Americanah

CHAPTER 3

Mariama finished her customer’s hair, sprayed it with sheen, and, after the customer left, she said, “I’m going to get Chinese.”

Aisha and Halima told her what they wanted — General Tso’s Chicken Very Spicy, Chicken Wings, Orange Chicken — with the quick ease of people saying what they said every day.

“You want anything?” Mariama asked Ifemelu.

“No, thanks,” Ifemelu said.

“Your hair take long. You need food,” Aisha said.

“I’m fine. I have a granola bar,” Ifemelu said. She had some baby carrots in a Ziploc, too, although all she had snacked on so far was her melted chocolate.

“What bar?” Aisha asked.

Ifemelu showed her the bar, organic, one hundred percent whole grain with real fruit.

“That not food!” Halima scoffed, looking away from the television.

“She here fifteen years, Halima,” Aisha said, as if the length of years in America explained Ifemelu’s eating of a granola bar.

“Fifteen? Long time,” Halima said.

Aisha waited until Mariama left before pulling out her cell phone from her pocket. “Sorry, I make quick call,” she said, and stepped outside. Her face had brightened when she came back; there was a smiling, even-featured prettiness, drawn out by that phone call, that Ifemelu had not earlier seen.

“Emeka work late today. So only Chijioke come to see you, before we finish,” she said, as if she and Ifemelu had planned it all together.

“Look, you don’t have to ask them to come. I won’t even know what to tell them,” Ifemelu said.

“Tell Chijioke Igbo can marry not Igbo.”

“Aisha, I can’t tell him to marry you. He will marry you if he wants to.”

“They want marry me. But I am not Igbo!” Aisha’s eyes glittered; the woman had to be a little mentally unstable.

“Is that what they told you?” Ifemelu asked.

“Emeka say his mother tell him if he marry American, she kill herself,” Aisha said.

“That’s not good.”

“But me, I am African.”

“So maybe she won’t kill herself if he marries you.”

Aisha looked blankly at her. “Your boyfriend mother want him to marry you?”

Ifemelu thought first of Blaine, then she realized that Aisha, of course, meant her make-believe boyfriend.

“Yes. She keeps asking us when we will get married.” She was amazed by her own fluidness, it was as if she had convinced even herself that she was not living on memories mildewed by thirteen years. But it could have been true; Obinze’s mother had liked her, after all.

“Ah!” Aisha said, in well-meaning envy.

A man with dry, graying skin and a mop of white hair came in with a plastic tray of herbal potions for sale.

“No, no, no,” Aisha said to him, palm raised as though to ward him off. The man retreated. Ifemelu felt sorry for him, hungry-looking in his worn dashiki, and wondered how much he could possibly make from his sales. She should have bought something.

“You talk Igbo to Chijioke. He listen to you,” Aisha said. “You talk Igbo?”

“Of course I speak Igbo,” Ifemelu said, defensive, wondering if Aisha was again suggesting that America had changed her. “Take it easy!” she added, because Aisha had pulled a tiny-toothed comb through a section of her hair.

“Your hair hard,” Aisha said.

“It is not hard,” Ifemelu said firmly. “You are using the wrong comb.” And she pulled the comb from Aisha’s hand and put it down on the table.

IFEMELU HAD GROWN UP in the shadow of her mother’s hair. It was black-black, so thick it drank two containers of relaxer at the salon, so full it took hours under the hooded dryer, and, when finally released from pink plastic rollers, sprang free and full, flowing down her back like a celebration. Her father called it a crown of glory. “Is it your real hair?” strangers would ask, and then reach out to touch it reverently. Others would say “Are you from Jamaica?” as though only foreign blood could explain such bounteous hair that did not thin at the temples. Through the years of childhood, Ifemelu would often look in the mirror and pull at her own hair, separate the coils, will it to become like her mother’s, but it remained bristly and grew reluctantly; braiders said it cut them like a knife.

One day, the year Ifemelu turned ten, her mother came home from work looking different. Her clothes were the same, a brown dress belted at the waist, but her face was flushed, her eyes unfocused. “Where is the big scissors?” she asked, and when Ifemelu brought it to her, she raised it to her head and, handful by handful, chopped off all her hair. Ifemelu stared, stunned. The hair lay on the floor like dead grass. “Bring me a big bag,” her mother said. Ifemelu obeyed, feeling herself in a trance, with things happening that she did not understand. She watched her mother walk around their flat, collecting all the Catholic objects, the crucifixes hung on walls, the rosaries nested in drawers, the missals propped on shelves. Her mother put them all in the polyethylene bag, which she carried to the backyard, her steps quick, her faraway look unwavering. She made a fire near the rubbish dump, at the same spot where she burned her used sanitary pads, and first she threw in her hair, wrapped in old newspaper, and then, one after the other, the objects of faith. Dark gray smoke curled up into the air. From the verandah, Ifemelu began to cry because she sensed that something had happened, and the woman standing by the fire, splashing in more kerosene as it dimmed and stepping back as it flared, the woman who was bald and blank, was not her mother, could not be her mother.

When her mother came back inside, Ifemelu backed away, but her mother hugged her close.

“I am saved,” she said. “Mrs. Ojo ministered to me this afternoon during the children’s break and I received Christ. Old things have passed away and all things have become new. Praise God. On Sunday we will start going to Revival Saints. It is a Bible-believing church and a living church, not like St. Dominic’s.” Her mother’s words were not hers. She spoke them too rigidly, with a demeanor that belonged to someone else. Even her voice, usually high-pitched and feminine, had deepened and curdled. That afternoon, Ifemelu watched her mother’s essence take flight. Before, her mother said the rosary once in a while, crossed herself before she ate, wore pretty images of saints around her neck, sang Latin songs and laughed when Ifemelu’s father teased her about her terrible pronunciation. She laughed, too, whenever he said, “I am an agnostic respecter of religion,” and she would tell him how lucky he was to be married to her, because even though he went to church only for weddings and funerals, he would get into heaven on the wings of her faith. But, after that afternoon, her God changed. He became exacting. Relaxed hair offended Him. Dancing offended Him. She bartered with Him, offering starvation in exchange for prosperity, for a job promotion, for good health. She fasted herself bone-thin: dry fasts on weekends, and on weekdays, only water until evening. Ifemelu’s father followed her with anxious eyes, urging her to eat a little more, to fast a little less, and he always spoke carefully, so that she would not call him the devil’s agent and ignore him, as she had done with a cousin who was staying with them. “I am fasting for your father’s conversion,” she told Ifemelu often. For months, the air in their flat was like cracked glass. Everyone tiptoed around her mother, who had become a stranger, thin and knuckly and severe. Ifemelu worried that she would, one day, simply snap into two and die.

Then, on Easter Saturday, a dour day, the first quiet Easter Saturday in Ifemelu’s life, her mother ran out of the kitchen and said, “I saw an angel!” Before, there would have been cooking and bustling, many pots in the kitchen and many relatives in the flat, and Ifemelu and her mother would have gone to night mass, and held up lit candles, singing in a sea of flickering flames, and then come home to continue cooking the big Easter lunch. But the flat was silent. Their relatives had kept away and lunch would be the usual rice and stew. Ifemelu was in the living room with her father, and when her mother said “I saw an angel!” Ifemelu saw exasperation in his eyes, a brief glimpse before it disappeared.

“What happened?” he asked, in the placating tone used for a child, as if humoring his wife’s madness would make it go away quickly.

Her mother told them of a vision she had just had, a blazing appearance near the gas cooker of an angel holding a book trimmed in red thread, telling her to leave Revival Saints because the pastor was a wizard who attended nightly demonic meetings under the sea.

“You should listen to the angel,” her father said.

And so her mother left the church and began to let her hair grow again, but stopped wearing necklaces and earrings because jewelry, according to the pastor at Miracle Spring, was ungodly, unbefitting a woman of virtue. Shortly afterwards, on the same day as the failed coup, while the traders who lived downstairs were crying because the coup would have saved Nigeria and market women would have been given cabinet positions, her mother saw another vision. This time, the angel appeared in her bedroom, above the wardrobe, and told her to leave Miracle Spring and join Guiding Assembly. Halfway through the first service Ifemelu attended with her mother, in a marble-floored convention hall, surrounded by perfumed people and the ricochet of rich voices, Ifemelu looked at her mother and saw that she was crying and laughing at the same time. In this church of surging hope, of thumping and clapping, where Ifemelu imagined a swirl of affluent angels above, her mother’s spirit had found a home. It was a church full of the newly wealthy; her mother’s small car, in the parking lot, was the oldest, with its dull paint and many scratches. If she worshipped with the prosperous, she said, then God would bless her as He had blessed them. She began to wear jewelry again, to drink her Guinness stout; she fasted only once a week and often said “My God tells me” and “My Bible says,” as though other people’s were not just different but misguided. Her response to a “Good morning” or a “Good afternoon” was a cheerful “God bless you!” Her God became genial and did not mind being commanded. Every morning, she woke the household up for prayers, and they would kneel on the scratchy carpet of the living room, singing, clapping, covering the day ahead with the blood of Jesus, and her mother’s words would pierce the stillness of dawn: “God, my heavenly father, I command you to fill this day with blessings and prove to me that you are God! Lord, I am waiting on you for my prosperity! Do not let the evil one win, do not let my enemies triumph over me!” Ifemelu’s father once said the prayers were delusional battles with imaginary traducers, yet he insisted that Ifemelu always wake up early to pray. “It keeps your mother happy,” he told her.

In church, at testimony time, her mother was first to hurry to the altar. “I had catarrh this morning,” she would start. “But as Pastor Gideon started to pray, it cleared. Now it is gone. Praise God!” The congregation would shout “Alleluia!” and other testimonies would follow. I did not study because I was sick and yet I passed my exams with flying colors! I had malaria and prayed over it and was cured! My cough disappeared as Pastor started praying! But always her mother went first, gliding and smiling, enclosed in salvation’s glow. Later in the service, when Pastor Gideon would leap out in his sharp-shouldered suit and pointy shoes, and say, “Our God is not a poor God, amen? It is our portion to prosper, amen?” Ifemelu’s mother would raise her arm high, heavenward, as she said, “Amen, Father Lord, amen.”

Ifemelu did not think that God had given Pastor Gideon the big house and all those cars, he had of course bought them with money from the three collections at each service, and she did not think that God would do for all as He had done for Pastor Gideon, because it was impossible, but she liked that her mother ate regularly now. The warmth in her mother’s eyes was back, and there was a new joy in her bearing, and she once again lingered at the dining table with her father after meals, and sang loudly while taking a bath. Her new church absorbed her but did not destroy her. It made her predictable and easy to lie to. “I am going to Bible study” and “I am going to Fellowship” were the easiest ways for Ifemelu to go out unquestioned during her teenage years. Ifemelu was uninterested in church, indifferent about making any religious effort, perhaps because her mother already made so much. Yet her mother’s faith comforted her; it was, in her mind, a white cloud that moved benignly above her as she moved. Until The General came into their lives.

EVERY MORNING, Ifemelu’s mother prayed for The General. She would say, “Heavenly father, I command you to bless Uju’s mentor. May his enemies never triumph over him!” Or she would say, “We cover Uju’s mentor with the precious blood of Jesus!” And Ifemelu would mumble something nonsensical instead of saying “Amen.” Her mother said the word “mentor” defiantly, a thickness in her tone, as though the force of her delivery would truly turn The General into a mentor, and also remake the world into a place where young doctors could afford Aunty Uju’s new Mazda, that green, glossy, intimidatingly streamlined car.

Chetachi, who lived upstairs, asked Ifemelu, “Your mom said Aunty Uju’s mentor also gave her a loan for the car?”

“Yes.”

“Eh! Aunty Uju is lucky o!” Chetachi said.

Ifemelu did not miss the knowing smirk on her face. Chetachi and her mother must have already gossiped about the car; they were envious, chattering people who visited only to see what others had, to size up new furniture or new electronics.

“God should bless the man o. Me I hope I will also meet a mentor when I graduate,” Chetachi said. Ifemelu bristled at Chetachi’s goading. Still, it was her mother’s fault, to so eagerly tell the neighbors her mentor story. She should not have; it was nobody’s business what Aunty Uju did. Ifemelu had overheard her telling somebody in the backyard, “You see, The General wanted to be a doctor when he was young, and so now he helps young doctors, God is really using him in people’s lives.” And she sounded sincere, cheerful, convincing. She believed her own words. Ifemelu could not understand this, her mother’s ability to tell herself stories about her reality that did not even resemble her reality. When Aunty Uju first told them about her new job—“The hospital has no doctor vacancy but The General made them create one for me” were her words — Ifemelu’s mother promptly said, “This is a miracle!”

Aunty Uju smiled, a quiet smile that held its peace; she did not, of course, think it was a miracle, but would not say so. Or maybe there was something of a miracle in her new job as consultant at the military hospital in Victoria Island, and her new house in Dolphin Estate, the cluster of duplexes that wore a fresh foreignness, some painted pink, others the blue of a warm sky, hemmed by a park with grass lush as a new rug and benches where people could sit — a rarity even on The Island. Only weeks before, she had been a new graduate and all her classmates were talking about going abroad to take the American medical exams or the British exams, because the other choice was to tumble into a parched wasteland of joblessness. The country was starved of hope, cars stuck for days in long, sweaty petrol lines, pensioners raising wilting placards demanding their pay, lecturers gathering to announce yet one more strike. But Aunty Uju did not want to leave; she had, for as long as Ifemelu could remember, dreamed of owning a private clinic, and she held that dream in a tight clasp.

“Nigeria will not be like this forever, I’m sure I will find part-time work and it will be tough, yes, but one day I will start my clinic, and on The Island!” Aunty Uju had told Ifemelu. Then she went to a friend’s wedding. The bride’s father was an air vice marshal, it was rumored that the Head of State might attend, and Aunty Uju joked about asking him to make her medical officer at Aso Rock. He did not attend, but many of his generals did, and one of them asked his ADC to call Aunty Uju, to ask her to come to his car in the parking lot after the reception, and when she went to the dark Peugeot with a small flag flying from its front, and said, “Good afternoon, sir,” to the man in the back, he told her, “I like you. I want to take care of you.” Maybe there was a kind of miracle in those words, I like you, I want to take care of you, Ifemelu thought, but not in the way her mother meant it. “A miracle! God is faithful!” her mother said that day, eyes liquid with faith.

SHE SAID, in a similar tone, “The devil is a liar. He wants to start blocking our blessing, he will not succeed,” when Ifemelu’s father lost his job at the federal agency. He was fired for refusing to call his new boss Mummy. He came home earlier than usual, wracked with bitter disbelief, his termination letter in his hand, complaining about the absurdity of a grown man calling a grown woman Mummy because she had decided it was the best way to show her respect. “Twelve years of dedicated labor. It is unconscionable,” he said. Her mother patted his back, told him God would provide another job and, until then, they would manage on her vice-principal salary. He went out job hunting every morning, teeth clenched and tie firmly knotted, and Ifemelu wondered if he just walked into random companies to try his luck, but soon he began to stay at home in a wrapper and singlet, lounging on the shabby sofa near the stereo. “You have not had a morning bath?” her mother asked him one afternoon, when she came back from work looking drained, clutching files to her chest, wet patches under her armpits. Then she added irritably, “If you have to call somebody Mummy to get your salary, you should have done so!”

He said nothing; for a moment, he seemed lost, shrunken and lost. Ifemelu felt sorry for him. She asked him about the book placed facedown on his lap, a familiar-looking book that she knew he had read before. She hoped he would give her one of his long talks about something like the history of China, and she would half listen as always, while cheering him up. But he was in no mood for talk. He shrugged as though to say she could look at the book if she wanted to. Her mother’s words too easily wounded him; he was too alert to her, his ears always pricked up at her voice, his eyes always rested on her. Recently, before he was fired, he had told Ifemelu, “Once I attain my promotion, I will buy your mother something truly memorable,” and when she asked him what, he smiled and said, mysteriously, “It will unveil itself.”

Looking at him as he sat mute on the sofa, she thought how much he looked like what he was, a man full of blanched longings, a middlebrow civil servant who wanted a life different from what he had, who had longed for more education than he was able to get. He talked often of how he could not go to university because he had to find a job to support his siblings, and how people he was cleverer than in secondary school now had doctorates. His was a formal, elevated English. Their house helps hardly understood him but were nevertheless very impressed. Once, their former house help, Jecinta, had come into the kitchen and started clapping quietly, and told Ifemelu, “You should have heard your father’s big word now! O di egwu!” Sometimes Ifemelu imagined him in a classroom in the fifties, an overzealous colonial subject wearing an ill-fitting school uniform of cheap cotton, jostling to impress his missionary teachers. Even his handwriting was mannered, all curves and flourishes, with a uniform elegance that looked like something printed. He had scolded Ifemelu as a child for being recalcitrant, mutinous, intransigent, words that made her little actions seem epic and almost prideworthy. But his mannered English bothered her as she got older, because it was costume, his shield against insecurity. He was haunted by what he did not have — a postgraduate degree, an upper-middle-class life — and so his affected words became his armor. She preferred it when he spoke Igbo; it was the only time he seemed unconscious of his own anxieties.

Losing his job made him quieter, and a thin wall grew between him and the world. He no longer muttered “nation of intractable sycophancy” when the nightly news started on NTA, no longer held long monologues about how Babangida’s government had reduced Nigerians to imprudent idiots, no longer teased her mother. And, most of all, he began to join in the morning prayers. He had never joined before; her mother had once insisted that he do so, before leaving to visit their hometown. “Let us pray and cover the roads with the blood of Jesus,” she had said, and he replied that the roads would be safer, less slippery, if not covered with blood. Which had made her mother frown and Ifemelu laugh and laugh.

At least he still did not go to church. Ifemelu used to come home from church with her mother and find him sitting on the floor in the living room, sifting through his pile of LPs, and singing along to a song on the stereo. He always looked fresh, rested, as though being alone with his music had replenished him. But he hardly played music after he lost his job. They came home to find him at the dining table, bent over loose sheets of paper, writing letters to newspapers and magazines. And Ifemelu knew that, if given another chance, he would call his boss Mummy.

IT WAS a Sunday morning, early, and somebody was banging on the front door. Ifemelu liked Sunday mornings, the slow shifting of time, when she, dressed for church, would sit in the living room with her father while her mother got ready. Sometimes they talked, she and her father, and other times they were silent, a shared and satisfying silence, as they were that morning. From the kitchen, the hum of the refrigerator was the only sound to be heard, until the banging on the door. A rude interruption. Ifemelu opened it and saw the landlord standing there, a round man with bulging, reddened eyes who was said to start his day with a glass of harsh gin. He looked past Ifemelu at her father, and shouted, “It is now three months! I am still waiting for my money!” His voice was familiar to Ifemelu, the brassy shouting that always came from the flats of their neighbors, from somewhere else. But now he was here in their flat, and the scene jarred her, the landlord shouting at their door, and her father turning a steely, silent face to him. They had never owed rent before. They had lived in this flat all her life; it was cramped, the kitchen walls blackened by kerosene fumes, and she was embarrassed when her school friends came to visit, but they had never owed rent.

“A braggart of a man,” her father said after the landlord left, and then he said nothing else. There was nothing else to say. They owed rent.

Her mother appeared, singing and heavily perfumed, her face dry and bright with powder that was one shade too light. She extended a wrist towards Ifemelu’s father, her thin gold bracelet hung unclasped.

“Uju is coming after church to take us to see the house in Dolphin Estate,” her mother said. “Will you follow us?”

“No,” he said shortly, as though Aunty Uju’s new life was a subject he would rather avoid.

“You should come,” she said, but he did not respond, as he carefully snapped the bracelet around her wrist, and told her he had checked the water in her car.

“God is faithful. Look at Uju, to afford a house on The Island!” her mother said happily.

“Mummy, but you know Aunty Uju is not paying one kobo to live there,” Ifemelu said.

Her mother glanced at her. “Did you iron that dress?”

“It doesn’t need ironing.”

“It is rumpled. Ngwa, go and iron it. At least there is light. Or change into something else.”

Ifemelu got up reluctantly. “This dress is not rumpled.”

“Go and iron it. There is no need to show the world that things are hard for us. Ours is not the worst case. Today is Sunday Work with Sister Ibinabo, so hurry up and let’s go.”

SISTER IBINABO WAS powerful, and because she pretended to wear her power lightly, it only made her more so. The pastor, it was said, did whatever she asked him. It was not clear why; some said she had started the church with him, others that she knew a terrible secret from his past, still others that she simply had more spiritual power than he did but could not be pastor because she was a woman. She could prevent pastoral approval of a marriage, if she wanted to. She knew everyone and everything and she seemed to be everywhere at the same time, with her weather-beaten air, as though life had tossed her around for a long time. It was difficult to tell how old she was, whether fifty or sixty, her body wiry, her face closed like a shell. She never laughed but often smiled the thin smile of the pious. The mothers were in reverent awe of her; they brought her small presents, they eagerly handed their daughters to her for Sunday Work. Sister Ibinabo, the savior of young females. She was asked to talk to troubled and troublesome girls. Some mothers asked if their daughters could live with her, in the flat behind the church. But Ifemelu had always sensed, in Sister Ibinabo, a deep-sown, simmering hostility to young girls. Sister Ibinabo did not like them, she merely watched them and warned them, as though offended by what in them was still fresh and in her was long dried up.

“I saw you wearing tight trousers last Saturday,” Sister Ibinabo said to a girl, Christie, in an exaggerated whisper, low enough to pretend it was a whisper but high enough for everyone to hear. “Everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial. Any girl that wears tight trousers wants to commit the sin of temptation. It is best to avoid it.”

Christie nodded, humble, gracious, carrying her shame.

In the church back room, the two tiny windows did not let in much light, and so the electric bulb was always turned on during the day. Fund-raising envelopes were piled on the table, and next to them was a stack of colored tissue, like fragile cloth. The girls began to organize themselves. Soon, some of them were writing on the envelopes, and others were cutting and curling pieces of tissue, gluing them into flower shapes, and stringing them together to form fluffy garlands. Next Sunday, at a special Thanksgiving service, the garlands would hang around the thick neck of Chief Omenka and the smaller necks of his family members. He had donated two new vans to the church.

“Join that group, Ifemelu,” Sister Ibinabo said.

Ifemelu folded her arms, and as often happened when she was about to say something she knew was better unsaid, the words rushed up her throat. “Why should I make decorations for a thief?”

Sister Ibinabo stared in astonishment. A silence fell. The other girls looked on expectantly.

“What did you say?” Sister Ibinabo asked quietly, offering a chance for Ifemelu to apologize, to put the words back in her mouth. But Ifemelu felt herself unable to stop, her heart thumping, hurtling on a fast-moving path.

“Chief Omenka is a 419 and everybody knows it,” she said. “This church is full of 419 men. Why should we pretend that this hall was not built with dirty money?”

“It is God’s work,” Sister Ibinabo said quietly. “If you cannot do God’s work then you should go. Go.”

Ifemelu hurried out of the room, past the gate, and towards the bus station, knowing that in minutes the story would reach her mother inside the main church building. She had ruined the day. They would have gone to see Aunty Uju’s house and had a nice lunch. Now, her mother would be testy and prickly. She wished she had said nothing. She had, after all, joined in making garlands for other 419 men in the past, men who had special seats in the front row, men who donated cars with the ease of people giving away chewing gum. She had happily attended their receptions, she had eaten rice and meat and coleslaw, food tainted by fraud, and she had eaten knowing this and had not choked, and had not even considered choking. Yet, something had been different today. When Sister Ibinabo was talking to Christie, with that poisonous spite she claimed was religious guidance, Ifemelu had looked at her and suddenly seen something of her own mother. Her mother was a kinder and simpler person, but like Sister Ibinabo, she was a person who denied that things were as they were. A person who had to spread the cloak of religion over her own petty desires. Suddenly, the last thing Ifemelu wanted was to be in that small room full of shadows. It had all seemed benign before, her mother’s faith, all drenched in grace, and suddenly it no longer was. She wished, fleetingly, that her mother was not her mother, and for this she felt not guilt and sadness but a single emotion, a blend of guilt and sadness.

The bus stop was eerily empty, and she imagined all the people who would have been crowded here, now in churches, singing and praying. She waited for the bus, wondering whether to go home or somewhere else to wait for a while. It was best to go home, and face whatever she had to face.

HER MOTHER PULLED her ear, an almost-gentle tug, as though reluctant to cause real pain. She had done that since Ifemelu was a child. “I will beat you!” she would say, when Ifemelu did something wrong, but there was never any beating, only the limp ear pull. Now, she pulled it twice, once and then again to emphasize her words. “The devil is using you. You have to pray about this. Do not judge. Leave the judging to God!”

Her father said, “You must refrain from your natural proclivity towards provocation, Ifemelu. You have singled yourself out at school where you are known for insubordination and I have told you that it has already sullied your singular academic record. There is no need to create a similar pattern in church.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

When Aunty Uju arrived, Ifemelu’s mother told her what had happened. “Go and give that Ifemelu a talking-to. You are the only person she will listen to. Ask her what I did to her that makes her want to embarrass me in the church like this. She insulted Sister Ibinabo! It is like insulting Pastor! Why must this girl be a troublemaker? I have been saying it since, that it would be better if she was a boy, behaving like this.”

“Sister, you know her problem is that she doesn’t always know when to keep her mouth shut. Don’t worry, I will talk to her,” Aunty Uju said, playing her role of pacifier, soothing her cousin’s wife. She had always got along with Ifemelu’s mother, the easy relationship between two people who carefully avoided conversations of any depth. Perhaps Aunty Uju felt gratitude to Ifemelu’s mother for embracing her, accepting her status as the special resident relative. Growing up, Ifemelu did not feel like an only child because of the cousins, aunts, and uncles who lived with them. There were always suitcases and bags in the flat; sometimes a relative or two would sleep on the floor of the living room for weeks. Most were her father’s family, brought to Lagos to learn a trade or go to school or look for a job, so that the people back in the village would not mutter about their brother with only one child who did not want to help raise others. Her father felt an obligation to them, he insisted that everyone be home before eight p.m., made sure there was enough food to go around, and locked his bedroom door even when he went to the bathroom, because any of them could wander in and steal something. But Aunty Uju was different. Too clever to waste away in that backwater, he said. He called her his youngest sister although she was the child of his father’s brother, and he had been more protective, less distant, with her. Whenever he came across Ifemelu and Aunty Uju curled up in bed talking, he would fondly say “You two.” After Aunty Uju left to go to university in Ibadan, he told Ifemelu, almost wistfully, “Uju exerted a calming influence on you.” He seemed to see, in their closeness, proof of his own good choice, as though he had knowingly brought a gift to his family, a buffer between his wife and daughter.

And so, in the bedroom, Aunty Uju told Ifemelu, “You should have just made the garland. I’ve told you that you don’t have to say everything. You have to learn that. You don’t have to say everything.”

“Why can’t Mummy like the things you get from The General without pretending they are from God?”

“Who says they are not from God?” Aunty Uju asked, and made a face, pulling her lips down at the sides. Ifemelu laughed.

According to the family legend, Ifemelu had been a surly three-year-old who screamed if a stranger came close, but the first time she saw Aunty Uju, thirteen and pimply faced, Ifemelu walked over and climbed into her lap and stayed there. She did not know if this had happened, or had merely become true from being told over and over again, a charmed tale of the beginning of their closeness. It was Aunty Uju who sewed Ifemelu’s little-girl dresses and, as Ifemelu got older, they would pore over fashion magazines, choosing styles together. Aunty Uju taught her to mash an avocado and spread it on her face, to dissolve Robb in hot water and place her face over the steam, to dry a pimple with toothpaste. Aunty Uju brought her James Hadley Chase novels wrapped in newspaper to hide the near-naked women on the cover, hot-stretched her hair when she got lice from the neighbors, talked her through her first menstrual period, supplementing her mother’s lecture that was full of biblical quotes about virtue but lacked useful details about cramps and pads. When Ifemelu met Obinze, she told Aunty Uju that she had met the love of her life, and Aunty Uju told her to let him kiss and touch but not to let him put it inside.

CHAPTER 4

The gods, the hovering deities who gave and took teenage loves, had decided that Obinze would go out with Ginika. Obinze was the new boy, a fine boy even if he was short. He had transferred from the university secondary school in Nsukka, and only days after, everyone knew of the swirling rumors about his mother. She had fought with a man, another professor at Nsukka, a real fight, punching and hitting, and she had won, too, even tearing his clothes, and so she was suspended for two years and had moved to Lagos until she could go back. It was an unusual story; market women fought, mad women fought, but not women who were professors. Obinze, with his air of calm and inwardness, made it even more intriguing. He was quickly admitted into the clan of swaggering, carelessly cool males, the Big Guys; he lounged in the corridors with them, stood with them at the back of the hall during assembly. None of them tucked in their shirts, and for this they always got into trouble, glamorous trouble, with the teachers, but Obinze came to school every day with his shirt neatly tucked in and soon all the Big Guys tucked in, too, even Kayode DaSilva, the coolest of them all.

Kayode spent every vacation in his parents’ house in England, which looked large and forbidding in the photos Ifemelu had seen. His girlfriend, Yinka, was like him — she, too, went to England often and lived in Ikoyi and spoke with a British accent. She was the most popular girl in their form, her school bag made of thick monogrammed leather, her sandals always different from what anybody else had. The second most popular girl was Ginika, Ifemelu’s close friend. Ginika did not go abroad often, and so did not have the air of away as Yinka did, but she had caramel skin and wavy hair that, when unbraided, fell down to her neck instead of standing Afro-like. Each year, she was voted Prettiest Girl in their form, and she would wryly say, “It’s just because I’m a half-caste. How can I be finer than Zainab?”

And so it was the natural order of things, that the gods should match Obinze and Ginika. Kayode was throwing a hasty party in their guest quarters while his parents were away in London. He told Ginika, “I’m going to introduce you to my guy Zed at the party.”

“He’s not bad,” Ginika said, smiling.

“I hope he did not get his mother’s fighting genes o,” Ifemelu teased. It was nice to see Ginika interested in a boy; almost all the Big Guys in school had tried with her and none had lasted long; Obinze seemed quiet, a good match.

Ifemelu and Ginika arrived together, the party still at its dawn, the dance floor bare, boys running around with cassette tapes, shyness and awkwardness still undissolved. Each time Ifemelu came to Kayode’s house, she imagined what it was like to live here, in Ikoyi, in a gracious and graveled compound, with servants who wore white.

“See Kayode with the new guy,” Ifemelu said.

“I don’t want to look,” Ginika said. “Are they coming?”

“Yes.”

“My shoes are so tight.”

“You can dance in tight shoes,” Ifemelu said.

The boys were before them. Obinze looked overdressed, in a thick corduroy jacket, while Kayode wore a T-shirt and jeans.

“Hey, babes!” Kayode said. He was tall and rangy, with the easy manner of the entitled. “Ginika, meet my friend Obinze. Zed, this is Ginika, the queen God made for you if you are ready to work for it!” He was smirking, already a little drunk, the golden boy making a golden match.

“Hi,” Obinze said to Ginika.

“This is Ifemelu,” Kayode said. “Otherwise known as Ifemsco. She’s Ginika’s right-hand man. If you misbehave, she will flog you.”

They all laughed on cue.

“Hi,” Obinze said. His eyes met Ifemelu’s and held, and lingered.

Kayode was making small talk, telling Obinze that Ginika’s parents were also university professors. “So both of you are book people,” Kayode said. Obinze should have taken over and begun talking to Ginika, and Kayode would have left, and Ifemelu would have followed, and the will of the gods would have been fulfilled. But Obinze said little, and Kayode was left to carry the conversation, his voice getting boisterous, and from time to time he glanced at Obinze, as though to urge him on. Ifemelu was not sure when something happened, but in those moments, as Kayode talked, something strange happened. A quickening inside her, a dawning. She realized, quite suddenly, that she wanted to breathe the same air as Obinze. She became, also, acutely aware of the present, the now, Toni Braxton’s voice from the cassette player, be it fast or slow, it doesn’t let go, or shake me, the smell of Kayode’s father’s brandy, which had been sneaked out of the main house, and the tight white shirt that chafed at her armpits. Aunty Uju had made her tie it, in a loose bow, at her navel and she wondered now if it was truly stylish or if she looked silly.

The music stopped abruptly. Kayode said, “I’m coming,” and left to find out what was wrong, and in the new silence, Ginika fiddled with the metal bangle that encircled her wrist.

Obinze’s eyes met Ifemelu’s again.

“Aren’t you hot in that jacket?” Ifemelu asked. The question came out before she could restrain herself, so used was she to sharpening her words, to watching for terror in the eyes of boys. But he was smiling. He looked amused. He was not afraid of her.

“Very hot,” he said. “But I’m a country bumpkin and this is my first city party so you have to forgive me.” Slowly, he took his jacket off, green and padded at the elbows, under which he wore a long-sleeved shirt. “Now I’ll have to carry a jacket around with me.”

“I can hold it for you,” Ginika offered. “And don’t mind Ifem, the jacket is fine.”

“Thanks, but don’t worry. I should hold it, as punishment for wearing it in the first place.” He looked at Ifemelu, eyes twinkling.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Ifemelu said. “It’s just that this room is so hot and that jacket looks heavy.”

“I like your voice,” he said, almost cutting her short.

And she, who was never at a loss, croaked, “My voice?”

“Yes.”

The music had begun. “Let’s dance?” he asked.

She nodded.

He took her hand and then smiled at Ginika, as though to a nice chaperone whose job was now done. Ifemelu thought Mills and Boon romances were silly, she and her friends sometimes enacted the stories, Ifemelu or Ranyinudo would play the man and Ginika or Priye would play the woman — the man would grab the woman, the woman would fight weakly, then collapse against him with shrill moans — and they would all burst out laughing. But in the filling-up dance floor of Kayode’s party, she was jolted by a small truth in those romances. It was indeed true that because of a male, your stomach could tighten up and refuse to unknot itself, your body’s joints could unhinge, your limbs fail to move to music, and all effortless things suddenly become leaden. As she moved stiffly, she saw Ginika in her side vision, watching them, her expression puzzled, mouth slightly slack, as though she did not quite believe what had happened.

“You actually said ‘country bumpkin,’ ” Ifemelu said, her voice high above the music.

“What?”

“Nobody says ‘country bumpkin.’ It’s the kind of thing you read in a book.”

“You have to tell me what books you read,” he said.

He was teasing her, and she did not quite get the joke, but she laughed anyway. Later, she wished that she remembered every word they said to each other as they danced. She remembered, instead, feeling adrift. When the lights were turned off, and the blues dancing started, she wanted to be in his arms in a dark corner, but he said, “Let’s go outside and talk.”

They sat on cement blocks behind the guesthouse, next to what looked like the gateman’s bathroom, a narrow stall which, when the wind blew, brought a stale smell. They talked and talked, hungry to know each other. He told her that his father had died when he was seven, and how clearly he remembered his father teaching him to ride a tricycle on a tree-lined street near their campus home, but sometimes he would discover, in panic, that he could not remember his father’s face and a sense of betrayal would overwhelm him and he would hurry to examine the framed photo on their living room wall.

“Your mother never wanted to remarry?”

“Even if she wanted to, I don’t think she would, because of me. I want her to be happy, but I don’t want her to remarry.”

“I would feel the same way. Did she really fight with another professor?”

“So you heard that story.”

“They said it’s why she had to leave Nsukka University.”

“No, she didn’t fight. She was on a committee and they discovered that this professor had misused funds and my mother accused him publicly and he got angry and slapped her and said he could not take a woman talking to him like that. So my mother got up and locked the door of the conference room and put the key in her bra. She told him she could not slap him back because he was stronger than her, but he would have to apologize to her publicly, in front of all the people who had seen him slap her. So he did. But she knew he didn’t mean it. She said he did it in a kind of ‘okay sorry if that’s what you want to hear and just bring out the key’ way. She came home that day really angry, and she kept talking about how things had changed and what did it mean that now somebody could just slap another person. She wrote circulars and articles about it, and the student union got involved. People were saying, Oh, why did he slap her when she’s a widow, and that annoyed her even more. She said she should not have been slapped because she is a full human being, not because she doesn’t have a husband to speak for her. So some of her female students went and printed Full Human Being on T-shirts. I guess it made her well-known. She’s usually very quiet and doesn’t have many friends.”

“Is that why she came to Lagos?”

“No. She’s been scheduled to do this sabbatical for a while. I remember the first time she told me we would go away for her two-year sabbatical, and I was excited because I thought it would be in America, one of my friend’s dads had just gone to America, and then she said it was Lagos, and I asked her what was the point? We might as well just stay in Nsukka.”

Ifemelu laughed. “But at least you can still get on a plane to come to Lagos.”

“Yes, but we came by road,” Obinze said, laughing. “But now I’m happy it was Lagos or I would not have met you.”

“Or met Ginika,” she teased.

“Stop it.”

“Your guys will kill you. You’re supposed to be chasing her.”

“I’m chasing you.”

She would always remember this moment, those words. I’m chasing you.

“I saw you in school some time ago. I even asked Kay about you,” he said.

“Are you serious?”

“I saw you holding a James Hadley Chase, near the lab. And I said, Ah, correct, there is hope. She reads.”

“I think I’ve read them all.”

“Me too. What’s your favorite?”

“Miss Shumway Waves a Wand.”

“Mine is Want to Stay Alive? I stayed up one night to finish it.”

“Yes, I like that too.”

“What about other books? Which of the classics do you like?”

“Classics, kwa? I just like crime and thrillers. Sheldon, Ludlum, Archer.”

“But you also have to read proper books.”

She looked at him, amused by his earnestness. “Aje-butter! University boy! That must be what your professor mother taught you.”

“No, seriously.” He paused. “I’ll give you some to try. I love the American ones.”

“You have to read proper books,” she mimicked.

“What about poetry?”

“What’s that last one we did in class, ‘Ancient Mariner’? So boring.”

Obinze laughed, and Ifemelu, uninterested in pursuing the subject of poetry, asked, “So what did Kayode say about me?”

“Nothing bad. He likes you.”

“You don’t want to tell me what he said.”

“He said, ‘Ifemelu is a fine babe but she is too much trouble. She can argue. She can talk. She never agrees. But Ginika is just a sweet girl.’ ” He paused, then added, “He didn’t know that was exactly what I hoped to hear. I’m not interested in girls that are too nice.”

“Ahn-ahn! Are you insulting me?” She nudged him, in mock anger. She had always liked this image of herself as too much trouble, as different, and she sometimes thought of it as a carapace that kept her safe.

“You know I’m not insulting you.” He put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him gently; it was the first time their bodies had met and she felt herself stiffen. “I thought you were so fine, but not just that. You looked like the kind of person who will do something because you want to, and not because everyone else is doing it.”

