Americanah (17 page)

“Ifem,
kedu
?” Aunty Uju asked. “I thought you would be in Nsukka. I just called Obinze’s house.”

“We’re on strike.”

“Ahn-ahn! The strike hasn’t ended?”

“No, that last one ended, we went back to school and then they started another one.”

“What is this kind of nonsense?” Aunty Uju said. “Honestly, you should come and study here, I am sure you can easily get a scholarship. And you can help me take care of Dike. I’m telling you, the small money I make is all going to his babysitter. And by God’s grace, by the time you come, I will have passed all my exams and started my residency.” Aunty Uju sounded enthusiastic but vague; until she voiced it, she had not given the idea much thought.

Ifemelu might have left it at that, a formless idea floated but allowed to sink again, if not for Obinze. “You should do it, Ifem,” he said. “You have nothing to lose. Take the SATs and try for a scholarship. Ginika can help you apply to schools. Aunty Uju is there so at least you have a foundation to start with. I wish I could do the same, but I can’t just get up and go. It’s better for me to finish my first degree and then come to America for graduate school. International students can get funding and financial aid for graduate school.”

Ifemelu did not quite grasp what it all meant, but it sounded correct because it came from him, the America expert, who so easily said “graduate school” instead of “postgraduate school.” And so she began to dream. She saw herself in a house from
The Cosby Show
, in a school with students holding notebooks miraculously free of wear and crease. She took the SATs at a Lagos center, packed with thousands of people, all bristling with their own American ambitions. Ginika, who had just graduated from college, applied to schools on her behalf, calling to say, “I just wanted you to know I’m focusing on the Philadelphia area because I went here,” as though Ifemelu knew where Philadelphia was. To her, America was America.

The strike ended. Ifemelu returned to Nsukka, eased back into campus life, and from time to time, she dreamed of America. When
Aunty Uju called to say that there were acceptance letters and a scholarship offer, she stopped dreaming. She was too afraid to hope, now that it seemed possible.

“Make small-small braids that will last long, it’s very expensive to make hair here,” Aunty Uju told her.

“Aunty, let me get the visa first!” Ifemelu said.

She applied for a visa, convinced that a rude American would reject her application, it was what happened so often, after all, but the gray-haired woman wearing a St. Vincent de Paul pin on her lapel smiled at her and said, “Pick up your visa in two days. Good luck with your studies.”

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.

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 though
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.”

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.