Americanah (16 page)

OBINZE
’
S MUSCLES WERE ACHING
. He lay on his belly, and Ifemelu straddled him, massaging his back and neck and thighs with her fingers, her knuckles, her elbows. He was painfully taut. She stood on him, placed one foot gingerly on the back of a thigh, and then the other. “Does it feel okay?”

“Yes.” He groaned in pleasure-pain. She pressed down slowly, his skin warm under the soles of her feet, his tense muscles unknotting. She steadied herself with a hand on the wall, and dug her heels deeper, moving inch by inch while he grunted, “Ah! Ifem, yes, just there. Ah!”

“You should stretch after playing ball, mister man,” she said, and then she was lying on his back, tickling his underarms and kissing his neck.

“I have a suggestion for a better kind of massage,” he said. When he undressed her, he did not stop, as usual, at her underwear. He pulled it down and she raised her legs to aid him.

“Ceiling,” she said, half-certain. She did not want him to stop, but she had imagined this differently, assumed they would make a carefully planned ceremony of it.

“I’ll come out,” he said.

“You know it doesn’t always work.”

“If it doesn’t work, then we’ll welcome Junior.”

“Stop it.”

He looked up. “But, Ifem, we’re going to get married anyway.”

“Look at you. I might meet a rich handsome man and leave you.”

“Impossible. We’ll go to America when we graduate and raise our fine children.”

“You’ll say anything now because your brain is between your legs.”

“But my brain is always there!”

They were both laughing, and then the laughter stilled, gave way to a new, strange graveness, a slippery joining. It felt, to Ifemelu, like a weak copy, a floundering imitation of what she had imagined it would be. After he pulled away, jerking and gasping and holding himself, a discomfort nagged at her. She had been tense through it all, unable to relax. She had imagined his mother watching them; the image had forced itself onto her mind, and it had, even more oddly, been a double image, of his mother and Onyeka Onwenu, both watching them with unblinking eyes. She knew she could not possibly tell Obinze’s mother what had happened, even though she had promised to, and had believed then that she would. But now she could not see how. What would she say? What words would she use? Would Obinze’s mother expect details? She and Obinze should have planned it better; that way, she would know how to tell his mother. The unplannedness of it all had left her a little shaken, and also a little disappointed. It seemed somehow as though it had not been worth it after all.

When, a week or so later, she woke up in pain, a sharp stinging on her side and a great, sickening nausea pervading her body, she panicked. Then she vomited and her panic grew.

“It’s happened,” she told Obinze. “I’m pregnant.” They had met, as usual, in front of the Ekpo refectory after their morning lecture. Students milled around. A group of boys were smoking and laughing close by and for a moment, their laughter seemed directed at her.

Obinze’s brows wrinkled. He did not seem to understand what she was saying. “But, Ifem, it can’t be. It’s too early. Besides, I came out.”

“I told you it doesn’t work!” she said. He suddenly seemed young, a confused small boy looking helplessly at her. Her panic grew. On an
impulse, she hailed a passing okada and jumped on the back and told the motorcyclist that she was going to town.

“Ifem, what are you doing?” Obinze asked. “Where are you going?”

“To call Aunty Uju,” she said.

Obinze got on the next okada and was soon speeding behind her, past the university gates and to the NITEL office, where Ifemelu gave the man behind the peeling counter a piece of paper with Aunty Uju’s American number. On the phone, she spoke in code, making it up as she went along, because of the people standing there, some waiting to make their own calls, others merely loitering, but all listening, with unabashed and open interest, to the conversations of others.

“Aunty, I think what happened to you before Dike came has happened to me,” Ifemelu said. “We ate the food a week ago.”

“Just last week? How many times?”

“Once.”

“Ifem, calm down. I don’t think you’re pregnant. But you need to do a test. Don’t go to the campus medical center. Go to town, where nobody will know you. But calm down first. It will be okay,
inugo
?”

Later, Ifemelu sat on a rickety chair in the waiting room of the lab, stony and silent, ignoring Obinze. She was angry with him. It was unfair, she knew, but she was angry with him. As she went into the dirty toilet with a small container the lab girl had given her, he had asked, already getting up, “Should I come with you?” and she snapped, “Come with me for what?” And she wanted to slap the lab girl. A yellow-faced beanpole of a girl who sneered and shook her head when Ifemelu first said, “Pregnancy test,” as though she could not believe she was encountering one more case of immorality. Now, she was watching them, smirking and humming insouciantly.

“I have the result,” she said after a while, holding the unsealed paper, her expression disappointed because it was negative. Ifemelu was too stunned, at first, to be relieved, and then she needed to urinate again.

“People should respect themselves and live like Christians to avoid trouble,” the lab girl said as they left.

That evening, Ifemelu vomited again. She was in Obinze’s room, lying down and reading, still frosty towards him, when a rush of salty saliva filled her mouth and she leaped up and ran to the toilet.

“It must be something I ate,” she said. “That yam pottage I bought from Mama Owerre.”

