Americanah (3 page)

She touched Ifemelu’s hair. “Why you don’t have relaxer?”

“I like my hair the way God made it.”

“But how you comb it? Hard to comb,” Aisha said.

Ifemelu had brought her own comb. She gently combed her hair, dense, soft, and tightly coiled, until it framed her head like a halo. “It’s not hard to comb if you moisturize it properly,” she said, slipping into the coaxing tone of the proselytizer that she used whenever she was trying to convince other black women about the merits of wearing their hair natural. Aisha snorted; she clearly could not understand why
anybody would choose to suffer through combing natural hair, instead of simply relaxing it. She sectioned out Ifemelu’s hair, plucked a little attachment from the pile on the table, and began deftly to twist.

“It’s too tight,” Ifemelu said. “Don’t make it tight.” Because Aisha kept twisting to the end, Ifemelu thought that perhaps she had not understood, and so Ifemelu touched the offending braid and said, “Tight, tight.”

Aisha pushed her hand away. “No. No. Leave it. It good.”

“It’s tight!” Ifemelu said. “Please loosen it.”

Mariama was watching them. A flow of French came from her. Aisha loosened the braid.

“Sorry,” Mariama said. “She doesn’t understand very well.”

But Ifemelu could see, from Aisha’s face, that she understood very well. Aisha was simply a true market woman, immune to the cosmetic niceties of American customer service. Ifemelu imagined her working in a market in Dakar, like the braiders in Lagos who would blow their noses and wipe their hands on their wrappers, roughly jerk their customers’ heads to position them better, complain about how full or how hard or how short the hair was, shout out to passing women, while all the time conversing too loudly and braiding too tightly.

“You know her?” Aisha asked, glancing at the television screen.

“What?”

Aisha repeated herself, and pointed at the actress on the screen.

“No,” Ifemelu said.

“But you Nigerian.”

“Yes, but I don’t know her.”

Aisha gestured to the pile of DVDs on the table. “Before, too much voodoo. Very bad. Now Nigeria film is very good. Big nice house!”

Ifemelu thought little of Nollywood films, with their exaggerated histrionics and their improbable plots, but she nodded in agreement because to hear “Nigeria” and “good” in the same sentence was a luxury, even coming from this strange Senegalese woman, and she chose to see in this an augury of her return home.

Everyone she had told she was moving back seemed surprised, expecting an explanation, and when she said she was doing it because she wanted to, puzzled lines would appear on foreheads.

“You are closing your blog and selling your condo to go back to
Lagos and work for a magazine that doesn’t pay that well,” Aunty Uju had said and then repeated herself, as though to make Ifemelu see the gravity of her own foolishness. Only her old friend in Lagos, Ranyinudo, had made her return seem normal. “Lagos is now full of American returnees, so you better come back and join them. Every day you see them carrying a bottle of water as if they will die of heat if they are not drinking water every minute,” Ranyinudo said. They had kept in touch, she and Ranyinudo, throughout the years. At first, they wrote infrequent letters, but as cybercafés opened, cell phones spread, and Facebook flourished, they communicated more often. It was Ranyinudo who had told her, some years ago, that Obinze was getting married. “Meanwhile o, he has serious money now. See what you missed!” Ranyinudo had said. Ifemelu feigned indifference to this news. She had cut off contact with Obinze, after all, and so much time had passed, and she was newly in a relationship with Blaine, and happily easing herself into a shared life. But after she hung up, she thought endlessly of Obinze. Imagining him at his wedding left her with a feeling like sorrow, a faded sorrow. But she was pleased for him, she told herself, and to prove to herself that she was pleased for him, she decided to write him. She was not sure if he still used his old address and she sent the e-mail half expecting that he would not reply, but he did. She did not write again, because she by then had acknowledged her own small, still-burning light. It was best to leave things alone. Last December, when Ranyinudo told her she had run into him at the Palms mall, with his baby daughter (and Ifemelu still could not picture this new sprawling, modern mall in Lagos; all that came to mind when she tried to was the cramped Mega Plaza she remembered)—“He was looking so
clean
, and his daughter is so fine,” Ranyinudo said—Ifemelu felt a pang at all the changes that had happened in his life.

