Then Obinze’s voice, his words floating into the air, into her head. “I love you, Ifem,” he said, at the end, in that voice that seemed suddenly so far away, part of another time and place. She lay rigid on her bed. She could not sleep, she could not distract herself. She began to think about killing the tennis coach. She would hit him on the head over and over with an axe. She would plunge a knife into his muscled chest. He lived alone, he probably had other women coming to his room to spread their legs for his stubby finger with its bitten-back nail. Nobody would know which of them had done it. She would leave the knife sunk in his chest and then search his drawers for his bundle of one-hundred-dollar bills, so that she could pay her rent and her tuition.
That night, it snowed, her first snow, and in the morning, she watched the world outside her window, the parked cars made lumpy, misshapen, by layered snow. She was bloodless, detached, floating in a world where darkness descended too soon and everyone walked around burdened by coats, and flattened by the absence of light. The days drained into one another, crisp air turning to freezing air, painful to inhale. Obinze called many times but she did not pick up her phone. She deleted his voice messages unheard and his e-mails unread, and she felt herself sinking, sinking quickly, and unable to pull herself up.
SHE WOKE UP torpid each morning, slowed by sadness, frightened by the endless stretch of day that lay ahead. Everything had thickened. She was swallowed, lost in a viscous haze, shrouded in a soup of nothingness. Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. She cared about nothing. She wanted to care, but she no longer knew how; it had slipped from her memory, the ability to care. Sometimes she woke up flailing and helpless, and she saw, in front of her and behind her and all around her, an utter hopelessness. She knew there was no point in being here, in being alive, but she had no energy to think concretely of how she could kill herself. She lay in bed and read books and thought of nothing. Sometimes she forgot to eat and other times she waited until midnight, her roommates in their rooms, before heating up her food, and she left the dirty plates under her bed, until greenish mold fluffed up around the oily remnants of rice and beans. Often, in the middle of eating or reading, she would feel a crushing urge to cry and the tears would come, the sobs hurting her throat. She had turned off the ringer of her phone. She no longer went to class. Her days were stilled by silence and snow.
ALLISON WAS BANGING on her door again. “Are you there? Phone call! She says it’s an emergency, for God’s sake! I know you’re there, I heard you flush the toilet a minute ago!”
The flat, dulled banging, as though Allison was hitting the door with an open palm rather than a knuckle, unnerved Ifemelu. “She’s not opening,” she heard Allison say, and then, just when she thought Allison had left, the banging resumed. She got up from her bed, where she had been lying and taking turns reading two novels chapter by chapter, and with leaden feet moved to the door. She wanted to walk quickly, normally, but she could not. Her feet had turned into snails. She unlocked the door. With a glare, Allison thrust the phone in her hand.
“Thanks,” she said, limply, and added, in a lower mumble, “Sorry.” Even talking, making words rise up her throat and out of her mouth, exhausted her.
“Hello?” she said into the phone.
“Ifem! What’s going on? What’s happening to you?” Ginika asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“I’ve been so worried about you. Thank God I found your roommate’s number! Obinze has been calling me. He’s worried out of his mind,” Ginika said. “Even Aunty Uju called to ask if I had seen you.”
“I’ve been busy,” Ifemelu said vaguely.
There was a pause. Ginika’s tone softened. “Ifem, I’m here, you know that, right?”
Ifemelu wanted to hang up and return to her bed. “Yes.”
“I have good news. Kimberly called me to ask for your phone number. The babysitter she hired just left. She wants to hire you. She wants you to start on Monday. She said she wanted you from the beginning but Laura talked her into hiring the other person. So, Ifem, you have a job! Cash! Under the table! Ifemsco, this is great. She’ll pay you two-fifty a week, more than the old babysitter. And pure cash under the table! Kimberly is a really great person. I’m coming tomorrow to take you over there to see her.”
Ifemelu said nothing, struggling to understand. Words took so long to form meaning.
The next day, Ginika knocked and knocked on her door before Ifemelu finally opened, and saw Allison standing on the landing at the back, watching curiously.
