But Ginika complained and cried, painting images of a sad, friendless life in a strange America. “I wish I could live with you people while they go,” she told Ifemelu. They had gathered at Ginika’s house, Ifemelu, Ranyinudo, Priye, and Tochi, and were in her bedroom, picking through the clothes she would not be taking with her.
“Ginika, just make sure you can still talk to us when you come back,” Priye said.
“She’ll come back and be a serious Americanah like Bisi,” Ranyinudo said.
They roared with laughter, at that word “Americanah,” wreathed in glee, the fourth syllable extended, and at the thought of Bisi, a girl in the form below them, who had come back from a short trip to America with odd affectations, pretending she no longer understood Yoruba, adding a slurred r to every English word she spoke.
“But, Ginika, seriously, I would give anything to be you right now,” Priye said. “I don’t understand why you don’t want to go. You can always come back.”
At school, friends gathered around Ginika. They all wanted to take her out to the tuck shop, and to see her after school, as though her impending departure had made her even more desirable. Ifemelu and Ginika were lounging in the corridor, during short break, when the Big Guys joined them: Kayode, Obinze, Ahmed, Emenike, and Osahon.
“Ginika, where in America are you going?” Emenike asked. He was awed by people who went abroad. After Kayode came back from a trip to Switzerland with his parents, Emenike had bent down to caress Kayode’s shoes, saying “I want to touch them because they have touched snow.”
“Missouri,” Ginika said. “My dad got a teaching job there.”
“Your mother is an American, abi? So you have an American passport?” Emenike asked.
“Yes. But we haven’t traveled since I was in primary three.”
“American passport is the coolest thing,” Kayode said. “I would exchange my British passport tomorrow.”
“Me too,” Yinka said.
“I very nearly had one o,” Obinze said. “I was eight months old when my parents took me to America. I keep telling my mom that she should have gone earlier and had me there!”
“Bad luck, man,” Kayode said.
“I don’t have a passport. Last time we traveled, I was on my mom’s passport,” Ahmed said.
“I was on my mom’s until primary three, then my dad said we needed to get our own passports,” Osahon said.
“I’ve never gone abroad but my father has promised that I will go for university. I wish I could just apply for my visa now instead of waiting to finish school,” Emenike said. After he spoke, a hushed silence followed.
“Don’t leave us now, wait until you finish,” Yinka finally said, and she and Kayode burst out laughing. The others laughed, too, even Emenike himself, but there was, underneath their laughter, a barbed echo. They knew he was lying, Emenike who made up stories of rich parents that everyone knew he didn’t have, so immersed in his need to invent a life that was not his. The conversation ebbed, changed to the mathematics teacher who did not know how to solve simultaneous equations. Obinze took Ifemelu’s hand and they drifted away. They did that often, slowly detaching themselves from their friends, to sit in a corner by the library or take a walk in the green behind the laboratories. As they walked, she wanted to tell Obinze that she didn’t know what it meant to “be on your mother’s passport,” that her mother didn’t even have a passport. But she said nothing, walking beside him in silence. He fit here, in this school, much more than she did. She was popular, always on every party list, and always announced, during assembly, as one of the “first three” in her class, yet she felt sheathed in a translucent haze of difference. She would not be here if she had not done so well on the entrance examination, if her father had not been determined that she would go to “a school that builds both character and career.” Her primary school had been different, full of children like her, whose parents were teachers and civil servants, who took the bus and did not have drivers. She remembered the surprise on Obinze’s face, a surprise he had quickly shielded, when he asked, “What’s your phone number?” and she replied, “We don’t have a phone.”
He was holding her hand now, squeezing gently. He admired her for being outspoken and different, but he did not seem able to see beneath that. To be here, among people who had gone abroad, was natural for him. He was fluent in the knowledge of foreign things, especially of American things. Everybody watched American films and exchanged faded American magazines, but he knew details about American presidents from a hundred years ago. Everybody watched American shows, but he knew about Lisa Bonet leaving The Cosby Show to go and do Angel Heart and Will Smith’s huge debts before he was signed to do The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. “You look like a black American” was his ultimate compliment, which he told her when she wore a nice dress, or when her hair was done in large braids. Manhattan was his zenith. He often said “It’s not as if this is Manhattan” or “Go to Manhattan and see how things are.” He gave her a copy of Huckleberry Finn, the pages creased from his thumbing, and she started reading it on the bus home but stopped after a few chapters. The next morning, she put it down on his desk with a decided thump. “Unreadable nonsense,” she said.
“It’s written in different American dialects,” Obinze said.
“And so what? I still don’t understand it.”
“You have to be patient, Ifem. If you really get into it, it’s very interesting and you won’t want to stop reading.”
“I’ve already stopped reading. Please keep your proper books and leave me with the books I like. And by the way, I still win when we play Scrabble, Mr. Read Proper Books.”
