Americanah

  “I ate really nice ofada rice at the wedding, I’m not hungry,” Ranyinudo said. But, after she served Ifemelu’s food on a dinner plate, she ate some rice and chicken stew from a plastic bowl, perched on the arm of the couch, while they gossiped about old friends: Priye was an event planner and had recently gone big time after being introduced to the governor’s wife. Tochi had lost her job at a bank after the last bank crisis, but she had married a wealthy lawyer and had a baby.

  “Tochi used to tell me how much people had in their accounts,” Ranyinudo said. “Remember that guy Mekkus Parara who was dying for Ginika? Remember how he always had smelly yellow patches under his arms? He has major money now, but it is dirty money. You know, all these guys who do fraud in London and America, then run back to Nigeria with the money and build mighty houses in Victoria Garden City. Tochi told me that he never came to the bank himself. He used to send his boys with Ghana Must Go bags to carry ten million today, twenty million tomorrow. Me, I never wanted to work in a bank. The problem with working in a bank is that if you don’t get a good branch with high-net customers, you are finished. You will spend all your time attending to useless traders. Tochi was lucky with her job and she worked in a good branch and she met her husband there. Do you want another malt?”

  Ranyinudo got up. There was a luxurious, womanly slowness to her gait, a lift, a roll, a toggle of her buttocks with each step. A Nigerian walk. A walk, too, that hinted at excess, as though it spoke of something in need of toning down. Ifemelu took the cold bottle of malt from Ranyinudo and wondered if this would have been her life if she had not left, if she would be like Ranyinudo, working for an advertising company, living in a one-bedroom flat whose rent her salary could not pay, attending a Pentecostal church where she was an usher, and dating a married chief executive who bought her business-class tickets to London. Ranyinudo showed Ifemelu his photographs on her phone. In one, he was bare-chested with the slight swell of a middle-aged belly, reclining on Ranyinudo’s bed, smiling the bashful smile of a man just sated from sex. In another, he was looking down in a close-up shot, his face a blurred and mysterious silhouette. There was something attractive, even distinguished, about his gray-speckled hair.

  “Is it me or does he look like a tortoise?” Ifemelu said.

  “It’s you. But Ifem, seriously, Don is a good man o. Not like many of these useless Lagos men running around town.”

  “Ranyi, you told me it was just a passing thing. But two years is not a passing thing. I worry about you.”

  “I have feelings for him, I won’t deny it, but I want to marry and he knows that. I used to think maybe I should have a child for him but look at Uche Okafor, remember her from Nsukka? She had a child for the managing director of Hale Bank and the man told her to go to hell, that he is not the father, and now she is left with raising a child alone. Na wa.”

  Ranyinudo was looking at the photograph on her phone with a faint, fond smile. Earlier, on the drive back from the airport, she had said, as she slowed down to sink into, and then climb out of, a large pothole, “I really want Don to change this car. He has been promising for the past three months. I need a jeep. Do you see how terrible the roads are?” And Ifemelu felt something between fascination and longing for Ranyinudo’s life. A life in which she waved a hand and things fell from the sky, things that she quite simply expected should fall from the sky.

  At midnight, Ranyinudo turned off her generator and opened the windows. “I have been running this generator for one straight week, can you imagine? The light situation has not been this bad in a long time.”

  The coolness dissipated quickly. Warm, humid air gagged the room, and soon Ifemelu was tossing in the wetness of her own sweat. A painful throbbing had started behind her eyes and a mosquito was buzzing nearby and she felt suddenly, guiltily grateful that she had a blue American passport in her bag. It shielded her from choicelessness. She could always leave; she did not have to stay.

  “What kind of humidity is this?” she said. She was on Ranyinudo’s bed, and Ranyinudo was on a mattress on the floor. “I can’t breathe.”

  “I can’t breathe,” Ranyinudo mimicked, her voice laughter-filled. “Haba! Americanah!”