“We’re late already, get dressed,” Ginika said, firmly, authoritatively, with no room for dissent. Ifemelu pulled on a pair of jeans. She felt Ginika watching her. In the car, Ginika’s rock music filled the silence between them. They were on Lancaster Avenue, just about to cross over from West Philadelphia, with boarded-up buildings and hamburger wrappers strewn around, and into the spotless, tree-filled suburbs of the Main Line, when Ginika said, “I think you’re suffering from depression.”
Ifemelu shook her head and turned to the window. Depression was what happened to Americans, with their self-absolving need to turn everything into an illness. She was not suffering from depression; she was merely a little tired and a little slow. “I don’t have depression,” she said. Years later, she would blog about this: “On the Subject of Non-American Blacks Suffering from Illnesses Whose Names They Refuse to Know.” A Congolese woman wrote a long comment in response: She had moved to Virginia from Kinshasa and, months into her first semester of college, begun to feel dizzy in the morning, her heart pounding as though in flight from her, her stomach fraught with nausea, her fingers tingling. She went to see a doctor. And even though she checked “yes” to all the symptoms on the card the doctor gave her, she refused to accept the diagnosis of panic attacks because panic attacks happened only to Americans. Nobody in Kinshasa had panic attacks. It was not even that it was called by another name, it was simply not called at all. Did things begin to exist only when they were named?
“Ifem, this is something a lot of people go through, and I know it’s not been easy for you adjusting to a new place and still not having a job. We don’t talk about things like depression in Nigeria but it’s real. You should see somebody at the health center. There’s always therapists.”
Ifemelu kept her face to the window. She felt, again, that crushing desire to cry, and she took a deep breath, hoping it would pass. She wished she had told Ginika about the tennis coach, taken the train to Ginika’s apartment on that day, but now it was too late, her self-loathing had hardened inside her. She would never be able to form the sentences to tell her story.
“Ginika,” she said. “Thank you.” Her voice was hoarse. The tears had come, she could not control them. Ginika stopped at a gas station, gave her a tissue, and waited for her sobs to die down before she started the car and drove to Kimberly’s house.
CHAPTER 16
Kimberly called it a signing bonus. “Ginika told me you’ve had some challenges,” Kimberly said. “Please don’t refuse.”
It would not have occurred to Ifemelu to refuse the check; now she could pay some bills, send something home to her parents. Her mother liked the shoes she sent, tasseled and tapering, the kind she could wear to church. “Thank you,” her mother said, and then sighing heavily over the phone line, she added, “Obinze came to see me.” Ifemelu was silent.
“Whatever problem you have, please discuss it with him,” her mother said.
Ifemelu said, “Okay,” and began to talk about something else. When her mother said there had been no light for two weeks, it seemed suddenly foreign to her, and home itself a distant place. She could no longer remember what it felt like to spend an evening in candlelight. She no longer read the news on Nigeria.com because each headline, even the most unlikely ones, somehow reminded her of Obinze.
At first, she gave herself a month. A month to let her self-loathing seep away, then she would call Obinze. But a month passed and still she kept
Obinze sealed in silence, gagged her own mind so that she would think of him as little as possible. She still deleted his e-mails unread. Many times she started to write to him, she crafted e-mails, and then stopped and discarded them. She would have to tell him what happened, and she could not bear the thought of telling him what happened. She felt shamed; she had failed. Ginika kept asking what was wrong, why she had shut out Obinze, and she said it was nothing, she just wanted some space, and Ginika gaped at her in disbelief. You just want some space?
Early in the spring, a letter arrived from Obinze. Deleting his e-mails took a click, and after the first click, the others were easier because she could not imagine reading the second if she had not read the first. But a letter was different. It brought to her the greatest sorrow she had ever felt. She sank to her bed, holding the envelope in her hand; she smelled it, stared at his familiar handwriting. She imagined him at his desk in his boys’ quarters, near his small humming refrigerator, writing in that calm manner of his. She wanted to read the letter, but she could not get herself to open it. She put it on her table. She would read it in a week; she needed a week to gather her strength. She would reply, too, she told herself. She would tell him everything. But a week later, the letter still lay there. She placed a book on top of it, then another book, and one day it was swallowed beneath files and books. She would never read it.