She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size. She told him how she very much wanted God to exist but feared He did not, how she worried that she should know what she wanted to do with her life but did not even know what she wanted to study at university. It seemed so natural, to talk to him about odd things. She had never done that before. The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her. They had known nothing of each other only hours ago, and yet, there had been a knowledge shared between them in those moments before they danced, and now she could think only of all the things she yet wanted to tell him, wanted to do with him. The similarities in their lives became good omens: that they were both only children, their birthdays two days apart, and their hometowns in Anambra State. He was from Abba and she was from Umunnachi and the towns were minutes away from each other.

“Ahn-ahn! One of my uncles goes to your village all the time!” he told her. “I’ve been a few times with him. You people have terrible roads.”

“I know Abba. The roads are worse.”

“How often do you go to your village?”

“Every Christmas.”

“Just once a year! I go very often with my mother, at least five times a year.”

“But I bet I speak Igbo better than you.”

“Impossible,” he said, and switched to Igbo. “Ama m atu inu. I even know proverbs.”

“Yes. The basic one everybody knows. A frog does not run in the afternoon for nothing.”

“No. I know serious proverbs. Akota ife ka ubi, e lee oba. If something bigger than the farm is dug up, the barn is sold.”

“Ah, you want to try me?” she asked, laughing. “Acho afu adi ako n’akpa dibia. The medicine man’s bag has all kinds of things.”

“Not bad,” he said. “E gbuo dike n’ogu uno, e luo na ogu agu, e lote ya. If you kill a warrior in a local fight, you’ll remember him when fighting enemies.”

They traded proverbs. She could say only two more before she gave up, with him still raring to go.

“How do you know all that?” she asked, impressed. “Many guys won’t even speak Igbo, not to mention knowing proverbs.”

“I just listen when my uncles talk. I think my dad would have liked that.”

They were silent. Cigarette smoke wafted up from the entrance of the guesthouse, where some boys had gathered. Party noises hung in the air: loud music, the raised voices and high laughter of boys and girls, all of them looser and freer than they would be the next day.

“Aren’t we going to kiss?” she asked.

He seemed startled. “Where did that come from?”

“I’m just asking. We’ve been sitting here for so long.”

“I don’t want you to think that is all I want.”

“What about what I want?”

“What do you want?”

“What do you think I want?”

“My jacket?”

She laughed. “Yes, your famous jacket.”

“You make me shy,” he said.

“Are you serious? Because you make me shy.”

“I don’t believe anything makes you shy,” he said.

They kissed, pressed their foreheads together, held hands. His kiss was enjoyable, almost heady; it was nothing like her ex-boyfriend Mofe, whose kisses she had thought too salivary.

When she told Obinze this some weeks later — she said, “So where did you learn to kiss? Because it’s nothing like my ex-boyfriend’s salivary fumbling”—he laughed and repeated “salivary fumbling!” and then told her that it was not technique, but emotion. He had done what her ex-boyfriend had done but the difference, in this case, was love.

“You know it was love at first sight for both of us,” he said.

“For both of us? Is it by force? Why are you speaking for me?”

“I’m just stating a fact. Stop struggling.”

They were sitting side by side on a desk in the back of his almost empty classroom. The end-of-break bell began to ring, jangling and discordant.

“Yes, it’s a fact,” she said.

“What?”

“I love you.” How easily the words came out, how loudly. She wanted him to hear and she wanted the boy sitting in front, bespectacled and studious, to hear and she wanted the girls gathered in the corridor outside to hear.

“Fact,” Obinze said, with a grin.

Because of her, he had joined the debate club, and after she spoke, he clapped the loudest and longest, until her friends said, “Obinze, please, it is enough.” Because of him, she joined the sports club and watched him play football, sitting by the sidelines and holding his bottle of water. But it was table tennis that he loved, sweating and shouting as he played, glistening with energy, smashing the small white ball, and she marveled at his skill, how he seemed to stand too far away from the table and yet managed to get the ball. He was already the undefeated school champion, as he had been, he told her, in his former school. When she played with him, he would laugh and say, “You don’t win by hitting the ball with anger o!” Because of her, his friends called him “woman wrapper.” Once, as he and his friends talked about meeting after school to play football, one of them asked, “Has Ifemelu given you permission to come?” And Obinze swiftly replied, “Yes, but she said I have only an hour.” She liked that he wore their relationship so boldly, like a brightly colored shirt. Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. She would sink into moodiness, and snap at Obinze, or be distant. And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.

CHAPTER 5

After Kayode’s party, Ginika was stilted; an alien awkwardness grew between them.

“You know I didn’t think it would happen that way,” Ifemelu told her. “Ifem, he was looking at you from the beginning,” Ginika said, and then, to show that she was fine with it all, she teased Ifemelu about stealing her guy without even trying. Her breeziness was forced, laid on thickly, and Ifemelu felt burdened with guilt, and with a desire to overcompensate. It seemed wrong, that her close friend Ginika, pretty, pleasant, popular Ginika with whom she had never quarreled, was reduced to pretending that she did not care, even though a wistfulness underlined her tone whenever she talked about Obinze. “Ifem, will you have time for us today or is it Obinze all the way?” she would ask.

And so when Ginika came to school one morning, her eyes red and shadowed, and told Ifemelu, “My popsie said we are going to America next month,” Ifemelu felt almost relieved. She would miss her friend, but Ginika’s leaving forced them both to wring out their friendship and lay it out newly fresh to dry, to return to where they used to be. Ginika’s parents had been talking for a while about resigning from the university and starting over in America. Once, while visiting, Ifemelu had heard Ginika’s father say, “We are not sheep. This regime is treating us like sheep and we are starting to behave as if we are sheep. I have not been able to do any real research in years, because every day I am organizing strikes and talking about unpaid salary and there is no chalk in the classrooms.” He was a small, dark man, smaller-looking and darker-looking beside Ginika’s large, ash-haired mother, with an undecided air about him, as though he was always dithering between choices. When Ifemelu told her own parents that Ginika’s family was finally leaving, her father sighed and said, “At least they are fortunate to have that option,” and her mother said, “They are blessed.”

But Ginika complained and cried, painting images of a sad, friendless life in a strange America. “I wish I could live with you people while they go,” she told Ifemelu. They had gathered at Ginika’s house, Ifemelu, Ranyinudo, Priye, and Tochi, and were in her bedroom, picking through the clothes she would not be taking with her.

“Ginika, just make sure you can still talk to us when you come back,” Priye said.

“She’ll come back and be a serious Americanah like Bisi,” Ranyinudo said.

They roared with laughter, at that word “Americanah,” wreathed in glee, the fourth syllable extended, and at the thought of Bisi, a girl in the form below them, who had come back from a short trip to America with odd affectations, pretending she no longer understood Yoruba, adding a slurred r to every English word she spoke.

“But, Ginika, seriously, I would give anything to be you right now,” Priye said. “I don’t understand why you don’t want to go. You can always come back.”

At school, friends gathered around Ginika. They all wanted to take her out to the tuck shop, and to see her after school, as though her impending departure had made her even more desirable. Ifemelu and Ginika were lounging in the corridor, during short break, when the Big Guys joined them: Kayode, Obinze, Ahmed, Emenike, and Osahon.

“Ginika, where in America are you going?” Emenike asked. He was awed by people who went abroad. After Kayode came back from a trip to Switzerland with his parents, Emenike had bent down to caress Kayode’s shoes, saying “I want to touch them because they have touched snow.”

“Missouri,” Ginika said. “My dad got a teaching job there.”

“Your mother is an American, abi? So you have an American passport?” Emenike asked.

“Yes. But we haven’t traveled since I was in primary three.”

“American passport is the coolest thing,” Kayode said. “I would exchange my British passport tomorrow.”

“Me too,” Yinka said.

“I very nearly had one o,” Obinze said. “I was eight months old when my parents took me to America. I keep telling my mom that she should have gone earlier and had me there!”

“Bad luck, man,” Kayode said.

“I don’t have a passport. Last time we traveled, I was on my mom’s passport,” Ahmed said.

“I was on my mom’s until primary three, then my dad said we needed to get our own passports,” Osahon said.

“I’ve never gone abroad but my father has promised that I will go for university. I wish I could just apply for my visa now instead of waiting to finish school,” Emenike said. After he spoke, a hushed silence followed.

“Don’t leave us now, wait until you finish,” Yinka finally said, and she and Kayode burst out laughing. The others laughed, too, even Emenike himself, but there was, underneath their laughter, a barbed echo. They knew he was lying, Emenike who made up stories of rich parents that everyone knew he didn’t have, so immersed in his need to invent a life that was not his. The conversation ebbed, changed to the mathematics teacher who did not know how to solve simultaneous equations. Obinze took Ifemelu’s hand and they drifted away. They did that often, slowly detaching themselves from their friends, to sit in a corner by the library or take a walk in the green behind the laboratories. As they walked, she wanted to tell Obinze that she didn’t know what it meant to “be on your mother’s passport,” that her mother didn’t even have a passport. But she said nothing, walking beside him in silence. He fit here, in this school, much more than she did. She was popular, always on every party list, and always announced, during assembly, as one of the “first three” in her class, yet she felt sheathed in a translucent haze of difference. She would not be here if she had not done so well on the entrance examination, if her father had not been determined that she would go to “a school that builds both character and career.” Her primary school had been different, full of children like her, whose parents were teachers and civil servants, who took the bus and did not have drivers. She remembered the surprise on Obinze’s face, a surprise he had quickly shielded, when he asked, “What’s your phone number?” and she replied, “We don’t have a phone.”

He was holding her hand now, squeezing gently. He admired her for being outspoken and different, but he did not seem able to see beneath that. To be here, among people who had gone abroad, was natural for him. He was fluent in the knowledge of foreign things, especially of American things. Everybody watched American films and exchanged faded American magazines, but he knew details about American presidents from a hundred years ago. Everybody watched American shows, but he knew about Lisa Bonet leaving The Cosby Show to go and do Angel Heart and Will Smith’s huge debts before he was signed to do The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. “You look like a black American” was his ultimate compliment, which he told her when she wore a nice dress, or when her hair was done in large braids. Manhattan was his zenith. He often said “It’s not as if this is Manhattan” or “Go to Manhattan and see how things are.” He gave her a copy of Huckleberry Finn, the pages creased from his thumbing, and she started reading it on the bus home but stopped after a few chapters. The next morning, she put it down on his desk with a decided thump. “Unreadable nonsense,” she said.

“It’s written in different American dialects,” Obinze said.

“And so what? I still don’t understand it.”

“You have to be patient, Ifem. If you really get into it, it’s very interesting and you won’t want to stop reading.”

“I’ve already stopped reading. Please keep your proper books and leave me with the books I like. And by the way, I still win when we play Scrabble, Mr. Read Proper Books.”

Now, she slipped her hand from his as they walked back to class. Whenever she felt this way, panic would slice into her at the slightest thing, and mundane events would become arbiters of doom. This time, Ginika was the trigger; she was standing near the staircase, her backpack on her shoulder, her face gold-streaked in the sunlight, and suddenly Ifemelu thought how much Ginika and Obinze had in common. Ginika’s house at the University of Lagos, the quiet bungalow, the yard crowned by bougainvillea hedges, was perhaps like Obinze’s house in Nsukka, and she imagined Obinze realizing how better suited Ginika was for him, and then this joy, this fragile, glimmering thing between them, would disappear.

OBINZE TOLD HER, one morning after assembly, that his mother wanted her to visit.

“Your mother?” she asked him, agape.

“I think she wants to meet her future daughter-in-law.”

“Obinze, be serious!”

“I remember in primary six, I took this girl to the send-off party and my mom dropped both of us off and gave the girl a handkerchief. She said, ‘A lady always needs a handkerchief.’ My mother can be strange, sha. Maybe she wants to give you a handkerchief.”

“Obinze Maduewesi!”

“She’s never done this before, but then I’ve never had a serious girlfriend before. I think she just wants to see you. She said you should come to lunch.”

Ifemelu stared at him. What sort of mother in her right mind asked her son’s girlfriend to visit? It was odd. Even the expression “come to lunch” was something people said in books. If you were Boyfriend and Girlfriend, you did not visit each other’s homes; you registered for after-school lessons, for French Club, for anything that could mean seeing each other outside school. Her parents did not, of course, know about Obinze. Obinze’s mother’s invitation frightened and excited her; for days, she worried about what to wear.

“Just be yourself,” Aunty Uju told her and Ifemelu replied, “How can I just be myself? What does that even mean?”

On the afternoon she visited, she stood outside the door of their flat for a while before she pressed the bell, suddenly and wildly hoping that they had gone out. Obinze opened the door.

“Hi. My mom just came back from work.”

The living room was airy, the walls free of photographs except for a turquoise painting of a long-necked woman in a turban.

“That’s the only thing that is ours. Everything else came with the flat,” Obinze said.

“It’s nice,” she mumbled.

“Don’t be nervous. Remember, she wants you here,” Obinze whispered, just before his mother appeared. She looked like Onyeka Onwenu, the resemblance was astounding: a full-nosed, full-lipped beauty, her round face framed by a low Afro, her faultless complexion the deep brown of cocoa. Onyeka Onwenu’s music had been one of the luminous joys of Ifemelu’s childhood, and had remained undimmed in the aftermath of childhood. She would always remember the day her father came home with the new album In the Morning Light; Onyeka Onwenu’s face on it was a revelation, and for a long time she traced that photo with her finger. The songs, each time her father played them, made their flat festive, turned him into a looser person who sang along with songs steeped in femaleness, and Ifemelu would guiltily fantasize about him being married to Onyeka Onwenu instead of to her mother. When she greeted Obinze’s mother with a “Good afternoon, ma,” she almost expected her, in response, to break into song in a voice as peerless as Onyeka Onwenu’s. But she had a low, murmuring voice.

“What a beautiful name you have. Ifemelunamma,” she said.

Ifemelu stood tongue-tied for seconds. “Thank you, ma.”

“Translate it,” she said.

“Translate?”

“Yes, how would you translate your name? Did Obinze tell you I do some translation? From the French. I am a lecturer in literature, not English literature, mind you, but literatures in English, and my translating is something I do as a hobby. Now translating your name from Igbo to English might be Made-in-Good-Times or Beautifully Made, or what do you think?”

Ifemelu could not think. There was something about the woman that made her want to say intelligent things, but her mind was blank.

“Mummy, she came to greet you, not to translate her name,” Obinze said, with a playful exasperation.

“Do we have a soft drink to offer our guest? Did you bring out the soup from the freezer? Let’s go to the kitchen,” his mother said. She reached out and picked off a piece of lint from his hair, and then hit his head lightly. Their fluid, bantering rapport made Ifemelu uncomfortable. It was free of restraint, free of the fear of consequences; it did not take the familiar shape of a relationship with a parent. They cooked together, his mother stirring the soup, Obinze making the garri, while Ifemelu stood by drinking a Coke. She had offered to help, but his mother had said, “No, my dear, maybe next time,” as though she did not just let anyone help in her kitchen. She was pleasant and direct, even warm, but there was a privacy about her, a reluctance to bare herself completely to the world, the same quality as Obinze. She had taught her son the ability to be, even in the middle of a crowd, somehow comfortably inside himself.

“What are your favorite novels, Ifemelunamma?” his mother asked. “You know Obinze will only read American books? I hope you’re not that foolish.”

“Mummy, you’re just trying to force me to like this book.” He gestured to the book on the kitchen table, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. “My mother reads this book twice a year. I don’t know why,” he said to Ifemelu.

“It is a wise book. The human stories that matter are those that endure. The American books you read are lightweights.” She turned to Ifemelu. “This boy is too besotted with America.”

“I read American books because America is the future, Mummy. And remember that your husband was educated there.”

“That was when only dullards went to school in America. American universities were considered to be at the same level as British secondary schools then. I did a lot of brushing-up on that man after I married him.”

“Even though you left your things in his flat so that his other girlfriends would stay away?”

“I’ve told you not to pay any attention to your uncle’s false stories.”

Ifemelu stood there mesmerized. Obinze’s mother, her beautiful face, her air of sophistication, her wearing a white apron in the kitchen, was not like any other mother Ifemelu knew. Here, her father would seem crass, with his unnecessary big words, and her mother provincial and small.

“You can wash your hands at the sink,” Obinze’s mother told her. “I think the water is still running.”

They sat at the dining table, eating garri and soup, Ifemelu trying hard to be, as Aunty Uju had said, “herself,” although she was no longer sure what “herself” was. She felt undeserving, unable to sink with Obinze and his mother into their atmosphere. “The soup is very sweet, ma,” she said politely. “Oh, Obinze cooked it,” his mother said. “Didn’t he tell you that he cooks?”

“Yes, but I didn’t think he could make soup, ma,” Ifemelu said. Obinze was smirking.

“Do you cook at home?” his mother asked.

Ifemelu wanted to lie, to say that she cooked and loved cooking, but she remembered Aunty Uju’s words. “No, ma,” she said. “I don’t like cooking. I can eat Indomie noodles day and night.”

His mother laughed, as though charmed by the honesty, and when she laughed, she looked like a softer-faced Obinze. Ifemelu ate her food slowly, thinking how much she wanted to remain there with them, in their rapture, forever.

THEIR FLAT SMELLED of vanilla on weekends, when Obinze’s mother baked. Slices of mango glistening on a pie, small brown cakes swelling with raisins. Ifemelu stirred the batter and peeled the fruit; her own mother did not bake, their oven housed cockroaches.

“Obinze just said ‘trunk,’ ma. He said it’s in the trunk of your car,” she said. In their America-Britain jousting, she always sided with his mother.

“Trunk is a part of a tree and not a part of a car, my dear son,” his mother said. When Obinze pronounced “schedule” with the k sound, his mother said, “Ifemelunamma, please tell my son I don’t speak American. Could he say that in English?”

On weekends, they watched films on video. They sat in the living room, eyes on the screen, and Obinze said, “Mummy, chelu, let’s hear,” when his mother, from time to time, gave her commentary on the plausibility of a scene, or the foreshadowing, or whether an actor was wearing a wig. One Sunday, midway into a film, his mother left for the pharmacy, to buy her allergy medicine. “I’d forgotten they close early today,” she said. As soon as her car engine started, a dull revving, Ifemelu and Obinze hurried to his bedroom and sank onto his bed, kissing and touching, their clothing rolled up, shifted aside, pulled halfway. Their skin warm against each other. They left the door and the window louvers open, both of them alert to the sound of his mother’s car. In a sluice of seconds, they were dressed, back in the living room, Play pressed on the video recorder.

Obinze’s mother walked in and glanced at the TV. “You were watching this scene when I left,” she said quietly. A frozen silence fell, even from the film. Then the singsong cries of a beans hawker floated in through the window.

“Ifemelunamma, please come,” his mother said, turning to go inside.

Obinze got up, but Ifemelu stopped him. “No, she called me.”

His mother asked her to come inside her bedroom, asked her to sit on the bed.

“If anything happens between you and Obinze, you are both responsible. But Nature is unfair to women. An act is done by two people, but if there are any consequences, one person carries it alone. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.” Ifemelu kept her eyes averted from Obinze’s mother, firmly fixed on the black-and-white linoleum on the floor.

“Have you done anything serious with Obinze?”

“No.”

“I was once young. I know what it is like to love while young. I want to advise you. I am aware that, in the end, you will do what you want. My advice is that you wait. You can love without making love. It is a beautiful way of showing your feelings but it brings responsibility, great responsibility, and there is no rush. I will advise you to wait until you are at least in the university, wait until you own yourself a little more. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Ifemelu said. She did not know what “own yourself a little more” meant.

“I know you are a clever girl. Women are more sensible than men, and you will have to be the sensible one. Convince him. Both of you should agree to wait so that there is no pressure.”

Obinze’s mother paused and Ifemelu wondered if she had finished. The silence rang in her head.

“Thank you, ma,” Ifemelu said.

“And when you want to start, I want you to come and see me. I want to know that you are being responsible.”

Ifemelu nodded. She was sitting on Obinze’s mother’s bed, in the woman’s bedroom, nodding and agreeing to tell her when she started having sex with her son. Yet she felt the absence of shame. Perhaps it was Obinze’s mother’s tone, the evenness of it, the normalness of it.

“Thank you, ma,” Ifemelu said again, now looking at Obinze’s mother’s face, which was open, no different from what it usually was. “I will.”

She went back to the living room. Obinze seemed nervous, perched on the edge of the center table. “I’m so sorry. I’m going to talk to her about this when you leave. If she wants to talk to anybody, it should be me.”

“She said I should never come here again. That I am misleading her son.”

Obinze blinked. “What?”

Ifemelu laughed. Later, when she told him what his mother had said, he shook his head. “We have to tell her when we start? What kind of rubbish is that? Does she want to buy condoms for us? What is wrong with that woman?”

“But who told you we are ever going to start anything?”

CHAPTER 6

During the week, Aunty Uju hurried home to shower and wait for The General and, on weekends, she lounged in her nightdress, reading or cooking or watching television, because The General was in Abuja with his wife and children. She avoided the sun and used creams in elegant bottles, so that her complexion, already naturally light, became lighter, brighter, and took on a sheen. Sometimes, as she gave instructions to her driver, Sola, or her gardener, Baba Flower, or her two house helps, Inyang who cleaned and Chikodili who cooked, Ifemelu would remember Aunty Uju, the village girl brought to Lagos so many years ago, who Ifemelu’s mother mildly complained was so parochial she kept touching the walls, and what was it with all those village people who could not stand on their feet without reaching out to smear their palm on a wall? Ifemelu wondered if Aunty Uju ever looked at herself with the eyes of the girl she used to be. Perhaps not. Aunty Uju had steadied herself into her new life with a lightness of touch, more consumed by The General himself than by her new wealth.

The first time Ifemelu saw Aunty Uju’s house in Dolphin Estate, she did not want to leave. The bathroom fascinated her, with its hot water tap, its gushing shower, its pink tiles. The bedroom curtains were made of raw silk, and she told Aunty Uju, “Ahn-ahn, it’s a waste to use this material as a curtain! Let’s sew a dress with it.” The living room had glass doors that slid noiselessly open and noiselessly shut. Even the kitchen was air-conditioned. She wanted to live there. It would impress her friends; she imagined them sitting in the small room just off the living room, which Aunty Uju called the TV room, watching programs on satellite. And so she asked her parents if she could stay with Aunty Uju during the week. “It’s closer to school, I won’t need to take two buses. I can go on Mondays and come home on Fridays,” Ifemelu said. “I can also help Aunty Uju in the house.”

“My understanding is that Uju has sufficient help,” her father said.

“It is a good idea,” her mother said to her father. “She can study well there, at least there will be light every day. No need for her to study with kerosene lamps.”

“She can visit Uju after school and on weekends. But she is not going to live there,” her father said.

Her mother paused, taken aback by his firmness. “Okay,” she said, with a helpless glance at Ifemelu.

For days, Ifemelu sulked. Her father often indulged her, giving in to what she wanted, but this time he ignored her pouts, her deliberate silences at the dinner table. He pretended not to notice when Aunty Uju brought them a new television. He settled back in his well-worn sofa, reading his well-worn book, while Aunty Uju’s driver put down the brown Sony carton. Ifemelu’s mother began to sing a church song—“the Lord has given me victory, I will lift him higher”—which was often sung at collection time.

“The General bought more than I needed in the house. There was nowhere to put this one,” Aunty Uju said, a general statement made to nobody in particular, a way of shrugging off thanks. Ifemelu’s mother opened the carton, gently stripped away the Styrofoam packaging.

“Our old one doesn’t even show anything anymore,” she said, although they all knew that it still did.

“Look at how slim it is!” she added. “Look!”

Her father raised his eyes from the book. “Yes, it is,” he said, and then lowered his gaze.

THE LANDLORD CAME AGAIN. He barged past Ifemelu into the flat, into the kitchen, and reached up to the electric meter, yanking off the fuse, cutting off what little electricity they had.

After he left, Ifemelu’s father said, “What ignominy. To ask us for two years’ rent. We have been paying one year.”

“But even that one year, we have not paid,” her mother said, and in her tone was the slightest of accusations.

“I’ve spoken to Akunne about a loan,” her father said. He disliked Akunne, his almost-cousin, the prosperous man from their hometown to whom everyone took their problems. He called Akunne a lurid illiterate, a money-miss-road.

“What did he say?”

“He said I should come and see him next Friday.” His fingers were unsteady; he was struggling, it seemed, to suppress emotions. Ifemelu hastily looked away, hoping he had not seen her watching him, and asked him if he could explain a difficult question in her homework. To distract him, to make it seem that life could happen again.

HER FATHER WOULD NOT ASK Aunty Uju for help, but if Aunty Uju presented him with the money, he would not refuse. It was better than being indebted to Akunne. Ifemelu told Aunty Uju how the landlord banged on their door, a loud, unnecessary banging for the benefit of the neighbors, while hurling insults at her father. “Are you not a real man? Pay me my money. I will throw you out of this flat if I don’t get that rent by next week!”

As Ifemelu mimicked the landlord, a wan sadness crossed Aunty Uju’s face. “How can that useless landlord embarrass Brother like this? I’ll ask Oga to give me the money.”

Ifemelu stopped. “You don’t have money?”

“My account is almost empty. But Oga will give it to me. And do you know I have not been paid a salary since I started work? Every day, there is a new story from the accounts people. The trouble started with my position that does not officially exist, even though I see patients every day.”

“But doctors are on strike,” Ifemelu said.

“The military hospitals still pay. Not that my pay will be enough for the rent, sha.”

“You don’t have money?” Ifemelu asked again, slowly, to clarify, to be sure. “Ahn-ahn, Aunty, but how can you not have money?”

“Oga never gives me big money. He pays all the bills and he wants me to ask for everything I need. Some men are like that.”

Ifemelu stared. Aunty Uju, in her big pink house with the wide satellite dish blooming from its roof, her generator brimming with diesel, her freezer stocked with meat, and she did not have money in her bank account.

“Ifem, don’t look as if somebody died!” Aunty Uju laughed, her wry laugh. She looked suddenly small and bewildered among the detritus of her new life, the fawn-colored jewel case on the dressing table, the silk robe thrown across the bed, and Ifemelu felt frightened for her.

“HE EVEN GAVE ME a little more than I asked for,” Aunty Uju told Ifemelu the next weekend, with a small smile, as though amused by what The General had done. “We’ll go to the house from the salon so I can give it to Brother.”

It startled Ifemelu, how much a relaxer retouching cost at Aunty Uju’s hair salon; the haughty hairdressers sized up each customer, eyes swinging from head to shoes, to decide how much attention she was worth. With Aunty Uju, they hovered and groveled, curtseying deeply as they greeted her, overpraising her handbag and shoes. Ifemelu watched, fascinated. It was here, at a Lagos salon, that the different ranks of imperial femaleness were best understood.

“Those girls, I was waiting for them to bring out their hands and beg you to shit so they could worship that too,” Ifemelu said, as they left the salon.

Aunty Uju laughed and patted the silky hair extensions that fell to her shoulders: Chinese weave-on, the latest version, shiny and straight as straight could be; it never tangled.

“You know, we live in an ass-licking economy. The biggest problem in this country is not corruption. The problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where they are supposed to be because they won’t lick anybody’s ass, or they don’t know which ass to lick or they don’t even know how to lick an ass. I’m lucky to be licking the right ass.” She smiled. “It’s just luck. Oga said I was well brought up, that I was not like all the Lagos girls who sleep with him on the first night and the next morning give him a list of what they want him to buy. I slept with him on the first night but I did not ask for anything, which was stupid of me now that I think of it, but I did not sleep with him because I wanted something. Ah, this thing called power. I was attracted to him even with his teeth like Dracula. I was attracted to his power.”

Aunty Uju liked to talk about The General, different versions of the same stories repeated and savored. Her driver had told her — she swayed his loyalty by arranging his wife’s prenatal visits and his baby’s immunizations — that The General asked for details of where she went and how long she stayed, and each time Aunty Uju told Ifemelu the story, she would end with a sigh, “Does he think I can’t see another man without him knowing, if I wanted to? But I don’t want to.”

They were in the cold interior of the Mazda. As the driver backed out of the gates of the salon compound, Aunty Uju gestured to the gateman, rolled down her window, and gave him some money.

“Thank you, madam!” he said, and saluted.

She had slipped naira notes to all the salon workers, to the security men outside, to the policemen at the road junction.

“They’re not paid enough to afford school fees for even one child,” Aunty Uju said.

“That small money you gave him will not help him pay any school fees,” Ifemelu said.

“But he can buy a little extra something and he will be in a better mood and he won’t beat his wife this night,” Aunty Uju said. She looked out of the window and said, “Slow down, Sola,” so that she could get a good look at an accident on Osborne Road; a bus had hit a car, the front of the bus and the back of the car were now mangled metal, and both drivers were shouting in each other’s faces, buffered by a gathering crowd. “Where do they come from? These people that appear once there is an accident?” Aunty Uju leaned back on her seat. “Do you know I have forgotten what it feels like to be in a bus? It is so easy to get used to all this.”

“You can just go to Falomo now and get on a bus,” Ifemelu said.

“But it won’t be the same. It’s never the same when you have other choices.” Aunty Uju looked at her. “Ifem, stop worrying about me.”

“I’m not worrying.”

“You’ve been worrying since I told you about my account.”

“If somebody else was doing this, you would say she was stupid.”

“I would not even advise you to do what I’m doing.” Aunty Uju turned back to the window. “He’ll change. I’ll make him change. I just need to go slowly.”

At the flat, Aunty Uju handed Ifemelu’s father a plastic bag swollen with cash. “It’s rent for two years, Brother,” she said, with an embarrassed casualness, and then made a joke about the hole in his singlet. She did not look him in the face as she spoke and he did not look her in the face as he thanked her.

THE GENERAL HAD yellowed eyes, which suggested to Ifemelu a malnourished childhood. His solid, thickset body spoke of fights that he had started and won, and the buckteeth that gaped through his lips made him seem vaguely dangerous. Ifemelu was surprised by the gleeful coarseness of him. “I’m a village man!” he said happily, as though to explain the drops of soup that landed on his shirt and on the table while he ate, or his loud burping afterwards. He arrived in the evenings, in his green uniform, holding a gossip magazine or two, while his ADC, at an obsequious pace behind him, brought his briefcase and put it on the dining table. He rarely left with the gossip magazines; copies of Vintage People and Prime People and Lagos Life littered Aunty Uju’s house, with their blurry photos and garish headlines.

“If I tell you what these people do, eh,” Aunty Uju would say to Ifemelu, tapping at a magazine photo with her French-manicured nail. “Their real stories are not even in the magazines. Oga has the real gist.” Then she would talk about the man who had sex with a top general to get an oil bloc, the military administrator whose children were fathered by somebody else, the foreign prostitutes flown in weekly for the Head of State. She repeated the stories with affectionate amusement, as though she thought The General’s keenness on raunchy gossip was a charming and forgivable indulgence. “Do you know he is afraid of injections? A whole General Officer Commanding and if he sees a needle, he is afraid!” Aunty Uju said, in the same tone. It was, to her, an endearing detail. Ifemelu could not think of The General as endearing, with his loud, boorish manner, the way he reached out to slap Aunty Uju’s backside as they went upstairs, saying, “All this for me? All this for me?” and the way he talked and talked, never acknowledging an interruption, until he finished a story. One of his favorites, which he often told Ifemelu, while drinking Star beer after dinner, was the story of how Aunty Uju was different. He told it with a self-congratulatory tone, as if her difference reflected his own good taste. “The first time I told her I was going to London and asked what she wanted, she gave me a list. Before I looked at it, I said I already know what she wants. Is it not perfume, shoes, bag, watch, and clothes? I know Lagos girls. But you know what was in it? One perfume and four books! I was shocked. Chai. I spent one good hour in that bookshop in Piccadilly. I bought her twenty books! Which Lagos babe do you know that will be asking for books?”

Aunty Uju would laugh, suddenly girlish and pliant. Ifemelu would smile dutifully. She thought it undignified and irresponsible, this old married man telling her stories; it was like showing her his unclean underwear. She tried to see him through Aunty Uju’s eyes, a man of wonders, a man of worldly excitements, but she could not. She recognized the lightness of being, the joyfulness that Aunty Uju had on weekdays; it was how she felt when she was looking forward to seeing Obinze after school. But it seemed wrong, a waste, that Aunty Uju should feel this for The General. Aunty Uju’s ex-boyfriend, Olujimi, was different, nice-looking and smooth-voiced; he glistened with a quiet polish. They had been together for most of university and when you saw them, you saw why they were together. “I outgrew him,” Aunty Uju said.

“Don’t you outgrow and move on to something better?” Ifemelu asked. And Aunty Uju laughed as though it was really a joke.

On the day of the coup, a close friend of The General’s called Aunty Uju to ask if she was with him. There was tension; some army officers had already been arrested. Aunty Uju was not with The General, did not know where he was, and she paced upstairs and then downstairs, worried, making phone calls that yielded nothing. Soon, she began to heave, struggling to breathe. Her panic had turned into an asthma attack. She was gasping, shaking, piercing her arm with a needle, trying to inject herself with medicine, drops of blood staining the bedcovers, until Ifemelu ran down the street to bang on the door of a neighbor whose sister was also a doctor. Finally, The General called to say that he was fine, the coup had failed and all was well with the Head of State; Aunty Uju’s trembling stopped.

ON A MUSLIM HOLIDAY, one of those two-day holidays when non-Muslims in Lagos said “Happy Sallah” to whoever they assumed to be a Muslim, often gatemen from the north, and NTA showed footage after footage of men slaughtering rams, The General promised to visit; it would be the first time he spent a public holiday with Aunty Uju. She was in the kitchen the entire morning supervising Chikodili, singing loudly from time to time, being a little too familiar with Chikodili, a little too quick to laugh with her. Finally, the cooking done and the house smelling of spices and sauces, Aunty Uju went upstairs to shower.

“Ifem, please come and help me trim my hair down there. Oga said it disturbs him!” Aunty Uju said, laughing, and then lay on her back, legs spread and held high, an old gossip magazine beneath her, while Ifemelu worked with a shaving stick. Ifemelu had finished and Aunty Uju was coating an exfoliating mask on her face when The General called to say he could no longer come. Aunty Uju, her face ghoulish, covered in chalk-white paste except for the circles of skin around her eyes, hung up and walked into the kitchen and began to put the food in plastic containers for the freezer. Chikodili looked on in confusion. Aunty Uju worked feverishly, jerking the freezer compartment, slamming the cupboard, and as she pushed back the pot of jollof rice, the pot of egusi soup fell off the cooker. Aunty Uju stared at the yellowish-green sauce spreading across the kitchen floor as though she did not know how it had happened. She turned to Chikodili and screamed, “Why are you looking like a mumu? Come on, clean it up!”

Ifemelu was watching from the kitchen entrance. “Aunty, the person you should be shouting at is The General.”

Aunty Uju stopped, her eyes bulging and enraged. “Is it me you are talking to like that? Am I your agemate?”

Aunty Uju charged at her. Ifemelu had not expected Aunty Uju to hit her, yet when the slap landed on the side of her face, making a sound that seemed to her to come from far away, finger-shaped welts rising on her cheek, she was not surprised. They stared at each other. Aunty Uju opened her mouth as though to say something and then she closed it and turned and walked upstairs, both of them aware that something between them was now different. Aunty Uju did not come downstairs until evening, when Adesuwa and Uche came to visit. She called them “my friends in quotes.” “I’m going to the salon with my friends in quotes,” she would say, a wan laughter in her eyes. She knew they were her friends only because she was The General’s mistress. But they amused her. They visited her insistently, comparing notes on shopping and travel, asking her to go to parties with them. It was strange what she knew and did not know about them, she once told Ifemelu. She knew that Adesuwa owned land in Abuja, given to her when she dated the Head of State, and that a famously wealthy Hausa man had bought Uche’s boutique in Surulere, but she did not know how many siblings either of them had or where their parents lived or whether they had gone to university.

Chikodili let them in. They wore embroidered caftans and spicy perfume, their Chinese weaves hanging down to their backs, their conversation lined with a hard-edged worldliness, their laughter short and scornful. I told him he must buy it in my name o. Ah, I knew he would not bring the money unless I said somebody was sick. No now, he doesn’t know I opened the account. They were going to a Sallah party in Victoria Island and had come to take Aunty Uju.

“I don’t feel like going,” Aunty Uju told them, while Chikodili served orange juice, a carton on a tray, two glasses placed beside it.

“Ahn-ahn. Why now?” Uche asked.

“Serious big men are coming,” Adesuwa said. “You never know if you will meet somebody.”

“I don’t want to meet anybody,” Aunty Uju said, and there was quiet, as though each of them had to catch their breath, Aunty Uju’s words a gale that tore through their assumptions. She was supposed to want to meet men, to keep her eyes open; she was supposed to see The General as an option that could be bettered. Finally, one of them, Adesuwa or Uche, said, “This your orange juice is the cheap brand o! You don’t buy Just Juice anymore?” A lukewarm joke, but they laughed to ease the moment away.

After they left, Aunty Uju came over to the dining table, where Ifemelu sat reading.

“Ifem, I don’t know what got into me. Ndo.” She held Ifemelu’s wrist, then ran her hand, almost meditatively, over the embossed title of Ifemelu’s Sidney Sheldon novel. “I must be mad. He has a beer belly and Dracula teeth and a wife and children and he’s old.”

For the first time, Ifemelu felt older than Aunty Uju, wiser and stronger than Aunty Uju, and she wished that she could wrest Aunty Uju away, shake her into a clear-eyed self, who would not lay her hopes on The General, slaving and shaving for him, always eager to fade his flaws. It was not as it should be. Ifemelu felt a small gratification to hear, later, Aunty Uju shouting on the phone. “Nonsense! You knew you were going to Abuja from the beginning so why let me waste my time preparing for you!”

The cake a driver delivered the next morning, with “I’m sorry my love” written on it in blue frosting, had a bitter aftertaste, but Aunty Uju kept it in the freezer for months.

AUNTY UJU’S PREGNANCY CAME, like a sudden sound in a still night. She arrived at the flat wearing a sequined bou-bou that caught the light, glistening like a flowing celestial presence, and said that she wanted to tell Ifemelu’s parents about it before they heard the gossip. “Adi m ime,” she said simply.

Ifemelu’s mother burst into tears, loud dramatic cries, looking around, as though she could see, lying around her, the splintered pieces of her own story. “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

“I did not plan this, it happened,” Aunty Uju said. “I fell pregnant for Olujimi in university. I had an abortion and I am not doing it again.” The word “abortion,” blunt as it was, scarred the room, because they all knew that what Ifemelu’s mother did not say was that surely there were ways to take care of this. Ifemelu’s father put his book down and picked it up again. He cleared his throat. He soothed his wife.

“Well, I cannot ask about the man’s intentions,” he said finally to Aunty Uju. “So I should ask what your own intentions are.”

“I will have the baby.”

He waited to hear more, but Aunty Uju said nothing else, and so he sat back, assailed. “You are an adult. This is not what I hoped for you, Obianuju, but you are an adult.”