  CHAPTER 45

  Ifemelu had found the listing on Nigerian Jobs Online—“features editor for leading women’s monthly magazine.” She edited her résumé, invented past experience as a staff writer on a women’s magazine (“folded due to bankruptcy” in parentheses), and days after she sent it off by courier, the publisher of Zoe called from Lagos. There was, about the mature, friendly voice on the other end of the line, a vague air of inappropriateness. “Oh, call me Aunty Onenu,” she said cheerfully when Ifemelu asked who was speaking. Before she offered Ifemelu the job, she said, tone hushed in confidence, “My husband did not support me when I started this, because he thought men would chase me if I went to seek advertising.” Ifemelu sensed that the magazine was a hobby for Aunty Onenu, a hobby that meant something, but still a hobby. Not a passion. Not something that consumed her. And when she met Aunty Onenu, she felt this more strongly: here was a woman easy to like but difficult to take seriously.

  Ifemelu went with Ranyinudo to Aunty Onenu’s home in Ikoyi. They sat on leather sofas that felt cold to the touch, and talked in low voices, until Aunty Onenu appeared. A slim, smiling, well-preserved woman, wearing leggings, a large T-shirt, and an overly youthful weave, the wavy hair trailing all the way to her back.

  “My new features editor has come from America!” she said, hugging Ifemelu. It was difficult to tell her age, anything between fifty and sixty-five, but it was easy to tell that she had not been born with her light complexion, its sheen was too waxy and her knuckles were dark, as though those folds of skin had valiantly resisted her bleaching cream.

  “I wanted you to come around before you start on Monday so I can welcome you personally,” Aunty Onenu said.

  “Thank you.” Ifemelu thought the home visit unprofessional and odd, but this was a small magazine, and this was Nigeria, where boundaries were blurred, where work blended into life, and bosses were called Mummy. Besides, she already imagined taking over the running of Zoe, turning it into a vibrant, relevant companion for Nigerian women, and—who knew—perhaps one day buying out Aunty Onenu. And she would not welcome new recruits in her home.

  “You are a pretty girl,” Aunty Onenu said, nodding, as though being pretty were needed for the job and she had worried that Ifemelu might not be. “I liked how you sounded on the phone. I am sure with you on board our circulation will soon surpass Glass. You know we are a much younger publication but already catching up to them!”

  A steward in white, a grave, elderly man, emerged to ask what they would drink.

  “Aunty Onenu, I’ve been reading back issues of both Glass and Zoe, and I have some ideas about what we can do differently,” Ifemelu said, after the steward left to get their orange juice.

  “You are a real American! Ready to get to work, a no-nonsense person! Very good. First of all, tell me how you think we compare to Glass?”

  Ifemelu had thought both magazines vapid, but Glass was better edited, the page colors did not bleed as badly as they did in Zoe, and it was more visible in traffic; whenever Ranyinudo’s car slowed, there was a hawker pressing a copy of Glass against her window. But because she could already see Aunty Onenu’s obsession with the competition, so nakedly personal, she said, “It’s about the same, but I think we can do better. We need to cut down the profile interviews and do just one a month and profile a woman who has actually achieved something real on her own. We need more personal columns, and we should introduce a rotating guest column, and do more health and money, have a stronger online presence, and stop lifting foreign magazine pieces. Most of your readers can’t go into the market and buy broccoli because we don’t have it in Nigeria, so why does this month’s Zoe have a recipe for cream of broccoli soup?”

  “Yes, yes,” Aunty Onenu said, slowly. She seemed astonished. Then, as though recov
ering herself, she said, “Very good. We’ll discuss all this on Monday.”

  In the car, Ranyinudo said, “Talking to your new boss like that, ha! If you had not come from America, she would have fired you immediately.”

  “I wonder what the story is between her and the Glass publisher.”

  “I read in one of the tabloids that they hate each other. I am sure it is man trouble, what else? Women, eh! I think Aunty Onenu started Zoe just to compete with Glass. As far as I’m concerned, she’s not a publisher, she’s just a rich woman who decided to start a magazine, and tomorrow she might close it and start a spa.”

  “And what an ugly house,” Ifemelu said. It was monstrous, with two alabaster angels guarding the gate, and a dome-shaped fountain sputtering in the front yard.

