Americanah (20 page)

BECAUSE OF OBINZE
, Manhattan intimidated Ifemelu. The first time she took the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, her palms sweaty, she walked the streets, watching, absorbing. A sylphlike woman running in high heels, her short dress floating behind her, until she tripped and almost fell, a pudgy man coughing and spitting on the curb, a girl dressed all in black raising a hand for the taxis that sliced past. The endless skyscrapers taunted the sky, but there was dirt on the building windows. The dazzling imperfection of it all calmed her. “It’s wonderful but it’s not heaven,” she told Obinze. She could not wait until he, too, saw Manhattan. She imagined them both walking hand in hand, like the American couples she saw, lingering at a shop window, pausing to read menus taped on restaurant doors, stopping at a food cart to buy cold bottles of iced tea. “Soon,” he said in his letter. They said “soon” to each other often, and “soon” gave their plan the weight of something real.

FINALLY
, Aunty Uju’s result came. Ifemelu brought in the envelope from the mailbox, so slight, so ordinary,
United States Medical Licensing Examination
printed on it in even script, and held it in her hand for a
long time, willing it to be good news. She raised it up as soon as Aunty Uju walked indoors. Aunty Uju gasped. “Is it thick? Is it thick?” she asked.

“What?
Gini
?” Ifemelu asked.

“Is it thick?” Aunty Uju asked again, letting her handbag slip to the floor and moving forward, her hand outstretched, her face savage with hope. She took the envelope and shouted, “I made it!” and then opened it to make sure, peering at the thin sheet of paper. “If you fail, they send you a thick envelope so that you can reregister.”

“Aunty! I knew it! Congratulations!” Ifemelu said.

Aunty Uju hugged her, both of them leaning into each other, hearing each other’s breathing, and it brought to Ifemelu a warm memory of Lagos.

“Where’s Dike?” Aunty Uju asked, as though he was not already in bed when she came home from her second job. She went into the kitchen, stood under the bright ceiling light and looked, again, at the result, her eyes wet. “So I will be a family physician in this America,” she said, almost in a whisper. She opened a can of Coke and left it undrunk.

Later, she said, “I have to take my braids out for my interviews and relax my hair. Kemi told me that I shouldn’t wear braids to the interview. If you have braids, they will think you are unprofessional.”

“So there are no doctors with braided hair in America?” Ifemelu asked.

“I have told you what they told me. You are in a country that is not your own. You do what you have to do if you want to succeed.”

There it was again, the strange naïveté with which Aunty Uju had covered herself like a blanket. Sometimes, while having a conversation, it would occur to Ifemelu that Aunty Uju had deliberately left behind something of herself, something essential, in a distant and forgotten place. Obinze said it was the exaggerated gratitude that came with immigrant insecurity. Obinze, so like him to have an explanation. Obinze, who anchored her through that summer of waiting—his steady voice over the phone, his long letters in blue airmail envelopes—and who understood, as summer was ending, the new gnawing in her stomach. She wanted to start school, to find the real America, and yet there was that gnawing in her stomach, an anxiety, and a new, aching
nostalgia for the Brooklyn summer that had become familiar: children on bicycles, sinewy black men in tight white tank tops, ice cream vans tinkling, loud music from roofless cars, sun shining into night, and things rotting and smelling in the humid heat. She did not want to leave Dike—the mere thought brought a sense of treasure already lost—and yet she wanted to leave Aunty Uju’s apartment, and begin a life in which she alone determined the margins.

Dike had once told her, wistfully, about his friend who had gone to Coney Island and come back with a picture taken on a steep, sliding ride, and so she surprised him on the weekend before she left, saying “We’re going to Coney Island!” Jane had told her what train to take, what to do, how much it would cost. Aunty Uju said it was a good idea, but gave her no money to add to what she had. As she watched Dike on the rides, screaming, terrified and thrilled, a little boy entirely open to the world, she did not mind what she had spent. They ate hot dogs and milkshakes and cotton candy. “I can’t wait until I don’t have to come with you to the girls’ bathroom,” he told her, and she laughed and laughed. On the train back, he was tired and sleepy. “Coz, this was the bestest day ever with you,” he said, resting against her.