Aunty Uju went over and sat on the arm of his sofa. She spoke in a low, pacifying voice, stranger for being formal, but saved from falseness by the soberness of her face. “Brother, this is not what I hoped for myself either, but it has happened. I am sorry to disappoint you, after everything you have done for me, and I beg you to forgive me. But I will make the best of this situation. The General is a responsible man. He will take care of his child.”

Ifemelu’s father shrugged wordlessly. Aunty Uju put an arm around him, as though it were he who needed comforting.

LATER, Ifemelu would think of the pregnancy as symbolic. It marked the beginning of the end and made everything else seem rapid, the months rushing past, time hurtling forward. There was Aunty Uju, dimpled with exuberance, her face aglow, her mind busy with plans as her belly curved outwards. Every few days, she came up with a new girl’s name for the baby. “Oga is happy,” she said. “He is happy to know that he can still score a goal at his age, old man like him!” The General came more often, even on some weekends, bringing her hot water bottles, herbal pills, things he had heard were good for pregnancy.

He told her, “Of course you will deliver abroad,” and asked which she preferred, America or England. He wanted England, so that he could travel with her; the Americans had barred entry to high-ranking members of the military government. But Aunty Uju chose America, because her baby could still have automatic citizenship there. The plans were made, a hospital picked, a furnished condo rented in Atlanta. “What is a condo, anyway?” Ifemelu asked. And Aunty Uju shrugged and said, “Who knows what Americans mean? You should ask Obinze, he will know. At least it is a place to live. And Oga has people there who will help me.” Aunty Uju was dampened only when her driver told her that The General’s wife had heard about the pregnancy and was furious; there had, apparently, been a tense family meeting with his relatives and hers. The General hardly spoke about his wife, but Aunty Uju knew enough: a lawyer who had given up working to raise their four children in Abuja, a woman who looked portly and pleasant in newspaper photographs. “I wonder what she is thinking,” Aunty Uju said sadly, musingly. While she was in America, The General had one of the bedrooms repainted a brilliant white. He bought a cot, its legs like delicate candles. He bought stuffed toys, and too many teddy bears. Inyang propped them in the cot, lined some up on a shelf and, perhaps because she thought nobody would notice, she took one teddy bear to her room in the back. Aunty Uju had a boy. She sounded high and elated over the phone. “Ifem, he has so much hair! Can you imagine? What a waste!”

She called him Dike, after her father, and gave him her surname, which left Ifemelu’s mother agitated and sour.

“The baby should have his father’s name, or is the man planning to deny his child?” Ifemelu’s mother asked, as they sat in their living room, still digesting the news of the birth.

“Aunty Uju said it was just easier to give him her name,” Ifemelu said. “And is he behaving like a man that will deny his child? Aunty told me he’s even talking about coming to pay her bride price.”

“God forbid,” Ifemelu’s mother said, almost spitting the words out, and Ifemelu thought of all those fervent prayers for Aunty Uju’s mentor. Her mother, when Aunty Uju came back, stayed in Dolphin Estate for a while, bathing and feeding the gurgling, smooth-skinned baby, but she faced The General with a cold officiousness. She answered him in monosyllables, as though he had betrayed her by breaking the rules of her pretense. A relationship with Aunty Uju was acceptable, but such flagrant proof of the relationship was not. The house smelled of baby powder. Aunty Uju was happy. The General held Dike often, suggesting that perhaps he needed to be fed again or that a doctor needed to see the rash on his neck.

FOR DIKE’S FIRST BIRTHDAY PARTY, The General brought a live band. They set up in the front garden, near the generator house, and stayed until the last guests left, all of them slow and sated, taking food wrapped in foil. Aunty Uju’s friends came, and The General’s friends came, too, their expressions determined, as though to say that no matter the circumstances, their friend’s child was their friend’s child. Dike, newly walking, tottered around in a suit and red bow tie, while Aunty Uju followed him, trying to get him to be still for a few moments with the photographer. Finally, tired, he began to cry, yanking at his bow tie, and The General picked him up and carried him around. It was the image of The General that would endure in Ifemelu’s mind, Dike’s arms around his neck, his face lit up, his front teeth jutting out as he smiled, saying, “He looks like me o, but thank God he took his mother’s teeth.”

The General died the next week, in a military plane crash. “On the same day, the very same day, that the photographer brought the pictures from Dike’s birthday,” Aunty Uju would often say, in telling the story, as though this held some particular significance.

It was a Saturday afternoon, Obinze and Ifemelu were in the TV room, Inyang was upstairs with Dike, Aunty Uju was in the kitchen with Chikodili when the phone rang. Ifemelu picked it up. The voice on the other end, The General’s ADC, crackled through a bad connection, but was still clear enough to give her details: the crash happened a few miles outside Jos, the bodies were charred, there were already rumors that the Head of State had engineered it to get rid of officers who he feared were planning a coup. Ifemelu held the phone too tightly, stunned. Obinze went with her to the kitchen, and stood by Aunty Uju as Ifemelu repeated the ADC’s words.

“You are lying,” Aunty Uju said. “It is a lie.”

She marched towards the phone, as though to challenge it, too, and then she slid to the floor, a boneless, bereft sliding, and began to weep. Ifemelu held her, cradled her, all of them unsure of what to do, and the silence in between her sobs seemed too silent. Inyang brought Dike downstairs.

“Mama?” Dike said, looking puzzled.

“Take Dike upstairs,” Obinze told Inyang.

There was banging on the gate. Two men and three women, relatives of The General, had bullied Adamu to open the gate, and now stood at the front door, shouting. “Uju! Pack your things and get out now! Give us the car keys!” One of the women was skeletal, agitated and red-eyed, and as she shouted—“Common harlot! God forbid that you will touch our brother’s property! Prostitute! You will never live in peace in this Lagos!”—she pulled her headscarf from her head and tied it tightly around her waist, in preparation for a fight. At first, Aunty Uju said nothing, staring at them, standing still at the door. Then she asked them to leave in a voice hoarse from tears, but the relatives’ shouting intensified, and so Aunty Uju turned to go back indoors. “Okay, don’t go,” she said. “Just stay there. Stay there while I go and call my boys from the army barracks.”

Only then did they leave, telling her, “We are coming back with our own boys.” Only then did Aunty Uju begin to sob again. “I have nothing. Everything is in his name. Where will I take my son to now?”

She picked up the phone from its cradle and then stared at it, uncertain whom to call.

“Call Uche and Adesuwa,” Ifemelu said. They would know what to do.

Aunty Uju did, pressing the speaker button, and then leaned against the wall.

“You have to leave immediately. Make sure you clear the house, take everything,” Uche said. “Do it fast-fast before his people come back. Arrange a tow van and take the generator. Make sure you take the generator.”

“I don’t know where to find a van,” Aunty Uju mumbled, with a helplessness foreign to her.

“We’re going to arrange one for you, fast-fast. You have to take that generator. That is what will pay for your life until you gather yourself. You have to go somewhere for a while, so that they don’t give you trouble. Go to London or America. Do you have American visa?”

“Yes.”

Ifemelu would remember the final moments in a blur, Adamu saying there was a journalist from City People at the gate, Ifemelu and Chikodili stuffing clothes in suitcases, Obinze carrying things out to the van, Dike stumbling around and chortling. The rooms upstairs had grown unbearably hot; the air conditioners had suddenly stopped working, as though they had decided, in unison, to pay tribute to the end.

CHAPTER 7

Obinze wanted to go to the University of Ibadan because of a poem.

He read the poem to her, J. P. Clark’s “Ibadan,” and he lingered on the words “running splash of rust and gold.”

“Are you serious?” she asked him. “Because of this poem?”

“It’s so beautiful.”

Ifemelu shook her head, in mocking, exaggerated incredulity. But she, too, wanted to go to Ibadan, because Aunty Uju had gone there. They filled out their JAMB forms together, sitting at the dining table while his mother hovered around, saying, “Are you using the right pencil? Cross-check everything. I have heard of the most unlikely mistakes that you will not believe.”

Obinze said, “Mummy, we are more likely to fill it out without mistakes if you stop talking.”

“At least you should make Nsukka your second choice,” his mother said. But Obinze did not want to go to Nsukka, he wanted to escape the life he had always had, and Nsukka, to Ifemelu, seemed remote and dusty. And so they both agreed to make the University of Lagos their second choice.

The next day, Obinze’s mother collapsed in the library. A student found her spread on the floor like a rag, a small bump on her head, and Obinze told Ifemelu, “Thank God we haven’t submitted our JAMB forms.”

“What do you mean?”

“My mom is returning to Nsukka at the end of this session. I have to be near her. The doctor said this thing will keep happening.” He paused. “We can see each other during long weekends. I will come to Ibadan and you come to Nsukka.”

“You’re a joker,” she told him. “Biko, I’m changing to Nsukka as well.”

The change pleased her father. It was heartening, he said, that she would go to university in Igboland since she had lived her whole life in the west. Her mother was downcast. Ibadan was only an hour away, but Nsukka meant a day’s journey on the bus.

“It’s not a day, Mummy, just seven hours,” Ifemelu said.

“And what is the difference between that and a day?” her mother asked.

Ifemelu was looking forward to being away from home, to the independence of owning her own time, and she felt comforted that Ranyinudo and Tochi were going to Nsukka too. So was Emenike, who asked Obinze if they could be roommates, in the boys’ quarters of Obinze’s house. Obinze said yes. Ifemelu wished he had not. “There’s just something about Emenike,” she said. “But anyway, as long as he goes away when we are busy with ceiling.”

Later, Obinze would ask, half seriously, if Ifemelu thought his mother’s fainting had been deliberate, a plot to keep him close. For a long time, he spoke wistfully of Ibadan until he visited the campus, for a table tennis tournament, and returned to tell her, sheepishly, “Ibadan reminded me of Nsukka.”

TO GO TO NSUKKA was to finally see Obinze’s home, a bungalow resting in a compound filled with flowers. Ifemelu imagined him growing up, riding his bicycle down the sloping street, returning home from primary school with his bag and water bottle. Still, Nsukka disoriented her. She thought it too slow, the dust too red, the people too satisfied with the smallness of their lives. But she would come to love it, a hesitant love at first. From the window of her hostel room, where four beds were squashed into a space for two, she could look out to the entrance of Bello Hall. Tall gmelina trees swayed in the wind, and underneath them were hawkers, guarding trays of bananas and groundnuts, and okadas all parked close to each other, the motorcyclists talking and laughing, but each of them alert to customers. She put up bright blue wallpaper in her corner and because she had heard stories of roommate squabbles — one final-year student, it was said, had poured kerosene into the drawer of the first-year student for being what was called “saucy”—she felt fortunate about her roommates. They were easygoing and soon she was sharing with them and borrowing from them the things that easily ran out, toothpaste and powdered milk and Indomie noodles and hair pomade. Most mornings, she woke up to the rumbling murmur of voices in the corridor, the Catholic students saying the rosary, and she would hurry to the bathroom, to collect water in her bucket before the tap stopped, to squat over the toilet before it became unbearably full. Sometimes, when she was too late, and the toilets already swirled with maggots, she would go to Obinze’s house, even if he was not there, and once the house help Augustina opened the front door, she would say, “Tina-Tina, how now? I came to use the toilet.”

She often ate lunch in Obinze’s house, or they would go to town, to Onyekaozulu, and sit on wooden benches in the dimness of the restaurant, eating, on enamel plates, the tenderest of meats and the tastiest of stews. She spent some nights in Obinze’s boys’ quarters, lounging on his mattress on the floor, listening to music. Sometimes she would dance in her underwear, wiggling her hips, while he teased her about having a small bottom: “I was going to say shake it, but there’s nothing to shake.”

University was bigger and baggier, there was room to hide, so much room; she did not feel as though she did not belong because there were many options for belonging. Obinze teased her about how popular she already was, her room busy during the first-year rush, final-year boys dropping by, eager to try their luck, even though a large photo of Obinze hung above her pillow. The boys amused her. They came and sat on her bed and solemnly offered to “show her around campus,” and she imagined them saying the same words in the same tone to the first-year girl in the next room. One of them, though, was different. His name was Odein. He came to her room, not as part of the first-year rush but to talk to her roommates about the students’ union, and after that, he would come by to visit her, to say hello, sometimes bringing a pack of suya, hot and spicy, wrapped in oil-stained newspaper. His activism surprised Ifemelu — he seemed a little too urbane, a little too cool, to be in the students’ union government — but also impressed her. He had thick, perfectly shaped lips, the lower the same size as the upper, lips that were both thoughtful and sensual, and as he spoke—“If the students are not united, nobody will listen to us”—Ifemelu imagined kissing him, in a way that she imagined doing something she knew she never would. It was because of him that she joined the demonstration, and convinced Obinze to join, too. They chanted “No Light! No Water!” and “VC is a Goat!” and found themselves carried along with the roaring crowd that settled, finally, in front of the vice chancellor’s house. Bottles were broken, a car was set on fire, and then the vice chancellor came out, diminutive, encased between security men, and spoke in pastel tones.

Later, Obinze’s mother said, “I understand the students’ grievances, but we are not the enemy. The military is the enemy. They have not paid our salary in months. How can we teach if we cannot eat?” And, still later, the news spread around campus of a strike by lecturers, and students gathered in the hostel foyer, bristling with the known and the unknown. It was true, the hall rep confirmed the news, and they all sighed, contemplating this sudden unwanted break, and returned to their rooms to pack; the hostel would be closed the next day. Ifemelu heard a girl close by say, “I don’t have ten kobo for transport to go home.”

THE STRIKE LASTED too long. The weeks crawled past. Ifemelu was restless, antsy; every day she listened to the news, hoping to hear that the strike was over. Obinze called her at Ranyinudo’s house; she would arrive minutes before he was due to call and sit by the gray rotary phone, waiting for it to ring. She felt cut away from him, each of them living and breathing in separate spheres, he bored and spiritless in Nsukka, she bored and spiritless in Lagos, and everything curdled in lethargy. Life had become a turgid and suspended film. Her mother asked if she wanted to join the sewing class at church, to keep her occupied, and her father said that this, the unending university strike, was why young people became armed robbers. The strike was nationwide, and all her friends were home, even Kayode was home, back on holiday from his American university. She visited friends and went to parties, wishing Obinze lived in Lagos. Sometimes Odein, who had a car, would pick her up and take her where she needed to go. “That your boyfriend is lucky,” he told her, and she laughed, flirting with him. She still imagined kissing him, sloe-eyed and thick-lipped Odein.

One weekend, Obinze visited and stayed with Kayode.

“What is going on with this Odein?” Obinze asked her.

“What?”

“Kayode said he took you home after Osahon’s party. You didn’t tell me.”

“I forgot.”

“You forgot.”

“I told you he picked me up the other day, didn’t I?”

“Ifem, what is going on?”

She sighed. “Ceiling, it’s nothing. I’m just curious about him. Nothing is ever going to happen. But I am curious. You get curious about other girls, don’t you?”

He was looking at her, his eyes fearful. “No,” he said coldly. “I don’t.”

“Be honest.”

“I am being honest. The problem is you think everyone is like you.

You think you’re the norm but you’re not.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Just forget it.”

He did not want to talk about it any further, but the air between them was marred, and remained disturbed for days, even after he went back home, so that when the strike ended (“The lecturers have called it off! Praise God!” Chetachi shouted from their flat one morning) and Ifemelu returned to Nsukka, they were tentative with each other for the first few days, their conversations on tiptoe, their hugs abridged.

It surprised Ifemelu, how much she had missed Nsukka itself, the routines of unhurried pace, friends gathered in her room until past midnight, the inconsequential gossip told and retold, the stairs climbed slowly up and down as though in a gradual awakening, and each morning whitened by the harmattan. In Lagos, the harmattan was a mere veil of haze, but in Nsukka, it was a raging, mercurial presence; the mornings were crisp, the afternoons ashen with heat, and the nights unknown. Dust whirls would start in the far distance, very pretty to look at as long as they were far away, and swirl until they coated everything brown. Even eyelashes. Everywhere, moisture would be greedily sucked up; the wood laminate on tables would peel off and curl, pages of exercise books would crackle, clothes would dry minutes after being hung out, lips would crack and bleed, and Robb and Mentholatum kept within reach, in pockets and handbags. Skin would be shined with Vaseline, while the forgotten bits — between the fingers or at the elbows — turned a dull ash. The tree branches would be stark and, with their leaves fallen, wear a kind of proud desolation. The church bazaars would leave the air redolent, smoky from mass cooking. Some nights, the heat lay thick like a towel. Other nights, a sharp cold wind would descend, and Ifemelu would abandon her hostel room and, snuggled next to Obinze on his mattress, listen to the whistling pines howling outside, in a world suddenly fragile and breakable.

OBINZE’S MUSCLES WERE ACHING. He lay on his belly, and Ifemelu straddled him, massaging his back and neck and thighs with her fingers, her knuckles, her elbows. He was painfully taut. She stood on him, placed one foot gingerly on the back of a thigh, and then the other. “Does it feel okay?”

“Yes.” He groaned in pleasure-pain. She pressed down slowly, his skin warm under the soles of her feet, his tense muscles unknotting. She steadied herself with a hand on the wall, and dug her heels deeper, moving inch by inch while he grunted, “Ah! Ifem, yes, just there. Ah!”

“You should stretch after playing ball, mister man,” she said, and then she was lying on his back, tickling his underarms and kissing his neck.

“I have a suggestion for a better kind of massage,” he said. When he undressed her, he did not stop, as usual, at her underwear. He pulled it down and she raised her legs to aid him.

“Ceiling,” she said, half-certain. She did not want him to stop, but she had imagined this differently, assumed they would make a carefully planned ceremony of it.

“I’ll come out,” he said.

“You know it doesn’t always work.”

“If it doesn’t work, then we’ll welcome Junior.”

“Stop it.”

He looked up. “But, Ifem, we’re going to get married anyway.”

“Look at you. I might meet a rich handsome man and leave you.”

“Impossible. We’ll go to America when we graduate and raise our fine children.”

“You’ll say anything now because your brain is between your legs.”

“But my brain is always there!”

They were both laughing, and then the laughter stilled, gave way to a new, strange graveness, a slippery joining. It felt, to Ifemelu, like a weak copy, a floundering imitation of what she had imagined it would be. After he pulled away, jerking and gasping and holding himself, a discomfort nagged at her. She had been tense through it all, unable to relax. She had imagined his mother watching them; the image had forced itself onto her mind, and it had, even more oddly, been a double image, of his mother and Onyeka Onwenu, both watching them with unblinking eyes. She knew she could not possibly tell Obinze’s mother what had happened, even though she had promised to, and had believed then that she would. But now she could not see how. What would she say? What words would she use? Would Obinze’s mother expect details? She and Obinze should have planned it better; that way, she would know how to tell his mother. The unplannedness of it all had left her a little shaken, and also a little disappointed. It seemed somehow as though it had not been worth it after all.

When, a week or so later, she woke up in pain, a sharp stinging on her side and a great, sickening nausea pervading her body, she panicked. Then she vomited and her panic grew.

“It’s happened,” she told Obinze. “I’m pregnant.” They had met, as usual, in front of the Ekpo refectory after their morning lecture. Students milled around. A group of boys were smoking and laughing close by and for a moment, their laughter seemed directed at her.

Obinze’s brows wrinkled. He did not seem to understand what she was saying. “But, Ifem, it can’t be. It’s too early. Besides, I came out.”

“I told you it doesn’t work!” she said. He suddenly seemed young, a confused small boy looking helplessly at her. Her panic grew. On an impulse, she hailed a passing okada and jumped on the back and told the motorcyclist that she was going to town.

“Ifem, what are you doing?” Obinze asked. “Where are you going?”

“To call Aunty Uju,” she said.

Obinze got on the next okada and was soon speeding behind her, past the university gates and to the NITEL office, where Ifemelu gave the man behind the peeling counter a piece of paper with Aunty Uju’s American number. On the phone, she spoke in code, making it up as she went along, because of the people standing there, some waiting to make their own calls, others merely loitering, but all listening, with unabashed and open interest, to the conversations of others.

“Aunty, I think what happened to you before Dike came has happened to me,” Ifemelu said. “We ate the food a week ago.”

“Just last week? How many times?”

“Once.”

“Ifem, calm down. I don’t think you’re pregnant. But you need to do a test. Don’t go to the campus medical center. Go to town, where nobody will know you. But calm down first. It will be okay, inugo?”

Later, Ifemelu sat on a rickety chair in the waiting room of the lab, stony and silent, ignoring Obinze. She was angry with him. It was unfair, she knew, but she was angry with him. As she went into the dirty toilet with a small container the lab girl had given her, he had asked, already getting up, “Should I come with you?” and she snapped, “Come with me for what?” And she wanted to slap the lab girl. A yellow-faced beanpole of a girl who sneered and shook her head when Ifemelu first said, “Pregnancy test,” as though she could not believe she was encountering one more case of immorality. Now, she was watching them, smirking and humming insouciantly.

“I have the result,” she said after a while, holding the unsealed paper, her expression disappointed because it was negative. Ifemelu was too stunned, at first, to be relieved, and then she needed to urinate again.

“People should respect themselves and live like Christians to avoid trouble,” the lab girl said as they left.

That evening, Ifemelu vomited again. She was in Obinze’s room, lying down and reading, still frosty towards him, when a rush of salty saliva filled her mouth and she leaped up and ran to the toilet.

“It must be something I ate,” she said. “That yam pottage I bought from Mama Owerre.”

Obinze went inside the main house and came back to say his mother was taking her to the doctor’s. It was late evening, his mother did not like the young doctor who was on call at the medical center in the evenings, and so she drove to Dr. Achufusi’s house. As they passed the primary school with its trimmed hedges of whistling pine, Ifemelu suddenly imagined that she was indeed pregnant, and the girl had used expired test chemicals in that dingy lab. She blurted out, “We had sex, Aunty. Once.” She felt Obinze tense. His mother looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Let us see the doctor first,” she said. Dr. Achufusi, an avuncular and pleasant man, pressed at Ifemelu’s side and announced, “It’s your appendix, very inflamed. We should get it out quickly.” He turned to Obinze’s mother. “I can schedule her for tomorrow afternoon.”

“Thank you so much, Doctor,” Obinze’s mother said.

In the car, Ifemelu said, “I’ve never had surgery, Aunty.”

“It’s nothing,” Obinze’s mother said briskly. “Our doctors here are very good. Get in touch with your parents and tell them not to worry. We will take care of you. After they discharge you, you can stay in the house until you feel strong.”

Ifemelu called her mother’s colleague, Aunty Bunmi, and gave her a message, as well as Obinze’s home phone number, to pass on to her mother. That evening, her mother called; she sounded short of breath.

“God is in control, my precious,” her mother said. “Thank God for this your friend. God will bless her and her mother.”

“It’s him. A boy.”

“Oh.” Her mother paused. “Please thank them. God bless them. We will take the first bus tomorrow morning to Nsukka.”

Ifemelu remembered a nurse cheerfully shaving her pubic hair, the rough scratch of the razor blade, the smell of antiseptic. Then there was a blankness, an erasure of her mind, and when she emerged from it, groggy and still swaying on the edge of memory, she heard her parents talking to Obinze’s mother. Her mother was holding her hand. Later, Obinze’s mother would ask them to stay in her house, there was no point wasting money on a hotel. “Ifemelu is like a daughter to me,” she said.

Before they returned to Lagos, her father said, with that intimidated awe he had in the face of the well-educated, “She has BA London First Class.” And her mother said, “Very respectful boy, that Obinze. He has good home training. And their hometown is not far from us.”

OBINZE’S MOTHER WAITED a few days, perhaps for Ifemelu to regain her strength, before she called them and asked them to sit down and turn the TV off.

“Obinze and Ifemelu, people make mistakes, but some mistakes can be avoided.”

Obinze remained silent. Ifemelu said, “Yes, Aunty.”

“You must always use a condom. If you want to be irresponsible, then wait until you are no longer in my care.” Her tone had hardened, become censorious. “If you make the choice to be sexually active, then you must make the choice to protect yourself. Obinze, you should take your pocket money and buy condoms. Ifemelu, you too. It is not my concern if you are embarrassed. You should go into the pharmacy and buy them. You should never ever let the boy be in charge of your own protection. If he does not want to use it, then he does not care enough about you and you should not be there. Obinze, you may not be the person who will get pregnant, but if it happens it will change your entire life and you cannot undo it. And please, both of you, keep it between both of you. Diseases are everywhere. AIDS is real.”

They were silent.

“Did you hear me?” Obinze’s mother asked.

“Yes, Aunty,” Ifemelu said.

“Obinze?” his mother said.

“Mummy, I’ve heard you,” Obinze said, adding, sharply, “I’m not a small boy!” Then he got up and stalked out of the room.

CHAPTER 8

Strikes now were common. In the newspapers, university lecturers listed their complaints, the agreements that were trampled in the dust by government men whose own children were schooling abroad. Campuses were emptied, classrooms drained of life. Students hoped for short strikes, because they could not hope to have no strike at all. Everyone was talking about leaving. Even Emenike had left for England. Nobody knew how he managed to get a visa. “So he didn’t even tell you?” Ifemelu asked Obinze, and Obinze said, “You know how Emenike is.” Ranyinudo, who had a cousin in America, applied for a visa but was rejected at the embassy by a black American who she said had a cold and was more interested in blowing his nose than in looking at her documents. Sister Ibinabo started the Student Visa Miracle Vigil on Fridays, a gathering of young people, each one holding out an envelope with a visa application form, on which Sister Ibinabo laid a hand of blessing. One girl, already in her final year at the University of Ife, got an American visa the first time she tried, and gave a tearful, excited testimony in church. “Even if I have to start from the beginning in America, at least I know when I will graduate,” she said.

One day, Aunty Uju called. She no longer called frequently; before, she would call Ranyinudo’s house if Ifemelu was in Lagos, or Obinze’s house if Ifemelu was at school. But her calls had dried up. She was working three jobs, not yet qualified to practice medicine in America. She talked about the exams she had to take, various steps meaning various things that Ifemelu did not understand. Whenever Ifemelu’s mother suggested asking Aunty Uju to send them something from America — multivitamins, shoes — Ifemelu’s father would say no, they had to let Uju find her feet first, and her mother would say, a hint of slyness in her smile, that four years was long enough to find one’s feet.

“Ifem, kedu?” Aunty Uju asked. “I thought you would be in Nsukka. I just called Obinze’s house.”

“We’re on strike.”

“Ahn-ahn! The strike hasn’t ended?”

“No, that last one ended, we went back to school and then they started another one.”

“What is this kind of nonsense?” Aunty Uju said. “Honestly, you should come and study here, I am sure you can easily get a scholarship. And you can help me take care of Dike. I’m telling you, the small money I make is all going to his babysitter. And by God’s grace, by the time you come, I will have passed all my exams and started my residency.” Aunty Uju sounded enthusiastic but vague; until she voiced it, she had not given the idea much thought.

Ifemelu might have left it at that, a formless idea floated but allowed to sink again, if not for Obinze. “You should do it, Ifem,” he said. “You have nothing to lose. Take the SATs and try for a scholarship. Ginika can help you apply to schools. Aunty Uju is there so at least you have a foundation to start with. I wish I could do the same, but I can’t just get up and go. It’s better for me to finish my first degree and then come to America for graduate school. International students can get funding and financial aid for graduate school.”

Ifemelu did not quite grasp what it all meant, but it sounded correct because it came from him, the America expert, who so easily said “graduate school” instead of “postgraduate school.” And so she began to dream. She saw herself in a house from The Cosby Show, in a school with students holding notebooks miraculously free of wear and crease. She took the SATs at a Lagos center, packed with thousands of people, all bristling with their own American ambitions. Ginika, who had just graduated from college, applied to schools on her behalf, calling to say, “I just wanted you to know I’m focusing on the Philadelphia area because I went here,” as though Ifemelu knew where Philadelphia was. To her, America was America.

The strike ended. Ifemelu returned to Nsukka, eased back into campus life, and from time to time, she dreamed of America. When Aunty Uju called to say that there were acceptance letters and a scholarship offer, she stopped dreaming. She was too afraid to hope, now that it seemed possible.

“Make small-small braids that will last long, it’s very expensive to make hair here,” Aunty Uju told her.

“Aunty, let me get the visa first!” Ifemelu said.

She applied for a visa, convinced that a rude American would reject her application, it was what happened so often, after all, but the gray-haired woman wearing a St. Vincent de Paul pin on her lapel smiled at her and said, “Pick up your visa in two days. Good luck with your studies.”

On the afternoon that she picked up her passport, the pale-toned visa on the second page, she organized that triumphant ritual that signaled the start of a new life overseas: the division of personal property among friends. Ranyinudo, Priye, and Tochi were in her bedroom, drinking Coke, her clothes in a pile on the bed, and the first thing they all reached for was her orange dress, her favorite dress, a gift from Aunty Uju; the A-line flair and neck-to-hem zipper had always made her feel both glamorous and dangerous. It makes things easy for me, Obinze would say, before he slowly began to unzip it. She wanted to keep the dress, but Ranyinudo said, “Ifem, you know you’ll have any kind of dress you want in America and next time we see you, you will be a serious Americanah.”

Her mother said Jesus told her in a dream that Ifemelu would prosper in America, her father pressed a slender envelope into her hand, saying, “I wish I had more,” and she realized, with sadness, that he must have borrowed it. In the face of the enthusiasim of others, she suddenly felt flaccid and afraid.

“Maybe I should stay and finish here,” she told Obinze.

“Ifem, no, you should go. Besides, you don’t even like geology. You can study something else in America.”

“But the scholarship is partial. Where will I find the money to pay the balance? I can’t work with a student visa.”

“You can do work-study at school. You’ll find a way. Seventy-five percent off your tuition is a big deal.”

She nodded, riding the wave of his faith. She visited his mother to say goodbye.

“Nigeria is chasing away its best resources,” Obinze’s mother said resignedly, hugging her.

“Aunty, I will miss you. Thank you so much for everything.”

“Stay well, my dear, and do well. Write to us. Make sure you keep in touch.”

Ifemelu nodded, tearful. As she left, already parting the curtain at the front door, Obinze’s mother said, “And make sure you and Obinze have a plan. Have a plan.” Her words, so unexpected and so right, lifted Ifemelu’s spirits. Their plan became this: he would come to America the minute he graduated. He would find a way to get a visa. Perhaps, by then, she would be able to help with his visa.

In the following years, even after she was no longer in touch with him, she would sometimes remember his mother’s words—make sure you and Obinze have a plan—and feel comforted.

CHAPTER 9

Mariama returned carrying oil-stained brown paper bags from the Chinese restaurant, trailing the smells of grease and spice into the stuffy salon.

“The film finished?” She glanced at the blank TV screen, and then flipped through the pile of DVDs to select another.

“Excuse me, please, to eat,” Aisha said to Ifemelu. She perched on a chair at the back and ate fried chicken wings with her fingers, her eyes on the TV screen. The new film began with trailers, jaggedly cut scenes interspersed with flashes of light. Each ended with a male Nigerian voice, theatrical and loud, saying “Grab your copy now!” Mariama ate standing up. She said something to Halima.

“I finish first and eat,” Halima replied in English.

“You can go ahead and eat if you want to,” Halima’s customer said, a young woman with a high voice and a pleasant manner.

“No, I finish. Just small more,” Halima said. Her customer’s head had only a tuft of hair left in front, sticking up like animal fur, while the rest was done in neat micro braids that fell to her neck.

“I have a hour before I have to go pick up my daughters,” the customer said.

“How many you have?” Halima asked.

“Two,” the customer said. She looked about seventeen. “Two beautiful girls.”

The new film had started. The grinning face of a middle-aged actress filled the screen.

“Oh-oh, yes! I like her!” Halima said. “Patience! She don’t take any nonsense!”

“You know her?” Mariama asked Ifemelu, pointing at the TV screen.

“No,” Ifemelu said. Why did they insist on asking if she knew Nollywood actors? The entire room smelled too strongly of food. It made the stuffy air rank with oiliness, and yet it also made her slightly hungry. She ate some of her carrots. Halima’s customer tilted her head this way and that in front of the mirror and said, “Thank you so much, it’s gorgeous!”

After she left, Mariama said, “Very small girl and already she has two children.”

“Oh oh oh, these people,” Halima said. “When a girl is thirteen already she knows all the positions. Never in Afrique!”

“Never!” Mariama agreed.

They looked at Ifemelu for her agreement, her approval. They expected it, in this shared space of their Africanness, but Ifemelu said nothing and turned a page of her novel. They would, she was sure, talk about her after she left. That Nigerian girl, she feels very important because of Princeton. Look at her food bar, she does not eat real food anymore. They would laugh with derision, but only a mild derision, because she was still their African sister, even if she had briefly lost her way. A new smell of oiliness flooded the room when Halima opened her plastic container of food. She was eating and talking to the television screen. “Oh, stupid man! She will take your money!”

Ifemelu brushed away at some sticky hair on her neck. The room was seething with heat. “Can we leave the door open?” she asked.

Mariama opened the door, propped it with a chair. “This heat is really bad.”

EACH HEAT WAVE REMINDED Ifemelu of her first, the summer she arrived. It was summer in America, she knew this, but all her life she had thought of “overseas” as a cold place of wool coats and snow, and because America was “overseas,” and her illusions so strong they could not be fended off by reason, she bought the thickest sweater she could find in Tejuosho market for her trip. She wore it for the journey, zipping it all the way up in the humming interior of the airplane and then unzipping it as she left the airport building with Aunty Uju. The sweltering heat alarmed her, as did Aunty Uju’s old Toyota hatchback, with a patch of rust on its side and peeling fabric on the seats. She stared at buildings and cars and signboards, all of them matte, disappointingly matte; in the landscape of her imagination, the mundane things in America were covered in a high-shine gloss. She was startled, most of all, by the teenage boy in a baseball cap standing near a brick wall, face down, body leaning forward, hands between his legs. She turned to look again.

“See that boy!” she said. “I didn’t know people do things like this in America.”

“You didn’t know people pee in America?” Aunty Uju asked, barely glancing at the boy before turning back to a traffic light.

“Ahn-ahn, Aunty! I mean that they do it outside. Like that.”

“They don’t. It’s not like back home where everybody does it. He can get arrested for that, but this is not a good neighborhood anyway,” Aunty Uju said shortly. There was something different about her. Ifemelu had noticed it right away at the airport, her roughly braided hair, her ears bereft of earrings, her quick casual hug, as if it had been weeks rather than years since they had last seen each other.

“I’m supposed to be with my books now,” Aunty Uju said, eyes focused on the road. “You know my exam is coming.”

Ifemelu had not known that there was yet another exam; she had thought Aunty Uju was waiting for a result. But she said, “Yes, I know.”

Their silence was full of stones. Ifemelu felt like apologizing, although she was not quite sure what she would be apologizing for. Perhaps Aunty Uju regretted her presence, now that she was here, in Aunty Uju’s wheezing car.

Aunty Uju’s cell phone rang. “Yes, this is Uju.” She pronounced it you-joo instead of oo-joo.

“Is that how you pronounce your name now?” Ifemelu asked afterwards.

“It’s what they call me.”

Ifemelu swallowed the words “Well, that isn’t your name.” Instead she said in Igbo, “I did not know it would be so hot here.”

“We have a heat wave, the first one this summer,” Aunty Uju said, as though heat wave was something Ifemelu was supposed to understand. She had never felt a heat quite so hot. An enveloping, uncompassionate heat. Aunty Uju’s door handle, when they arrived at her one-bedroom apartment, was warm to the touch. Dike sprang up from the carpeted floor of the living room, scattered with toy cars and action figures, and hugged her as though he remembered her. “Alma, this is my cousin!” he said to his babysitter, a pale-skinned, tired-faced woman with black hair held in a greasy ponytail. If Ifemelu had met Alma in Lagos, she would have thought of her as white, but she would learn that Alma was Hispanic, an American category that was, confusingly, both an ethnicity and a race, and she would remember Alma when, years later, she wrote a blog post titled “Understanding America for the Non-American Black: What Hispanic Means.”

Hispanic means the frequent companions of American blacks in poverty rankings, Hispanic means a slight step above American blacks in the American race ladder, Hispanic means the chocolate-skinned woman from Peru, Hispanic means the indigenous people of Mexico. Hispanic means the biracial-looking folks from the Dominican Republic. Hispanic means the paler folks from Puerto Rico. Hispanic also means the blond, blue-eyed guy from Argentina. All you need to be is Spanish-speaking but not from Spain and voilà, you’re a race called Hispanic.

But that afternoon, she hardly noticed Alma, or the living room furnished only with a couch and a TV, or the bicycle lodged in a corner, because she was absorbed by Dike. The last time she saw him, on the day of Aunty Uju’s hasty departure from Lagos, he had been a one-year-old, crying unendingly at the airport as though he understood the upheaval his life had just undergone, and now here he was, a first grader with a seamless American accent and a hyper-happiness about him; the kind of child who could never stay still and who never seemed sad.

“Why do you have a sweater? It’s too hot for a sweater!” he said, chortling, still holding on to her in a drawn-out hug. She laughed. He was so small, so innocent, and yet there was a precociousness about him, but it was a sunny one; he did not nurse dark intentions about the adults in his world. That night, after he and Aunty Uju got into bed and Ifemelu settled on a blanket on the floor, he said, “How come she has to sleep on the floor, Mom? We can all fit in,” as though he could sense how Ifemelu felt. There was nothing wrong with the arrangement — she had, after all, slept on mats when she visited her grandmother in the village — but this was America at last, glorious America at last, and she had not expected to bed on the floor.

“I’m fine, Dike,” she said.

He got up and brought her his pillow. “Here. It’s soft and comfy.”

Aunty Uju said, “Dike, come and lie down. Let your aunty sleep.”

Ifemelu could not sleep, her mind too alert to the newness of things, and she waited to hear Aunty Uju’s snoring before she slipped out of the room and turned on the kitchen light. A fat cockroach was perched on the wall near the cabinets, moving slightly up and down as though breathing heavily. If she had been in their Lagos kitchen, she would have found a broom and killed it, but she left the American cockroach alone and went and stood by the living room window. Flatlands, Aunty Uju said this section of Brooklyn was called. The street below was poorly lit, bordered not by leafy trees but by closely parked cars, nothing like the pretty street on The Cosby Show. Ifemelu stood there for a long time, her body unsure of itself, overwhelmed by a sense of newness. But she felt, also, a frisson of expectation, an eagerness to discover America.

“I THINK it’s better if you take care of Dike for the summer and save me babysitting money and then start looking for a job when you get to Philadelphia,” Aunty Uju said the next morning. She had woken Ifemelu up, giving brisk instructions about Dike, saying she would go to the library to study after work. Her words tumbled out. Ifemelu wished she would slow down a little.

“You can’t work with your student visa, and work-study is rubbish, it pays nothing, and you have to be able to cover your rent and the balance of your tuition. Me, you can see I am working three jobs and yet it’s not easy. I talked to one of my friends, I don’t know if you remember Ngozi Okonkwo? She’s now an American citizen and she has gone back to Nigeria for a while, to start a business. I begged her and she agreed to let you work with her Social Security card.”

