Americanah

  Tochi was unrecognizable now, so fat that even her nose had changed shape, her double chin hanging below her face like a bread roll. She came to Ifemelu’s flat with her baby in one hand, her BlackBerry in the other, and a house help trailing behind, holding a canvas bag full of bottles and bibs. “Madam America” was Tochi’s greeting, and then she spoke, for the rest of her visit, in defensive spurts, as though she had come determined to battle Ifemelu’s Americanness.

  “I buy only British clothes for my baby because American ones fade after one wash,” she said. “My husband wanted us to move to America but I refused, because the education system is so bad. An international agency rated it the lowest in the developed countries, you know.”

  Tochi had always been perceptive and thoughtful; it was Tochi who had intervened with calm reason whenever Ifemelu and Ranyinudo argued in secondary school. In Tochi’s changed persona, in her need to defend against imagined slights, Ifemelu saw a great personal unhappiness. And so she appeased Tochi, putting America down, talking only about the things she, too, disliked about America, exaggerating her non-American accent, until the conversation became an enervating charade. Finally Tochi’s baby vomited, a yellowish liquid that the house help hastily wiped, and Tochi said, “We should go, baby wants to sleep.” Ifemelu, relieved, watched her leave. People changed, sometimes they changed too much.

  Priye had not changed so much as hardened, her personality coated in chrome. She arrived at Ranyinudo’s flat with a pile of newspapers, full of photographs of the big wedding she had just planned. Ifemelu imagined how people would talk about Priye. She is doing well, they would say, she is really doing well.

  “My phone has not stopped ringing since last week!” Priye said triumphantly, pushing back the auburn straight weave that fell across one eye; each time she raised a hand to push back the hair, which invariably fell back again across her eye since it had been sewn in to do so, Ifemelu was distracted by the brittle pink color of her nails. Priye had the sure, slightly sinister manner of someone who could get other people to do what she wanted. And she glittered—her yellow-gold earrings, the metal studs on her designer bag, the sparkly bronze lipstick.

  “It was a very successful wedding: we had seven governors in attendance, seven!” she said.

  “And none of them knew the couple, I’m sure,” Ifemelu said drily.

  Priye gestured, a shrug, an upward flick of her palm, to show how irrelevant that was.

  “Since when has the success of weddings been measured by how many governors attend?” Ifemelu asked.

  “It shows you’re connected. It shows prestige. Do you know how powerful governors in this country are? Executive power is not a small thing,” Priye said.

  “Me, I want as many governors as possible to come to my own wedding o. It shows levels, serious levels,” Ranyinudo said. She was studying the photographs, turning the newspaper pages slowly. “Priye, you heard Mosope is getting married in two weeks?”

  “Yes. She approached me, but their budget was too small for me. That girl never understood the first rule of life in this Lagos. You do not marry the man you love. You marry the man who can best maintain you.”

  “Amen!” Ranyinudo said, laughing. “But sometimes one man can be both o. This is the season of weddings. When will it be my turn, Father Lord?” She glanced upwards, raised her hands as though in prayer.

  “I’ve told Ranyinudo that I’ll do her wedding at no commission,” Priye said to Ifemelu. “And I’ll do yours too, Ifem.”

  “Thank you, but I think Blaine will prefer a governor-free event,” Ifemelu said, and they all laughed. “We’ll probably do something small on a beach.”

  Sometimes she believed her own lies. She could see it now, she and Blaine wearing white on a beach in the Caribbean, surrounded by a few friends, running to a makeshift altar of sand and flowers, and Shan watching and hoping one of them would trip and fall.

