She turned to Ifemelu. “Kim’s kids do supervised TV, only PBS. So if she hired you, you would need to be completely present and monitor what goes on, especially with Morgan.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t have a babysitter,” Laura said, her “I” glowing with righteous emphasis. “I’m a full-time, hands-on mom. I thought I would return to work when Athena turned two, but I just couldn’t bear to let her go. Kim is really hands-on, too, but she’s busy sometimes, she does wonderful work with her charity, and so I’m always worried about the babysitters. The last one, Martha, was wonderful, but we did wonder whether the one before her, what was her name again, let Morgan watch inappropriate shows. I don’t do any television at all with my daughter. I think there’s too much violence. I might let her do a few cartoons when she’s a little older.”
“But there’s violence in cartoons, too,” Ifemelu said.
Laura looked annoyed. “It’s cartoon. Kids are traumatized by the real thing.”
Ginika glanced at Ifemelu, a knitted-brow look that said: Just leave it alone. In primary school, Ifemelu had watched the firing squad that killed Lawrence Anini, fascinated by the mythologies around his armed robberies, how he wrote warning letters to newspapers, fed the poor with what he stole, turned himself into air when the police came. Her mother had said, “Go inside, this is not for children,” but halfheartedly, after Ifemelu had already seen most of the shooting anyway, Anini’s body roughly tied to a pole, jerking as the bullets hit him, before slumping against the criss-cross of rope. She thought about this now, how haunting and yet how ordinary it had seemed.
“Let me show you the house, Ifemelu,” Kimberly said. “Did I say it right?”
They walked from room to room—the daughter’s room with pink walls and a frilly bedcover, the son’s room with a set of drums, the den with a piano, its polished wooden top crowded with family photographs.
“We took that in India,” Kimberly said. They were standing by an empty rickshaw, wearing T-shirts, Kimberly with her golden hair tied back, her tall and lean husband, her small blond son and older red-haired daughter, all holding water bottles and smiling. They were always smiling in the photos they took, while sailing and hiking and visiting tourist spots, holding each other, all easy limbs and white teeth. They reminded Ifemelu of television commercials, of people whose lives were lived always in flattering light, whose messes were still aesthetically pleasing.
“Some of the people we met had nothing, absolutely nothing, but they were so happy,” Kimberly said. She extracted a photograph from the crowded back of the piano, of her daughter with two Indian women, their skin dark and weathered, their smiles showing missing teeth. “These women were so wonderful,” she said.
Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.
“Morgan loves that, it’s Native American. But Taylor says it’s scary!” Kimberly pointed to a small piece of sculpture amid the photographs.
“Oh.” Ifemelu suddenly did not remember which was the boy and which the girl; both names, Morgan and Taylor, sounded to her like surnames.
Kimberly’s husband came home just before Ifemelu left.
“Hello! Hello!” he said, gliding into the kitchen, tall and tanned and tactical. Ifemelu could tell, from the longish length, the near-perfect waves that grazed his collar, that he took fastidious care of his hair.
“You must be Ginika’s friend from Nigeria,” he said, smiling, brimming with his awareness of his own charm. He looked people in the eye not because he was interested in them but because he knew it made them feel that he was interested in them.
With his appearance, Kimberly became slightly breathless. Her voice changed; she spoke now in the high-pitched voice of the self-consciously female. “Don, honey, you’re early,” she said as they kissed.
Don looked into Ifemelu’s eyes and told her how he had nearly visited Nigeria, just after Shagari was elected, when he worked as a consultant to an international development agency, but the trip fell through at the last minute and he had felt bad because he had been hoping to go to the shrine and see Fela perform. He mentioned Fela casually, intimately, as though it was something they had in common, a secret they shared. There was, in his storytelling, an expectation of successful seduction. Ifemelu stared at him, saying little, refusing to be ensnared, and feeling strangely sorry for Kimberly. To be saddled with a sister like Laura and a husband like this.
“Don and I are involved with a really good charity in Malawi, actually Don is much more involved than I am.” Kimberly looked at Don, who made a wry face and said, “Well, we do our best but we know very well that we’re not messiahs.”
“We really should plan a trip to visit. It’s an orphanage. We’ve never been to Africa. I would love to do something with my charity in Africa.”
Kimberly’s face had softened, her eyes misted over, and for a moment Ifemelu was sorry to have come from Africa, to be the reason that this beautiful woman, with her bleached teeth and bounteous hair, would have to dig deep to feel such pity, such hopelessness. She smiled brightly, hoping to make Kimberly feel better.