TAYLOR WAS EASY, a childish child, the playful one who was sometimes so naïve that Ifemelu guiltily thought him stupid. But Morgan, only three years older, already wore the mourning demeanor of a teenager. She read many grades above her level, was steeped in enrichment classes, and watched adults with a hooded gaze, as though privy to the darkness that lurked in their lives. At first, Ifemelu disliked Morgan, responding to what she thought was Morgan’s own disturbingly full-grown dislike. She was cool, sometimes even cold, to Morgan during her first weeks with them, determined not to indulge this spoiled silken child with a dusting of burgundy freckles on her nose, but she had come, with the passing months, to care for Morgan, an emotion she was careful not to show to Morgan. Instead she was firm and neutral, staring back when Morgan stared. Perhaps it was why Morgan did what Ifemelu asked. She would do it coldly, indifferently, grudgingly, but she would do it. She routinely ignored her mother. And with her father, her brooding watchfulness sharpened into poison. Don would come home and sweep into the den, expecting that everything would stop because of him. And everything did stop, except for whatever Morgan was doing. Kimberly, fluttery and ardent, would ask how his day was, scrambling to please, as though she could not quite believe that he had again come home to her. Taylor would hurl himself into Don’s arms. And Morgan would look up from the TV or a book or a game to watch him, as though she saw through him, while Don pretended not to squirm under her piercing eyes. Sometimes Ifemelu wondered. Was it Don? Was he cheating and had Morgan found out? Cheating was the first thing anyone would think of with a man like Don, with that lubricious aura of his. But he might be satisfied with suggestiveness alone; he would flirt outrageously but not do more, because an affair would require some effort and he was the kind of man who took but did not give.
Ifemelu thought often of that afternoon early in her babysitting: Kimberly was out, Taylor was playing and Morgan reading in the den. Suddenly, Morgan put down her book, calmly walked upstairs and ripped off the wallpaper in her room, pushed down her dresser, yanked off her bedcovers, tore down the curtains, and was on her knees pulling and pulling and pulling at the strongly glued carpet when Ifemelu ran in and stopped her. Morgan was like a small, steel robot, writhing to be let free, with a strength that frightened Ifemelu. Perhaps the child would end up being a serial murderer, like those women on television crime documentaries, standing half-naked on dark roads to lure truck drivers and then strangle them. When finally Ifemelu let go, slowly loosening her grip on a quieted Morgan, Morgan went back downstairs to her book.
Later, Kimberly, in tears, asked her, “Honey, please tell me what’s wrong.”
And Morgan said, “I’m too old for all that pink stuff in my room.”
Now, Kimberly took Morgan twice a week to a therapist in Bala Cynwyd. Both she and Don were more tentative towards her, more cowering under her denouncing stare.
When Morgan won an essay contest at school, Don came home with a present for her. Kimberly anxiously stood at the bottom of the stairs while Don went up to present the gift, wrapped in sparkly paper. He came down moments later.
“She wouldn’t even look at it. She just got up and went into the bathroom and stayed there,” he said. “I left it on the bed.”
“It’s okay, honey, she’ll come around,” Kimberly said, hugging him, rubbing his back.
Later, Kimberly, sotto voce, told Ifemelu, “Morgan’s really hard on him. He tries so hard and she won’t let him in. She just won’t.”
“Morgan doesn’t let anyone in,” Ifemelu said. Don needed to remember that Morgan, and not he, was the child.
“She listens to you,” Kimberly said, a little sadly.
Ifemelu wanted to say, “I don’t give her too many choices,” because she wished Kimberly would not be so sheer in her yieldingness; perhaps Morgan just needed to feel that her mother could push back. Instead she said, “That’s because I’m not her family. She doesn’t love me and so she doesn’t feel all these complicated things for me. I’m just a nuisance at best.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” Kimberly said.
“It’s a phase. It will pass, you’ll see.” She felt protective of Kimberly, she wanted to shield Kimberly.
“The only person she really cares about is my cousin Curt. She adores him. If we have family gatherings she’ll brood unless Curt is there. I’ll see if he can come visit and talk to her.”
LAURA HAD BROUGHT a magazine.
“Look at this, Ifemelu,” she said. “It isn’t Nigeria, but it’s close. I know celebrities can be flighty but she seems to be doing good work.”