Now, she slipped her hand from his as they walked back to class. Whenever she felt this way, panic would slice into her at the slightest thing, and mundane events would become arbiters of doom. This time, Ginika was the trigger; she was standing near the staircase, her backpack on her shoulder, her face gold-streaked in the sunlight, and suddenly Ifemelu thought how much Ginika and Obinze had in common. Ginika’s house at the University of Lagos, the quiet bungalow, the yard crowned by bougainvillea hedges, was perhaps like Obinze’s house in Nsukka, and she imagined Obinze realizing how better suited Ginika was for him, and then this joy, this fragile, glimmering thing between them, would disappear.
OBINZE TOLD HER, one morning after assembly, that his mother wanted her to visit.
“Your mother?” she asked him, agape.
“I think she wants to meet her future daughter-in-law.”
“Obinze, be serious!”
“I remember in primary six, I took this girl to the send-off party and my mom dropped both of us off and gave the girl a handkerchief. She said, ‘A lady always needs a handkerchief.’ My mother can be strange, sha. Maybe she wants to give you a handkerchief.”
“Obinze Maduewesi!”
“She’s never done this before, but then I’ve never had a serious girlfriend before. I think she just wants to see you. She said you should come to lunch.”
Ifemelu stared at him. What sort of mother in her right mind asked her son’s girlfriend to visit? It was odd. Even the expression “come to lunch” was something people said in books. If you were Boyfriend and Girlfriend, you did not visit each other’s homes; you registered for after-school lessons, for French Club, for anything that could mean seeing each other outside school. Her parents did not, of course, know about Obinze. Obinze’s mother’s invitation frightened and excited her; for days, she worried about what to wear.
“Just be yourself,” Aunty Uju told her and Ifemelu replied, “How can I just be myself? What does that even mean?”
On the afternoon she visited, she stood outside the door of their flat for a while before she pressed the bell, suddenly and wildly hoping that they had gone out. Obinze opened the door.
“Hi. My mom just came back from work.”
The living room was airy, the walls free of photographs except for a turquoise painting of a long-necked woman in a turban.
>
“That’s the only thing that is ours. Everything else came with the flat,” Obinze said.
“It’s nice,” she mumbled.
“Don’t be nervous. Remember, she wants you here,” Obinze whispered, just before his mother appeared. She looked like Onyeka Onwenu, the resemblance was astounding: a full-nosed, full-lipped beauty, her round face framed by a low Afro, her faultless complexion the deep brown of cocoa. Onyeka Onwenu’s music had been one of the luminous joys of Ifemelu’s childhood, and had remained undimmed in the aftermath of childhood. She would always remember the day her father came home with the new album In the Morning Light; Onyeka Onwenu’s face on it was a revelation, and for a long time she traced that photo with her finger. The songs, each time her father played them, made their flat festive, turned him into a looser person who sang along with songs steeped in femaleness, and Ifemelu would guiltily fantasize about him being married to Onyeka Onwenu instead of to her mother. When she greeted Obinze’s mother with a “Good afternoon, ma,” she almost expected her, in response, to break into song in a voice as peerless as Onyeka Onwenu’s. But she had a low, murmuring voice.
“What a beautiful name you have. Ifemelunamma,” she said.
Ifemelu stood tongue-tied for seconds. “Thank you, ma.”
“Translate it,” she said.
“Translate?”
“Yes, how would you translate your name? Did Obinze tell you I do some translation? From the French. I am a lecturer in literature, not English literature, mind you, but literatures in English, and my translating is something I do as a hobby. Now translating your name from Igbo to English might be Made-in-Good-Times or Beautifully Made, or what do you think?”
Ifemelu could not think. There was something about the woman that made her want to say intelligent things, but her mind was blank.
“Mummy, she came to greet you, not to translate her name,” Obinze said, with a playful exasperation.
“Do we have a soft drink to offer our guest? Did you bring out the soup from the freezer? Let’s go to the kitchen,” his mother said. She reached out and picked off a piece of lint from his hair, and then hit his head lightly. Their fluid, bantering rapport made Ifemelu uncomfortable. It was free of restraint, free of the fear of consequences; it did not take the familiar shape of a relationship with a parent. They cooked together, his mother stirring the soup, Obinze making the garri, while Ifemelu stood by drinking a Coke. She had offered to help, but his mother had said, “No, my dear, maybe next time,” as though she did not just let anyone help in her kitchen. She was pleasant and direct, even warm, but there was a privacy about her, a reluctance to bare herself completely to the world, the same quality as Obinze. She had taught her son the ability to be, even in the middle of a crowd, somehow comfortably inside himself.
“What are your favorite novels, Ifemelunamma?” his mother asked. “You know Obinze will only read American books? I hope you’re not that foolish.”
“Mummy, you’re just trying to force me to like this book.” He gestured to the book on the kitchen table, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. “My mother reads this book twice a year. I don’t know why,” he said to Ifemelu.
“It is a wise book. The human stories that matter are those that endure. The American books you read are lightweights.” She turned to Ifemelu. “This boy is too besotted with America.”
“I read American books because America is the future, Mummy. And remember that your husband was educated there.”
