Americanah

“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.