Americanah (48 page)

Curt leaned in and whispered, “That one, the one with the bad spray tan? She can’t even see her fucking boyfriend’s been checking you out since we walked in here.”

So he had noticed, and understood, the “Why her?” looks. It surprised her. Sometimes, in the middle of floating on his bubbly exuberance, he would have a flash of intuition, of surprising perception, and she would wonder if there were other more primal things she was missing about him. Such as when he told his mother, who had glanced at the Sunday newspaper and mumbled that some people were still looking for reasons to complain even though America was now color-blind, “Come on, Mother. What if ten people who look like Ifemelu suddenly walked in here to eat? You realize our fellow diners would be less than pleased?”

“Maybe,” his mother said, noncommittal, and shot an eyebrow-raise of accusation at Ifemelu, as though to say she knew very well who had turned her son into a pathetic race warrior. Ifemelu smiled a small, victorious smile.

And yet. Once, they visited his aunt, Claire, in Vermont, a woman who had an organic farm and walked around barefoot and talked about how connected to the earth it made her feel. Did Ifemelu have such an experience in Nigeria? she asked, and looked disappointed when Ifemelu said her mother would slap her if she ever stepped outside without shoes. Claire talked, throughout the visit, about her Kenyan safari, about Mandela’s grace, about her adoration for Harry Belafonte, and Ifemelu worried that she would lapse into Ebonics or Swahili. As they left her rambling house, Ifemelu said, “I bet she’s an
interesting woman if she’d just be herself. I don’t need her to over-assure me that she likes black people.”

And Curt said it was not about race, it was just that his aunt was hyperaware of difference, any difference.

“She would have done the exact same thing if I had turned up with a blond Russian,” he said.

Of course his aunt would not have done the same thing with a blond Russian. A blond Russian was white, and his aunt would not feel the need to prove that she liked people who looked like the blond Russian. But Ifemelu did not tell Curt this because she wished it were obvious to him.

When they walked into a restaurant with linen-covered tables, and the host looked at them and asked Curt, “Table for one?” Curt hastily told her the host did not mean it “like that.” And she wanted to ask him, “How else could the host have meant it?” When the strawberry-haired owner of the bed-and-breakfast in Montreal refused to acknowledge her as they checked in, a steadfast refusal, smiling and looking only at Curt, she wanted to tell Curt how slighted she felt, worse because she was unsure whether the woman disliked black people or liked Curt. But she did not, because he would tell her she was overreacting or tired or both. There were, simply, times that he saw and times that he was unable to see. She knew that she should tell him these thoughts, that not telling him cast a shadow over them both. Still, she chose silence. Until the day they argued about her magazine. He had picked up a copy of
Essence
from the pile on her coffee table, on a rare morning that they spent in her apartment, the air still thick with the aroma of the omelets she had made.

“This magazine’s kind of racially skewed,” he said.

“What?”

“Come on. Only black women featured?”

“You’re serious,” she said.

He looked puzzled. “Yeah.”

“We’re going to the bookstore.”

“What?”

“I need to show you something. Don’t ask.”

“Okay,” he said, unsure what this new adventure was but eager, with that childlike delight of his, to participate.

She drove to the bookstore in the Inner Harbor, took down copies of the different women’s magazines from the display shelf, and led the way to the café.

“Do you want a latte?” he asked.

“Yes, thanks.”

After they settled down on the chairs, paper cups in front of them, she said, “Let’s start with the covers.” She spread the magazines on the table, some on top of the others. “Look, all of them are white women. This one is supposed to be Hispanic, we know this because they wrote two Spanish words here, but she looks exactly like this white woman, no difference in her skin tone and hair and features. Now, I’m going to flip through, page by page, and you tell me how many black women you see.”

“Babe, come on,” Curt said, amused, leaning back, paper cup to his lips.

“Just humor me,” she said.

And so he counted. “Three black women,” he said, finally. “Or maybe four.
She
could be black.”