“That was when only dullards went to school in America. American universities were considered to be at the same level as British secondary schools then. I did a lot of brushing-up on that man after I married him.”
“Even though you left your things in his flat so that his other girlfriends would stay away?”
“I’ve told you not to pay any attention to your uncle’s false stories.”
Ifemelu stood there mesmerized. Obinze’s mother, her beautiful face, her air of sophistication, her wearing a white apron in the kitchen, was not like any other mother Ifemelu knew. Here, her father would seem crass, with his unnecessary big words, and her mother provincial and small.
“You can wash your hands at the sink,” Obinze’s mother told her. “I think the water is still running.”
They sat at the dining table, eating garri and soup, Ifemelu trying hard to be, as Aunty Uju had said, “herself,” although she was no longer sure what “herself” was. She felt undeserving, unable to sink with Obinze and his mother into their atmosphere. “The soup is very sweet, ma,” she said politely. “Oh, Obinze cooked it,” his mother said. “Didn’t he tell you that he cooks?”
“Yes, but I didn’t think he could make soup, ma,” Ifemelu said. Obinze was smirking.
“Do you cook at home?” his mother asked.
Ifemelu wanted to lie, to say that she cooked and loved cooking, but she remembered Aunty Uju’s words. “No, ma,” she said. “I don’t like cooking. I can eat Indomie noodles day and night.”
His mother laughed, as though charmed by the honesty, and when she laughed, she looked like a softer-faced Obinze. Ifemelu ate her food slowly, thinking how much she wanted to remain there with them, in their rapture, forever.
THEIR FLAT SMELLED of vanilla on weekends, when Obinze’s mother baked. Slices of mango glistening on a pie, small brown cakes swelling with raisins. Ifemelu stirred the batter and peeled the fruit; her own mother did not bake, their oven housed cockroaches.
“Obinze just said ‘trunk,’ ma. He said it’s in the trunk of your car,” she said. In their America-Britain jousting, she always sided with his mother.
“Trunk is a part of a tree and not a part of a car, my dear son,” his mother said. When Obinze pronounced “schedule” with the k sound, his mother said, “Ifemelunamma, please tell my son I don’t speak American. Could he say that in English?”
On weekends, they watched films on video. They sat in the living room, eyes on the screen, and Obinze said, “Mummy, chelu, let’s hear,” when his mother, from time to time, gave her commentary on the plausibility of a scene, or the foreshadowing, or whether an actor was wearing a wig. One Sunday, midway into a film, his mother left for the pharmacy, to buy her allergy medicine. “I’d forgotten they close early today,” she said. As soon as her car engine started, a dull revving, Ifemelu and Obinze hurried to his bedroom and sank onto his bed, kissing and touching, their clothing rolled up, shifted aside, pulled halfway. Their skin warm against each other. They left the door and the window louvers open, both of them alert to the sound of his mother’s car. In a sluice of seconds, they were dressed, back in the living room, Play pressed on the video recorder.
Obinze’s mother walked in and glanced at the TV. “You were watching this scene when I left,” she said quietly. A frozen silence fell, even from the film. Then the singsong cries of a beans hawker floated in through the window.
“Ifemelunamma, please come,” his mother said, turning to go inside.
Obinze got up, but Ifemelu stopped him. “No, she called me.”
His mother asked her to come inside her bedroom, asked her to sit on the bed.
“If anything happens between you and Obinze, you are both responsible. But Nature is unfair to women. An act is done by two people, but if there are any consequences, one person carries it alone. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.” Ifemelu kept her eyes averted from Obinze’s mother, firmly fixed on the black-and-white linoleum on the floor.
“Have you done anything serious with Obinze?”
“No.”
“I was once young. I know what it is like to love while young. I want to advise you. I am aware that, in the end, you will do what you want. My advice is that you wait. You can love without making love. It is a beautiful way of showing your feelings but it brings responsibility, great responsibility, and there is no rush. I will advise you to wait until you are at least in the university, wait until you own yourself a little more. Do you understand?”
/> “Yes,” Ifemelu said. She did not know what “own yourself a little more” meant.
“I know you are a clever girl. Women are more sensible than men, and you will have to be the sensible one. Convince him. Both of you should agree to wait so that there is no pressure.”
Obinze’s mother paused and Ifemelu wondered if she had finished. The silence rang in her head.
“Thank you, ma,” Ifemelu said.
“And when you want to start, I want you to come and see me. I want to know that you are being responsible.”
Ifemelu nodded. She was sitting on Obinze’s mother’s bed, in the woman’s bedroom, nodding and agreeing to tell her when she started having sex with her son. Yet she felt the absence of shame. Perhaps it was Obinze’s mother’s tone, the evenness of it, the normalness of it.
“Thank you, ma,” Ifemelu said again, now looking at Obinze’s mother’s face, which was open, no different from what it usually was. “I will.”
She went back to the living room. Obinze seemed nervous, perched on the edge of the center table. “I’m so sorry. I’m going to talk to her about this when you leave. If she wants to talk to anybody, it should be me.”
“She said I should never come here again. That I am misleading her son.”