Americanah (63 page)

“You went to Wellson in Philly? I went to Temple?” Doris said, as though to establish right away that they were members of the same superior club. “You’re going to be sharing this office with me and Zemaye. She’s the assistant editor, and she’s out on assignment until this afternoon, or maybe longer? She always stays as long as she wants.”

Ifemelu caught the malice. It was not subtle; Doris had meant for it to be caught.

“I thought you could, like, just spend this week getting used to
things? See what we do? And then next week you can start some assignments?” Doris said.

“Okay,” Ifemelu said.

The office itself, a large room with four desks, on each of which sat a computer, looked bare and untested, as though it was everybody’s first day at work. Ifemelu was not sure what would make it look otherwise, perhaps pictures of family on the desks, or just more things, more files and papers and staplers, proof of its being inhabited.

“I had a great job in New York, but I decided to move back and settle down here?” Doris said. “Like, family pressure to settle down and stuff, you know? Like I’m the only daughter? When I first got back one of my aunts looked at me and said, ‘I can get you a job at a good bank, but you have to cut off that dada hair.’ ” She shook her head from side to side in mockery as she mimicked a Nigerian accent. “I swear to God this city is full of banks that just want you to be reasonably attractive in a kind of predictable way and you have a job in customer service? Anyway, I took this job because I’m interested in the magazine business? And this is like a good place to meet people, because of all the events we get to go to, you know?” Doris sounded as if she and Ifemelu somehow shared the same plot, the same view of the world. Ifemelu felt a small resentment at this, the arrogance of Doris’s certainty that she, too, would of course feel the same way as Doris.

Just before lunchtime, into the office walked a woman in a tight pencil skirt and patent shoes high as stilts, her straightened hair sleekly pulled back. She was not pretty, her facial features created no harmony, but she carried herself as though she was. Nubile. She made Ifemelu think of that word, with her shapely slenderness, her tiny waist and the unexpected high curves of her breasts.

“Hi. You’re Ifemelu, right? Welcome to
Zoe
. I’m Zemaye.” She shook Ifemelu’s hand, her face carefully neutral.

“Hi, Zemaye. It’s nice to meet you. You have a lovely name,” Ifemelu said.

“Thank you.” She was used to hearing it. “I hope you don’t like cold rooms.”

“Cold rooms?”

“Yes. Doris likes to put the AC on too high and I have to wear
a sweater in the office, but now that you are here sharing the office, maybe we can vote,” Zemaye said, settling down at her desk.

“What are you talking about? Since when do you have to wear a sweater in the office?” Doris asked.

Zemaye raised her eyebrows and pulled out a thick shawl from her drawer.

“It’s the humidity that’s just so crazy?” Doris said, turning to Ifemelu, expecting agreement. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe when I first came back?”

Zemaye, too, turned to Ifemelu. “I am a Delta girl, homemade, born and bred. So I did not grow up with air conditioners and I can breathe without a room being cold.” She spoke in an impassive tone, and everything she said was delivered evenly, never rising or falling.

“Well, I don’t know about cold?” Doris said. “Most offices in Lagos have air conditioners?”

“Not turned to the lowest temperature,” Zemaye said.

“You’ve never said anything about it?”

“I tell you all the time, Doris.”

“I mean that it actually prevents you from working?”

“It’s cold, full stop,” Zemaye said.

Their mutual dislike was a smoldering, stalking leopard in the room.

“I don’t like cold,” Ifemelu said. “I think I would freeze if the AC was turned on to the lowest.”

Doris blinked. She looked not merely betrayed but surprised that she had been betrayed. “Well, okay, we can turn it off and on throughout the day? I have a hard time breathing without the AC and the windows are so damn small?”

“Okay,” Ifemelu said.

Zemaye said nothing; she had turned to her computer, as though indifferent to this small victory and Ifemelu felt unaccountably disappointed. She had taken sides, after all, boldly standing with Zemaye, and yet Zemaye remained expressionless, hard to read. Ifemelu wondered what her story was. Zemaye intrigued her.

