Americanah Read online

  On the afternoon that she picked up her passport, the pale-toned visa on the second page, she organized that triumphant ritual that signaled the start of a new life overseas: the division of personal property among friends. Ranyinudo, Priye, and Tochi were in her bedroom, drinking Coke, her clothes in a pile on the bed, and the first thing they all reached for was her orange dress, her favorite dress, a gift from Aunty Uju; the A-line flair and neck-to-hem zipper had always made her feel both glamorous and dangerous. It makes things easy for me, Obinze would say, before he slowly began to unzip it. She wanted to keep the dress, but Ranyinudo said, “Ifem, you know you’ll have any kind of dress you want in America and next time we see you, you will be a serious Americanah.”

  Her mother said Jesus told her in a dream that Ifemelu would prosper in America, her father pressed a slender envelope into her hand, saying, “I wish I had more,” and she realized, with sadness, that he must have borrowed it. In the face of the enthusiasim of others, she suddenly felt flaccid and afraid.

  “Maybe I should stay and finish here,” she told Obinze.

  “Ifem, no, you should go. Besides, you don’t even like geology. You can study something else in America.”

  “But the scholarship is partial. Where will I find the money to pay the balance? I can’t work with a student visa.”

  “You can do work-study at school. You’ll find a way. Seventy-five percent off your tuition is a big deal.”

  She nodded, riding the wave of his faith. She visited his mother to say goodbye.

  “Nigeria is chasing away its best resources,” Obinze’s mother said resignedly, hugging her.

  “Aunty, I will miss you. Thank you so much for everything.”

  “Stay well, my dear, and do well. Write to us. Make sure you keep in touch.”

  Ifemelu nodded, tearful. As she left, already parting the curtain at the front door, Obinze’s mother said, “And make sure you and Obinze have a plan. Have a plan.” Her words, so unexpected and so right, lifted Ifemelu’s spirits. Their plan became this: he would come to America the minute he graduated. He would find a way to get a visa. Perhaps, by then, she would be able to help with his visa.

  In the following years, even after she was no longer in touch with him, she would sometimes remember his mother’s words—make sure you and Obinze have a plan—and feel comforted.

  CHAPTER 9

  Mariama returned carrying oil-stained brown paper bags from the Chinese restaurant, trailing the smells of grease and spice into the stuffy salon.

  “The film finished?” She glanced at the blank TV screen, and then flipped through the pile of DVDs to select another.

  “Excuse me, please, to eat,” Aisha said to Ifemelu. She perched on a chair at the back and ate fried chicken wings with her fingers, her eyes on the TV screen. The new film began with trailers, jaggedly cut scenes interspersed with flashes of light. Each ended with a male Nigerian voice, theatrical and loud, saying “Grab your copy now!” Mariama ate standing up. She said something to Halima.

  “I finish first and eat,” Halima replied in English.

  “You can go ahead and eat if you want to,” Halima’s customer said, a young woman with a high voice and a pleasant manner.

  “No, I finish. Just small more,” Halima said. Her customer’s head had only a tuft of hair left in front, sticking up like animal fur, while the rest was done in neat micro braids that fell to her neck.

  “I have a hour before I have to go pick up my daughters,” the customer said.

  “How many you have?” Halima asked.

  “Two,” the customer said. She looked about seventeen. “Two beautiful girls.”

  The new film had started. The grinning face of a middle-aged actress filled the screen.

  “Oh-oh, yes! I like her!” Halima said. “Patience! She don’t take any nonsense!”

  “You know her?” Mariama asked Ifemelu, pointing at the TV screen.

  “No,” Ifemelu said. Why did they insist on asking if she knew Nollywood actors? The entire room smelled too strongly of food. It made the stuffy air rank with oiliness, and yet it also made her slightly hungry. She ate some of her carrots. Halima’s customer tilted her head this way and that in front of the mirror and said, “Thank you so much, it’s gorgeous!”

  After she left, Mariama said, “Very small girl and already she has two children.”

  “Oh oh oh, these people,” Halima said. “When a girl is thirteen already she knows all the positions. Never in Afrique!”

  “Never!” Mariama agreed.

