Americanah (32 page)

Ifemelu showed her the cover of the novel. She did not want to start a conversation. Especially not with Kelsey. She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.

“Is it good?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a novel, right? What’s it about?”

Why did people ask “What is it about?” as if a novel had to be about only one thing. Ifemelu disliked the question; she would have disliked it even if she did not feel, in addition to her depressed uncertainty, the beginning of a headache. “It may not be the kind of book you would like if you have particular tastes. He mixes prose and verse.”

“You have a great accent. Where are you from?”

“Nigeria.”

“Oh. Cool.” Kelsey had slender fingers; they would be perfect for advertising rings. “I’m going to Africa in the fall. Congo and Kenya and I’m going to try and see Tanzania too.”

“That’s nice.”

“I’ve been reading books to get ready. Everybody recommended
Things Fall Apart
, which I read in high school. It’s very good but sort of quaint, right? I mean like it didn’t help me understand modern Africa. I’ve just read this great book,
A Bend in the River
. It made me truly understand how modern Africa works.”

Ifemelu made a sound, halfway between a snort and a hum, but said nothing.

“It’s just so honest, the most honest book I’ve read about Africa,” Kelsey said.

Ifemelu shifted. Kelsey’s knowing tone grated. Her headache was getting worse. She did not think the novel was about Africa at all. It was about Europe, or the longing for Europe, about the battered self-image of an Indian man born in Africa, who felt so wounded, so diminished, by not having been born European, a member of a race which he had elevated for their ability to create, that he turned his imagined personal insufficiencies into an impatient contempt for Africa; in his knowing haughty attitude to the African, he could become, even if only fleetingly, a European. She leaned back on her seat and said this in measured tones. Kelsey looked startled; she had not expected a minilecture. Then, she said kindly, “Oh, well, I see why you would read the novel like that.”

“And I see why
you
would read it like you did,” Ifemelu said.

Kelsey raised her eyebrows, as though Ifemelu was one of those slightly unbalanced people who were best avoided. Ifemelu closed her eyes. She had the sensation of clouds gathering over her head. She felt faint. Perhaps it was the heat. She had ended a relationship in which she was not unhappy, closed a blog she enjoyed, and now she was chasing something she could not articulate clearly, even to herself. She could have blogged about Kelsey, too, this girl who somehow believed that she was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while other people read emotionally.

“You want to use hair?” Mariama asked Kelsey.

“Hair?”

Maraima held up a pack of the attachments in a see-through plastic wrapping. Kelsey’s eyes widened, and she glanced quickly around, at the pack from which Aisha took small sections for each braid, at the pack that Halima was only just unwrapping.

“Oh my God. So that’s how it’s done. I used to think African-American women with braided hair had such full hair!”

“No, we use attachments,” Mariama said, smiling.

“Maybe next time. I think I’ll just do my own hair today,” Kelsey said.

Her hair did not take long, seven cornrows, the too-fine hair already slackening in the plaits. “It’s great!” she said afterwards.

“Thank you,” Mariama said. “Please come back again. I can do another style for you next time.”

“Great!”

Ifemelu watched Mariama in the mirror, thinking of her own new American selves. It was with Curt that she had first looked in the mirror and, with a flush of accomplishment, seen someone else.

CURT LIKED
to say that it was love at first laugh. Whenever people asked how they met, even people they hardly knew, he would tell the story of how Kimberly had introduced them, he the cousin visiting from Maryland, she the Nigerian babysitter whom Kimberly talked so much about, and how taken he was by her deep voice, by the braid that had escaped from her rubber band. But it was when Taylor dashed into the den, wearing a blue cape and underwear, shouting, “I am Captain Underpants!” and she threw back her head and laughed, that he had fallen in love. Her laugh was so vibrant, shoulders shaking, chest heaving; it was the laugh of a woman who, when she laughed, really laughed. Sometimes when they were alone and she laughed, he would say teasingly, “That’s what got me. And you know what I thought? If she laughs like that, I wonder how she does
other things
.” He told her, too, that she had known he was smitten—how could she not know?—but pretended not to because she didn’t want a white man. In truth, she did not notice his interest. She had always been able to sense the desire of men, but not Curt’s, not at first. She still thought of Blaine, saw him walking along the platform at the New Haven train station, an apparition that filled her with a doomed yearning. She had not merely been attracted to Blaine, she had been arrested by Blaine, and in her mind he had become the perfect American partner that she would never have. Still, she had had other crushes since then, minor compared to that strike on the train, and had only just emerged from a crush on Abe in her ethics class, Abe who was white, Abe who liked her well enough, who thought her smart and funny, even attractive, but who did not see her as female. She was curious about Abe, interested
in Abe, but all the flirting she did was, to him, merely niceness: Abe would hook her up with his black friend, if he had a black friend. She was invisible to Abe. This crushed her crush, and perhaps also made her overlook Curt. Until one afternoon when she was playing catch with Taylor, who threw the ball high, too high, and it fell into the thicket near the neighbor’s cherry tree.

“I think we’ve lost that one,” Ifemelu said. The week before, a Frisbee had disappeared in there. Curt rose from the patio chair (he had been watching her every move, he told her later) and bounded into the bush, almost diving, as though into a pool, and emerged with the yellow ball.

