Americanah

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.”