  They looked at Ifemelu for her agreement, her approval. They expected it, in this shared space of their Africanness, but Ifemelu said nothing and turned a page of her novel. They would, she was sure, talk about her after she left. That Nigerian girl, she feels very important because of Princeton. Look at her food bar, she does not eat real food anymore. They would laugh with derision, but only a mild derision, because she was still their African sister, even if she had briefly lost her way. A new smell of oiliness flooded the room when Halima opened her plastic container of food. She was eating and talking to the television screen. “Oh, stupid man! She will take your money!”

  Ifemelu brushed away at some sticky hair on her neck. The room was seething with heat. “Can we leave the door open?” she asked.

  Mariama opened the door, propped it with a chair. “This heat is really bad.”

  EACH HEAT WAVE REMINDED Ifemelu of her first, the summer she arrived. It was summer in America, she knew this, but all her life she had thought of “overseas” as a cold place of wool coats and snow, and because America was “overseas,” and her illusions so strong they could not be fended off by reason, she bought the thickest sweater she could find in Tejuosho market for her trip. She wore it for the journey, zipping it all the way up in the humming interior of the airplane and then unzipping it as she left the airport building with Aunty Uju. The sweltering heat alarmed her, as did Aunty Uju’s old Toyota hatchback, with a patch of rust on its side and peeling fabric on the seats. She stared at buildings and cars and signboards, all of them matte, disappointingly matte; in the landscape of her imagination, the mundane things in America were covered in a high-shine gloss. She was startled, most of all, by the teenage boy in a baseball cap standing near a brick wall, face down, body leaning forward, hands between his legs. She turned to look again.

  “See that boy!” she said. “I didn’t know people do things like this in America.”

  “You didn’t know people pee in America?” Aunty Uju asked, barely glancing at the boy before turning back to a traffic light.

  “Ahn-ahn, Aunty! I mean that they do it outside. Like that.”

  “They don’t. It’s not like back home where everybody does it. He can get arrested for that, but this is not a good neighborhood anyway,” Aunty Uju said shortly. There was something different about her. Ifemelu had noticed it right away at the airport, her roughly braided hair, her ears bereft of earrings, her quick casual hug, as if it had been weeks rather than years since they had last seen each other.

  “I’m supposed to be with my books now,” Aunty Uju said, eyes focused on the road. “You know my exam is coming.”

  Ifemelu had not known that there was yet another exam; she had thought Aunty Uju was waiting for a result. But she said, “Yes, I know.”

  Their silence was full of stones. Ifemelu felt like apologizing, although she was not quite sure what she would be apologizing for. Perhaps Aunty Uju regretted her presence, now that she was here, in Aunty Uju’s wheezing car.

  Aunty Uju’s cell phone rang. “Yes, this is Uju.” She pronounced it you-joo instead of oo-joo.

  “Is that how you pronounce your name now?” Ifemelu asked afterwards.

  “It’s what they call me.”

  Ifemelu swallowed the words “Well, that isn’t your name.” Instead she said in Igbo, “I did not know it would be so hot here.”

  “We have a heat wave, the first one this summer,” Aunty Uju said, as thou
gh heat wave was something Ifemelu was supposed to understand. She had never felt a heat quite so hot. An enveloping, uncompassionate heat. Aunty Uju’s door handle, when they arrived at her one-bedroom apartment, was warm to the touch. Dike sprang up from the carpeted floor of the living room, scattered with toy cars and action figures, and hugged her as though he remembered her. “Alma, this is my cousin!” he said to his babysitter, a pale-skinned, tired-faced woman with black hair held in a greasy ponytail. If Ifemelu had met Alma in Lagos, she would have thought of her as white, but she would learn that Alma was Hispanic, an American category that was, confusingly, both an ethnicity and a race, and she would remember Alma when, years later, she wrote a blog post titled “Understanding America for the Non-American Black: What Hispanic Means.”

  Hispanic means the frequent companions of American blacks in poverty rankings, Hispanic means a slight step above American blacks in the American race ladder, Hispanic means the chocolate-skinned woman from Peru, Hispanic means the indigenous people of Mexico. Hispanic means the biracial-looking folks from the Dominican Republic. Hispanic means the paler folks from Puerto Rico. Hispanic also means the blond, blue-eyed guy from Argentina. All you need to be is Spanish-speaking but not from Spain and voilà, you’re a race called Hispanic.

