Americanah (29 page)

“This is Ifemelu, our babysitter and my friend,” Kimberly introduced her to guests.

“You’re so beautiful,” a man told her, smiling, his teeth jarringly white. “African women are gorgeous, especially Ethiopians.”

A couple spoke about their safari in Tanzania. “We had a wonderful tour guide and we’re now paying for his first daughter’s education.” Two women spoke about their donations to a wonderful charity in Malawi that built wells, a wonderful orphanage in Botswana, a wonderful microfinance cooperative in Kenya. Ifemelu gazed at them. There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have. To take “charity” for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know—perhaps it came from having had yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow. She envied them this.

A petite woman in a severe pink jacket said, “I’m chair of the board of a charity in Ghana. We work with rural women. We’re always interested
in African staff, we don’t want to be the NGO that won’t use local labor. So if you’re ever looking for a job after graduation and want to go back and work in Africa, give me a call.”

“Thank you.” Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy. She went out to the deck in search of fresh air. Over the hedge, she could see the Jamaican nanny of the neighbors’ children, walking down the driveway, the one who always evaded Ifemelu’s eyes, and did not like to say hello. Then she noticed a movement on the other end of the deck. It was Don. There was something furtive about him and she felt rather than saw that he had just ended a cell phone conversation.

“Great party,” he told her. “It’s just an excuse for Kim and me to have friends over. Roger is totally out of his league and I’ve told him that, no chance in hell …”

Don kept talking, his voice too larded in bonhomie, her dislike clawing at her throat. She and Don did not talk like this. It was too much information, too much talk. She wanted to tell him that she had heard nothing of his phone conversation, if there had been anything at all to hear, that she knew nothing and that she did not want to know.

“They must be wondering where you are,” she said.

“Yes, we must go back,” he said, as though they had come out together. Back inside, Ifemelu saw Kimberly standing in the middle of the den, slightly apart from her circle of friends; she had been looking around for Don and when she saw him, her eyes rested on him, and her face became soft, and shorn of worry.

IFEMELU LEFT
the party early; she wanted to speak to Dike before his bedtime. Aunty Uju picked up the phone.

“Has Dike slept?” Ifemelu asked.

“He’s brushing his teeth,” she said, and then in a lower voice, she added, “He was asking me about his name again.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The same thing. You know he never asked me this kind of thing before we moved here.”

“Maybe it’s having Bartholomew in the picture, and the new environment. He’s used to having you to himself.”

“This time he didn’t ask why he has my name, he asked if he has my name because his father did not love him.”

“Aunty, maybe it’s time to tell him you were not a second wife,” Ifemelu said.

“I was practically a second wife.” Aunty Uju sounded defiant, even petulant, clenching her fist tightly around her own story. She had told Dike that his father was in the military government, that she was his second wife, and that they had given him her surname to protect him, because some people in the government, not his father, had done some bad things.

“Okay, here’s Dike,” Aunty Uju said, in a normal tone.

“Hey, Coz! You should have seen my soccer game today!” Dike said.

“How come you score all the great goals when I’m not there? Are these goals in your dreams?” Ifemelu asked.

He laughed. He still laughed easily, his sense of humor whole, but since the move to Massachusetts, he was no longer transparent. Something had filmed itself around him, making him difficult to read, his head perennially bent towards his Game Boy, looking up once in a while to view his mother, and the world, with a weariness too heavy for a child. His grades were falling. Aunty Uju threatened him more often. The last time Ifemelu visited, Aunty Uju told him, “I will send you back to Nigeria if you do that again!” speaking Igbo as she did to him only when she was angry, and Ifemelu worried that it would become for him the language of strife.

Aunty Uju, too, had changed. At first, she had sounded curious, expectant about her new life. “This place is so
white
,” she said. “Do you know I went to the drugstore to quickly buy lipstick, because the mall is thirty minutes away, and all the shades were too pale! But they can’t carry what they can’t sell! At least this place is quiet and restful, and I feel safe drinking the tap water, something I will never even try in Brooklyn.”

Slowly, over the months, her tone soured.

“Dike’s teacher said he is aggressive,” she told Ifemelu one day, after she had been called to come in and see the principal. “Aggressive, of all things. She wants him to go to what they call special ed, where they will put him in a class alone and bring somebody who is trained to deal with mental children to teach him. I told the woman that it is not my son, it is her father who is aggressive. Look at him, just because he looks different, when he does what other little boys do, it becomes aggression. Then the principal told me, ‘Dike is just like one of us, we don’t see him as different at all.’ What kind of pretending is that? I told him to look at my son. There are only two of them in the whole school. The other child is a half-caste, and so fair that if you look from afar you will not even know that he is black. My son sticks out, so how can you tell me that you don’t see any difference? I refused completely that they should put him in a special class. He is brighter than all of them combined. They want to start now to mark him. Kemi warned me about this. She said they tried to do it to her son in Indiana.”

Later, Aunty Uju’s complaints turned to her residency program, how slow and small it was, medical records still handwritten and kept in dusty files, and then when she finished her residency, she complained about the patients who thought they were doing her a favor by seeing her. She hardly mentioned Bartholomew; it was as though she lived only with Dike in the Massachusetts house by the lake.

