Americanah (31 page)

WARRINGTON WAS
a somnolent town, a town contented with itself; winding roads cut through thick woods—even the main road, which the residents did not want widened for fear that it would bring in foreigners from the city, was winding and narrow—sleepy homes were shielded by trees, and on weekends the blue lake was stippled with boats. From the dining room window of Aunty Uju’s house, the lake shimmered, a blueness so tranquil that it held the gaze. Ifemelu stood by the window while Aunty Uju sat at the table drinking orange juice and airing her grievances like jewels. It had become a routine of Ifemelu’s visits: Aunty Uju collected all her dissatisfactions in a silk purse, nursing them, polishing them, and then on the Saturday of Ifemelu’s visit, while Bartholomew was out and Dike upstairs, she would spill them out on the table, and turn each one this way and that, to catch the light.

Sometimes she told the same story twice. How she had gone to the public library the other day, had forgotten to bring out the unreturned book from her handbag, and the guard told her, “You people never do anything right.” How she walked into an examining room and a patient asked “Is the doctor coming?” and when she said she was the doctor the patient’s face changed to fired clay.

“Do you know, that afternoon she called to transfer her file to another doctor’s office! Can you imagine?”

“What does Bartholomew think about all this?” Ifemelu gestured to take in the room, the view of the lake, the town.

“That one is too busy chasing business. He leaves early and comes home late every day. Sometimes Dike doesn’t even set eyes on him for a whole week.”

“I’m surprised you’re still here, Aunty,” Ifemelu said quietly, and by “here” they both knew that she did not merely mean Warrington.

“I want another child. We’ve been trying.” Aunty Uju came and stood beside her, by the window.

There was the clatter of footsteps on the wooden stairs, and Dike came into the kitchen, in a faded T-shirt and shorts, holding his Game Boy. Each time Ifemelu saw him, he seemed to her to have grown taller and to have become more reserved.

“Are you wearing that shirt to camp?” Aunty Uju asked him.

“Yes, Mom,” he said, his eyes on the flickering screen in his hand.

Aunty Uju got up to check the oven. She had agreed this morning, his first of summer camp, to make him chicken nuggets for breakfast.

“Coz, we’re still playing soccer later, right?” Dike asked.

“Yes,” Ifemelu said. She took a chicken nugget from his plate and put it in her mouth. “Chicken nuggets for breakfast is strange enough, but is this chicken or just plastic?”

“Spicy plastic,” he said.

She walked him to the bus and watched him get on, the pale faces of the other children at the window, the bus driver waving to her too cheerfully. She was standing there waiting when the bus brought him back that afternoon. There was a guardedness on his face, something close to sadness.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, her arm around his shoulder.

“Nothing,” he said. “Can we play soccer now?”

“After you tell me what happened.”

“Nothing happened.”

“I think you need some sugar. You’ll probably have too much tomorrow, with your birthday cake. But let’s get a cookie.”

“Do you bribe the kids you babysit with sugar? Man, they’re lucky.”

She laughed. She brought out the packet of Oreos from the fridge.

“Do you play soccer with the kids you babysit?” he asked.

“No,” she said, even though she played once in a while with Taylor, kicking the ball back and forth in their oversized, wooded backyard. Sometimes, when Dike asked her about the children she cared for, she indulged his childish interest, telling him about their toys and their lives, but she was careful not to make them seem important to her.

“So how was camp?”

“Good.” A pause. “My group leader, Haley? She gave sunscreen to everyone but she wouldn’t give me any. She said I didn’t need it.”

She looked at his face, which was almost expressionless, eerily so. She did not know what to say.

“She thought that because you’re dark you don’t need sunscreen. But you do. Many people don’t know that dark people also need sunscreen. I’ll get you some, don’t worry.” She was speaking too fast, not sure that she was saying the right thing, or what the right thing to say was, and worried because this had upset him enough that she had seen it on his face.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It was kind of funny. My friend Danny was laughing about it.”

“Why did your friend think it was funny?”

“Because it was!”

“You wanted her to give you the sunscreen, too, right?”

“I guess so,” he said with a shrug. “I just want to be regular.”

She hugged him. Later, she went to the store and bought him a big bottle of sunscreen, and the next time she visited, she saw it lying on his dresser, forgotten and unused.

Manama’s new customer was wearing jeans shorts, the denim glued to her backside, and sneakers the same bright pink shade as her top. Large hoop earrings grazed her face. She stood in front of the mirror, describing the kind of cornrows she wanted.

“Like a zigzag with a parting at the side right here, but you don’t add the hair at the beginning, you add it when you get to the ponytail,” she said, speaking slowly, overenunciating. “You understand me?” she added, already convinced, it seemed, that Mariama did not.

“I understand,” Mariama said quietly. “You want to see a photo? I have that style in my album.”

The album was flipped through and, finally, the customer was satisfied and seated, frayed plastic hoisted around her neck, her chair height adjusted, and Mariama all the time smiling a smile full of things restrained.