Later, Doris and Zemaye were looking over photographs spread out on Doris’s table, of a portly woman wearing tight ruffled clothes, when Zemaye said, “Excuse me, I’m pressed,” and hurried to the door, her
supple movements making Ifemelu want to lose weight. Doris’s eyes followed her too.

“Don’t you just hate it how people say ‘I’m pressed’ or ‘I want to ease myself’ when they want to go to the bathroom?” Doris asked.

Ifemelu laughed. “I know!”

“I guess ‘bathroom’ is very American. But there’s ‘toilet,’ ‘restroom,’ ‘the ladies.’ ”

“I never liked ‘the ladies.’ I like ‘toilet.’ ”

“Me too!” Doris said. “And don’t you just hate it when people here use ‘on’ as a verb? On the light!”

“You know what I can’t stand? When people say ‘take’ instead of ‘drink.’ I will take wine. I don’t take beer.”

“Oh God, I know!”

They were laughing when Zemaye came back in, and she looked at Ifemelu with her eerily neutral expression and said, “You people must be discussing the next Been-To meeting.”

“What’s that?” Ifemelu asked.

“Doris talks about them all the time, but she can’t invite me because it is only for people who have come from abroad.” If there was mockery in Zemaye’s tone, and there had to be, she kept it under her flat delivery.

“Oh, please. ‘Been-To’ is like so outdated? This is not 1960,” Doris said. Then to Ifemelu, she said, “I was actually going to tell you about it. It’s called the Nigerpolitan Club and it’s just a bunch of people who have recently moved back, some from England, but mostly from the U.S.? Really low-key, just like sharing experiences and networking? I bet you’ll know some of the people. You should totally come?”

“Yes, I’d like to.”

Doris got up and took her handbag. “I have to go to Aunty Onenu’s house.”

After she left, the room was silent, Zemaye typing at her computer, Ifemelu browsing the Internet, and wondering what Zemaye was thinking.

Finally, Zemaye said, “So you were a famous race blogger in America. When Aunty Onenu told us, I didn’t understand.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why race?”

“I discovered race in America and it fascinated me.”

“Hmm,” Zemaye murmured, as though she thought this, discovering race, an exotic and self-indulgent phenomenon. “Aunty Onenu said your boyfriend is a black American and he is coming soon?”

Ifemelu was surprised. Aunty Onenu had asked about her personal life, with a casualness that was also insistent, and she had told her the false story of Blaine, thinking that her boss had no business with her personal life anyway, and now it seemed that personal life had been shared with other staff. Perhaps she was being too American about it, fixating on privacy for its own sake. What did it really matter if Zemaye knew of Blaine?

“Yes. He should be here by next month,” she said.

“Why is it only black people that are criminals over there?”

Ifemelu opened her mouth and closed it. Here she was, famous race blogger, and she was lost for words.

“I love
Cops
. It is because of that show that I have DSTV,” Zemaye said. “And all the criminals are black people.”

“It’s like saying every Nigerian is a 419,” Ifemelu said finally. She sounded too limp, too insufficient.

“But it is true, all of us have small 419 in our blood!” Zemaye smiled with what seemed to be, for the first time, a real amusement in her eyes. Then she added, “Sorry o. I did not mean that your boyfriend is a criminal. I was just asking.”

Ifemelu asked Ranyinudo to come with her and Doris to the Nigerpolitan meeting.

“I don’t have energy for you returnees, please,” Ranyinudo said. “Besides, Ndudi is finally back from all his traveling up and down and we’re going out.”

“Good luck choosing a man over your friend, you witch.”

“Yes o. Are you the person that will marry me? Meanwhile I told Don I am going out with you, so make sure you don’t go anywhere that he might go.” Ranyinudo was laughing. She was still seeing Don, waiting to make sure that Ndudi was “serious” before she stopped, and she hoped, too, that Don would get her the new car before then.