Ifemelu and Kimberly looked at the page together: a thin white woman, smiling at the camera, holding a dark-skinned African baby in her arms, and all around her, little dark-skinned African children were spread out like a rug. Kimberly made a sound, a hmmm, as though she was unsure how to feel.
“She’s stunning too,” Laura said.
“Yes, she is,” Ifemelu said. “And she’s just as skinny as the kids, only that her skinniness is by choice and theirs is not by choice.”
A pop of loud laughter burst out from Laura. “You are funny! I love how sassy you are!”
Kimberly did not laugh. Later, alone with Ifemelu, she said, “I’m sorry Laura said that. I’ve never liked that word ‘sassy.’ It’s the kind of word that’s used for certain people and not for others.” Ifemelu shrugged and smiled and changed the subject. She did not understand why Laura looked up so much information about Nigeria, asking her about 419 scams, telling her how much money Nigerians in America sent back home every year. It was an aggressive, unaffectionate interest; strange indeed, to pay so much attention to something you did not like. Perhaps it was really about Kimberly, and Laura was in some distorted way aiming at her sister by saying things that would make Kimberly launch into apologies. It seemed too much work for too little gain, though. At first, Ifemelu thought Kimberly’s apologizing sweet, even if unnecessary, but she had begun to feel a flash of impatience, because Kimberly’s repeated apologies were tinged with self-indulgence, as though she believed that she could, with apologies, smooth all the scalloped surfaces of the world.
A FEW MONTHS INTO her babysitting, Kimberly asked her, “Would you consider living in? The basement is really a one-bedroom apartment with a private entrance. It would be rent-free, of course.”
Ifemelu was already looking for a studio apartment, eager to leave her roommates now that she could afford to, and she did not want to be further enmeshed in the lives of the Turners, yet she considered saying yes, because she heard a plea in Kimberly’s voice. In the end, she decided she could not li
ve with them. When she said no, Kimberly offered her the use of their spare car. “It’ll make it much easier for you to get here after your classes. It’s an old thing. We were going to give it away. I hope it doesn’t stop you on the road,” she said, as if the Honda, only a few years old, its body unmarked, could possibly stop on the road.
“You really shouldn’t trust me to take your car home. What if I don’t come back one day?” Ifemelu said.
Kimberly laughed. “It’s not worth very much.”
“You do have an American license?” Laura asked. “I mean, you can drive legally in this country?”
“Of course she can, Laura,” Kimberly said. “Why would she accept the car if she couldn’t?”
“I’m just checking,” Laura said, as though Kimberly could not be depended upon to ask the necessary tough questions of non-American citizens. Ifemelu watched them, so alike in their looks, and both unhappy people. But Kimberly’s unhappiness was inward, unacknowledged, shielded by her desire for things to be as they should, and also by hope: she believed in other people’s happiness because it meant that she, too, might one day have it. Laura’s unhappiness was different, spiky, she wished that everyone around her were unhappy because she had convinced herself that she would always be.
“Yes, I have an American license,” Ifemelu said, and then she began to talk about the safe driving course she had taken in Brooklyn, before she got her license, and how the instructor, a thin white man with matted hair the color of straw, had cheated. In the dark basement room full of foreigners, the entrance of which was an even darker flight of narrow stairs, the instructor had collected all the cash payments before he showed the safe-driving film on the wall projector. From time to time, he made jokes that nobody understood and chuckled to himself. Ifemelu was a little suspicious of the film: How could a car driving so slowly have caused that amount of damage in an accident, leaving the driver’s neck broken? Afterwards, he gave out the test questions. Ifemelu found them easy, quickly shading in the answers in pencil. A small South Asian man beside her, perhaps fifty years old, kept glancing over at her, his eyes pleading, while she pretended not to understand that he wanted her help. The instructor collected the papers, brought out a clay-colored eraser, and began to wipe out some of the answers and to shade in others. Everybody passed. Many of them shook his hand, said “Thank you, thank you” in a wide range of accents before they shuffled out. Now they could apply for American driver’s licenses. Ifemelu told the story with a false openness, as though it was merely a curiosity for her, and not something she had chosen to goad Laura.