Americanah (65 page)

Esther came in to tell Aunty Onenu that her daughter had arrived.

Esther’s black high heels were shaky, and as she walked past, Ifemelu worried that the shoes would collapse and sprain Esther’s ankles. Earlier in the morning, Esther had told Ifemelu, “Aunty, your hair is jaga-jaga,” with a kind of sad honesty, about what Ifemelu considered an attractive twist-out style.

“Ehn, she is already here?” Aunty Onenu said. “Girls, please finish the meeting. I am taking my daughter to shop for a dress and I have an afternoon meeting with our distributors.”

Ifemelu was tired, bored. She thought, again, of starting a blog. Her phone was vibrating, Ranyinudo calling, and ordinarily she would have waited until the meeting was over to call her back. But she said, “Sorry, I have to take this, international call,” and hurried out. Ranyinudo was complaining about Don. “He said I am not the sweet girl I used to be. That I’ve changed. Meanwhile, I know he has bought the jeep for me and has even cleared it at the port, but now he doesn’t want to give it to me.”

Ifemelu thought about the expression “sweet girl.” Sweet girl meant that, for a long time, Don had molded Ranyinudo into a malleable shape, or that she had allowed him to think he had.

“What about Ndudi?”

Ranyinudo sighed loudly. “We haven’t talked since Sunday. Today he will forget to call me. Tomorrow he will be too busy. And so I told him that it’s not acceptable. Why should I be making all the effort? Now he is sulking. He can never initiate a conversation like an adult, or agree that he did something wrong.”

Later, back in the office, Esther came in to say that a Mr. Tolu wanted to see Zemaye.

“Is that the photographer you did the tailors article with?” Doris asked.

“Yes. He’s late. He has been dodging my calls for days,” Zemaye said.

Doris said, “You need to handle that and make sure I have the images by tomorrow afternoon? I need everything to get to the printer before three? I don’t want a repeat of the printer’s delay, especially now that
Glass
is printing in South Africa?”

“Okay.” Zemaye shook her mouse. “The server is so slow today. I just need to send this thing. Esther, tell him to wait.”

“Yes, ma.”

“You are feeling better, Esther?” Doris asked.

“Yes, ma, Thank you, ma.” Esther curtsied, Yoruba-style. She had been standing by the door as though waiting to be dismissed, listening in on the conversation. “I am taking the medicine for typhoid.”

“You have typhoid?” Ifemelu asked.

“Didn’t you notice how she looked on Monday? I gave her some money and told her to go to the hospital, not to a chemist?” Doris said. Ifemelu wished that
she
had noticed that Esther was unwell.

“Sorry, Esther,” Ifemelu said.

“Thank you, ma.”

“Esther, sorry o,” Zemaye said. “I saw her dull face, but I thought she was just fasting. You know she’s always fasting. She will fast and fast until God gives her a husband.”

Esther giggled.

“I remember I had this really bad case of typhoid when I was in
secondary school,” Ifemelu said. “It was terrible, and it turned out I was taking an antibiotic that wasn’t strong enough. What are you taking, Esther?”

“Medicine, ma.”

“What antibiotic did they give you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know the name?”

“Let me bring them, ma.”

Esther came back with transparent packets of pills, on which instructions, but no names, were written in a crabbed handwriting in blue ink.
Two to be taken morning and night. One to be taken three times daily
.

“We should write about this, Doris. We should have a health column with useful practical information. Somebody should let the health minister know that ordinary Nigerians go to see a doctor and the doctor gives them unnamed medicines. This can kill you. How will anybody know what you have already taken, or what you shouldn’t take if you’re already taking something else?”

“Ahn-ahn, but that one is a small problem: they do it so that you don’t buy the medicine from someone else,” Zemaye said. “But what about fake drugs? Go to the market and see what they are selling.”

“Okay, let’s all calm down? No need to get all activist? We’re not doing investigative journalism here?” Doris said.

Ifemelu began then to visualize her new blog, a blue-and-white design, and, on the masthead, an aerial shot of a Lagos scene. Nothing familiar, not a traffic clog of yellow rusted buses or a water-logged slum of zinc shacks. Perhaps the abandoned house next to her flat would do. She would take the photo herself, in the haunted light of early evening, and hope to catch the male peacock in flight. The blog posts would be in a stark, readable font. An article about health care, using Esther’s story, with pictures of the packets of nameless medicine. A piece about the Nigerpolitan Club. A fashion article about clothes that women could actually afford. Posts about people helping others, but nothing like the
Zoe
stories that always featured a wealthy person, hugging children at a motherless babies’ home, with bags of rice and tins of powdered milk propped in the background.

“But, Esther, you have to stop all that fasting o,” Zemaye said. “You know, some months Esther will give her whole salary to her church,
they call it ‘sowing a seed,’ then she will come and ask me to give her three hundred naira for transport.”

“But, ma, it is just small help. You are equal to the task,” Esther said, smiling.

“Last week she was fasting with a handkerchief,” Zemaye continued. “She kept it on her desk all day. She said somebody in her church got promoted after fasting with the handkerchief.”

“Is that what that handkerchief on her table was about?” Ifemelu asked.

“But I believe miracles totally work? I know my aunt was cured of cancer in her church?” Doris said.

“With a magic handkerchief,
abi
?” Zemaye scoffed.

“You don’t believe, ma? But it is true.” Esther was enjoying the camaraderie, reluctant to return to her desk.

“So you want a promotion, Esther? Which means you want my job?” Zemaye asked.

