Americanah (56 page)

Aunty Uju had taken up yoga. She was on her hands and knees, back arched high, on a bright blue mat on the basement floor, while Ifemelu lay on the couch, eating a chocolate bar and watching her.

“How many of those things have you eaten? And since when do you eat regular chocolate? I thought you and Blaine eat only organic, fair trade.”

“I bought them at the train station.”

“Them? How many?”

“Ten.”

“Ahn-ahn! Ten!”

Ifemelu shrugged. She had already eaten them all, but she would not tell Aunty Uju that. It had given her pleasure, buying chocolate bars from the newsstand, cheap bars filled with sugar and chemicals and other genetically modified ghastly things.

“Oh, so because you are quarreling with Blaine, you are now eating the chocolate he doesn’t like?” Aunty Uju laughed.

Dike came downstairs and looked at his mother, her arms now up in the air, warrior position. “Mom, you look ridiculous.”

“Didn’t your friend say that your mother was hot, the other day? This is why.”

Dike shook his head. “Coz, I need to show you something on YouTube, this hilarious video.”

Ifemelu got up.

“Has Dike told you about the computer incident at school?” Aunty Uju asked.

“No, what?” Ifemelu asked.

“The principal called me on Monday to say that Dike hacked into the school’s computer network on Saturday. This is a boy who was with me all day on Saturday. We went to Hartford to visit Ozavisa. We were there the whole day and the boy did not go near a computer. When I asked why they thought it was him, they said they got information. Imagine, you just wake up and blame my son. The boy is not even good with computers. I thought we had left them behind in that bush town. Kweku wants us to lodge a formal complaint, but I don’t think it’s worth the time. They have now said they no longer suspect him.”

“I don’t even know
how
to hack,” Dike said drily.

“Why would they do this sort of rubbish?” Ifemelu asked.

“You have to blame the black kid first,” he said, and laughed.

Later, he told her how his friends would say, “Hey, Dike, got some weed?” and how funny it was. He told her about the pastor at church, a white woman, who had said hello to all the other kids but when she came to him, she said, “What’s up, bro?” “I feel like I have vegetables instead of ears, like large broccoli sticking out of my head,” he said, laughing. “So of course it had to be me that hacked into the school network.”

“Those people in your school are fools,” Ifemelu said.

“So funny how you say that word, Coz,
fools
.” He paused and then repeated her words, “Those people in your school are fools,” in a good mimicry of a Nigerian accent. She told him the story of the Nigerian pastor who, while giving a sermon in a church in America, said something about a beach but because of his accent, his parishioners thought he had said “bitch” and they wrote to his bishop to complain. Dike laughed and laughed. It became one of their stock jokes. “Hey, Coz, I just want to spend a summer day at the bitch,” he would say.

FOR NINE DAYS
, Blaine did not take her calls. Finally he answered the phone, his voice muffled.

“Can I come this weekend so we can cook coconut rice? I’ll do the cooking,” she said. Before he said “Okay,” she sensed an intake of breath and she wondered if he was surprised that she dared to suggest coconut rice.

SHE WATCHED
Blaine cutting the onions, watched his long fingers and recalled them on her body, tracing lines on her collarbone, and on the darkened skin below her navel. He looked up and asked if the slices were a good size and she said, “The onion is fine,” and thought how he had always known the right size for onions, slicing them so precisely, how he had always steamed the rice although she was going to do it now. He broke the coconut against the sink and let the water out before he began to nudge the white meat off the shell with a knife. Her hands shook as she poured rice into the boiling water and, as she watched the narrow basmati grains begin to swell, she wondered if they were failing at this, their reconciliatory meal. She checked the chicken on the stove. The spices wafted up when she opened the pot—ginger and curry and bay leaves—and she told him, unnecessarily, that it looked good.

“I didn’t overspice it like you do,” he said. She felt a momentary anger and wanted to say that it was unfair of him to hold out forgiveness like this, but instead she asked if he thought she should add some water. He kept grating the coconuts and said nothing. She watched the coconut crumble into white dust; it saddened her to think that it would never be a whole coconut again, and she reached out and held Blaine from the back, wrapped her arms around his chest, felt the warmth through his sweatshirt, but he eased away and said he had to finish before the rice got too soft. She walked across the living room to look out of the window, at the clock tower, high and regal, imposing itself on the other buildings of the Yale campus below, and saw the first snow flurries swirling through the late evening air, as though flung from above, and she remembered her first winter with him, when everything had seemed burnished and unendingly new.

