Americanah (14 page)

Ifemelu was watching from the kitchen entrance. “Aunty, the person you should be shouting at is The General.”

Aunty Uju stopped, her eyes bulging and enraged. “Is it me you are talking to like that? Am I your agemate?”

Aunty Uju charged at her. Ifemelu had not expected Aunty Uju
to hit her, yet when the slap landed on the side of her face, making a sound that seemed to her to come from far away, finger-shaped welts rising on her cheek, she was not surprised. They stared at each other. Aunty Uju opened her mouth as though to say something and then she closed it and turned and walked upstairs, both of them aware that something between them was now different. Aunty Uju did not come downstairs until evening, when Adesuwa and Uche came to visit. She called them “my friends in quotes.” “I’m going to the salon with my friends in quotes,” she would say, a wan laughter in her eyes. She knew they were her friends only because she was The General’s mistress. But they amused her. They visited her insistently, comparing notes on shopping and travel, asking her to go to parties with them. It was strange what she knew and did not know about them, she once told Ifemelu. She knew that Adesuwa owned land in Abuja, given to her when she dated the Head of State, and that a famously wealthy Hausa man had bought Uche’s boutique in Surulere, but she did not know how many siblings either of them had or where their parents lived or whether they had gone to university.

Chikodili let them in. They wore embroidered caftans and spicy perfume, their Chinese weaves hanging down to their backs, their conversation lined with a hard-edged worldliness, their laughter short and scornful.
I told him he must buy it in my name o. Ah, I knew he would not bring the money unless I said somebody was sick. No now, he doesn’t know I opened the account
. They were going to a Sallah party in Victoria Island and had come to take Aunty Uju.

“I don’t feel like going,” Aunty Uju told them, while Chikodili served orange juice, a carton on a tray, two glasses placed beside it.

“Ahn-ahn. Why now?” Uche asked.

“Serious big men are coming,” Adesuwa said. “You never know if you will meet somebody.”

“I don’t want to meet anybody,” Aunty Uju said, and there was quiet, as though each of them had to catch their breath, Aunty Uju’s words a gale that tore through their assumptions. She was supposed to want to meet men, to keep her eyes open; she was supposed to see The General as an option that could be bettered. Finally, one of them, Adesuwa or Uche, said, “This your orange juice is the cheap brand o!
You don’t buy Just Juice anymore?” A lukewarm joke, but they laughed to ease the moment away.

After they left, Aunty Uju came over to the dining table, where Ifemelu sat reading.

“Ifem, I don’t know what got into me.
Ndo
.” She held Ifemelu’s wrist, then ran her hand, almost meditatively, over the embossed title of Ifemelu’s Sidney Sheldon novel. “I must be mad. He has a beer belly and Dracula teeth and a wife and children and he’s old.”

For the first time, Ifemelu felt older than Aunty Uju, wiser and stronger than Aunty Uju, and she wished that she could wrest Aunty Uju away, shake her into a clear-eyed self, who would not lay her hopes on The General, slaving and shaving for him, always eager to fade his flaws. It was not as it should be. Ifemelu felt a small gratification to hear, later, Aunty Uju shouting on the phone. “Nonsense! You knew you were going to Abuja from the beginning so why let me waste my time preparing for you!”

The cake a driver delivered the next morning, with “I’m sorry my love” written on it in blue frosting, had a bitter aftertaste, but Aunty Uju kept it in the freezer for months.

AUNTY UJU
’
S PREGNANCY CAME
, like a sudden sound in a still night. She arrived at the flat wearing a sequined bou-bou that caught the light, glistening like a flowing celestial presence, and said that she wanted to tell Ifemelu’s parents about it before they heard the gossip.
“Adi m ime,”
she said simply.

Ifemelu’s mother burst into tears, loud dramatic cries, looking around, as though she could see, lying around her, the splintered pieces of her own story. “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

“I did not plan this, it happened,” Aunty Uju said. “I fell pregnant for Olujimi in university. I had an abortion and I am not doing it again.” The word “abortion,” blunt as it was, scarred the room, because they all knew that what Ifemelu’s mother did not say was that surely there were ways to take care of this. Ifemelu’s father put his book down and picked it up again. He cleared his throat. He soothed his wife.

“Well, I cannot ask about the man’s intentions,” he said finally to Aunty Uju. “So I should ask what your own intentions are.”

“I will have the baby.”

He waited to hear more, but Aunty Uju said nothing else, and so he sat back, assailed. “You are an adult. This is not what I hoped for you, Obianuju, but you are an adult.”

Aunty Uju went over and sat on the arm of his sofa. She spoke in a low, pacifying voice, stranger for being formal, but saved from falseness by the soberness of her face. “Brother, this is not what I hoped for myself either, but it has happened. I am sorry to disappoint you, after everything you have done for me, and I beg you to forgive me. But I will make the best of this situation. The General is a responsible man. He will take care of his child.”

Ifemelu’s father shrugged wordlessly. Aunty Uju put an arm around him, as though it were he who needed comforting.

LATER
, Ifemelu would think of the pregnancy as symbolic. It marked the beginning of the end and made everything else seem rapid, the months rushing past, time hurtling forward. There was Aunty Uju, dimpled with exuberance, her face aglow, her mind busy with plans as her belly curved outwards. Every few days, she came up with a new girl’s name for the baby. “Oga is happy,” she said. “He is happy to know that he can still score a goal at his age, old man like him!” The General came more often, even on some weekends, bringing her hot water bottles, herbal pills, things he had heard were good for pregnancy.