The bittersweet glow of an ending limbo overcame her days later when she kissed Dike goodbye—once then twice and three times, while he cried, a child so unused to crying, and she bit back her own tears and Aunty Uju said over and over that Philadelphia was not very far away. Ifemelu rolled her suitcase to the subway, took it to the Forty-second Street terminal, and got on a bus to Philadelphia. She sat by the window—somebody had stuck a blob of chewed gum on the pane—and spent long minutes looking again at the Social Security card and driver’s license that belonged to Ngozi Okonkwo. Ngozi Okonkwo was at least ten years older than she was, with a narrow face, eyebrows that started as little balls before loping into arcs, and a jaw shaped like the letter
V
.

“I don’t even look like her at all,” Ifemelu had said when Aunty Uju gave her the card.

“All of us look alike to white people,” Aunty Uju said.

“Ahn-ahn, Aunty!”

“I’m not joking. Amara’s cousin came last year and she doesn’t have her papers yet so she has been working with Amara’s ID. You remember
Amara? Her cousin is very fair and slim. They do not look alike at all. Nobody noticed. She works as a home health aide in Virginia. Just make sure you always remember your new name. I have a friend who forgot and one of her co-workers called her and called her and she was blank. Then they became suspicious and reported her to immigration.”

There was Ginika, standing in the small, crowded bus terminal, wearing a miniskirt and a tube top that covered her chest but not her midriff, and waiting to scoop Ifemelu up and into the real America. Ginika was much thinner, half her old size, and her head looked bigger, balanced on a long neck that brought to mind a vague, exotic animal. She extended her arms, as though urging a child into an embrace, laughing, calling out, “Ifemsco! Ifemsco!” and Ifemelu was taken back, for a moment, to secondary school: an image of gossiping girls in their blue-and-white uniforms, felt berets perched on their heads, crowded in the school corridor. She hugged Ginika. The theatrics of their holding each other close, disengaging and then holding each other close again, made her eyes fill, to her mild surprise, with tears.

“Look at you!” Ginika said, gesturing, jangling the many silver bangles around her wrist. “Is it really you?”

“When did
you
stop eating and start looking like a dried stockfish?” Ifemelu asked.

Ginika laughed, took the suitcase and turned to the door. “Come on, let’s go. I’m parked illegally.”

The green Volvo was at the corner of a narrow street. An unsmiling woman in uniform, ticket booklet in hand, was stumping towards them when Ginika jumped in and started the car. “Close!” she said, laughing. A homeless man in a grubby T-shirt, pushing a trolley filled with bundles, had stopped just by the car, as though to rest briefly, staring ahead at nothing, and Ginika glanced at him as she eased the car into the street. They drove with the windows down. Philadelphia was the smell of the summer sun, of burnt asphalt, of sizzling meat
from food carts tucked into street corners, foreign brown men and women hunched inside. Ifemelu would come to like the gyros from those carts, flatbread and lamb and dripping sauces, as she would come to love Philadelphia itself. It did not raise the specter of intimidation as Manhattan did; it was intimate but not provincial, a city that might yet be kind to you. Ifemelu saw women on the sidewalks going to lunch from work, wearing sneakers, proof of their American preference for comfort over elegance, and she saw young couples clutching each other, kissing from time to time as if they feared that, if they unclasped their hands, their love would dissolve, melt into nothingness.

“I borrowed my landlord’s car. I didn’t want to come get you in my shit-ass car. I can’t believe it, Ifemsco. You’re in America!” Ginika said. There was a metallic, unfamiliar glamour in her gauntness, her olive skin, her short skirt that had risen up, barely covering her crotch, her straight-straight hair that she kept tucking behind her ears, blond streaks shiny in the sunlight.