They did not fight again until the relationship ended, but in the time of Blaine’s stoniness, when Ifemelu burrowed into herself and ate whole chocolate bars, her feelings for him changed. She still admired him, his moral fiber, his life of clean lines, but now it was admiration for a person separate from her, a person far away. And her body had changed. In bed, she did not turn to him full of a raw wanting as she used to do, and when he reached for her, her first instinct was to roll away. They kissed often, but always with her lips firmly pursed; she did not want his tongue in her mouth. Their union was leached of passion, but there was a new passion, outside of themselves, that united them in an intimacy they had never had before, an unfixed, unspoken, intuitive intimacy: Barack Obama. They agreed, without any prodding, without the shadows of obligation or compromise, on Barack Obama.

At first, even though she wished America would elect a black man as president, she thought it impossible, and she could not imagine Obama as president of the United States; he seemed too slight, too skinny, a man who would be blown away by the wind. Hillary Clinton was sturdier. Ifemelu liked to watch Clinton on television, in her square trouser suits, her face a mask of resolve, her prettiness disguised, because that was the only way to convince the world that she was able. Ifemelu liked her. She wished her victory, willed good fortune her way, until the morning she picked up Barack Obama’s book,
Dreams from My Father
, which Blaine had just finished and left lying on the bookshelf, some of its pages folded in. She examined the photographs on the cover, the young Kenyan woman staring befuddled at the camera, arms enclosing her son, and the young American man, jaunty of manner,
holding his daughter to his chest. Ifemelu would later remember the moment she decided to read the book. Just to see. She might not have read it if Blaine had recommended it, because she more and more avoided the books he liked. But he had not recommended it, he had merely left it on the shelf, next to a pile of other books he had finished but meant to go back to. She read
Dreams from My Father
in a day and a half, sitting up on the couch, Nina Simone playing on Blaine’s iPod speaker. She was absorbed and moved by the man she met in those pages, an inquiring and intelligent man, a kind man, a man so utterly, helplessly, winningly humane. He reminded her of Obinze’s expression for people he liked.
Obi ocha
. A clean heart. She believed Barack Obama. When Blaine came home, she sat at the dining table, watching him chop fresh basil in the kitchen, and said, “If only the man who wrote this book could be the president of America.”

Blaine’s knife stopped moving. He looked up, eyes lit, as though he had not dared hope she would believe the same thing that he believed, and she felt between them the first pulse of a shared passion. They clutched each other in front of the television when Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses. The first battle, and he had won. Their hope was radiating, exploding into possibility: Obama could actually win this thing. And then, as though choreographed, they began to worry. They worried that something would derail him, crash his fast-moving train. Every morning, Ifemelu woke up and checked to make sure that Obama was still alive. That no scandal had emerged, no story dug up from his past. She would turn on her computer, her breath still, her heart frantic in her chest, and then, reassured that he was alive, she would read the latest news about him, quickly and greedily, seeking information and reassurance, multiple windows minimized at the bottom of the screen. Sometimes, in chat rooms, she wilted as she read the posts about Obama, and she would get up and move away from her computer, as though the laptop itself were the enemy, and stand by the window to hide her tears even from herself.
How can a monkey be president? Somebody do us a favor and put a bullet in this guy. Send him back to the African jungle. A black man will never be in the white house, dude, it’s called the white house for a reason
. She tried to imagine the people who wrote those posts, under monikers like SuburbanMom231 and NormanRockwellRocks, sitting at their desks, a cup of coffee beside them, and their children about to
come home on the school bus in a glow of innocence. The chat rooms made her blog feel inconsequential, a comedy of manners, a mild satire about a world that was anything but mild. She did not blog about the vileness that seemed to have multiplied each morning she logged on, more chat rooms springing up, more vitriol flourishing, because to do so would be to spread the words of people who abhorred not the man that Barack Obama was, but the idea of him as president. She blogged, instead, about his policy positions, in a recurring post titled “This Is Why Obama Will Do It Better,” often adding links to his website, and she blogged, too, about Michelle Obama. She gloried in the offbeat dryness of Michelle Obama’s humor, the confidence in her long-limbed carriage, and then she mourned when Michelle Obama was clamped, flattened, made to sound tepidly wholesome in interviews. Still, there was, in Michelle Obama’s overly arched eyebrows and in her belt worn higher on her waist than tradition would care for, a glint of her old self. It was this that drew Ifemelu, the absence of apology, the promise of honesty.