He told her, “Of course you will deliver abroad,” and asked which she preferred, America or England. He wanted England, so that he could travel with her; the Americans had barred entry to high-ranking members of the military government. But Aunty Uju chose America, because her baby could still have automatic citizenship there. The plans were made, a hospital picked, a furnished condo rented in Atlanta. “What is a condo, anyway?” Ifemelu asked. And Aunty Uju shrugged and said, “Who knows what Americans mean? You should ask Obinze, he will know. At least it is a place to live. And Oga has people
there who will help me.” Aunty Uju was dampened only when her driver told her that The General’s wife had heard about the pregnancy and was furious; there had, apparently, been a tense family meeting with his relatives and hers. The General hardly spoke about his wife, but Aunty Uju knew enough: a lawyer who had given up working to raise their four children in Abuja, a woman who looked portly and pleasant in newspaper photographs. “I wonder what she is thinking,” Aunty Uju said sadly, musingly. While she was in America, The General had one of the bedrooms repainted a brilliant white. He bought a cot, its legs like delicate candles. He bought stuffed toys, and too many teddy bears. Inyang propped them in the cot, lined some up on a shelf and, perhaps because she thought nobody would notice, she took one teddy bear to her room in the back. Aunty Uju had a boy. She sounded high and elated over the phone. “Ifem, he has so much hair! Can you imagine? What a waste!”

She called him Dike, after her father, and gave him her surname, which left Ifemelu’s mother agitated and sour.

“The baby should have his father’s name, or is the man planning to deny his child?” Ifemelu’s mother asked, as they sat in their living room, still digesting the news of the birth.

“Aunty Uju said it was just easier to give him her name,” Ifemelu said. “And is he behaving like a man that will deny his child? Aunty told me he’s even talking about coming to pay her bride price.”

“God forbid,” Ifemelu’s mother said, almost spitting the words out, and Ifemelu thought of all those fervent prayers for Aunty Uju’s mentor. Her mother, when Aunty Uju came back, stayed in Dolphin Estate for a while, bathing and feeding the gurgling, smooth-skinned baby, but she faced The General with a cold officiousness. She answered him in monosyllables, as though he had betrayed her by breaking the rules of her pretense. A relationship with Aunty Uju was acceptable, but such flagrant proof of the relationship was not. The house smelled of baby powder. Aunty Uju was happy. The General held Dike often, suggesting that perhaps he needed to be fed again or that a doctor needed to see the rash on his neck.

FOR DIKE
’
S FIRST BIRTHDAY PARTY
, The General brought a live band. They set up in the front garden, near the generator house, and stayed until the last guests left, all of them slow and sated, taking food wrapped in foil. Aunty Uju’s friends came, and The General’s friends came, too, their expressions determined, as though to say that no matter the circumstances, their friend’s child was their friend’s child. Dike, newly walking, tottered around in a suit and red bow tie, while Aunty Uju followed him, trying to get him to be still for a few moments with the photographer. Finally, tired, he began to cry, yanking at his bow tie, and The General picked him up and carried him around. It was the image of The General that would endure in Ifemelu’s mind, Dike’s arms around his neck, his face lit up, his front teeth jutting out as he smiled, saying, “He looks like me o, but thank God he took his mother’s teeth.”

The General died the next week, in a military plane crash. “On the same day, the very same day, that the photographer brought the pictures from Dike’s birthday,” Aunty Uju would often say, in telling the story, as though this held some particular significance.

It was a Saturday afternoon, Obinze and Ifemelu were in the TV room, Inyang was upstairs with Dike, Aunty Uju was in the kitchen with Chikodili when the phone rang. Ifemelu picked it up. The voice on the other end, The General’s ADC, crackled through a bad connection, but was still clear enough to give her details: the crash happened a few miles outside Jos, the bodies were charred, there were already rumors that the Head of State had engineered it to get rid of officers who he feared were planning a coup. Ifemelu held the phone too tightly, stunned. Obinze went with her to the kitchen, and stood by Aunty Uju as Ifemelu repeated the ADC’s words.

“You are lying,” Aunty Uju said. “It is a lie.”

She marched towards the phone, as though to challenge it, too, and then she slid to the floor, a boneless, bereft sliding, and began to weep. Ifemelu held her, cradled her, all of them unsure of what to do, and the silence in between her sobs seemed too silent. Inyang brought Dike downstairs.

“Mama?” Dike said, looking puzzled.

“Take Dike upstairs,” Obinze told Inyang.

There was banging on the gate. Two men and three women, relatives of The General, had bullied Adamu to open the gate, and now stood at the front door, shouting. “Uju! Pack your things and get out now! Give us the car keys!” One of the women was skeletal, agitated and red-eyed, and as she shouted—“Common harlot! God forbid that you will touch our brother’s property! Prostitute! You will never live in peace in this Lagos!”—she pulled her headscarf from her head and tied it tightly around her waist, in preparation for a fight. At first, Aunty Uju said nothing, staring at them, standing still at the door. Then she asked them to leave in a voice hoarse from tears, but the relatives’ shouting intensified, and so Aunty Uju turned to go back indoors. “Okay, don’t go,” she said. “Just stay there. Stay there while I go and call my boys from the army barracks.”