“I’m interviewing one more person and then I’ll let you know, but I really think you’re a great fit for us,” Kimberly said, leading Ifemelu and Ginika to the front door.
“Thank you,” Ifemelu said. “I would love to work for you.”
The next day, Ginika called and left a message, her tone low. “Ifem, I’m so sorry. Kimberly hired somebody else but she
said she’ll keep you in mind. Something will work out soon, don’t worry too much. I’ll call later.”
Ifemelu wanted to fling the phone away. Keep her in mind. Why would Ginika even repeat such an empty expression, “keep her in mind”?
IT WAS late autumn, the trees had grown antlers, dried leaves were sometimes trailed into the apartment, and the rent was due. Her roommates’ checks were on the kitchen table, one on top of the other, all of them pink and bordered by flowers. She thought it unnecessarily decorative, to have flowered checks in America; it almost took away from the seriousness of a check. Beside the checks was a note, in Jackie’s childish writing: Ifemelu, we’re almost a week late for rent. Writing a check would leave her account empty. Her mother had given her a small jar of Mentholatum the day before she left Lagos, saying, “Put this in your bag, for when you will be cold.” She rummaged now in her suitcase for it, opened and sniffed it, rubbing some under her nose. The scent made her want to weep. The answering machine was blinking but she did not check it because it would be yet another variation of Aunty Uju’s message. “Has anyone called you back? Have you tried the nearby McDonald’s and Burger King? They don’t always advertise but they might be hiring. I can’t send you anything until next month. My own account is empty, honestly to be a resident doctor is slave labor.”
Newspapers were strewn on the floor, job listings circled in ink. She picked one up and flipped through, looking at advertisements she had already seen. escorts caught her eye again. Ginika had said to her, “Forget that escort thing. They say it isn’t prostitution but it is and the worst thing is that you get maybe a quarter of what you earn because the agency takes the rest. I know this girl who did it in freshman year.” Ifemelu read the advertisement and thought, again, of calling, but she didn’t, because she was hoping that the last interview she went for, a waitress position in a little restaurant that didn’t pay a salary, only tips, would come through. They had said they would call her by the end of the day if she got the job; she waited until very late but they did not call.
AND THEN Elena’s dog ate her bacon. She had heated up a slice of bacon on a paper towel, put it on the table, and turned to open the fridge. The dog swallowed the bacon and the paper towel. She stared at the empty space where her bacon had been, and then she stared at the dog, its expression smug, and all the frustrations of her life boiled up in her head. A dog eating her bacon, a dog eating her bacon while she was jobless.
“Your dog just ate my bacon,” she told Elena, who was slicing a banana at the other end of the kitchen, the pieces falling into her cereal bowl.
“You just hate my dog.”
“You should train him better. He shouldn’t eat people’s food from the kitchen table.”
“You better not kill my dog with voodoo.”
“What?”
“Just kidding!” Elena said. Elena was smirking, her dog’s tail wagging, and Ifemelu felt acid in her veins; she moved towards Elena, hand raised and ready to explode on Elena’s face, before she caught herself with a jolt, stopped and turned and went upstairs. She sat on her bed and hugged her knees to her chest, shaken by her own reaction, how quickly her fury had risen. Downstairs, Elena was screaming on the phone: “I swear to God, bitch just tried to hit me!” Ifemelu had wanted to slap her dissolute roommate not because a slobbering dog had eaten her bacon but because she was at war with the world, and woke up each day feeling bruised, imagining a horde of faceless people who were all against her. It terrified her, to be unable to visualize tomorrow. When her parents called and left a voice message, she saved it, unsure if that would be the last time she would hear their voices. To be here, living abroad, not knowing when she could go home again, was to watch love become anxiety. If she called her mother’s friend Aunty Bunmi and the phone rang to the end, with no answer, she panicked, worried that perhaps her father had died and Aunty Bunmi did not know how to tell her.
LATER, Allison knocked on her door. “Ifemelu? Just wanted to remind you, your rent check isn’t on the table. We’re already really late.”
“I know. I’m writing it.” She lay faceup on her bed. She didn’t want to be the roommate who had rent problems. She hated that Ginika had bought her groceries last week. She could hear Jackie’s raised voice from downstairs. “What are we supposed to do? We’re not her fucking parents.”
She brought out her checkbook. Before she wrote the check, she called Aunty Uju to speak to Dike. Then, refreshed by his innocence, she called the tennis coach in Ardmore.
“When can I start working?” she asked.
“Want to come over right now?”