“How? I’ll use her name?” Ifemelu asked.

“Of course you’ll use her name,” Aunty Uju said, eyebrows raised, as though she had barely stopped herself from asking if Ifemelu was stupid. There was a small white blob of face cream on her hair, caught at the root of a braid, and Ifemelu was going to tell her to wipe it off but she changed her mind, saying nothing, and watched Aunty Uju hurry to the door. She felt singed by Aunty Uju’s reproach. It was as if, between them, an old intimacy had quite suddenly lapsed. Aunty Uju’s impatience, that new prickliness in her, made Ifemelu feel that there were things she should already know but, through some personal failing of hers, did not know. “There’s corned beef so you can make sandwiches for lunch,” Aunty Uju had said, as though those words were perfectly normal and did not require a humorous preamble about how Americans ate bread for lunch. But Dike didn’t want a sandwich. After he had shown her all his toys, and they had watched some episodes of Tom and Jerry, with him laughing, thrilled, because she had watched them all before in Nigeria and so told him what would happen before it did, he opened the refrigerator and pointed at what he wanted her to make him. “Hot dogs.” Ifemelu examined the curiously long sausages and then began to open cupboards to look for some oil.

“Mummy says I have to call you Aunty Ifem. But you’re not my aunt. You’re my cousin.”

“So call me Cousin.”

“Okay, Coz,” Dike said, and laughed. His laughter was so warm, so open. She had found the vegetable oil.

“You don’t need oil,” Dike said. “You just cook the hot dog in water.”

“Water? How can a sausage be cooked in water?”

“It’s a hot dog, not a sausage.”

Of course it was a sausage, whether or not they called it the ludicrous name of “hot dog,” and so she fried two in a little oil as she was used to doing with Satis sausages. Dike looked on in horror. She turned the stove off. He backed away and said “Ugh.” They stood looking at each other, between them a plate with a bun and two shriveled hot dogs. She knew then that she should have listened to him.

“Can I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead?” Dike asked. She followed his instructions for the sandwich, cutting off the bread crusts, layering on the peanut butter first, stifling her laughter at how closely he watched her, as though she just might decide to fry the sandwich.

When, that evening, Ifemelu told Aunty Uju about the hot dog incident, Aunty Uju said with none of the amusement Ifemelu had expected, “They are not sausages, they are hot dogs.”

“It’s like saying that a bikini is not the same thing as underwear. Would a visitor from space know the difference?”

Aunty Uju shrugged; she was sitting at the dining table, a medical textbook open in front of her, eating a hamburger from a rumpled paper bag. Her skin dry, her eyes shadowed, her spirit bleached of color. She seemed to be staring at, rather than reading, the book.

AT THE GROCERY STORE, Aunty Uju never bought what she needed; instead she bought what was on sale and made herself need it. She would take the colorful flyer at the entrance of Key Food, and go looking for the sale items, aisle after aisle, while Ifemelu wheeled the cart and Dike walked along.

“Mummy, I don’t like that. Get the blue one,” Dike said, as Aunty Uju put cartons of cereal in the cart.

“It’s buy one, get one free,” Aunty Uju said.

“It doesn’t taste good.”

“It tastes just like your regular cereal, Dike.”

“No.” Dike took a blue carton from the shelf and hurried ahead to the checkout counter.

“Hi, little guy!” The cashier was large and cheerful, her cheeks reddened and peeling from sunburn. “Helping Mummy out?”

“Dike, put it back,” Aunty Uju said, with the nasal, sliding accent she put on when she spoke to white Americans, in the presence of white Americans, in the hearing of white Americans. Pooh-reet-back. And with the accent emerged a new persona, apologetic and self-abasing. She was overeager with the cashier. “Sorry, sorry,” she said as she fumbled to get her debit card from her wallet. Because the cashier was watching, Aunty Uju let Dike keep the cereal, but in the car she grabbed his left ear and twisted it, yanked it.

“I have told you, do not ever take anything in the grocery! Do you hear me? Or do you want me to slap you before you hear?”

Dike pressed his palm to his ear.

Aunty Uju turned to Ifemelu. “This is how children like to misbehave in this country. Jane was even telling me that her daughter threatens to call the police when she beats her. Imagine. I don’t blame the girl, she has come to America and learned about calling the police.”

Ifemelu rubbed Dike’s knee. He did not look at her. Aunty Uju was driving a little too fast.

DIKE CALLED OUT from the bathroom, where he had been sent to brush his teeth before bed.

“Dike, I mechago?” Ifemelu asked.

“Please don’t speak Igbo to him,” Aunty Uju said. “Two languages will confuse him.”

“What are you talking about, Aunty? We spoke two languages growing up.”

“This is America. It’s different.”

Ifemelu held her tongue. Aunty Uju closed her medical book and stared ahead at nothing. The television was off and the sound of water running came from the bathroom.

“Aunty, what is it?” Ifemelu asked. “What is wrong?”

“What do you mean? Nothing is wrong.” Aunty Uju sighed. “I failed my last exam. I got the result just before you came.”

“Oh.” Ifemelu was watching her.

“I’ve never failed an exam in my life. But they weren’t testing actual knowledge, they were testing our ability to answer tricky multiple-choice questions that have nothing to do with real medical knowledge.” She stood up and went to the kitchen. “I’m tired. I am so tired. I thought by now things would be better for me and Dike. It’s not as if anybody was helping me and I just could not believe how quickly money went. I was studying and working three jobs. I was doing retail at the mall, and a research assistantship, and I even did some hours at Burger King.”

“It will get better,” Ifemelu said, helplessly. She knew how hollow she sounded. Nothing was familiar. She was unable to comfort Aunty Uju because she did not know how. When Aunty Uju spoke about her friends who had come to America earlier and passed their exams — Nkechi in Maryland had sent her the dining set, Kemi in Indiana bought her the bed, Ozavisa had sent crockery and clothes from Hartford — Ifemelu said, “God bless them,” and the words felt bulky and useless in her mouth.

She had assumed, from Aunty Uju’s calls home, that things were not too bad, although she realized now that Aunty Uju had always been vague, mentioning “work” and “exam” without details. Or perhaps it was because she had not asked for details, had not expected to understand details. And she thought, watching her, how the old Aunty Uju would never have worn her hair in such scruffy braids. She would never have tolerated the ingrown hair that grew like raisins on her chin, or worn trousers that gathered bulkily between her legs. America had subdued her.

CHAPTER 10

That first summer was Ifemelu’s summer of waiting; the real America, she felt, was just around the next corner she would turn. Even the days, sliding one into the other, languorous and limpid, the sun lingering until very late, seemed to be waiting. There was a stripped-down quality to her life, a kindling starkness, without parents and friends and home, the familiar landmarks that made her who she was. And so she waited, writing Obinze long, detailed letters, calling him once in a while — calls kept brief because Aunty Uju said she could not waste the phone card — and spending time with Dike. He was a mere child, but she felt, with him, a kinship close to friendship; they watched his favorite cartoon shows together, Rugrats and Franklin, and they read books together, and she took him out to play with Jane’s children. Jane lived in the next apartment. She and her husband, Marlon, were from Grenada and spoke in a lyrical accent as though just about to break into song. “They are like us; he has a good job and he has ambition and they spank their children,” Aunty Uju had said approvingly.

Ifemelu and Jane laughed when they discovered how similar their childhoods in Grenada and Nigeria had been, with Enid Blyton books and Anglophile teachers and fathers who worshipped the BBC World Service. She was only a few years older than Ifemelu. “I married very young. Everybody wanted Marlon so how could I say no?” she said, half teasing. They would sit together on the front steps of the building and watch Dike and Jane’s children, Elizabeth and Junior, ride their bicycles to the end of the street and then back, Ifemelu often calling out to Dike not to go any farther, the children shouting, the concrete sidewalks gleaming in the hot sun, and the summer lull disrupted by the occasional rise and fall of loud music from passing cars.

“Things must still be very strange for you,” Jane said.

Ifemelu nodded. “Yes.”

An ice cream van drove into the street, and with it a tinkling melody.

“You know, this is my tenth year here and I feel as if I’m still settling in,” Jane said. “The hardest thing is raising my kids. Look at Elizabeth, I have to be very careful with her. If you are not careful in this country, your children become what you don’t know. It’s different back home because you can control them. Here, no.” Jane wore an air of harmlessness, with her plain face and jiggly arms, but there was, beneath her ready smile, an icy watchfulness.

“How old is she? Ten?” Ifemelu asked.

“Nine and already trying to be a drama queen. We pay good money for her to go to private school because the public schools here are useless. Marlon says we’ll move to the suburbs soon so they can go to better schools. Otherwise she will start behaving like these black Americans.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry, you will understand with time,” Jane said, and got up to get some money for the children’s ice cream.

Ifemelu looked forward to sitting outside with Jane, until the evening Marlon came back from work and told Ifemelu in a hasty whisper, after Jane went in to get some lemonade for the children, “I’ve been thinking about you. I want to talk to you.” She did not tell Jane. Jane would never hold Marlon responsible for anything, her light-skinned, hazel-eyed Marlon whom everyone wanted, and so Ifemelu began to avoid both of them, to design elaborate board games that she and Dike could play indoors.

Once, she asked Dike what he had done in school before summer, and he said, “Circles.” They would sit on the floor in a circle and share their favorite things.

She was appalled. “Can you do division?”

He looked at her strangely. “I’m only in first grade, Coz.”

“When I was your age I could do simple division.”

The conviction lodged in her head, that American children learned nothing in elementary school, and it hardened when he told her that his teacher sometimes gave out homework coupons; if you got a homework coupon, then you could skip one day of homework. Circles, homework coupons, what foolishness would she next hear? And so she began to teach him mathematics — she called it “maths” and he called it “math” and so they agreed not to shorten the word. She could not think, now, of that summer without thinking of long division, of Dike’s brows furrowed in confusion as they sat side by side at the dining table, of her swings from bribing him to shouting at him. Okay, try it one more time and you can have ice cream. You’re not going to play unless you get them all right. Later, when he was older, he would say that he found mathematics easy because of her summer of torturing him. “You must mean summer of tutoring,” she would say in what became a familiar joke that, like comfort food, they would reach for from time to time.

It was, also, her summer of eating. She enjoyed the unfamiliar — the McDonald’s hamburgers with the brief tart crunch of pickles, a new taste that she liked on one day and disliked on the next, the wraps Aunty Uju brought home, wet with piquant dressing, and the bologna and pepperoni that left a film of salt in her mouth. She was disoriented by the blandness of fruits, as though Nature had forgotten to sprinkle some seasoning on the oranges and the bananas, but she liked to look at them, and to touch them; because bananas were so big, so evenly yellow, she forgave them their tastelessness. Once, Dike said, “Why are you doing that? Eating a banana with peanuts?”

“That’s what we do in Nigeria. Do you want to try?”

“No,” he said firmly. “I don’t think I like Nigeria, Coz.”

Ice cream was, fortunately, a taste unchanged. She scooped straight from the buy-one-get-one-free giant tubs in the freezer, globs of vanilla and chocolate, while staring at the television. She followed shows she had watched in Nigeria—The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, A Different World—and discovered new shows she had not known—Friends, The Simpsons—but it was the commercials that captivated her. She ached for the lives they showed, lives full of bliss, where all problems had sparkling solutions in shampoos and cars and packaged foods, and in her mind they became the real America, the America she would only see when she moved to school in the autumn. At first, the evening news puzzled her, a litany of fires and shootings, because she was used to NTA news, where self-important army officers cut ribbons or gave speeches. But as she watched day after day, images of men being hauled off in handcuffs, distraught families in front of charred, smoldering houses, the wreckage of cars crashed in police chases, blurred videos of armed robberies in shops, her puzzlement ripened to worry. She panicked when there was a sound by the window, when Dike went too far down the street on his bicycle. She stopped taking out the trash after dark, because a man with a gun might be lurking outside. Aunty Uju said, laughing shortly, “If you keep watching television, you will think these things happen all the time. Do you know how much crime happens in Nigeria? Is it because we don’t report it like they do here?”

CHAPTER 11

Aunty Uju came home dry-faced and tense, the streets dark and Dike already in bed, to ask “Do I have mail? Do I have mail?” the question always repeated, her entire being at a perilous edge, about to tip over. Some nights, she would talk on the phone for a long time, her voice hushed, as though she were protecting something from the world’s prying gaze. Finally, she told Ifemelu about Bartholomew. “He is an accountant, divorced, and he is looking to settle down. He is from Eziowelle, very near us.”

Ifemelu, floored by Aunty Uju’s words, could only say, “Oh, okay,” and nothing else. “What does he do?” and “Where is he from?” were the questions her own mother would ask, but when had it started to matter to Aunty Uju that a man was from a hometown close to theirs?

One Saturday, Bartholomew visited from Massachusetts. Aunty Uju cooked peppered gizzards, powdered her face, and stood by the living room window, waiting to see his car pull in. Dike watched her, playing halfheartedly with his action figures, confused but also excited because he could sense her expectation. When the doorbell rang, she told Dike, urgently, “Behave well!”

Bartholomew wore khaki trousers pulled up high on his belly, and spoke with an American accent filled with holes, mangling words until they were impossible to understand. Ifemelu sensed, from his demeanor, a deprived rural upbringing that he tried to compensate for with his American affectation, his gonnas and wannas.

He glanced at Dike, and said, almost indifferently, “Oh, yes, your boy. How are you doing?”

“Good,” Dike mumbled.

It irked Ifemelu that Bartholomew was not interested in the son of the woman he was courting, and did not bother to pretend that he was. He was jarringly unsuited for, and unworthy of, Aunty Uju. A more intelligent man would have realized this and tempered himself, but not Bartholomew. He behaved grandiosely, like a special prize that Aunty Uju was fortunate to have, and Aunty Uju humored him. Before he tasted the gizzards, he said, “Let me see if this is any good.”

Aunty Uju laughed and in her laughter was a certain assent, because his words “Let me see if this is any good” were about her being a good cook, and therefore a good wife. She had slipped into the rituals, smiling a smile that promised to be demure to him but not to the world, lunging to pick up his fork when it slipped from his hand, serving him more beer. Quietly, Dike watched from the dining table, his toys untouched. Bartholomew ate gizzards and drank beer. He talked about Nigerian politics with the fervid enthusiasm of a person who followed it from afar, who read and reread articles on the Internet. “Kudirat’s death will not be in vain, it will only galvanize the democratic movement in a way that even her life did not! I just wrote an article about this issue online in Nigerian Village.” Aunty Uju nodded while he talked, agreeing with everything he said. Often, silence gaped between them. They watched television, a drama, predictable and filled with brightly shot scenes, one of which featured a young girl in a short dress.

“A girl in Nigeria will never wear that kind of dress,” Bartholomew said. “Look at that. This country has no moral compass.”

Ifemelu should not have spoken, but there was something about Bartholomew that made silence impossible, the exaggerated caricature that he was, with his back-shaft haircut unchanged since he came to America thirty years ago and his false, overheated moralities. He was one of those people who, in his village back home, would be called “lost.” He went to America and got lost, his people would say. He went to America and refused to come back.

“Girls in Nigeria wear dresses much shorter than that o,” Ifemelu said. “In secondary school, some of us changed in our friends’ houses so our parents wouldn’t know.”

Aunty Uju turned to her, eyes narrow with warning. Bartholomew looked at her and shrugged, as though she was not worth responding to. Dislike simmered between them. For the rest of the afternoon, he ignored her. He would, in the future, often ignore her. Later, she read his online posts on Nigerian Village, all of them sour-toned and strident, under the moniker “Igbo Massachusetts Accountant,” and it surprised her how profusely he wrote, how actively he pursued airless arguments.

He had not been back to Nigeria in years and perhaps he needed the consolation of those online groups, where small observations flared and blazed into attacks, personal insults flung back and forth. Ifemelu imagined the writers, Nigerians in bleak houses in America, their lives deadened by work, nursing their careful savings throughout the year so that they could visit home in December for a week, when they would arrive bearing suitcases of shoes and clothes and cheap watches, and see, in the eyes of their relatives, brightly burnished images of themselves. Afterwards they would return to America to fight on the Internet over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here and there, and at least online they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential they had become.

Nigerian women came to America and became wild, Igbo Massachusetts Accountant wrote in one post; it was an unpleasant truth but one that had to be said. What else accounted for the high divorce rates among Nigerians in America and the low rates among Nigerians in Nigeria? Delta Mermaid replied that women simply had laws protecting them in America and the divorce rates would be just as high if those laws were in Nigeria. Igbo Massachusetts Accountant’s rejoinder: “You have been brainwashed by the West. You should be ashamed to call yourself a Nigerian.” In response to Eze Houston, who wrote that Nigerian men were cynical when they went back to Nigeria looking for nurses and doctors to marry, only so that the new wives would earn money for them back in America, Igbo Massachusetts Accountant wrote, “What is wrong with a man wanting financial security from his wife? Don’t women want the same thing?”

After he left that Saturday, Aunty Uju asked Ifemelu, “What did you think?”

“He uses bleaching creams.”

“What?”

“Couldn’t you see? His face is a funny color. He must be using the cheap ones with no sunscreen. What kind of man bleaches his skin, biko?”

Aunty Uju shrugged, as though she had not noticed the greenish-yellow tone of the man’s face, worse at his temples.

“He’s not bad. He has a good job.” She paused. “I’m not getting any younger. I want Dike to have a brother or a sister.”

“In Nigeria, a man like him would not even have the courage to talk to you.”

“We are not in Nigeria, Ifem.”

Before Aunty Uju went into the bedroom, tottering under her many anxieties, she said, “Please just pray that it will work.”

Ifemelu did not pray, but even if she did, she could not bear praying for Aunty Uju to be with Bartholomew. It saddened her that Aunty Uju had settled merely for what was familiar.

BECAUSE OF OBINZE, Manhattan intimidated Ifemelu. The first time she took the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, her palms sweaty, she walked the streets, watching, absorbing. A sylphlike woman running in high heels, her short dress floating behind her, until she tripped and almost fell, a pudgy man coughing and spitting on the curb, a girl dressed all in black raising a hand for the taxis that sliced past. The endless skyscrapers taunted the sky, but there was dirt on the building windows. The dazzling imperfection of it all calmed her. “It’s wonderful but it’s not heaven,” she told Obinze. She could not wait until he, too, saw Manhattan. She imagined them both walking hand in hand, like the American couples she saw, lingering at a shop window, pausing to read menus taped on restaurant doors, stopping at a food cart to buy cold bottles of iced tea. “Soon,” he said in his letter. They said “soon” to each other often, and “soon” gave their plan the weight of something real.

FINALLY, Aunty Uju’s result came. Ifemelu brought in the envelope from the mailbox, so slight, so ordinary, United States Medical Licensing Examination printed on it in even script, and held it in her hand for a long time, willing it to be good news. She raised it up as soon as Aunty Uju walked indoors. Aunty Uju gasped. “Is it thick? Is it thick?” she asked.

“What? Gini?” Ifemelu asked.

“Is it thick?” Aunty Uju asked again, letting her handbag slip to the floor and moving forward, her hand outstretched, her face savage with hope. She took the envelope and shouted, “I made it!” and then opened it to make sure, peering at the thin sheet of paper. “If you fail, they send you a thick envelope so that you can reregister.”

“Aunty! I knew it! Congratulations!” Ifemelu said.

Aunty Uju hugged her, both of them leaning into each other, hearing each other’s breathing, and it brought to Ifemelu a warm memory of Lagos.

“Where’s Dike?” Aunty Uju asked, as though he was not already in bed when she came home from her second job. She went into the kitchen, stood under the bright ceiling light and looked, again, at the result, her eyes wet. “So I will be a family physician in this America,” she said, almost in a whisper. She opened a can of Coke and left it undrunk.

Later, she said, “I have to take my braids out for my interviews and relax my hair. Kemi told me that I shouldn’t wear braids to the interview. If you have braids, they will think you are unprofessional.”

“So there are no doctors with braided hair in America?” Ifemelu asked.

“I have told you what they told me. You are in a country that is not your own. You do what you have to do if you want to succeed.”

There it was again, the strange naïveté with which Aunty Uju had covered herself like a blanket. Sometimes, while having a conversation, it would occur to Ifemelu that Aunty Uju had deliberately left behind something of herself, something essential, in a distant and forgotten place. Obinze said it was the exaggerated gratitude that came with immigrant insecurity. Obinze, so like him to have an explanation. Obinze, who anchored her through that summer of waiting — his steady voice over the phone, his long letters in blue airmail envelopes — and who understood, as summer was ending, the new gnawing in her stomach. She wanted to start school, to find the real America, and yet there was that gnawing in her stomach, an anxiety, and a new, aching nostalgia for the Brooklyn summer that had become familiar: children on bicycles, sinewy black men in tight white tank tops, ice cream vans tinkling, loud music from roofless cars, sun shining into night, and things rotting and smelling in the humid heat. She did not want to leave Dike — the mere thought brought a sense of treasure already lost — and yet she wanted to leave Aunty Uju’s apartment, and begin a life in which she alone determined the margins.

Dike had once told her, wistfully, about his friend who had gone to Coney Island and come back with a picture taken on a steep, sliding ride, and so she surprised him on the weekend before she left, saying “We’re going to Coney Island!” Jane had told her what train to take, what to do, how much it would cost. Aunty Uju said it was a good idea, but gave her no money to add to what she had. As she watched Dike on the rides, screaming, terrified and thrilled, a little boy entirely open to the world, she did not mind what she had spent. They ate hot dogs and milkshakes and cotton candy. “I can’t wait until I don’t have to come with you to the girls’ bathroom,” he told her, and she laughed and laughed. On the train back, he was tired and sleepy. “Coz, this was the bestest day ever with you,” he said, resting against her.

The bittersweet glow of an ending limbo overcame her days later when she kissed Dike goodbye — once then twice and three times, while he cried, a child so unused to crying, and she bit back her own tears and Aunty Uju said over and over that Philadelphia was not very far away. Ifemelu rolled her suitcase to the subway, took it to the Forty-second Street terminal, and got on a bus to Philadelphia. She sat by the window — somebody had stuck a blob of chewed gum on the pane — and spent long minutes looking again at the Social Security card and driver’s license that belonged to Ngozi Okonkwo. Ngozi Okonkwo was at least ten years older than she was, with a narrow face, eyebrows that started as little balls before loping into arcs, and a jaw shaped like the letter V.

“I don’t even look like her at all,” Ifemelu had said when Aunty Uju gave her the card.

“All of us look alike to white people,” Aunty Uju said.

“Ahn-ahn, Aunty!”

“I’m not joking. Amara’s cousin came last year and she doesn’t have her papers yet so she has been working with Amara’s ID. You remember Amara? Her cousin is very fair and slim. They do not look alike at all. Nobody noticed. She works as a home health aide in Virginia. Just make sure you always remember your new name. I have a friend who forgot and one of her co-workers called her and called her and she was blank. Then they became suspicious and reported her to immigration.”

CHAPTER 12

There was Ginika, standing in the small, crowded bus terminal, wearing a miniskirt and a tube top that covered her chest but not her midriff, and waiting to scoop Ifemelu up and into the real America. Ginika was much thinner, half her old size, and her head looked bigger, balanced on a long neck that brought to mind a vague, exotic animal. She extended her arms, as though urging a child into an embrace, laughing, calling out, “Ifemsco! Ifemsco!” and Ifemelu was taken back, for a moment, to secondary school: an image of gossiping girls in their blue-and-white uniforms, felt berets perched on their heads, crowded in the school corridor. She hugged Ginika. The theatrics of their holding each other close, disengaging and then holding each other close again, made her eyes fill, to her mild surprise, with tears.

“Look at you!” Ginika said, gesturing, jangling the many silver bangles around her wrist. “Is it really you?”

“When did you stop eating and start looking like a dried stockfish?” Ifemelu asked.

Ginika laughed, took the suitcase and turned to the door. “Come on, let’s go. I’m parked illegally.”

The green Volvo was at the corner of a narrow street. An unsmiling woman in uniform, ticket booklet in hand, was stumping towards them when Ginika jumped in and started the car. “Close!” she said, laughing. A homeless man in a grubby T-shirt, pushing a trolley filled with bundles, had stopped just by the car, as though to rest briefly, staring ahead at nothing, and Ginika glanced at him as she eased the car into the street. They drove with the windows down. Philadelphia was the smell of the summer sun, of burnt asphalt, of sizzling meat from food carts tucked into street corners, foreign brown men and women hunched inside. Ifemelu would come to like the gyros from those carts, flatbread and lamb and dripping sauces, as she would come to love Philadelphia itself. It did not raise the specter of intimidation as Manhattan did; it was intimate but not provincial, a city that might yet be kind to you. Ifemelu saw women on the sidewalks going to lunch from work, wearing sneakers, proof of their American preference for comfort over elegance, and she saw young couples clutching each other, kissing from time to time as if they feared that, if they unclasped their hands, their love would dissolve, melt into nothingness.

“I borrowed my landlord’s car. I didn’t want to come get you in my shit-ass car. I can’t believe it, Ifemsco. You’re in America!” Ginika said. There was a metallic, unfamiliar glamour in her gauntness, her olive skin, her short skirt that had risen up, barely covering her crotch, her straight-straight hair that she kept tucking behind her ears, blond streaks shiny in the sunlight.

“We’re entering University City, and that’s where Wellson campus is, shay you know? We can go for you to see the school first and then we can go to my place, out in the suburbs, and after we can go to my friend’s place in the evening. She’s doing a get-together.” Ginika had lapsed into Nigerian English, a dated, overcooked version, eager to prove how unchanged she was. She had, with a strenuous loyalty, kept in touch through the years: calling and writing letters and sending books and shapeless trousers she called slacks. And now she was saying “shay you know” and Ifemelu did not have the heart to tell her that nobody said “shay” anymore.

Ginika recounted anecdotes about her own early experiences in America, as though they were all filled with subtle wisdom that Ifemelu would need.

“If you see how they laughed at me in high school when I said that somebody was boning for me. Because boning here means to have sex! So I had to keep explaining that in Nigeria it means carrying face. And can you imagine ‘half-caste’ is a bad word here? In freshman year, I was telling a bunch of my friends about how I was voted prettiest girl in school back home. Remember? I should never have won. Zainab should have won. It was just because I was a half-caste. There’s even more of that here. There’s some shit you’ll get from white people in this country that I won’t get. But anyway, I was telling them about back home and how all the boys were chasing me because I was a half-caste, and they said I was dissing myself. So now I say biracial, and I’m supposed to be offended when somebody says half-caste. I’ve met a lot of people here with white mothers and they are so full of issues, eh. I didn’t know I was even supposed to have issues until I came to America. Honestly, if anybody wants to raise biracial kids, do it in Nigeria.”

“Of course. Where all the boys chase the half-caste girls.”

“Not all the boys, by the way.” Ginika made a face. “Obinze had better hurry up and come to the U.S., before somebody will carry you away. You know you have the kind of body they like here.”

“What?”

“You’re thin with big breasts.”

“Please, I’m not thin. I’m slim.”

“Americans say ‘thin.’ Here ‘thin’ is a good word.”

“Is that why you stopped eating? All your bum has gone. I always wished I had a bum like yours,” Ifemelu said.

“Do you know I started losing weight almost as soon as I came? I was even close to anorexia. The kids at my high school called me Pork. You know at home when somebody tells you that you lost weight, it means something bad. But here somebody tells you that you lost weight and you say thank you. It’s just different here,” Ginika said, a little wistfully, as though she, too, were new to America.

Later, Ifemelu watched Ginika at her friend Stephanie’s apartment, a bottle of beer poised at her lips, her American-accented words sailing out of her mouth, and was struck by how like her American friends Ginika had become. Jessica, the Japanese American, beautiful and animated, playing with the emblemed key of her Mercedes. Pale-skinned Teresa, who had a loud laugh and wore diamond studs and shabby, worn-out shoes. Stephanie, the Chinese American, her hair a perfect swingy bob that curved inwards at her chin, who from time to time she reached into her monogrammed bag to get her cigarettes and step out for a smoke. Hari, coffee-skinned and black-haired and wearing a tight T-shirt, who said, “I am Indian, not Indian American,” when Ginika introduced Ifemelu. They all laughed at the same things and said “Gross!” about the same things; they were well choreographed. Stephanie announced that she had homemade beer in her fridge and everyone chanted “Cool!” Then Teresa said, “Can I have the regular beer, Steph?” in the small voice of a person afraid to offend. Ifemelu sat on a lone armchair at the end of the room, drinking orange juice, listening to them talk. That company is so evil. Oh my God, I can’t believe there’s so much sugar in this stuff. The Internet is totally going to change the world. She heard Ginika ask, “Did you know they use something from animal bones to make that breath mint?” and the others groaned. There were codes Ginika knew, ways of being that she had mastered. Unlike Aunty Uju, Ginika had come to America with the flexibility and fluidness of youth, the cultural cues had seeped into her skin, and now she went bowling, and knew what Tobey Maguire was about, and found double-dipping gross. Bottles and cans of beer were piling up. They all lounged in glamorous lassitude on the sofa, and on the rug, while heavy rock, which Ifemelu thought was unharmonious noise, played on the CD player. Teresa drank the fastest, rolling each empty can of beer on the wood floor, while the others laughed with an enthusiasm that puzzled Ifemelu because it really was not that funny. How did they know when to laugh, what to laugh about?

GINIKA WAS BUYING a dress for a dinner party, hosted by the lawyers she was interning with.

“You should get some things, Ifem.”

“I’m not spending ten kobo of my money unless I have to.”

“Ten cents.”

“Ten cents.”

“I’ll give you a jacket and bedding stuff, but at least you need tights. The cold is coming.”

“I’ll manage,” Ifemelu said. And she would. If she needed to, she would wear all her clothes at the same time, in layers, until she found a job. She was terrified to spend money.

“Ifem, I’ll pay for you.”

“It’s not as if you are earning much.”

“At least I am earning some,” Ginika quipped.

“I really hope I find a job soon.”

“You will, don’t worry.”

“I don’t understand how anybody will believe I’m Ngozi Okonkwo.”

“Don’t show them the license when you go to an interview. Just show the Social Security card. Maybe they won’t even ask. Sometimes they don’t for small jobs like that.”

Ginika led the way into a clothing store, which Ifemelu thought too fevered; it reminded her of a nightclub, disco music playing loudly, the interior shadowy, and the salespeople, two thin-armed young women in all black, moving up and down too swiftly. One was chocolate-skinned, her long black weave highlighted with auburn, the other was white, inky hair floating behind her as she came up to them.

“Hi, ladies, how are you? Is there anything I can help you with?” she asked in a tinkly, singsong voice. She pulled clothes off hangers and unfurled them from shelves to show Ginika. Ifemelu was looking at the price tags, converting them to naira, exclaiming, “Ahn-ahn! How can this thing cost this much?” She picked up and carefully examined some of the clothes, to find out what each was, whether underwear or blouse, whether shirt or dress, and sometimes she was still not certain.

“This literally just came in,” the salesperson said of a sparkly dress, as though divulging a big secret, and Ginika said, “Oh my God, really?” with a great excitement. Under the too-bright lighting of the fitting room, Ginika tried on the dress, walking on tiptoe. “I love it.”

“But it’s shapeless,” Ifemelu said. It looked, to her, like a boxy sack on which a bored person had haphazardly stuck sequins.

“It’s postmodern,” Ginika said.

Watching Ginika preen in front of the mirror, Ifemelu wondered whether she, too, would come to share Ginika’s taste for shapeless dresses, whether this was what America did to you.

At the checkout, the blond cashier asked, “Did anybody help you?”

“Yes,” Ginika said.

“Chelcy or Jennifer?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember her name.” Ginika looked around, to point at her helper, but both young women had disappeared into the fitting rooms at the back.

“Was it the one with long hair?” the cashier asked.

“Well, both of them had long hair.”

“The one with dark hair?”

Both of them had dark hair.

Ginika smiled and looked at the cashier and the cashier smiled and looked at her computer screen, and two damp seconds crawled past before she cheerfully said, “It’s okay, I’ll figure it out later and make sure she gets her commission.”

As they walked out of the store, Ifemelu said, “I was waiting for her to ask ‘Was it the one with two eyes or the one with two legs?’ Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?’ ”

Ginika laughed. “Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.”

GINIKA ASKED Ifemelu to stay with her, to save on rent, but her apartment was too far away, at the end of the Main Line, and the commuter train, taken every day into Philadelphia, would cost too much. They looked at apartments together in West Philadelphia, Ifemelu surprised by the rotting cabinets in the kitchen, the mouse that dashed past an empty bedroom.

“My hostel in Nsukka was dirty but there were no rats o.”

“It’s a mouse,” Ginika said.

Ifemelu was about to sign a lease — if saving money meant living with mice, then so be it — when Ginika’s friend told them of a room for rent, a great deal, as college life went. It was in a four-bedroom apartment with moldy carpeting, above a pizza store on Powelton Avenue, on the corner where drug addicts sometimes dropped crack pipes, miserable pieces of twisted metal that glinted in the sun. Ifemelu’s room was the cheapest, the smallest, facing the scuffed brick walls of the next building. Dog hair floated around. Her roommates, Jackie, Elena, and Allison, looked almost interchangeable, all small-boned and slim-hipped, their chestnut hair ironed straight, their lacrosse sticks piled in the narrow hallway. Elena’s dog ambled about, large and black, like a shaggy donkey; once in a while, a mound of dog shit appeared at the bottom of the stairs and Elena would scream “You’re in big trouble now, buddy!” as though performing for the roommates, playing a role whose lines everyone knew. Ifemelu wished the dog were kept outside, which was where dogs belonged. When Elena asked why Ifemelu had not petted her dog, or scratched his head in the week since she moved in, she said, “I don’t like dogs.”

“Is that like a cultural thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean like I know in China they eat cat meat and dog meat.”

“My boyfriend back home loves dogs. I just don’t.”

“Oh,” Elena said, and looked at her, brows furrowed, as Jackie and Allison had earlier looked at her when she said she had never gone bowling, as though wondering how she could have turned out a normal human being without ever having gone bowling. She was standing at the periphery of her own life, sharing a fridge and a toilet, a shallow intimacy, with people she did not know at all. People who lived in exclamation points. “Great!” they said often. “That’s great!” People who did not scrub in the shower; their shampoos and conditioners and gels were cluttered in the bathroom, but there was not a single sponge, and this, the absence of a sponge, made them seem unreachably alien to her. (One of her earliest memories was of her mother, a bucket of water between them in the bathroom, saying to her, “Ngwa, scrub between your legs very well, very well …,” and Ifemelu had applied a little too much vigor with the loofah, to show her mother just how clean she could get herself, and for a few days afterwards had hobbled around with her legs spread wide.) There was something unquestioning about her roommates’ lives, an assumption of certainty that fascinated her, so that they often said, “Let’s go get some,” about whatever it was they needed — more beer, pizza, buffalo wings, liquor — as though this getting was not an act that required money. She was used, at home, to people first asking “Do you have money?” before they made such plans. They left pizza boxes on the kitchen table, and the kitchen itself in casual disarray for days, and on weekends their friends gathered in the living room, with packs of beer stacked in the refrigerator and streaks of dried urine on the toilet seat.

“We’re going to a party. Come with us, it’ll be fun!” Jackie said, and Ifemelu pulled on her slim-fitting trousers and a halter-neck blouse borrowed from Ginika.

“Won’t you get dressed?” she asked her roommates before they left, all of them wearing slouchy jeans, and Jackie said, “We are dressed. What are you talking about?” with a laugh that suggested yet another foreign pathology had emerged. They went to a fraternity house on Chestnut Street, where everyone stood around drinking vodka-rich punch from plastic cups, until Ifemelu accepted that there would be no dancing; to party here was to stand around and drink. They were all a jumble of frayed fabric and slack collars, the students at the party, all their clothes looked determinedly worn. (Years later, a blog post would read: When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. “We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall.”) As they got drunker and drunker, some lay limp on the floor and others took felt-tipped pens and began to write on the exposed skin of the fallen. Suck me off. Go Sixers.

“Jackie said you’re from Africa?” a boy in a baseball cap asked her.

“Yes.”

“That’s really cool!” he said, and Ifemelu imagined telling Obinze about this, the way she would mimic the boy. Obinze pulled every strand of story from her, going over details, asking questions, and sometimes he would laugh, the sound echoing down the line. She had told him how Allison had said, “Hey, we’re getting a bite to eat. Come with us!” and she thought it was an invitation and that, as with invitations back home, Allison or one of the others would buy her meal. But when the waitress brought the bill, Allison carefully began to untangle how many drinks each person had ordered and who had the calamari appetizer, to make sure nobody paid for anybody else. Obinze had found this very funny, finally saying, “That’s America for you!”

It was, to her, funny only in retrospect. She had struggled to hide her bafflement at the boundaries of hospitality, and also at this business of tipping — paying an extra fifteen or twenty percent of your bill to the waitress — which was suspiciously like bribing, a forced and efficient bribing system.

CHAPTER 13

At first, Ifemelu forgot that she was someone else. In an apartment in South Philadelphia, a tired-faced woman opened the door and led her into a strong stench of urine. The living room was dark, unaired, and she imagined the whole building steeped in months, even years, of accumulated urine, and herself working every day in this urine cloud. From inside the apartment, a man was groaning, deep and eerie sounds; they were the groans of a person for whom groaning was the only choice left, and they frightened her.

“That’s my dad,” the woman said, looking at her with keen assessing eyes. “Are you strong?”

The advertisement in the City Paper had stressed strong. Strong Home Health Aide. Pays cash.

“I’m strong enough to do the job,” Ifemelu said, and fought the urge to back out of the apartment and run and run.

“That’s a pretty accent. Where are you from?”

“Nigeria.”

“Nigeria. Isn’t there a war going on there?”

“No.”

“Can I see your ID?” the woman asked, and then, glancing at the license, added, “How do you pronounce your name again?”

“Ifemelu.”

“What?”

Ifemelu almost choked. “Ngozi. You hum the N.”

“Really.” The woman, with her air of unending exhaustion, seemed too tired to question the two different pronunciations. “Can you live in?”

“Live in?”

“Yes. Live here with my dad. There’s a spare bedroom. You would do three nights a week. You’d need to clean him up in the morning.” The woman paused. “You are pretty slight. Look, I’ve two more people to interview and I’ll get back to you.”

“Okay. Thank you.” Ifemelu knew she would not get the job and for this she was grateful.

She repeated “I’m Ngozi Okonkwo” in front of the mirror before her next interview, at the Seaview restaurant. “Can I call you Goz?” the manager asked after they shook hands, and she said yes, but before she said yes, she paused, the slightest and shortest of pauses, but still a pause. And she wondered if that was why she did not get the job.

Later Ginika said, “You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They’ll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.”