Ifemelu decided to stop faking an American accent on a sunlit day in July, the same day she met Blaine. It was convincing, the accent. She had perfected, from careful watching of friends and newscasters, the blurring of the t, the creamy roll of the
r
, the sentences starting with “so,” and the sliding response of “oh really,” but the accent creaked with consciousness, it was an act of will. It took an effort, the twisting of lip, the curling of tongue. If she were in a panic, or terrified, or jerked awake during a fire, she would not remember how to produce those American sounds. And so she resolved to stop, on that summer day, the weekend of Dike’s birthday. Her decision was prompted by a telemarketer’s call. She was in her apartment on Spring Garden Street, the first that was truly hers in America, hers alone, a studio with a leaky faucet and a noisy heater. In the weeks since she moved in, she had felt light-footed, cloaked in well-being, because she opened the fridge knowing that everything in it was hers and she cleaned the bathtub knowing she would not find tufts of disconcertingly foreign roommate-hair in the drain. “Officially two blocks away from the real hood” was how the apartment super, Jamal, had put it, when he told her to expect to hear gunshots from time to time, but although she had opened her window every evening, straining and listening, all she heard were the sounds of late summer, music from passing cars, the high-spirited laughter of playing children, the shouting of their mothers.

On that July morning, her weekend bag already packed for Massachusetts, she was making scrambled eggs when the phone rang. The caller ID showed “unknown” and she thought it might be a call from her parents in Nigeria. But it was a telemarketer, a young, male American
who was offering better long-distance and international phone rates. She always hung up on telemarketers, but there was something about his voice that made her turn down the stove and hold on to the receiver, something poignantly young, untried, untested, the slightest of tremors, an aggressive customer-service friendliness that was not aggressive at all; it was as though he was saying what he had been trained to say but was mortally worried about offending her.

He asked how she was, how the weather was in her city, and told her it was pretty hot in Phoenix. Perhaps it was his first day on the job, his telephone piece poking uncomfortably in his ear while he half hoped that the people he was calling would not be home to pick up. Because she felt strangely sorry for him, she asked whether he had rates better than fifty-seven cents a minute to Nigeria.

“Hold on while I look up Nigeria,” he said, and she went back to stirring her eggs.

He came back and said his rates were the same, but wasn’t there another country that she called? Mexico? Canada?

“Well, I call London sometimes,” she said. Ginika was there for the summer.

“Okay, hold on while I look up France,” he said.

She burst out laughing.

“Something funny over there?” he asked.

She laughed harder. She had opened her mouth to tell him, bluntly, that what was funny was that he was selling international telephone rates and did not know where London was, but something held her back, an image of him, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, overweight, pink-faced, awkward around girls, keen on video games, and with no knowledge of the roiling contradictions that were the world. So she said, “There’s a hilarious old comedy on TV.”

“Oh, really?” he said, and he laughed too. It broke her heart, his greenness, and when he came back on to tell her the France rates, she thanked him and said they were better than the rates she already had and that she would think about switching carriers.

“When is a good time to call you back? If that’s okay …,” he said. She wondered whether they were paid on commission. Would his paycheck be bigger if she did switch her phone company? Because she would, as long as it cost her nothing.

“Evenings,” she said.

“May I ask who I’m talking to?”

“My name is Ifemelu.”

He repeated her name with exaggerated care. “Is it a French name?”

“No. Nigerian.”

“That where your family came from?”

“Yes.” She scooped the eggs onto a plate. “I grew up there.”

“Oh, really? How long have you been in the U.S.?”

“Three years.”

“Wow. Cool. You sound totally American.”

“Thank you.”

Only after she hung up did she begin to feel the stain of a burgeoning shame spreading all over her, for thanking him, for crafting his words “You sound American” into a garland that she hung around her own neck. Why was it a compliment, an accomplishment, to sound American? She had won; Cristina Tomas, pallid-faced Cristina Tomas under whose gaze she had shrunk like a small, defeated animal, would speak to her normally now. She had won, indeed, but her triumph was full of air. Her fleeting victory had left in its wake a vast, echoing space, because she had taken on, for too long, a pitch of voice and a way of being that was not hers. And so she finished eating her eggs and resolved to stop faking the American accent. She first spoke without the American accent that afternoon at Thirtieth Street Station, leaning towards the woman behind the Amtrak counter.

“Could I have a round-trip to Haverhill, please? Returning Sunday afternoon. I have a Student Advantage card,” she said, and felt a rush of pleasure from giving the
t
its full due in “advantage,” from not rolling her
r
in “Haverhill.” This was truly her; this was the voice with which she would speak if she were woken up from a deep sleep during an earthquake. Still, she resolved that if the Amtrak woman responded to her accent by speaking too slowly as though to an idiot, then she would put on her Mr. Agbo Voice, the mannered, overcareful pronunciations she had learned during debate meetings in secondary school when the bearded Mr. Agbo, tugging at his frayed tie, played BBC recordings on his cassette player and then made all the students pronounce words over and over until he beamed and cried “Correct!” She would also affect, with the Mr. Agbo Voice, a slight raising of her
eyebrows in what she imagined was a haughty foreigner pose. But there was no need to do any of these because the Amtrak woman spoke normally. “Can I see an ID, miss?”