“Nigeria film very good now,” Aisha said again.

“Yes,” Ifemelu said enthusiastically. This was what she had become, a seeker of signs. Nigerian films were good, therefore her move back home would be good.

“You from Yoruba in Nigeria,” Aisha said.

“No. I am Igbo.”

“You Igbo?” For the first time, a smile appeared on Aisha’s face, a smile that showed as much of her small teeth as her dark gums. “I
think you Yoruba because you dark and Igbo fair. I have two Igbo men. Very good. Igbo men take care of women real good.”

Aisha was almost whispering, a sexual suggestion in her tone, and in the mirror, the discoloration on her arms and neck became ghastly sores. Ifemelu imagined some bursting and oozing, others flaking. She looked away.

“Igbo men take care of women real good,” Aisha repeated. “I want marry. They love me but they say the family want Igbo woman. Because Igbo marry Igbo always.”

Ifemelu swallowed the urge to laugh. “You want to marry both of them?”

“No.” Aisha made an impatient gesture. “I want marry one. But this thing is true? Igbo marry Igbo always?”

“Igbo people marry all kinds of people. My cousin’s husband is Yoruba. My uncle’s wife is from Scotland.”

Aisha paused in her twisting, watching Ifemelu in the mirror, as though deciding whether to believe her.

“My sister say it is true. Igbo marry Igbo always,” she said.

“How does your sister know?”

“She know many Igbo people in Africa. She sell cloth.”

“Where is she?”

“In Africa.”

“Where? In Senegal?”

“Benin.”

“Why do you say Africa instead of just saying the country you mean?” Ifemelu asked.

Aisha clucked. “You don’t know America. You say Senegal and American people, they say, Where is that? My friend from Burkina Faso, they ask her, your country in Latin America?” Aisha resumed twisting, a sly smile on her face, and then asked, as if Ifemelu could not possibly understand how things were done here, “How long you in America?”

Ifemelu decided then that she did not like Aisha at all. She wanted to curtail the conversation now, so that they would say only what they needed to say during the six hours it would take to braid her hair, and so she pretended not to have heard and instead brought out her phone. Dike had still not replied to her text. He always replied within minutes,
or maybe he was still at basketball practice, or with his friends, watching some silly video on YouTube. She called him and left a long message, raising her voice, going on and on about his basketball practice and was it as hot up in Massachusetts and was he still taking Page to see the movie today. Then, feeling reckless, she composed an e-mail to Obinze and, without permitting herself to reread it, she sent it off. She had written that she was moving back to Nigeria and, even though she had a job waiting for her, even though her car was already on a ship bound for Lagos, it suddenly felt true for the first time.
I recently decided to move back to Nigeria
.

Aisha was not discouraged. Once Ifemelu looked up from her phone, Aisha asked again, “How long you in America?”

Ifemelu took her time putting her phone back into her bag. Years ago, she had been asked a similar question, at a wedding of one of Aunty Uju’s friends, and she had said two years, which was the truth, but the jeer on the Nigerian’s face had taught her that, to earn the prize of being taken seriously among Nigerians in America, among Africans in America, indeed among immigrants in America, she needed more years. Six years, she began to say when it was just three and a half. Eight years, she said when it was five. Now that it was thirteen years, lying seemed unnecessary but she lied anyway.

“Fifteen years,” she said.

“Fifteen? That long time.” A new respect slipped into Aisha’s eyes.

“You live here in Trenton?”

“I live in Princeton.”

“Princeton.” Aisha paused. “You student?”

“I’ve just finished a fellowship,” she said, knowing that Aisha would not understand what a fellowship was, and in the rare moment that Aisha looked intimidated, Ifemelu felt a perverse pleasure. Yes, Princeton. Yes, the sort of place that Aisha could only imagine, the sort of place that would never have signs that said
QUICK TAX REFUND;
people in Princeton did not need quick tax refunds.

“But I’m going back home to Nigeria,” Ifemelu added, suddenly remorseful. “I’m going next week.”

“To see the family.”

“No. I’m moving back. To live in Nigeria.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? Why not?”

“Better you send money back. Unless your father is big man? You have connections?”

“I’ve found a job there,” she said.