“So three black women in maybe two thousand pages of women’s magazines, and all of them are biracial or racially ambiguous, so they could also be Indian or Puerto Rican or something. Not one of them is dark. Not one of them looks like me, so I can’t get clues for makeup from these magazines. Look, this article tells you to pinch your cheeks for color because all their readers are supposed to have cheeks you can pinch for color. This tells you about different hair products for
everyone
—and ‘everyone’ means blonds, brunettes, and redheads. I am none of those. And this tells you about the best conditioners—for straight, wavy, and curly. No kinky. See what they mean by curly? My hair could never do that. This tells you about matching your eye color and eye shadow—blue, green, and hazel eyes. But my eyes are black so I can’t know what shadow works for me. This says that this pink lipstick is universal, but they mean universal if you are white because I would look like a golliwog if I tried that shade of pink. Oh, look, here is some progress. An advertisement for foundation. There are seven different shades for white skin and one generic chocolate shade, but that is progress. Now, let’s talk about what is racially skewed. Do you see why a magazine like
Essence
even exists?”

“Okay, babe, okay, I didn’t mean for it to be such a big deal,” he said.

That evening, Ifemelu wrote a long e-mail to Wambui about the bookstore, the magazines, the things she didn’t tell Curt, things unsaid and unfinished. It was a long e-mail, digging, questioning, unearthing. Wambui replied to say, “This is so raw and true. More people should read this. You should start a blog.”

Blogs were new, unfamiliar to her. But telling Wambui what happened was not satisfying enough; she longed for other listeners, and she longed to hear the stories of others. How many other people chose silence? How many other people had become black in America? How many had felt as though their world was wrapped in gauze? She broke up with Curt a few weeks after that, and she signed on to WordPress, and her blog was born. She would later change the name, but at first she called it
Raceteenth or Curious Observations by a Non-American Black on the Subject of Blackness in America
. Her first post was a better-punctuated version of the e-mail she had sent to Wambui. She referred to Curt as “The Hot White Ex.” A few hours later, she checked her blog stats. Nine people had read it. Panicked, she took down the post. The next day, she put it up again, modified and edited, ending with words she still so easily remembered. She recited those words now, at the dinner table of the French and American couple, while the Haitian poet stared, arms folded.

“Oh! What a wonderful story!” the French host said, her palm placed dramatically on her chest, looking around the table, as though to seek a response. But everyone else remained silent, their eyes averted and unsure.

For weeks, Ifemelu stumbled around, trying to remember the person she was before Curt. Their life together had happened to her, she would not have been able to imagine it if she had tried, and so, surely, she could return to what was before. But before was a slate-toned blur and she no longer knew who she had been then, what she had enjoyed, disliked, wanted. Her job bored her: she did the same bland things, writing press releases, editing press releases, copyediting press releases, her movements rote and numbing. Perhaps it had always been so and she had not noticed, because she was blinded by the brightness of Curt. Her apartment felt like a stranger’s home. On weekends, she went to Willow. Aunty Uju’s condo was in a cluster of stucco buildings, the neighborhood carefully landscaped, boulders placed at corners, and in the evenings, friendly people walked their handsome dogs. Aunty Uju had taken on a new lightheartedness; she wore a tiny anklet in the summer, a hopeful flash of gold on her leg. She had joined African Doctors for Africa, volunteering her time on two-week medical missions, and on her trip to Sudan, she met Kweku, a divorced Ghanaian doctor. “He treats me like a princess. Just like Curt treated you,” she told Ifemelu.

“I’m trying to forget him, Aunty. Stop talking about him!”

“Sorry,” Aunty Uju said, not looking sorry at all. She had told Ifemelu to do everything to save the relationship, because she would not find another man who would love her as Curt had. When Ifemelu told Dike that she had broken up with Curt, he said, “He was pretty cool, Coz. Are you going to be okay?”

“Yes, of course.”

Perhaps he sensed otherwise, and knew of the slight unsteadiness
of her spirit; most nights she lay in bed and cried, berating herself for what she had destroyed, then telling herself that she had no reason to be crying, and crying all the same. Dike brought up a tray to her room, on which he had placed a banana and a can of peanuts.

“Snack time!” he said, with a teasing grin; he still did not understand why anybody would want to eat both together. While Ifemelu ate, he sat on the bed and told her about school. He was playing basketball now, his grades had improved, he liked a girl called Autumn.