Ginika laughed, a sure throaty laugh. Ifemelu laughed, too, although she did not fully understand the joke. And she had the sudden sensation of fogginess, of a milky web through which she tried to claw. Her autumn of half blindness had begun, the autumn of puzzlements, of experiences she had knowing there were slippery layers of meaning that eluded her.

THE WORLD WAS WRAPPED in gauze; she could see the shapes of things but not clearly enough, never enough. She told Obinze that there were things she should know how to do, but didn’t, details she should have corralled into her space but hadn’t. And he reminded her of how quickly she was adapting, his tone always calm, always consoling. She applied to be a waitress, hostess, bartender, cashier, and then waited for job offers that never came, and for this she blamed herself. It had to be that she was not doing something right; and yet she did not know what it might be. Autumn had come, wet and gray-skied. Her meager bank account was leaking money. The cheapest sweaters from Ross still startled with their high cost, bus and train tickets added up, and groceries punctured holes in her bank balance, even though she stood guard at the checkout, watching the electronic display and saying, “Please stop. I won’t be taking the rest,” when it got to thirty dollars. Each day, there seemed to be a letter for her on the kitchen table, and inside the envelope was a tuition bill, and words printed in capital letters: YOUR RECORDS WILL BE FROZEN UNLESS PAYMENT IS RECEIVED BY THE DATE AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS NOTICE.

It was the boldness of the capital letters more than the words that frightened her. She worried about the possible consequences, a vague but constant worry. She did not imagine a police arrest for not paying her school fees, but what did happen if you did not pay your school fees in America? Obinze told her nothing would happen, suggested she speak to the bursar about getting on a payment plan so that she would at least have taken some action. She called him often, with cheap phone cards she bought from the crowded store of a gas station on Lancaster Avenue, and just scratching off the metallic dust, to reveal the numbers printed beneath, flooded her with anticipation: to hear Obinze’s voice again. He calmed her. With him, she could feel whatever she felt, and she did not have to force some cheer into her voice, as she did with her parents, telling them she was very fine, very hopeful to get a waitress job, settling down very well with her classes.

The highlight of her days was talking to Dike. His voice, higher-pitched on the phone, warmed her as he told her what had happened on his TV show, how he had just beat a new level on Game Boy. “When are you coming to visit, Coz?” he asked often. “I wish you were taking care of me. I don’t like going to Miss Brown’s. Her bathroom is stinky.”

She missed him. Sometimes she told him things she knew he would not understand, but she told him anyway. She told him about her professor who sat on the grass at lunch to eat a sandwich, the one who asked her to call him by his first name, Al, the one who wore a studded leather jacket and had a motorcycle. On the day she got her first piece of junk mail, she told him, “Guess what? I got a letter today.” That credit card preapproval, with her name correctly spelled and elegantly italicized, had roused her spirits, made her a little less invisible, a little more present. Somebody knew her.

CHAPTER 14

And then there was Cristina Tomas. Cristina Tomas with her rinsed-out look, her washy blue eyes, faded hair, and pallid skin, Cristina Tomas seated at the front desk with a smile, Cristina Tomas wearing whitish tights that made her legs look like death. It was a warm day, Ifemelu had walked past students sprawled on green lawns; cheery balloons were clustered below a welcome FRESHMEN sign.

“Good afternoon. Is this the right place for registration?” Ifemelu asked Cristina Tomas, whose name she did not then know.

“Yes. Now. Are. You. An. International. Student?”

“Yes.”

“You. Will. First. Need. To. Get. A. Letter. From. The. International. Students. Office.”

Ifemelu half smiled in sympathy, because Cristina Tomas had to have some sort of illness that made her speak so slowly, lips scrunching and puckering, as she gave directions to the international students office. But when Ifemelu returned with the letter, Cristina Tomas said, “I. Need. You. To. Fill. Out. A. Couple. Of. Forms. Do. You. Understand. How. To. Fill. These. Out?” and she realized that Cristina Tomas was speaking like that because of her, her foreign accent, and she felt for a moment like a small child, lazy-limbed and drooling.

“I speak English,” she said.

“I bet you do,” Cristina Tomas said. “I just don’t know how well.”

Ifemelu shrank. In that strained, still second when her eyes met Cristina Tomas’s before she took the forms, she shrank. She shrank like a dried leaf. She had spoken English all her life, led the debating society in secondary school, and always thought the American twang inchoate; she should not have cowered and shrunk, but she did. And in the following weeks, as autumn’s coolness descended, she began to practice an American accent.

SCHOOL IN AMERICA was easy, assignments sent in by e-mail, classrooms air-conditioned, professors willing to give makeup tests. But she was uncomfortable with what the professors called “participation,” and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words. It had to be that Americans were taught, from elementary school, to always say something in class, no matter what. And so she sat stiff-tongued, surrounded by students who were all folded easily on their seats, all flush with knowledge, not of the subject of the classes, but of how to be in the classes. They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge. And they ambled, these Americans, they walked without rhythm. They avoided giving direct instructions: they did not say “Ask somebody upstairs”; they said “You might want to ask somebody upstairs.” When you tripped and fell, when you choked, when misfortune befell you, they did not say “Sorry.” They said “Are you okay?” when it was obvious that you were not. And when you said “Sorry” to them when they choked or tripped or encountered misfortune, they replied, eyes wide with surprise, “Oh, it’s not your fault.” And they overused the word “excited,” a professor excited about a new book, a student excited about a class, a politician on TV excited about a law; it was altogether too much excitement. Some of the expressions she heard every day astonished her, jarred her, and she wondered what Obinze’s mother would make of them. You shouldn’t of done that. There is three things. I had a apple. A couple days. I want to lay down. “These Americans cannot speak English o,” she told Obinze. On her first day at school, she had visited the health center, and had stared a little too long at the bin filled with free condoms in the corner. After her physical, the receptionist told her, “You’re all set!” and she, blank, wondered what “You’re all set” meant until she assumed it had to mean that she had done all she needed to.

She woke up every day worrying about money. If she bought all the textbooks she needed, she would not have enough to pay her rent, and so she borrowed textbooks during class and made feverish notes which, reading them later, sometimes confused her. Her new class friend, Samantha, a thin woman who avoided the sun, often saying “I burn easily,” would, from time to time, let her take a textbook home. “Keep it until tomorrow and make notes if you need to,” she would say. “I know how tough things can be, that’s why I dropped out of college years ago to work.” Samantha was older, and a relief to befriend, because she was not a slack-jawed eighteen-year-old as so many others in her communications major were. Still, Ifemelu never kept the books for more than a day, and sometimes refused to take them home. It stung her, to have to beg. Sometimes after classes, she would sit on a bench in the quad and watch the students walking past the large gray sculpture in the middle; they all seemed to have their lives in the shape that they wanted, they could have jobs if they wanted to have jobs, and above them, small flags fluttered serenely from lampposts.

SHE HUNGERED to understand everything about America, to wear a new, knowing skin right away: to support a team at the Super Bowl, understand what a Twinkie was and what sports “lockouts” meant, measure in ounces and square feet, order a “muffin” without thinking that it really was a cake, and say “I ‘scored’ a deal” without feeling silly.

Obinze suggested she read American books, novels and histories and biographies. In his first e-mail to her — a cybercafé had just opened in Nsukka — he gave her a list of books. The Fire Next Time was the first. She stood by the library shelf and skimmed the opening chapter, braced for boredom, but slowly she moved to a couch and sat down and kept reading until three-quarters of the book was gone, then she stopped and took down every James Baldwin title on the shelf. She spent her free hours in the library, so wondrously well lit; the sweep of computers, the large, clean, airy reading spaces, the welcoming brightness of it all, seemed like a sinful decadence. She was used, after all, to reading books with pages missing, fallen off while passing through too many hands. And now to be in a cavalcade of books with healthy spines. She wrote to Obinze about the books she read, careful, sumptuous letters that opened, between them, a new intimacy; she had begun, finally, to grasp the power books had over him. His longing for Ibadan because of “Ibadan” had puzzled her; how could a string of words make a person ache for a place he did not know? But in those weeks when she discovered the rows and rows of books with their leathery smell and their promise of pleasures unknown, when she sat, knees tucked underneath her, on an armchair in the lower level or at a table upstairs with the fluorescent light reflecting off the book’s pages, she finally understood. She read the books on Obinze’s list but also, randomly, pulled out book after book, reading a chapter before deciding which she would speed-read in the library and which she would check out. And as she read, America’s mythologies began to take on meaning, America’s tribalisms — race, ideology, and region — became clear. And she was consoled by her new knowledge.

“YOU KNOW you said ‘excited’?” Obinze asked her one day, his voice amused. “You said you were excited about your media class.”

“I did?”

New words were falling out of her mouth. Columns of mist were dispersing. Back home, she would wash her underwear every night and hang it in a discreet corner of the bathroom. Now that she piled them up in a basket and threw them into the washing machine on Friday evenings, she had come to see this, the heaping of dirty underwear, as normal. She spoke up in class, buoyed by the books she read, thrilled that she could disagree with professors, and get, in return, not a scolding about being disrespectful but an encouraging nod.

“We watch films in class,” she told Obinze. “They talk about films here as if films are as important as books. So we watch films and then we write a response paper and almost everybody gets an A. Can you imagine? These Americans are not serious o.”

In her honors history seminar, Professor Moore, a tiny, tentative woman with the emotionally malnourished look of someone who did not have friends, showed some scenes from Roots, the images bright on the board of the darkened classroom. When she turned off the projector, a ghostly white patch hovered on the wall for a moment before disappearing. Ifemelu had first watched Roots on video with Obinze and his mother, sunk into sofas in their living room in Nsukka. As Kunta Kinte was being flogged into accepting his slave name, Obinze’s mother got up abruptly, so abruptly she almost tripped on a leather pouf, and left the room, but not before Ifemelu saw her reddened eyes. It startled her, that Obinze’s mother, fully hemmed into her self-containment, her intense privacy, could cry watching a film. Now, as the window blinds were raised and the classroom once again plunged into light, Ifemelu remembered that Saturday afternoon, and how she had felt lacking, watching Obinze’s mother, and wishing that she, too, could cry.

“Let’s talk about historical representation in film,” Professor Moore said.

A firm, female voice from the back of the class, with a non-American accent, asked, “Why was ‘nigger’ bleeped out?”

And a collective sigh, like a small wind, swept through the class.

“Well, this was a recording from network television and one of the things I wanted us to talk about is how we represent history in popular culture and the use of the N-word is certainly an important part of that,” Professor Moore said.

“It makes no sense to me,” the firm voice said. Ifemelu turned. The speaker’s natural hair was cut as low as a boy’s and her pretty face, wide-foreheaded and fleshless, reminded Ifemelu of the East Africans who always won long-distance races on television.

“I mean, ‘nigger’ is a word that exists. People use it. It is part of America. It has caused a lot of pain to people and I think it is insulting to bleep it out.”

“Well,” Professor Moore said, looking around, as though for help.

It came from a gravelly voice in the middle of the class. “Well, it’s because of the pain that word has caused that you shouldn’t use it!” Shouldn’t sailed astringently into the air, the speaker an African-American girl wearing bamboo hoop earrings.

“Thing is, each time you say it, the word hurts African Americans,” a pale, shaggy-haired boy in front said.

Ifemelu raised her hand; Faulkner’s Light in August, which she had just read, was on her mind. “I don’t think it’s always hurtful. I think it depends on the intent and also on who is using it.”

A girl next to her, face flushing bright red, burst out, “No! The word is the same for whoever says it.”

“That is nonsense.” The firm voice again. A voice unafraid. “If my mother hits me with a stick and a stranger hits me with a stick, it’s not the same thing.”

Ifemelu looked at Professor Moore to see how the word “nonsense” had been received. She did not seem to have noticed; instead, a vague terror was freezing her features into a smirk-smile.

“I agree it’s different when African Americans say it, but I don’t think it should be used in films because that way people who shouldn’t use it can use it and hurt other people’s feelings,” a light-skinned African-American girl said, the last of the four black people in class, her sweater an unsettling shade of fuchsia.

“But it’s like being in denial. If it was used like that, then it should be represented like that. Hiding it doesn’t make it go away.” The firm voice.

“Well, if you all hadn’t sold us, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this,” the gravelly-voiced African-American girl said, in a lowered tone that was, nonetheless, audible.

The classroom was wrapped in silence. Then rose that voice again. “Sorry, but even if no Africans had been sold by other Africans, the transatlantic slave trade would still have happened. It was a European enterprise. It was about Europeans looking for labor for their plantations.”

Professor Moore interrupted in a small voice. “Okay, now let’s talk about the ways in which history can be sacrificed for entertainment.”

After class, Ifemelu and the firm voice drifted towards each other.

“Hi. I’m Wambui. I’m from Kenya. You’re Nigerian, right?” She had a formidable air; a person who went about setting everyone and everything right in the world.

“Yes. I’m Ifemelu.”

They shook hands. They would, in the next weeks, ease into a lasting friendship. Wambui was the president of the African Students Association.

“You don’t know about ASA? You must come to the next meeting on Thursday,” she said.

The meetings were held in the basement of Wharton Hall, a harshly lit, windowless room, paper plates, pizza cartons, and soda bottles piled on a metal table, folding chairs arranged in a limp semicircle. Nigerians, Ugandans, Kenyans, Ghanaians, South Africans, Tanzanians, Zimbabweans, one Congolese, and one Guinean sat around eating, talking, fueling spirits, and their different accents formed meshes of solacing sounds. They mimicked what Americans told them: You speak such good English. How bad is AIDS in your country? It’s so sad that people live on less than a dollar a day in Africa. And they themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again. Here, Ifemelu felt a gentle, swaying sense of renewal. Here, she did not have to explain herself.

WAMBUI HAD TOLD everyone that Ifemelu was looking for a job. Dorothy, the girly Ugandan with long braids who worked as a waitress in Center City, said her restaurant was hiring. But first, Mwombeki, the Tanzanian double major in engineering and political science, looked over Ifemelu’s résumé and asked her to delete the three years of university in Nigeria: American employers did not like lower-level employees to be too educated. Mwombeki reminded her of Obinze, that ease about him, that quiet strength. At meetings, he made everyone laugh. “I got a good primary education because of Nyerere’s socialism,” Mwombeki said often. “Otherwise I would be in Dar right now, carving ugly giraffes for tourists.” When two new students came for the first time, one from Ghana and the other from Nigeria, Mwombeki gave them what he called the welcome talk.

“Please do not go to Kmart and buy twenty pairs of jeans because each costs five dollars. The jeans are not running away. They will be there tomorrow at an even more reduced price. You are now in America: do not expect to have hot food for lunch. That African taste must be abolished. When you visit the home of an American with some money, they will offer to show you their house. Forget that in your house back home, your father would throw a fit if anyone came close to his bedroom. We all know that the living room was where it stopped and, if absolutely necessary, then the toilet. But please smile and follow the American and see the house and make sure you say you like everything. And do not be shocked by the indiscriminate touching of American couples. Standing in line at the cafeteria, the girl will touch the boy’s arm and the boy will put his arm around her shoulder and they will rub shoulders and back and rub rub rub, but please do not imitate this behavior.”

They were all laughing. Wambui shouted something in Swahili.

“Very soon you will start to adopt an American accent, because you don’t want customer service people on the phone to keep asking you ‘What? What?’ You will start to admire Africans who have perfect American accents, like our brother here, Kofi. Kofi’s parents came from Ghana when he was two years old, but do not be fooled by the way he sounds. If you go to their house, they eat kenkey everyday. His father slapped him when he got a C in a class. There’s no American nonsense in that house. He goes back to Ghana every year. We call people like Kofi American-African, not African-American, which is what we call our brothers and sisters whose ancestors were slaves.”

“It was a B minus, not a C,” Kofi quipped.

“Try and make friends with our African-American brothers and sisters in a spirit of true pan-Africanism. But make sure you remain friends with fellow Africans, as this will help you keep your perspective. Always attend African Students Association meetings, but if you must, you can also try the Black Student Union. Please note that in general, African Americans go to the Black Student Union and Africans go to the African Students Association. Sometimes it overlaps but not a lot. The Africans who go to BSU are those with no confidence who are quick to tell you ‘I am originally from Kenya’ even though Kenya just pops out the minute they open their mouths. The African Americans who come to our meetings are the ones who write poems about Mother Africa and think every African is a Nubian queen. If an African American calls you a Mandingo or a booty scratcher, he is insulting you for being African. Some will ask you annoying questions about Africa, but others will connect with you. You will also find that you might make friends more easily with other internationals, Koreans, Indians, Brazilians, whatever, than with Americans both black and white. Many of the internationals understand the trauma of trying to get an American visa and that is a good place to start a friendship.”

There was more laughter, Mwombeki himself laughing loudly, as though he had not heard his own jokes before.

Later, as Ifemelu left the meeting, she thought of Dike, wondered which he would go to in college, whether ASA or BSU, and what he would be considered, whether American African or African American. He would have to choose what he was, or rather, what he was would be chosen for him.

IFEMELU THOUGHT the interview at the restaurant where Dorothy worked had gone well. It was for a hostess position, and she wore her nice shirt, smiled warmly, shook hands firmly. The manager, a chortling woman full of a seemingly uncontrollable happiness, told her, “Great! Wonderful to talk to you! You’ll hear from me soon!” And so when, that evening, her phone rang, she snatched it up, hoping it was a job offer.

“Ifem, kedu?” Aunty Uju said.

Aunty Uju called too often to ask if she had found a job. “Aunty, you will be the first person I will call when I do,” Ifemelu had said during the last call, only yesterday, and now Aunty Uju was calling again.

“Fine,” Ifemelu said, and was about to add, “I have not found anything yet,” when Aunty Uju said, “Something happened with Dike.”

“What?” Ifemelu asked.

“Miss Brown told me that she saw him in a closet with a girl. The girl is in third grade. Apparently they were showing each other their private parts.”

There was a pause.

“Is that all?” Ifemelu asked.

“What do you mean, is that all? He is not yet seven years old! What type of thing is this? Is this what I came to America for?”

“We actually read something about this in one of my classes the other day. It’s normal. Children are curious about things like that at an early age, but they don’t really understand it.”

“Normal kwa? It’s not normal at all.”

“Aunty, we were all curious as children.”

“Not at seven years old! Tufiakwa! Where did he learn that from? It is that day care he goes to. Since Alma left and he started going to Miss Brown, he has changed. All those wild children with no home training, he is learning rubbish from them. I’ve decided to move to Massachusetts at the end of this term.”

“Ahn-ahn!”

“I’ll finish my residency there and Dike will go to a better school and better day care. Bartholomew is moving from Boston to a small town, Warrington, to start his business, so it will be a new beginning for both of us. The elementary school there is very good. And the local doctor is looking for a partner because his practice is growing. I’ve spoken to him and he is interested in my joining him when I finish.”

“You’re leaving New York to go to a village in Massachusetts? Can you just leave residency like that?”

“Of course. My friend Olga, the one from Russia? She is leaving, too, but she will have to repeat a year in her new program. She wants to practice dermatology and most of our patients here are black and she said skin diseases look different on black skin and she knows she will not end up practicing in a black area so she wants to go where the patients will be white. I don’t blame her. It’s true my program is higher ranked, but sometimes job opportunities are better in smaller places. Besides, I don’t want Bartholomew to think I am not serious. I’m not getting any younger. I want to start trying.”

“You’re really going to marry him.”

Aunty Uju said with mock exasperation, “Ifem, I thought we had passed that stage. Once I move, we’ll go to court and get married, so that he can act as Dike’s legal parent.”

Ifemelu heard the beep-beep of an incoming call. “Aunty, let me call you back,” she said, and switched over without waiting for Aunty Uju’s response. It was the restaurant manager.

“I’m sorry, Ngozi,” she said, “But we decided to hire a more qualified person. Good luck!”

Ifemelu put the phone down and thought of her mother, how she often blamed the devil. The devil is a liar. The devil wants to block us. She stared at the phone, and then at the bills on her table, a tight, suffocating pressure rising inside her chest.

CHAPTER 15

The man was short, his body a glut of muscles, his hair thinning and sun-bleached. When he opened the door, he looked her over, mercilessly sizing her up, and then he smiled and said, “Come on in. My office is in the basement.” Her skin prickled, an unease settling over her. There was something venal about his thin-lipped face; he had the air of a man to whom corruption was familiar.

“I’m a pretty busy guy,” he said, gesturing to a chair in his cramped home office that smelled slightly of damp.

“I assumed so from the advertisement,” Ifemelu said. Female personal assistant for busy sports coach in Ardmore, communication and interpersonal skills required. She sat on the chair, perched really, suddenly thinking that, from reading a City Paper ad, she was now alone with a strange man in the basement of a strange house in America. Hands thrust deep in his jeans pockets, he walked back and forth with short quick steps, talking about how much in demand he was as a tennis coach, and Ifemelu thought he might trip on the stacks of sports magazines on the floor. She felt dizzy just watching him. He spoke as quickly as he moved, his expression uncannily alert; his eyes stayed wide and unblinking for too long.

“So here’s the deal. There are two positions, one for office work and the other for help relaxing. The office position has already been filled. She started yesterday, she goes to Bryn Mawr, and she’ll spend the whole week just clearing up my backlog of stuff. I bet I have some unopened checks in there somewhere.” He withdrew a hand to gesture towards his messy desk. “Now what I need is help to relax. If you want the job you have it. I’d pay you a hundred dollars, with the possibility of a raise, and you’d work as needed, no set schedule.”

A hundred dollars a day, almost enough for her monthly rent. She shifted on the chair. “What exactly do you mean by ‘help to relax’?”

She was watching him, waiting for his explanation. It began to bother her, thinking of how much she had paid for the suburban train ticket.

“Look, you’re not a kid,” he said. “I work so hard I can’t sleep. I can’t relax. I don’t do drugs so I figured I need help to relax. You can give me a massage, help me relax, you know. I had somebody doing it before, but she’s just moved to Pittsburgh. It’s a great gig, at least she thought so. Helped her with a lot of her college debt.” He had said this to many other women, she could tell, from the measured pace with which the words came out. He was not a kind man. She did not know exactly what he meant, but whatever it was, she regretted that she had come.

She stood up. “Can I think about this and give you a call?”

“Of course.” He shrugged, shoulders thick with sudden irritability, as though he could not believe she did not recognize her good fortune. As he let her out, he shut the door quickly, not responding to her final “Thank you.” She walked back to the station, mourning the train fare. The trees were awash with color, red and yellow leaves tinted the air golden, and she thought of the words she had recently read somewhere: Nature’s first green is gold. The crisp air, fragrant and dry, reminded her of Nsukka during the harmattan season, and brought with it a sudden stab of homesickness, so sharp and so abrupt that it filled her eyes with tears.

EACH TIME she went to a job interview, or made a phone call about a job, she told herself that this would, finally, be her day; this time, the waitress, hostess, babysitter position would be hers, but even as she wished herself well, there was already a gathering gloom in a far corner of her mind. “What am I doing wrong?” she asked Ginika, and Ginika told her to be patient, to have hope. She typed and retyped her résumé, invented past waitressing experience in Lagos, wrote Ginika’s name as an employer whose children she had babysat, gave the name of Wambui’s landlady as a reference, and, at each interview, she smiled warmly and shook hands firmly, all the things that were suggested in a book she had read about interviewing for American jobs. Yet there was no job. Was it her foreign accent? Her lack of experience? But her African friends all had jobs, and college students got jobs all the time with no experience. Once, she went to a gas station near Chestnut Street and a large Mexican man said, with his eyes on her chest, “You’re here for the attendant position? You can work for me in another way.” Then, with a smile, the leer never leaving his eyes, he told her the job was taken. She began to think more about her mother’s devil, to imagine how the devil might have a hand here. She added and subtracted endlessly, determining what she would need and not need, cooking rice and beans each week, and heating up small portions in the microwave for lunch and dinner. Obinze offered to send her some money. His cousin had visited from London and given him some pounds. He would change it to dollars in Enugu.

“How can you be sending me money from Nigeria? It should be the other way around,” she said. But he sent it to her anyway, a little over a hundred dollars carefully sealed in a card.

GINIKA WAS BUSY, working long hours at her internship and studying for her law school exams, but she called often to check up on Ifemelu’s job searching, and always with that upbeat voice, as though to urge Ifemelu towards hope. “This woman I did an internship with her charity, Kimberly, called me to say her babysitter is leaving and she’s looking. I told her about you and she’d like to meet you. If she hires you, she’ll pay cash under the table so you won’t have to use that fake name. When do you finish tomorrow? I can come and take you to her for an interview.”

“If I get this job, I will give you my first month’s salary,” Ifemelu said, and Ginika laughed.

Ginika parked in the circular driveway of a house that announced its wealth, the stone exterior solid and overbearing, four white pillars rising portentously at the entrance. Kimberly opened the front door. She was slim and straight, and raised both hands to push her thick golden hair away from her face, as though one hand could not possibly tame all that hair.

“How nice to meet you,” she said to Ifemelu, smiling, as they shook hands, her hand small, bony-fingered, fragile. In her gold sweater belted at an impossibly tiny waist, with her gold hair, in gold flats, she looked improbable, like sunlight.

“This is my sister Laura, who’s visiting. Well, we visit each other almost every day! Laura practically lives next door. The kids are in the Poconos until tomorrow, with my mother. I thought it would be best to do this when they’re not here anyway.”

“Hi,” Laura said. She was as thin and straight and blond as Kimberly. Ifemelu, describing them to Obinze, would say that Kimberly gave the impression of a tiny bird with fine bones, easily crushed, while Laura brought to mind a hawk, sharp-beaked and dark-minded.

“Hello, I’m Ifemelu.”

“What a beautiful name,” Kimberly said. “Does it mean anything? I love multicultural names because they have such wonderful meanings, from wonderful rich cultures.” Kimberly was smiling the kindly smile of people who thought “culture” the unfamiliar colorful reserve of colorful people, a word that always had to be qualified with “rich.” She would not think Norway had a “rich culture.”

“I don’t know what it means,” Ifemelu said, and sensed rather than saw a small amusement on Ginika’s face.

“Would you like some tea?” Kimberly asked, leading the way into a kitchen of shiny chrome and granite and affluent empty space. “We’re tea drinkers, but of course there are other choices.”

“Tea is great,” Ginika said.

“And you, Ifemelu?” Kimberly asked. “I know I’m mauling your name but it really is such a beautiful name. Really beautiful.”

“No, you said it properly. I’d like some water or orange juice, please.” Ifemelu would come to realize later that Kimberly used “beautiful” in a peculiar way. “I’m meeting my beautiful friend from graduate school,” Kimberly would say, or “We’re working with this beautiful woman on the inner-city project,” and always, the women she referred to would turn out to be quite ordinary-looking, but always black. One day, late that winter, when she was with Kimberly at the huge kitchen table, drinking tea and waiting for the children to be brought back from an outing with their grandmother, Kimberly said, “Oh, look at this beautiful woman,” and pointed at a plain model in a magazine whose only distinguishing feature was her very dark skin. “Isn’t she just stunning?”

“No, she isn’t.” Ifemelu paused. “You know, you can just say ‘black.’ Not every black person is beautiful.”

Kimberly was taken aback, something wordless spread on her face and then she smiled, and Ifemelu would think of it as the moment they became, truly, friends. But on that first day, she liked Kimberly, her breakable beauty, her purplish eyes full of the expression Obinze often used to describe the people he liked: obi ocha. A clean heart. Kimberly asked Ifemelu questions about her experience with children, listening carefully as though what she wanted to hear was what might be left unsaid.

“She doesn’t have CPR certification, Kim,” Laura said. She turned to Ifemelu. “Are you willing to take the course? It’s very important if you are going to have children in your care.”

“I’m willing to.”

“Ginika said you left Nigeria because college professors are always on strike there?” Kimberly asked.

“Yes.”

Laura nodded knowingly. “Horrible, what’s going on in African countries.”

“How are you finding the U.S. so far?” Kimberly asked.

Ifemelu told her about the vertigo she had felt the first time she went to the supermarket; in the cereal aisle, she had wanted to get corn flakes, which she was used to eating back home, but suddenly confronted by a hundred different cereal boxes, in a swirl of colors and images, she had fought dizziness. She told this story because she thought it was funny; it appealed harmlessly to the American ego.

Laura laughed. “I can see how you’d be dizzy!”

“Yes, we’re really about excess in this country,” Kimberly said. “I’m sure back home you ate a lot of wonderful organic food and vegetables, but you’re going to see it’s different here.”

“Kim, if she was eating all of this wonderful organic food in Nigeria, why would she come to the U.S.?” Laura asked. As children, Laura must have played the role of the big sister who exposed the stupidity of the little sister, always with kindness and good cheer, and preferably in the company of adult relatives.

“Well, even if they had very little food, I’m just saying it was probably all organic vegetables, none of the Frankenfood we have here,” Kimberly said. Ifemelu sensed, between them, the presence of spiky thorns floating in the air.

“You haven’t told her about television,” Laura said. She turned to Ifemelu. “Kim’s kids do supervised TV, only PBS. So if she hired you, you would need to be completely present and monitor what goes on, especially with Morgan.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t have a babysitter,” Laura said, her “I” glowing with righteous emphasis. “I’m a full-time, hands-on mom. I thought I would return to work when Athena turned two, but I just couldn’t bear to let her go. Kim is really hands-on, too, but she’s busy sometimes, she does wonderful work with her charity, and so I’m always worried about the babysitters. The last one, Martha, was wonderful, but we did wonder whether the one before her, what was her name again, let Morgan watch inappropriate shows. I don’t do any television at all with my daughter. I think there’s too much violence. I might let her do a few cartoons when she’s a little older.”

“But there’s violence in cartoons, too,” Ifemelu said.

Laura looked annoyed. “It’s cartoon. Kids are traumatized by the real thing.”

Ginika glanced at Ifemelu, a knitted-brow look that said: Just leave it alone. In primary school, Ifemelu had watched the firing squad that killed Lawrence Anini, fascinated by the mythologies around his armed robberies, how he wrote warning letters to newspapers, fed the poor with what he stole, turned himself into air when the police came. Her mother had said, “Go inside, this is not for children,” but halfheartedly, after Ifemelu had already seen most of the shooting anyway, Anini’s body roughly tied to a pole, jerking as the bullets hit him, before slumping against the criss-cross of rope. She thought about this now, how haunting and yet how ordinary it had seemed.

“Let me show you the house, Ifemelu,” Kimberly said. “Did I say it right?”

They walked from room to room — the daughter’s room with pink walls and a frilly bedcover, the son’s room with a set of drums, the den with a piano, its polished wooden top crowded with family photographs.

“We took that in India,” Kimberly said. They were standing by an empty rickshaw, wearing T-shirts, Kimberly with her golden hair tied back, her tall and lean husband, her small blond son and older red-haired daughter, all holding water bottles and smiling. They were always smiling in the photos they took, while sailing and hiking and visiting tourist spots, holding each other, all easy limbs and white teeth. They reminded Ifemelu of television commercials, of people whose lives were lived always in flattering light, whose messes were still aesthetically pleasing.

“Some of the people we met had nothing, absolutely nothing, but they were so happy,” Kimberly said. She extracted a photograph from the crowded back of the piano, of her daughter with two Indian women, their skin dark and weathered, their smiles showing missing teeth. “These women were so wonderful,” she said.

Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.

“Morgan loves that, it’s Native American. But Taylor says it’s scary!” Kimberly pointed to a small piece of sculpture amid the photographs.

“Oh.” Ifemelu suddenly did not remember which was the boy and which the girl; both names, Morgan and Taylor, sounded to her like surnames.

Kimberly’s husband came home just before Ifemelu left.

“Hello! Hello!” he said, gliding into the kitchen, tall and tanned and tactical. Ifemelu could tell, from the longish length, the near-perfect waves that grazed his collar, that he took fastidious care of his hair.

“You must be Ginika’s friend from Nigeria,” he said, smiling, brimming with his awareness of his own charm. He looked people in the eye not because he was interested in them but because he knew it made them feel that he was interested in them.

With his appearance, Kimberly became slightly breathless. Her voice changed; she spoke now in the high-pitched voice of the self-consciously female. “Don, honey, you’re early,” she said as they kissed.

Don looked into Ifemelu’s eyes and told her how he had nearly visited Nigeria, just after Shagari was elected, when he worked as a consultant to an international development agency, but the trip fell through at the last minute and he had felt bad because he had been hoping to go to the shrine and see Fela perform. He mentioned Fela casually, intimately, as though it was something they had in common, a secret they shared. There was, in his storytelling, an expectation of successful seduction. Ifemelu stared at him, saying little, refusing to be ensnared, and feeling strangely sorry for Kimberly. To be saddled with a sister like Laura and a husband like this.

“Don and I are involved with a really good charity in Malawi, actually Don is much more involved than I am.” Kimberly looked at Don, who made a wry face and said, “Well, we do our best but we know very well that we’re not messiahs.”

“We really should plan a trip to visit. It’s an orphanage. We’ve never been to Africa. I would love to do something with my charity in Africa.”

Kimberly’s face had softened, her eyes misted over, and for a moment Ifemelu was sorry to have come from Africa, to be the reason that this beautiful woman, with her bleached teeth and bounteous hair, would have to dig deep to feel such pity, such hopelessness. She smiled brightly, hoping to make Kimberly feel better.

“I’m interviewing one more person and then I’ll let you know, but I really think you’re a great fit for us,” Kimberly said, leading Ifemelu and Ginika to the front door.

“Thank you,” Ifemelu said. “I would love to work for you.”

The next day, Ginika called and left a message, her tone low. “Ifem, I’m so sorry. Kimberly hired somebody else but she said she’ll keep you in mind. Something will work out soon, don’t worry too much. I’ll call later.”

Ifemelu wanted to fling the phone away. Keep her in mind. Why would Ginika even repeat such an empty expression, “keep her in mind”?

IT WAS late autumn, the trees had grown antlers, dried leaves were sometimes trailed into the apartment, and the rent was due. Her roommates’ checks were on the kitchen table, one on top of the other, all of them pink and bordered by flowers. She thought it unnecessarily decorative, to have flowered checks in America; it almost took away from the seriousness of a check. Beside the checks was a note, in Jackie’s childish writing: Ifemelu, we’re almost a week late for rent. Writing a check would leave her account empty. Her mother had given her a small jar of Mentholatum the day before she left Lagos, saying, “Put this in your bag, for when you will be cold.” She rummaged now in her suitcase for it, opened and sniffed it, rubbing some under her nose. The scent made her want to weep. The answering machine was blinking but she did not check it because it would be yet another variation of Aunty Uju’s message. “Has anyone called you back? Have you tried the nearby McDonald’s and Burger King? They don’t always advertise but they might be hiring. I can’t send you anything until next month. My own account is empty, honestly to be a resident doctor is slave labor.”

Newspapers were strewn on the floor, job listings circled in ink. She picked one up and flipped through, looking at advertisements she had already seen. escorts caught her eye again. Ginika had said to her, “Forget that escort thing. They say it isn’t prostitution but it is and the worst thing is that you get maybe a quarter of what you earn because the agency takes the rest. I know this girl who did it in freshman year.” Ifemelu read the advertisement and thought, again, of calling, but she didn’t, because she was hoping that the last interview she went for, a waitress position in a little restaurant that didn’t pay a salary, only tips, would come through. They had said they would call her by the end of the day if she got the job; she waited until very late but they did not call.

AND THEN Elena’s dog ate her bacon. She had heated up a slice of bacon on a paper towel, put it on the table, and turned to open the fridge. The dog swallowed the bacon and the paper towel. She stared at the empty space where her bacon had been, and then she stared at the dog, its expression smug, and all the frustrations of her life boiled up in her head. A dog eating her bacon, a dog eating her bacon while she was jobless.

“Your dog just ate my bacon,” she told Elena, who was slicing a banana at the other end of the kitchen, the pieces falling into her cereal bowl.

“You just hate my dog.”

“You should train him better. He shouldn’t eat people’s food from the kitchen table.”

“You better not kill my dog with voodoo.”

“What?”

“Just kidding!” Elena said. Elena was smirking, her dog’s tail wagging, and Ifemelu felt acid in her veins; she moved towards Elena, hand raised and ready to explode on Elena’s face, before she caught herself with a jolt, stopped and turned and went upstairs. She sat on her bed and hugged her knees to her chest, shaken by her own reaction, how quickly her fury had risen. Downstairs, Elena was screaming on the phone: “I swear to God, bitch just tried to hit me!” Ifemelu had wanted to slap her dissolute roommate not because a slobbering dog had eaten her bacon but because she was at war with the world, and woke up each day feeling bruised, imagining a horde of faceless people who were all against her. It terrified her, to be unable to visualize tomorrow. When her parents called and left a voice message, she saved it, unsure if that would be the last time she would hear their voices. To be here, living abroad, not knowing when she could go home again, was to watch love become anxiety. If she called her mother’s friend Aunty Bunmi and the phone rang to the end, with no answer, she panicked, worried that perhaps her father had died and Aunty Bunmi did not know how to tell her.

LATER, Allison knocked on her door. “Ifemelu? Just wanted to remind you, your rent check isn’t on the table. We’re already really late.”

“I know. I’m writing it.” She lay faceup on her bed. She didn’t want to be the roommate who had rent problems. She hated that Ginika had bought her groceries last week. She could hear Jackie’s raised voice from downstairs. “What are we supposed to do? We’re not her fucking parents.”

She brought out her checkbook. Before she wrote the check, she called Aunty Uju to speak to Dike. Then, refreshed by his innocence, she called the tennis coach in Ardmore.

“When can I start working?” she asked.

“Want to come over right now?”

“Okay,” she said.

She shaved her underarms, dug out the lipstick she had not worn since the day she left Lagos, most of it left smeared on Obinze’s neck at the airport. What would happen with the tennis coach? He had said “massage,” but his manner, his tone, had dripped suggestion. Perhaps he was one of those white men she had read about, with strange tastes, who wanted women to drag a feather over their back or urinate on them. She could certainly do that, urinate on a man for a hundred dollars. The thought amused her, and she smiled a small wry smile. Whatever happened, she would approach it looking her best, she would make it clear to him that there were boundaries she would not cross. She would say, from the beginning, “If you expect sex, then I can’t help you.” Or perhaps she would say it more delicately, more suggestively. “I’m not comfortable going too far.” She might be imagining too much; he might just want a massage.

When she arrived at his house, his manner was brusque. “Come on up,” he said, and led the way to his bedroom, bare but for a bed and a large painting of a tomato soup can on the wall. He offered her something to drink, in a perfunctory way that suggested he expected her to say no, and then he took off his shirt and lay on the bed. Was there no preface? She wished he had done things a little more slowly. Her own words had deserted her.

“Come over here,” he said. “I need to be warm.”

She should leave now. The power balance was tilted in his favor, had been tilted in his favor since she walked into his house. She should leave. She stood up.

“I can’t have sex,” she said. Her voice felt squeaky, unsure of itself. “I can’t have sex with you,” she repeated.