“No, ma! All of us will be promoted in Jesus’ name!” Esther said.

They were all laughing.

“Has Esther told you what spirit you have, Ifemelu?” Zemaye asked, walking to the door. “When I first started working here, she kept inviting me to her church and then one day she told me there would be a special prayer service for people with the spirit of seductiveness. People like me.”

“That’s not like entirely far-fetched?” Doris said and smirked.

“What is my spirit, Esther?” Ifemelu asked.

Esther shook her head, smiling, and left the office.

Ifemelu turned to her computer. The title for the blog had just come to her.
The Small Redemptions of Lagos
.

“I wonder who Zemaye is dating?” Doris said.

“She told me she doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

“Have you seen her car? Her salary can’t pay for the light in that car? It’s not like her family is rich or anything. I’ve been working with her almost a year now and I don’t know what she like really does?”

“Maybe she goes home and changes her clothes and becomes an armed robber at night,” Ifemelu said.

“Whatever,” Doris said.

“We should do a piece about churches,” Ifemelu said. “Like Esther’s church.”

“That’s not a good fit for
Zoe
?”

“It makes no sense that Aunty Onenu likes to run three profiles of these boring women who have achieved nothing and have nothing to say. Or the younger women with zero talent who have decided that they are fashion designers.”

“You know they pay Aunty Onenu, right?” Doris asked.

“They pay her?” Ifemelu stared. “No, I didn’t know. And you know I didn’t know.”

“Well, they do. Most of them. You have to realize a lot of things happen in this country like that?”

Ifemelu got up to gather her things. “I never know where you stand or if you stand on anything at all.”

“And you are such a judgmental bitch?” Doris screamed, her eyes bulging. Ifemelu, alarmed by the suddenness of the change, thought that perhaps Doris was, underneath her retro affectations, one of those women who could transform when provoked, and tear off their clothes and fight in the street.

“You sit there and judge everyone,” Doris was saying. “Who do you think you are? Why do you think this magazine should be about you? It isn’t yours. Aunty Onenu has told you what she wants her magazine to be and it’s either you do it or you shouldn’t be working here?”

“You need to get yourself a moisturizer and stop scaring people with that nasty red lipstick,” Ifemelu said. “And you need to get a life, and stop thinking that sucking up to Aunty Onenu and helping her publish a god-awful magazine will open doors for you, because it won’t.”

She left the office feeling common, shamed, by what had just happened. Perhaps this was a sign, to quit now and start her blog.

On her way out, Esther said, her voice earnest and low, “Ma? I think you have the spirit of husband-repelling. You are too hard, ma, you will not find a husband. But my pastor can destroy that spirit.”

Dike was seeing a therapist three times a week. Ifemelu called him every other day, and sometimes he spoke about his session, and other times he did not, but always he wanted to hear about her new life. She told him about her flat, and how she had a driver who drove her to work, and how she was seeing her old friends, and how, on Sundays, she loved to drive herself because the roads were empty; Lagos became a gentler version of itself, and the people dressed in their bright church clothes looked, from far away, like flowers in the wind.

“You would like Lagos, I think,” she said, and he, eagerly, surprisingly, said, “Can I come visit you, Coz?”

Aunty Uju was reluctant at first. “Lagos? Is it safe? You know what he has been through. I don’t think he can handle it.”

“But he asked to come, Aunty.”

“He asked to come? Since when has he known what is good for him? Is he not the same person who wanted to make me childless?”

But Aunty Uju bought Dike’s ticket and now here they were, she and Dike in her car, crawling through the crush of traffic in Oshodi, Dike looking wide-eyed out of the window. “Oh my God, Coz, I’ve never seen so many black people in the same place!” he said.

They stopped at a fast-food place, where he ordered a hamburger. “Is this horse meat? Because it isn’t a hamburger.” Afterwards, he would eat only jollof rice and fried plantain.

It was auspicious, his arrival, a day after she put up her blog and a week after she resigned. Aunty Onenu did not seem surprised by her resignation, nor did she try to make her stay. “Come and give me a hug, my dear,” was all she said, smiling vacuously, while Ifemelu’s pride
soured. But Ifemelu was full of sanguine expectations for
The Small Redemptions of Lagos
, with a dreamy photograph of an abandoned colonial house on its masthead. Her first post was a short interview with Priye, with photographs from weddings Priye had planned. Ifemelu thought most of the décor fussy and overdone, but the post received enthusiastic comments, especially about the décor.
Fantastic decoration. Madam Priye, I hope you will do my own wedding. Great work, carry go
. Zemaye had written, under a pseudonym, a piece about body language and sex, “Can You Tell If Two People Are Doing It Just by Looking at Them Together?” That, too, drew many comments. But the most comments, by far, were for Ifemelu’s piece about the Nigerpolitan Club.

The first commenter wrote:
Rubbish post. Who cares?
The second wrote:
Thank God somebody is finally talking about this. Na wa for arrogance of Nigerian returnees. My cousin came back after six years in America and the other morning she came with me to the nursery school at Unilag where I was dropping off
my niece and, near the gate, she saw students standing in line for the bus and she said, “Wow, people actually stand in line here!”
Another early commenter wrote:
Why should Nigerians who school abroad have a choice of where to get posted for their national youth service? Nigerians who school in Nigeria are randomly posted so why shouldn’t Nigerians who school abroad be treated the same way?
That comment sparked more responses than the original post had. By the sixth day, the blog had one thousand unique visitors.