“This other braider I went to the last time,” the customer said. “She was African, too, and she wanted to burn my damned hair! She brought out this lighter and I’m going, Shontay White, don’t let that woman bring that thing close to your hair. So I ask her, What’s that for? She says, I want to clean your braids, and I go, What? Then she tries to show me, she tries to run the lighter over one braid and I went all crazy on her.”

Mariama shook her head. “Oh, that’s bad. Burning is not good. We don’t do that.”

A customer came in, her hair covered in a bright yellow headwrap.

“Hi,” she said. “I’d like to get braids.”

“What kind of braids you want?” Mariama asked.

“Just regular box braids, medium size.”

“You want it long?” Mariama asked.

“Not too long, maybe shoulder length?”

“Okay. Please sit down. She will do it for you,” Mariama said, gesturing to Halima, who was sitting at the back, her eyes on the television. Halima stood up and stretched, for a little too long, as though to register her reluctance.

The woman sat down and gestured to the pile of DVDs. “You sell Nigerian films?” she asked Mariama.

“I used to but my supplier went out of business. You want to buy?”

“No. You just seem to have a lot of them.”

“Some of them are real nice,” Mariama said.

“I can’t watch that stuff. I guess I’m biased. In my country, South Africa, Nigerians are known for stealing credit cards and doing drugs and all kinds of crazy stuff. I guess the films are kind of like that too.”

“You’re from South Africa? You don’t have accent!” Mariama exclaimed.

The woman shrugged. “I’ve been here a long time. It doesn’t make much of a difference.”

“No,” Halima said, suddenly animated, standing behind the woman. “When I come here with my son they beat him in school because of African accent. In Newark. If you see my son face? Purple like onion. They beat, beat, beat him. Black boys beat him like this. Now accent go and no problems.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the woman said.

“Thank you.” Halima smiled, enamored of the woman because of this extraordinary feat, an American accent. “Yes, Nigeria very corrupt. Worst corrupt country in Africa. Me, I watch the film but no, I don’t go to Nigeria!” She half waved her palm in the air.

“I cannot marry a Nigerian and I won’t let anybody in my family marry a Nigerian,” Mariama said, and darted Ifemelu an apologetic glance. “Not all but many of them do bad things. Even killing for money.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” the customer said, in a halfheartedly moderate tone.

Aisha looked on, sly and quiet. Later, she whispered to Ifemelu,
her expression suspicious, “You here fifteen years, but you don’t have American accent. Why?”

Ifemelu ignored her and, once again, opened Jean Toomer’s
Cane
. She stared at the words and wished suddenly that she could turn back time and postpone this move back home. Perhaps she had been hasty. She should not have sold her condo. She should have accepted
Letterly
magazine’s offer to buy her blog and keep her on as a paid blogger. What if she got back to Lagos and realized what a mistake it was to move back? Even the thought that she could always return to America did not comfort her as much as she wished it to.

The film had ended, and in the new noiselessness of the room, Mariama’s customer said, “This one’s rough,” touching one of the thin cornrows that zigzagged over her scalp, her voice louder than it needed to be.

“No problem. I will do it again,” Mariama said. She was agreeable, and smooth-tongued, but Ifemelu could tell that she thought her customer was a troublemaker, and there was nothing wrong with the cornrow, but this was a part of her new American self, this fervor of customer service, this shiny falseness of surfaces, and she had accepted it, embraced it. When the customer left, she might shrug out of that self and say something to Halima and to Aisha about Americans, how spoiled and childish and entitled they were, but when the next customer came, she would become, again, a faultless version of her American self.

Her customer said, “It’s cute,” as she paid Mariama, and shortly after she left, a young white woman came in, soft-bodied and tanned, her hair held back in a loose ponytail.

“Hi!” she said.

Mariama said “Hi,” and then waited, wiping her hands over and over the front of her shorts.

“I wanted to get my hair braided? You can braid my hair, right?”

Mariama smiled an overly eager smile. “Yes. We do every kind of hair. Do you want braids or cornrows?” She was furiously cleaning the chair now. “Please sit.”

The woman sat down and said she wanted cornrows. “Kind of like Bo Derek in the movie? You know that movie 10?”

“Yes, I know,” Mariama said. Ifemelu doubted that she did.

“I’m Kelsey,” the woman announced as though to the whole room. She was aggressively friendly. She asked where Mariama was from, how long she had been in America, if she had children, how her business was doing.

“Business is up and down but we try,” Mariama said.

“But you couldn’t even have this business back in your country, right? Isn’t it wonderful that you get to come to the U.S. and now your kids can have a better life?”

Mariama looked surprised. “Yes.”

“Are women allowed to vote in your country?” Kelsey asked.

A longer pause from Mariama. “Yes.”

“What are you reading?” Kelsey turned to Ifemelu.