“Yay! Uncle Curt!” Taylor said. But Curt did not give Taylor the ball; instead he held it out to Ifemelu. She saw in his eyes what he wanted her to see. She smiled and said, “Thank you.” Later in the kitchen, after she had put in a video for Taylor and was drinking a glass of water, he said, “This is where I ask you to dinner, but at this point, I’ll take anything I can get. May I buy you a drink, an ice cream, a meal, a movie ticket? This evening? This weekend before I go back to Maryland?”

He was looking at her with wonder, his head slightly lowered, and she felt an unfurling inside her. How glorious it was, to be so wanted, and by this man with the rakish metal band around his wrist and the cleft-chinned handsomeness of models in department store catalogues. She began to like him because he liked her. “You eat so delicately,” he told her on their first date, at an Italian restaurant in Old City. There was nothing particularly delicate about her raising a fork to her mouth but she liked that he thought that there was.

“So, I’m a rich white guy from Potomac, but I’m not nearly as much of an asshole as I’m supposed to be,” he said, in a way that made her feel he had said that before, and that it had been received well when he did. “Laura always says my mom is richer than God, but I’m not sure she is.”

He talked about himself with such gusto, as though determined to tell her everything there was to know, and all at once. His family had been hoteliers for a hundred years. He went to college in California to escape them. He graduated and traveled through Latin America and Asia. Something began to pull him homewards, perhaps his father’s death, perhaps his unhappiness with a relationship. So he moved, a
year ago, back to Maryland, started a software business just so that he would not be in the family business, bought an apartment in Baltimore, and went down to Potomac every Sunday to have brunch with his mother. He talked about himself with an uncluttered simplicity, assuming that she enjoyed his stories simply because he enjoyed them himself. His boyish enthusiasm fascinated her. His body was firm as they hugged good night in front of her apartment.

“I’m about to move in for a kiss in exactly three seconds,” he said. “A real kiss that can take us places, so if you don’t want that to happen, you might want to back off right now.”

She did not back off. The kiss was arousing in the way that unknown things are arousing. Afterwards he said, with urgency, “We have to tell Kimberly.”

“Tell Kimberly what?”

“That we’re dating.”

“We are?”

He laughed, and she laughed, too, although she had not been joking. He was open and gushing; cynicism did not occur to him. She felt charmed and almost helpless in the face of this, carried along by him; perhaps they were indeed dating after one kiss since he was so sure that they were.

Kimberly’s greeting to her the next day was “Hello there, lovebird.”

“So you’ll forgive your cousin for asking out the help?” Ifemelu asked.

Kimberly laughed and then, in an act that both surprised and moved Ifemelu, Kimberly hugged her. They moved apart awkwardly. Oprah was on the TV in the den and she heard the audience erupt in applause.

“Well,” Kimberly said, looking a little startled by the hug herself. “I just wanted to say I’m really … happy for you both.”

“Thank you. But it’s only been one date and there has been no consummation.”

Kimberly giggled and for a moment it felt as though they were high school girlfriends gossiping about boys. Ifemelu sometimes sensed, underneath the well-oiled sequences of Kimberly’s life, a flash of regret not only for things she longed for in the present but for things she had longed for in the past.

“You should have seen Curt this morning,” Kimberly said. “I’ve never seen him like this! He’s really excited.”

“About what?” Morgan asked. She was standing by the kitchen entrance, her prepubescent body stiff with hostility. Behind her, Taylor was trying to straighten the legs of a small plastic robot.

“Well, honey, you’re going to have to ask Uncle Curt.”

Curt came into the kitchen, smiling shyly, his hair slightly wet, wearing a fresh, light cologne. “Hey,” he said. He had called her at night to say he couldn’t sleep. “This is really corny but I am so full of you, it’s like I’m
breathing
you, you know?” he had said, and she thought that the romance novelists were wrong and it was men, not women, who were the true romantics.

“Morgan is asking why you seem so excited,” Kimberly said.

“Well, Morg, I’m excited because I have a new girlfriend, somebody really special who you might know.”

Ifemelu wished Curt would remove the arm he had thrown around her shoulder; they were not announcing their engagement, for goodness’ sake. Morgan was staring at them. Ifemelu saw Curt through her eyes: the dashing uncle who traveled the world and told all the really funny jokes at Thanksgiving dinner, the cool one young enough to get her, but old enough to try and make her mother get her.

“Ifemelu is your girlfriend?” Morgan asked.

“Yes,” Curt said.

“That’s disgusting,” Morgan said, looking genuinely disgusted.

“Morgan!” Kimberly said.

Morgan turned and stalked off upstairs.

“She has a crush on Uncle Curt, and now the babysitter steps onto her turf. It can’t be easy,” Ifemelu said.

Taylor, who seemed happy both with the news and with having straightened out the robot’s legs, said, “Are you and Ifemelu going to get married and have a baby, Uncle Curt?”

“Well, buddy, right now we are just going to be spending a lot of time together, to get to know each other.”

“Oh, okay,” Taylor said, slightly dampened, but when Don came home, Taylor ran into his arms and said, “Ifemelu and Uncle Curt are going to get married and have a baby!”

“Oh,” Don said.

His surprise reminded Ifemelu of Abe in her ethics class: Don thought she was attractive and interesting, and thought Curt was attractive and interesting, but it did not occur to him to think of both of them, together, entangled in the delicate threads of romance.