“Oh no, I don’t expect you to,” he said, too quickly.

She moved slowly toward the door, wondering if it was locked, if he had locked it, and then she wondered if he had a gun.

“Just come here and lie down,” he said. “Keep me warm. I’ll touch you a little bit, nothing you’ll be uncomfortable with. I just need some human contact to relax.”

There was, in his expression and tone, a complete assuredness; she felt defeated. How sordid it all was, that she was here with a stranger who already knew she would stay. He knew she would stay because she had come. She was already here, already tainted. She took off her shoes and climbed into his bed. She did not want to be here, did not want his active finger between her legs, did not want his sigh-moans in her ear, and yet she felt her body rousing to a sickening wetness. Afterwards, she lay still, coiled and deadened. He had not forced her. She had come here on her own. She had lain on his bed, and when he placed her hand between his legs, she had curled and moved her fingers. Now, even after she had washed her hands, holding the crisp, slender hundred-dollar bill he had given her, her fingers still felt sticky; they no longer belonged to her.

“Can you do twice a week? I’ll cover your train fare,” he said, stretching and dismissive; he wanted her to leave.

She said nothing.

“Shut the door,” he said, and turned his back to her.

She walked to the train, feeling heavy and slow, her mind choked with mud, and, seated by the window, she began to cry. She felt like a small ball, adrift and alone. The world was a big, big place and she was so tiny, so insignificant, rattling around emptily. Back in her apartment, she washed her hands with water so hot that it scalded her fingers, and a small soft welt flowered on her thumb. She took off all her clothes, and squashed them into a rumpled ball that she threw at a corner, staring at it for a while. She would never again wear those clothes, never even touch them. She sat naked on her bed and looked at her life, in this tiny room with the moldy carpet, the hundred-dollar bill on the table, her body rising with loathing. She should never have gone there. She should have walked away. She wanted to shower, to scrub herself, but she could not bear the thought of touching her own body, and so she put on her nightdress, gingerly, to touch as little of herself as possible. She imagined packing her things, somehow buying a ticket, and going back to Lagos. She curled on her bed and cried, wishing she could reach into herself and yank out the memory of what had just happened. Her voice mail light was blinking. It was probably Obinze. She could not bear to think of him now. She thought of calling Ginika. Finally, she called Aunty Uju.

“I went to work for a man in the suburbs today. He paid me a hundred dollars.”

“Ehn? That’s very good. But you have to keep looking for something permanent. I’ve just realized I have to buy health insurance for Dike because the one this new hospital in Massachusetts offers is nonsense, it does not cover him. I am still in shock by how much I have to pay.”

“Won’t you ask me what I did, Aunty? Won’t you ask me what I did before the man paid me a hundred dollars?” Ifemelu asked, a new anger sweeping over her, treading itself through her fingers so that they shook.

“What did you do?” Aunty Uju asked flatly.

Ifemelu hung up. She pressed New on her machine. The first message was from her mother, speaking quickly to reduce the cost of the call: “Ifem, how are you? We are calling to see how you are. We have not heard from you in a while. Please send a message. We are well. God bless you.”

Then Obinze’s voice, his words floating into the air, into her head. “I love you, Ifem,” he said, at the end, in that voice that seemed suddenly so far away, part of another time and place. She lay rigid on her bed. She could not sleep, she could not distract herself. She began to think about killing the tennis coach. She would hit him on the head over and over with an axe. She would plunge a knife into his muscled chest. He lived alone, he probably had other women coming to his room to spread their legs for his stubby finger with its bitten-back nail. Nobody would know which of them had done it. She would leave the knife sunk in his chest and then search his drawers for his bundle of one-hundred-dollar bills, so that she could pay her rent and her tuition.

That night, it snowed, her first snow, and in the morning, she watched the world outside her window, the parked cars made lumpy, misshapen, by layered snow. She was bloodless, detached, floating in a world where darkness descended too soon and everyone walked around burdened by coats, and flattened by the absence of light. The days drained into one another, crisp air turning to freezing air, painful to inhale. Obinze called many times but she did not pick up her phone. She deleted his voice messages unheard and his e-mails unread, and she felt herself sinking, sinking quickly, and unable to pull herself up.

SHE WOKE UP torpid each morning, slowed by sadness, frightened by the endless stretch of day that lay ahead. Everything had thickened. She was swallowed, lost in a viscous haze, shrouded in a soup of nothingness. Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. She cared about nothing. She wanted to care, but she no longer knew how; it had slipped from her memory, the ability to care. Sometimes she woke up flailing and helpless, and she saw, in front of her and behind her and all around her, an utter hopelessness. She knew there was no point in being here, in being alive, but she had no energy to think concretely of how she could kill herself. She lay in bed and read books and thought of nothing. Sometimes she forgot to eat and other times she waited until midnight, her roommates in their rooms, before heating up her food, and she left the dirty plates under her bed, until greenish mold fluffed up around the oily remnants of rice and beans. Often, in the middle of eating or reading, she would feel a crushing urge to cry and the tears would come, the sobs hurting her throat. She had turned off the ringer of her phone. She no longer went to class. Her days were stilled by silence and snow.

ALLISON WAS BANGING on her door again. “Are you there? Phone call! She says it’s an emergency, for God’s sake! I know you’re there, I heard you flush the toilet a minute ago!”

The flat, dulled banging, as though Allison was hitting the door with an open palm rather than a knuckle, unnerved Ifemelu. “She’s not opening,” she heard Allison say, and then, just when she thought Allison had left, the banging resumed. She got up from her bed, where she had been lying and taking turns reading two novels chapter by chapter, and with leaden feet moved to the door. She wanted to walk quickly, normally, but she could not. Her feet had turned into snails. She unlocked the door. With a glare, Allison thrust the phone in her hand.

“Thanks,” she said, limply, and added, in a lower mumble, “Sorry.” Even talking, making words rise up her throat and out of her mouth, exhausted her.

“Hello?” she said into the phone.

“Ifem! What’s going on? What’s happening to you?” Ginika asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

“I’ve been so worried about you. Thank God I found your roommate’s number! Obinze has been calling me. He’s worried out of his mind,” Ginika said. “Even Aunty Uju called to ask if I had seen you.”

“I’ve been busy,” Ifemelu said vaguely.

There was a pause. Ginika’s tone softened. “Ifem, I’m here, you know that, right?”

Ifemelu wanted to hang up and return to her bed. “Yes.”

“I have good news. Kimberly called me to ask for your phone number. The babysitter she hired just left. She wants to hire you. She wants you to start on Monday. She said she wanted you from the beginning but Laura talked her into hiring the other person. So, Ifem, you have a job! Cash! Under the table! Ifemsco, this is great. She’ll pay you two-fifty a week, more than the old babysitter. And pure cash under the table! Kimberly is a really great person. I’m coming tomorrow to take you over there to see her.”

Ifemelu said nothing, struggling to understand. Words took so long to form meaning.

The next day, Ginika knocked and knocked on her door before Ifemelu finally opened, and saw Allison standing on the landing at the back, watching curiously.

“We’re late already, get dressed,” Ginika said, firmly, authoritatively, with no room for dissent. Ifemelu pulled on a pair of jeans. She felt Ginika watching her. In the car, Ginika’s rock music filled the silence between them. They were on Lancaster Avenue, just about to cross over from West Philadelphia, with boarded-up buildings and hamburger wrappers strewn around, and into the spotless, tree-filled suburbs of the Main Line, when Ginika said, “I think you’re suffering from depression.”

Ifemelu shook her head and turned to the window. Depression was what happened to Americans, with their self-absolving need to turn everything into an illness. She was not suffering from depression; she was merely a little tired and a little slow. “I don’t have depression,” she said. Years later, she would blog about this: “On the Subject of Non-American Blacks Suffering from Illnesses Whose Names They Refuse to Know.” A Congolese woman wrote a long comment in response: She had moved to Virginia from Kinshasa and, months into her first semester of college, begun to feel dizzy in the morning, her heart pounding as though in flight from her, her stomach fraught with nausea, her fingers tingling. She went to see a doctor. And even though she checked “yes” to all the symptoms on the card the doctor gave her, she refused to accept the diagnosis of panic attacks because panic attacks happened only to Americans. Nobody in Kinshasa had panic attacks. It was not even that it was called by another name, it was simply not called at all. Did things begin to exist only when they were named?

“Ifem, this is something a lot of people go through, and I know it’s not been easy for you adjusting to a new place and still not having a job. We don’t talk about things like depression in Nigeria but it’s real. You should see somebody at the health center. There’s always therapists.”

Ifemelu kept her face to the window. She felt, again, that crushing desire to cry, and she took a deep breath, hoping it would pass. She wished she had told Ginika about the tennis coach, taken the train to Ginika’s apartment on that day, but now it was too late, her self-loathing had hardened inside her. She would never be able to form the sentences to tell her story.

“Ginika,” she said. “Thank you.” Her voice was hoarse. The tears had come, she could not control them. Ginika stopped at a gas station, gave her a tissue, and waited for her sobs to die down before she started the car and drove to Kimberly’s house.

CHAPTER 16

Kimberly called it a signing bonus. “Ginika told me you’ve had some challenges,” Kimberly said. “Please don’t refuse.”

It would not have occurred to Ifemelu to refuse the check; now she could pay some bills, send something home to her parents. Her mother liked the shoes she sent, tasseled and tapering, the kind she could wear to church. “Thank you,” her mother said, and then sighing heavily over the phone line, she added, “Obinze came to see me.” Ifemelu was silent.

“Whatever problem you have, please discuss it with him,” her mother said.

Ifemelu said, “Okay,” and began to talk about something else. When her mother said there had been no light for two weeks, it seemed suddenly foreign to her, and home itself a distant place. She could no longer remember what it felt like to spend an evening in candlelight. She no longer read the news on Nigeria.com because each headline, even the most unlikely ones, somehow reminded her of Obinze.

At first, she gave herself a month. A month to let her self-loathing seep away, then she would call Obinze. But a month passed and still she kept Obinze sealed in silence, gagged her own mind so that she would think of him as little as possible. She still deleted his e-mails unread. Many times she started to write to him, she crafted e-mails, and then stopped and discarded them. She would have to tell him what happened, and she could not bear the thought of telling him what happened. She felt shamed; she had failed. Ginika kept asking what was wrong, why she had shut out Obinze, and she said it was nothing, she just wanted some space, and Ginika gaped at her in disbelief. You just want some space?

Early in the spring, a letter arrived from Obinze. Deleting his e-mails took a click, and after the first click, the others were easier because she could not imagine reading the second if she had not read the first. But a letter was different. It brought to her the greatest sorrow she had ever felt. She sank to her bed, holding the envelope in her hand; she smelled it, stared at his familiar handwriting. She imagined him at his desk in his boys’ quarters, near his small humming refrigerator, writing in that calm manner of his. She wanted to read the letter, but she could not get herself to open it. She put it on her table. She would read it in a week; she needed a week to gather her strength. She would reply, too, she told herself. She would tell him everything. But a week later, the letter still lay there. She placed a book on top of it, then another book, and one day it was swallowed beneath files and books. She would never read it.

TAYLOR WAS EASY, a childish child, the playful one who was sometimes so naïve that Ifemelu guiltily thought him stupid. But Morgan, only three years older, already wore the mourning demeanor of a teenager. She read many grades above her level, was steeped in enrichment classes, and watched adults with a hooded gaze, as though privy to the darkness that lurked in their lives. At first, Ifemelu disliked Morgan, responding to what she thought was Morgan’s own disturbingly full-grown dislike. She was cool, sometimes even cold, to Morgan during her first weeks with them, determined not to indulge this spoiled silken child with a dusting of burgundy freckles on her nose, but she had come, with the passing months, to care for Morgan, an emotion she was careful not to show to Morgan. Instead she was firm and neutral, staring back when Morgan stared. Perhaps it was why Morgan did what Ifemelu asked. She would do it coldly, indifferently, grudgingly, but she would do it. She routinely ignored her mother. And with her father, her brooding watchfulness sharpened into poison. Don would come home and sweep into the den, expecting that everything would stop because of him. And everything did stop, except for whatever Morgan was doing. Kimberly, fluttery and ardent, would ask how his day was, scrambling to please, as though she could not quite believe that he had again come home to her. Taylor would hurl himself into Don’s arms. And Morgan would look up from the TV or a book or a game to watch him, as though she saw through him, while Don pretended not to squirm under her piercing eyes. Sometimes Ifemelu wondered. Was it Don? Was he cheating and had Morgan found out? Cheating was the first thing anyone would think of with a man like Don, with that lubricious aura of his. But he might be satisfied with suggestiveness alone; he would flirt outrageously but not do more, because an affair would require some effort and he was the kind of man who took but did not give.

Ifemelu thought often of that afternoon early in her babysitting: Kimberly was out, Taylor was playing and Morgan reading in the den. Suddenly, Morgan put down her book, calmly walked upstairs and ripped off the wallpaper in her room, pushed down her dresser, yanked off her bedcovers, tore down the curtains, and was on her knees pulling and pulling and pulling at the strongly glued carpet when Ifemelu ran in and stopped her. Morgan was like a small, steel robot, writhing to be let free, with a strength that frightened Ifemelu. Perhaps the child would end up being a serial murderer, like those women on television crime documentaries, standing half-naked on dark roads to lure truck drivers and then strangle them. When finally Ifemelu let go, slowly loosening her grip on a quieted Morgan, Morgan went back downstairs to her book.

Later, Kimberly, in tears, asked her, “Honey, please tell me what’s wrong.”

And Morgan said, “I’m too old for all that pink stuff in my room.”

Now, Kimberly took Morgan twice a week to a therapist in Bala Cynwyd. Both she and Don were more tentative towards her, more cowering under her denouncing stare.

When Morgan won an essay contest at school, Don came home with a present for her. Kimberly anxiously stood at the bottom of the stairs while Don went up to present the gift, wrapped in sparkly paper. He came down moments later.

“She wouldn’t even look at it. She just got up and went into the bathroom and stayed there,” he said. “I left it on the bed.”

“It’s okay, honey, she’ll come around,” Kimberly said, hugging him, rubbing his back.

Later, Kimberly, sotto voce, told Ifemelu, “Morgan’s really hard on him. He tries so hard and she won’t let him in. She just won’t.”

“Morgan doesn’t let anyone in,” Ifemelu said. Don needed to remember that Morgan, and not he, was the child.

“She listens to you,” Kimberly said, a little sadly.

Ifemelu wanted to say, “I don’t give her too many choices,” because she wished Kimberly would not be so sheer in her yieldingness; perhaps Morgan just needed to feel that her mother could push back. Instead she said, “That’s because I’m not her family. She doesn’t love me and so she doesn’t feel all these complicated things for me. I’m just a nuisance at best.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” Kimberly said.

“It’s a phase. It will pass, you’ll see.” She felt protective of Kimberly, she wanted to shield Kimberly.

“The only person she really cares about is my cousin Curt. She adores him. If we have family gatherings she’ll brood unless Curt is there. I’ll see if he can come visit and talk to her.”

LAURA HAD BROUGHT a magazine.

“Look at this, Ifemelu,” she said. “It isn’t Nigeria, but it’s close. I know celebrities can be flighty but she seems to be doing good work.”

Ifemelu and Kimberly looked at the page together: a thin white woman, smiling at the camera, holding a dark-skinned African baby in her arms, and all around her, little dark-skinned African children were spread out like a rug. Kimberly made a sound, a hmmm, as though she was unsure how to feel.

“She’s stunning too,” Laura said.

“Yes, she is,” Ifemelu said. “And she’s just as skinny as the kids, only that her skinniness is by choice and theirs is not by choice.”

A pop of loud laughter burst out from Laura. “You are funny! I love how sassy you are!”

Kimberly did not laugh. Later, alone with Ifemelu, she said, “I’m sorry Laura said that. I’ve never liked that word ‘sassy.’ It’s the kind of word that’s used for certain people and not for others.” Ifemelu shrugged and smiled and changed the subject. She did not understand why Laura looked up so much information about Nigeria, asking her about 419 scams, telling her how much money Nigerians in America sent back home every year. It was an aggressive, unaffectionate interest; strange indeed, to pay so much attention to something you did not like. Perhaps it was really about Kimberly, and Laura was in some distorted way aiming at her sister by saying things that would make Kimberly launch into apologies. It seemed too much work for too little gain, though. At first, Ifemelu thought Kimberly’s apologizing sweet, even if unnecessary, but she had begun to feel a flash of impatience, because Kimberly’s repeated apologies were tinged with self-indulgence, as though she believed that she could, with apologies, smooth all the scalloped surfaces of the world.

A FEW MONTHS INTO her babysitting, Kimberly asked her, “Would you consider living in? The basement is really a one-bedroom apartment with a private entrance. It would be rent-free, of course.”

Ifemelu was already looking for a studio apartment, eager to leave her roommates now that she could afford to, and she did not want to be further enmeshed in the lives of the Turners, yet she considered saying yes, because she heard a plea in Kimberly’s voice. In the end, she decided she could not live with them. When she said no, Kimberly offered her the use of their spare car. “It’ll make it much easier for you to get here after your classes. It’s an old thing. We were going to give it away. I hope it doesn’t stop you on the road,” she said, as if the Honda, only a few years old, its body unmarked, could possibly stop on the road.

“You really shouldn’t trust me to take your car home. What if I don’t come back one day?” Ifemelu said.

Kimberly laughed. “It’s not worth very much.”

“You do have an American license?” Laura asked. “I mean, you can drive legally in this country?”

“Of course she can, Laura,” Kimberly said. “Why would she accept the car if she couldn’t?”

“I’m just checking,” Laura said, as though Kimberly could not be depended upon to ask the necessary tough questions of non-American citizens. Ifemelu watched them, so alike in their looks, and both unhappy people. But Kimberly’s unhappiness was inward, unacknowledged, shielded by her desire for things to be as they should, and also by hope: she believed in other people’s happiness because it meant that she, too, might one day have it. Laura’s unhappiness was different, spiky, she wished that everyone around her were unhappy because she had convinced herself that she would always be.

“Yes, I have an American license,” Ifemelu said, and then she began to talk about the safe driving course she had taken in Brooklyn, before she got her license, and how the instructor, a thin white man with matted hair the color of straw, had cheated. In the dark basement room full of foreigners, the entrance of which was an even darker flight of narrow stairs, the instructor had collected all the cash payments before he showed the safe-driving film on the wall projector. From time to time, he made jokes that nobody understood and chuckled to himself. Ifemelu was a little suspicious of the film: How could a car driving so slowly have caused that amount of damage in an accident, leaving the driver’s neck broken? Afterwards, he gave out the test questions. Ifemelu found them easy, quickly shading in the answers in pencil. A small South Asian man beside her, perhaps fifty years old, kept glancing over at her, his eyes pleading, while she pretended not to understand that he wanted her help. The instructor collected the papers, brought out a clay-colored eraser, and began to wipe out some of the answers and to shade in others. Everybody passed. Many of them shook his hand, said “Thank you, thank you” in a wide range of accents before they shuffled out. Now they could apply for American driver’s licenses. Ifemelu told the story with a false openness, as though it was merely a curiosity for her, and not something she had chosen to goad Laura.

“It was a strange moment for me, because until then I thought nobody in America cheated,” Ifemelu said.

Kimberly said, “Oh my goodness.”

“This happened in Brooklyn?” Laura asked.

“Yes.”

Laura shrugged, as though to say that it would, of course, happen in Brooklyn but not in the America in which she lived.

AT ISSUE WAS an orange. A round, flame-colored orange that Ifemelu had brought with her lunch, peeled and quartered and enclosed in a Ziploc bag. She ate it at the kitchen table, while Taylor sat nearby writing in his homework sheet.

“Would you like some, Taylor?” she asked, and offered him a piece.

“Thanks,” he said. He put it into his mouth. His face crumpled. “It’s bad! It’s got stuff in it!”

“Those are the seeds,” she said, looking at what he had spat into his hand.

“The seeds?”

“Yes, the orange seeds.”

“Oranges don’t have stuff in them.”

“Yes, they do. Throw that in the trash, Taylor. I’m going to put the learning video in for you.”

“Oranges don’t have stuff in them,” he repeated.

All his life, he had eaten oranges without seeds, oranges grown to look perfectly orange and to have faultless skin and no seeds, so at eight years old he did not know that there was such a thing as an orange with seeds. He ran into the den to tell Morgan about it. She looked up from her book, raised a slow, bored hand, and tucked her red hair behind her ear.

“Of course oranges have seeds. Mom just buys the seedless variety. Ifemelu didn’t get the right kind.” She gave Ifemelu one of her accusatory glares.

“The orange is the right one for me, Morgan. I grew up eating oranges with seeds,” Ifemelu said, turning on the video.

“Okay.” Morgan shrugged. With Kimberly she would have said nothing, only glowered.

The doorbell rang. It had to be the carpet cleaner. Kimberly and Don were hosting a cocktail party fundraiser the next day, for a friend of theirs about whom Don had said, “It’s just an ego trip for him running for Congress, he won’t even come close,” and Ifemelu was surprised that he seemed to recognize the ego of others, while blinded in the fog of his own. She went to the door. A burly, red-faced man stood there, carrying cleaning equipment, something slung over his shoulder, something else that looked like a lawn mower propped at his feet.

He stiffened when he saw her. First surprise flitted over his features, then it ossified to hostility.

“You need a carpet cleaned?” he asked, as if he did not care, as if she could change her mind, as if he wanted her to change her mind. She looked at him, a taunt in her eyes, prolonging a moment loaded with assumptions: he thought she was a homeowner, and she was not what he had expected to see in this grand stone house with the white pillars.

“Yes,” she said finally, suddenly tired. “Mrs. Turner told me you were coming.”

It was like a conjurer’s trick, the swift disappearance of his hostility. His face sank into a grin. She, too, was the help. The universe was once again arranged as it should be.

“How are you doing? Know where she wants me to start?” he asked.

“Upstairs,” she said, letting him in, wondering how all that cheeriness could have existed earlier in his body. She would never forget him, bits of dried skin stuck to his chapped, peeling lips, and she would begin the blog post “Sometimes in America, Race Is Class” with the story of his dramatic change, and end with: It didn’t matter to him how much money I had. As far as he was concerned I did not fit as the owner of that stately house because of the way I looked. In America’s public discourse, “Blacks” as a whole are often lumped with “Poor Whites.” Not Poor Blacks and Poor Whites. But Blacks and Poor Whites. A curious thing indeed.

Taylor was excited. “Can I help? Can I help?” he asked the carpet cleaner.

“No thanks, buddy,” the man said. “I got it.”

“I hope he doesn’t start in my room,” Morgan said.

“Why?” Ifemelu asked.

“I just don’t want him to.”

IFEMELU WANTED to tell Kimberly about the carpet cleaner, but Kimberly might become flustered and apologize for what was not her fault as she often, too often, apologized for Laura.

It was discomfiting to observe how Kimberly lurched, keen to do the right thing and not knowing what the right thing was. If she told Kimberly about the carpet cleaner, there was no telling how she would respond — laugh, apologize, snatch up the phone to call the company and complain.

And so, instead, she told Kimberly about Taylor and the orange.

“He really thought seeds meant it was bad? How funny.”

“Morgan of course promptly set him right,” Ifemelu said.

“Oh, she would.”

“When I was a little girl my mother used to tell me that an orange would grow on my head if I swallowed a seed. I had many anxious mornings of going to look in the mirror. At least Taylor won’t have that childhood trauma.”

Kimberly laughed.

“Hello!” It was Laura, coming in through the back door with Athena, a tiny wisp of a child with hair so thin that her pale scalp gaped through. A waif. Perhaps Laura’s blended vegetables and strict diet rules had left the child malnourished.

Laura put a vase on the table. “This will look terrific tomorrow.”

“It’s lovely,” Kimberly said, bending to kiss Athena’s head. “That’s the caterer’s menu. Don thinks the hors d’oeuvre selection is too simple. I’m not sure.”

“He wants you to add more?” Laura said, scanning the menu.

“He just thought it was a little simple, he was very sweet about it.”

In the den, Athena began to cry. Laura went to her and, soon enough, a string of negotiations followed: “Do you want this one, sweetheart? The yellow or the blue or the red? Which do you want?”

Just give her one, Ifemelu thought. To overwhelm a child of four with choices, to lay on her the burden of making a decision, was to deprive her of the bliss of childhood. Adulthood, after all, already loomed, where she would have to make grimmer and grimmer decisions.

“She’s been grumpy today,” Laura said, coming back into the kitchen, Athena’s crying quelled. “I took her to her follow-up from the ear infection and she’s been an absolute bear all day. Oh and I met the most charming Nigerian man today. We get there and it turns out a new doctor has just joined the practice and he’s Nigerian and he came by and said hello to us. He reminded me of you, Ifemelu. I read on the Internet that Nigerians are the most educated immigrant group in this country. Of course, it says nothing about the millions who live on less than a dollar a day back in your country, but when I met the doctor I thought of that article and of you and other privileged Africans who are here in this country.” Laura paused and Ifemelu, as she often did, felt that Laura had more to say but was holding back. It felt strange, to be called privileged. Privileged was people like Kayode DaSilva, whose passport sagged with the weight of visa stamps, who went to London for summer and to Ikoyi Club to swim, who could casually get up and say “We’re going to Frenchies for ice cream.”

“I’ve never been called privileged in my life!” Ifemelu said. “It feels good.”

“I think I’ll switch and have him be Athena’s doctor. He was wonderful, so well-groomed and well-spoken. I haven’t been very satisfied with Dr. Bingham since Dr. Hoffman left, anyway.” Laura picked up the menu again. “In graduate school I knew a woman from Africa who was just like this doctor, I think she was from Uganda. She was wonderful, and she didn’t get along with the African-American woman in our class at all. She didn’t have all those issues.”

“Maybe when the African American’s father was not allowed to vote because he was black, the Ugandan’s father was running for parliament or studying at Oxford,” Ifemelu said.

Laura stared at her, made a mocking confused face. “Wait, did I miss something?”

“I just think it’s a simplistic comparison to make. You need to understand a bit more history,” Ifemelu said.

Laura’s lips sagged. She staggered, collected herself.

“Well, I’ll get my daughter and then go find some history books from the library, if I can figure out what they look like!” Laura said, and marched out.

Ifemelu could almost hear Kimberly’s heart beating wildly.

“I’m sorry,” Ifemelu said.

Kimberly shook her head and murmured, “I know Laura can be challenging,” her eyes on the salad she was mixing.

Ifemelu hurried upstairs to Laura.

“I’m sorry. I was rude just now and I apologize.” But she was sorry only because of Kimberly, the way she had begun to mix the salad as though to reduce it to a pulp.

“It’s fine,” Laura sniffed, smoothing her daughter’s hair, and Ifemelu knew that for a long time afterwards, she would not unwrap from herself the pashmina of the wounded.

APART FROM a stiff “Hi,” Laura did not speak to her at the party the next day. The house filled with the gentle murmur of voices, guests raising wineglasses to their lips. They were similar, all of them, their clothes nice and safe, their sense of humor nice and safe, and, like other upper-middle-class Americans, they used the word “wonderful” too often. “You’ll come and help out with the party, won’t you, please?” Kimberly had asked Ifemelu, as she always did of their gatherings. Ifemelu was not sure how she helped out, since the events were catered and the children went to bed early, but she sensed, beneath the lightness of Kimberly’s invitation, something close to a need. In some small way that she did not entirely understand, her presence seemed to steady Kimberly. If Kimberly wanted her there, then she would be there.

“This is Ifemelu, our babysitter and my friend,” Kimberly introduced her to guests.

“You’re so beautiful,” a man told her, smiling, his teeth jarringly white. “African women are gorgeous, especially Ethiopians.”

A couple spoke about their safari in Tanzania. “We had a wonderful tour guide and we’re now paying for his first daughter’s education.” Two women spoke about their donations to a wonderful charity in Malawi that built wells, a wonderful orphanage in Botswana, a wonderful microfinance cooperative in Kenya. Ifemelu gazed at them. There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have. To take “charity” for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know — perhaps it came from having had yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow. She envied them this.

A petite woman in a severe pink jacket said, “I’m chair of the board of a charity in Ghana. We work with rural women. We’re always interested in African staff, we don’t want to be the NGO that won’t use local labor. So if you’re ever looking for a job after graduation and want to go back and work in Africa, give me a call.”

“Thank you.” Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy. She went out to the deck in search of fresh air. Over the hedge, she could see the Jamaican nanny of the neighbors’ children, walking down the driveway, the one who always evaded Ifemelu’s eyes, and did not like to say hello. Then she noticed a movement on the other end of the deck. It was Don. There was something furtive about him and she felt rather than saw that he had just ended a cell phone conversation.

“Great party,” he told her. “It’s just an excuse for Kim and me to have friends over. Roger is totally out of his league and I’ve told him that, no chance in hell …”

Don kept talking, his voice too larded in bonhomie, her dislike clawing at her throat. She and Don did not talk like this. It was too much information, too much talk. She wanted to tell him that she had heard nothing of his phone conversation, if there had been anything at all to hear, that she knew nothing and that she did not want to know.

“They must be wondering where you are,” she said.

“Yes, we must go back,” he said, as though they had come out together. Back inside, Ifemelu saw Kimberly standing in the middle of the den, slightly apart from her circle of friends; she had been looking around for Don and when she saw him, her eyes rested on him, and her face became soft, and shorn of worry.

IFEMELU LEFT the party early; she wanted to speak to Dike before his bedtime. Aunty Uju picked up the phone.

“Has Dike slept?” Ifemelu asked.

“He’s brushing his teeth,” she said, and then in a lower voice, she added, “He was asking me about his name again.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The same thing. You know he never asked me this kind of thing before we moved here.”

“Maybe it’s having Bartholomew in the picture, and the new environment. He’s used to having you to himself.”

“This time he didn’t ask why he has my name, he asked if he has my name because his father did not love him.”

“Aunty, maybe it’s time to tell him you were not a second wife,” Ifemelu said.

“I was practically a second wife.” Aunty Uju sounded defiant, even petulant, clenching her fist tightly around her own story. She had told Dike that his father was in the military government, that she was his second wife, and that they had given him her surname to protect him, because some people in the government, not his father, had done some bad things.

“Okay, here’s Dike,” Aunty Uju said, in a normal tone.

“Hey, Coz! You should have seen my soccer game today!” Dike said.

“How come you score all the great goals when I’m not there? Are these goals in your dreams?” Ifemelu asked.

He laughed. He still laughed easily, his sense of humor whole, but since the move to Massachusetts, he was no longer transparent. Something had filmed itself around him, making him difficult to read, his head perennially bent towards his Game Boy, looking up once in a while to view his mother, and the world, with a weariness too heavy for a child. His grades were falling. Aunty Uju threatened him more often. The last time Ifemelu visited, Aunty Uju told him, “I will send you back to Nigeria if you do that again!” speaking Igbo as she did to him only when she was angry, and Ifemelu worried that it would become for him the language of strife.

Aunty Uju, too, had changed. At first, she had sounded curious, expectant about her new life. “This place is so white,” she said. “Do you know I went to the drugstore to quickly buy lipstick, because the mall is thirty minutes away, and all the shades were too pale! But they can’t carry what they can’t sell! At least this place is quiet and restful, and I feel safe drinking the tap water, something I will never even try in Brooklyn.”

Slowly, over the months, her tone soured.

“Dike’s teacher said he is aggressive,” she told Ifemelu one day, after she had been called to come in and see the principal. “Aggressive, of all things. She wants him to go to what they call special ed, where they will put him in a class alone and bring somebody who is trained to deal with mental children to teach him. I told the woman that it is not my son, it is her father who is aggressive. Look at him, just because he looks different, when he does what other little boys do, it becomes aggression. Then the principal told me, ‘Dike is just like one of us, we don’t see him as different at all.’ What kind of pretending is that? I told him to look at my son. There are only two of them in the whole school. The other child is a half-caste, and so fair that if you look from afar you will not even know that he is black. My son sticks out, so how can you tell me that you don’t see any difference? I refused completely that they should put him in a special class. He is brighter than all of them combined. They want to start now to mark him. Kemi warned me about this. She said they tried to do it to her son in Indiana.”

Later, Aunty Uju’s complaints turned to her residency program, how slow and small it was, medical records still handwritten and kept in dusty files, and then when she finished her residency, she complained about the patients who thought they were doing her a favor by seeing her. She hardly mentioned Bartholomew; it was as though she lived only with Dike in the Massachusetts house by the lake.

CHAPTER 17

Ifemelu decided to stop faking an American accent on a sunlit day in July, the same day she met Blaine. It was convincing, the accent. She had perfected, from careful watching of friends and newscasters, the blurring of the t, the creamy roll of the r, the sentences starting with “so,” and the sliding response of “oh really,” but the accent creaked with consciousness, it was an act of will. It took an effort, the twisting of lip, the curling of tongue. If she were in a panic, or terrified, or jerked awake during a fire, she would not remember how to produce those American sounds. And so she resolved to stop, on that summer day, the weekend of Dike’s birthday. Her decision was prompted by a telemarketer’s call. She was in her apartment on Spring Garden Street, the first that was truly hers in America, hers alone, a studio with a leaky faucet and a noisy heater. In the weeks since she moved in, she had felt light-footed, cloaked in well-being, because she opened the fridge knowing that everything in it was hers and she cleaned the bathtub knowing she would not find tufts of disconcertingly foreign roommate-hair in the drain. “Officially two blocks away from the real hood” was how the apartment super, Jamal, had put it, when he told her to expect to hear gunshots from time to time, but although she had opened her window every evening, straining and listening, all she heard were the sounds of late summer, music from passing cars, the high-spirited laughter of playing children, the shouting of their mothers.

On that July morning, her weekend bag already packed for Massachusetts, she was making scrambled eggs when the phone rang. The caller ID showed “unknown” and she thought it might be a call from her parents in Nigeria. But it was a telemarketer, a young, male American who was offering better long-distance and international phone rates. She always hung up on telemarketers, but there was something about his voice that made her turn down the stove and hold on to the receiver, something poignantly young, untried, untested, the slightest of tremors, an aggressive customer-service friendliness that was not aggressive at all; it was as though he was saying what he had been trained to say but was mortally worried about offending her.

He asked how she was, how the weather was in her city, and told her it was pretty hot in Phoenix. Perhaps it was his first day on the job, his telephone piece poking uncomfortably in his ear while he half hoped that the people he was calling would not be home to pick up. Because she felt strangely sorry for him, she asked whether he had rates better than fifty-seven cents a minute to Nigeria.

“Hold on while I look up Nigeria,” he said, and she went back to stirring her eggs.

He came back and said his rates were the same, but wasn’t there another country that she called? Mexico? Canada?

“Well, I call London sometimes,” she said. Ginika was there for the summer.

“Okay, hold on while I look up France,” he said.

She burst out laughing.

“Something funny over there?” he asked.

She laughed harder. She had opened her mouth to tell him, bluntly, that what was funny was that he was selling international telephone rates and did not know where London was, but something held her back, an image of him, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, overweight, pink-faced, awkward around girls, keen on video games, and with no knowledge of the roiling contradictions that were the world. So she said, “There’s a hilarious old comedy on TV.”

“Oh, really?” he said, and he laughed too. It broke her heart, his greenness, and when he came back on to tell her the France rates, she thanked him and said they were better than the rates she already had and that she would think about switching carriers.

“When is a good time to call you back? If that’s okay …,” he said. She wondered whether they were paid on commission. Would his paycheck be bigger if she did switch her phone company? Because she would, as long as it cost her nothing.

“Evenings,” she said.

“May I ask who I’m talking to?”

“My name is Ifemelu.”

He repeated her name with exaggerated care. “Is it a French name?”

“No. Nigerian.”

“That where your family came from?”

“Yes.” She scooped the eggs onto a plate. “I grew up there.”

“Oh, really? How long have you been in the U.S.?”

“Three years.”

“Wow. Cool. You sound totally American.”

“Thank you.”

Only after she hung up did she begin to feel the stain of a burgeoning shame spreading all over her, for thanking him, for crafting his words “You sound American” into a garland that she hung around her own neck. Why was it a compliment, an accomplishment, to sound American? She had won; Cristina Tomas, pallid-faced Cristina Tomas under whose gaze she had shrunk like a small, defeated animal, would speak to her normally now. She had won, indeed, but her triumph was full of air. Her fleeting victory had left in its wake a vast, echoing space, because she had taken on, for too long, a pitch of voice and a way of being that was not hers. And so she finished eating her eggs and resolved to stop faking the American accent. She first spoke without the American accent that afternoon at Thirtieth Street Station, leaning towards the woman behind the Amtrak counter.

“Could I have a round-trip to Haverhill, please? Returning Sunday afternoon. I have a Student Advantage card,” she said, and felt a rush of pleasure from giving the t its full due in “advantage,” from not rolling her r in “Haverhill.” This was truly her; this was the voice with which she would speak if she were woken up from a deep sleep during an earthquake. Still, she resolved that if the Amtrak woman responded to her accent by speaking too slowly as though to an idiot, then she would put on her Mr. Agbo Voice, the mannered, overcareful pronunciations she had learned during debate meetings in secondary school when the bearded Mr. Agbo, tugging at his frayed tie, played BBC recordings on his cassette player and then made all the students pronounce words over and over until he beamed and cried “Correct!” She would also affect, with the Mr. Agbo Voice, a slight raising of her eyebrows in what she imagined was a haughty foreigner pose. But there was no need to do any of these because the Amtrak woman spoke normally. “Can I see an ID, miss?”

And so she did not use her Mr. Agbo Voice until she met Blaine.

The train was crowded. The seat next to Blaine was the only empty one in that car, as far as she could see, and the newspaper and bottle of juice placed on it seemed to be his. She stopped, gesturing towards the seat, but he kept his gaze levelly ahead. Behind her, a woman was pulling along a heavy suitcase and the conductor was announcing that all personal belongings had to be moved from free seats and Blaine saw her standing there — how could he possibly not see her? — and still he did nothing. So her Mr. Agbo Voice emerged. “Excuse me. Are these yours? Could you possibly move them?”

She placed her bag on the overhead rack and settled onto the seat, stiffly, holding her magazine, her body aligned towards the aisle and away from him. The train had begun to move when he said, “I’m really sorry I didn’t see you standing there.”

His apologizing surprised her, his expression so earnest and sincere that it seemed as though he had done something more offensive. “It’s okay,” she said, and smiled.

“How are you?” he asked.

She had learned to say “Good-how-are-you?” in that singsong American way, but now she said, “I’m well, thank you.”

“My name’s Blaine,” he said, and extended his hand.

He looked tall. A man with skin the color of gingerbread and the kind of lean, proportioned body that was perfect for a uniform, any uniform. She knew right away that he was African-American, not Caribbean, not African, not a child of immigrants from either place. She had not always been able to tell. Once she had asked a taxi driver, “So where are you from?” in a knowing, familiar tone, certain that he was from Ghana, and he said “Detroit” with a shrug. But the longer she spent in America, the better she had become at distinguishing, sometimes from looks and gait, but mostly from bearing and demeanor, that fine-grained mark that culture stamps on people. She felt confident about Blaine: he was a descendant of the black men and women who had been in America for hundreds of years.