“We’re entering University City, and that’s where Wellson campus is, shay you know? We can go for you to see the school first and then we can go to my place, out in the suburbs, and after we can go to my friend’s place in the evening. She’s doing a get-together.” Ginika had lapsed into Nigerian English, a dated, overcooked version, eager to prove how unchanged she was. She had, with a strenuous loyalty, kept in touch through the years: calling and writing letters and sending books and shapeless trousers she called slacks. And now she was saying “shay you know” and Ifemelu did not have the heart to tell her that nobody said “shay” anymore.

Ginika recounted anecdotes about her own early experiences in America, as though they were all filled with subtle wisdom that Ifemelu would need.

“If you see how they laughed at me in high school when I said that somebody was boning for me. Because boning here means to have sex! So I had to keep explaining that in Nigeria it means carrying face. And can you imagine ‘half-caste’ is a bad word here? In freshman year, I was telling a bunch of my friends about how I was voted prettiest girl in school back home. Remember? I should never have won. Zainab should have won. It was just because I was a half-caste. There’s even more of that here. There’s some shit you’ll get from white people in
this country that I won’t get. But anyway, I was telling them about back home and how all the boys were chasing me because I was a half-caste, and they said I was dissing myself. So now I say biracial, and I’m supposed to be offended when somebody says half-caste. I’ve met a lot of people here with white mothers and they are so full of issues, eh. I didn’t know I was even supposed to
have
issues until I came to America. Honestly, if anybody wants to raise biracial kids, do it in Nigeria.”

“Of course. Where all the boys chase the half-caste girls.”

“Not
all
the boys, by the way.” Ginika made a face. “Obinze had better hurry up and come to the U.S., before somebody will carry you away. You know you have the kind of body they like here.”

“What?”

“You’re thin with big breasts.”

“Please, I’m not thin. I’m slim.”

“Americans say ‘thin.’ Here ‘thin’ is a good word.”

“Is that why you stopped eating? All your bum has gone. I always wished I had a bum like yours,” Ifemelu said.

“Do you know I started losing weight almost as soon as I came? I was even close to anorexia. The kids at my high school called me Pork. You know at home when somebody tells you that you lost weight, it means something bad. But here somebody tells you that you lost weight and you say thank you. It’s just different here,” Ginika said, a little wistfully, as though she, too, were new to America.

Later, Ifemelu watched Ginika at her friend Stephanie’s apartment, a bottle of beer poised at her lips, her American-accented words sailing out of her mouth, and was struck by how like her American friends Ginika had become. Jessica, the Japanese American, beautiful and animated, playing with the emblemed key of her Mercedes. Pale-skinned Teresa, who had a loud laugh and wore diamond studs and shabby, worn-out shoes. Stephanie, the Chinese American, her hair a perfect swingy bob that curved inwards at her chin, who from time to time she reached into her monogrammed bag to get her cigarettes and step out for a smoke. Hari, coffee-skinned and black-haired and wearing a tight T-shirt, who said, “I am Indian, not Indian American,” when Ginika introduced Ifemelu. They all laughed at the same things and said “Gross!” about the same things; they were well choreographed. Stephanie announced that she had homemade beer in her
fridge and everyone chanted “Cool!” Then Teresa said, “Can I have the regular beer, Steph?” in the small voice of a person afraid to offend. Ifemelu sat on a lone armchair at the end of the room, drinking orange juice, listening to them talk.
That company is so evil. Oh my God, I can’t believe there’s so much sugar in this stuff. The Internet is totally going to change the world
. She heard Ginika ask, “Did you know they use something from animal bones to make that breath mint?” and the others groaned. There were codes Ginika knew, ways of being that she had mastered. Unlike Aunty Uju, Ginika had come to America with the flexibility and fluidness of youth, the cultural cues had seeped into her skin, and now she went bowling, and knew what Tobey Maguire was about, and found double-dipping gross. Bottles and cans of beer were piling up. They all lounged in glamorous lassitude on the sofa, and on the rug, while heavy rock, which Ifemelu thought was unharmonious noise, played on the CD player. Teresa drank the fastest, rolling each empty can of beer on the wood floor, while the others laughed with an enthusiasm that puzzled Ifemelu because it really was not that funny. How did they know when to laugh, what to laugh about?