Americanah (11 page)

After Kayode’s party, Ginika was stilted; an alien awkwardness grew between them.

“You know I didn’t think it would happen that way,” Ifemelu told her. “Ifem, he was looking at you from the beginning,” Ginika said, and then, to show that she was fine with it all, she teased Ifemelu about stealing her guy without even trying. Her breeziness was forced, laid on thickly, and Ifemelu felt burdened with guilt, and with a desire to overcompensate. It seemed wrong, that her close friend Ginika, pretty, pleasant, popular Ginika with whom she had never quarreled, was reduced to pretending that she did not care, even though a wistfulness underlined her tone whenever she talked about Obinze. “Ifem, will you have time for us today or is it Obinze all the way?” she would ask.

And so when Ginika came to school one morning, her eyes red and shadowed, and told Ifemelu, “My popsie said we are going to America next month,” Ifemelu felt almost relieved. She would miss her friend, but Ginika’s leaving forced them both to wring out their friendship and lay it out newly fresh to dry, to return to where they used to be. Ginika’s parents had been talking for a while about resigning from the university and starting over in America. Once, while visiting, Ifemelu had heard Ginika’s father say, “We are not sheep. This regime is treating us like sheep and we are starting to behave as if we are sheep. I have not been able to do any real research in years, because every day I am organizing strikes and talking about unpaid salary and there is no chalk in the classrooms.” He was a small, dark man, smaller-looking and darker-looking beside Ginika’s large, ash-haired mother, with an undecided air about him, as though he was always dithering between choices. When Ifemelu told her own parents that Ginika’s family was
finally leaving, her father sighed and said, “At least they are fortunate to have that option,” and her mother said, “They are blessed.”

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.