  CHAPTER 47

  Onikan was the old Lagos, a slice of the past, a temple to the faded splendor of the colonial years; Ifemelu remembered how houses here had sagged, unpainted and untended, and mold crept up the walls, and gate hinges rusted and atrophied. But developers were renovating and dismantling now, and on the ground floor of a newly refurbished three-story building, heavy glass doors opened into a reception area painted a terra-cotta orange, where a pleasant-faced receptionist, Esther, sat, and behind her loomed giant words in silver: ZOE MAGAZINE. Esther was full of small ambitions. Ifemelu imagined her combing through the piles of secondhand shoes and clothes in the side stalls of Tejuosho market, finding the best pieces and then haggling tirelessly with the trader. She wore neatly pressed clothes and scuffed but carefully polished high heels, read books like Praying Your Way to Prosperity, and was superior with the drivers and ingratiating with the editors. “This your earring is very fine, ma,” she said to Ifemelu. “If you ever want to throw it away, please give it to me to help you throw it away.” And she ceaselessly invited Ifemelu to her church.

  “Will you come this Sunday, ma? My pastor is a powerful man of God. So many people have testimonies of miracles that have happened in their lives because of him.”

  “Why do you think I need to come to your church, Esther?”

  “You will like it, ma. It is a spirit-filled church.”

  At first, the “ma” had made Ifemelu uncomfortable, Esther was at least five years older than she was, but status, of course, surpassed age: she was the features editor, with a car and a driver and the spirit of America hanging over her head, and even Esther expected her to play the madam. And so she did, complimenting Esther and joking with Esther, but always in that manner that was both playful and patronizing, and sometimes giving Esther things, an old handbag, an old watch. Just as she did with her driver, Ayo. She complained about his speeding, threatened to fire him for being late again, asked him to repeat her instructions to make sure he had understood. Yet she always heard the unnatural high pitch of her voice when she said these things, unable fully to convince even herself of her own madamness.

  Aunty Onenu liked to say, “Most of my staff are foreign graduates while that woman at Glass hires riffraff who cannot punctuate sentences!” Ifemelu imagined her saying this at a dinner party, “most of my staff” making the magazine sound like a large, busy operation, although it was an editorial staff of three, an administrative staff of four, and only Ifemelu and Doris, the editor, had foreign degrees. Doris, thin and hollow-eyed, a vegetarian who announced that she was a vegetarian as soon as she possibly could, spoke with a teenage American accent that made her sentences sound like questions, except for when she was speaking to her mother on the phone; then her English took on a flat, stolid Nigerianness. Her long sisterlocks were sun-bleached a coppery tone, and she dressed unusually—white socks and brogues, men’s shirts tucked into pedal pushers—which she considered original, and which everyone in the office forgave her for because she had come back from abroad. She wore no makeup except for bright-red lipstick, and it gave her face a certain shock value, that slash of crimson, which was probably her intent, but her unadorned skin tended towards ashy gray and Ifemelu’s first urge, when they met, was to suggest a good moisturizer.

  “You went to Wellson in Philly? I went to Temple?” Doris said, as though to establish right away that they were members of the same superior club. “You’re going to be sharing this office with me and Zemaye. She’s the assistant editor, and she’s out on assignment until this afternoon, or maybe longer? She always stays as long as she wants.”

  Ifemelu caught the malice. It was not subtle; Doris had meant for it to be caught.

  “I thought you could, like, just spend this week getting used to things? See what we do? And then next week you can start some assignments?” Doris said.

  “Okay,” Ifemelu said.

  The office itself, a large room with four desks, on each of which sat a computer, looked bare and untested, as though it was everybody’s first day at work. Ifemelu was not sure what would
make it look otherwise, perhaps pictures of family on the desks, or just more things, more files and papers and staplers, proof of its being inhabited.

  “I had a great job in New York, but I decided to move back and settle down here?” Doris said. “Like, family pressure to settle down and stuff, you know? Like I’m the only daughter? When I first got back one of my aunts looked at me and said, ‘I can get you a job at a good bank, but you have to cut off that dada hair.’ ” She shook her head from side to side in mockery as she mimicked a Nigerian accent. “I swear to God this city is full of banks that just want you to be reasonably attractive in a kind of predictable way and you have a job in customer service? Anyway, I took this job because I’m interested in the magazine business? And this is like a good place to meet people, because of all the events we get to go to, you know?” Doris sounded as if she and Ifemelu somehow shared the same plot, the same view of the world. Ifemelu felt a small resentment at this, the arrogance of Doris’s certainty that she, too, would of course feel the same way as Doris.