  “Ugly kwa? What are you talking about? The house is beautiful!”

  “Not to me,” Ifemelu said, and yet she had once found houses like that beautiful. But here she was now, disliking it with the haughty confidence of a person who recognized kitsch.

  “Her generator is as big as my flat and it is completely noiseless!” Ranyinudo said. “Did you notice the generator house on the side of the gate?”

  Ifemelu had not noticed. And it piqued her. This was what a true Lagosian should have noticed: the generator house, the generator size.

  On Kingsway Road, she thought she saw Obinze drive past in a low-slung black Mercedes and she sat up, straining and peering, but, slowed at a traffic jam, she saw that the man looked nothing like him. There were other imagined glimpses of Obinze over the next weeks, people she knew were not him but could have been: the straight-backed figure in a suit walking into Aunty Onenu’s office, the man in the back of a car with tinted windows, his face bent to a phone, the figure behind her in the supermarket line. She even imagined, when she first went to meet her landlord, that she would walk in and discover Obinze sitting there. The estate agent had told her that the landlord preferred expatriate renters. “But he relaxed when I told him you came from America,” he added. The landlord was an elderly man in a brown caftan and matching trousers; he had the weathered skin and wounded air of one who had endured much at the hands of others.

  “I do not rent to Igbo people,” he said softly, startling her. Were such things now said so easily? Had they been said so easily and had she merely forgotten? “That is my policy since one Igbo man destroyed my house at Yaba. But you look like a responsible somebody.”

  “Yes, I am responsible,” she said, and feigned a simpering smile. The other flats she liked were too expensive. Even though pipes poked out under the kitchen sink and the toilet was lopsided and the bathroom tiles shoddily laid, this was the best she could afford. She liked the airiness of the living room, with its large windows, and the narrow flight of stairs that led to a tiny verandah charmed her, but, most of all, it was in Ikoyi. And she wanted to live in Ikoyi. Growing up, Ikoyi had reeked of gentility, a faraway gentility that she could not touch: the people who lived in Ikoyi had faces free of pimples and drivers designated “the children’s driver.” The first day she saw the flat, she stood on the verandah and looked across at the compound next door, a grand colonial house, now yellowed from decay, the grounds swallowed in foliage, grass and shrubs climbing atop one another. On the roof of the house, a part of which had collapsed and sunk in, she saw a movement, a turquoise splash of feathers. It was a peacock. The estate agent told her that an army officer had lived there during General Abacha’s regime; now the house was tied up in court. And she imagined the people who had lived there fifteen years ago while she, in a little flat on the crowded mainland, longed for their spacious, serene lives.

  She wrote the check for two years’ rent. This was why people took bribes and asked for bribes; how else could anyone honestly pay two years’ rent in advance? She planned to fill her verandah with white lilies in clay pots, and decorate her living room in pastels, but first, she had to find an electrician to install air conditioners, a painter to redo the oily walls, and somebody to lay new tiles in the kitchen and bathroom. The estate agent brought a man who did tiles. It took him a week and, when the estate agent called her to say that the work was done, she went eagerly to the flat. In the bathroom, she stared in disbelief. The tile edges were rough, tiny spaces gaping at the corners. One tile had an ugly crack across the middle. It looked like something done by an impatient child.

  “What is this nonsense? Look at how rough this is! One tile is broken! This is even worse than the old tiles! How can you be happy with this useless work?” she asked the man.

  He shrugged; he clearly thought she was making unnecessary trouble. “I am happy with the work, aunty.”

  “You want me to pay you?”

  A small smile. “Ah, aunty, but I have finish the work.”

  The estate agent intervened. “Don’t worry, ma, he will repair the broken one.”

  The tile man looked reluctant. “But I have finish the work. The problem is the tile is breaking very easily. It is the quality of tile.”

  “You have finished? You do this rubbish job and say you have finished?” Her anger was growing, her voice rising and hardening. “I will not pay you what we agreed, no way, because you have not done what we agreed.”

  The tile man was staring at her, eyes narrowed.

