Americanah (62 page)

“What is this nonsense? Look at how rough this is! One tile is broken!
This is even worse than the old tiles! How can you be happy with this useless work?” she asked the man.

He shrugged; he clearly thought she was making unnecessary trouble. “I am happy with the work, aunty.”

“You want me to pay you?”

A small smile. “Ah, aunty, but I have finish the work.”

The estate agent intervened. “Don’t worry, ma, he will repair the broken one.”

The tile man looked reluctant. “But I have finish the work. The problem is the tile is breaking very easily. It is the quality of tile.”

“You have finished? You do this rubbish job and say you have finished?” Her anger was growing, her voice rising and hardening. “I will not pay you what we agreed, no way, because you have not done what we agreed.”

The tile man was staring at her, eyes narrowed.

“And if you want trouble, trust me, you will get it,” Ifemelu said. “The first thing I will do is call the commissioner of police and they will lock you up in Alagbon Close!” She was screaming now. “Do you know who I am? You don’t know who I am, that is why you can do this kind of rubbish work for me!”

The man looked cowed. She had surprised herself. Where had that come from, the false bravado, the easy resort to threats? A memory came to her, undiminished after so many years, of the day Aunty Uju’s General died, how Aunty Uju had threatened his relatives. “No, don’t go, just stay there,” she had said to them. “Stay there while I go and call my boys from the army barracks.”

The estate agent said, “Aunty, don’t worry, he will do the work again.”

Later, Ranyinudo told her, “You are no longer behaving like an Americanah!” and despite herself, Ifemelu felt pleased to hear this.

“The problem is that we no longer have artisans in this country,” Ranyinudo said. “Ghanaians are better. My boss is building a house and he is using only Ghanaians to do his finishing. Nigerians will do rubbish for you. They do not take their time to finish things properly. It’s terrible. But Ifem, you should have called Obinze. He would have sorted everything out for you. This is what he does, after all. He must
have all kinds of contacts. You should have called him before you even started looking for a flat. He could have given you reduced rent in one of his properties, even a free flat
sef
. I don’t know what you are waiting for before you call him.”

Ifemelu shook her head. Ranyinudo, for whom men existed only as sources of things. She could not imagine calling Obinze to ask him for reduced rent in one of his properties. Still, she did not know why she had not called him at all. She had thought of it many times, often bringing out her phone to scroll to his number, and yet she had not called. He still sent e-mails, saying he hoped she was fine, or he hoped Dike was doing better, and she replied to a few, always briefly, replies he would assume were sent from America.

She spent weekends with her parents, in the old flat, happy simply to sit and look at the walls that had witnessed her childhood; only when she began to eat her mother’s stew, an oil layer floating on top of the pureed tomatoes, did she realize how much she had missed it. The neighbors stopped by to greet her, the daughter back from America. Many of them were new and unfamiliar, but she felt a sentimental fondness for them, because they reminded her of the others she had known, Mama Bomboy downstairs who had once pulled her ear when she was in primary school and said, “You do not greet your elders,” Oga Tony upstairs who smoked on his verandah, the trader next door who called her, for reasons she never knew, “champion.”

“They are just coming to see if you will give them anything,” her mother said, in a whisper, as if the neighbors who had all left might overhear. “They all expected me to buy something for them when we went to America, so I went to the market and bought small-small bottles of perfume and told them it was from America!”

Her parents liked to talk about their visit to Baltimore, her mother about the sales, her father about how he could not understand the news because Americans now used expressions like “divvy up” and “nuke” in serious news.

“It is the final infantilization and informalization of America! It portends the end of the American empire, and they are killing themselves from within!” he pronounced.

Ifemelu humored them, listening to their observations and memories, and hoped that neither of them would bring up Blaine; she had told them a work issue had delayed his visit.

She did not have to lie to her old friends about Blaine, but she did,
telling them she was in a serious relationship and he would join her in Lagos soon. It surprised her how quickly, during reunions with old friends, the subject of marriage came up, a waspish tone in the voices of the unmarried, a smugness in those of the married. Ifemelu wanted to talk about the past, about the teachers they had mocked and the boys they had liked, but marriage was always the preferred topic—whose husband was a dog, who was on a desperate prowl, posting too many dressed-up pictures of herself on Facebook, whose man had disappointed her after four years and left her to marry a small girl he could control. (When Ifemelu told Ranyinudo that she had run into an old classmate, Vivian, at the bank, Ranyinudo’s first question was “Is she married?”) And so she used Blaine as armor. If they knew of Blaine, then the married friends would not tell her “Don’t worry, your own will come, just pray about it,” and the unmarried friends would not assume that she was a member of the self-pity party of the single. There was, also, a strained nostalgia in those reunions, some in Ranyinudo’s flat, some in hers, some in restaurants, because she struggled to find, in these adult women, some remnants from her past that were often no longer there.

Tochi was unrecognizable now, so fat that even her nose had changed shape, her double chin hanging below her face like a bread roll. She came to Ifemelu’s flat with her baby in one hand, her BlackBerry in the other, and a house help trailing behind, holding a canvas bag full of bottles and bibs. “Madam America” was Tochi’s greeting, and then she spoke, for the rest of her visit, in defensive spurts, as though she had come determined to battle Ifemelu’s Americanness.

“I buy only British clothes for my baby because American ones fade after one wash,” she said. “My husband wanted us to move to America but I refused, because the education system is so bad. An international agency rated it the lowest in the developed countries, you know.”