  Just before lunchtime, into the office walked a woman in a tight pencil skirt and patent shoes high as stilts, her straightened hair sleekly pulled back. She was not pretty, her facial features created no harmony, but she carried herself as though she was. Nubile. She made Ifemelu think of that word, with her shapely slenderness, her tiny waist and the unexpected high curves of her breasts.

  “Hi. You’re Ifemelu, right? Welcome to Zoe. I’m Zemaye.” She shook Ifemelu’s hand, her face carefully neutral.

  “Hi, Zemaye. It’s nice to meet you. You have a lovely name,” Ifemelu said.

  “Thank you.” She was used to hearing it. “I hope you don’t like cold rooms.”

  “Cold rooms?”

  “Yes. Doris likes to put the AC on too high and I have to wear a sweater in the office, but now that you are here sharing the office, maybe we can vote,” Zemaye said, settling down at her desk.

  “What are you talking about? Since when do you have to wear a sweater in the office?” Doris asked.

  Zemaye raised her eyebrows and pulled out a thick shawl from her drawer.

  “It’s the humidity that’s just so crazy?” Doris said, turning to Ifemelu, expecting agreement. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe when I first came back?”

  Zemaye, too, turned to Ifemelu. “I am a Delta girl, homemade, born and bred. So I did not grow up with air conditioners and I can breathe without a room being cold.” She spoke in an impassive tone, and everything she said was delivered evenly, never rising or falling.

  “Well, I don’t know about cold?” Doris said. “Most offices in Lagos have air conditioners?”

  “Not turned to the lowest temperature,” Zemaye said.

  “You’ve never said anything about it?”

  “I tell you all the time, Doris.”

  “I mean that it actually prevents you from working?”

  “It’s cold, full stop,” Zemaye said.

  Their mutual dislike was a smoldering, stalking leopard in the room.

  “I don’t like cold,” Ifemelu said. “I think I would freeze if the AC was turned on to the lowest.”

  Doris blinked. She looked not merely betrayed but surprised that she had been betrayed. “Well, okay, we can turn it off and on throughout the day? I have a hard time breathing without the AC and the windows are so damn small?”

  “Okay,” Ifemelu said.

  Zemaye said nothing; she had turned to her computer, as though indifferent to this small victory and Ifemelu felt unaccountably disappointed. She had taken sides, after all, boldly standing with Zemaye, and yet Zemaye remained expressionless, hard to read. Ifemelu wondered what her story was. Zemaye intrigued her.

  Later, Doris and Zemaye were looking over photographs spread out on Doris’s table, of a portly woman wearing tight ruffled clothes, when Zemaye said, “Excuse me, I’m pressed,” and hurried to the door, her supple movements making Ifemelu want to lose weight. Doris’s eyes followed her too.

  “Don’t you just hate it how people say ‘I’m pressed’ or ‘I want to ease myself’ when they want to go to the bathroom?” Doris asked.

  Ifemelu laughed. “I know!”

  “I guess ‘bathroom’ is very American. But there’s ‘toilet,’ ‘restroom,’ ‘the ladies.’ ”

  “I never liked ‘the ladies.’ I like ‘toilet.’ ”

  “Me too!” Doris said. “And don’t you just hate it when people here use ‘on’ as a verb? On the light!”

  “You know what I can’t stand? When people say ‘take’ instead of ‘drink.’ I will take wine. I don’t take beer.”

  “Oh God, I know!”

  They were laughing when Zemaye came back in, and she looked at Ifemelu with her eerily neutral expression and said, “You people must be discussing the next Been-To meeting.”

  “What’s that?” Ifemelu asked.

  “Doris talks about them all the time, but she can’t invite me because it is only for people who have come from abroad.” If there was mockery in Zemaye’s tone, and there had to be, she kept it under her flat delivery.

  “Oh, please. ‘Been-To’ is like so outdated? This is not 1960,” Doris said. Then to Ifemelu, she said, “I was actually going to tell you about it. It’s called the Nigerpolitan Club and it’s just a bunch of people who have recently moved back, some from England, but mostly from the U.S.? Really low-key, just like sharing experiences and networking? I bet you’ll know some of the people. You should totally come?”