  But that afternoon, she hardly noticed Alma, or the living room furnished only with a couch and a TV, or the bicycle lodged in a corner, because she was absorbed by Dike. The last time she saw him, on the day of Aunty Uju’s hasty departure from Lagos, he had been a one-year-old, crying unendingly at the airport as though he understood the upheaval his life had just undergone, and now here he was, a first grader with a seamless American accent and a hyper-happiness about him; the kind of child who could never stay still and who never seemed sad.

  “Why do you have a sweater? It’s too hot for a sweater!” he said, chortling, still holding on to her in a drawn-out hug. She laughed. He was so small, so innocent, and yet there was a precociousness about him, but it was a sunny one; he did not nurse dark intentions about the adults in his world. That night, after he and Aunty Uju got into bed and Ifemelu settled on a blanket on the floor, he said, “How come she has to sleep on the floor, Mom? We can all fit in,” as though he could sense how Ifemelu felt. There was nothing wrong with the arrangement—she had, after all, slept on mats when she visited her grandmother in the village—but this was America at last, glorious America at last, and she had not expected to bed on the floor.

  “I’m fine, Dike,” she said.

  He got up and brought her his pillow. “Here. It’s soft and comfy.”

  Aunty Uju said, “Dike, come and lie down. Let your aunty sleep.”

  Ifemelu could not sleep, her mind too alert to the newness of things, and she waited to hear Aunty Uju’s snoring before she slipped out of the room and turned on the kitchen light. A fat cockroach was perched on the wall near the cabinets, moving slightly up and down as though breathing heavily. If she had been in their Lagos kitchen, she would have found a broom and killed it, but she left the American cockroach alone and went and stood by the living room window. Flatlands, Aunty Uju said this section of Brooklyn was called. The street below was poorly lit, bordered not by leafy trees but by closely parked cars, nothing like the pretty street on The Cosby Show. Ifemelu stood there for a long time, her body unsure of itself, overwhelmed by a sense of newness. But she felt, also, a frisson of expectation, an eagerness to discover America.

  “I THINK it’s better if you take care of Dike for the summer and save me babysitting money and then start looking for a job when you get to Philadelphia,” Aunty Uju said the next morning. She had woken Ifemelu up, giving brisk instructions about Dike, saying she would go to the library to study after work. Her words tumbled out. Ifemelu wished she would slow down a little.

  “You can’t work with your student visa, and work-study is rubbish, it pays nothing, and you have to be able to cover your rent and the balance of your tuition. Me, you can see I am working three jobs and yet it’s not easy. I talked to one of my friends, I don’t know if you remember Ngozi Okonkwo? She’s now an American citizen and she has gone back to Nigeria for a while, to start a business. I begged her and she agreed to let you work with her Social Security card.”

  “How? I’ll use her name?” Ifemelu asked.

  “Of course you’ll use her name,” Aunty Uju said, eyebrows raised, as though she had barely stopped herself from asking if Ifemelu was stupid. There was a small white blob of face cream on her hair, caught at the root of a braid, and Ifemelu was going to tell her to wipe it off but she changed her mind, saying nothing, and watched Aunty Uju hurry to the door. She felt singed by Aunty Uju’s reproach. It was as if, between them, an old intimacy had quite suddenly lapsed. Aunty Uju’s impatience, that new prickliness in her, made Ifemelu feel that there were things she should already know but, through some personal failing of hers, did not know. “There’s corned beef so you can make sandwiches for lunch,” Aunty Uju had said, as though those words were perfectly normal and did not require a humorous preamble about how Americans ate bread for lunch. But Dike didn’t want a sandwich. After he had shown her all his toys, and they had watched some episodes of Tom and Jerry, with him laughing, thrilled, because she had watched them all before in Nigeria and so told him what would happen before it did, he opened the refrigerator and pointed at what he wanted her to make him. “Hot dogs.” Ifemelu examined the curiously long sausages and then began to open cupboards to look for some oil.

  “Mummy says I have to call you Aunty Ifem. But you’re not my aunt. You’re my cousin.”

  “So call me Cousin.”

  “Okay, Coz,” Dike said, and laughed. His laughter was so warm, so open. She had found the vegetable oil.