Obinze went inside the main house and came back to say his mother was taking her to the doctor’s. It was late evening, his mother did not like the young doctor who was on call at the medical center in the evenings, and so she drove to Dr. Achufusi’s house. As they passed the primary school with its trimmed hedges of whistling pine, Ifemelu suddenly imagined that she was indeed pregnant, and the girl had used expired test chemicals in that dingy lab. She blurted out, “We had sex, Aunty. Once.” She felt Obinze tense. His mother looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Let us see the doctor first,” she said. Dr. Achufusi, an avuncular and pleasant man, pressed at Ifemelu’s side and announced, “It’s your appendix, very inflamed. We should get it out quickly.” He turned to Obinze’s mother. “I can schedule her for tomorrow afternoon.”

“Thank you so much, Doctor,” Obinze’s mother said.

In the car, Ifemelu said, “I’ve never had surgery, Aunty.”

“It’s nothing,” Obinze’s mother said briskly. “Our doctors here are very good. Get in touch with your parents and tell them not to worry. We will take care of you. After they discharge you, you can stay in the house until you feel strong.”

Ifemelu called her mother’s colleague, Aunty Bunmi, and gave her a message, as well as Obinze’s home phone number, to pass on to her mother. That evening, her mother called; she sounded short of breath.

“God is in control, my precious,” her mother said. “Thank God for this your friend. God will bless her and her mother.”

“It’s him. A boy.”

“Oh.” Her mother paused. “Please thank them. God bless them. We will take the first bus tomorrow morning to Nsukka.”

Ifemelu remembered a nurse cheerfully shaving her pubic hair, the rough scratch of the razor blade, the smell of antiseptic. Then there was a blankness, an erasure of her mind, and when she emerged from it, groggy and still swaying on the edge of memory, she heard her parents talking to Obinze’s mother. Her mother was holding her hand. Later, Obinze’s mother would ask them to stay in her house, there was no point wasting money on a hotel. “Ifemelu is like a daughter to me,” she said.

Before they returned to Lagos, her father said, with that intimidated awe he had in the face of the well-educated, “She has BA London First Class.” And her mother said, “Very respectful boy, that Obinze. He has good home training. And their hometown is not far from us.”

OBINZE
’
S MOTHER WAITED
a few days, perhaps for Ifemelu to regain her strength, before she called them and asked them to sit down and turn the TV off.

“Obinze and Ifemelu, people make mistakes, but some mistakes can be avoided.”

Obinze remained silent. Ifemelu said, “Yes, Aunty.”

“You must always use a condom. If you want to be irresponsible, then wait until you are no longer in my care.” Her tone had hardened, become censorious. “If you make the choice to be sexually active, then you must make the choice to protect yourself. Obinze, you should take your pocket money and buy condoms. Ifemelu, you too. It is not my concern if you are embarrassed. You should go into the pharmacy and buy them. You should never ever let the boy be in charge of your own protection. If he does not want to use it, then he does not care enough about you and you should not be there. Obinze, you may not be the person who will get pregnant, but if it happens it will change your entire life and you cannot undo it. And please, both of you, keep it between both of you. Diseases are everywhere. AIDS is real.”

They were silent.

“Did you hear me?” Obinze’s mother asked.

“Yes, Aunty,” Ifemelu said.

“Obinze?” his mother said.

“Mummy, I’ve heard you,” Obinze said, adding, sharply, “I’m not a small boy!” Then he got up and stalked out of the room.

Strikes now were common. In the newspapers, university lecturers listed their complaints, the agreements that were trampled in the dust by government men whose own children were schooling abroad. Campuses were emptied, classrooms drained of life. Students hoped for short strikes, because they could not hope to have no strike at all. Everyone was talking about leaving. Even Emenike had left for England. Nobody knew how he managed to get a visa. “So he didn’t even tell you?” Ifemelu asked Obinze, and Obinze said, “You know how Emenike is.” Ranyinudo, who had a cousin in America, applied for a visa but was rejected at the embassy by a black American who she said had a cold and was more interested in blowing his nose than in looking at her documents. Sister Ibinabo started the Student Visa Miracle Vigil on Fridays, a gathering of young people, each one holding out an envelope with a visa application form, on which Sister Ibinabo laid a hand of blessing. One girl, already in her final year at the University of Ife, got an American visa the first time she tried, and gave a tearful, excited testimony in church. “Even if I have to start from the beginning in America, at least I know when I will graduate,” she said.

One day, Aunty Uju called. She no longer called frequently; before, she would call Ranyinudo’s house if Ifemelu was in Lagos, or Obinze’s house if Ifemelu was at school. But her calls had dried up. She was working three jobs, not yet qualified to practice medicine in America. She talked about the exams she had to take, various steps meaning various things that Ifemelu did not understand. Whenever Ifemelu’s mother suggested asking Aunty Uju to send them something from
America—multivitamins, shoes—Ifemelu’s father would say no, they had to let Uju find her feet first, and her mother would say, a hint of slyness in her smile, that four years was long enough to find one’s feet.