“I’m Ifemelu, it’s nice to meet you,” she said.

“Are you Nigerian?”

“I am, yes.”

“Bourgie Nigerian,” he said, and smiled. There was a surprising and immediate intimacy to his teasing her, calling her privileged.

“Just as bourgie as you,” she said. They were on firm flirting territory now. She looked him over quietly, his light-colored khakis and navy shirt, the kind of outfit that was selected with the right amount of thought; a man who looked at himself in the mirror but did not look for too long. He knew about Nigerians, he told her, he was an assistant professor at Yale, and although his interest was mostly in southern Africa, how could he not know about Nigerians when they were everywhere?

“What is it, one in every five Africans is Nigerian?” he asked, still smiling. There was something both ironic and gentle about him. It was as if he believed that they shared a series of intrinsic jokes that did not need to be verbalized.

“Yes, we Nigerians get around. We have to. There are too many of us and not enough space,” she said, and it struck her how close to each other they were, separated only by the single armrest. He spoke the kind of American English that she had just given up, the kind that made race pollsters on the telephone assume that you were white and educated.

“So is southern Africa your discipline?” she asked.

“No. Comparative politics. You can’t do just Africa in political science graduate programs in this country. You can compare Africa to Poland or Israel but focusing on Africa itself? They don’t let you do that.”

His use of “they” suggested an “us,” which would be the both of them. His nails were clean. He was not wearing a wedding band. She began to imagine a relationship, both of them waking up in the winter, cuddling in the stark whiteness of the morning light, drinking English Breakfast tea; she hoped he was one of those Americans who liked tea. His juice, the bottle stuffed in the pouch in front of him, was organic pomegranate. A plain brown bottle with a plain brown label, both stylish and salutary. No chemicals in the juice and no ink wasted on decorative labels. Where had he bought it? It was not the sort of thing that was sold at the train station. Perhaps he was vegan and distrusted large corporations and shopped only at farmers markets and brought his own organic juice from home. She had little patience for Ginika’s friends, most of whom were like that, their righteousness made her feel both irritated and lacking, but she was prepared to forgive Blaine’s pieties. He was holding a hardcover library book whose title she could not see and had stuffed his New York Times next to the juice bottle. When he glanced at her magazine, she wished she had brought out the Esiaba Irobi book of poems that she planned to read on the train back. He would think that she read only shallow fashion magazines. She felt the sudden and unreasonable urge to tell him how much she loved the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, to redeem herself. First, she shielded, with her palm, the bright red lipstick on the cover model’s face. Then, she reached forward and pushed the magazine into the pouch in front of her and said, with a slight sniff, that it was absurd how women’s magazines forced images of small-boned, small-breasted white women on the rest of the multi-boned, multi-ethnic world of women to emulate.

“But I keep reading them,” she said. “It’s like smoking, it’s bad for you but you do it anyway.”

“Multi-boned and multi-ethnic,” he said, amused, his eyes warm with unabashed interest; it charmed her that he was not the kind of man who, when he was interested in a woman, cultivated a certain cool, pretended indifference.

“Are you a grad student?” he asked.

“I’m a junior at Wellson.”

Did she imagine it or did his face fall, in disappointment, in surprise? “Really? You seem more mature.”

“I am. I’d done some college in Nigeria before I left to come here.”

She shifted on her seat, determined to get back on firm flirting ground. “You, on the other hand, look too young to be a professor. Your students must be confused about who the professor is.”

“I think they’re probably confused about a lot of stuff. This is my second year of teaching.” He paused. “Are you thinking of graduate school?”

“Yes, but I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialectics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking academese instead of English and they don’t really know what’s happening in the real world.”

“That’s a pretty strong opinion.”

“I don’t know how to have any other kind.”

He laughed, and it pleased her to have made him laugh.

“But I hear you,” he said. “My research interests include social movements, the political economy of dictatorships, American voting rights and representation, race and ethnicity in politics, and campaign finance. That’s my classic spiel. Much of which is bullshit anyway. I teach my classes and I wonder if any of it matters to the kids.”

“Oh, I’m sure it does. I’d love to take one of your classes.” She had spoken too eagerly. It had not come out as she wanted. She had cast herself, without meaning to, in the role of a potential student. He seemed keen to change the direction of the conversation; perhaps he did not want to be her teacher either. He told her he was going back to New Haven after visiting friends in Washington, D.C. “So where are you headed?” he asked.

“Warrington. A bit of a drive from Boston. My aunt lives there.”

“So do you ever come up to Connecticut?”

“Not much. I’ve never been to New Haven. But I’ve gone to the malls in Stamford and Clinton.”

“Oh, yes, malls.” His lips turned down slightly at the sides.

“You don’t like malls?”

“Apart from being soulless and bland? They’re perfectly fine.”

She had never understood the quarrel with malls, with the notion of finding exactly the same shops in all of them; she found malls quite comforting in their sameness. And with his carefully chosen clothes, surely he had to shop somewhere?

“So do you grow your own cotton and make your own clothes?” she asked.

He laughed, and she laughed too. She imagined both of them, hand in hand, going to the mall in Stamford, she teasing him, reminding him of this conversation on the day they met, and raising her face to kiss him. It was not in her nature to talk to strangers on public transportation — she would do it more often when she started her blog a few years later — but she talked and talked, perhaps because of the newness of her own voice. The more they talked, the more she told herself that this was no coincidence; there was a significance to her meeting this man on the day that she returned her voice to herself. She told him, with the suppressed laughter of a person impatient for the punch line of her own joke, about the telemarketer who thought that London was in France. He did not laugh, but instead shook his head.

“They don’t train these telemarketer folks well at all. I bet he’s a temp with no health insurance and no benefits.”

“Yes,” she said, chastened. “I felt kind of sorry for him.”

“So my department moved buildings a few weeks ago. Yale hired professional movers and told them to make sure to put everything from each person’s old office in the exact same spot in the new office. And they did. All my books were shelved in the right position. But you know what I noticed later? Many of the books had their spines upside down.” He was looking at her, as though to experience a shared revelation, and for a blank moment, she was not sure what the story was about.

“Oh. The movers couldn’t read,” she said finally.

He nodded. “There was just something about it that totally killed me …” He let his voice trail away.

She began to imagine what he would be like in bed: he would be a kind, attentive lover for whom emotional fulfillment was just as important as ejaculation, he would not judge her slack flesh, he would wake up even-tempered every morning. She hastily looked away, afraid that he might have read her mind, so startlingly clear were the images there.

“Would you like a beer?” he asked.

“A beer?”

“Yes. The café car serves beers. You want one? I’m going to get one.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

She stood up, self-consciously, to let him pass and hoped she would smell something on him, but she didn’t. He did not wear cologne. Perhaps he had boycotted cologne because the makers of cologne did not treat their employees well. She watched him walk up the aisle, knowing that he knew that she was watching him. The beer offer had pleased her. She had worried that all he drank was organic pomegranate juice, but now the thought of organic pomegranate juice was pleasant if he drank beer as well. When he came back with the beers and plastic cups, he poured hers with a flourish that, to her, was thick with romance. She had never liked beer. Growing up, it had been male alcohol, gruff and inelegant. Now, sitting next to Blaine, laughing as he told her about the first time he got truly drunk in his freshman year, she realized that she could like beer. The grainy fullness of beer.

He talked about his undergraduate years: the stupidity of eating a semen sandwich during his fraternity initiation, constantly being called Michael Jordan in China the summer of his junior year when he traveled through Asia, his mother’s death from cancer the week after he graduated.

“A semen sandwich?”

“They masturbated into a piece of pita bread and you had to take a bite, but you didn’t have to swallow.”

“Oh God.”

“Well, hopefully you do stupid things when you’re young so you don’t do them when you’re older,” he said.

When the conductor announced that the next stop was New Haven, Ifemelu felt a stab of loss. She tore out a page from her magazine and wrote her phone number. “Do you have a card?” she asked.

He touched his pockets. “I don’t have any with me.”

There was silence while he gathered his things. Then the screeching of the train brakes. She sensed, and hoped she was wrong, that he did not want to give her his number.

“Well, will you write your number then, if you remember it?” she asked. A lame joke. The beer had pushed those words out of her mouth.

He wrote his number on her magazine. “You take care,” he said. He touched her shoulder lightly as he left and there was something in his eyes, something both tender and sad, that made her tell herself that she had been wrong to sense reluctance from him. He already missed her. She moved to his seat, reveling in the warmth his body had left in its wake, and watched through the window as he walked along the platform.

When she arrived at Aunty Uju’s house, the first thing she wanted to do was call him. But she thought it was best to wait a few hours. After an hour, she said fuck it and called. He did not answer. She left a message. She called back later. No answer. She called and called and called. No answer. She called at midnight. She did not leave messages. The whole weekend she called and called and he never picked up the phone.

WARRINGTON WAS a somnolent town, a town contented with itself; winding roads cut through thick woods — even the main road, which the residents did not want widened for fear that it would bring in foreigners from the city, was winding and narrow — sleepy homes were shielded by trees, and on weekends the blue lake was stippled with boats. From the dining room window of Aunty Uju’s house, the lake shimmered, a blueness so tranquil that it held the gaze. Ifemelu stood by the window while Aunty Uju sat at the table drinking orange juice and airing her grievances like jewels. It had become a routine of Ifemelu’s visits: Aunty Uju collected all her dissatisfactions in a silk purse, nursing them, polishing them, and then on the Saturday of Ifemelu’s visit, while Bartholomew was out and Dike upstairs, she would spill them out on the table, and turn each one this way and that, to catch the light.

Sometimes she told the same story twice. How she had gone to the public library the other day, had forgotten to bring out the unreturned book from her handbag, and the guard told her, “You people never do anything right.” How she walked into an examining room and a patient asked “Is the doctor coming?” and when she said she was the doctor the patient’s face changed to fired clay.

“Do you know, that afternoon she called to transfer her file to another doctor’s office! Can you imagine?”

“What does Bartholomew think about all this?” Ifemelu gestured to take in the room, the view of the lake, the town.

“That one is too busy chasing business. He leaves early and comes home late every day. Sometimes Dike doesn’t even set eyes on him for a whole week.”

“I’m surprised you’re still here, Aunty,” Ifemelu said quietly, and by “here” they both knew that she did not merely mean Warrington.

“I want another child. We’ve been trying.” Aunty Uju came and stood beside her, by the window.

There was the clatter of footsteps on the wooden stairs, and Dike came into the kitchen, in a faded T-shirt and shorts, holding his Game Boy. Each time Ifemelu saw him, he seemed to her to have grown taller and to have become more reserved.

“Are you wearing that shirt to camp?” Aunty Uju asked him.

“Yes, Mom,” he said, his eyes on the flickering screen in his hand.

Aunty Uju got up to check the oven. She had agreed this morning, his first of summer camp, to make him chicken nuggets for breakfast.

“Coz, we’re still playing soccer later, right?” Dike asked.

“Yes,” Ifemelu said. She took a chicken nugget from his plate and put it in her mouth. “Chicken nuggets for breakfast is strange enough, but is this chicken or just plastic?”

“Spicy plastic,” he said.

She walked him to the bus and watched him get on, the pale faces of the other children at the window, the bus driver waving to her too cheerfully. She was standing there waiting when the bus brought him back that afternoon. There was a guardedness on his face, something close to sadness.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, her arm around his shoulder.

“Nothing,” he said. “Can we play soccer now?”

“After you tell me what happened.”

“Nothing happened.”

“I think you need some sugar. You’ll probably have too much tomorrow, with your birthday cake. But let’s get a cookie.”

“Do you bribe the kids you babysit with sugar? Man, they’re lucky.”

She laughed. She brought out the packet of Oreos from the fridge.

“Do you play soccer with the kids you babysit?” he asked.

“No,” she said, even though she played once in a while with Taylor, kicking the ball back and forth in their oversized, wooded backyard. Sometimes, when Dike asked her about the children she cared for, she indulged his childish interest, telling him about their toys and their lives, but she was careful not to make them seem important to her.

“So how was camp?”

“Good.” A pause. “My group leader, Haley? She gave sunscreen to everyone but she wouldn’t give me any. She said I didn’t need it.”

She looked at his face, which was almost expressionless, eerily so. She did not know what to say.

“She thought that because you’re dark you don’t need sunscreen. But you do. Many people don’t know that dark people also need sunscreen. I’ll get you some, don’t worry.” She was speaking too fast, not sure that she was saying the right thing, or what the right thing to say was, and worried because this had upset him enough that she had seen it on his face.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It was kind of funny. My friend Danny was laughing about it.”

“Why did your friend think it was funny?”

“Because it was!”

“You wanted her to give you the sunscreen, too, right?”

“I guess so,” he said with a shrug. “I just want to be regular.”

She hugged him. Later, she went to the store and bought him a big bottle of sunscreen, and the next time she visited, she saw it lying on his dresser, forgotten and unused.

Understanding America for the Non-American Black: American Tribalism

In America, tribalism is alive and well. There are four kinds — class, ideology, region, and race. First, class. Pretty easy. Rich folk and poor folk.

Second, ideology. Liberals and conservatives. They don’t merely disagree on political issues, each side believes the other is evil. Intermarriage is discouraged and on the rare occasion that it happens, is considered remarkable. Third, region. The North and the South. The two sides fought a civil war and tough stains from that war remain. The North looks down on the South while the South resents the North. Finally, race. There’s a ladder of racial hierarchy in America. White is always on top, specifically White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, otherwise known as WASP, and American Black is always on the bottom, and what’s in the middle depends on time and place. (Or as that marvelous rhyme goes: if you’re white, you’re all right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, get back!) Americans assume that everyone will get their tribalism. But it takes a while to figure it all out. So in undergrad, we had a visiting speaker and a classmate whispers to another, “Oh my God, he looks so Jewish,” with a shudder, an actual shudder. Like Jewish was a bad thing. I didn’t get it. As far as I could see, the man was white, not much different from the classmate herself. Jewish to me was something vague, something biblical. But I learned quickly. You see, in America’s ladder of races, Jewish is white but also some rungs below white. A bit confusing, because I knew this straw-haired, freckled girl who said she was Jewish. How can Americans tell who is Jewish? How did the classmate know the guy was Jewish? I read somewhere how American colleges used to ask applicants for their mother’s surnames, to make sure they weren’t Jewish because they wouldn’t admit Jewish people. So maybe that’s how to tell? From people’s names? The longer you are here, the more you start to get it.

CHAPTER 18

Manama’s new customer was wearing jeans shorts, the denim glued to her backside, and sneakers the same bright pink shade as her top. Large hoop earrings grazed her face. She stood in front of the mirror, describing the kind of cornrows she wanted.

“Like a zigzag with a parting at the side right here, but you don’t add the hair at the beginning, you add it when you get to the ponytail,” she said, speaking slowly, overenunciating. “You understand me?” she added, already convinced, it seemed, that Mariama did not.

“I understand,” Mariama said quietly. “You want to see a photo? I have that style in my album.”

The album was flipped through and, finally, the customer was satisfied and seated, frayed plastic hoisted around her neck, her chair height adjusted, and Mariama all the time smiling a smile full of things restrained.

“This other braider I went to the last time,” the customer said. “She was African, too, and she wanted to burn my damned hair! She brought out this lighter and I’m going, Shontay White, don’t let that woman bring that thing close to your hair. So I ask her, What’s that for? She says, I want to clean your braids, and I go, What? Then she tries to show me, she tries to run the lighter over one braid and I went all crazy on her.”

Mariama shook her head. “Oh, that’s bad. Burning is not good. We don’t do that.”

A customer came in, her hair covered in a bright yellow headwrap.

“Hi,” she said. “I’d like to get braids.”

“What kind of braids you want?” Mariama asked.

“Just regular box braids, medium size.”

“You want it long?” Mariama asked.

“Not too long, maybe shoulder length?”

“Okay. Please sit down. She will do it for you,” Mariama said, gesturing to Halima, who was sitting at the back, her eyes on the television. Halima stood up and stretched, for a little too long, as though to register her reluctance.

The woman sat down and gestured to the pile of DVDs. “You sell Nigerian films?” she asked Mariama.

“I used to but my supplier went out of business. You want to buy?”

“No. You just seem to have a lot of them.”

“Some of them are real nice,” Mariama said.

“I can’t watch that stuff. I guess I’m biased. In my country, South Africa, Nigerians are known for stealing credit cards and doing drugs and all kinds of crazy stuff. I guess the films are kind of like that too.”

“You’re from South Africa? You don’t have accent!” Mariama exclaimed.

The woman shrugged. “I’ve been here a long time. It doesn’t make much of a difference.”

“No,” Halima said, suddenly animated, standing behind the woman. “When I come here with my son they beat him in school because of African accent. In Newark. If you see my son face? Purple like onion. They beat, beat, beat him. Black boys beat him like this. Now accent go and no problems.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the woman said.

“Thank you.” Halima smiled, enamored of the woman because of this extraordinary feat, an American accent. “Yes, Nigeria very corrupt. Worst corrupt country in Africa. Me, I watch the film but no, I don’t go to Nigeria!” She half waved her palm in the air.

“I cannot marry a Nigerian and I won’t let anybody in my family marry a Nigerian,” Mariama said, and darted Ifemelu an apologetic glance. “Not all but many of them do bad things. Even killing for money.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” the customer said, in a halfheartedly moderate tone.

Aisha looked on, sly and quiet. Later, she whispered to Ifemelu, her expression suspicious, “You here fifteen years, but you don’t have American accent. Why?”

Ifemelu ignored her and, once again, opened Jean Toomer’s Cane. She stared at the words and wished suddenly that she could turn back time and postpone this move back home. Perhaps she had been hasty. She should not have sold her condo. She should have accepted Letterly magazine’s offer to buy her blog and keep her on as a paid blogger. What if she got back to Lagos and realized what a mistake it was to move back? Even the thought that she could always return to America did not comfort her as much as she wished it to.

The film had ended, and in the new noiselessness of the room, Mariama’s customer said, “This one’s rough,” touching one of the thin cornrows that zigzagged over her scalp, her voice louder than it needed to be.

“No problem. I will do it again,” Mariama said. She was agreeable, and smooth-tongued, but Ifemelu could tell that she thought her customer was a troublemaker, and there was nothing wrong with the cornrow, but this was a part of her new American self, this fervor of customer service, this shiny falseness of surfaces, and she had accepted it, embraced it. When the customer left, she might shrug out of that self and say something to Halima and to Aisha about Americans, how spoiled and childish and entitled they were, but when the next customer came, she would become, again, a faultless version of her American self.

Her customer said, “It’s cute,” as she paid Mariama, and shortly after she left, a young white woman came in, soft-bodied and tanned, her hair held back in a loose ponytail.

“Hi!” she said.

Mariama said “Hi,” and then waited, wiping her hands over and over the front of her shorts.

“I wanted to get my hair braided? You can braid my hair, right?”

Mariama smiled an overly eager smile. “Yes. We do every kind of hair. Do you want braids or cornrows?” She was furiously cleaning the chair now. “Please sit.”

The woman sat down and said she wanted cornrows. “Kind of like Bo Derek in the movie? You know that movie 10?”

“Yes, I know,” Mariama said. Ifemelu doubted that she did.

“I’m Kelsey,” the woman announced as though to the whole room. She was aggressively friendly. She asked where Mariama was from, how long she had been in America, if she had children, how her business was doing.

“Business is up and down but we try,” Mariama said.

“But you couldn’t even have this business back in your country, right? Isn’t it wonderful that you get to come to the U.S. and now your kids can have a better life?”

Mariama looked surprised. “Yes.”

“Are women allowed to vote in your country?” Kelsey asked.

A longer pause from Mariama. “Yes.”

“What are you reading?” Kelsey turned to Ifemelu.

Ifemelu showed her the cover of the novel. She did not want to start a conversation. Especially not with Kelsey. She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.

“Is it good?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a novel, right? What’s it about?”

Why did people ask “What is it about?” as if a novel had to be about only one thing. Ifemelu disliked the question; she would have disliked it even if she did not feel, in addition to her depressed uncertainty, the beginning of a headache. “It may not be the kind of book you would like if you have particular tastes. He mixes prose and verse.”

“You have a great accent. Where are you from?”

“Nigeria.”

“Oh. Cool.” Kelsey had slender fingers; they would be perfect for advertising rings. “I’m going to Africa in the fall. Congo and Kenya and I’m going to try and see Tanzania too.”

“That’s nice.”

“I’ve been reading books to get ready. Everybody recommended Things Fall Apart, which I read in high school. It’s very good but sort of quaint, right? I mean like it didn’t help me understand modern Africa. I’ve just read this great book, A Bend in the River. It made me truly understand how modern Africa works.”

Ifemelu made a sound, halfway between a snort and a hum, but said nothing.

“It’s just so honest, the most honest book I’ve read about Africa,” Kelsey said.

Ifemelu shifted. Kelsey’s knowing tone grated. Her headache was getting worse. She did not think the novel was about Africa at all. It was about Europe, or the longing for Europe, about the battered self-image of an Indian man born in Africa, who felt so wounded, so diminished, by not having been born European, a member of a race which he had elevated for their ability to create, that he turned his imagined personal insufficiencies into an impatient contempt for Africa; in his knowing haughty attitude to the African, he could become, even if only fleetingly, a European. She leaned back on her seat and said this in measured tones. Kelsey looked startled; she had not expected a minilecture. Then, she said kindly, “Oh, well, I see why you would read the novel like that.”

“And I see why you would read it like you did,” Ifemelu said.

Kelsey raised her eyebrows, as though Ifemelu was one of those slightly unbalanced people who were best avoided. Ifemelu closed her eyes. She had the sensation of clouds gathering over her head. She felt faint. Perhaps it was the heat. She had ended a relationship in which she was not unhappy, closed a blog she enjoyed, and now she was chasing something she could not articulate clearly, even to herself. She could have blogged about Kelsey, too, this girl who somehow believed that she was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while other people read emotionally.

“You want to use hair?” Mariama asked Kelsey.

“Hair?”

Maraima held up a pack of the attachments in a see-through plastic wrapping. Kelsey’s eyes widened, and she glanced quickly around, at the pack from which Aisha took small sections for each braid, at the pack that Halima was only just unwrapping.

“Oh my God. So that’s how it’s done. I used to think African-American women with braided hair had such full hair!”

“No, we use attachments,” Mariama said, smiling.

“Maybe next time. I think I’ll just do my own hair today,” Kelsey said.

Her hair did not take long, seven cornrows, the too-fine hair already slackening in the plaits. “It’s great!” she said afterwards.

“Thank you,” Mariama said. “Please come back again. I can do another style for you next time.”

“Great!”

Ifemelu watched Mariama in the mirror, thinking of her own new American selves. It was with Curt that she had first looked in the mirror and, with a flush of accomplishment, seen someone else.

CURT LIKED to say that it was love at first laugh. Whenever people asked how they met, even people they hardly knew, he would tell the story of how Kimberly had introduced them, he the cousin visiting from Maryland, she the Nigerian babysitter whom Kimberly talked so much about, and how taken he was by her deep voice, by the braid that had escaped from her rubber band. But it was when Taylor dashed into the den, wearing a blue cape and underwear, shouting, “I am Captain Underpants!” and she threw back her head and laughed, that he had fallen in love. Her laugh was so vibrant, shoulders shaking, chest heaving; it was the laugh of a woman who, when she laughed, really laughed. Sometimes when they were alone and she laughed, he would say teasingly, “That’s what got me. And you know what I thought? If she laughs like that, I wonder how she does other things.” He told her, too, that she had known he was smitten — how could she not know? — but pretended not to because she didn’t want a white man. In truth, she did not notice his interest. She had always been able to sense the desire of men, but not Curt’s, not at first. She still thought of Blaine, saw him walking along the platform at the New Haven train station, an apparition that filled her with a doomed yearning. She had not merely been attracted to Blaine, she had been arrested by Blaine, and in her mind he had become the perfect American partner that she would never have. Still, she had had other crushes since then, minor compared to that strike on the train, and had only just emerged from a crush on Abe in her ethics class, Abe who was white, Abe who liked her well enough, who thought her smart and funny, even attractive, but who did not see her as female. She was curious about Abe, interested in Abe, but all the flirting she did was, to him, merely niceness: Abe would hook her up with his black friend, if he had a black friend. She was invisible to Abe. This crushed her crush, and perhaps also made her overlook Curt. Until one afternoon when she was playing catch with Taylor, who threw the ball high, too high, and it fell into the thicket near the neighbor’s cherry tree.

“I think we’ve lost that one,” Ifemelu said. The week before, a Frisbee had disappeared in there. Curt rose from the patio chair (he had been watching her every move, he told her later) and bounded into the bush, almost diving, as though into a pool, and emerged with the yellow ball.

“Yay! Uncle Curt!” Taylor said. But Curt did not give Taylor the ball; instead he held it out to Ifemelu. She saw in his eyes what he wanted her to see. She smiled and said, “Thank you.” Later in the kitchen, after she had put in a video for Taylor and was drinking a glass of water, he said, “This is where I ask you to dinner, but at this point, I’ll take anything I can get. May I buy you a drink, an ice cream, a meal, a movie ticket? This evening? This weekend before I go back to Maryland?”

He was looking at her with wonder, his head slightly lowered, and she felt an unfurling inside her. How glorious it was, to be so wanted, and by this man with the rakish metal band around his wrist and the cleft-chinned handsomeness of models in department store catalogues. She began to like him because he liked her. “You eat so delicately,” he told her on their first date, at an Italian restaurant in Old City. There was nothing particularly delicate about her raising a fork to her mouth but she liked that he thought that there was.

“So, I’m a rich white guy from Potomac, but I’m not nearly as much of an asshole as I’m supposed to be,” he said, in a way that made her feel he had said that before, and that it had been received well when he did. “Laura always says my mom is richer than God, but I’m not sure she is.”

He talked about himself with such gusto, as though determined to tell her everything there was to know, and all at once. His family had been hoteliers for a hundred years. He went to college in California to escape them. He graduated and traveled through Latin America and Asia. Something began to pull him homewards, perhaps his father’s death, perhaps his unhappiness with a relationship. So he moved, a year ago, back to Maryland, started a software business just so that he would not be in the family business, bought an apartment in Baltimore, and went down to Potomac every Sunday to have brunch with his mother. He talked about himself with an uncluttered simplicity, assuming that she enjoyed his stories simply because he enjoyed them himself. His boyish enthusiasm fascinated her. His body was firm as they hugged good night in front of her apartment.

“I’m about to move in for a kiss in exactly three seconds,” he said. “A real kiss that can take us places, so if you don’t want that to happen, you might want to back off right now.”

She did not back off. The kiss was arousing in the way that unknown things are arousing. Afterwards he said, with urgency, “We have to tell Kimberly.”

“Tell Kimberly what?”

“That we’re dating.”

“We are?”

He laughed, and she laughed, too, although she had not been joking. He was open and gushing; cynicism did not occur to him. She felt charmed and almost helpless in the face of this, carried along by him; perhaps they were indeed dating after one kiss since he was so sure that they were.

Kimberly’s greeting to her the next day was “Hello there, lovebird.”

“So you’ll forgive your cousin for asking out the help?” Ifemelu asked.

Kimberly laughed and then, in an act that both surprised and moved Ifemelu, Kimberly hugged her. They moved apart awkwardly. Oprah was on the TV in the den and she heard the audience erupt in applause.

“Well,” Kimberly said, looking a little startled by the hug herself. “I just wanted to say I’m really … happy for you both.”

“Thank you. But it’s only been one date and there has been no consummation.”

Kimberly giggled and for a moment it felt as though they were high school girlfriends gossiping about boys. Ifemelu sometimes sensed, underneath the well-oiled sequences of Kimberly’s life, a flash of regret not only for things she longed for in the present but for things she had longed for in the past.

“You should have seen Curt this morning,” Kimberly said. “I’ve never seen him like this! He’s really excited.”

“About what?” Morgan asked. She was standing by the kitchen entrance, her prepubescent body stiff with hostility. Behind her, Taylor was trying to straighten the legs of a small plastic robot.

“Well, honey, you’re going to have to ask Uncle Curt.”

Curt came into the kitchen, smiling shyly, his hair slightly wet, wearing a fresh, light cologne. “Hey,” he said. He had called her at night to say he couldn’t sleep. “This is really corny but I am so full of you, it’s like I’m breathing you, you know?” he had said, and she thought that the romance novelists were wrong and it was men, not women, who were the true romantics.

“Morgan is asking why you seem so excited,” Kimberly said.

“Well, Morg, I’m excited because I have a new girlfriend, somebody really special who you might know.”

Ifemelu wished Curt would remove the arm he had thrown around her shoulder; they were not announcing their engagement, for goodness’ sake. Morgan was staring at them. Ifemelu saw Curt through her eyes: the dashing uncle who traveled the world and told all the really funny jokes at Thanksgiving dinner, the cool one young enough to get her, but old enough to try and make her mother get her.

“Ifemelu is your girlfriend?” Morgan asked.

“Yes,” Curt said.

“That’s disgusting,” Morgan said, looking genuinely disgusted.

“Morgan!” Kimberly said.

Morgan turned and stalked off upstairs.

“She has a crush on Uncle Curt, and now the babysitter steps onto her turf. It can’t be easy,” Ifemelu said.

Taylor, who seemed happy both with the news and with having straightened out the robot’s legs, said, “Are you and Ifemelu going to get married and have a baby, Uncle Curt?”

“Well, buddy, right now we are just going to be spending a lot of time together, to get to know each other.”

“Oh, okay,” Taylor said, slightly dampened, but when Don came home, Taylor ran into his arms and said, “Ifemelu and Uncle Curt are going to get married and have a baby!”

“Oh,” Don said.

His surprise reminded Ifemelu of Abe in her ethics class: Don thought she was attractive and interesting, and thought Curt was attractive and interesting, but it did not occur to him to think of both of them, together, entangled in the delicate threads of romance.

CURT HAD NEVER BEEN with a black woman; he told her this after their first time, in his penthouse apartment in Baltimore, with a self-mocking toss of his head, as if this were something he should have done long ago but had somehow neglected.

“Here’s to a milestone, then,” she said, pretending to raise a glass.

Wambui once said, after Dorothy introduced them to her new Dutch boyfriend at an ASA meeting, “I can’t do a white man, I’d be scared to see him naked, all that paleness. Unless maybe an Italian with a serious tan. Or a Jewish guy, dark Jewish.” Ifemelu looked at Curt’s pale hair and pale skin, the rust-colored moles on his back, the fine sprinkle of golden chest hair, and thought how strongly, at this moment, she disagreed with Wambui.

“You are so sexy,” she said.

“You are sexier.”

He told her he had never been so attracted to a woman before, had never seen a body so beautiful, her perfect breasts, her perfect butt. It amused her, that he considered a perfect butt what Obinze called a flat ass, and she thought her breasts were ordinary big breasts, already with a downward slope. But his words pleased her, like an unnecessary lavish gift. He wanted to suck her finger, to lick honey from her nipple, to smear ice cream on her belly, as though it was not enough simply to lie bare skin to bare skin.

Later, when he wanted to do impersonations—“How about you be Foxy Brown,” he said — she thought it endearing, his ability to act, to lose himself so completely in character, and she played along, humoring him, pleased by his pleasure, although it puzzled her that this could be so exciting to him. Often, naked beside him, she found herself thinking of Obinze. She struggled not to compare Curt’s touch to his. She had told Curt about her secondary school boyfriend Mofe, but she said nothing about Obinze. It felt a sacrilege to discuss Obinze, to refer to him as an “ex,” that flippant word that said nothing and meant nothing. With each month of silence that passed between them, she felt the silence itself calcify, and become a hard and hulking statue, impossible to defeat. She still, often, began to write to him, but always she stopped, always she decided not to send the e-mails.

WITH CURT, she became, in her mind, a woman free of knots and cares, a woman running in the rain with the taste of sun-warmed strawberries in her mouth. “A drink” became a part of the architecture of her life, mojitos and martinis, dry whites and fruity reds. She went hiking with him, kayaking, camping near his family’s vacation home, all things she would never have imagined herself doing before. She was lighter and leaner; she was Curt’s Girlfriend, a role she slipped into as into a favorite, flattering dress. She laughed more because he laughed so much. His optimism blinded her. He was full of plans. “I have an idea!” he said often. She imagined him as a child surrounded by too many brightly colored toys, always being encouraged to carry out “projects,” always being told that his mundane ideas were wonderful.

“Let’s go to Paris tomorrow!” he said one weekend. “I know it’s totally unoriginal but you’ve never been and I love that I get to show you Paris!”

“I just can’t get up and go to Paris. I have a Nigerian passport. I need to apply for a visa, with bank statements and health insurance and all sorts of proof that I won’t stay and become a burden to Europe.”

“Yeah, I forgot about that. Okay, we’ll go next weekend. We’ll get the visa stuff done this week. I’ll get a copy of my bank statement tomorrow.”

“Curtis,” she said, a little sternly, to make him be reasonable, but standing there looking down at the city from so high up, she was already caught in the whirl of his excitement. He was upbeat, relentlessly so, in a way that only an American of his kind could be, and there was an infantile quality to this that she found admirable and repulsive. One day, they took a walk on South Street, because she had never seen what he told her was the best part of Philadelphia, and he slipped his hand into hers as they wandered past tattoo parlors and groups of boys with pink hair. Near Condom Kingdom, he ducked into a tiny tarot shop, pulling her along. A woman in a black veil told them, “I see light and long-term happiness ahead for you two,” and Curt said, “So do we!” and gave her an extra ten dollars. Later, when his ebullience became a temptation to Ifemelu, an unrelieved sunniness that made her want to strike at it, to crush it, this would be one of her best memories of Curt, as he was in the tarot shop on South Street on a day filled with the promise of summer: so handsome, so happy, a true believer. He believed in good omens and positive thoughts and happy endings to films, a trouble-free belief, because he had not considered them deeply before choosing to believe; he just simply believed.

CHAPTER 19

Curt’s mother had a bloodless elegance, her hair shiny, her complexion well-preserved, her tasteful and expensive clothes made to look tasteful and expensive; she seemed like the kind of wealthy person who did not tip well. Curt called her “Mother,” which had a certain formality, an archaic ring. On Sundays, they had brunch with her. Ifemelu enjoyed the Sunday ritual of those meals in the ornate hotel dining room, full of nicely dressed people, silver-haired couples with their grandchildren, middle-aged women with brooches pinned on their lapels. The only other black person was a stiffly dressed waiter. She ate fluffy eggs and thinly sliced salmon and crescents of fresh melon, watching Curt and his mother, both blindingly golden-haired. Curt talked, while his mother listened, rapt. She adored her son — the child born late in life when she wasn’t sure she could still have children, the charmer, the one whose manipulations she always gave in to. He was her adventurer who would bring back exotic species — he had dated a Japanese girl, a Venezuelan girl — but would, with time, settle down properly. She would tolerate anybody he liked, but she felt no obligation for affection.

“I’m Republican, our whole family is. We are very anti-welfare but we did very much support civil rights. I just want you to know the kind of Republicans we are,” she told Ifemelu when they first met, as though it was the most important thing to get out of the way.

“And would you like to know what kind of Republican I am?” Ifemelu asked.

His mother first looked surprised, and then her face stretched into a tight smile. “You’re funny,” she said.

Once, his mother told Ifemelu, “Your lashes are pretty,” abrupt, unexpected words, and then sipped her Bellini, as though she had not heard Ifemelu’s surprised “Thank you.”

On the drive back to Baltimore, Ifemelu said, “Lashes? She must have really tried hard to find something to compliment!”

Curt laughed. “Laura says my mother doesn’t like beautiful women.”

ONE WEEKEND, Morgan visited.

Kimberly and Don wanted to take the children to Florida, but Morgan refused to go. So Curt asked her to spend the weekend in Baltimore. He planned a boating trip, and Ifemelu thought he should have some time alone with Morgan. “You’re not coming, Ifemelu?” Morgan asked, looking deflated. “I thought we were all going together.” The word “together” said with more animation than Ifemelu had ever heard from Morgan. “Of course I’m coming,” she said. As she put on mascara and lip gloss, Morgan watched.

“Come here, Morg,” she said, and she ran the lip gloss over Morgan’s lips. “Smack your lips. Good. Now why are you so pretty, Miss Morgan?” Morgan laughed. On the pier, Ifemelu and Curt walked along, each holding Morgan’s hand, Morgan happy to have her hands held, and Ifemelu thought, as she sometimes fleetingly did, of being married to Curt, their life engraved in comfort, he getting along with her family and friends and she with his, except for his mother. They joked about marriage. Since she first told him about bride price ceremonies, that Igbo people did them before the wine-carrying and church wedding, he joked about going to Nigeria to pay her bride price, arriving at her ancestral home, sitting with her father and uncles, and insisting he get her for free. And she joked, in return, about walking down the aisle in a church in Virginia, to the tune of “Here Comes the Bride,” while his relatives stared in horror and asked one another, in whispers, why the help was wearing the bride’s dress.

THEY WERE CURLED UP on the couch, she reading a novel, he watching sports. She found it endearing, how absorbed he was in his games, eyes small and still in concentration. During commercial breaks, she teased him: Why did American football have no inherent logic, just overweight men jumping on top of one another? And why did baseball players spend so much time spitting and then making sudden incomprehensible runs? He laughed and tried to explain, yet again, the meaning of home runs and touchdowns, but she was uninterested, because understanding meant she could no longer tease him, and so she glanced back at her novel, ready to tease him again at the next break.

The couch was soft. Her skin was glowing. At school, she took extra credits and raised her GPA. Outside the tall living room windows, the Inner Harbor spread out below, water gleaming and lights twinkling. A sense of contentment overwhelmed her. That was what Curt had given her, this gift of contentment, of ease. How quickly she had become used to their life, her passport filled with visa stamps, the solicitousness of flight attendants in first-class cabins, the feathery bed linen in the hotels they stayed in and the little things she hoarded: jars of preserves from the breakfast tray, little vials of conditioner, woven slippers, even face towels if they were especially soft. She had slipped out of her old skin. She almost liked winter, the glittering coat of frosted ice on the tops of cars, the lush warmth of the cashmere sweaters Curt bought her. In stores, he did not look first at the prices of things. He bought her groceries and textbooks, sent her gift certificates for department stores, took her shopping himself. He asked her to give up babysitting; they could spend more time together if she didn’t have to work every day. But she refused. “I have to have a job,” she said.

She saved money, sent more home. She wanted her parents to move to a new flat. There had been an armed robbery in the block of flats next to theirs.

“Something bigger in a better neighborhood,” she said.

“We are okay here,” her mother said. “It is not too bad. They built a new gate in the street and banned okadas after six p.m., so it is safe.”