  “Yes, I’d like to.”

  Doris got up and took her handbag. “I have to go to Aunty Onenu’s house.”

  After she left, the room was silent, Zemaye typing at her computer, Ifemelu browsing the Internet, and wondering what Zemaye was thinking.

  Finally, Zemaye said, “So you were a famous race blogger in America. When Aunty Onenu told us, I didn’t understand.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why race?”

  “I discovered race in America and it fascinated me.”

  “Hmm,” Zemaye murmured, as though she thought this, discovering race, an exotic and self-indulgent phenomenon. “Aunty Onenu said your boyfriend is a black American and he is coming soon?”

  Ifemelu was surprised. Aunty Onenu had asked about her personal life, with a casualness that was also insistent, and she had told her the false story of Blaine, thinking that her boss had no business with her personal life anyway, and now it seemed that personal life had been shared with other staff. Perhaps she was being too American about it, fixating on privacy for its own sake. What did it really matter if Zemaye knew of Blaine?

  “Yes. He should be here by next month,” she said.

  “Why is it only black people that are criminals over there?”

  Ifemelu opened her mouth and closed it. Here she was, famous race blogger, and she was lost for words.

  “I love Cops. It is because of that show that I have DSTV,” Zemaye said. “And all the criminals are black people.”

  “It’s like saying every Nigerian is a 419,” Ifemelu said finally. She sounded too limp, too insufficient.

  “But it is true, all of us have small 419 in our blood!” Zemaye smiled with what seemed to be, for the first time, a real amusement in her eyes. Then she added, “Sorry o. I did not mean that your boyfriend is a criminal. I was just asking.”

  CHAPTER 48

  Ifemelu asked Ranyinudo to come with her and Doris to the Nigerpolitan meeting.

  “I don’t have energy for you returnees, please,” Ranyinudo said. “Besides, Ndudi is finally back from all his traveling up and down and we’re going out.”

  “Good luck choosing a man over your friend, you witch.”

  “Yes o. Are you the person that will marry me? Meanwhile I told Don I am going out with you, so make sure you don’t go anywhere that he might go.” Ranyinudo was laughing. She was still seeing Don, waiting to make sure that Ndudi was “serious” before she stopped, and she hoped, too, that Don would get her the ne
w car before then.

  The Nigerpolitan Club meeting: a small cluster of people drinking champagne in paper cups, at the poolside of a home in Osborne Estate, chic people, all dripping with savoir faire, each nursing a self-styled quirkiness—a ginger-colored Afro, a T-shirt with a graphic of Thomas Sankara, oversize handmade earrings that hung like pieces of modern art. Their voices burred with foreign accents. You can’t find a decent smoothie in this city! Oh my God, were you at that conference? What this country needs is an active civil society. Ifemelu knew some of them. She chatted with Bisola and Yagazie, both of whom had natural hair, worn in a twist-out, a halo of spirals framing their faces. They talked about hair salons here, where the hairdressers struggled and fumbled to comb natural hair, as though it were an alien eruption, as though their own hair was not the same way before it was defeated by chemicals.

  “The salon girls are always like, ‘Aunty, you don’t want to relax your hair?’ It’s ridiculous that Africans don’t value our natural hair in Africa,” Yagazie said.

  “I know,” Ifemelu said, and she caught the righteousness in her voice, in all their voices. They were the sanctified, the returnees, back home with an extra gleaming layer. Ikenna joined them, a lawyer who had lived outside Philadelphia and whom she had met at a Blogging While Brown convention. And Fred joined them too. He had introduced himself to Ifemelu earlier, a pudgy, well-groomed man. “I lived in Boston until last year,” he said, in a falsely low-key way, because “Boston” was code for Harvard (otherwise he would say MIT or Tufts or anywhere else), just as another woman said, “I was in New Haven,” in that coy manner that pretended not to be coy, which meant that she had been at Yale. Other people joined them, all encircled by a familiarity, because they could reach so easily for the same references. Soon they were laughing and listing the things they missed about America.