“Okay,” she said.
She shaved her underarms, dug out the lipstick she had not worn since the day she left Lagos, most of it left smeared on Obinze’s neck at the airport. What would happen with the tennis coach? He had said “massage,” but his manner, his tone, had dripped suggestion. Perhaps he was one of those white men she had read about, with strange tastes, who wanted women to drag a feather over their back or urinate on them. She could certainly do that, urinate on a man for a hundred dollars. The thought amused her, and she smiled a small wry smile. Whatever happened, she would approach it looking her best, she would make it clear to him that there were boundaries she would not cross. She would say, from the beginning, “If you expect sex, then I can’t help you.” Or perhaps she would say it more delicately, more suggestively. “I’m not comfortable going too far.” She might be imagining too much; he might just want a massage.
When she arrived at his house, his manner was brusque. “Come on up,” he said, and led the way to his bedroom, bare but for a bed and a large painting of a tomato soup can on the wall. He offered her something to drink, in a perfunctory way that suggested he expected her to say no, and then he took off his shirt and lay on the bed. Was there no preface? She wished he had done things a little more slowly. Her own words had deserted her.
“Come over here,” he said. “I need to be warm.”
She should leave now. The power balance was tilted in his favor, had been tilted in his favor since she walked into his house. She should leave. She stood up.
“I can’t have sex,” she said. Her voice felt squeaky, unsure of itself. “I can’t have sex with you,” she repeated.
“Oh no, I don’t expect you to,” he said, too quickly.
She moved slowly toward the door, wondering if it was locked, if he had locked it, and then she wondered if he had a gun.
“Just come here and lie down,” he said. “Keep me warm. I’ll touch you a little bit, nothing you’ll be uncomfortable with. I just need some human contact to relax.”
There was, in his expression and tone, a complete assuredness; she felt defeated. How sordid it all was, that she was here with a stranger who already knew she would stay. He knew she would stay because she had come. She was already here, already tainted. She took off her shoes and climbed into his bed. She did not want to be here, did not want his active finger between her legs, did not want his sigh-moans in her ear, and yet she felt her body rousing to a sickening wetness. Afterwards, she lay still, coiled and deadened. He had not forced her. She had come here on her own. She had lain on his bed, and when he placed her hand between his legs, she had curled and moved her fingers. Now, even after she had washed her hands, holding the crisp, slender hundred-dollar bill he had given her, her fingers still felt sticky; they no longer belonged to her.
“Can you do twice a week? I’ll cover your train fare,” he said, stretching and dismissive; he wanted her to leave.
She said nothing.
“Shut the door,” he said, and turned his back to her.
She walked to the train, feeling heavy and slow, her mind choked with mud, and, seated by the window, she began to cry. She felt like a small ball, adrift and alone. The world was a big, big place and she was so tiny, so insignificant, rattling around emptily. Back in her apartment, she washed her hands with water so hot that it scalded her fingers, and a small soft welt flowere
d on her thumb. She took off all her clothes, and squashed them into a rumpled ball that she threw at a corner, staring at it for a while. She would never again wear those clothes, never even touch them. She sat naked on her bed and looked at her life, in this tiny room with the moldy carpet, the hundred-dollar bill on the table, her body rising with loathing. She should never have gone there. She should have walked away. She wanted to shower, to scrub herself, but she could not bear the thought of touching her own body, and so she put on her nightdress, gingerly, to touch as little of herself as possible. She imagined packing her things, somehow buying a ticket, and going back to Lagos. She curled on her bed and cried, wishing she could reach into herself and yank out the memory of what had just happened. Her voice mail light was blinking. It was probably Obinze. She could not bear to think of him now. She thought of calling Ginika. Finally, she called Aunty Uju.
“I went to work for a man in the suburbs today. He paid me a hundred dollars.”
“Ehn? That’s very good. But you have to keep looking for something permanent. I’ve just realized I have to buy health insurance for Dike because the one this new hospital in Massachusetts offers is nonsense, it does not cover him. I am still in shock by how much I have to pay.”
“Won’t you ask me what I did, Aunty? Won’t you ask me what I did before the man paid me a hundred dollars?” Ifemelu asked, a new anger sweeping over her, treading itself through her fingers so that they shook.
“What did you do?” Aunty Uju asked flatly.
Ifemelu hung up. She pressed New on her machine. The first message was from her mother, speaking quickly to reduce the cost of the call: “Ifem, how are you? We are calling to see how you are. We have not heard from you in a while. Please send a message. We are well. God bless you.”