The Nigerpolitan Club meeting: a small cluster of people drinking champagne in paper cups, at the poolside of a home in Osborne Estate, chic people, all dripping with savoir faire, each nursing a self-styled quirkiness—a ginger-colored Afro, a T-shirt with a graphic of Thomas Sankara, oversize handmade earrings that hung like pieces of modern art. Their voices burred with foreign accents.
You can’t find a decent smoothie in this city! Oh my God, were you at that conference? What this country needs is an active civil society
. Ifemelu knew some of them. She chatted with Bisola and Yagazie, both of whom had natural hair, worn in a twist-out, a halo of spirals framing their faces. They talked about hair salons here, where the hairdressers struggled and fumbled to comb natural hair, as though it were an alien eruption, as though their own hair was not the same way before it was defeated by chemicals.

“The salon girls are always like, ‘Aunty, you don’t want to relax your hair?’ It’s ridiculous that Africans don’t value our natural hair in Africa,” Yagazie said.

“I know,” Ifemelu said, and she caught the righteousness in her voice, in all their voices. They were the sanctified, the returnees, back home with an extra gleaming layer. Ikenna joined them, a lawyer who had lived outside Philadelphia and whom she had met at a Blogging While Brown convention. And Fred joined them too. He had introduced himself to Ifemelu earlier, a pudgy, well-groomed man. “I lived in Boston until last year,” he said, in a falsely low-key way, because “Boston” was code for Harvard (otherwise he would say MIT or Tufts or anywhere else), just as another woman said, “I was in New Haven,” in that coy manner that pretended not to be coy, which meant that she had been at Yale. Other people joined them, all encircled by a familiarity, because they could reach so easily for the same references. Soon they were laughing and listing the things they missed about America.

“Low-fat soy milk, NPR, fast Internet,” Ifemelu said.

“Good customer service, good customer service, good customer service,” Bisola said. “Folks here behave as if they are doing you a favor by serving you. The high-end places are okay, not great, but the regular restaurants? Forget it. The other day I asked a waiter if I could get boiled yam with a different sauce than was on the menu and he just looked at me and said no. Hilarious.”

“But the American customer service can be so annoying. Someone hovering around and bothering you all the time.
Are you still working on that?
Since when did eating become work?” Yagazie said.

“I miss a decent vegetarian place?” Doris said, and then talked about her new house help who could not make a simple sandwich, about how she had ordered a vegetarian spring roll at a restaurant in Victoria Island, bit in and tasted chicken, and the waiter, when summoned, just smiled and said, “Maybe they put chicken today.” There was laughter. Fred said a good vegetarian place would open soon, now that there was so much new investment in the country; somebody would figure out that there was a vegetarian market to cater to.

“A vegetarian restaurant? Impossible. There are only four vegetarians in this country, including Doris,” Bisola said.

“You’re not vegetarian, are you?” Fred asked Ifemelu. He just wanted to talk to her. She had looked up from time to time to find his eyes on her.

“No,” she said.

“Oh, there’s this new place that opened on Akin Adesola,” Bisola said. “The brunch is really good. They have the kinds of things we can eat. We should go next Sunday.”

They have the kinds of things we can eat
. An unease crept up on Ifemelu. She was comfortable here, and she wished she were not. She wished, too, that she was not so interested in this new restaurant, did not perk up, imagining fresh green salads and steamed still-firm vegetables. She loved eating all the things she had missed while away, jollof rice cooked with a lot of oil, fried plantains, boiled yams, but she longed, also, for the other things she had become used to in America, even quinoa, Blaine’s specialty, made with feta and tomatoes. This was what she hoped she had not become but feared that she had: a “they have the kinds of things we can eat” kind of person.

Fred was talking about Nollywood, speaking a little too loudly. “Nollywood is really public theater, and if you understand it like that, then it is more tolerable. It’s for public consumption, even mass participation, not the kind of individual experience that film is.” He was looking at her, soliciting her agreement with his eyes: they were not supposed to watch Nollywood, people like them, and if they did, then only as amusing anthropology.