“You stay in America fifteen years and you just go back to work?”

Aisha smirked. “You can stay there?”

Aisha reminded her of what Aunty Uju had said, when she finally accepted that Ifemelu was serious about moving back—
Will you be able to cope?
—and the suggestion, that she was somehow irrevocably altered by America, had grown thorns on her skin. Her parents, too, seemed to think that she might not be able to “cope” with Nigeria. “At least you are now an American citizen so you can always return to America,” her father had said. Both of them had asked if Blaine would be coming with her, their question heavy with hope. It amused her how often they asked about Blaine now, since it had taken them a while to make peace with the idea of her black American boyfriend. She imagined them nursing quiet plans for her wedding; her mother would think of a caterer and colors, and her father would think of a distinguished friend he could ask to be the sponsor. Reluctant to flatten their hope, because it took so little to keep them hoping, which in turn kept them happy, she told her father, “We decided I will come back first and then Blaine will come after a few weeks.”

“Splendid,” her father said, and she said nothing else because it was best if things were simply left at splendid.

Aisha tugged a little too hard at her hair. “Fifteen years in America very long time,” Aisha said, as though she had been pondering this. “You have boyfriend? You marry?”

“I’m also going back to Nigeria to see my man,” Ifemelu said, surprising herself.
My man
. How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives that we have imagined.

“Oh! Okay!” Aisha said, excited; Ifemelu had finally given her a comprehensible reason for wanting to move back. “You will marry?”

“Maybe. We’ll see.”

“Oh!” Aisha stopped twisting and stared at her in the mirror, a dead stare, and Ifemelu feared, for a moment, that the woman had clairvoyant powers and could tell she was lying.

“I want you see my men. I call them. They come and you see them.
First I call Chijioke. He work cab driver. Then Emeka. He work security. You see them.”

“You don’t have to call them just to meet me.”

“No. I call them. You tell them Igbo can marry not Igbo. They listen to you.”

“No, really. I can’t do that.”

Aisha kept speaking as if she hadn’t heard. “You tell them. They listen to you because you their Igbo sister. Any one is okay. I want marry.”

Ifemelu looked at Aisha, a small, ordinary-faced Senegalese woman with patchwork skin who had two Igbo boyfriends, implausible as it seemed, and who was now insistent that Ifemelu should meet them and urge them to marry her. It would have made for a good blog post: “A Peculiar Case of a Non-American Black, or How the Pressures of Immigrant Life Can Make You Act Crazy.”

When Obinze first saw her e-mail, he was sitting in the back of his Range Rover in still Lagos traffic, his jacket slung over the front seat, a rusty-haired child beggar glued outside his window, a hawker pressing colorful CDs against the other window, the radio turned on low to the Pidgin English news on Wazobia FM, and the gray gloom of imminent rain all around. He stared at his BlackBerry, his body suddenly rigid. First, he skimmed the e-mail, instinctively wishing it were longer.
Ceiling
, kedu?
Hope all is well with work and family. Ranyinudo said she ran into you some time ago and that you now have a child! Proud Papa. Congratulations. I recently decided to move back to Nigeria. Should be in Lagos in a week. Would love to keep in touch. Take care. Ifemelu
.

He read it again slowly and felt the urge to smooth something, his trousers, his shaved-bald head. She had called him Ceiling. In the last e-mail from her, sent just before he got married, she had called him Obinze, apologized for her silence over the years, wished him happiness in sunny sentences, and mentioned the black American she was living with. A gracious e-mail. He had hated it. He had hated it so much that he Googled the black American—and why should she give him the man’s full name if not because she wanted him Googled?—a lecturer at Yale, and found it infuriating that she lived with a man who referred on his blog to friends as “cats,” but it was the photo of the black American, oozing intellectual cool in distressed jeans and black-framed eyeglasses, that had tipped Obinze over, made him send her a cold reply.
Thank you for the good wishes, I have never been happier in my life
, he’d written. He hoped she would write something mocking back—it was so unlike her, not to have been even vaguely tart in that first e-mail—but she did not write at all, and when he e-mailed her again,
after his honeymoon in Morocco, to say he wanted to keep in touch and wanted to talk sometime, she did not reply.