“A gate?”

“Yes, near the kiosk.”

“Which kiosk?”

“You don’t remember the kiosk?” her mother asked. Ifemelu paused. A sepia tone to her memories. She could not remember the kiosk.

Her father had, finally, found a job, as the deputy director of human resources in one of the new banks. He bought a mobile phone. He bought new tires for her mother’s car. Slowly, he was easing back into his monologues about Nigeria.

“One could not describe Obasanjo as a good man, but it must be conceded that he has done some good things in the country; there is a flourishing spirit of entrepreneurship,” he said.

It felt strange to call them directly, to hear her father’s “Hello?” after the second ring, and when he heard her voice, he raised his, almost shouting, as he always did with international calls. Her mother liked to take the phone out to the verandah, to make sure the neighbors overheard: “Ifem, how is the weather in America?”

Her mother asked breezy questions and accepted breezy replies. “Everything is going well?” and Ifemelu had no choice but to say yes. Her father remembered classes she’d mentioned, and asked about specifics. She chose her words, careful not to say anything about Curt. It was easier not to tell them about Curt.

“What are your employment prospects?” her father asked. Her graduation was approaching, her student visa expiring.

“I have been assigned to a career counselor, and I’m meeting her next week,” she said.

“All graduating students have a counselor assigned to them?”

“Yes.”

Her father made a sound, of admiring respect. “America is an organized place, and job opportunities are rife there.”

“Yes. They have placed many students in good jobs,” Ifemelu said. It was untrue, but it was what her father expected to hear. The career services office, an airless space, piles of files sitting forlornly on desks, was known to be full of counselors who reviewed résumés and asked you to change the font or format and gave you outdated contact information for people who never called you back. The first time Ifemelu went there, her counselor, Ruth, a caramel-skinned African-American woman, asked, “What do you really want to do?”

“I want a job.”

“Yes, but what kind?” Ruth asked, slightly incredulous.

Ifemelu looked at her résumé on the table. “I’m a communications major, so anything in communications, the media.”

“Do you have a passion, a dream job?”

Ifemelu shook her head. She felt weak, for not having a passion, not being sure what she wanted to do. Her interests were vague and varied, magazine publishing, fashion, politics, television; none of them had a firm shape. She attended the school career fair, where students wore awkward suits and serious expressions, and tried to look like adults worthy of real jobs. The recruiters, themselves not long out of college, the young who had been sent out to catch the young, told her about “opportunity for growth” and “good fit” and “benefits,” but they all became noncommittal when they realized she was not an American citizen, that they would, if they hired her, have to descend into the dark tunnel of immigration paperwork. “I should have majored in engineering or something,” she told Curt. “Communications majors are a dime a dozen.”

“I know some people my dad did business with, they might be able to help,” Curt said. And, not long afterwards, he told her she had an interview at an office in downtown Baltimore, for a position in public relations. “All you need to do is ace the interview and it’s yours,” he said. “So I know folks in this other bigger place, but the good thing about this one is they’ll get you a work visa and start your green card process.”

“What? How did you do it?”

He shrugged. “Made some calls.”

“Curt. Really. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“I have some ideas,” he said, boyishly pleased.

It was good news, and yet a soberness wrapped itself around her. Wambui was working three jobs under the table to raise the five thousand dollars she would need to pay an African-American man for a green-card marriage, Mwombeki was desperately trying to find a company that would hire him on his temporary visa, and here she was, a pink balloon, weightless, floating to the top, propelled by things outside of herself. She felt, in the midst of her gratitude, a small resentment: that Curt could, with a few calls, rearrange the world, have things slide into the spaces that he wanted them to.

When she told Ruth about the interview in Baltimore, Ruth said, “My only advice? Lose the braids and straighten your hair. Nobody says this kind of stuff but it matters. We want you to get that job.”

Aunty Uju had said something similar in the past, and she had laughed then. Now, she knew enough not to laugh. “Thank you,” she said to Ruth.

Since she came to America, she had always braided her hair with long extensions, always alarmed at how much it cost. She wore each style for three months, even four months, until her scalp itched unbearably and the braids sprouted fuzzily from a bed of new growth. And so it was a new adventure, relaxing her hair. She removed her braids, careful to leave her scalp unscratched, to leave undisturbed the dirt that would protect it. Relaxers had grown in their range, boxes and boxes in the “ethnic hair” section of the drugstore, faces of smiling black women with impossibly straight and shiny hair, beside words like “botanical” and “aloe” that promised gentleness. She bought one in a green carton. In her bathroom, she carefully smeared the protective gel around her hairline before she began to slather the creamy relaxer on her hair, section by section, her fingers in plastic gloves. The smell reminded her of chemistry lab in secondary school, and so she forced open the bathroom window, which was often jammed. She timed the process carefully, washing off the relaxer in exactly twenty minutes, but her hair remained kinky, its denseness unchanged. The relaxer did not take. That was the word—“take”—that the hairdresser in West Philadelphia used. “Girl, you need a professional,” the hairdresser said as she reapplied another relaxer. “People think they’re saving money by doing it at home but they’re really not.”

Ifemelu felt only a slight burning, at first, but as the hairdresser rinsed out the relaxer, Ifemelu’s head bent backwards against a plastic sink, needles of stinging pain shot up from different parts of her scalp, down to different parts of her body, back up to her head.

“Just a little burn,” the hairdresser said. “But look how pretty it is. Wow, girl, you’ve got the white-girl swing!”

Her hair was hanging down rather than standing up, straight and sleek, parted at the side and curving to a slight bob at her chin. The verve was gone. She did not recognize herself. She left the salon almost mournfully; while the hairdresser had flat-ironed the ends, the smell of burning, of something organic dying which should not have died, had made her feel a sense of loss. Curt looked uncertain when he saw her.

“Do you like it, babe?” he asked.

“I can see you don’t,” she said.

He said nothing. He reached out to stroke her hair, as though doing so might make him like it.

She pushed him away. “Ouch. Careful. I have a bit of relaxer burn.”

“What?”

“It’s not too bad. I used to get it all the time in Nigeria. Look at this.”

She showed him a keloid behind her ear, a small enraged swelling of skin, which she got after Aunty Uju straightened her hair with a hot comb in secondary school. “Pull back your ear,” Aunty Uju often said, and Ifemelu would hold her ear, tense and unbreathing, terrified that the red-hot comb fresh from the stove would burn her but also excited by the prospect of straight, swingy hair. And one day it did burn her, as she moved slightly and Aunty Uju’s hand moved slightly and the hot metal singed the skin behind her ear.

“Oh my God,” Curt said, his eyes wide. He insisted on gently looking at her scalp to see how much she had been hurt. “Oh my God.”

His horror made her more concerned than she would ordinarily have been. She had never felt so close to him as she did then, sitting still on the bed, her face sunk in his shirt, the scent of fabric softener in her nose, while he gently parted her newly straightened hair.

“Why do you have to do this? Your hair was gorgeous braided. And when you took out the braids the last time and just kind of let it be? It was even more gorgeous, so full and cool.”

“My full and cool hair would work if I were interviewing to be a backup singer in a jazz band, but I need to look professional for this interview, and professional means straight is best but if it’s going to be curly then it has to be the white kind of curly, loose curls or, at worst, spiral curls but never kinky.”

“It’s so fucking wrong that you have to do this.”

At night, she struggled to find a comfortable position on her pillow. Two days later, there were scabs on her scalp. Three days later, they oozed pus. Curt wanted her to see a doctor and she laughed at him. It would heal, she told him, and it did. Later, after she breezed through the job interview, and the woman shook her hand and said she would be a “wonderful fit” in the company, she wondered if the woman would have felt the same way had she walked into that office wearing her thick, kinky, God-given halo of hair, the Afro.

She did not tell her parents how she got the job; her father said, “I have no doubt that you will excel. America creates opportunities for people to thrive. Nigeria can indeed learn a lot from them,” while her mother began to sing when Ifemelu said that, in a few years, she could become an American citizen.

Understanding America for the Non-American Black: What Do WASPs Aspire To?

Professor Hunk has a visiting professor colleague, a Jewish guy with a thick accent from the kind of European country where most people drink a glass of antisemitism at breakfast. So Professor Hunk was talking about civil rights and Jewish guy says, “The blacks have not suffered like the Jews.” Professor Hunk replies, “Come on, is this the oppression olympics?”

Jewish guy did not know this, but “oppression olympics” is what smart liberal Americans say, to make you feel stupid and to make you shut up. But there IS an oppression olympics going on. American racial minorities — blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews — all get shit from white folks, different kinds of shit, but shit still. Each secretly believes that it gets the worst shit. So, no, there is no United League of the Oppressed. However, all the others think they’re better than blacks because, well, they’re not black. Take Lili, for example, the coffee-skinned, black-haired and Spanish-speaking woman who cleaned my aunt’s house in a New England town. She had a great hauteur. She was disrespectful, cleaned poorly, made demands. My aunt believed Lili didn’t like working for black people. Before she finally fired her, my aunt said, “Stupid woman, she thinks she’s white.” So whiteness is the thing to aspire to. Not everyone does, of course (please, commenters, don’t state the obvious) but many minorities have a conflicted longing for WASP whiteness or, more accurately, for the privileges of WASP whiteness. They probably don’t really like pale skin but they certainly like walking into a store without some security dude following them. Hating Your Goy and Eating One Too, as the great Philip Roth put it. So if everyone in America aspires to be WASPs, then what do WASPs aspire to? Does anyone know?

CHAPTER 20

Ifemelu came to love Baltimore — for its scrappy charm, its streets of faded glory, its farmers market that appeared on weekends under the bridge, bursting with green vegetables and plump fruit and virtuous souls — although never as much as her first love, Philadelphia, that city that held history in its gentle clasp. But when she arrived in Baltimore knowing she was going to live there, and not merely visiting Curt, she thought it forlorn and unlovable. The buildings were joined to one another in faded slumping rows, and on shabby corners, people were hunched in puffy jackets, black and bleak people waiting for buses, the air around them hazed in gloom. Many of the drivers outside the train station were Ethiopian or Punjabi.

Her Ethiopian taxi driver said, “I can’t place your accent. Where are you from?”

“Nigeria.”

“Nigeria? You don’t look African at all.”

“Why don’t I look African?”

“Because your blouse is too tight.”

“It is not too tight.”

“I thought you were from Trinidad or one of those places.” He was looking in the rearview with disapproval and concern. “You have to be very careful or America will corrupt you.” When, years later, she wrote the blog post “On the Divisions Within the Membership of Non-American Blacks in America,” she wrote about the taxi driver, but she wrote of it as the experience of someone else, careful not to let on whether she was African or Caribbean, because her readers did not know which she was.

She told Curt about the taxi driver, how his sincerity had infuriated her and how she had gone to the station bathroom to see if her pink long-sleeved blouse was too tight. Curt laughed and laughed. It became one of the many stories he liked to tell friends. She actually went to the bathroom to look at her blouse! His friends were like him, sunny and wealthy people who existed on the glimmering surface of things. She liked them, and sensed that they liked her. To them, she was interesting, unusual in the way she bluntly spoke her mind. They expected certain things of her, and forgave certain things from her, because she was foreign. Once, sitting with them in a bar, she heard Curt talking to Brad, and Curt said “blowhard.” She was struck by the word, by the irredeemable Americanness of it. Blowhard. It was a word that would never occur to her. To understand this was to realize that Curt and his friends would, on some level, never be fully knowable to her.

She got an apartment in Charles Village, a one-bedroom with old wood floors, although she might as well have been living with Curt; most of her clothes were in his walk-in closet lined with mirrors. Now that she saw him every day, no longer just on weekends, she saw new layers of him, how difficult it was for him to be still, simply still without thinking of what next to do, how used he was to stepping out of his trousers and leaving them on the floor for days, until the cleaning woman came. Their lives were full of plans he made — Cozumel for one night, London for a long weekend — and she sometimes took a taxi on Friday evenings after work to meet him at the airport.

“Isn’t this great?” he would ask her, and she would say yes, it was great. He was always thinking of what else to do and she told him that it was rare for her, because she had grown up not doing, but being. She added quickly, though, that she liked it all, because she did like it and she knew, too, how much he needed to hear that. In bed, he was anxious.

“Do you like that? Do you enjoy me?” he asked often. And she said yes, which was true, but she sensed that he did not always believe her, or that his belief lasted only so long before he would need to hear her affirmation again. There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, waxing.

AND THEN her hair began to fall out at the temples. She drenched it in rich, creamy conditioners, and sat under steamers until water droplets ran down her neck. Still, her hairline shifted further backwards each day.

“It’s the chemicals,” Wambui told her. “Do you know what’s in a relaxer? That stuff can kill you. You need to cut your hair and go natural.”

Wambui’s hair was now in short locs, which Ifemelu did not like; she thought them sparse and dull, unflattering to Wambui’s pretty face.

“I don’t want dreads,” she said.

“It doesn’t have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There’s a lot you can do with natural hair.”

“I can’t just cut my hair,” she said.

“Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You’re caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn’t go running with Curt today because you don’t want to sweat out this straightness. That picture you sent me, you had your hair covered on the boat. You’re always battling to make your hair do what it wasn’t meant to do. If you go natural and take good care of your hair, it won’t fall off like it’s doing now. I can help you cut it right now. No need to think about it too much.”

Wambui was so sure, so convincing. Ifemelu found a pair of scissors. Wambui cut her hair, leaving only two inches, the new growth since her last relaxer. Ifemelu looked in the mirror. She was all big eyes and big head. At best, she looked like a boy; at worst, like an insect.

“I look so ugly I’m scared of myself.”

“You look beautiful. Your bone structure shows so well now. You’re just not used to seeing yourself like this. You’ll get used to it,” Wambui said.

Ifemelu was still staring at her hair. What had she done? She looked unfinished, as though the hair itself, short and stubby, was asking for attention, for something to be done to it, for more. After Wambui left, she went to the drugstore, Curt’s baseball hat pulled over her head. She bought oils and pomades, applying one and then the other, on wet hair and then on dry hair, willing an unknown miracle to happen. Something, anything, that would make her like her hair. She thought of buying a wig, but wigs brought anxiety, the always-present possibility of flying off your head. She thought of a texturizer to loosen her hair’s springy coils, stretch out the kinkiness a little, but a texturizer was really a relaxer, only milder, and she would still have to avoid the rain.

Curt told her, “Stop stressing, babe. It’s a really cool and brave look.”

“I don’t want my hair to be brave.”

“I mean like stylish, chic.” He paused. “You look beautiful.”

“I look like a boy.”

Curt said nothing. There was, in his expression, a veiled amusement, as though he did not see why she should be so upset but was better off not saying so.

The next day, she called in sick, and climbed back into bed.

“You didn’t call in sick so we could stay a day longer in Bermuda but you call in sick because of your hair?” Curt asked, propped up by pillows, stifling laughter.

“I can’t go out like this.” She was burrowing under the covers as though to hide.

“It’s not as bad as you think,” he said.

“At least you finally accept that it’s bad.”

Curt laughed. “You know what I mean. Come here.”

He hugged her, kissed her, and then slid down and began to massage her feet; she liked the warm pressure, the feel of his fingers. Yet she could not relax. In the bathroom mirror, her hair had startled her, dull and shrunken from sleep, like a mop of wool sitting on her head. She reached for her phone and sent Wambui a text: I hate my hair. I couldn’t go to work today.

Wambui’s reply came minutes later: Go online. HappilyKinkyNappy.com. It’s this natural hair community. You’ll find inspiration.

She showed the text to Curt. “What a silly name for the website.”

“I know, but it sounds like a good idea. You should check it out sometime.”

“Like now,” Ifemelu said, getting up. Curt’s laptop was open on the desk. As she went to it, she noticed a change in Curt. A sudden tense quickness. His ashen, panicked move towards the laptop.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“They mean nothing. The e-mails mean nothing.”

She stared at him, forcing her mind to work. He had not expected her to use his computer, because she hardly ever did. He was cheating on her. How odd, that she had never considered that. She picked up the laptop, held it tightly, but he didn’t try to reach for it. He just stood and watched. The Yahoo mail page was minimized, next to a page about college basketball. She read some of the e-mails. She looked at attached photographs. The woman’s e-mails — her address was SparklingPaola123—were strongly suggestive, while Curt’s were just suggestive enough to make sure she continued. I’m going to cook you dinner in a tight red dress and sky-high heels, she wrote, and you just bring yourself and a bottle of wine. Curt replied: Red would look great on you. The woman was about his age, but there was, in the photos she sent, an air of hard desperation, hair dyed a brassy blond, eyes burdened by too much blue makeup, top too low-cut. It surprised Ifemelu, that Curt found her attractive. His white ex-girlfriend had been fresh-faced and preppy.

“I met her in Delaware,” Curt said. “Remember the conference thing I wanted you to come to? She started hitting on me right away. She’s been after me since. She won’t leave me alone. She knows I have a girlfriend.”

Ifemelu stared at one of the photos, a profile shot in black-and-white, the woman’s head thrown back, her long hair flowing behind her. A woman who liked her hair and thought Curt would too.

“Nothing happened,” Curt said. “At all. Just the e-mails. She’s really after me. I told her about you, but she just won’t stop.”

She looked at him, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, so certain in his self-justifications. He was entitled in the way a child was: blindly.

“You wrote her too,” she said.

“But that’s because she wouldn’t stop.”

“No, it’s because you wanted to.”

“Nothing happened.”

“That is not the point.”

“I’m sorry. I know you’re already upset and I hate to make it worse.”

“All your girlfriends had long flowing hair,” she said, her tone thick with accusation.

“What?”

She was being absurd, but knowing that did not make her any less so. Pictures she had seen of his ex-girlfriends goaded her, the slender Japanese with straight hair dyed red, the olive-skinned Venezuelan with corkscrew hair that fell to her shoulders, the white girl with waves and waves of russet hair. And now this woman, whose looks she did not care for, but who had long straight hair. She shut the laptop. She felt small and ugly. Curt was talking. “I’ll ask her never to contact me. This will never happen again, babe, I promise,” he said, and she thought he sounded as though it was somehow the woman’s responsibility, rather than his.

She turned away, pulled Curt’s baseball hat over her head, threw things in a bag, and left.

CURT CAME BY LATER, holding so many flowers she hardly saw his face when she opened the door. She would forgive him, she knew, because she believed him. Sparkling Paola was one more small adventure of his. He would not have gone further with her, but he would have kept encouraging her attention, until he was bored. Sparkling Paola was like the silver stars that his teachers pasted on the pages of his elementary school homework, sources of a shallow, fleeting pleasure.

She did not want to go out, but she did not want to be with him in the intimacy of her apartment; she still felt too raw. So she covered her hair in a headwrap and they took a walk, Curt solicitous and full of promises, walking side by side but not touching, all the way to the corner of Charles and University Parkway, and then back to her apartment.

FOR THREE DAYS, she called in sick. Finally, she went to work, her hair a very short, overly combed and overly oiled Afro. “You look different,” her co-workers said, all of them a little tentative.

“Does it mean anything? Like, something political?” Amy asked, Amy who had a poster of Che Guevara on her cubicle wall.

“No,” Ifemelu said.

At the cafeteria, Miss Margaret, the bosomy African-American woman who presided over the counter — and, apart from two security guards, the only other black person in the company — asked, “Why did you cut your hair, hon? Are you a lesbian?”

“No, Miss Margaret, at least not yet.”

Some years later, on the day Ifemelu resigned, she went into the cafeteria for a last lunch. “You leaving?” Miss Margaret asked, downcast. “Sorry, hon. They need to treat folk better around here. You think your hair was part of the problem?”

HAPPILYKINKYNAPPY.COM HAD a bright yellow background, message boards full of posts, thumbnail photos of black women blinking at the top. They had long trailing dreadlocks, small Afros, big Afros, twists, braids, massive raucous curls and coils. They called relaxers “creamy crack.” They were done with pretending that their hair was what it was not, done with running from the rain and flinching from sweat. They complimented each other’s photos and ended comments with “hugs.” They complained about black magazines never having natural-haired women in their pages, about drugstore products so poisoned by mineral oil that they could not moisturize natural hair. They traded recipes. They sculpted for themselves a virtual world where their coily, kinky, nappy, woolly hair was normal. And Ifemelu fell into this world with a tumbling gratitude. Women with hair as short as hers had a name for it: TWA, Teeny Weeny Afro. She learned, from women who posted long instructions, to avoid shampoos with silicones, to use a leave-in conditioner on wet hair, to sleep in a satin scarf. She ordered products from women who made them in their kitchens and shipped them with clear instructions: BEST TO REFRIGERATE IMMEDIATELY, DOES NOT CONTAIN PRESERVATIVES. Curt would open the fridge, hold up a container labeled “hair butter,” and ask, “Okay to spread this on my toast?” Curt thrummed with fascination about it all. He read posts on HappilyKinkyNappy.com. “I think it’s great!” he said. “It’s like this movement of black women.”

One day, at the farmers market, as she stood hand in hand with Curt in front of a tray of apples, a black man walked past and muttered, “You ever wonder why he likes you looking all jungle like that?” She stopped, unsure for a moment whether she had imagined those words, and then she looked back at the man. He walked with too much rhythm in his step, which suggested to her a certain fickleness of character. A man not worth paying any attention to. Yet his words bothered her, pried open the door for new doubts.

“Did you hear what that guy said?” she asked Curt.

“No, what did he say?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

She felt dispirited and, while Curt watched a game that evening, she drove to the beauty supply store and ran her fingers through small bundles of silky straight weaves. Then she remembered a post by Jamilah1977—I love the sistas who love their straight weaves, but I’m never putting horse hair on my head again—and she left the store, eager to get back and log on and post on the boards about it. She wrote: Jamilah’s words made me remember that there is nothing more beautiful than what God gave me. Others wrote responses, posting thumbs-up signs, telling her how much they liked the photo she had put up. She had never talked about God so much. Posting on the website was like giving testimony in church; the echoing roar of approval revived her.

On an unremarkable day in early spring — the day was not bronzed with special light, nothing of any significance happened, and it was perhaps merely that time, as it often does, had transfigured her doubts — she looked in the mirror, sank her fingers into her hair, dense and spongy and glorious, and could not imagine it any other way. That simply, she fell in love with her hair.

Why Dark-Skinned Black Women — Both American and Non-American — Love Barack Obama

Many American blacks proudly say they have some “Indian.” Which means Thank God We Are Not Full-Blooded Negroes. Which means they are not too dark. (To clarify, when white people say dark they mean Greek or Italian but when black people say dark they mean Grace Jones.) American black men like their black women to have some exotic quota, like half-Chinese or splash of Cherokee. They like their women light. But beware what American blacks consider “light.” Some of these “light” people, in countries of Non-American Blacks, would simply be called white. (Oh, and dark American black men resent light men, for having it too easy with the ladies.)

Now, my fellow Non-American Blacks, don’t get smug. Because this bullshit also exists in our Caribbean and African countries. Not as bad as with American blacks, you say? Maybe. But there nonetheless. By the way, what is it with Ethiopians thinking they are not that black? And Small Islanders eager to say their ancestry is “mixed”? But we must not digress. So light skin is valued in the community of American blacks. But everyone pretends this is no longer so. They say the days of the paper-bag test (look this up) are gone and let’s move forward. But today most of the American blacks who are successful as entertainers and as public figures, are light. Especially women. Many successful American black men have white wives. Those who deign to have black wives have light (otherwise known as high yellow) wives. And this is the reason dark women love Barack Obama. He broke the mold! He married one of their own. He knows what the world doesn’t seem to know: that dark black women totally rock. They want Obama to win because maybe finally somebody will cast a beautiful chocolate babe in a big-budget rom-com that opens in theaters all over the country, not just three artsy theaters in New York City. You see, in American pop culture, beautiful dark women are invisible. (The other group just as invisible is Asian men. But at least they get to be super smart.) In movies, dark black women get to be the fat nice mammy or the strong, sassy, sometimes scary sidekick standing by supportively. They get to dish out wisdom and attitude while the white woman finds love. But they never get to be the hot woman, beautiful and desired and all. So dark black women hope Obama will change that. Oh, and dark black women are also for cleaning up Washington and getting out of Iraq and whatnot.

CHAPTER 21

It was a Sunday morning, and Aunty Uju called, agitated and strained. “Look at this boy! Come and see the nonsense he wants to wear to church. He has refused to wear what I brought out for him. You know that if he does not dress properly, they will find something to say about us. If they are shabby, it’s not a problem, but if we are, it is another thing. This is the same way I have been telling him to tone it down at school. The other day, they said he was talking in class and he said he was talking because he had finished his work. He has to tone it down, because his own will always be seen as different, but the boy doesn’t understand. Please talk to your cousin!”

Ifemelu asked Dike to take the phone to his room.

“Mom wants me to wear this really ugly shirt.” His tone was flat, dispassionate.

“I know how uncool that shirt is, Dike, but wear it for her, okay? Just to church. Just for today.”

She did know the shirt, a striped, humorless shirt that Bartholomew had bought for Dike. It was the sort of shirt Bartholomew would buy; it reminded her of his friends she had met one weekend, a Nigerian couple visiting from Maryland, their two boys sitting next to them on the sofa, both buttoned-up and stiff, caged in the airlessness of their parents’ immigrant aspirations. She did not want Dike to be like them, but she understood Aunty Uju’s anxieties, making her way in unfamiliar terrain as she was.

“You’ll probably not see anybody you know in church,” Ifemelu said. “And I’ll talk to your mom about not making you wear it again.” She cajoled until finally Dike agreed, as long as he could wear sneakers, not the lace-ups his mother wanted.

“I’m coming up this weekend,” she told him. “I’m bringing my boyfriend, Curt. You’ll finally get to meet him.”

WITH AUNTY UJU, Curt was solicitous and charming in that well-oiled way that slightly embarrassed Ifemelu. At dinner the other night with Wambui and some friends, Curt had reached out and refilled a wineglass here, a water glass there. Charming, was what one of the girls said later: Your boyfriend is so charming. And the thought occurred to Ifemelu that she did not like charm. Not Curt’s kind, with its need to dazzle, to perform. She wished Curt were quieter and more inward. When he started conversations with people in elevators, or lavishly complimented strangers, she held her breath, certain that they could see what an attention-loving person he was. But they always smiled back and responded and allowed themselves to be wooed. As Aunty Uju did. “Curt, won’t you try the soup? Ifemelu has never cooked this soup for you? Have you tried fried plantain?”

Dike watched, saying little, speaking politely and properly, even though Curt joked with him and talked sports and tried so hard to win his affection that Ifemelu feared he might do somersaults. Finally, Curt asked, “Want to shoot some hoops?”

Dike shrugged. “Okay.”

Aunty Uju watched them leave.

“Look at the way he behaves as if anything you touch starts smelling like perfume. He really likes you,” Aunty Uju said, and then, face wrinkling, she added, “And even with your hair like that.”

“Aunty, biko, leave my hair alone,” Ifemelu said.

“It is like jute.” Aunty Uju plunged a hand into Ifemelu’s Afro.

Ifemelu drew her head away. “What if every magazine you opened and every film you watched had beautiful women with hair like jute? You would be admiring my hair now.”

Aunty Uju scoffed. “Okay, you can speak English about it but I am just saying what is true. There is something scruffy and untidy about natural hair.” Aunty Uju paused. “Have you read the essay your cousin wrote?”

“Yes.”

“How can he say he does not know what he is? Since when is he conflicted? And even that his name is difficult?”

“You should talk to him, Aunty. If that is how he feels, then that is how he feels.”

“I think he wrote that because that is the kind of thing they teach them here. Everybody is conflicted, identity this, identity that. Somebody will commit murder and say it is because his mother did not hug him when he was three years old. Or they will do something wicked and say it is a disease that they are struggling with.” Aunty Uju looked out of the window. Curt and Dike were dribbling a basketball in the backyard, and farther away was the beginning of thick woods. On Ifemelu’s last visit, she had woken up to see, through the kitchen window, a pair of gracefully galloping deer.

“I am tired,” Aunty Uju said in a low voice.

“What do you mean?” Ifemelu knew, though, that it would only be more complaints about Bartholomew.

“Both of us work. Both of us come home at the same time and do you know what Bartholomew does? He just sits in the living room and turns on the TV and asks me what we are eating for dinner.” Aunty Uju scowled and Ifemelu noticed how much weight she had put on, the beginning of a double chin, the new flare of her nose. “He wants me to give him my salary. Imagine! He said that it is how marriages are since he is the head of the family, that I should not send money home to Brother without his permission, that we should make his car payments from my salary. I want to look at private schools for Dike, with all this nonsense happening in that public school, but Bartholomew said it is too expensive. Too expensive! Meanwhile, his children went to private schools in California. He is not even bothered with all the rubbish going on in Dike’s school. The other day I went there, and a teacher’s assistant shouted at me across the hall. Imagine. She was so rude. I noticed she did not shout across the hall to the other parents. So I went over and told her off. These people, they make you become aggressive just to hold your dignity.” Aunty Uju shook her head. “Bartholomew is not even bothered that Dike still calls him Uncle. I told him to encourage Dike to call him Dad but it doesn’t bother him. All he wants is for me to hand over my salary to him and cook peppered gizzard for him on Saturdays while he watches European League on satellite. Why should I give him my salary? Did he pay my fees in medical school? He wants to start a business but they won’t give him a loan and he says he will sue them for discrimination because his credit is not bad and he found out a man who goes to our church got a loan with much worse credit. Is it my fault that he cannot get the loan? Did anybody force him to come here? Did he not know we would be the only black people here? Did he not come here because he felt it would benefit him? Everything is money, money, money. He keeps wanting to make my work decisions for me. What does an accountant know about medicine? I just want to be comfortable. I just want to be able to pay for my child’s college. I don’t need to work longer hours just to accumulate money. It’s not as if I am planning to buy a boat like Americans.” Aunty Uju moved away from the window and sat down at the kitchen table. “I don’t even know why I came to this place. The other day the pharmacist said my accent was incomprehensible. Imagine, I called in a medicine and she actually told me that my accent was incomprehensible. And that same day, as if somebody sent them, one patient, a useless layabout with tattoos all over his body, told me to go back to where I came from. All because I knew he was lying about being in pain and I refused to give him more pain medicine. Why do I have to take this rubbish? I blame Buhari and Babangida and Abacha because they destroyed Nigeria.”

It was strange, how Aunty Uju often spoke about the former heads of state, invoking their names with poisoned blame, but never mentioning The General.

Curt and Dike came back into the kitchen. Dike was bright-eyed, slightly sweaty, and talkative; he had, out there in the basketball space, swallowed Curt’s star.

“Do you want some water, Curt?” he asked.

“Call him Uncle Curt,” Aunty Uju said.

Curt laughed. “Or Cousin Curt. How about Coz Curt?”

“You’re not my cousin,” Dike said, smiling.

“I would be if I married your cousin.”

“Depends on how much you are offering us!” Dike said.

They all laughed. Aunty Uju looked pleased.

“Do you want to get that drink and meet me outside, Dike?” Curt asked. “We’ve got some unfinished business!”

Curt touched Ifemelu’s shoulder gently, asked if she was okay, before going back outside.

“O na-eji gi ka akwa,” Aunty Uju said, her tone charged with admiration.

Ifemelu smiled. Curt did indeed hold her like an egg. With him, she felt breakable, precious. Later, as they left, she slipped her hand into his and squeezed; she felt proud — to be with him, and of him.

ONE MORNING, Aunty Uju woke up and went to the bathroom. Bartholemew had just brushed his teeth. Aunty Uju reached for her toothbrush and saw, inside the sink, a thick blob of toothpaste. Thick enough for a full mouth-cleaning. It sat there, far from the drain, soft and melting. It disgusted her. How exactly did a person clean their teeth and end up leaving so much toothpaste in the sink? Had he not seen it? Had he, when it fell into the sink, pressed more onto his toothbrush? Or did he just go ahead and brush anyway with an almost-dry brush? Which meant his teeth were not clean. But his teeth did not concern Aunty Uju. The blob of toothpaste left in the sink did. On so many other mornings, she had cleaned off toothpaste, rinsed out the sink. But not this morning. This morning, she was done. She shouted his name, again and again. He asked her what was wrong. She told him the toothpaste in the sink was wrong. He looked at her and mumbled that he had been in a hurry, he was already late for work, and she told him that she, too, had work to go to, and she earned more than he did, in case he had forgotten. She was paying for his car, after all. He stormed off and went downstairs. At this point in the story, Aunty Uju paused, and Ifemelu imagined Bartholemew in his contrast-collar shirt and his trousers pulled too high up, the unflattering pleats at the front, his K-leg walk as he stormed off. Aunty Uju’s voice was unusually calm over the phone.

“I’ve found a condo in a town called Willow. A very nice gated place near the university. Dike and I are leaving this weekend,” Aunty Uju said.

“Ahn-ahn! Aunty, so quickly?”

“I’ve tried. It is enough.”

“What did Dike say?”

“He said he never liked living in the woods. He didn’t even say one word about Bartholomew. Willow will be so much better for him.”

Ifemelu liked the name of the town, Willow; it sounded to her like freshly squeezed beginnings.

To My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby

Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t “black” in your country? You’re in America now. We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea what that was. So I just made something up. And admit it — you say “I’m not black” only because you know black is at the bottom of America’s race ladder. And you want none of that. Don’t deny now. What if being black had all the privileges of being white? Would you still say “Don’t call me black, I’m from Trinidad”? I didn’t think so. So you’re black, baby. And here’s the deal with becoming black: You must show that you are offended when such words as “watermelon” or “tar baby” are used in jokes, even if you don’t know what the hell is being talked about — and since you are a Non-American Black, the chances are that you won’t know. (In undergrad a white classmate asks if I like watermelon, I say yes, and another classmate says, Oh my God that is so racist, and I’m confused. “Wait, how?”) You must nod back when a black person nods at you in a heavily white area. It is called the black nod. It is a way for black people to say “You are not alone, I am here too.” In describing black women you admire, always use the word “STRONG” because that is what black women are supposed to be in America. If you are a woman, please do not speak your mind as you are used to doing in your country. Because in America, strong-minded black women are SCARY. And if you are a man, be hyper-mellow, never get too excited, or somebody will worry that you’re about to pull a gun. When you watch television and hear that a “racist slur” was used, you must immediately become offended. Even though you are thinking “But why won’t they tell me exactly what was said?” Even though you would like to be able to decide for yourself how offended to be, or whether to be offended at all, you must nevertheless be very offended.

When a crime is reported, pray that it was not committed by a black person, and if it turns out to have been committed by a black person, stay well away from the crime area for weeks, or you might be stopped for fitting the profile. If a black cashier gives poor service to the non-black person in front of you, compliment that person’s shoes or something, to make up for the bad service, because you’re just as guilty for the cashier’s crimes. If you are in an Ivy League college and a Young Republican tells you that you got in only because of Affirmative Action, do not whip out your perfect grades from high school. Instead, gently point out that the biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action are white women. If you go to eat in a restaurant, please tip generously. Otherwise the next black person who comes in will get awful service, because waiters groan when they get a black table. You see, black people have a gene that makes them not tip, so please overpower that gene. If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don’t even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion.

CHAPTER 22

One Saturday at the mall in White Marsh, Ifemelu saw Kayode DaSilva. It was raining. She was standing inside, by the entrance, waiting for Curt to bring the car around, and Kayode almost bumped into her.

“Ifemsco!” he said.

“Oh my God. Kayode!”

They hugged, looked at each other, said all the things people said who had not seen each other in many years, both lapsing into their Nigerian voices and their Nigerian selves, louder, more heightened, adding “o” to their sentences. He had left right after secondary school to attend university in Indiana and had graduated years ago.

“I was working in Pittsburgh but I just moved to Silver Spring to start a new job. I love Maryland. I run into Nigerians at the grocery store and in the mall, everywhere. It’s like being back home. But I guess you know that already.”

“Yes,” she said, even though she did not. Her Maryland was a small, circumscribed world of Curt’s American friends.

“I was planning to come and find you, by the way.” He was looking at her, as though absorbing her details, memorizing her, for when he would tell the story of their meeting.

“Really?”

“So my guy The Zed and I were talking the other day and you came up and he said he’d heard you were living in Baltimore and since I was close by could I just find you and see that you were okay and tell him what you look like now.”

A numbness spread swiftly through her. She mumbled, “Oh, you’re still in touch?”

“Yes. We got back in touch when he moved to England last year.”

England! Obinze was in England. She had created the distance, ignoring him, changing her e-mail address and phone number, and yet she felt deeply betrayed by this news. Changes had been made in his life that she did not know about. He was in England. Only a few months ago, she and Curt had gone to England for the Glastonbury Festival, and later spent two days in London. Obinze might have been there. She might have run into him as she walked down Oxford Street.

“So what happened now? Honestly, I couldn’t believe it when he said you guys were not in touch. Ahn-ahn! All of us were just waiting for the wedding invitation card o!” Kayode said.

Ifemelu shrugged. There were things scattered inside of her that she needed to gather together.

“So how have you been? How is life?” Kayode asked.

“Fine,” she said coldly. “I’m waiting for my boyfriend to pick me up. Actually, I think that’s him.”

There was, in Kayode’s demeanor, a withdrawal of spirit, a pulling back of his army of warmth, because he sensed very well that she had made the choice to shut him out. She was already walking away. Over her shoulder, she said to him, “Take care.” She was supposed to exchange phone numbers, talk for longer, behave in all the expected ways. But emotions were rioting inside her. And she found Kayode guilty for knowing about Obinze, for bringing Obinze back.

“I just ran into an old friend from Nigeria. I haven’t seen him since high school,” she told Curt.

“Oh, really? That’s nice. He live here?”

“In D.C.”

Curt was watching her, expecting more. He would want to ask Kayode to have drinks with them, want to be friends with her friend, want to be as gracious as he always was. And this, his expectant expression, irritated her. She wanted silence. Even the radio was bothering her. What would Kayode tell Obinze? That she was dating a handsome white man in a BMW coupe, her hair an Afro, a red flower tucked behind her ear. What would Obinze make of this? What was he doing in England? A clear memory came to her, of a sunny day — the sun was always shining in her memories of him and she distrusted this — when his friend Okwudiba brought a videocassette to his house, and Obinze said, “A British film? Waste of time.” To him, only American films were worth watching. And now he was in England.

Curt was looking at her. “Seeing him upset you?”

“No.”

“Was he like a boyfriend or something?”

“No,” she said, looking out of the window.

Later that day she would send an e-mail to Obinze’s Hotmail address: Ceiling, I don’t even know how to start. I ran into Kayode today at the mall. Saying sorry for my silence sounds stupid even to me but I am so sorry and I feel so stupid. I will tell you everything that happened. I have missed you and I miss you. And he would not reply.

“I booked the Swedish massage for you,” Curt said.

“Thank you,” she said. Then, in a lower voice, she added, to make up for her peevishness, “You are such a sweetheart.”

“I don’t want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life,” Curt said with a force that startled her.