Tochi had always been perceptive and thoughtful; it was Tochi who had intervened with calm reason whenever Ifemelu and Ranyinudo argued in secondary school. In Tochi’s changed persona, in her need to defend against imagined slights, Ifemelu saw a great personal unhappiness. And so she appeased Tochi, putting America down, talking only about the things she, too, disliked about America, exaggerating her non-American accent, until the conversation became an enervating
charade. Finally Tochi’s baby vomited, a yellowish liquid that the house help hastily wiped, and Tochi said, “We should go, baby wants to sleep.” Ifemelu, relieved, watched her leave. People changed, sometimes they changed too much.

Priye had not changed so much as hardened, her personality coated in chrome. She arrived at Ranyinudo’s flat with a pile of newspapers, full of photographs of the big wedding she had just planned. Ifemelu imagined how people would talk about Priye. She is doing well, they would say, she is really doing well.

“My phone has not stopped ringing since last week!” Priye said triumphantly, pushing back the auburn straight weave that fell across one eye; each time she raised a hand to push back the hair, which invariably fell back again across her eye since it had been sewn in to do so, Ifemelu was distracted by the brittle pink color of her nails. Priye had the sure, slightly sinister manner of someone who could get other people to do what she wanted. And she glittered—her yellow-gold earrings, the metal studs on her designer bag, the sparkly bronze lipstick.

“It was a very successful wedding: we had seven governors in attendance, seven!” she said.

“And none of them knew the couple, I’m sure,” Ifemelu said drily.

Priye gestured, a shrug, an upward flick of her palm, to show how irrelevant that was.

“Since when has the success of weddings been measured by how many governors attend?” Ifemelu asked.

“It shows you’re connected. It shows prestige. Do you know how powerful governors in this country are? Executive power is not a small thing,” Priye said.

“Me, I want as many governors as possible to come to my own wedding o. It shows levels, serious levels,” Ranyinudo said. She was studying the photographs, turning the newspaper pages slowly. “Priye, you heard Mosope is getting married in two weeks?”

“Yes. She approached me, but their budget was too small for me. That girl never understood the first rule of life in this Lagos. You do not marry the man you love. You marry the man who can best maintain you.”

“Amen!” Ranyinudo said, laughing. “But sometimes one man can be both o. This is the season of weddings. When will it be my turn,
Father Lord?” She glanced upwards, raised her hands as though in prayer.

“I’ve told Ranyinudo that I’ll do her wedding at no commission,” Priye said to Ifemelu. “And I’ll do yours too, Ifem.”

“Thank you, but I think Blaine will prefer a governor-free event,” Ifemelu said, and they all laughed. “We’ll probably do something small on a beach.”

Sometimes she believed her own lies. She could see it now, she and Blaine wearing white on a beach in the Caribbean, surrounded by a few friends, running to a makeshift altar of sand and flowers, and Shan watching and hoping one of them would trip and fall.

Onikan was the old Lagos, a slice of the past, a temple to the faded splendor of the colonial years; Ifemelu remembered how houses here had sagged, unpainted and untended, and mold crept up the walls, and gate hinges rusted and atrophied. But developers were renovating and dismantling now, and on the ground floor of a newly refurbished three-story building, heavy glass doors opened into a reception area painted a terra-cotta orange, where a pleasant-faced receptionist, Esther, sat, and behind her loomed giant words in silver:
ZOE MAGAZINE
. Esther was full of small ambitions. Ifemelu imagined her combing through the piles of secondhand shoes and clothes in the side stalls of Tejuosho market, finding the best pieces and then haggling tirelessly with the trader. She wore neatly pressed clothes and scuffed but carefully polished high heels, read books like
Praying Your Way to Prosperity
, and was superior with the drivers and ingratiating with the editors. “This your earring is very fine, ma,” she said to Ifemelu. “If you ever want to throw it away, please give it to me to help you throw it away.” And she ceaselessly invited Ifemelu to her church.

“Will you come this Sunday, ma? My pastor is a powerful man of God. So many people have testimonies of miracles that have happened in their lives because of him.”

“Why do you think I need to come to your church, Esther?”

“You will like it, ma. It is a spirit-filled church.”

At first, the “ma” had made Ifemelu uncomfortable, Esther was at least five years older than she was, but status, of course, surpassed age: she was the features editor, with a car and a driver and the spirit of
America hanging over her head, and even Esther expected her to play the madam. And so she did, complimenting Esther and joking with Esther, but always in that manner that was both playful and patronizing, and sometimes giving Esther things, an old handbag, an old watch. Just as she did with her driver, Ayo. She complained about his speeding, threatened to fire him for being late again, asked him to repeat her instructions to make sure he had understood. Yet she always heard the unnatural high pitch of her voice when she said these things, unable fully to convince even herself of her own madamness.

Aunty Onenu liked to say, “Most of my staff are foreign graduates while that woman at
Glass
hires riffraff who cannot punctuate sentences!” Ifemelu imagined her saying this at a dinner party, “most of my staff” making the magazine sound like a large, busy operation, although it was an editorial staff of three, an administrative staff of four, and only Ifemelu and Doris, the editor, had foreign degrees. Doris, thin and hollow-eyed, a vegetarian who announced that she was a vegetarian as soon as she possibly could, spoke with a teenage American accent that made her sentences sound like questions, except for when she was speaking to her mother on the phone; then her English took on a flat, stolid Nigerianness. Her long sisterlocks were sun-bleached a coppery tone, and she dressed unusually—white socks and brogues, men’s shirts tucked into pedal pushers—which she considered original, and which everyone in the office forgave her for because she had come back from abroad. She wore no makeup except for bright-red lipstick, and it gave her face a certain shock value, that slash of crimson, which was probably her intent, but her unadorned skin tended towards ashy gray and Ifemelu’s first urge, when they met, was to suggest a good moisturizer.