  “You don’t need oil,” Dike said. “You just cook the hot dog in water.”

  “Water? How can a sausage be cooked in water?”

  “It’s a hot dog, not a sausage.”

  Of course it was a sausage, whether or not they called it the ludicrous name of “hot dog,” and so she fried two in a little oil as she was used to doing with Satis sausages. Dike looked on in horror. She turned the stove off. He backed away and said “Ugh.” They stood looking at each other, between them a plate with a bun and two shriveled hot dogs. She knew then that she should have listened to him.

  “Can I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead?” Dike asked. She followed his instructions for the sandwich, cutting off the bread crusts, layering on the peanut butter first, stifling her laughter at how closely he watched her, as though she just might decide to fry the sandwich.

  When, that evening, Ifemelu told Aunty Uju about the hot dog incident, Aunty Uju said with none of the amusement Ifemelu had expected, “They are not sausages, they are hot dogs.”

  “It’s like saying that a bikini is not the same thing as underwear. Would a visitor from space know the difference?”

  Aunty Uju shrugged; she was sitting at the dining table, a medical textbook open in front of her, eating a hamburger from a rumpled paper bag. Her skin dry, her eyes shadowed, her spirit bleached of color. She seemed to be staring at, rather than reading, the book.

  AT THE GROCERY STORE, Aunty Uju never bought what she needed; instead she bought what was on sale and made herself need it. She would take the colorful flyer at the entrance of Key Food, and go looking for the sale items, aisle after aisle, while Ifemelu wheeled the cart and Dike walked along.

  “Mummy, I don’t like that. Get the blue one,” Dike said, as Aunty Uju put cartons of cereal in the cart.

  “It’s buy one, get one free,” Aunty Uju said.

  “It doesn’t taste good.”

  “It tastes just like your regular cereal, Dike.”

  “No.” Dike took a blue carton from the shelf and hurried ahead to the checkout counter.

  “Hi, little guy!” The cashier was large and cheerful, her cheeks reddened and peeling from sunburn. “Helping Mummy out?”

  “Dike, put it back
,” Aunty Uju said, with the nasal, sliding accent she put on when she spoke to white Americans, in the presence of white Americans, in the hearing of white Americans. Pooh-reet-back. And with the accent emerged a new persona, apologetic and self-abasing. She was overeager with the cashier. “Sorry, sorry,” she said as she fumbled to get her debit card from her wallet. Because the cashier was watching, Aunty Uju let Dike keep the cereal, but in the car she grabbed his left ear and twisted it, yanked it.

  “I have told you, do not ever take anything in the grocery! Do you hear me? Or do you want me to slap you before you hear?”

  Dike pressed his palm to his ear.

  Aunty Uju turned to Ifemelu. “This is how children like to misbehave in this country. Jane was even telling me that her daughter threatens to call the police when she beats her. Imagine. I don’t blame the girl, she has come to America and learned about calling the police.”

  Ifemelu rubbed Dike’s knee. He did not look at her. Aunty Uju was driving a little too fast.

  DIKE CALLED OUT from the bathroom, where he had been sent to brush his teeth before bed.

  “Dike, I mechago?” Ifemelu asked.

  “Please don’t speak Igbo to him,” Aunty Uju said. “Two languages will confuse him.”

  “What are you talking about, Aunty? We spoke two languages growing up.”

  “This is America. It’s different.”

  Ifemelu held her tongue. Aunty Uju closed her medical book and stared ahead at nothing. The television was off and the sound of water running came from the bathroom.

  “Aunty, what is it?” Ifemelu asked. “What is wrong?”

  “What do you mean? Nothing is wrong.” Aunty Uju sighed. “I failed my last exam. I got the result just before you came.”

  “Oh.” Ifemelu was watching her.

  “I’ve never failed an exam in my life. But they weren’t testing actual knowledge, they were testing our ability to answer tricky multiple-choice questions that have nothing to do with real medical knowledge.” She stood up and went to the kitchen. “I’m tired. I am so tired. I thought by now things would be better for me and Dike. It’s not as if anybody was helping me and I just could not believe how quickly money went. I was studying and working three jobs. I was doing retail at the mall, and a research assistantship, and I even did some hours at Burger King.”