  “And if you want trouble, trust me, you will get it,” Ifemelu said. “The first thing I will do is call the commissioner of police and they will lock you up in Alagbon Close!” She was screaming now. “Do you know who I am? You don’t know who I am, that is why you can do this kind of rubbish work for me!”

  The man looked cowed. She had surprised herself. Where had that come from, the false bravado, the easy resort to threats? A memory came to her, undiminished after so many years, of the day Aunty Uju’s General died, how Aunty Uju had threatened his relatives. “No, don’t go, just stay there,” she had said to them. “Stay there while I go and call my boys from the army barracks.”

  The estate agent said, “Aunty, don’t worry, he will do the work again.”

  Later, Ranyinudo told her, “You are no longer behaving like an Americanah!” and despite herself, Ifemelu felt pleased to hear this.

  “The problem is that we no longer have artisans in this country,” Ranyinudo said. “Ghanaians are better. My boss is building a house and he is using only Ghanaians to do his finishing. Nigerians will do rubbish for you. They do not take their time to finish things properly. It’s terrible. But Ifem, you should have called Obinze. He would have sorted everything out for you. This is what he does, after all. He must have all kinds of contacts. You should have called him before you even started looking for a flat. He could have given you reduced rent in one of his properties, even a free flat sef. I don’t know what you are waiting for before you call him.”

  Ifemelu shook her head. Ranyinudo, for whom men existed only as sources of things. She could not imagine calling Obinze to ask him for reduced rent in one of his properties. Still, she did not know why she had not called him at all. She had thought of it many times, often bringing out her phone to scroll to his number, and yet she had not called. He still sent e-mails, saying he hoped she was fine, or he hoped Dike was doing better, and she replied to a few, always briefly, replies he would assume were sent from America.

  CHAPTER 46

  She spent weekends with her parents, in the old flat, happy simply to sit and look at the walls that had witnessed her childhood; only when she began to eat her mother’s stew, an oil layer floating on top of the pureed tomatoes, did she realize how much she had missed it. The neighbors stopped by to greet her, the daughter back from America. Many of them were new and unfamiliar, but she felt a sentimental fondness for them, because they reminded her of the others she had known, Mama Bomboy downstairs who had once pulled her ear when she was in primary school and said, “You do not greet your elders,” Oga Tony upstairs who smoked on his verandah, the trader next door who called her, for reasons she never knew, “champion.”

  “They
are just coming to see if you will give them anything,” her mother said, in a whisper, as if the neighbors who had all left might overhear. “They all expected me to buy something for them when we went to America, so I went to the market and bought small-small bottles of perfume and told them it was from America!”

  Her parents liked to talk about their visit to Baltimore, her mother about the sales, her father about how he could not understand the news because Americans now used expressions like “divvy up” and “nuke” in serious news.

  “It is the final infantilization and informalization of America! It portends the end of the American empire, and they are killing themselves from within!” he pronounced.

  Ifemelu humored them, listening to their observations and memories, and hoped that neither of them would bring up Blaine; she had told them a work issue had delayed his visit.

  She did not have to lie to her old friends about Blaine, but she did, telling them she was in a serious relationship and he would join her in Lagos soon. It surprised her how quickly, during reunions with old friends, the subject of marriage came up, a waspish tone in the voices of the unmarried, a smugness in those of the married. Ifemelu wanted to talk about the past, about the teachers they had mocked and the boys they had liked, but marriage was always the preferred topic—whose husband was a dog, who was on a desperate prowl, posting too many dressed-up pictures of herself on Facebook, whose man had disappointed her after four years and left her to marry a small girl he could control. (When Ifemelu told Ranyinudo that she had run into an old classmate, Vivian, at the bank, Ranyinudo’s first question was “Is she married?”) And so she used Blaine as armor. If they knew of Blaine, then the married friends would not tell her “Don’t worry, your own will come, just pray about it,” and the unmarried friends would not assume that she was a member of the self-pity party of the single. There was, also, a strained nostalgia in those reunions, some in Ranyinudo’s flat, some in hers, some in restaurants, because she struggled to find, in these adult women, some remnants from her past that were often no longer there.